Red Lines

Barnett Newman, Red Line

Having self-snookered himself into his own corner, our increasingly hapless President Obama, ham-strung with a recalcitrant House of alleged Representatives which seems intent on dragging the entire nation into some imaginary past – one in which a “Negro” would never be allowed to rise above a certain station in life (say, shoe-shine boy) – and abandoned by our “special-relationship” ally of the UK, and so forced into the arms of a French lover, is presently pondering an attack upon Syria for having crossed a certain “red-line” – to say having allegedly used chemical arms against his own population.  Claiming a highly dubious “moral high-ground,” the President asserts that Syria’s unsavory leader, Assad, must be punished for this transgression of supposed international “norms.”  Coming from the head of a country which not so long ago thought nothing of laying waste to Vietnam with chemical agents (Boehner Orange), or more recently winked and nodded when its then-erstwhile lackey, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, gassed Kurds and Iranians, this moral outrage takes on a tragically comic air.  America skates on ever thinner ice as it pontificates about ethics and morals, especially as it imprisons Chelsea/Bradley Manning for 35 years for revealing American war crimes, as according to the Nuremberg Convention he was duty-bound to do; or as it hounds Edward Snowden for revealing a vast conspiracy within the government to illegally violate the US Constitution.  On this day, as I write, tucked into the New York Times front page is the now every-day banner, “4 Killed in Pakistan Drone Attack.”   As was once said, Mr. Obama has a lot of “‘splainin'” on his hands.

While trotting out last week for the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famed speech, and trying his very best to emulate the preacher cadence of same, Mr. Obama droned on double the length of King, and to 100th the effect:  smooth teleprompter reader that he is, despite his best efforts, Barack just can’t do it like the master did.  Perhaps because lurking behind the voice is a absence of passion and belief.   Not long before he was killed, Mr King said this:

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own

Government, I can not be Silent.”

 

Martin Luther King

I think there is little room to doubt whether Mr. King would be silent in the face of the ever burgeoning military-industrial-media-security state which the American system has become.  [Below I print in full King’s address, where his analysis of where America was, and was heading, has proved to be tragically accurate.]

And so, to pile irony on bitter irony, sent out in Obama’s stead, is his current Secretary of State, John Kerry.  If you will recall Kerry ran for President and was defeated by AWOL draft-avoider, rich man’s son, George W. Bush, in a campaign which ridiculed Kerry’s service (during which time he received medals for this and that) and “Swift Boating” became a verb.  During the Vietnam war Kerry became a hero of the American left when he spoke out against the war while still in service.  He became an anti-war icon, testifying in Congress.

Today Kerry is the administration’s waterboy, its loudest and most aggressive voice calling for action – a military strike – against Assad’s Syria, while Obama, our Nobel “Peace Prize” laureate, stays relatively quiet in the background.   For America the middle-east’s oily tar-baby is proving Uncle Remus’ fable all too prescient.    The craggy faced New Englander has good reason for a few more worry-wrinkles.

John Kerry

And as I write (noon August 31 2013), the NY Times headlines a sudden change in direction as Obama attempts to tip-toe out of his corner, and has now tossed the matter of attacking into the hands of what had been a largely silent Congress:  now they must decide, as some had demanded and requested, just what to do.  Somehow the chant “Bomb, bomb,  bomb Damascus” just doesn’t have the same jolly ring that old John McCain’s (chorused by Rush Limbaugh and others), “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” had.  And besides Congress isn’t back for another week and perhaps by then America will have forgotten about it all, we’ll have done a few more drone attacks in Yemen or elsewhere, and as school kicks in we can all discuss college football and basketball and then the pro games.

And this criminal, having lied to Congress, will slip away, perhaps retiring quietly from government service and back through the revolving door to head one of our NSA contract spy corporations.  Ah, America.

James Clapper, head of NSA, Congressional perjurer

Following is the full text of Martin Luther King’s address:

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I’m in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

 

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

 

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

 

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

 

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

 

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

 

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

 

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

 

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!

 

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

 

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954¹; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

 

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 — in 1945 rather — after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China — for whom the Vietnamese have no great love — but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

 

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

 

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States’ influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

 

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

 

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

 

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing — in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

 

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid — solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

 

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

 

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

 

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

 

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

 

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

 

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred — rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

 

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

 

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

 

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

 

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

 

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

 

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do [immediately] to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

 

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government. Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

 

Part of our ongoing — Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile — Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

 

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

 

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

 

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

 

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

 

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

 

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

 

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

 

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

 

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

 

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

 

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”² We in the West must support these revolutions.

 

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”³

 

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

 

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing — embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate — ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”⁴ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

 

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says:

 

Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word (unquote).

 

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

 

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

 

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message — of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

 

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

 

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

 

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”⁵

Obit for Dennis

Dennis Grunes, 2007 on the Columbia River gorge

I met Dennis Grunes when I moved to Portland, I think around 2006.  It was at a screening, I don’t recall of what.  He’d already written a few things – nice things – about some of my work, and it was nice to meet the obscure (at least to me) critic who’d written the words.  He seemed a somewhat eccentric, perhaps cantankerous soul, at that point already being seriously afflicted by his medical difficulties.   In the period I was there I saw him perhaps two other times, once, if I remember right, in his disheveled apartment.  (I don’t know if there is something inherent in it, but most those I have met who are film critics or fanatics also seem to share the trait of a chaotic domestic setting.)  In the months before I was to depart for my first ever job – teaching at Yonsei University in Seoul – Dennis’ health took some serious drops, and as I left I asked my friend Jane Wilcox if she would sort of mind after Dennis a bit.  It was rather an excessive request as Dennis was hardly a friend of mine, and she didn’t know him at all.  As things evolved, though, she did so in spades, visiting him several times a week, taking him shopping or doing so for him, cooking dinners, for what turned out to be five years – all far beyond the call of any reasonable duty.  My deepest thanks to her for taking it on.

Two months ago, after a long period of very serious illnesses, Dennis died.  Here is an obituary written by one of his friends, Mindy Aloff.

Dennis Grunes, the literary critic, poet, and critic and historian of world cinema, died in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital, in Portland, Oregon, on June 15, 2013. According to his elder brother, Rodney, the cause was aspiration pneumonitis, owing to end-state renal disease.

Although Dr. Grunes [pronounced GREW-niss] was not famous as a mass-media critic, his literate, informed, and, often, deeply moving writings on film, especially, were avidly followed by working filmmakers, other critics and historians, and armchair cineastes throughout the U.S. and abroad. His film critic’s blog, on WordPress, contains thousands of critical entries—most of them precisely 300 words long but some essays on individual masterpieces much longer than that. He loved the pictures of 20th-century Russia and France, in particular; however, he made it his business to evaluate films as old as 19th-century Russian, French, and American silents and filmmakers as far-flung as those of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and he found masters and masterpieces to appreciate in every category. He was also a vigorous partisan of nonpareil independent filmmakers of the past quarter century—notably Chris Marker, Jon Jost, and Gus Van Sant.

Like many online critics, Dr. Grunes also amassed lists: the 100 Greatest Films of All Time (his pride and joy), the 25 Greatest Film Performances by Actresses, the 10 Greatest Films on the Holocaust, and so forth. These lists were never set in stone, however; and where Orson Welles might top a list one year he could be dethroned by Michelangelo Antonioni in another. Because the lists reflected Dr. Grunes’s tremendous erudition in film, one consulted them often to, so to speak, take the temperature of the critic’s enthusiasms, which encompassed every genre of filmmaking (the short and long feature, the documentary, the film essay) and every kind of tone or temperament (comic, tragic, dispassionate, engaged) and also represented his appetite and limitless capacity for revisiting individual films many, many times. And for finding humor in extremis: As one of his Portland friends, Paul Wotipka, wrote with affection: “Even at his darkest moments he could roar with laughter.”

Dennis Scott Grunes was born on January 31, 1948, in Brooklyn, New York, to Ann and Casper Grunes. He earned his B.A., in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton, in 1969, and his Ph.D., in English with a minor in film, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in 1974, where his mentor was Leslie Fiedler. His thesis, The Romantic Brother, a brilliant study of fraternal myth and motifs in Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and others, was published in 1973 by SUNY/Buffalo. The 1970s and ‘80s were gruesome decades for English Ph.D.s who sought full-time teaching jobs; and, despite not only completing his doctoral thesis in three years but having it published, and publishing many essays and articles in such distinguished scholarly journals as Transcendental Quarterly, the Emily Dickinson Bulletin, Contemporary Poetry, and Studies in the Humanities, Dr. Grunes could not find a sustaining perch in academe. With the exception of one year as a public relations writer for the Bet On A Vet program in Buffalo, he never enjoyed a full-time job; instead, he patched together a living from adjunct teaching, business and governmental-report writing, and tutoring. In 1976, he was one of three featured young scholars in “A Generation of ‘Lost’ Scholars,” a cover story, by Darcy O’Brien, of The New York Times Magazine. Although the article attracted much attention, it didn’t help to bring Dr. Grunes secure work as a teacher.

In 1980, Dr. Grunes moved from Buffalo to Portland, Oregon, where friends were living, and he began to write for general audiences on various arts, publishing over 100 reviews and features in local magazines, and to teach literature and composition, again as an adjunct, at Portland State University and, by mail, for the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, for which he also wrote four independent student course guides. From the early 1980s, as well, Dr. Grunes assisted his friend Tony Bacon on editorial projects. When, in 1995, Mr. Bacon established The Daily Insider, an online community news periodical, published on weekdays for southwest Washington State, Dr. Grunes became the valued editor and continued, after Mr. Bacon’s death, at the behest of Mrs. Bacon, until shortly before Dr. Grunes’s death. Some of Dr. Grunes’s film writings were published there.

In 2007, thanks to numerous telephone tutorials with Chicagoan Denise Gaeta, Dr. Grunes established his blog on world film and contributed to it many times a week, up until a few weeks before his death. Its title was simply “Dennis Grunes.” Referring to some of the severe effects of his progressively worsening diabetes, Ms Gaeta wrote:

“The thing that most moved me about Dennis was his absolute dedication to his craft.  Every time I think of the horrors he was living through, while still religiously writing every single day, and sending his work out with notes of such vivacity and humor, it makes me cry.

“The world kneels before all the wrong kings.”

In 2010, Olivier Stockman, of the Sands Films Cinema Club, in London, England, published a compendium of Dr. Grunes’s film writings, A Short Chronology of World Cinema (still in print, in paperback), with the following foreword:

“In his book Histoire du Cinema Mondial, Georges Sadoul tried to put each film in its context; in an appendix, he added a chronology, giving for each year, from 1892 to 1966, a list of notable titles. Sadoul’s list became the main inspiration for Sands Films Cinema Club and programming films by year of production.

“The necessity of cinema clubs and film societies is demonstrated by the fact that many of Sadoul’s 5,000 listed titles have not been seen since their original release; and when a film is lost, forgotten, or locked in the vault of a remote cinematheque, it ceases to exist: a film exists only when it is screened to an audience.

“Searching for information about films I have not seen, I came across someone who seems to have seen everything. I then discovered that Dennis Grunes has written about almost each film he has seen during the last 40 years or so. This massive work cannot be improvised nor even commissioned: it is a lifetime commitment. Taken individually, each entry is, at the very least, an introduction to a film, but edited together and classified by year, these neat 300-word entries become a remarkable survey of the history of world cinema. Publishing this book became therefore the natural continuation of the club’s activity and purpose.

“Dennis Grunes is a sharp critic, opinionated and well informed, his passion and enthusiasm are contagious. Ironically, Dennis Grunes has never been to Sands Films Cinema Club, we have never met, we have never watched a film together and, perhaps, we never will: he lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Several thousand email messages exchanges supplied the material for this book, composed with care and discipline by an exacting writer.”

Another tribute from a reader who only knew Dr. Grunes online comes from the writer Tom Zaniello:

“Because I never met Dennis, I knew him through his reviews and his e-mails and was always pleased to read both. They were unfailingly fascinating; often the result was that I would rush off to locate the film he had written about so I could see it. Dennis was a virtual film school. He took time out not too long ago to send me a few critiques of sections of a Hitchcock book I am writing. Whence comes such another?! He will be very, very missed.”

Dr. Grunes never married, although he enjoyed long friendships with many individuals. He is survived by his brother; his sister-in-law, Judith; and his nephews Jeff and Eric and their families, including Jeff and Harsha’s new baby, Dennis’s great-nephew Avi Jacob.

In August of 2012, Dr. Grunes last updated his list of “50 Best Films of All Time.” The first five entries are, in order: L’eclisse by Antonioni, A Sixth of the World by Dziga Vertov, Ordet by Carl Dreyer, Earth by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Early Summer by Yasujiro Ozu. The entire list, as well as his other film writings and some of his poetry, are still available on his blog:   www.grunes.wordpress.com.

In his own foreword to A Short Chronology of World Cinema, Dr. Grunes wrote:

“I have tried to emphasize the expressive nature of films—those aspects that certify cinema as an art form rather than as a medium of diversion. Like most paintings, poems or whatever, most films aren’t especially expressive; they simply fail as art. They may take as their primary aim the filmmaker’s relationship with an audience, which the filmmaker tries to manipulate or entertain. A serious filmmaker places his or her primary interest elsewhere: in developing themes, which entails finding—by intellection or intuition, for different artists work very differently—the expressive means for doing this. Substantial films therefore require considerable focus for their creation, and they require, by us, scarcely less in their viewing and consideration. Diversions glide over us; art, on the other hand, makes demands on us—and rewards us generously when we meet those demands.”

Dr. Grunes was a devoted cat fancier, and he owned, one at a time, several beloved felines, including his last, the beauteous Shée. Contributions in his name may be made to The House of Dreams, a no-kill cat shelter, in Portland, Oregon. – Mindy Aloff

Jane Wilcox and Avery – thanks on behalf of Dennis from me.  You’re an angel.Shee

Thank, Mindy, for letting me publish this.  And for those interested in a wide, global range of cinema, do read Dennis’ blog:

www.grunes.wordpress.com.

Bo Jangles & StepnFetchit

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (May 25, 1878 – November 25, 1949) was an American tap dancer and actor of stage and film. Audiences enjoyed his understated style, which eschewed the frenetic manner of the jitterbug in favor of cool and reserve; rarely did he use his upper body, relying instead on busy, inventive feet, and an expressive face.

Yesterday President Obama emerged for a press conference and attempted to stick the genies of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden back in their top secret bottles.  In his best Harvardese shuck & jive mode, he tap danced around the blunt truth that the military-industrial-security-state is in constant violation of the Constitution of the USA (which its members are sworn to uphold), and instead put a smiley face on governmental intrusions into the privacy of everyone (American or not), all in the name of “protecting” Americans from the nasty nebulous “terrorists” who bedevil us, god only knows why since we are so very nice all around the world.  Seldom rattled by his job as cover for the Wizard of Oz system behind the curtain, Obama fumbled as he suggested that in order for Michelle to believe him, he had to take her back in the kitchen and show her he actually did the dishes.  This lame would-be metaphor found him foundering, probably aware that he was, well, lying, and that, well, the entire system which he represents is nothing more than a lie.

James Clapper, perjuror before Congress, Director of NSA

Trying his best to put lipstick on his pig, Obama did his smooth-talk routine, attempting to calm the roiling realization that Americans, as he said rather explicitly, just plain don’t trust the government (anymore).  Left or right, those who swallowed the cold-war Kool-Aid, and all the other trumped up jangle-your-nerves crises that seem to be the societal norm of our imperium, seem to have drawn a line in the collecting of their telecommunications, emails, visits to porn sites or whatever else it is they desire to keep “private.”  Snowden, for whom the government in the form of another shuck and jive artist, Attorney General Eric Holder – another culturally bleached-black – found itself having to issue an assuring word to Russia that it would not execute or torture him should he be returned to the USA (!), as the US security system shuddered at what further revelations he might offer.  One could hear the murmuring, “This is all supposed to be secret… and how do those dang computer code things work, anyway?”

Ironically, the security apparatus is at the mercy of the techies – many of whom incline to a libertarian slant, and many of whom follow the motto, “information wants to be free” – who understand the arcane matters of bits and bytes, encryption, code, etc., in a manner other than a “concept” to bandy about while not understanding it at all.  Those in the executive echelons of these systems are probably quite aware of their vulnerability on this account, and hence the draconian responses to those who let the beans slip.  Manning and Snowden are not the first to feel the harsh hand of the security agencies for letting out the word that America is not at all the America the government wishes you to think it is.   Long before General Smedley Butler wrote his “War is a Racket,” Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, and more recently Russ Tice and William Binney informed the public about the US surveillance abuses so clearly revealed by Snowden.

America’s ambassador, the Predator

And so it is that while Bojangles and StepnFetchit did their duties, and tap-danced mightily to hide the ugly truths which keep slipping out of our Big Brother surveillance systems, and glossed over the long American history of governmental abuses of the citizenry, even former President Carter was found to say that we “no longer have a functioning democracy.”  Suddenly Senators and Representatives in Congress have found a new hobby horse to ride as a wave of public sympathy for Snowden and Manning builds.  What was formerly the turf of the woolly-eyed radical crazy now finds a home in the mouths of “respectable” politicos.  If interested, look up the quote of Mahatma Gandhi in this regard.

Dazzling with his toes, Obama attempts to deflect attention from what he does with his hands.  This on-going show began with his “don’t look back” absolution of the war criminals and Constitution-abusers who immediately preceded him.  It began at the outset of his administration when the criminals of Wall Street were chosen as his advisers regarding the economic collapse of 2008.  It carries on in his hounding of whistle-blowers far in excess of all previous governments.  And finally, with the present defense he offers of NSA-CIA-FBI violations of the law and Constitution, even his most faithful supporters begin to fall away, no longer charmed by the seemingly gentle and intelligent words of their black knight on a white horse, come to rescue them from the disappeared faux Texas cowboy.  Rather late (and with three years to go) they discover their guy is a kiss-ass Harvard tongued StepnFetchit to the hard powers that run the show.

Keep tapping, Bo.  Just nobody believes in the change you can believe in anymore. And why should they?  It was a PR line of pure-BS to con the liberals into thinking something would actually happen, and instead they got more Bush than Bush, all delivered in a hot package of 100% shuck & jive as done by well-educated criminals – like the ones who run Wall Street, the military-industrial-security state-media complex – and who pull your strings.  You offered “the most transparent” government, and instead you provided the most secretive.  The only thing transparent is that Obama is owned lock, stock and barrel by the ruling elite of the 1% who do what they want, legal or not.   That’s the secret they are worried about, and that you showed in your dismal press conference.  Trust us?  Are you kidding?