In
1980, I was on adventure in the Cloud Forests of Guatemala by way a bus ride up
the windy road from Huehuetenango to Nebaj. Guatemalan buses are built for
Guatemalans, which means they are too small for a well-fed, six-foot-plus American boy like myself. I’d
figured it out by then though, how to wedge my knees against the seat in front
of me in order to take up as little space as possible and also to anchor myself
against the turns in the road. I could even doze a bit. These buses were old,
gayly-painted in the Guatemalan style, and shock absorbers were considered
accessories[i].
This is probably where my lower back problems started, but that’s another story.
On the
way up to the little town of Nebaj, my destination, we passed a bullet-riddled
bus pulled off the road. It had been attacked the week before, by a government
patrol I was told. There was only one road in and out of Nebaj, and I knew about
the civil war. I knew that the mountains of Quiche Province was at the heart of
the troubles and I had heard about the four Europeans who had been recently killed
hiking along the road between Nebaj and the village of San Juan Cotzal, about twelve
kilometers from Nebaj. That’s why I was going. I had been treated so hospitably
by these people whose height oftentimes only came up to my well-fed sternum for
the past month I felt obliged to go and see what was troubling them. And sure
enough, passing by the shot-up bus alongside of the only road into and out of
my destination gave me a birds-eye view.
The
reason the Europeans were hiking to San Juan Cotzal was because it was
“along the gringo trail”. A popular travel book by that name was stuffed into
the backpacks of most of us first-world pilgrims. This was long before the Internet,
smart phones or GPS. In those faraway days, you followed your nose, and the
instructions outlined for you in “Along The Gringo Trail”. It was a pre-cyber
travel guide, gave you history lessons, directions for the cheapest hostels, places
to eat, things to see.
In
Nebaj, I ended up renting a room in an informal hostel run by a former Peace
Corps volunteer who had stayed after his tour was up to live the rural
lifestyle of an expatriot and also to become an encyclopedia of Latin tunes he
had learned on his accordion. I ended up learning a couple the tunes from him. A cool guy. He told us this story:
The
month before I arrived, the army had come to Nebaj, demanding the physical presence of
all the local men in front of the church in the center of town. They rounded them up in the plaza and
told them that they had to be “registered” with the U.S.-backed Guatemalan government
so that they could be kept better track of. The army brought plenty of troops
to do the rounding up--a couple platoons I would guess--and one typist with one
manual typewriter. The men from Nebaj stood in line, guarded at gunpoint by young kids
mostly recruited from the lowlands, for hours. They had no choice. The women
became anxious, demanded answers, got pushy. The officer in charge became annoyed,
lined up about twenty women against the wall of the church, and shot them. The Peace
Corps expatriot showed us the bulletholes in the walls of the church.
When
it was time for me to leave Nebaj--which was soon after I heard this story--I
went down to the little tienda which served as the town bus stop at 3 A.M. to
catch the only ride out of town down the only road back to the relative safety
of the tourist-infested towns around Lago de Atitlan. I was told to get to the
bus stop early, to make sure I got a seat. I and another gringo stood with the
line of townpeople in the dark for a couple hours. The bus finally came about
dawn, and when it was our turn we handed our backpacks up to the assistant who
placed them on the roof rack. Then we waited. And waited. And we waited some more,
wondering what the delay was about. Finally the assistant reappeared, climbed
back up onto the roof rack, and handed our backpacks down to us. He told us we
couldn’t take the bus today. We asked him why, tried to explain that we had been diligent, got
here early, been here for hours, needed to get back to Antigua.
He never explained and finally just shook his index finger at us in the local
gesture of “no”, and that was that.
We
figured something was going to happen, the bus get shot up again, and my sense of
adventure and dread heightened. I stayed another five days in Nebaj. Nothing
happened, I never learned why the bus driver had decided to kick us off, but I
like to think it was a matter of the same politeness and respect these people
had shown me during my short visit to their beautiful, beautiful country. Or
maybe the driver just thought if something did happen he didn’t want two
gringoes on his bus to screw things up even more than they already were. Nobody ever said in my hearing, and five days
later he let us on and down the mountain we went.
Thirty-three
years later, last week in fact, I was heading up the mountain behind our place
to pick huckleberries. It was dawn, a cup of coffee between my legs and the
local public radio station, KUFM, on the news. Pretty typical morning for me,
the coffee, the mountains, NPR. A good life I admit, but I feel the
excruciating need to claim expert status on bullshit news today. So here goes:
With
solid authority and propriety I can say I've long hated Steve Inskeep's snarkiness and corporate bias and whatever happened to Bob Edwards and I've
been wondering for the past fifteen years at least who told NPR that they were
the Business Roundup news channel. I listen to KUFM a lot. My friends are DJs
there, I know people on the board, and the local news is generally good. It's
MY radio station, after all, but its national news has been on drugs for a long, long time
and I'm always on the verge of disowning it.
I
usually get about ten minutes into the news, make sure the world's not about to
end and all, before they start up on some puff piece covering (in depth) some
corporate shill's giant ego and I turn it off. This morning I got about two
minutes in when the host, who was supposed to be doing a 30-second objective
play-by-play on Ed Snowden, willfully described the man who almost
single-handedly jumpstarted our long-overdue national debate on privacy, as a
"self-described" whistleblower. Wait a minute, I thought. What about the
whistleblowers who outed Reagan’s Iran-Contra debacle in ’86 and probably saved
us a couple hundred thousand boots on the ground in Central America, where our
young innocents would have found themselves allied with the annoyed officer who
felt free to shoot defenseless women?! Would you call them "self-described"? What the hell? I was driving by a hayfield and my
window was open when I shouted at the top of my lungs "I'M CALLING HIM A
WHISTLEBLOWER, TOO, YOU SONOFABITCH!! And I punched the radio off. I assume
only a meadowlark or two heard me, but millions of people heard that cruel and
thoughtless radio sound bite. Not fair to the meadowlarks.
Rios
Montt, D'Aubuisson, the Contras. Murderers all. They actually had to do it
dirty since they were holding the corporate line in third world countries. Get
actual blood on their own personal hands. Jesse Helms many times claimed the butcher D'Aubuisson as his personal friend. The Reagan gang was legendary for bloody glad-handing with client-generals doing the administration’s willful bidding[ii].
You know all this. Where’s the context, then, in today’s news coverage?
The only
night I ever spent in jail was the time I got myself arrested for protesting
the $27 million in Contra aid in 1985. I was organizing the "Pledge of
Resistance" effort in Missoula, got hundreds of people to sign up for
civil disobedience if Congress escalated the Central American wars. When it came
down to it, there were only eight of us willing to put it on the line, which I
fully understand now. But it was the same result throughout the country. We The Alternative People didn't stand up for ourselves. Reagan and company got busted for treason
the next year, blew it off, flushed the Fairness Doctrine down the toilet in
1987 and Voila! By 1988 Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and NPR’s cave-in during the
first Gulf War became the new "news" norms, and it's never let up since. How we get it
back I don't know, but how we tolerate the mainstream coverage of the Snowden
and Manning issues is going to be watershed as far as the near future of what
passes for journalism anymore.
I have
sincerely held NPR accountable for the first Gulf War for the past two decades.
They fell demonstrably flat on their mandated job of providing a counter to
corporate news for the thinking, caring public who pay their bills, and they've
gone barreling downhill ever since. Their coverage of the second Gulf War was
only the proof in the pudding. We've been had, and now that the wing nuts want
to axe public broadcasting altogether we are compelled to defend them?
Obama's
not doing anything original. He's playing the same old shell game and we're the
shells. "Liberalism" was hollowed out from the inside long ago, by
“liberals”, when "liberals" never effectively questioned what real
news was. Why the hell, for example, did we have any business knowing whose D.N.A.
samples were on whose clothes when it came to consensual sex between adults,
let alone what our listening in to the private lives of adults via the latest techno-wizardry meant to the
corrosion of our own core expectations of privacy? When I recall the multi-year
coverage Corporate Media and N.P.R. gave the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal when
there were legions of real stories untouched during that same era, the word “orgy” comes to mind.
It’s like we’re contestants on a T.V. game show called “Who’s More Moral” and
the only winner is Ragu Spagetti Sauce. For chrissakes.
Why do
courageous individuals like Ed Snowden and Brad Manning, who were only
operating within the long-established relationship between whistleblowers and
real journalists stand so alone now, in publicly-funded news coverage that is
supposed to counter the venal perspectives of the Corporate News Monopoly? Do
they think we can’t see? Maybe we can’t.
In
these new e-days of smart phones, GPS, drones and zero-privacy, why has hatred
of U.S. Imperialism become so suddenly and deadenly quaint? Why on Earth, with
the mere seconds a well-paid, publicly-supported "journalist" had to
touch on a real news story, did he feel so free or obliged to slam real
journalism with his piss-poor journalism? What in the hell do they teach those
kids in journalism school anymore? Never mind, I already know.
We
gotta demand better. How to do that? Why don’t you kids of this new age tell
me. [iii]
[i] This is a
bald-faced attempt at creative license on my part. Of course they had shock
absorbers, but they were old like the buses they were attached to.
[ii] Chief Justice
John Roberts, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Associate justices Samuel Alito,
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, all creatures of the Reagan Administration.
