A Song Without Knees

from the book

Toward an American Revolution

by Jerry Fresia

South End Press

When Protesters Become Police

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Suggestions that something is fundamentally wrong with our political economy and the Constitution are more than difficult to accept; they are difficult even to reflect upon. It is far easier to live in the comfort zone and seek happiness ... in liking what we have got to do. Even in our protests we slide away from a direct confrontation of the structure of American life. We tend to avoid the harsh implications of reality and cling to the image of the United States as a basically free and democratic country in the way that one clings to prayer beads or a good luck charm. The axioms of empire have become the axioms of faith.

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The Need for Revolutionaries

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' The Constitution, in this period of decline, invites the private control of public policy and given the corporate domination of public policy it should hardly surprise anyone that the largest corporate owners apply the most efficient and impersonal methods in their effort to protect their privilege and power.

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The shield against state repression which the Constitution provides individuals has never been large enough to protect the victims of capitalism in their attempt to organize an alternative political economy, particularly abroad where from a Constitutional viewpoint only resources, not people, exist.

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... a defense of Constitutional protection without a clear and strong indictment of the way in which Constitutional provisions protect corporate interests abroad, particularly death squad activity, is also a defense of the very narrow definition of the self which capitalism is based upon... it is an obligation under international law, as articulated within the Nuremberg Protocols, to restrain one's government from engaging in criminal conduct.

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Taking Back the Concept of Revolution

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... a full shopping bag is a full life.

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... Is [the] the right which entitles us to own and become rich also the right to exploit those who must sell their lives in order to live?

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The need to see ourselves as better than others ... betrays a thinness of generosity and a self-awareness that mocks imagination.

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What happens to our integrity as citizens when our government is compelled to lie, assassinate its political opposition abroad, condemn the World Court after it asserted that our war against Nicaragua is a violation of international law? What happens to our bond to the international community when the United States sends weapons to over twenty countries which practice torture and covertly attempts to destabilize several dozen more?

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We live amidst massive inequality. We don't really care that most people have little power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse to acknowledge that the earth is dying and that we are killing it. We play games with the most horrible weapons imaginable and actually seem to take pride in our ability to end life as we know it. Our unthinking celebration of individual achievement and upward mobility works to damage the life-giving ties of kinship and the bonds of community. Whether with regard to women or workers or people of color, we, as a nation, accept the systematic subordination of human beings. We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence.

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... with righteous indignation public officials admonish the Supreme Court nominee who smoked marijuana while they keep information from the public that would expose U.S.-sponsored terror(and the criminal history of the Secret Team;)The U.S. orchestration of the heaviest aerial war ever seen in the Americas, directed against the civilian population of El Salvador, is ignored while the assassination of Marines in that same country is held aloft as a banner of our innocence.

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... the struggle to see ourselves as free and innocent is one that is self-defeating. For to deny and repress what we see and hear and know is to live in a purely invented world, a, world where reason must die and where stupidity must reign...

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... Consider the Nicaraguan revolution. The Sandinistas, following the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Somoza regime in 1979 and the ending of forty years of dictatorship "embarked almost immediately on a program aimed at changing the basic social structure..." The data on the accomplishments of the revolution as well as the destructive effects of the U.S.-backed Contra attacks have been well documented elsewhere. I shall provide you with but a glimpse of the picture. In health care, the Sandinistas reduced the infant mortality rate from 121 per 1,000 births in 1979 to 75 per 1,000 births in 1984. They eliminated polio by 1982 and sharply increased the number of health facilities, such as hospitals, health centers, and health posts. In 1982 Nicaragua received the UNICEF/World Health Organization prize for the Third World country that had made the greatest improvement in health. By 1984, however, the Contras had killed sixty-nine health care providers and had destroyed fifty-nine rural health outposts, three health centers, and one hospital. The economic costs of the war in 1984 alone could have built 8,000 rural health outposts, 196 health centers, or twenty-five hospitals of 200-bed capacity.

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Confronting the Beast

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... the U.S. political-economic system is not a democratic system. Its power and wealth depends upon rule by a few and the subordination of the many, and ... the people who run it are horrified by genuine democratic movements which aim to give majorities political and economic power ... it is not Reagan or Carter or Kennedy or Eisenhower, necessarily, that is responsible for a given intervention. Rather it is a system-the ideas, values, beliefs, and practices within it, that require such intervention for its preservation. Presidents simply help manage the system and try to maintain its political and economic stability.

... genuine democratic movements in this country are also defined by elites as crises. We need to begin to explore the idea that the threads of injustice and corruption and repression within U.S. client states run throughout our institutions here. We need to emphasize that many of the people within the United States and within U.S. client states face a common power structure and experience similar forms of oppression. We have a common interest and we need to work together. Therefore, when we speak of the torture and mass murder that takes place within U.S. client states let us also speak of the situation of dependent populations here. For example, the percentage of blacks in our overall prison population has doubled since 1962 to 46 percent. Blacks in this country go to prison more often than blacks in South Africa. The Public Health Service estimates that every year prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals, dusts, noise, heat, cold, and radiation kills nearly 200,000 workers. The leading cause of death of teenagers is suicide. Twenty-five percent of all children will be sexually molested before they are eighteen. Two out of three poor adults are women. Twenty-five million adults can't read poison labels. An additional 35 million are functionally illiterate, all of which means that the United States ranks 49th among the 158 United Nation members in literacy. With regard to infant mortality, the United States ranks 18th. Nine thousand Americans are killed yearly by commercial reactor emissions. The National Academy of Sciences reports that "The average consumer is exposed to pesticide residues...in nearly every food, including meat, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, sugar, coffee, oils, dried goods and most processed foods." Information such as this leads us to conclude that in some respects we are all dependent upon the decisions made by corporate elites. It leads us to the understanding that Santiago and the South Bronx are all part of the same corporate empire. And so while unions are being busted and social programs are being slashed, the right women have to their bodies is being challenged, affirmative action is being denied, "voting rights" are being circumvented, and while we are all being monitored, F-16 fighters and M-1 tanks are being built, and a 600 ship navy is being assembled so that intervention, penetration, forcible entry, assault, and rape can be as easily carried out in Libya, Grenada, and Nicaragua as it can in Detroit, Oakland, and East L.A. The "low intensity" warfare that is being waged abroad to protect the system of production for private profit is being waged at home as well.

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Acquiring a More Real Identity

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I can think of no greater task for activists today than to study the reasons why so many common people, surely a majority, objected to the ratification of the Constitution . We must understand the design and structure of our national institutions before we can begin to understand what our government is up to at home and around the world.

The Constitution was designed to ensure that the majority of citizens (without property) would not have a real voice in political affairs and it is no coincidence that is the case today. And the Constitution was designed to ensure that real political power in this country would always be held by the handful of very large property owners and it is no coincidence that is the case today. Simply stated, the Constitution was designed to protect the privilege and power of large property owners and shatter the logic of the majority and today it helps to do that in Nicaragua, South Africa, Guatemala, Chile, Newark, Detroit, most of the South, most of California where soon the majority will be of Third World origins, and so many other places. The merchants, bankers, and plantation slave-owners of 1787 have become a global corporate clan of 1987. ... how many more plucked eyes and wrenched throats must we pay for in the villages of the poor before we figure out that Congress does the dirty work of corporations and that respectfully petitioning those men and women can only be the work of imperial citizens who are slowly dying.

The interpretation presented on these pages, for many, will be one that is hard to accept. Criticism of the ideas, beliefs, and values with which we identify generally are. But it may be helpful to ponder the validity of a Soviet citizen's remark that the essential difference between the Soviets and Americans is that while Soviet citizens often disbelieve their propaganda, we seem to fully accept ours. Take the war in Southeast Asia. It was just a little over ten years ago that the armed forces of the United States ended its killing of over four million people. Yet government officials within the Reagan administration tell us it was one of "our" finest hours. Or take Lincoln, probably our greatest president. His contribution was preserving the union. But as we know, he was going to preserve it with or without slavery. Now, do you believe that the preservation of any country is worth more than the freedom of four million slaves? The Emancipation Proclamation was signed primarily out of military necessity. Stated Lincoln near the end of the Emancipation Proclamation: "I further declare and make known that such persons, of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." As Vincent Harding concludes, "The heart of the matter was this: while the concrete historical realities of the time testified to the costly, daring, courageous activities of hundreds of thousands of black people breaking loose from slavery and setting themselves free, the myth [that Lincoln freed the slaves] gave the credit for this freedom to a white Republican president. In those same times when black men and women saw visions of a new society of equals, and heard voices pressing them against the American Union of white supremacy, Abraham Lincoln was unable to see beyond the limits of his own race, class, and time, and dreamed of a Haitian island and of Central American colonies to rid the country of the constantly accusing, constantly challenging black presence." For whom is he the "great emancipator?"

Or consider Andrew Jackson, the "Father of Democracy." We know that the Father of Democracy enslaved human beings and was the first U.S. president to use troops to break a strike. In addition, much like George Washington, his early fame came about because of his aggressiveness with regard to killing Native Americans and his cunning in stealing their land. Also, Jackson as a military leader had developed an effective way of dealing with the high rate of desertion. He suggested u whipping for the first two attempts, and the third time, execution." As Howard Zinn points out, "If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people-not Jackson, the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, and exterminator of Indians." For whom is he the Father of Democracy?"

The question is one of moving beyond a political economy that rests upon the assumption that massive inequality is natural and functional. Early in the 19th century when China resisted Great Britain s "free trade" policy of having opium shipped from India to China, John Quincy Adams argued that China s resistance was "an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations." The same arrogance disguised as natural law underscores much of U.S. foreign policy today. I think it is important that we let go of these sorts of myths so that we can be free from the lie, from the need to distort reality, and from the need to identify with a set of assumptions and values simply because we inherited them. It would do us well, I believe, to identify with the slaves, not the slave masters. For we work in the tradition of and are inspired not by Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, but by Denmark Vessey, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, slaves who by virtue of their resistance and their solidarity with the oppressed expressed what it meant to be human.

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We are in Danger

We the people have control over neither political nor economic power. We are a dependent population. Let us have no illusions about the government of the United States. Following World War II, when the military, economic, and political strength of this country knew no historical parallel, the government quite explicitly, and one could say feverishly, struggled to maintain its relationships of disparity with most of the rest of the world. Efforts by indigenous people to move in the direction of modest reform and democratization were, without sentimentality, crushed. Now the American Empire is in decline. The government of the United States, particularly in light of liberation movements both at home and abroad, has revealed a kind of desperation. The suggestion, for example, that the embattled and impoverished little nation of Nicaragua (whose population is equal to that of greater Boston) poses a security threat to the United States compares to Hitler's suggestion that Czechoslovakia was "a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany and that the "aggressiveness" of the Poles threatened the Third Reich. Domestically there have been a variety of recent attempts to strengthen the ability of the U.S. government to repress dissent Gregory Shank has identified the following expressions of what he calls the "criminalization of dissent":

* Reagan's 1980 blueprint for conservative government recommended the abolition of restrictions on domestic intelligence work and the renewal of congressional panels on internal security. The blueprint also urged that national security requirements and the quelling of internal disorder take precedence over individual liberties.

* The term "street crime" has been developed as the code word for domestic law and order. In 1981 for example, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, referred to "street crime" as "day-by-day terrorism." Law violators were called domestic terrorists. "Burger explicitly called for a law and order campaign to combat the internal and external problems which were reducing the United States to 'the status of an impotent society.' What was needed was a War on Crime that raised it to the status of the War on terrorism."

* Along with the massive cuts in social programs which has the effect of pushing many within the activist communities of the 1960s and 1970s (blacks, students, women, Hispanics and working people generally) to the margin of society, the Reagan administration has proposed limiting constitutional protection of individuals from the federal government. These proposals included the weakening of "rules excluding use of illegally seized evidence, the right to counsel of individual defendants, the right to trial by jury, and the precept of 'innocent until proven guilty' " and the advocacy of preventive detention.

* Efforts are underway to widen the definition of criminal conduct to include "potential disrupters of the economic, political, and ideological rule of global capital." Attempts have been made to "vastly enlarge the counter-subversive and counter-terrorist roles of intelligence agencies."

* There are campaigns to "build more prisons, lengthen and maximize the severity of prison sentences, destroy social service alternatives to imprisonment, enlarge and better equip police forces, and vigorously reintroduce the death penalty."

* Senate Bill 1762 signed into law October 12, 1984 permits "preventive detention" for federal defendants considered "dangerous" and legalized unwarranted search and seizure of people and vehicles by customs officials suspecting violations of currency transaction laws. H R. 6311 redefined terrorism as a "violent act" (including violence against property and persons) which "appears to be intended...to influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion." Shank notes that by this definition demonstrators that push down a chain fence in order to hold a sit-in at a nuclear power plant could be prosecuted as terrorists. And rewards up to $500,000 could be paid to informers.

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Beginning It Now

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So here we are. Watched over. Infiltrated at meetings. Monitored at work. Spied on when we come back from Nicaragua or Cuba. Legislated at instead of self-governed. Indoctrinated in not so subtle ways. Poisoned and experimented on. Assessed and ordered about by rich white men who are corrupt and really not very much alive. And at each turn, on just about each day, we are exploited, lied t: to, ripped-off, pressed to work harder, extorted, and generally held [^ in contempt. And when we resist, when we organize, or when we I stand up and say no, we are repressed, fined, assaulted and battered, followed, censored, photographed, wire-tapped, lie-detected, drug-tested, ridiculed, insulted, stigmatized, harassed, left unemployed or underpaid, and increasingly made to speak English.

But you know, things are going to change. We are going to stand up because we know who we are. We are the enlightened souls of history who disturb, upset, and open ways for a better understanding. The doubt is false. We are restlessness, hunger, and lust. We are E a great furnace of resolve. The doubt is false.

We state the bare facts and let them sing. We are the perfection of sensuality and we dream of celebrating the fierce joy of victory and that dream is real. We are luxuriant play; we are sin; we are god; we are transcendent humanity. And we shall turn the page of history. The doubt is false.

We ride on some undiscovered spirit. We are unarmed warriors, we reverberate with shattering force. We are the stars and nothing can stop us. The doubt is false.

We have the capacity to ennoble. We are voices strong and steady. We are defiant, rebellious. The doubt is false.

We have been told all our lives that we can 't change anything, that you can '" fight city hall." At every meeting there is someone who always makes a case why we should not be radical - it will alienate someone, we are not ready, we need to educate a little more, read a little more, get more numbers. Well, you can always make the case not to be radical. But don't. It's a lie. The doubt is false.

We are activists. We are liberators. We are revolutionaries. We are here on earth in this hour of danger and we must move beyond the vision of the Framers to express our own. And that belief is real.

Toward an American Revolution