Chellis Glendinning : Confessions of an Obituary 'Aficionada'

Fred Astaire: Bidding adieu.

Witness to notable crossings:
Confessions of an obituary aficionada

Brimming with Mississippi gentility and rousing political arguments, he drew me into the swirl of mad farmers, musicians, historians, sheep herders, and political philosophers who were demanding that the state of Vermont secede from the United States of America.

By Chellis Glendinning / Wild Culture / March 27, 2013

Bolivia-based psychotherapist and author Chellis Glendinning on the fine art of biography-after-the-fact.

I’m a daily reader of the New York Times obituaries. There, I said it. And yes, this little habit of mine has been going on for decades. Needless to say, in that time I’ve witnessed a surfeit of notable crossings into the unknown. Simone de Beauvoir. Picasso. Katherine Hepburn. Anwar Sadat. Indira Gandhi. Mercedes Sosa. And, in the process, I’ve gained an education in the fine art of biography-after-the-fact.

For example, I’m an admirer of Fred Astaire -- and of Fred Astaire’s NYT obit. Placing him in the era of America’s immigration rush, vaudeville, and the rise of Hollywood talkies, it covers his working-class upbringing, attendance at dance school, how he stayed so lithe, film successes, marriages, praise from colleagues, and why he put away his tap shoes. The essay is capped off with his philosophy of hoofing: “The search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked.” The obit itself is as elegant as Fred Astaire in a tuxedo skipping across the linoleum.

Which brings us to the obituary as literary form. While the death notice began as a titillating little gossip crumb in early-1700s England, Melanie Johnson’s The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries informs us that we have arrived at the Golden Age of the Obituary. In addition, says Johnson, while the earliest obit writers perceived the job as the lowest-entry-rung of a hopefully rising journalistic career, today’s writers accomplish the mythic feat of blending “empathy and detachment; sensitivity and bluntness.”

But, we might ask, from where springs this mad dash toward minimalism? True, invention of the six-word narrative, short-short fiction, and “smoke long” (a tale whose enjoyment lasts the length of a cigarette) parallels the fascination. The cell phone, whose text-messaging lines allow but 40 characters, could be a culprit.

In this era of flash-technologies, life has become too hurried and fragmented for lolling about for days on end with Sense and Sensibility. Whatever the sociology of this literary development, in a mere 100-500 words, the obituary may have replaced the biography, using the most telling incidents of a lifetime to reveal the blistering whole of a person’s story; perhaps, we might consider, its practitioners have become today’s bards.

Nonetheless, in not-so-Golden-Age circles, to be an aficionada, as I am, is still not an accepted social status. If ever my little secret happens to come up in conversation, the incredulous demand to know why, and I’m never able to formulate an explanation that saves me from assignment to the “Goth” category. That is... until my own friends’ life stories began to appear like confetti in a ticker tape parade in those same revered pages -- and in the San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Fe New Mexican, Washington Post, Anderson Valley Advertiser, By What Authority, Orion, La Jornada, CounterPunch...

Feminists, writers, filmmakers, anti-nuclear activists, farmers, historians, ecologists, bioregional activists, folk singers, yoga teachers, technology critics, philosophers, they -- and I could see that death was no longer going to be something that happened occasionally and to someone else. It was the flame-eyed, snake-coifed Gorgon in the room -- right here and right now.

The passing that threw me over was that of John Ross. The news came via an email announcement from his colleagues in San Francisco, reporting that the doctors had done all they could to prolong his time and, by choice, he had left his room in a Mexico City hotel for Lake Patzcuaro where he had lived on and off for 50 years. It wasn’t that we hadn’t had sufficient notice of the possibility, yet I sat in my chair for some time, as stunned as a bird slamming into a glass window.

I could not imagine a world
without John Ross.

Red-diaper baby, the first journalist to venture into the Chiapas selva to report on the Zapatistas, Human Shield against the war in Iraq, author of books documenting left-wing history in the U.S., jazz poet: Ross was a bona fide character. Toothless and almost blind from conflict generated during his various political exploits, he could guzzle cheap wine like nobody’s business and recite poetry into the wee hours. He was obnoxious as all get-out, and he had liver cancer.

Ross took the rail-runner from Albuquerque to Santa Fe to visit me while on a book tour for his monstrous tribute to Mexico City, El Monstruo. His mission was to swig espresso, buy a really cool cane to bolster his failing leg, and (needless to say) talk politics. I was on the verge of moving to Bolivia, and he reached into the suitcases of memory to regale me with his encounters with now-President Evo Morales. Although neither of us said a word, when he mounted the aluminum steps for the return journey, we knew it would be the last time we would be together. I clung to the vision of this brave warrior as he hobbled to grab the overhead bar and plop his wiry body into a seat.

The news of his passing in January 2011 struck me in a way that even my own mother’s death did not. I could not imagine – or accept – a world without John Ross.

Maybe I was still reeling from Ross’ passing when Richard Grossman’s metastatic melanoma flared up. Grossman was what one might call a “sweetheart with an edge.” Caring in friendship, he also boasted something of an uncouth penchant for sticking his face into stretch limousines and loudly decreeing the shame of the owners in a world of gross inequity. He was best known for his contribution to progressive thought for the “legal” mechanism corporations rely on to perpetrate injustice and exploitation: they enjoy the same rights as individual people do.

He had also fought for workers’ rights in the context of the environmental movement, jumpstarted organizations to push citizen rights, designed a school for teaching democracy, and spearheaded court cases to challenge the “rights” of corporations. Grossman and I had had a habit of talking on the phone for hours each week -- Río Grande Valley to the Catskills -- about history and politics. He had a fondness for growing opium poppies, and since cultivating such a crop was illegal in the U.S. (and, incidentally, since I had written a book about the global heroin trade), he reveled in referring to his delicate blossoms with code words and a tone of devilish irony.

Two weeks before he died, in November of 2011, Grossman was talking up a storm about his new lawsuit in Pennsylvania; he had just done an interview for Corporate Crime Reporter proposing a law to strip away 500 years of Constitutional protections for corporations -- and out of the blue he offered financial help to salve my housing problems in Bolivia. His last email to me capped off with: “Be Good, Be Bad, Be Historical.” And then the calls and letters stopped...

Rebekah Azen’s suicide hit like the clang of an alarm clock: “SAD NEWS FROM SANTA FE” announced the note from a friend-in-common. Upon arriving in New Mexico from Wisconsin, Azen had sought roots with a Native clan at San Felipe Pueblo that she called her “family,” and by the time I met her in the 1990s, she was hot on the trail of the visionary philosophies of what she called the two Henrys: Thoreau and George. Her particular outrage had to do with theft of land and home, drawing parallels between the colonization of indigenous peoples and the housing hardships of the working class – and she wrote abundantly on the topic in Green Fire Times.

Of late, she had been suffering from an ill-explained illness, although her diligent work in the anti-electromagnetic radiation movement, and her constant complaints about her librarian job at the Santa Fe New Mexican where she was daily barraged by Wi-Fi, gave the sense that she had electro-hypersensitivity, otherwise known as microwave sickness. One afternoon in October of 2011, probably very slowly as Azen always moved at the pace of a snail in a Buddhist retreat, she walked into her beloved, juniper-spotted Tesuque desert and blasted her skull to bits with a bullet.

I couldn’t get over the courage that such an act took. Maybe it was desperation: she hadn’t been able to sleep for months. But being that she was an ally with whom I had navigated the labyrinthine passageways of philosophy and literature, not to mention Cochiti Pueblo’s wind-sculpted Tent Rocks -- and who had come to me in my moment of need -- I knew her spirit: that exit was the handy work of one intrepid voyager.

Then Thomas Naylor surprised us with a stroke, and on December 12, 2012, the family chose to remove the life-support technologies. That decision would have pleased Thomas: he was a raving critic of mass technologies and of the authoritarian institutions they reflected, facilitated, and propagated. After a successful career as an economics/computer science professor at Duke University, he moved to Vermont and authored a series of books on decentralism, including Downsizing the USA.

Thomas Naylor: Brimming with
Mississippi gentility.

I met him in 2008. I had written an essay for CounterPunch entitled “Techno-Fascism,” and it turned out that Naylor had been using that same term. He sent me a packet containing a four-page hand-scrawled letter, a pile of articles, and a book he had written called Secession. And so it came to be that Naylor, brimming with Mississippi gentility and rousing political arguments, drew me into the swirl of mad farmers, musicians, historians, sheep herders, and political philosophers who were demanding that the state of Vermont secede from the United States of America.

His activism was inflamed by old-fashioned ethical outrage, and he waxed emotional when it came to the immorality of remaining within a U.S. that was ruining the planet with its technologies and killing people with its imperialist wars. Right before his death, he was organizing an assembly of the small nations of the world to discuss their role in addressing the injustices caused by imperial nations and gain worldwide backing for secession movements, to be held in Liechtenstein in 2013. But then, unexpectedly, he was gone.

One angle on this incessant bombardment of obituaries is that today’s culprits to the final demise tend not so much toward what in my grandmother’s day was called “natural causes” as they do toward the impacts of the dirty chemicals and abrasive technologies overrunning planet Earth. Pesticides. Nuclear power plant leakages. Preservatives. Dioxin-infused tampons. Cell-tower and satellite emissions of electromagnetic radiation. Carbon monoxide. Asbestos. Chemical hormones. Heavy metals. I do not feel just the wells of grief at these deaths; I feel unnerved and discombobulated by the untimely and unnecessary theft of lives -- and wisdom -- from our midst.

And there is something else. Now, after reading so many of my own friends’ life endeavors in encapsulated form, I finally understand why I have relished the NYT obituaries all these years. As we know, the end of an individual’s life bold-facedly reveals that person’s participation in an era. Yet too, and perhaps more notably for the longings of the human psyche, it offers up the wide view we all seek so that we can make meaning of life. And more importantly still, it proposes a frame.

When the dreaded skeleton-laden-with-roses-and-gauze snatches away a comrade, we are able to see with utter clarity what that person did with this life, what her challenges and burdens were, how he mounted them, what she did with ease, what he attempted against all odds. No matter how illuminated or bewildered, how fulfilled or unfinished, how healed or how wounded, the frame reveals that each person is in reality a hero.

The irritations and disappointments we may have felt at personality quirks fall away; whether the most introverted of poets, the most inspiring of orators, or the crankiest of curmudgeons, the final marking unveils each of us as a wondrous creature in the eyes of Creation.

This article was first published at The Journal of Wild Culture.

[Chellis Glendinning lives in Bolivia. She is a psychotherapist specializing in treatment of traumatic stress and the author of six books. Her Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy won the U.S. National Press Women book award in 2000, and she just finished a novel about the energies emanating from artifacts used in revolutions and social movements. In Bolivia she writes for Los Tiempos. She may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org.  Read more of Chellis Glendinning's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Chellis Glendinning : In Bolivia, 'The Repression Strengthened Us!'

Native demonstrators march on La Paz to protest highway construction. Photo from AFP.
Letter from Bolivia:
'The repression strengthened us!'

The ragtag band walked day and night in flip-flops, and the hearts of Bolivians went out to them...

By Chellis Glendinning / The Rag Blog / January 5, 2012

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- One wrong move, forgetting to take your hat off, the interruption of a phone ringing notwithstanding, after a spell a trip to the bank to pay the light bill -- alongside men carrying machine guns -- does get to feel normal.

Such a transit of mind is a testimony to the human ability to adapt, yes? -- and I am reminded of a tale that dear friend anthropologist Francis Huxley tells.

It was the 1950s, and he was called to transport a Native of the Brazilian Xingu tribe to Sao Paulo for emergency medical treatment. After success with that, they strolled through the streets of the city -- for the Native man, the first time ever in such a scene. Upon passing a bank heavily guarded by men in military uniform, bearing epaulets, badges, and heavy black boots and carting machine guns -- the man turned and asked what this strange display was all about.

Grappling for words, Francis reported that this was where the jefe kept his riches. The Native man immediately quipped, “Well! He must not be a very good jefe!”

And so it is here, just over the border from Brazil and 60 years later.

Jefe Evo Morales has -- to quote one of Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia” cartoons -- “made (him)self unpopular.” To tell the truth, he already had accomplished that feat, but the Moxeño-Chimare-Yurakerés march to the capital hammered the final nail in.

On 15 August, some 700 indígenas set out to protest a Brazil-funded intra-continental superhighway the Bolivian state was erecting through their constitutionally-protected, sovereign eco-reserve, the Territorio Indígena and Parque Nacional Isibro Sécure (TIPNIS) -- where the last of the planet’s gatherer-hunter cultures thrive, while flora and fauna in danger of extinction make their fragile way. The purpose of the highway: to carry petroleum from Brazil across Bolivia to Chile’s ports to be shipped to your cars in the U.S.

The ragtag band walked day and night in flip-flops, and the hearts of Bolivians went out to them in the form of a nationwide drive to send shoes, clothes, food, and medicines.

First the government blocked the road from passage, including the arrival of food and water. Then, on Sunday 25 September, the police attacked the encampment! Bursting in with tear gas, they chased down fleeing indígenas, sometimes five officers in full riot gear against a single boy in cotton shorts; with their night sticks they beat them on their backs and chests and heads; they bound their arms, legs, and mouths with silver duct tape making it almost impossible to breathe; they dragged some 300 dirigente-leaders, women, children, and ancianos to waiting trucks and hauled them away to unknown locations. It was claimed that one child died in the violence.

Riot police in La Paz. Photo from The Guardian (U.K).
By Monday morning a pall of shock had settled over Bolivia; everyone was glued to a television somewhere -- and then the popular response burst forth. All over, including at the Bolivian embassy in New York where Morales was presenting at the United Nations, people took to the streets. And the venting allowed for long pent-up emotions to flow into the public vocabulary.

“Ya no tiene máscara indígena”/”Morales can no longer wear his mask of so-called indigenous support,” proclaimed Native social analyst Fernando Untoja. Long-time activist Rafael Quispe trotted out the as-yet unspoken words: “dictadura”/”dictatorship.” And ex-government official Alex Contreras termed the actions “métodos del fascismo”/”methods of fascism.”

Astoundingly, one marcher was quoted in a 20 October newspaper report, “La represión nos fortaleció”/”The repression strengthened us.”

On 19 October what had started, two months before, as a march of 700 had now swelled to 3,000. After two months of treking/camping, treking/camping; after the sweltering heat of the tropics and the driving sleet of the mountains; after bearing inadequate shoes, too thin jackets, foot sores, injuries, dehydration, diarrhea, and exhaustion; after enduring disregard, insults, and arguments for disqualification spouting from the mouths of government officials: after the official withholding of water and food; and then having endured violent repression -- the TIPNIS marchers rounded the last crag before the descent into the capital city.

What lay below, they say, was unexpected.

The streets of La Paz were teeming with supporters from every hamlet and municipality in Bolivia and beyond! Red flags were blowing in the wind. Green flags. Yellow flags. Wiphala flags. Workers. Taxi drivers. Housekeepers. University students. Mothers with babies. Union leaders. Theater groups. Supporting indigenous groups boasting traditional dress, flutes, and drums Former government officials who had left the MAS party. The press. International support teams.

Trumpets blared. Flutes sang. Mariachi bands blasted accordion music. Placards proclaimed: “TIPNIS=VIDA, EVO=MUERTE,” “EL TIPNIS: NO SE TOCA, CARAJO!” and “¡TIPNIS SOMOS TODOS!” People rushed to meet the marchers, hugged them, kissed them on the lips. Men and women were sobbing in the streets! Whole schools had been liberated to play a role in history, and uniformed children were waving flags, holding up their drawings of tropical flowers, and cheering.

Along the boulevards the welcomers flanked the marchers like a thick envelope of protection from potential police action; in some parts the shield extended five times thicker than the march itself.

It was the largest gathering of humanity in the history of Bolivia.

After all his grandstanding about how the state would never, ever, give in -- not! the president ventured into the plaza with his phony smile -- this after months of badmouthing the marchers as dupes of the imperialist state to the north, denying them a meeting, sending para-protestors out to harm them, cutting off food and water, and finally unleashing the military.

Against the very real possibility of his government going under, he gave in. No highway through TIPNIS. As we say in baseball, though, “It’s not over ‘till it’s over.” Now the government is finding ways to backpedal. But this was a major triumphant event that went unreported in the EE.UU -- and I wanted you, for this moment, to bask in the heroism that our human spirit is capable of mustering.

[Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books, including When Technology Wounds, Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. She lives in Bolivia and may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org. A version of this article was published at CounterPunch. Read more of Chellis Glendinning's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Chellis Glendinning : 'Decepción' in Bolivia

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Militant ambivalence? A demonstrator holds portraits of President Evo Morales during a protest in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo from Reuters.
Evo on the rocks:
Decepción in Bolivia

By Chellis Glendinning / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2011

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia -- A poster of “Guernica” was bursting from the wall, and the umpteenth Latin American rendition of “My Way” was booming from the record player. I was sharing a hand-carved table in a Cochabamba cantina with a cowboy from the Chapare, an anti-capitalist immigration officer, an anarchist surgeon, and a barbacoa-restaurateur. All had been supporters of President Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).

The conversation was fiery and, as is normal here in the Andes, its topic was politics.

Despite this particular crowd’s claim to the middle class, the agreement among them echoed a truth of Bolivian culture: a tendency to view things from the perspective of the collective, rather than solely from one’s perceived interests.

And indeed, this conversation echoed other charlas I’d had with campesinos, taxi-trufi drivers, and union members -- and I need to be straight with you: things are not going well for the government of Bolivia’s first indigenous leader in 500 years. It was only a matter of filling in the details -- and, in between gulps of Auténtico beer and Cuban mixed drinks, said details were pouring forth at the cantina.

Then the question was put to me. What did citizens of the United States think? I had to admit two answers: 1) if my daily dip into The New York Times provides any indication, people in the U.S. are basically uninformed about goings-on in Bolivia; and 2) for U.S. leftists, environmentalists, and climate-change activists, the aura of hope unleashed by the 2005 election of Evo Morales lingers like perfume from a Cochabamba jasmine bush.

I offer, then, a sweep of an overview of what’s happening and what some cowboys and campesinos, taxi drivers, and rank-and-file, are thinking.

Bolivian President Evo Morales reacts during a nationwide message at the presidential palace in La Paz while vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera looks on. Photo by Reuters.
Forked Tongue I: Madre Tierra

Out of one tine of what has become the Morales administration’s two-sided tongue come blood-stirring proclamations like the president’s empassioned grito “¡Planeta o Muerte!” at the 2010 Cancun climate change talks. Brilliant. Then there is the stark refusal, that not even Cuba or Venezuela would match, to sign on to the watered-down agreement at said talks.

And now comes the nation’s new law proclaiming the rights of Madre Tierra -- to some minds, a legal-philosophic leap forward that, a few decades ago, only bioregionalists, primitive-anarchists, and traditional Native peoples could imagine.

But, sorry to say, the other spine of the eco-fork must be noted:

• the launch of genetically-modified agriculture into a countryside presently free of GMOs;
• two under-construction hydro-electric dams 300% bigger than the U.S.’s Hoover Dam at a cost of $13 billion, slated to channel water to Brazil in exchange for monies to boost Bolivia’s petro and plastic industries -- this, in a country where many communities have no potable water and water-borne illnesses are rampant;
• in a nation uncontaminated by nuclear radiation: uranium mining, with future plans for nuclear power plants -- aided by Iran;
• blankets of electromagnetic radiation in the form of WiMAX over urban landscapes – with the state telecommunications corporation bragging of 1350 radiobases in an area the size of Texas and California combined, with many more to come;
• commodity-transporting highways bulldozing through protected nature reserves whose treasures, in the case of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos road, include 11 endangered species and three Native groups in 60 communities living their traditional hunter-gatherer-fishing lifeways;
• new oil excavations;
• new gas excavations;
• in partnership with Mitubishi, Sumitomo, South Korea, and Iran: massive lithium development -- threatening leeching, leaks, emissions, and spills in the world-treasure salt flats;
• Bolivia’s own Made-in-China satellite;
• with the help of India, the construction of humankind’s largest iron mine;
• 900 miles of pipeline slated to transport natural gas to Argentina; and
• an explosion of airport and high-rise construction.

In other words: full-tilt, high-tech, colossal-scale, high-capital modernization -- on a Madre Tierra in which such expansion has already been shown to be The Problem.

A Dec. 30, 2010 protest against gas prices turns violent. Top image from FM Center es Noticia. Below, from Reuters.
Forked Tongue II: Democracy

Regarding governance, from one side of Bolivia’s forked tongue is spoken the legal language of plurinationalismo. After centuries of dictatorships, neoliberal governments, and military juntas, the 2009 Morales-initiated Constitution legitimizes a form of decentralized federalism: a reinstatement of decision-making to local communities, whether defined by place, indigenous heritage, or worker identity.

But, from the other tine of the fork, we encounter unabashed state centralism -- and the stringency of an If-You’re-Not-With-Us-You’re-Against-Us mentality to reinforce its dominion. A blazing example of such top-down musculature is the 2010 Christmas Time Gasolinazo: Decreto Supremo #748 in which Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera abruptly announced that gasoline and diesel prices had been jacked up -- by as much as 83%. (“Joy to the World” notwithstanding, the violent uprisings that followed rerouted the government’s hurry to a slower pace of inflation.)

But the truth remains: ever since the immediate threat from the right wing subsided following Morales’ 2009 re-election by 62%, a chronic refusal to listen to the very social movements the president promised to follow has posed a disturbing blow to adherents of participatory democracy.

Indigenous woman in La Paz protests against high prices and low wages on Feb. 25, 2011. Photo by Juan Karita / AP / La Prensa.
When indigenous groups protest the bulldozing of their lands for the construction of freeways; when state workers call for increases in salaries against the reality of galloping food prices; when media workers fight for freedom of the press against regulations threatening fines and license suspensions, state control of 20% of the media, and state ownership of all of it -- the administration’s reaction is knee-jerk.

Whether by the vice president or the president himself, citizens questioning the government’s dictates are received with neither concern for their suffering nor gratitude for their participation; they are bold-facedly dismissed as instruments of U.S. imperialism, middle-class whiners, out of touch, and/or dupes of the right wing.

The Who’s famed rock ‘n roll declaration, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss,” comes to mind, and the long-standing trade union congress Centro Obrera Boliviana (COB) is now seeking to unseat the vice president for just such a pronouncement aimed at workers.

A demonstrator sprays graffiti protesting fuel price hikes in Bolivia. Photo from Reuters.
Meet the new problems, same as the old problems

At the same time, Bolivia is rife with chronic problems that, according to some street-level opinion, the government has failed to address.

Corruption within government is an age-old theme. During the Morales administration, the most spectacular example occurred in February 2011: the U.S.-Chile-aided arrest of the national jefe of police, former head of the Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico, and founder of the Centro de Inteligencia y Generación de Información, General René Sarabria Oropeza -- caught in the act of opening up cocaine routes to Miami. His accomplices included a mayor, a military colonel, and a captain.

Another revelation of corruption, more so perhaps for spiritual interest, was the June 2010 arrest of Valentín Mejillones, the amauta-priest who had led the purification ritual of Evo Morales’ inauguration at Tiawanaku in 2006 -- for hosting a cocaine purification factory in his El Alto home.

According to Diego Rada Cuadros, a lawyer whose family was forced to flee the country during the 1980s dictatorships, in the nation-state boasting the severest poverty in South America and -- save Haiti -- all of Latin America, a position in government that may last but six years (or, most probably, less) is a one-shot chance to amass some longer-lasting plata.

Too, while Bolivian coca has been sold for cocaine manufacture since Vietnam War days, the country is fast becoming a global fount of cocaine -- and this development also feeds popular discontent. In the tropical Chapare, where the leaf used for cocaine is grown, every family has a tale of relinquishing food crops to grow the more valuable produce, giving up agriculture all together to work in a lab, or loaning out a youth to play lookout at a staggeringly high salary of $200 a month.

According to satellite surveillance reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), since Morales launched his presidency, the number of hectares commandeered has expanded by fútbol fields: by 2008 as many as 28,000 hectares were ponying up some 130 tons of cocaine, and in 2010 the vice president divulged that el narcotráfico now contributes $700 million a year to the national economy. To boot, one out of every 20 workers in the country is engaged in the biz.

In truth, the location of drug production is most often determined by international events like droughts, floods, inroads made by drug-war efforts, and inter-cartel politics -- yet many Bolivians contend that Morales is to blame. In 2008 he threw out the DEA; all the while, they contend, he was ignoring the expansion of cocaine production as he blithely touted the sacredness of the coca leaf and pushed for the right of cocaleros to plant it.

La Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) represents approximately 2 million workers and indigenous activists. Photo from AP /La Prensa.
Decepción and protest

Curiously, in Spanish, the word for “disappointment” is decepción -- a term that, to the English-speaking ear, does not merely name a feeling; it proposes a dynamic between inner and outer by citing the presence of an impacting source.

In Bolivia popular decepción was measured in a Radio Fides poll in February 2011. The sample was conducted in the barrios of La Paz that are normally a MAS stronghold, and yet a whopping 84% of respondents reported loss of confidence in the government of Evo Morales, with 80% saying they’d go for a change.

In other words, the red-blue-white chompa-sweaters emulating the one Morales wore on his 2005 foreign-policy tour -- that every Tomás, Ricardo, and Hari was sporting in 2006 -- are now totally and completely... out.

Also reflecting growing disappointment is the fact that today’s Bolivia exists in a near-constant state of disruption due to non-stop huelga-strikes, paro-stoppages, bloqueo-road blocks, and manifestacion-demonstrations. Such extreme tactics were honed during the military dictatorships of the 1960-‘90s to force demands by taking the economy hostage -- but they fell off during the early, hope-for-the-best years of the Morales administration.

As I pen this essay, the post office is closed down and a road block has halted overland travel between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Before that, in April, COB threw nationwide marches and paros seeking increases in state medical worker, teacher, and retired incomes to keep up with inflation.

During a (read: peaceful) demonstration by doctors, nurses, and educators in La Paz, a university professor nearly lost his eye when a tear-gas canister shattered his glasses. After multiple surgeries -- performed by the on-strike eye doctor in an act of solidarity -- he is now waiting to find out if his sight will return. His comment about the event: “This is my personal tragedy, yes. But it’s not isolated. It shows how really bad things are in Bolivia -- for all of us.”

From December 2010 through March of 2010, during the worst global-warming-induced storms -- when for months rain gushed as if being thrown from a bucket and floods washed over communities like raging rivers -- the taxi, trufi, and bus choferes and transportistas shut down what was left of the water-logged economy with paros, bloqueos, and manifestaciones in all the major cities of the country.

Earlier, in October 2010, when the government began to whittle away at guarantees for freedom of the press via La Ley Anti-Racismo y Toda Forma de Discriminación -- ostensibly geared to fight racism and sexism, but also containing two articles initiating government control over content -- the nation’s periodistas hit the streets with coffins bearing microphones and reporter tablets, wrote protest placards with their own blood, hung like Christ figures from the balconies of buildings, collected thousands of signatures, and appealed to international press associations.

And in July and August of 2010, the city of Potosí – normally a MAS bastion -- presented Morales with demands to be included in the promised proceso de cambio-process of change, mounting hunger strikes, bloqueos, and mobilizations of up to 100,000 protestors.

A Bolivian mine worker with a stick of dynamite on his helmet joins thousands of Bolivian miners in a protest rally in La Paz on April 6, 2011. Photo from Reuters.
The clutches of 'Guernica'

I understand that the information I am laying out may be difficult to take in -- and please know that activists in Bolivia have asked me to tell their compañeros in the U.S. what is happening here.

In a world laden with fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, and technological disasters; unending wars over land, oil, and water; the unfolding of Peak Oil and, frankly, of what scholar Richard Heinberg calls Peak Everything; a refurbishing of nuclear technologies and fears of nuclear war; swathes of electromagnetic radiation from consumer and military installations; increasing corporate power; decreasing social liberties; out-of-hand control by drug cartels; cancer epidemics; mass addictions; and growing social chaos -- in this world, hope is a precious thing.

When my essay “The Techno-Fantasies of Evo Morales” came out in CounterPunch (December 24-26, 2010), the messenger was held guilty by a few -- to me, revealing the distress at losing, or at least calling into question, the pure promise that Evo Morales’ Bolivia had once offered.

Such distress is not unknown to me. I left an established life in the U.S. to be part of history in Bolivia, and when I arrived in April 2010, my heart clawed at my throat upon encountering the cynicism and despair that had replaced 2006’s enthusiasm.

But now, if I may muster an iota of the courageous perspective my friend, the injured professor, has managed: the predicament isn’t isolated. It shows how bad things are -- for all of us.

Indeed, the politics of the socio-techno-psycho-economic aggregate known as empire have had their way. As American scholar Arab Edward Said has noted, no one in this world has escaped the impacts of imperialist conquest. And yet, if we acknowledge that a better -- and perhaps evolutionally built-in way of being human -- is possible, we might also grasp that the conflicts, contradictions, and conundrum created through centuries of ripping people from roots in land and community, whether by force or seduction, have us by toe, throat, and tail.

Yes, ours is a world writhing in the clutches of “Guernica,” in which too many are dancing to the individualism of “My Way.” In such a world, how does the beautiful, spirited human being blossom out of the militaristic politics, oversize scale, sterile alienation, and brash egoism that have, in one way or another, infected every one of us and every institution in our midst -- including in a mountain land called Bolivia?

I don’t ask my question seeking The Answer -- for, after a lifetime of participation in the political, cultural, and psychological movements of our times, I am aware of the multitude of intelligent projects afoot. I ask my question rather that -- if only for a moment -- we may bring awareness and compassion to the sad reality of our world.

[Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books, including the award-winning Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. She is Writer-in-Residence at Asociación Jakaña in Cochabamba and may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org. This article was also published in the June 1-12, 2011 issue of CounterPunch. Read more of Chellis Glendinning's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Chellis Glendinning : The Way We Were

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1969, 30,000 students and Berkeley citizens marched past barricaded People's Park to protest events of recent days, including the death of James Rector, the blinding of Alan Blanchard, and the many injuries inflicted by police. Photo by Suellen Bulow / Peoples Park.

People's Park and beyond:
The way we were

By Chellis Glendinning / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2011

I plopped down onto the sidewalk in the first row of cross-legged protestors, eye-level with the shin-guards of the first row of National Guardsmen. My hair dropped down my back in a braid, and I was wearing a shirt made of an Indian-print bedspread. The blonde next to me leaned over and disclosed that she was on acid, in fact that she took acid every day.

I know all the details because a photograph of us showed up in Newsweek a few days later: me, the acid head, the dudes with their gas masks and rifles. It was snapped by photojournalist Peter Barnes, who later broke from the “objectivity” of press work, wrote a book on the oppression of soldiers, founded the progressive credit-card company Working Assets, wrote some more books -- and even later than that, by 20 years and wild providence, became lovers with the subject of his camera aim whose Indian-print shirt had long since shredded into compost.

Another photo appeared in that article about the rabble-rousers in Berkeley: a helicopter soaring between the Campanile and Sproul Hall dropping toxic CS gas into the plaza like it was Vietnam. Down at ground level people were screaming, fainting, falling down, blinded, retching, and the National Guard was advancing into the crowds cracking skulls with their batons.

My husband Bill and I somehow ratcheted our bodies away from the toxic clouds, into the cafeteria, down the spiral staircase of the kitchen, and out into the lower plaza. It was the first (and last) time I ever hurled a rock through a window, I was so appalled by the military exercise, and I wonder to this day whatever happened to the woman on acid.

On Bloody Thursday, May 29, 1969, a crowd at Dwight Way and Telegraph is despersed with teargas, a few minutes before the Alameda County deputies came down the street with their shotguns. Photo by Kathryn Bigelow / Peoples Park.


The Third World Liberation Strike demanded that we students skip classes, so I regrouped in the Victorian house that Bill and I rented on Walnut Street, turned my attention to cooking Adele Davis-style, shook my fist during protests against racism, played volleyball with my professor-pal Troy Duster and his social-science comrades... and quietly kept up with my homework.

I was taking The Sociology of the Family. At the end of the quarter, when I decided I’d hand in my paper on women in the Soviet Union and take the final so I could still graduate, the template was laid for a nightmare that plagued my dreams for decades after.

I nervously approached the lecture hall that I hadn’t stepped Swedish clog into for three months. To my terror it was empty. Abandoned, reassigned, unavailable, gone. No students. No prof. No sign redirecting the Returning Striker.

Panic emanated from The Sociology of the Family again when I sheepishly edged toward the departmental office to retrieve the paper and final exam I had somehow managed to hand in. I rifled through the pile to no avail: neither was there -- and I felt as adrift as a hippie waif on Telegraph Avenue. I finally mustered the courage to ask the secretary, and she offered that I must be “the one” who was instructed to see the prof.

He had a beard and glasses (as if I even remembered what he looked like). With a stern voice he told me to sit down, and I felt the axe about to fall. He then smiled and explained that there had been only two A’s in the whole quarter... and they were my paper and my exam. It was hardly the moment to speak of irony, as he blubbered on encouraging me to pursue graduate sociology. I had a flare for it, apparently. Somehow the news was more stultifying than if he’d announced I’d been kicked out for fraud.

The strike was a raging success, laying the ground for what then became a norm in higher education: Black, Chicano, Asian, and Native American studies. I went on to write books that sprang from such experiences as our Third World Liberation Strike -- and at least hinted that I might have kind-of taken some sociology classes.

National Guardsmen confront students at Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus, May 20, 1969. Photo Dick Corten / Peoples Park.

I really can’t figure out how I have wrangled my way through this life, somehow doing the most out-there-outrageous things -- and at the same time being so timid.

The Café Mediterraneum was clearly the place to hang out. Michael Delacour was always there in his pea coat, earnestly talking revolution. There was Moe, with his waning hairline and cigar. Marty Schiffenbauer with his shorts, combat boots, and curly red locks flying every which-way. Old Carroll, the ghetto astrologer. Street poet Julia Vinograd in her yellow cap.

It was all I could do to go in there, I was so nervous: the place was that cool.

It was where the hot-and-heavy political strategizing took place. Where the Red Family grabbed a break from haggling about who did the dishes in the commune. Where the seekers from Shambhala Bookstore talked Krishnamurti, astrology, and Tibetan Buddhism. Where Simone de Beauvoir mixed it up with Martin Heidegger. Where the espresso machine swooshed, Vivaldi’s “Primavera” echoed, and folks sported Mao caps. Where, for Chrissake, everyone smoked... Galoise.

I went, at first ordering cappuccino dusted with chocolate and toting the de rigueur blue pack of cancer sticks, later (after I launched a brief stint with a two-hour-a-day yoga-meditation practice), the far thinner rose-hips tea.

But I always felt a tad “thin” in the cool department.

I cottoned right up to the fashion side of things, though. I mean, how many cases of scabies can be traced to the ultra-wide bell-bottoms scrounged from piles of threads on the concrete floor of the San Pablo army-navy store?

As my signature, I donned the Pirate Coat I paid $15 for at the Paris flea market. Some days I boasted a green leather jacket hinting of London Mod, purchased at the hippest of boutiques, Red Square, and my closet burst with slinky 1930s dresses.

But maybe the finest of couture happened when we dressed up in garb appropriate to the film we were seeing: tux and gowns for Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers; trench coats for noir; boxy 1940s suits and spectators for Preston Sturges; kimonos for Rashomon.

Cool threads and the National Guard, May 30, 1969. Photo by Suellen Bulow / Peoples Park.


Being in jail had its perks. Quiet time, good food, ample bedding, exercise, books for illumination, freedom to roam -- they were not among them.

But it was a pre-feminist moment for us women to be together. I know now that we could have done things differently. There simply did not have to be that pre-midnight crescendo of panicked voices in a solitaire cell that some 100 women from the Mass Bust were now crammed into; we could have gathered into small groups to quietly discuss terror and claustrophobia. We could have been more supportive of our disparate needs. We could have meditated. Or done a ritual.

But what did we know?

We did know that the big bust was coming. Our own private rendition of Deep Throat within the police department had tipped us off, and a few had met in a living room just off campus to weigh our options. Tom Hayden was there. Wendy Schlesinger. Delacour. Bill Miller.

But somehow any planning we mustered had zero effect when the shit hit the fan and the cops cordoned off Shattuck Avenue, hemming in not just us anti-war protestors, but also innocent mailmen and shopping mothers. I was one of the Health Food 15. Guilty as all get-out, we had rushed into Goodson’s, grabbed wire shopping baskets, and pretended to be buying organic oatmeal -- but sure enough, a policeman emerged tall and angry through the back door and rounded us up for the bus ride to Santa Rita Detention Center.

Knowing it was coming, I had made my own plan for bail. It’s not a plan that -- what with post-9-11 paranoia -- would fly today, but it did back then. I had hand-penned a letter to Wells Fargo bank authorizing my commune-mate to take out $300 from my savings account, and when he showed up at the jail with papers for my release, I was never happier to see a parking lot.

The stories that came out of the men’s section were grim. While we women had had the freedom to fashion the plastic bags filled with Wonder-bread-bologna sandwiches into “volleyballs” for our nervous amusement, the men had been jammed face down in the yard and made to lie there without flinching through the night. One had his head tied to an iron pipe, and an officer had banged the pipe till blood gushed from his eyes, nose, and mouth.

In the end, the Health Food 15 got off through the efforts of our pro bono lawyer Bob Treuhaft. And in the end, the perk was seeing the system from the inside out.

Members of the Black Panther Party in their "humongous leather jackets." Image from Ancestry in Progress.

In their humongous leather jackets, the Black Panthers came on as fierce as the police they were bucking. One day a militaristic line-up of them made the trek from downtown Oakland to hold forth at the noon rally in Sproul Plaza.

Their message was kind of confusing to those of us who had grown up on “We Shall Overcome” and sharpened our political teeth in the South during Mississippi Summer. Bristling with the radicalism of the international liberation/decolonization movements, the Black Panthers announced that the new revolutionary tack was to stand alone, Whitey not invited. At the same time, they demanded our support.

After that, a lot of interracial marriages broke apart in a frenzy of political realignment. Along with everyone else, I was reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Frantz Fanon’s notion of violence against whites as a cleansing act was flying through the halls of academia, so I wasn’t completely in the dark about rage, separatism, and self-empowerment.

Just then something began to appear in the dark, hung on a peg in the hallway of the apartment we shared with a university secretary, who was white. It was the fiercest black-leather jacket of all. Every time it was there, a heavy silence emanated from behind her closed door, and soon she began to show up in a black beret behind the card table, taking the money and handing out leaflets, at Panther events.

I could only think that she, among very few, had mastered the delicacies of white support.

Mario Savio, standing atop a police car in Sproul Plaza, Oct. 1, 1964, speaks to thousands during the Free Speech Movement. Photo courtesy Bancroft Library / Berkeley Daily Planet.

I had no idea that we activists -- sometimes amassed in crowds of 3,000, sometimes 100,000 -- had, through the years of rampaging around campus and in the streets, developed an unspoken method: a way of forming, spreading, taking over the city, then dispersing, and finally re-congealing like a dance that was in our genes.

That is, until the neophytes arrived -- which happened the summer after People’s Park when every Tom, Dick, and Hari Krishna east of Sproul Plaza decided that Berkeley was the place to hone one’s revolutionary skills. Suddenly, up against the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department “Blue Meanies,” the streets became a place of edginess, chaos, and utter lack of method.

I said, “To Hell With It,” and retired to my commune on Vine Street. It was a good time to pull back for a spell. The obvious next step was something akin to what we’d seen in the film Battle of Algiers, and indeed many in the New Left were joining gun clubs, just as some Students for a Democratic Society radicals back East were morphing into the Weather Underground.

Bill and I hightailed it to Europe, bought a second-hand Deux Chevaux in Amsterdam, and tooled at 40 m.p.h. through Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Andorra, Spain, and Morocco. When we got back and retreated to a maple-sugar farm in Vermont, sure enough, the FBI tracked us down and paid a visit to see what we were up to.

Things being as they were, Bill refused to ID any of the folks in the photos and told the FBI dude to shove it.

[Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books, including My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Her Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade, both won the National Federation of Press Women book award in nonfiction, in 2000 and 2006 respectively. She lives in Marquina, Bolivia, and can be reached via www.chellisglendinning.org.]

Photo by Gil Madrid / PeoplesPark.
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