Helping Toads Cross the Road to Make Whoopee

The Ecstasy of Altruism

For the past two years I’ve been a volunteer for the Roxborough, Pennsylvania Toad DETOUR (Defending Emerging Toads of Upper Roxborough). It’s not the thousands of migrating amphibians who are being detoured, however, it’s that non-native rumbling beast, the car. 

I’d like to take you on a brief but epic journey of the toads, their helpers and their antagonists -- from the meat eating toad saviors to the Commie vegans (me), to the right wing talk-shit radio host who ridicules the detour, to the local evangelical pastor who believes we should be working on “the abortion issue instead of the toad issue,” to the five-year-olds filled with wonder and their Dixie cups filled with toadlets, to the little old ladies (and men) in tennis shoes who remain the backbone of the movement to help animals of all kinds, and to the discomforting effect that any kind of street activism seems to have on don’t-make-a-scene, don’t-slow-my-routine Americans who, if living in 1775, might have yelled: “Get a life, Paul Revere!” And, most importantly, to the power of what can happen when a single person cares a lot even when no one else seems to care at all.   

Once upon a time, every spring, the hibernating bufo americanus digs up about a foot through the dirt and emerges into the darkness of the first warm rainy night in March. By the thousands, and from every direction over several weeks, the Roxborough toads begin their journey from backyards, junior league baseball fields, a small cemetery and the woods of the 340-acre Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, hopping to the highest point in the city, the abandoned (by humans) 30-acre Roxborough reservoir. Most of the toads hop for over a mile and cross one or two busy roads where they are met with a 20-foot tall stone wall which they travel along for a city block. They then turn right to go up a brick pedestrian ramp another half block or so, crawl under a fence, then down a steep wooded embankment and into the reservoir where they began their lives. About a month after the males fertilize the females’ eggs, the tadpoles develop into tiny fly-sized toadlets and they begin the perilous reverse migration. 

Pickerel frogs, in much smaller numbers, also move with the toads during the four to six week migration. When the trilling of the male toads, calling for the females, joins with the croaking frogs and the squawks and chirps of migrating birds the reservoir becomes another of nature’s great symphonies. An association of free producers -- producing joy!  

The toad detour began several years ago when Lisa Levinson, a 44-year-old therapist, saw toads getting crushed by cars one night on her way home from work. She stopped traffic and picked up the toads and put them on the other side of the road. Soon someone called the police on this “crazy lady in the street.” But when the female officer rolled up, instead of taking Levinson in for observation, she blocked off the street with her patrol car so Levinson could continue her work unimpeded. After another year of unsafe solo “renegade operations,” Levinson convinced the city of Roxborough to issue a temporary permit to block the two main migration roads for several hours during nights that the toads are on the move. Levinson then organized over 100 volunteers and got the backing of a dozen civic, environmental and neighborhood groups to support the project. The Toad DETOUR was born. The Schuylkill Center recently took over the detour and there is also a documentary film, “The Toad Detour,” by Burgess Coffield.  

Although a longtime animal activist, I’m a newbie to amphibian migrations. Turns out that all over the world people are detouring (or dodging) traffic to help toads, frogs and salamanders cross the roads. No claim is made that the Roxborough toads are endangered as a specie, nor that preserving them is going to do some wondrous thing somewhere down the line for the human animal -- the toads are being assisted for their own individual sake, protected not from evolution and nature but from one of the more unnatural creations that humans have invented. The volunteers in this unglamorous but highly effective endeavor are not, by and large, vegetarian animal activists. 

The Roxborough detour is the only one I’m aware of  that protects migrating toadlets as well as adult toads. The toads don’t make it easy to help as they travel mainly at night and in the rain. So you will see volunteers with flashlights, buckets, rain suits, reflective vests, walkie talkies and umbrellas, both inside and outside the wooden barricades, gathering data on numbers of toads and frogs crossing, nightly temperature and weather conditions, numbers killed outside the barricades, etc. My first year I was tasked with counting the dead ones -- they came much earlier than expected and the detour wasn’t officially set up so a couple hundred of them were run over in the first hour or two of migration, dying in all poses of mutilation, amputation and twisted agony. Many people aren’t aware that they have amphibian migrations going on in their areas because even many hundreds of dead bodies are typically washed away by the rain and/or scavenged by other creatures during the night. By morning rush hour there’s no evidence that these amphibian Antietams have occurred. 

Female adult toads have it rough: they are bloated with eggs, again sometimes hopping for a mile, and they are often laid claim to by males who hitch a ride on their back the entire way, something known to scientists as “amplexus” (Perhaps you’ve read Henry Miller’s great toad-fucking trilogy “Sexus Amplexus Nexus”?) One of the saddest sights is to find a pair of them run over and dying together. 

Some nights there are 30-40 volunteers and other nights, like a memorable  Saturday night thunderstorm last April, there are only two people staffing the two barricades and redirecting traffic. On that night the wind was gusting 40 mph, God flipped on the lightning switch and then wastefully walked away for two hours in a scene, as I stand toading, straight out of Faulkner: Levinson was at one barricade, I was a half mile away at the other one and the storm washed dirt, tree branches and debris down the hilly streets that border the reservoir, the street became a stream flowing over my shoes and I watched the small but mighty pickerel frogs (who feel like a rocket in your hand), understanding that it’s party time, leaping across the  road in a couple bounds while the placid non-athletic toads were simply carried away, que sera sera, like little boats from the top of the street to the bottom. My umbrella looked like Picasso got a hold of it. And, of course, car-bots were still out there driving, wondering why they were being detoured. GEE I DON’T KNOW -- MAYBE BECAUSE THE EARTH OPENED UP AND YOU’RE DRIVING STRAIGHT INTO A TSUNAMI YOU DEVOLUTIONARY FREAKS. MAYBE YOU HAVE TO SLOW DOWN AND GO A DIFFERENT DIRECTION. MAYBE YOU CAN’T CONTINUE TO DO EVERY LITTLE THING THAT YOU’VE ALWAYS DONE AT THE EXACT MOMENT THAT YOU WANT TO DO IT. MAYBE YOU DON’T HAVE THE CORRECT UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR PLACE IN THE WORLD THAT A TOAD HAS OF HIS/HERS. 

Actually, most motorists are great about the detour -- some who roll down their windows and ask what’s going on often end up volunteering. It’s hard to describe what a unique community event the toad migration is -- it’s Roxborough’s equivalent of wildebeests on the Serengeti, especially when the streets appear to be moving with thousands of toadlets. June 12 was the apex night last year for the toadlets and neighbors called up their grandchildren to come over and witness it. Children, being lower to the ground, make great toad-spotters and on this night, outside of the barricades, they and their parents collected 1,900 toadlets in cups and put them on the other side of the road. Many thousands more crossed between the barricades. Toadlets were behind me, beside me, in front of me, even boldly marching single file down the sidewalks on their way “back” to homes they’ve never seen near headstones, home run fences and deep in the woods. 

Not everyone likes the detour. A neighborhood pastor thinks it’s ridiculous and that we should be helping humans rather than toads. (Fugettaboutit that we pick up much trash while toad patrolling in this heavily littered area. His current church sign: "GET OFF FACEBOOK AND GET INTO MY BOOK.") Instead of seeing this incredible miracle of God’s (or somebody’s) creation he sees 40 people out in the rain helping toads, often outnumbering those at his Sunday evening service. One of the most infuriating documents for capitalist Christian America, whenever it’s put into practice, is the diabolical Sermon on the Mount. Invariably, irreverent agnostics like me get the memo from the desk of Jesus H. Christ about mercy, while multitudes of Christians nit pick about who deserves mercy and who doesn’t (non-human beings, prisoners/criminals, Muslims, etc.) 

Still, I know where from the pastor comes: how many peace vigils and antiwar protests have I attended over the past 10 years where there weren’t 40 people? But non-human beings shouldn’t have to wait indefinitely to get their injustices addressed. I also feel that if the toads could fight back, they would, which you can’t say for the American working class. I’d rather spend time directly and tangibly helping some innocents than trying to rally narcissistic zombies who see nothing wrong with living inside a relentless and remorseless lifetime worldwide war-making machine and then, upon a blue moon retaliation, ask stupid shit like, “Why do they hate us?”    

The toad detour has also taken potshots from a local right wing talk radio host. A local all-volunteer effort that takes no tax dollars and unites three generations becomes an object of suspicion and derision because it helps animals. One morning he ominously wondered, “Where do these people get their money from?” The previous week I spent 80 bucks at Radio Shack to buy two walkie talkies. But since I’m a Marxist I guess the international communist conspiracy paid for it after all. (By the way, I would like to join the international communist conspiracy but I can’t find it anywhere -- it’s not in Russia, it’s not in China, it’s not in Vietnam. Maybe it’s on back order or only available now as an FBI entrapment scheme.) 

For the rabid right, kindness is a “wedge” issue and they’re against it on principle. And these hierarchy-lovin’ authoritarians are onto something here: capitalism has so thoroughly alienated people of all political stripes from their lives, their work and other human beings -- just as Marx said it did 160 years ago -- that kindness to animals is sometimes a gateway back to restoring humanity in general. And looking at the structural causes that make so much kindness necessary leads directly to the answer of abolishing the property status of animals which leads to dumping capitalism entirely. Animal activists who don’t see this are deluding themselves, thinking that this vicious system is going to create a special legal niche for non-humans that it won’t create for humans.  And “progressives” who won’t embrace elementary respect and justice for non-human beings ( i.e., STOP FUCKING EATING THEM!) have more in common with Dick Cheney than they should be comfortable with. Animal liberation is revolutionary. So, congrats, you right wingers are correct about something important: kindness is dangerous (for you). 

The shock jock is a kissin’ cousin to the DWB (driving without brains) young white males who scream “Fuck the frogs!” and “Get a life!” One of these human patriots threw an egg (missing) at three of our volunteers one night -- a man and two ladies who were 82, 80 and 67 years old respectively. Truth is, it doesn’t matter how much animal rescuers soft pedal what we do, we are a threat in a thoroughly speciesist world. Also, as Occupy Wall Street shows, in a cowardly kiss up kick down obedient society begging for fascism, people hate other people who stand up to power. 

All I can say is that on The Day Of The Great Skinniness, when we Commie vegans have triumphed, every one of you right wing bastards are getting shipped off to Randy’s Gulag Tofupelago for brown rice, miso and Melanie music. To show you that I am merciful, I won’t make you drink kombucha tea. So be very afraid! After all, that what you guys do so well -- being afraid of beings of different colors, shapes, sizes, languages, afraid of experiencing the suffering of others, afraid of releasing your death grip on the rest of creation. “NO FEAR!” says your chatty pick up trucks -- riiiiiiiiight. 

The toad detour is a diverse group of strangers who have come together and cooperated to experience the ecstasy of altruism, a little bit of humanity unleashed to what it can and should be, where money is not answered to and private gain has no place, something very un-American because America is nothing but the tyranny of money which squashes the truth toad, the science toad, the humanity toad, the democracy toad, the compassion toad and leisure time toad. Nobody needed to tell Lisa Levinson that cars mowing down thousands of creatures was wrong and needed to be stopped. And no corrupt politicians had to be appealed to for years on end to remedy the problem. No, the working class, in the form of the toad detour, JUST TOOK IT, and that’s a lesson we should be trying to figure out how to apply everywhere. 

The toads are on the move right now. If you live in the Philadelphia area and would like to volunteer, contact cmorgan@schuylkillcenter.org. The staff of the Schuylkill Center does not condone or endorse foul-mouthed Marxist vegans -- they are good people helping good toads. So help them help the toads cross the road to make whoopee.

published 3/23/2012 at counterpunch.org

The Horseshit Whisperer Rides Again

Pulling the Trigger on Trigger

The chief function of American presidents is to “break” unruly working class resistance to American capital whether in Middle Eastern deserts, Latin American jungles or the streets of Oakland and Cincinnati. Eight years of Bush/Cheney fear-training gave way to the current horse shit whisperer-in-chief whose vague soaring Rorschach rhetoric encourages his followers to believe they’re  getting their own personal nods and winks about what he believes and what he’ll do if he just gets a “chance.” And, often, when he gets the chance, he’s worse than Bush. To wit:

Just in case my liberal Democrat animal-lovin’ friends missed it: last week Barack Humane Obama signed a bill legalizing horse slaughter for human consumption in the United States after it was outlawed six years ago, thus betraying his 2008 campaign pledge (yawn) to keep it illegal. With the stroke of a pen, Obama is responsible for killing more animals each year than Dick Cheney has killed in a lifetime. 

Seventy percent of Americans wanted to keep horses off the menu but, in a flowering of demockracy -- genus venus americanus flytrapus -- the POTUS and the Congrossest kept their bipartisan unbeaten streak alive: the working class majority must never, ever get anything we want, no matter how tiny. Obama’s favorite movie is said to be “The Godfather” and, figuratively, he just put 200,000 horses’ heads each year into the beds and nightmares of anyone who cares about them. Hope and change you can tuck into. The particulars of this merciless outrage, including our old friend: private profit/socialized cost, can be found at  Our Compass. 

(Here’s some free advice for you Republican presidential yahoos: if you can put a pole ax in Obama’s hand and a thoroughbred horse on the other end of it, you’ll win the election. Poster: “Uncle Tom Obama wants YOU to go the knackers!” Remember all the letters congress received several decades ago when the military was gassing beagles? Give it a try, Mitt and Newt -- it only requires that, for once, you refrain from out-gooning Obama. You can’t excoriate Obama because he didn’t waterboard the horses before he killed them.)

Vegan nags like me point out that horses shouldn’t be eaten any more than cows, chickens, pigs, fish, deer, whales or humans. Others correctly say that American capitalism’s current Death-Mask-In-Chief murders Pakistani, Yemeni and Afghan children on a regular basis so why be surprised when he pulls the trigger on Trigger. 

So why is Obama’s marching of Mr. Ed into the terror and cruelty of the slaughterhouse any more irritating than numerous other things he does? It probably has to do with how hard it is to get minimal protections for non-human animals enacted and the fact that he keeps pretending, just like his liberal supporters keep pretending, that he and they are some kind of superior enlightened humane beings wholly unlike their barbarous right wing opponents who we’re supposed to be petrified of. It’s the liberals who shop around for both “humane meat” and “humanitarian”  “good wars” and other oxymorons -- and that grates. The lack of revolutionary class/vegan-conciousness among people on the left -- revealing their cowardice, shallowness, hypocrisy and stupidity, and the attachment they have to failure -- is one of the biggest impediments to anything positive happening in America. What’s true of health is also true of ethics and revolution: you can’t buy it, you have to live it. 

And now I have a special treat for you, an exclusive draft of a screenplay I’m  sending to Pixar called “Barack O’Celery.”

White liberal child: Mommy, come quick and look in the refrigerator! The organic Barack O’Celery is spoiled! He’s all slimy.

White liberal mom: Oh I know, honey, and we paid so much for him -- what a waste. He was so fresh and healthy-looking when we bought him four years ago at the Whole Fools election market.

Child: Can we throw him out?

Mom: No, we’ll probably just keep him for another four years.

Child: Mommy, there’s some cockroaches having a sit-in on the lower shelf, protesting the Barack O’Celery and he just pepper sprayed them! Everything in the refrigerator is ruined.   

Barack O’Celery: Will you two shut up and close the door! This doesn’t concern you! I’m trying to build a coalition of carrots, radishes and kohlrabi to attack some bok choy -- the security of this entire refrigerator depends on it! 

Child (coughing): Mommy, he’s making a mess in there and the longer he hangs around, the whiter he gets.

Mom (coughing): God only knows what he’ll be like four years from now.

Child: Mommy, can we go riding today?

Mom: No, Barack O’Celery just killed your pony. I don’t know how he did it from inside the refrigerator -- he had to really go out of his way -- but he did it. Sorry, pumpkin.

Child (horrified): Liberal mommy, is that my dead pony wrapped up in the refrigerator?! I don’t think I can take four more years of Barack O’Celery! And you need to get the hell up out of here too!

published 12/9/2011 at counterpunch.org

Ain't No New Thing: Reflections On The Whitey House

Gil Scott-Heron Dies at 62

The commanding voice that named the names, that directed a musical letter of rage (air mail special) to whitey on the moon, and lived to see a revolt (if not a revolution) televised from Egypt, has died. Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon at age 62 in NYC’s St. Luke’s Hospital.

I don’t know what age I was when I first heard Scott-Heron wittily and boldly lambaste Nixon and Spearhead Agnew and Ronnie Raygun and Attilla the Haig and Marlin Perkins and Papa Doc Bush — they and their America didn’t mean shit to him (and me and millions of other Americans) and it felt damned good to hear it. One of his favorite targets was Americans’ greatest religious experience: getting something for nothing — specifically, the ripping off of black art, music and culture by (mostly) white capitalists while its creators often died paupers.

He declined the title of “Godfather of Rap” and it was easy to see why. I was blown away by NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” the first couple weeks I listened to it — the anger, the violence, fighting back against racist cops, the clarity about who your enemies are, the cheapness of life worn like a badge. But I found that I couldn’t keep listening to it indefinitely — the music, especially, was both depressing and boring. And that’s what Gil Scott-Heron and his brilliant longtime collaborator Brian Jackson figured out: they created a poetic, free-flowing, typically flute and percussion-driven platform for Scott-Heron’s AK-47 mouth to artistically and scathingly say that America was a racist war-loving hypocritical slag heap, deluded by fake movies, fake history, fake images and fake media. Scott-Heron and the multi-instrumentalist Jackson fused and maxed out beat poetry and music to what they always should have been, with fabulous hypnotic grooves and the occasional tasty solo. Scott-Heron ra-ta-tatted against injustice, but you kept on listening, for decades, because the hooks and creativity are always present whether moving through funk, soul, R & B, free jazz, African or Caribbean beats. Drugs, violence, poverty, inequality, opportunistic “leaders” and sellouts, addiction, defeat and lives that never got off the ground were frequent subjects. But the really unforgivable sin was musical boredom.

In his prime, Scott-Heron shouted that the emperors were not only stark naked but stark raving mad. He had empathy for people struggling against addiction and poverty and whenever you have empathy — artistically, personally, politically — it will lead you to a better place. And this is another difference between Scott-Heron and many of the rappers he is alleged to have inspired. Empathy begat the anger. I dispute that most of the rappers I hear are angry — if they were, they would be totally revulsed by Barack Obama. How empathetic are Americans, in general, when they acquiesce to the nonstop killing of innocents all over the world– they may think they are angry or that their backs are against the wall but these are largely the cries of the alienated, unconnected and passive, satisfied as debt-slaves with iTrinkets and currently presided over by MC Obummer, an astounding master of, as it turns out, killing hope.

I saw Scott-Heron perform two years ago at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia. To see the creator of “Storm Music” and “The Bottle” perform in an intimate club was a thrill. He had a voice and presence that you paid attention to — his baritone was born to deliver Shakespeare, as bassist Ron Carter once said. He and his rockin’ pianist, blistering lefty lead player and the smoking rhythm section were so relentlessly good that I didn’t even miss my favorite song, “Storm Music,” or “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The new songs, from “I’m New Here,” were instantly embraced. “The Bottle” swung mightily that night. And he was hilarious, both that night and on his recorded offhand pot shots against the ruling class, something that isn’t often noted when he’s written about.

That Philly show fell in a time period, the fall of 2009, where I also saw James McMurtry and Iris DeMent. Interestingly (maybe) is that Scott-Heron did not perform “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” DeMent did not perform “Wasteland of the Free,” and McMurtry did not play “We Can’t Make It Here,” all absolutely classic songs pointedly critical of America. I’m sure these artists had different reasons for not playing these tunes but I took it as a bad omen. The impression it made on me was that now that the Big Bad Bush was gone it was time to STFU about America. It was time to start feeling good about America because an uncouth goon from Texas was replaced by a smooth-talking intelligent Wall Street stooge. Protest and anger were uncool. Nothing as pseudo-glorious as Reagan’s Morning (Thunder) in America but, rather, some weak-ass liberal Sleepytime tea time in America. Scott-Heron had also spoken favorably about Obama.

So, after two years of Obama, I muse: the working class of America, especially blacks, can get as much action on their concerns by sending a letter to whitey on the moon as they can from having America’s first black president in the White House.

In the jumbled world of confusing musicians with leaders, I thought about how Scott-Heron canceled a planned show in Israel in 2010 (why did he ever schedule it?) — persuaded by activists that it would be similar to playing in apartheid South Africa. One might imagine that Scott-Heron would be helping to lead a BDS movement instead of being confronted by it. But why should we expect musicians and celebrities to be more unaffected by capitalism than 99.9% of the rest of the population? His embrace of Obama perfectly symbolizes the personal and political decline and irrelevance of the left over the last 40 years. We didn’t just come a short way, baby. We went headlong the wrong way. O working class, we have to be constantly moving forward toward the overthrow of capitalism because when we cease to advance we will either die immediately or be lost for decades.

So I’m thinking of Gil Scott-Heron and his commendable activism against the nuclear industry and apartheid South Africa, and the litmus test of one’s  commitment to justice, equality and the rule of law, i.e., supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and how two weeks ago I saw my first keyboard hero, Ray Manzarek (of the Doors), at the Sellersville Theater, pleased with his acid-tested spirituality, telling the crowd that Christians and Muslims and Jews should put away their religious books and just love each other and, by the way, he and Robby Krieger are looking forward to playing as the Doors in Tel Aviv this summer because “the Israelis are so cool.”

(Hey, Ray, how about you and Robby do something that truly breaks on through: be on the next Free Gaza flotilla and play a Gaza concert if and when you “break on through” the illegal Israeli blockade — maybe you can see how “cool” the IDF is. Maybe you can grab Jim Morrison from out of the ether, where you said he resides, and bring your interstellular spirituality down to earth where it might mean something. It says in the Uncool Book that faith without works is dead.) Oh well, as a sometime Zionist, sometime Christian troubadour once admonished us, “Don’t follow leaders and watch the parking meters.” He never explained the parking meter thing though I assumed he was warning us not to take up the drunken dares of friends to vault over the meters after the bars close.

And I give Gil Scott-Heron almost the last word: “It ain’t no new thing — America is always the same old shit.”

Now, are those words from many years ago too negative and cynical, too unhopey and unchangey? Well, decades after Gil Scott-Heron urged people to send their unaffordable, unpaid “doctor bills to whitey on the moon,” he lived to see 45 million Americans without any health insurance and 47 million on food stamps. He railed against ghetto poverty in 1970 and 41 years later lived to see the greatest inequalities in wealth since the Great Depression. And he lived to see the first black POTUS, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who’s currently slaughtering innocent dark-skinned people in five different countries. America can’t make clothes, shoes, toys, electronics, peace or justice but we make a hell of a lot of irony.

Anyway… Gil Scott-Heron, don’t rest in peace as everyone is advising you to, rage on wherever you are, be witty and scathing, be the fighter you are, be bold when no one else will, whether you’re in heaven or hell, I’m sure that things can be better in both places. Take with you into eternity the fiery ambitious man/child who wrote a well-regarded novel, “The Vulture,” when you were only 19 years old. Fuck crack, fuck Rikers, fuck HIV, fuck capitalism's blunting of your spirit, it happens, from time to time the darkness comes along to terrorize the weak and challenge the strong, because you were a human being, not a god, the storm is coming, it grows on the waves from Johannesburg to Montego Bay, these were tiny blips on the road to making a beautiful soul, none of us are who capitalism says we are, we have no idea who we are or what we could be, but justice is coming on the wings of a storm and we resist in the present for those yet unborn, what’s that music (storm music) playin’ on the radio, what’s that music (storm music) playin’ everywhere I go, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sweeter feelin’ in the whole wide world than Gil Scott-Heron playing “Storm Music” on the radio.

published 5/31/2011 at counterpunch.org

The Good Don't Triumph And There Is No Justice

Brian De Palma's "Blow Out" Thirty Years On

This July 21 is the 30th anniversary release date of Brian De Palma’s political/conspiracy thriller “Blow Out,” starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow. Critics praised De Palma’s artful weaving of references to other directors and movies and real life events into “Blow Out” but audiences were turned off by the film’s ravagingly sad ending. As a movie heathen, I’m not so interested in De Palma’s cinematic virtuosity, and I feel that the critics never got to the heart of why this is such a powerful film — which is the fact that it’s a deep and devastating attack on America. The film’s numerous similarities and small divergences from today’s political landscape are instructive.

SPOILER ALERT! I reveal the ending of “Blow Out,” so if you haven’t seen it and intend to, you might want to stop reading now.

Travolta plays Jack, a sound technician who serendipitously records an auto accident which turns out to be the murder of the governor of Pennsylvania and  potential presidential candidate. Jack rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) from the crash scene and the story follows their efforts to interest the authorities in the evidence they have, the conspiracy/cover-up they are met with and their own fated investigation as they battle against the political operative/murderer Burke, played by John Lithgow. The film is set in Philadelphia against the backdrop of a splashy patriotic ain’t-we-great “Liberty Days” celebration.

Jack and Sally represent marginal members of the American working class, motivated chiefly by guilt and trying to redeem themselves. The fact that they feel guilt is in stark contrast to the powers that be in the movie or to America’s real political, financial and military elite who would find it unfathomable to redeem themselves because they would never imagine that they’ve done anything wrong –  except, perhaps, not made enough money or not bombed enough countries.

Jack and Sally are pitted against Burke who is no mere private eye gone bad. No, Burke has superior knowledge of surveillance, wiretapping, the staging of “accidents” and various ways to kill people. It’s never made explicit in the movie but I take Burke as some kind of ex (?) government agent, probably a CIA assassin. He is a one man death squad who ties up the “loose ends” and engages in false flag murders of complete strangers to cover up the murder he really wants to commit. The powerful and privileged are protected at all costs.

The greatness of “Blow Out” is due to the contrast between what America thinks itself to be versus what it actually is. In the movie, as in real life, while the people are having an Old Glory-gasmic celebration of the America they think they live in — freedom, democracy, the light unto the world — in reality, in the  underbelly of the nation, the real work is being done by people like Burke, who murder innocent people right and left and get away with it, violating every law and premise the nation was supposedly founded on — except murder and theft are exactly what it was founded on. The “Liberty Days” revelers whoop it up in mirage America, the America that never was or is always just out of reach, just one more election away, celebrating fake freedom (the one that doesn’t know it’s chained up because it never moves) and fake democracy (the one where we’re supposed to be eternally grateful to vote for one of the twin heads, Republican or Democrat, of the capitalist freak.)

“Blow Out’s” roof top climax, played out beneath the exploding fireworks of “Liberty Days,” is one of the most memorable scenes in all of film. Travolta’s character Jack does everything in his power to do the right thing but he and Sally are ultimately destroyed, Sally physically and Jack, more pertinent to everyday life in America, mentally, socially, emotionally and spiritually. When Jack tries to be an honest, altruistic full participant in society, when he becomes the most vital and self-actualized, and the least little bit effective (a hero for the working class, as opposed to Navy SEAL death squad heroes for the ruling class), America promptly destroys him. Jack lives in trickle-down America where evil, not wealth, trickles down and ruins many a small life. “Blow Out” is a great and terrible Greek-like tragedy because Jack gets the person killed that he  risked his own life to initially save.

It was actually the audiences, not the critics, who best understood “Blow Out.” The critics were too cowardly and unclassconscious to acknowledge the truth of a film that took on the Great Satan, they could only speak of De Palma’s technical brilliance. But the audiences — they understood in a visceral way, the ending smacked them in the mouth, the ending said all is not well here, their hopes and dreams and notions of justice crushed, innocence laid waste (as represented by Sally), the mockery of the “promise” of America and all the lies told to children every day in every school. Audiences recoiled at seeing themselves as the mindless “Liberty Days” revelers instead of the heroic resisters like Jack and Sally — they understood that they betray the founding icons every day — by never taking a risk to overthrow the illegitimate ruling class — even as they celebrate those icons.

On the roof top in “Blow Out,” on a raw revelatory monumentally sad Independence Day night, the flags wave, the fireworks explode and the cheers rise while, out of sight and under the din, another innocent person is anonymously killed for the American ruling class. That’s the American creation story, by God: the good don’t triumph and there is no justice. America wrecks the world, America moves on — and it all so easily escapes the notice of the revelers. America doesn’t pay, America doesn’t make amends, so get used to it, red man, black man, yellow man, sand man. And if every once in a blue moon the serfs get hit and bellyache, “Why do they hate us!” — and the masters go on a ten-year murder tantrum across the earth — well, for Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corrupt politicians who successfully run on racism and warmongering, well, it’s all good. In fact, it’s a bonanza. Let a thousand Blackwaters bloom. That’s your American revolution, that’s your gift to the world.

De Palma took much more heat for his 2007 film “Redacted” than he did from the 30-year-old “Blow Out” even though the latter will probably go down many years from now as the most consummate film critique of America. (“Redacted” was based on the true story of Abeer Hamza, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was gang-raped and murdered in her home by American soldiers. The troops also murdered her mother, father and 6-year-old sister. Just a little slice of life in America’s nonstop unconstitutional wars which weak-ass liberals insist that their hero Obama continue. Yes, liberals support the gang-rape of children and mass murder — see how easy it is to be Fox News when your Dumbocratic targets don’t, in fact, have any principles except getting their unprincipled man elected?)

The one faulty thing about “Blow Out” is that John Lithgow’s character is presented as a rogue operative whereas the lawlessness and murderousness that he symbolizes have always been US government policy, though, unlike today’s world, they used to be officially denied and decried. Also of note: Lithgow’s character is cut loose in the end by his superiors as opposed to, say, the way Obama moved heaven and earth to get CIA agent Raymond Davis, accused of murdering two Pakistanis, out of a jail in Pakistan and back to America.

Another divergence between “Blow Out” and the present concerns the idea of conspiracy. In “Blow Out” there is an all-encompassing successful conspiracy. But that was so then (Reagan) and this is now (Obama). And what’s different now is that the constitutional scholar/shredder Obama has normalized his predecessors’ crimes: undeclared wars, torture, indefinite detention and extra-judicial assassination (including of American citizens) are now openly defended and celebrated. When you can openly get away with these crimes and more, when there is no effective opposition to anything you do, what need is there for a conspiracy?

Now that I’ve given you my bleak interpretation of Brian De Palma’s bleak vision of (bleeping) America, let me cheer you up. I’m no comedian but I do know a few jokes.

Did you hear the one about the country that got its pride back after ten years by summarily executing a 54-year-old dialysis patient? Booyah! You don’t think that’s funny?  Well there’s lots of college students, who were only ten years old at the time when the pride was lost, who think it’s a riot… Tomorrow belongs to them and they are well prepared — look at all the American flags apparently stashed in their dorms, ready for any Old Glory-gasmic celebration that comes along…

What about the one where a government walks into a bar and says give me billions of dollars each year to fight a terrorist boogeyman and then, when the same government has the opportunity to easily capture the terrorist and question him about his worldwide links to other terrorists, and put him in handcuffs and frog-march him into court for months on end and demystify him — but, instead, chooses to immediately gun him down and silence him, thus insuring his martyrdom…? You heard that one too? You’re so hip, you must watch a lot of TV!

OK, what about the killing of the terrorist in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the 24-hour aftermath where, in Washington (District of Costellobad), the White House took back the tale of the bloodthirsty fiend shot dead in a fire fight while cowardly using one of his wives as a human shield in his luxurious mansion while his impoverished followers freeze their jihadis off in caves? You don’t think that’s funny? You know, you’re a tough crowd, so let’s just call it a night before I start heckling you back.

Just go out and get the Criterion Collection’s recently released “Blow Out” on Blu-ray or a double disc DVD containing lengthy interviews with Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen, De Palma’s 1967 feature “Murder a la Mod,” a booklet and many other extras.

published 5/13/2011 at counterpunch.org

Al-Qaeda Wants to Kill You with Rattlesnakes!

Shake Your Rattlebooty


My hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, wasn’t much interested earlier this year when WikiLeaks released “Collateral Murder,” the classified American military video which showed an Apache helicopter crew having a jolly time mowing down Iraqi civilians, including children and two Reuters news staffers.

But now that ghost face killa Joe Lieberman has given American business its marching orders to destroy WikiLeaks, the Inquirer has plenty of alarmist anti-WikiLeaks stories.

My favorite recent WikiLeaks scare, entitled “a hit list for al-Qaeda,” told of   “infuriated” unnamed government officials who “expressed alarm” that WikiLeaks released a State Department cable of “potential targets”  whose disruption by al-Qaeda could “jeopardize our national security.” Among the targets: the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Australian laboratory that produces  polyvalent crotalid antivenin — the antidote for rattlesnake venom. Yup, public enemy number one, Julian Assange, went and told Osama bin Laden where the Panama Canal is — and we’d been keeping it from him for all these years!

The concern expressed for the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is transported, was touching also. Touching, because many United States Congresspersons foam at the mouth for an Israeli attack on Iran which, in turn, would shut down the strait and cause gas prices to soar. But it all makes sense in Capitol Hell: if Israeli aggression causes me to pay $10 a gallon for gas that’s a regrettable but necessary thing, whereas if al-Qaeda causes this same result it’s an economic disaster for the world that can only be properly avenged by murdering a multitude of Muslim civilians.

As for the al-Qaeda/rattlesnake connection, well, this makes sense too. If you’re a person in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen, and America is converting your wedding parties into funerals, your rage is likely directed to one thought only: I’m going to get even by making sure that some poor bastard in West Texas, dying of a rattlesnake bite (which he probably deserved), knows in his dying moments, when he can’t get any antivenin, that Sharia law and baba ganoush have triumphed after all.

But what if the shadowy world of the pit viper family began working tail in hand with al-Qaeda? What would an al-Qaeda terrorist rattlesnake be like? If he was like the failed shoe bomber and the failed underwear bomber, and all the other terrorists who can’t find a gun or a knife or a match in America, he’d be a little bit off. To wit:

If a terrorist rattlesnake was coiled up in the seat next to you on an airplane he would probably appear furtive and wouldn’t “look right.”  You might be too polite (or afraid) to say something like, “Shouldn’t you be in the cargo area?” Or you might think that this snake has connections, especially if he’s in first class — maybe this is Paris Hilton’s snake, maybe you should ask if he’d pose for a picture together. You should definitely tweet about it immediately. Everything must be okay with the authorities — and that’s all that matters — because the snake made it through the TSA scanner or got felt up just like you did.

Somewhere in your carry on bag you have your good digital camera, the one with the equivalent of a 300 mm zoom lens that pops out about 4 inches — you must have that close up of the snake’s tongue  and his rattles. You turn in your seat and zoom in on his face  — “Come on, show me your tongue, shake your rattlebooty, attaboy!” and — wham! — out of the blue, the crazy terrorist rattlesnake bites your forearm! But because this is a screw-up terrorist rattlesnake, instead of fangs he has molars and instead of venom he regurgitates a nauseating concoction of chocolate milk and barbecued Fritos all over your arm. You and several other passengers wrestle him to the floor and you end up getting that photo-op after all. You’re famous, baby.

In the weeks following this terrorist plot you and the rest of America learn one of two things:

1) For years the family, friends and neighbors of this particular rattlesnake were victims of a foreign invasion, torture and genocidal killing. It turns out that snake hunters — a tiny subset of America’s treasure trove of psycho killers and sadists — go to the canyons of West Texas and thread long tubing into narrow crevices in canyon walls where rattlesnakes sleep and then pour in gasoline and /or ammonia ( snake hunters care about nature, dontcha know) to drive out the snakes. Then the hunters bravely capture the snakes with long metal tongs and transport them to “festivals” where the animals are shot, burned with cigarettes and sometimes have their mouths sewn shut with wire before they are gutted and skinned. But don’t think this isn’t educational or fun for kids because the adults will let children hold the still beating heart of a decapitated snake and sometimes even the head itself, though it can bite for up to an hour later — see how cruel and vicious rattlesnakes are! So are we creating more terrorist rattlesnakes faster than we are killing them? A known known that only Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t know for sure.

Or, we learn this:

2) The FBI befriended and cultivated this terrorist rattlesnake and bought him the plane ticket. They knocked him out, drained him of all venom, filed down his fangs and promised him a fabulous garbage dump in paradise where, rather than 72 virgins, there will be 72,000 varmints.

After the plot is foiled the FBI offers this terrorist rattlesnake a deal and puts him in the same small cell as Private First Class Bradley Manning, whose 23rd birthday occurred on December 17. The rattlesnake — touted by the FBI as “pet therapy” — is a sop to civil libertarians who had complained about Manning’s  mind-destroying solitary confinement, the 23 hours of each day with no contact with any living creature. The government’s impeccable reasoning is this: the snake scares or befriends Manning who turns on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange who turns on all the people in the world who he doesn’t know who steal and anonymously leak classified information and who hate the American government and then, after a few decades, when everybody who has a contrary view to the US government is behind bars or dead, the war on terror is over and America wins. It all makes perfect sense — if it didn’t the American public wouldn’t believe it. And if it didn’t make sense, newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer would alert us immediately.

published 12/24/2010 at dissidentvoice.org