There they go, the bloggers, refusing to mourn the departure of Colin Powell, even though there also a sense that the adult supervision has left the room. Many, if not most, cite perhaps the high/low point of his career: his piece of performance art at the United Nations in late 2002, using shadow puppets to claim imminent threats. Given this, the result, it's completely justified for people to feel this way.
But I need to join the chorus in reminding those of us who care about human rights that Powell has never been the treasure his charisma and formidable intellect might suggest.
It was Powell, using his famous "Doctrine," who ran the first Iraqi slaughter in 1991, the one whose veterans came home with depleted uranium sapping their bones and which was followed by a sanctions regime that starved ten times as many people as died on that famous 11 September. Previous to that, as someone reminded me this afternoon, he was Ronald Reagan's bagman in Nicaragua and ran the invasion of Panama in 1989. And prior to that, as he admits in his own autobiography, he witnessed war crimes in Vietnam from aloft and never investigated further., (Richard Stutsman offers an invaluable chronology here. ) And we won't even get into "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" , a policy which is currently in its usual wartime lull).
I first became aware of most of this about 9 years ago, when Powell was pushing his autobiography and normally sensible people were talking about him as presidential caliber. At CCCO, we mentioned Powell every day: in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. he'd convinced George I to put in motion an expansion of the Junior ROTC program, which charges schools to hire retired military folks to lead drills and teach a surreal version of American history ( in the process, ensuring a steady stream of leads for military recruiters). We went to confront him, at a bookstore in downtown San Francisco, and in the process reminded ourselves of all the griefs caused by this "hero."
That day's still crisp in my mind: Labor Day weekend, big crowd on a summer-sunny day, and I a scrappy activist trying to get our flyer in front of the TV cameras. All to no avail until Ron Kovic showed up, demanding to get into the press room: an immovable force, that one, in his sunglasses and roughly used voice: "I want to tell him some things!" We slid in right behind him, working the room until Powell himself came to take questions.
I was pretty thorough in handing out our informational flyer, which was entitled"Not a Hero!" Not that we influenced the coverage of the event a whit: but nearly a year later I realized that the tall, striking woman in the dashiki was not a reporter but Alma Powell. When it was announced, around 1996, that Powell wouldn''t run for "family reasons," I was inspired to do that old commercial for Shake and Bake: "An' I helped!"
Not that I'm looking forward to the Age of Rice. Especially because it also seems ro mean an Age of Purge. Tamar , what's that about Canada again? But then I remember - there's work to be done, (I've just agreed to begin doing some work with the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild: putting what I know to more immediate use than this blog or any of the books not yet complete.) Having maniacs in office doesn't make our responsibility any lighter.
Besides, I'm not ready to leave New York yet. It feels like I just got here.
(And for any of you in New York, I'll be part of a reading at the 11th Street Bar, between A and B. Yes, there's only one bar on that block: I'll be reading a piece called "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?")
Excuse the shameless self promotion: I won't do it often, I promise.
Comments