Wayback machine of Al Giordano's old blog Big Left Outside. Lots of great reading!

[beachmom]

I am checking it out now. Great stuff!! He links to a long article he wrote in the Boston Phoenix. Well, it is actually an Open Letter to John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry from Mexico. What I like best about Al is that he is not a whiny Lefty. He is, of course, way to the Left of my beliefs yet his exuberance is infectious.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030823082125/www.bostonphoenix.com/archives/1997/documents/00521091.htm

For a while, in 1994, '95, and early '96, many foreigners and journalists came down here, as did thousands of Mexicans from other states -- human-rights workers, "doctors without borders," and others. Indeed, about a year ago the Boston Globe published a rather snooty and crass story (the last page-one story that I recall about the conflict here) calling the phenomenon "Zapa-turismo." That story fostered an impression that these hills were merely a kind of vacationland for the left.

As to why career journalists so frequently try to defame and discredit change agents who do not work for money, I will let their mealy mouths be judged by history. But it was my experience after 10 years in that sordid profession that most journalists cannot understand anyone who is not mercenary, who is not career-obsessed. Journalists have made their compromises, and they feel viscerally threatened by those who have not so compromised themselves, deformed themselves around capital and its media machines. I've read and seen a thousand puff-pieces about social-service bureaucrats with offices and salaries. But let someone stand for something -- almost anything -- without compensation, and the gotcha game begins, with pens, video cameras, and computers wielded like knives. It's a sick profession. That's a large part of why I defected from it.

And yet, here I am, rendering unto media again, so desperate to reach you and others that I make this compromise after a year of refusal. I have asked the Phoenix to print this tract unabridged, with minimal editing. If you read it in these pages, please understand, its faults are my own; I don't get to blame them on editors.

Here is another little nugget from the Phoenix piece:

John, I know you will be naturally cynical toward the Zapatistas. We've known each other a long time, ever since I worked on your campaign staffs in 1982 and 1984, as a lad in my early 20s.

...

John, another thing I know about you is that you prefer to research, to study, to investigate a matter thoroughly before you go off half-cocked. I'm certain the State Department has all kinds of evasions and half-truths to give you. I recommend you pick up a copy of Zapatistas: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution (updated edition 1995, Autonomedia Press). It's the best, most accurate translation of Marcos's communiqués and other EZLN statements.

This got to me. I do not think John Kerry did what Al asked. But things happen, history happens, and well, Al did rec my diary yesterday about John Kerry becoming chairman of the SFRC, so he must have gotten over the disappointment.

Teresa Heinz: Before I left the States, I visited with a very special friend of the past 20 years, a man greatly admired by the late US Senator John Heinz, folksinger Pete Seeger. Pete is getting on in years. There was the sad realization, on both our parts, that this might have been our final reunion. Pete is hard of hearing now; he has a device in his ear. So I mainly listened to what could be his parting advice.

Pete spoke mainly of the miracles he witnessed in the darkest hours of the labor movement of the '30s, the war of the '40s, the witch hunts of the '50s . . . down through the present.

He told a story of a youngster swept away by a flooding river, certain to drown. And how, downstream, there just happened to be a couple of people standing in the right place, at the right time, who reached into the raging waters and saved that youngster's life.

"Wait for the miracle," Pete urged me, perhaps sensing my despair. "It will come. it will come."

Teresa and John, you are standing on that riverbank right now. You are the most right people to come to Chiapas -- in the right place at this, the right hour. A visit here by the two of you, now, at a time when the global media have abandoned Chiapas as "old news," would electrify these Americas, North and South.

John, perhaps I have strayed too far off the plantation for you to be associated with me in any way. They tell me you'll run for president in 2000. That's serious. It may preclude you from even communicating with one, like me, who bandies about the word revolution and holds other unpopular ideas. I recognize that.

As well, I know you -- your strengths and weaknesses. If you fail to respond, to act, with sufficient and necessary swiftness, your inaction will run counter to your entire political profile -- your history, your legacy.

If you fail to act in a forceful and meaningful way, the Mexican army may close in on Marcos and the Zapatistas, and slam the door on hope itself for the indigenous who fight for life, for the land, for autonomy, democracy.

Please take care of these orphaned sentences -- they are my all. I am ready to risk my all, just as thousands of poor people have risked theirs in these mountains.

That may be of no consequence. I have no votes to offer, no money to contribute, no spectacular terrain left to expend. Perhaps this letter shall be forgotten too.

But if on January 20, 2001, you find yourself on the Capitol steps, raising your right hand, taking an oath -- well, then you will learn just how powerless even presidents and kings have become in the shadow of the global empire of money and media.

When Al linked to this article in 2003, he put it under the category of how he can "fuss and fight with my old friend John Kerry".

Link to the web archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://BigLeftOutside.com

Edit: you might have to copy and paste the web address. The asterisk broke up the link.

[beachmom]

1. Al on John Kerry on June 12, 2003. I kind of agree with him at least in part:

As the last link discloses, I have a long history with Kerry (here’s his website; links to the other candidates’ websites above): Twenty-one and nineteen years ago, I worked on Kerry’s campaign staffs. In later years, I covered him as a journalist. One of these days I hope the Boston Phoenix will archive those stories online: no politician likes having a reporter on his tail who’s cut through the mystery factor haze. He had to do his job, and I had to do mine, and in the middle there were some pretty interesting yelling matches.

There’s the John Kerry I like (the guy who, in the middle of the recent Gulf War II called for a “regime change in Washington”) and then there’s the overly cautious John Kerry which has been in control of the candidate for the rest of recent history. It might as well be said: The lesser Kerry can’t beat Bush.

We also need a “regime change” in John Kerry’s brain: he needs to be unhooked from the Borg. If he’s left only to the Commercial Media’s pressures, that will never happen.

To bring out the better Kerry, here’s what I learned long ago: You have to get him mad. I used to be good at that, but I’ve been busy making others mad in recent years.

Here’s the key: To wake Kerry up, you have to piss him off. You have to put his back up against the wall and slam into him with everything you’ve got to awaken his mutant powers. And then the real John Kerry stands up: he’s golden in those moments: American politics’ version of the Incredible Hulk. The American political highway is littered with the higher political aspirations of former giants (Jim Shannon, Ed Markey, Ray Shamie, Bill Weld, and a dozen or so others you probably haven’t heard of) slain by Kerry when he was awake.

The Hulk can beat Bush.

Dr. Bruce Banner cannot.

[beachmom]

2. Ha! Al abandoned the Hulk meme when the Right stole it and pinned it on Dean:

A "meme," in case anybody hasn't been paying attention for the past ten years, is the basic building block of a "media virus." I love to invent 'em. The thing about a meme, though, like any viral agent, is it can then mutate and grow out of the control of its inventor.

Last June I started, from this blog, handing out superheroe identities to the presidential candidates, and named John Kerry the Hulk because, as recent history has shown, when the guy is put under enough pressure he becomes unstoppable in size and sheer strength. We who grew up on Marvel Comics knew that the Hulk was, deep down inside, a gentle and sensitive creature who, even in his big green rampages, tended to destroy the tanks and airplanes of the oppressors.

But, now, alas, I have to declare my meme dead, or at least mutated out of control, because a month ago Mark Steyn hijacked my meme. (No sour grapes here: hijacking memes is also something we all aspire to do. Congrats to Steyn!) That's when he said, citing the now ubiquitous white male "anger management issues" of Howard Dean, that Dean was like the Hulk.

After that moment on Monday night, what Mort Kondrake calls Howard Dean's "Krakatoa moment," when a corpuscle-necked, green biled, Dean looked and sounded like one of those guys he once referred to as having Confederate Flags on their pick-up trucks in a fit of rage, or, as Senator Alan Simpson said, "a prarie dog on speed," well, after that homage to Crystal Meth, the neo-cons picked up on the Steyn mutation of my meme. From Conan O'Brien to National Review's Jonah Goldberg, they piled on, annointing Dean as The Hulk.

First conclusion: The neo-cons grew up on DC comics, where the heroes were one dimensional, and not on Marvel comics, where they were complex talents, often nerds in real life, who made their neuroses work for the public good! Otherwise they would understand that being the Hulk is not all a bad thing.

Second conclusion: Time to abandon my meme, to send it to the viral orphanage, where it may be raised by neo-cons and, like the real Hulk, explode in their faces.

[TayTay]

3. I meant to post on this, and then forgot

And I meant to say how much I enjoyed this. And, I think there is a lot of truth here.

And a lot of things to be angry about, come January.