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Today's
Stories
May
7, 2005
Gary
Leupp
Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism
May
6, 2005
Patrick
Cockburn
Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and
Blood
Erin
Yoshioka
Another "3 Strikes" Travesty:
Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison?
Sam
Husseini
Talking with Syrians
Dave
Lindorff
Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters
Kevin
Zeese
Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead
Guilty
Joshua
Frank
An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War
Dan
Bacher
Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water
Raid
P.
Saineth
India's Bloody Water Wars
May
5, 2005
Carles
Mutaner
Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist"
or "Populist?"
Carl
G. Estabrook
Is There Any Hope for the Pope?
Farrah
Hassen
The US's Syrian Obsession
Kevin
Zeese
"Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview
with Patrick Resta
Michael
Leonardi
May Day with an American Soldier in Rome
Bennett
Ramberg
The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You
Ray
McGovern
The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit
Norman
Solomon
Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran
Nicole
Colson
The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights
Brian
Concannon, Jr.
Clearing the Fences in Haiti
May
4, 2005
Colin
Kalmbacher
Ann Coulter and the Police State:
Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested
John
Walsh
Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying
on Air America to Support the War
Greg
Moses
Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises
"Birth of a Nation"
Ali
Khan
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart
Chris
Floyd
Ring Them Bells
Linda
S. Heard
D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics
Dave
Zirin
The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle
William
S. Lind
Fool's Paradise
Gary
Leupp
Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking
the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution
Website
of the Day
Kent State, May 4, 1970
May
3, 2005
Dave
Lindorff
Bush has Grasped the Third Rail,
Now Turn on the Juice
Brian
Cloughley
Halliburton's War Loot
Ira
Kurzban
Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers
Seth
Sandronsky
Towards Debtors' Prisons?
Gilad
Atzmon
The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More
Michael
Donnelly
Branding Eco Collapse
Alex
Sanchez
Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush?
Peter
Linebaugh
Magna Carta and May Day
May
2, 2005
Ron
Jacobs
Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement
Stan
Goff
The Case of Hasan Akbar
Karyn
Strickler
Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics
Joshua
Frank
Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly
Kevin
Zeese
Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam
Vicente
Navarro
Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician
April
30 / May 1, 2005
Alexander
Cockburn
Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and
"Credibility"
Gabriel
Kolko
Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End
of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later
Jennifer
Loewenstein
The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood
Lee
Sustar
City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago
Saul
Landau
The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power
T.W.
Croft
The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy
Nikolas
Kozloff
Fox News v. Hugo Chavez
William
Blum
Never-Ending Double Standards
Dave
Lindorff
Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly
Joshua
Frank
The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls
Doug
Giebel
Saving Jane Fonda
Steven
Erlanger
A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau
Chief
Fred
Gardner
Washington State Doctor Harassed
Mike
Whitney
Another Mad Bush Press Conference
Kurt
Nimmo
Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine
Joe
DeRaymond
A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania
Michael
Dickinson
Flags
Mickey
Z.
May Day at Yankee Stadium
Justin
Taylor
The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Save Barbados's Cowpastor
April
29, 2005
W.
John Green
Rice in Colombia: Silence on the Death
Squads?
Luke
Brothers
Greenwashing Nuclear Power: Nicholas
Kristof, the John Stossel of the NYT
Norman
Solomon
War, Aid and Public Relations
M.
Junaid Alam
The Politics of Smears and Self-Absorption
Jackie
Corr
The Bush Budget and Constitutionally Protected Tax Havens
Hunter
Greer
Feeding Tubes and the SAT: Finally,
a Use for Standardized Testing!
Sharon
Smith
The New Assault on Women's Rights:
Why are the Democrats Silent?
Website
of the Day
Tony Blair's Election Rap
April
28, 2005
Omar
Waraich
Blair's Poodle: the Billy Bragg Interview
Kevin
Zeese
Abu Ghraib One Year Later: Have Those Responsible Gotten Off?
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torture Tort Reform
Greg
Moses
Why I'm Not Standing with the Gringo Vigilantes
Toni
Solo
Nicaragua on a Dollar a Day...Forever?
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Republican Dole Drums; Democrats in Doldrums
Werther
George Will Revises the Vietnam War
April
27, 2005
John
Ross
Pope Ratzo and the Hucksters of Death
Joshua
Frank
DeLay, Abramoff and Israeli Militias
Ray
McGovern
The Bolton Affair: More Than Meets
the Eye
Mark
Donham
Government Pettiness and Wetland
Destruction
Dan
Smith
Bush's Iraq Poker: Hold, Fold, or Raise?
April
26, 2005
Dave
Lindorff
Church Sex Trumps Torture and Murder
Alevtina
Rea
Magic of the Yellow Emperor
Greg
Moses
The Senator and the Narc Pirates of
Highway 281
Joshua
Frank
Horowitz's Gang of Ghouls and Cowards
on Ruzicka
Diana
Johnstone
The French are At It Again
April
25, 2005
Uri
Avnery
The Persecution of Vanunu
Alison
Weir
The Okrent Perversions: How the NYT
Minimizes Palestinian Deaths
Lee
Sustar
Labor Loses a Hero: the Strong Life
of Dave Yettaw
Leonardo
Boff
A Liberation Theologist on Ratsinger:
a Pope of Fear and Centralized Power?
Gary
Leupp
Bush's Bully: the Career of John Bolton
April
23 / 24, 2005
Alexander
Cockburn
Time's Buried Hitler Cover
Gary
Leupp
The Anti-Japanese Demonstrations
in China
James
Petras
Elections for Democracy or Empire?
Harry
Browne
Springsteen's "Devils and
Dust"
Fred
Gardner
The Custody Threat
Ron
Jacobs
The Desterrados of Colombia: They
are not Collateral Damage
Elizabeth
Schulte
Why Backing Democrats is Pulling
the Anti-War Mvt. to the Right
Chris
Floyd
Oil, Guns and Banks
April
22, 2005
Saul
Landau
The Kinky Moralists: Missionaries
Forever
Kevin
Zeese
Dean Backs the Iraq Occupation
Joshua
Frank
Earth Day Paradox: Enviros vs. Nature
Mike
Whitney
God's Rottweiller: Pope Ratzinger's
Pie-in-the-Sky for the Masses
Michael
Flynn
Wolfowitz on Top of the World
Lee
Sustar
The One-Sided Class War
Website
of the Day
Bitter Greens
April
21, 2005
Bill
Quigley
The Church Picks Its Ashcroft for
Pope: a Catholic Worker Response to the Rise of Ratsinger
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's X-Files
Jason
Leopold
Drilling and Spilling in ANWR: Worse
Than the Exxon Valdez?
Kathleen
Christison
Sharon's 92 Percent Solution:
How the Misperceptions Roll On
April 20, 2005
April 20, 2005
John Ross
Lopez
Obrador: Mexico's Would-be Mandela (Part Two)
Kevin Zeese
Halliburton:
Poster Child of the War Profiteers
Uri Avnery
The
100 Days of Abu Mazen
Website of the Day
The House that Jack Built
April 19, 2005
Jean-Guy Allard
An
Exclusive CP Interview with Ricardo Alarcon on One of the World's
Most Notorious Terrorists: "Is Posada Still Working for
the White House?"
Dave Lindorff
What's
Good for Canada is Good for GM: Health Care Costs and Job Flight
Neve Gordon
Before
the Law: Israel's Military Justice System in the Occupied Territories
Brian Concannon, Jr
Immaculate Evasions in Haiti
Murray Hudson
Chemical Warfare Over Tennessee: Aerial Spraying of Deadly Pesticides
Frank B. Ford
Poem for Marla Ruzicka
Monty Python
Memo to Pope Rat
Michael Dickinson
Cardinal Sins
Paul Craig
Roberts
Outsourcing
the American Economy: a Greater Threat Than Terrorism
Website of the Day
Strindberg and Helium
April 18, 2005
Linda Schade
/ Kevin Zeese
The
Carter-Baker Commission: Corporate Conflicts of Interest
John Ross
Mexico's
Would-Be Mandela Stares into the Darkness
Brian McKenna
Dow
Chemical Buys Silence in Michigan
Mike Whitney
The NYT in Fallujah
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Peace in Tatters
Dave Zirin
Straight Outta High School: Jermaine O'Neal, Race and Hip Hop
Eli Stephens
The Killing of Nicola Calipari: a Math Lesson
Harry Browne
War
and Elections in Britain and Ireland
Website of
the Day
A16: Photos of the World Bank Protest
April 16 /
17, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Message
in a Bottle: How Coca-Cola Gave Back to Plachimada
Mark Dow
The Art of Jailing: Inside America's Immigration Gulag
Omar Waraich
Blair's Accountability Moment: Lesser-Evilism Grips Britain
Robert Buzzanco
How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq
Sherry Wolf
Bitches' Liberation? Whatever Happened to the Struggle for Women's
Liberation?
Fred Gardner
The Pharmaceuticalization of Marijuana
Ron Jacobs
Free Speech with Permission Only: a Tale of Two Universities
Mark Weisbrot
CAFTA will Further Depress US Wages
John Pardon
The High-Tech "Competitiveness" Smokescreen
Yoshie Furuhashi
Debtors of the World Unite! How Dems Went to Bat for the Credit
Industry
Mike Roselle
Cubicle of Doom: the Death of Environmentalism?
Ralph Nader
Scientists or Celebrities?
Ramzy Baroud
Gaza: the Line of Memory and Despair
Jackson Thoreau
Barbara Bush: We Should Have Pulled the Plug on Our Daughter
Michael Dickinson
"Imagine" and the Koran: Listening to Lennon in Istanbul
Richard Neville
Shaking the Walls of TwinWorld™
Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel, Curtis, Ford and Gaffney
Website of the Weekend
Rebel Angel
April 15, 2005
Brian Cloughley
Diplomacy,
Bush Style: Boorish Bolton & Arrogant Rice
Bill Glahn
No
Child Left a Dime
Mickey Z.
One Zimbabwe or Another: an Interview with Greg Elich
Stephanie McMillan
Fear and Art: Feds Raid Another Exhibit
Josh Mahan
Victoria's Dirty Secret
David Russitano
Will the Real Minutemen Please Stand Up?
Jorge Mariscal
Rodolfo Gonzales: the Passing of a Legend
Rodolfo "Corky"
Gonzales
"I am Joaquin"
Tom Reeves
Students
Rise Again in Québec
April 14, 2005
Karyn Strickler
Red
States Rebellion: Montana vs. the Patriot Act
Pat Williams
The
Flattened Economy of the Rocky Mountain West
Jessica Pupovac
What
You Should Know About Bank One's New Daddy
Joshua Frank
Contradictions of the Anti-War Mvt.
Jerzy Mankowski
Jeffrey
Sach's Millennium Plan: a View from Poland
Talli Naumann
Right-to-Know in Mexico
Antony Loewenstein
The Aussie Press Under the Empire of Murdoch
Virginia Rodino
Challenging the Empire: Tactics for the Anti-War Movement
Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen
Bush's
Vision of Arab Democracy vs. Two Reports
Website of the Day
The 13th
Moon: Women Poets Read for Peace in Portland
April 13, 2005
Maria Carrión
Bolton
in the Western Sahara
Mike Whitney
Fighting Torture with Art: the Abu Ghraib Paintings of Fernando
Botero
Terry Jones
Let Them Eat Bombs
Dave Lindorff
A Sickening Error
Nathaniel Livingston, Jr.
Ethnic Cleansing at Air America
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Nuclear Blackjack with Iran
Don Fitz
Battling Dengue Fever with Bats and Birds: the Vietnamese Alternative
to Pesticides
Tom Crumpacker
Democracy and the Multiparty System: The US and Cuban Experiences
JG
The
Abuse of Haitian Kids at PS 34
Jack McCarthy
Horowitz Comes to Tallahassee
Kevin Zeese
Is God Picking a Side in Iraq?: an Interview with Rev. Sekou
Jeffrey St.
Clair
How
Exxon Used the Guise of Homeland Security to Purge One of Louisiana's
Environmental Champions
April 12, 2005
John Wheat
Gibson
The
Goddess of Immigrants: Aeschylus, Thucydides and the Patriot
Act
Kevin Zeese
The Time to Oppose a Draft is Now
Alan Farago
The
Cancer Clusters of Cape Coral: Toxics Trump Democracy in Florida
Dave Lindorff
Blackout in Montgomery: Selling Social Security Destruction to
White Alabamans
Ron Jacobs
Bob
Dylan at the Crossroads
Nelson P. Valdes
Flashback: John Bolton's Big Lie
Dave Zirin
War
Games and War Names
Website of the Day
Parents Against the Draft
April 11, 2005
Tom Barry
Negroponte
and the Eclipse of the CIA
Saul Landau
Love for the Unborn and Brain Dead:
Contempt for the Rest Us
Monique Dols
Scapegoated at Columbia: Smearing Joseph Massad
Phil Gasper
Burning Professors: Resurrection of a Witchhunt
Mike Whitney
See No Evil: Pope TV and the New World Media
Edwin Krales
The Origin of AIDS: an Ethical Inquiry
Paul de Rooij
Undermining
Civil Society: Horowitz's Corrosive Projects
Website of the Day
Academic Freedom at Columbia: a Petition
April 9 / 10,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Torture
Air, Incorporated
William A. Cook
Janus at the State Dept.: Glossing Over Israel's Human Rights
Abuses
Gary Leupp
My Favorite Papal Moment: a Bonfire in Peru
Alan Maass
Pope-a-Dope: John Paul 2, Death of a Reactionary
Laura Carlsen
Democracy Sinking in Mexico
Joe DeRaymond
Death and Displacement in Colombia
Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Rebuffed in Venezuela (Again)
Dave Lindorff
The Price of Oil and the Bush Dollar
Greg Moses
Growling at Hallliburton
Fred Gardner
Southern Station Session
Justin Smith
The US Prison System: a Hesitant Defense of the Not-Quite-as
Bad Old Days
Ron Jacobs
George Bush's True Religion: From Bob Jones to Jim Jones
M. Junaid Alam
No Intelligence Failure in Iraq; Political Failure in the US
Ira Kay
West Point's Bad Geography: the Conqueror's Warped View of the
World
Elizabeth Schulte
From McCarthyism to COINTELPRO: the Ongoing War on the Left
Jackie Corr
Stranger in a Strange Land: What Bush Didn't See in Montana
Christopher
Brauchli
From Darfur to Iraq: Crime Without Punishment
Leslie A. Fiedler
On Saul Bellow: "The Age of the Jewish-American Novel is
Over"
Ben Tripp
Pocket Furniture
Poets Basement
Lamantia, Engel, Louise, Albert and Curtis
Website of
the Weekend
Military Free Zones
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
May 7 / 8, 2005
Rick Steves: a Voice of Sanity
"Getting
High is a Little Like Cuba: When the Government Says 'No', You've
Just Got to Go There"
By
FRED GARDNER
Rick Steves is a travel guide and writer who lives
in Edmunds, Washington, and spends about 100 days a year in Europe.
His TV shows on PBS are seen by millions of viewers like you.
He is in his late 40s; sandy-haired, bespectacled, intelligent,
and so calm that he seems slightly bemused even when he's expressing
outrage. A family man, a church-goer, pragmatic
Two years ago Allen St. Pierre
of NORML noticed Steves's name on the membership list and invited
him to join the advisory board and to talk at the annual meeting.
"I took my pastor out for a walk," said Steves on that
occasion, "And I explained to him that there's a lot of
good Christians who find marijuana actually helps them get closer
to God... I think that was an accomplishment there: to find a
leader in your community who respects you, but would be disinclined
to understand what you're doing, and take the time to explain
to him. I'm trying to do that and I think we all need to do that."
At this year's NORML meeting
in San Francisco, Steves reprised his practical advice in a keynote
talk, excerpted below. Is there anyone better suited to begin
guiding this country towards sanity?
To me travel is accelerated
living. You make more friends and you learn more per day when
you're away from home than you do at home. Everything becomes
very vivid. When I'm in Europe for a month I can recall every
meal. Can't do that when I'm at home, it's just not that vivid....
Travel really challenges truth.
You're raised thinking certain truths are self-evident and God-given,
and then you get over there and you realize that people do things
differently. Travel rearranges your furniture. I mean, you go
to Bulgaria and this means yes (shaking his head) and that means
no (nodding). And you go to France and slow service means good
service. Slow service is respectful service -you've got the table
all night, take your time...
You go to Belgium and they
dip their French fries into mayonnaise, they look at you strange
if you ask for ketchup...
I go to Japan and I'm in a
Raokan in the middle of the night and it's cold. They don't heat
their houses. And you slip on your slippers and you put on your
kimono and you shuffle down the hallway you can see your breath,
you're not looking forward to sitting on the toilet, but the
seat is heated. That's a nice jolt... Travel carbonates your
life. It makes things different, it sort of refreshes your perspective
and in a lot of ways, that's like marijuana, I would say.
When I started teaching I wondered
if it was a noble thing to teach rich Americans to do. My image
of travel when I was a kid was rich white Americans on big cruise
ships in the Caribbean throwing coins, photographing black kids
diving for those coins. It was a way to flaunt your affluence.
Nobody thought twice about it. That's what travel was all about.
Even today that notion of travel
persists. For a lot of people, travel is: see if you can eat
five miles a day and still snorkel when you get into . And that's
not something I wanted to promote. I wanted to promote thoughtful
travel. In the last few years, thoughtful travel has become more
important than ever for Americans. I'm really committed to the
notion that travel is a constructive, healthy thing to do. That's
nothing new. Fourteen hundred years ago Mohamed said "Don't
tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled."
Thomas Jefferson said, "Travel makes a person wiser, but
less happy." Mark Twain traveled, and he said "Travel
is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." I
travel and it turns out to be one of the last great sources of
legal adventure.
When you travel you realize
there's things to get excited about. I grew up thinking cheese
was the same size as the bread -and it's orange. Then you go
over there and they've got a different cheese for every day of
the year. You go into a cheese shop in Paris it's like a festival
of mold. I love hanging around with my restaurateur friends in
Paris. I'm their little American bumpkin and they can help me
appreciate the fine points of life. She takes me into the cheese
shop and picks up the moldiest one. (As if taking a deep whiff)
"Oh, Rick, smell this cheese it smells like ze feet of angels."
Now, imagine thinking that cheese smells like ze feet of angels!
It just changes your perspective on things.
I was in Kabul, in Afghanistan.
A professor sat down next to me and said, "You're an American,
aren't you?" I said "Yeah." He said, "I
want you to know that a third of the people on this planet eat
with spoons and forks like you do, a third of the people eat
with chopsticks and third of the people eat with their fingers
like I do and we're all just as civilized." I was thankful
for that. He had a little chip on his shoulder and he wanted
to tell every American he could meet that he's not less civilized
because he eats with his fingers.
I was in Eastern Turkey in
a land that might be called Kurdistan some day and met a carver
who was famous in his corner of the country, everybody wanted
a prayer niche carved by him. And we visited with him, and he
was so proud to be showing his work off to these American travelers,
he lifted his chisel up to the sky and said, "A man and
his chisel, the greatest factory on earth!" Wow! There's
a fulfilled guy. He may not know how to turn on a computer, but
he can define his own success, and I thought that was pretty
cool.
When you travel you just meet
people, you meet people all over the place. A little while ago
in Germany a little kid, like a 5-year-old kid, was just staring
at me. And finally his mom said, "Excuse my son, he stares
at Americans. You see, last week we were at MacDonald's and he
asked me 'Why do Americans have such soft bread?'" And the
mother told the kid, "Because they have no teeth."
You know, travel puts you in
your place. I'm as inclined as the next American to brag about
how well our athletes do at the Olympics, and I grew up marveling
at how great we were, it was always USA on top of that Olympic
medal list. Well, then my Dutch friend said, "Well, you've
got a lot of Olympic medals, but per capita, we're doing eight
times as well as you." We're not used to thinking of Olympic
medals in terms of per capita.
It's important to broaden your
perspective and it's important to bring it home -to bring it
home and share it with people that way. We're trying to bring
it home with out kids. Grandma and grandpa came over when my
son was about four years old or three years old and after table
prayers I taught him to say "Allah...Allah...Allah..."
Just to freak out my dad. You've got to put people a little outside
their comfort zone to share what you've learned from your travels.
One thing I've learned from
my travels is how Europeans are a little more progressive than
us in dealing with social problems. Every time there's a death
sentence commuted in the United States, there's a light show
at the Coliseum in Rome. They celebrate in Europe when we commute
a death sentence in the United States... And of course when you
travel in Europe you realize that there is a non-criminal approach
to marijuana that could be quite inspirational to American policy
makers if they would just learn about it.
When you think about taking
a trip, you can take a trip with your marijuana or you can take
a trip with your passport. It's kind of fun to take a trip without
having to travel. Just put me in a nice location with a National
Geogrpahic and a joint and I'm climbing Mt. Everest. That travel
is really quite cheap if the dollar's too low... And you can
do your actual travel and mix some appreciation of marijuana
into that and it becomes kind of super-travel.
A lot of Americans are not
edgy enough to smoke here, where it's illegal, but it's enjoyable
for them to have an opportunity to enjoy some recreational use
of marijuana without the paranoia that comes with doing that
publicly in the United States. First time I ever smoked was
in Afghanistan. As a kid I didn't want peer pressure to make
me do something my parents said I shouldn't. Over there it was
just like going local. "When in Rome," you know; and
when in Afghanistan, this is what you do. The bus stops and everybody
stands around and watches a goat get slaughtered and passes around
the bong.
I mean, you stand on the rooftop
of your hotel and there's chariots going by, torchlit, and the
lightbulbs are all breathing and people are eating soup with
their hands and they don't drop a bit. And you travel on over
to Nepal and you can look right into the eyes of the living virgin
goddess the Kumari Deva, you've got these slow-motion beach attacks
and everybody is going "namas dei, namas dei," CHECK
SPELLING I salute your virtues... and you write in your journal
trying to catch all this stuff and you get home and you hardly
remember where you were high and where you weren't. But when
you read it there's a certain dreaminess that comes into your
journal writing that you can kind of derive, it couldn't have
been that great, I must have been high.
When I teach a writer's workshop
a lot of times people will ask me "What's a trick? How can
I be a better travel writer?" One of the tricks of travel
writing is to be able to experiment with your perspective -smoking
pot if you want to sharpen your ability to be a good travel writer.
Like photographers will experiment with light. Any good photographer's
going to play around with existing light, it's a fascinating
thing. Well, as a travel writer you want to experiment with different
perspectives on things. When you're a keen observer you realize
- you can try and kill flies forever on the bed in Cairo but
if you realize that when they're rubbing their little front feet
together, they're toast! You can get 'em when they're doing this...
(rubs his hands)
When you're in Shanghai you
see these skyscrapers. They're throwing up the equivalent of
a skyscraper every day in Shanghai, surrounded by a sea of poverty.
When you write about that, it helps to see these skyscrapers
as stilettos just sticking up through this fertile soil of a
billion people. You've got to make your observations from a different
angle so people can better enjoy them.
You're looking into the eyes
of Michelangelo's David and you're actually seeing him sizing
up the darkness of medieval superstition right there, five hundred
years ago when Florence was pulling Europe out of the Dark Ages.
For 25 years I've been taking groups around Europe. We take five
thousand people around Europe every year on 200 different tours...
Trying to get my travelers
engaged to travel thoughtfully- not just fun in the sun, not
just bingo and not just shopping but thoughtful travel. Going
to Europe is going to a continent where people realize that society
has to make a choice. You can tolerate alternative lifestyles
or you can build more prisons. But you've got to make a choice.
In Europe they'd rather tolerate alternative lifestyles. In our
society we'd rather build more prisons. We live in a country
where the hottest thing in real estate is gated communities for
the wealthy and prisons for the poor. And we're oblivious. I
don't know why we don't see this as a political issue, but it's
a scary thing. Europeans are quick to remind me that my country
has 4% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. That's
not a good statistic.
Europe has learned that you
cannot legislate personal morality. It's futile. It's counterproductive.
The Dutch say "We're businessmen. If there's a problem,
we deal with that person as if he's a future customer or partner.
The Dutch have so many creative ways to solve problems. You can
complain about junkmail all you want. In the Netherlands they
have stickers on their mailboxes that say yes or no, so they
don't get junkmail unless they want it. Americans say "We
can't have pedestrian streets because then cars can't get to
my shop." In Europe they have pedestrian streets with little
swipe things for a credit card and you swipe it if you're a resident
and the gate goes down but otherwise it's traffic free. In the
Netherlands 40 percent of the traffic is on two wheels. There
are entire communities in Europe that are going to be wind-powered.
There's a race going on right
now for that. They deal with their problems by thinking outside
the box. And as Europe unites, what they're doing gets more
impressive. It's easy to write Europe off as the "old world,"
but they've got a bigger economy and a bigger population than
we do right now. 400 million people with 11 trillion dollar GDP
and they're not spending half of their disposable income on
the military, they're investing it in their own infrastructure.
It's breathtaking what's going on there.
The hard choice we're making
is to find 60 billion dollars to cover our government's military
needs -cutting right into people's programs that weaken our communities.
In Europe those are the last things they'd be cutting. Europe
knows how to deal with social problems. Prostitution? There's
no disease, there's no crime with prostitution in Europe. Prostitutes
have their own union.... These days when a prostitute in the
Netherlands has trouble she pushes an emergency button and a
pimp doesn't come, the police come.
When we think about the Netherlands
we think about coffeeshops. They've got loaner bongs. You can
check your email. It's a community center and it's considered
by law enforcement officers and health officials as a good wall
between the responsible adult use of soft drugs and hard drugs.
There's nothing soft about hard drugs [policy] in the Netherlands.
They are anti-hard-drug. They just classify marijuana in the
category of alcohol and tobacco.
The law enforcement officers
see it as a wonderful way to communicate with people who have
problems with hard drugs. They go to the coffeeshops. After 15
years of this, the Netherlands is clear. Even people who are
against drugs are in favor of decriminalizing marijuana. Teen
use does not go up. The crime element around drugs goes way way
down. It's tough that the United States applies pressure on
them. I had people in Copenhagen tell me they had to arrest a
couple of potsmokers every year just to maintain favored trade
status with the United States of America. That's a pathetic thing.
Coming home for me is always
a little bit of a jolt. The first person that meets me at the
airport is a dog. I can't help but think: "One nation under
surveillance." We pride ourselves on life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, but we have the shortest vacations in the
rich world. We've got an uptight situation about sex where even
my travel shows on PBS are rated for mature audiences only -if
you can imagine that. David's going to be pixilated here pretty
soon. TV programmers around the United States have a list of
how many seconds of marble penis and canvas breast are showing
as I show art from Europe. A lot of programmers can inflict a
Titian painting or a Michalengelo statue on their viewership
in some conservative communities.
In a lot of regards we're going
in the wrong direction in this society and that's why it's good
for us all to ge4t together and encourage each other and break
from this huddle and go back into our communities. Jailing people
for pot in Europe would be laughable. But that's not the case
here in the United States. In so many ways I think we're living
a lie.
And that's one reason why I
got involved with NORML. I just don't think if you're a successful,
affluent, free country you need to embrace lies to con your electorate
into this or that. We just heard that the intelligence on weapons
of mass destruction was mistaken. And they all pretend they didn't
know... We are routinely outvoted in the United Nations by 140
to four on environmental issues, development of the third world,
the criminal court, on Cuba, on Israel. Who stands with us? Israel,
the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. That's what I call a rogue
nation.
If there's something going
on to help solve the problems of desperately poor people, there's
one country that gets in the way, the U.S.A. It's us! If Canada
wants to give discounted medicine for AIDS to Africa, who gets
in the way of it? We do. If Americans knew this, if it could
be communicated effectively, I think it would be not a very tough
sell to get our country a little more tuned into the needs of
the people on this planet. But we are embracing these lies. We
buy this stuff. "No child left behind." "Clean
skies." "I love trees." "The party of life."
"Tax relief." "Death tax." All of this terminology
we just embrace. They call it the "defense" department.
Nobody should ever let that word go by without a challenge. It's
not a "defense" department. We spend as much as the
rest of the world put together on the military and you can't
get elected without promising more. There's a mania in that regard;
it's a big problem. We hear that we're for peace and we've got
these 'Christian values,' but we're pounding plowshares into
swords these days at a record pace. Somebody's got to just stand
up and just say -you know, when Bush talks about freedom and
liberty, he's talking about freedom to other people's natural
resources and liberty to use their cheap labor. That's what they're
talking about!
I was down in El Salvador last
week. I just wanted to see what was going on in the developing
world. They've got their struggles between the left and the right
down there and the leftwing party in El Salvador was almost going
to win the presidential election last year and President Bush
had to send his brother Jeb down there to stand by the righwinger
and tell the Salvadorans "If you vote for the leftwing,
we're going to stop remittances coming down from all the refugees
working in the United States." Which is a third of the money
in El Salvador's economy. So most of the people voted for the
rightwing, against their interests, because of this threat from
the United States. That's democracy these days.
A leading Jesuit priest, an
educator in El Salvador, says whenever he hears the term "democracy"
these days, his bowels move. I've got a journal about that.
If you're curious about what I learned down in El Salvador. It's
at ricksteves.com One thing I'm concerned about is the mass
dumbing down of our society. The stuff I've been talking about,
we go "yeah, yeah, yeah," but the average person doesn't
get it. It's because of fear, I think, and because powerful forces
in our society have been dumbing us down. They would find it
convenient if we all become just mindless producer-consumers.
We've got to not let them dumb us down. Because when we're dumbed
down, that's the only way political initiatives against the interest
of the people in general can have a chance.
The news is not news. Reality
tv is not reality. When you see steroids on TV, and Michael Jackson
and Terry Schiavo and so on, nobody's talking about the big issues.
I mean every day, if you care about people if you're into sanctity
of life, every day three times as many people who died on 9/11
die in Africa. Every day because of AIDs. That's a real problem
that can be dealt with. We hear about the tsunami, and then it's
gone out of the news. And nobody tells us that every week there's
a tsunami worth of innocent children that die of starvation on
this planet. It's just structural poverty, and America is the
flagbearer of this structural poverty around the planet. As good
people we can encourage our neighbors and so on to become a little
more progressive.
The problem with marijuana
is, if they're trying to make us just mindless producer-consumers,
marijuana is not good on either account. It doesn't make us want
to produce more and the only thing we would consume more is cheetos.
The thing this society doesn't like about marijuana is it turns
people who wouldn't otherwise be poets into poets. Think of Maslow's
famous hierarchy of needs. First you get your clothes and your
car and your house and then you can do things that are more creative
and then at the top you got "selfless actualization,"
helping other people.
It's more convenient in our
society to have barbed wire. So that we continue to consume out
and out and out, not realizing that we can step over the barbed
wire and live more fulfilling lives. One of the reasons why philosophically
I'm into marijuana is that it's a good way to cut that barbed
wire and be true to yourself and be what really is successful.
To sell this propaganda it's the big-lie technique. Hitler
learned that you can tell a big lie over and over again, and
people believe it if you tell it enough times. We've got to recognize
the propaganda. The propaganda erodes the credibility of the
government, of schools, of families when it comes to marijuana.
We've got a government -a White House- that spends millions of
dollars advertising in the Super Bowl trying to tell people that
marijuana causes teen pregnancies. And it's surrounded by beer
ads! Now what's causing the pregnancies?
I've got friends who are teachers
and the DARE program by any teacher's assessment is somewhere
between ineffectual and counterproductive. When you got a DARE
officer, they'll meet with the teachers lounge, these teachers
who are free spirits, Dead Poets Society kind of stuff, you know,
they are cowed into silence when the DARE officer is there. You
can hear a pin drop in the teacher's lounge. No one will question
DARE because it's bad news for your job security if you are known
as somebody who is a little bit open-minded about creative ways
to deal with drugs and children. It is so exciting to go to
a DARE meeting at school and question it. I mean, every parent
there wants to do it but they're just too chicken. Every parent
knows this is bogus but they just are afraid and this fear is
what's keeping us down. At home, I have two teenage kids. My
wife is a nervous wreck. Parents are taught that this is a gateway
drug and it's 20 times as powerful back when we did it innocently
when we were kids and all this kinds of stuff. I'm excited about
having credibility with my kids. One of the perks I get for being
on the advisory board here at NORML is I can invite Keith Stroup
over for dinner and introduce my teenage kids to a lawyer who
has dedicated his life to dedicating an ideal rather than people
with a lot of money. There's a nobility in our struggle that
I think can be explained a little better. My daughter just wrote
a paper. She got to choose whatever topic she wanted and she
chose "Why marijuana should be decriminalized. I just read
the teacher's response to it two days ago. She got an 'A' but
the teacher said, "We don't all have to agree with you,
but it's a good paper."
I think the underlying thing
about this propaganda war on the part of our government against
marijuana is that even more than stopping kids from drug use,
what's motivating them is instilling fear in parents. Because
fear is the only way they're going to keep us down. Normally,
I'm not talking about the decriminalization of marijuana, I'm
talking about foreign policy and 9/11 stuff and terrorism. That
relates to my travel stuff more directly. But it is the same
thing! Our government wants us to be afraid and the fear enables
them to manipulate us this way.
For goodness sakes, we've got
doctors and scientists and medical experts that have to be politically
correct to give our government advice. It's sort of bad news
to make Hitler parallels but it's getting more and more like
that. Our environmental policies, our health policies, our AIDS
policies, are shaped by people who are driven by ideological
agendas. I mean, tears cause AIDS now... Our government is embracing
this. It's amazing to me. I was very impressed when I read on
the NORML website a bulletin the Drug Czar sent out to all the
prosecuting attorneys listing 20 reasons why marijuana is the
devil's weed. Each one of these points is refuted very solidly
on the NORML website. But that our government would be giving
this trash to prosecutors with the implication that you better
be running with this sort of standard....That's just really -somebody's
got to stand up to that.
Travel teaches you a respect
for history. We should learn from history. We had this 13-year
experiment with Prohibition and I think by any sober assessment,
it just made a lot of criminals, filled a lot of prisons and
cost our society a lot of money back in the '20s. It was big
government at its worst. Today, more and more people are waking
up to this prohibition that's keeping Americans who shouldn't
be criminals criminals. It's causing so many people to be arrested
every year. If one person is arrested for marijuana is contributing
to the congestion of our prisons right now, that's one person
too many.
We need to balance our activism.
I think your marijuana activism will be more effective if your
also into the PTA and homelessness and the schools and public
television or whatever. It makes me be more credible because
people know I'm into other causes, also. It makes me feel more
effective as an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.
We have a clear message and
you've just got to have these figures. 750,000 Americans were
arrested last year because of marijuana, 88% of them for simple
possession. Our country blew 7 billion dollars on this. This
should be a conservative issue. We can talk about the European
solution. Fifteen years they've been experimentingwith treating
marijuana as a medical concern rather than a criminal one. Even
crusty, conservative law enforcement types like it this way.
We need to pre-empt the discredit. They're going to say: You're
for children abusing drugs? No, we're not for children smoking
pot, we're not for hard drugs, we're not for driving when you're
high, none of that stuff. But you need to pre-empt that because
they'll try to discredit you right away... Responsible adult
use is okay, but nobody's talking about kids getting easy access
to pot. We need to shoot off that torpedo before they torpedo
us with it.
People think advocating for
NORML is advocating for breaking a law. It's not. It's advocating
to change a law -and that's a very fundamental difference. I'm
not saying to smoke pot. I'[m saying it's wrong to arrest people
who want to smoke pot as mature adults, or for medical use. We're
not saying break the law. I want to support NORML publicly like
I support travel. I think it's a matter of freedom. I think
it's recess, and we need it in this society.
Being high to me is a little
like Cuba. Any time my government says I can't go somewhere,
I feel it's one of my rights to go there. My government can't
tell me I can't go to Cuba. Everyone else is going to Cuba, why
can't I go to Cuba? And I don't think my government can tell
me what I can do as a responsible citizen in the privacy of my
own home. We need to challenge our friends. It's frustrating
to me that there are so many potsmokers out there who don't even
put two and two together. To me, NORML is not a charity, NORML
is a service.
So, happy travels, even if
you're just staying home.
Fred Gardner can be reached at: fred@plebesite.com
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