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09/07/2004:

"On the Road in Gringolandia: The Politics of Darkness: North / South"

by John Ross
The ambiance inside the Garden was as toxic as an Al Qaeda bioterrorist Jihad. In the spotlight, a smugly chortling Bush lip-synched doom to 20,000 beardless Caucasian conventioneers. "This will not happen on my watch" the President pandered from the podium while the Twin Towers crumbled on the big screen behind him, apparently so brain-damaged that he did not remember that it had already happened. The Caucasians zeig heiled appropriately. "Four more years!" they regurgitated.

"Four more wars!" I screamed hoarsely and my colleagues in the press corps backed off to avoid contamination by my alarming lack of journalistic objectivity. An agitated gnome in an elephant's head hat two rows in front of me who had been haranguing the sky boxes where Al Franken and Michael Moore were quarantined to prevent a public lynching, lunged at me menacingly when I refused to stand up and cheer the bilious Bush.

Shamelessly harping on the nearly 3000 souls toasted on 9/11, the third anniversary of whose incineration would be mourned the very next week, Bushwa pumped up the paranoia as the lynch mob swooned in the aisles. Although the President often mumbles in a patois only his fellow Texans can decipher, his intentions were crystal clear. Filling the hearts and minds of the American electorate with fear and loathing is his most ballistic missile, and the malignant exploitation of national tragedy his hole card in the battle to retain the White House.

I longed for an overripe tomato to toss at this dangerous bozo strutting around down below on the circular stage but the sentries at the Garden gates, perhaps remembering an earlier Eden, had proscribed all round fruit from being carried onto the premises.

The craven spectacle that profaned the hallowed home court of the Knicks and countless classic championship slugfests, was my first stop on a campaign trail I will cover for the next months as I wend my way across the country from right coast to left, reminding my fellow Americans of their true his and herstory as depicted in my latest instant cult classic, "Murdered By Capitalism", a personal memoir of life and death on the U.S. Left.

Indeed, I had just touched down at LaGuardia en route from tropical Chiapas where I had been celebrating the first anniversary of the Zapatista "caracoles" (political/cultural centers) and the "Juntas de Buen Gobierno" (JBGs or Good Government Commissions) that now administer the five autonomous regions and 29 autonomous municipalities in the highlands and jungle of Mexico's southernmost state. The anniversary week had been filled with many cumbia dances and basketball tournaments and earnest evaluations of the JBG's first year of work. They still made a lot of mistakes, the members of the Juntas confessed but 50 rebel schools had been built in the autonomous zones in recent seasons and they were learning each day how to apply the Zapatista ethos of "mandar obedeciendo" or "governing by obeying the will of the people", a concept so foreign to Bushite brains that the rebels might as well be discoursing in Martian. Above all, the Zapatistas spoke from their hearts, an organ which Bush and his boys, despite their claims of "compassionate conservatism", have never been able to locate. The contrast between the toxic megalomania at the Garden and the unselfish, heroic resistance of the Indians was as stark as a sudden plunge into Dante's Inferno.

The Zapatistas, and for that matter the legions of oppressed who take up most of the space on this lonely planet, were in fact keeping close tabs on the blasphemy in the Garden. Much as protestors proclaimed in Chicago 1968 during another party's perverted presidential convention, the whole world was watching. They know that what happens here in the north from now until November could very well prove to be a life and death decision for them.

Full Article: counterpunch.org

I just read a good book by John Ross called War Against Oblivion, a history of the Zapatistas. The indigenous people of America have a firm hold on democratic principles: they have not been still in the face of this 500-year conquest, not for a single day.