by Larry Calloway (c) 2012

In the new Bangkok air terminal a long sculpture on the way to international departures depicts a tug of war, demigods v. devils, in the clean bright primary colors of Theravada Buddhist  temples. This moral chemistry, this dynamic equilibrium of unresolved issues that has gone on since the beginning is a fine Hindu creation myth.

In this story, “Churning the Ocean of Milk,” the Asuras and Devas pull back and forth on a rope hitched around a spindle. (The rope is a mythological snake, the spindle is a sacred mountain, and the winners will get immortality if they last, but we’ll never know.) From the disturbance of the Milky Way came a number of things, depending on the version. The version in my Western eyes as I departed – perhaps finally – was cosmic. It was creation via the slightest first tick of information in the ocean of Zen Emptiness, like Milton’s Satan crossing Chaos and leaving a track from which all organization evolved. The sculpture also is Thailand, where the nightclubs are as famous as the temples (and a whore would never touch a monk) and yellow shirts and red shirts hold staggered demonstrations and democracy alternates with military dictatorship and committees on national reconciliation don’t reconcile. Whatever, the reciprocating engine produces something wonderful like . . . life.

Except for the creationist sculpture, the new airport terminal could be anywhere. It is novel – facades of plate glass and stainless steel under tent tops. It is impressive – 6 million square feet on a steaming plain 20 miles from the city. It is coherent – a single project completed in 2005. But it could be Hong Kong or Beijing or Dubai, equally large. There is a kingdom of airports in the world. You could get stamped in to dozens of nations around it and never leave one. Ram Dass said – and it was a teaching – that every air terminal has posters for somewhere else.

The 600-room Novotel, with a lobby high as a cathedral, was built along with the terminal. I have stayed in this hotel several times to make overnight flight connections. In the city there’s a spread of places to stay: tall luxury hotels on the river Chao Phraya, international franchises at Silom Road, backpacker havens at Khao San Road. But overnighting in the city involves the risk of missing a flight next day due to the uncertainty of Bangkok traffic. Another annoyance is that taxi drivers will pimp a farang traveling alone and wanting only to wake up on time. (“You want see the girls?” “Mai Chai. Pai Holiday Inn, khrab.” “Why not? You like boys?” “Hotel is all, sir.”) For the same reasons, traffic gridlock and pimping taxi drivers, I learned long ago to do my Bangkok sightseeing by boat, the cheap regular daytime public transportation on the Chao Phraya.

On April 10, 2010 I checked in to the Novotel with my longtime traveling partner after two weeks in pure and happy Bhutan. We were directed to take the back way to our room. After the luggage arrived, she went to the jungley pool and I went to the lobby for a newspaper to catch up on the demonstrating red shirts. Returning I headed for the main elevators and was stopped by a hotel security man. “No. No. Other way.” I turned to the stairs. “No. No.” He pointed down a long hall, the way I had come down. “Other way.” I did not understand this, but I complied. In Thailand some things go unexplained, even in the humming modernism of Suvarnabhoumi airport and its hotel.

That evening when we went down, by the back way, for dinner we had an explanation. The restaurant was crowded with men in uniform, officers of the Thai armed forces. They sat at tables in small groups, eating well and talking quietly. They had taken over a wing of the hotel. I supposed it had something to do with the trouble in the city.

The red shirts had been camped downtown for two months and the military government was losing patience. I had seen the beginning of it in March, when I was staying at a wat near Fang, north of Chiang Mai. (Wat translates as “temple,” but the word applies to any religious complex, from the rich royal temple grounds in Bangkok to humble village centers.) On a Friday morning I had watched at the highway as cars and trucks full of protesters waving red flags streamed by. They were on their way to the “Million Man March” in Bangkok. I was in the north, where almost everybody was a red shirt, as opposed to the yellow shirts of Bangkok and the southern resort towns. The only yellow displays I saw in the north were banners at government compounds.

These northerners were ordinary people who worked hard and kept their kids in school, but they were poor by comparison with the Bangkok factory workers and those in the tourist trade. Still, they were Thai, and like the rich southerners they respected the king and the Buddha and sometimes the military. On Sundays in the sala, a spacious pavilion dominated by a single whitefigure of the seated Buddha in tranquil meditation, whole families would gather with food baskets and spend the day, singing the Pali sutras and listening to dharma talks by the young abbot or his senior monks.

Theravada Buddhism is practiced in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. Under the non-democratic regimes of Burma, Laos and Cambodia, the monks in saffron robes are constantly watched, but they are embraced under Thailand’s constitutional (when not suspended) monarchy. Theravada (sometimes translated as wisdom of the elders) differs from the Mahayana (meaning larger vehicle) tradition of China, Japan, Tibet and Vietnam. The Theravada dharma is a back-to-the-sources teaching in the ancient Indian language called Pali. It does not rely upon latter-day sacred texts or venerate bodhisattvas like Avalokitesvara. The Theravada altars are simple venerations of the Buddha.

As Buddhism unites Thailand, politics divides it, north from south, rural from urban, the interests of poor farmers and the immigrants along the Lao border from those of the wealthy royalist families of Bangkok. The north was the solid constituency of Shinawatra Thaksin, the telecom billionaire and  twice-elected prime minister who served from 2001 until he was overthrown in a military coup in 2006. (His younger sister was elected prime minister in 2011.) Thaksin’s party, by various names, provided development money and medical care to the poor and was rewarded by the voters in the northern region called the issan. He went into exile after being charged with corruption by the supreme court under the military government.

Now, in the spring of 2010, the red shirts were demanding an election, promised for four years by the military government. In a strange and gruesome display, they emptied bags of their donated blood at the gates of Government House. There had been confrontations with police and army surrounding the camp at Phan Fa Bridge, but both sides seemed to show restraint.

At the Summer Palace

MEAN STREETS

As we dined among the quiet officers and talked of where we had been and where we were going next, soldiers and police were moving to clear the protesters downtown. The state TV channels were rerunning game shows. An objective report of the clashes that spring by Human Rights Watch, an American group, tells how on the morning of that day, April 10, the military-appointed prime minister had announced an order to clear the protesters. In the afternoon the army, under helicopters spraying tear gas, moved against 5,000 red shirts bearing pointed bamboo sticks at Phan Fa Bridge, which crosses a canal in the neighborhood of government buildings and Khao San Road. The wind shifted, carrying a cloud of tear gas back on the soldiers. They retreated. Protesters approached in the heat and gave the soldiers water, according to a news reporter quoted in the report.

That night at Khao San Road there was shooting – from both sides. The report found that armed men in black had joined the red shirts and were firing live ammunition. The soldiers too were firing, some with rubber bullets, some not. The fighting spilled to other areas including the upscale World shopping mall. An army commander was killed by a grenade. A Reuters photographer died from a gunshot wound in the chest. After two hours of fighting the army retreated. The day ended in a standoff. Human Rights Watch published these numbers for the day: 26 dead including 5 soldiers, 800 wounded including 350 soldiers. According to autopsy reports, most deaths were by high velocity bullets.

We flew away early next morning, knowing nothing and never having left the safe, insular, humming modernity of the airport, a monument to 50 years of incredible development. It was named Suvarnabhumi, “Golden Land,” by King Bhumipol.

On the way south I replayed impressions from three trips through Thailand and Laos, and what shined brightest were those fresh mornings in Luang Prabang, Laos, a United Nations world heritage site. Hundreds of barefoot monks in bright saffron file down the sunny side of the central avenue of the narrow peninsular town at 6 a.m. (Tourists with cameras work the other side.) Townspeople and merchants drop small parcels of food – sticky rice, packaged noodles, cakes and such – into the brass bowls. The monks receive the gifts impassively and walk on. It’s the givers instead who express gratitude, putting their palms together, because they are earning merit under the inexorable law of karma. (In the 2007 protests in Yangoon, Burmese monks turned their begging bowls upside down.)

The meritorious giving takes place everywhere in the Theravada Buddhist countries. Monks walk the beaches at dawn in southern Thai resorts. They appear at shops beside noisy highways or among village stalls in the issan. On some mornings at the wat near Fang I would follow Joi, the bright young monk who had unceremoniously shaved my head and eyebrows for ordination as a novice. He would stand alone with his bowl in the dimly lit early morning market, impassive but thoughtful as shoppers gathering food for the day would drop gifts in his bowl.

Joi was from a village of people who had escaped Burma. They are Palaung, a million-member ethic minority that was virtually at war with the Burmese army. Most refugees, from Cambodia and Laos as well as from Burma, go officially unrecognized by Thailand, so they have no country and, therefore, no actual workable rights (I follow Hannah Arendt on this point) . It seemed to me that this young man’s only protection was the universal Thai respect for his saffron robe. He had just received his high school diploma, was fluent in English and Thai and aspired to learn Chinese so he could teach in the region, which has communities of earlier refugees, nationalists from China.

Joi was preoccupied. If he left the order, replacing his robe with civilian clothes, he would be vulnerable. But it was the only way to enter the private college in Chiang Mai and pursue courses in Chinese. If he continued as a monk, he would receive a free Buddhist education but the foreign language study would be limited to English. I learned later by Facebook that he chose Chinese.

A small regional NGO called the Blood Foundation operates day-care schools for children of Burmese refugees, many of whom work in the orange groves in the Fang area. One evening we arrived by pickup at Joi’s village in the mountains on the border where army outposts of both Burma and Thailand face each other across a no-man’s land of barbed wire. The Burmese army could watch every move in the village and once shelled it after some sort of altercation, but the people were carrying on with their lives without fear. They sat in family circles eating the evening meal in porous bamboo houses.

The abbot at the wat was Dr. Apisit (PhD from a Buddhist University), a gentle and compassionate young man who kept two beloved monkeys as pets. His remarks to me at my ordination forewarned that the four weeks were not going to be a

holiday.Besides accepting the universal Buddhist precepts and seeking refuge in the Buddha, dharma and sangha, I also pledged to take no food after noon, sleep on a hard bench, wear nothing decorative and avoid trivial conversation. Dressed in white and without hair or eyebrows, I had trouble recognizing myself in digital photos. Which was the point. All this, the abbot counseled, was intended to aid the practice: vipassana meditation.

The village and neighborhood wats are schools for boys whose families choose traditional Buddhist education, often because they cannot afford any other. They live simply and (allowing for their nature as boys) quietly. They sweep the grounds thoughtfully. They chant mornings and evenings in their sanctuaries.  

But mere monastic quietude does not define the fullness of Theravada Buddhism, at least in Thailand. Dr. Apsit carried a cell phone and was in the process of buying farmland around the wat for expansion – a retreat center for Westerners, a hospital. The director of the wat school one evening invited me and another in white (who took the vows but because of her gender  could not become a novice monk) to come with him in his small pickup to an event marking the completion of renovation work at a wat down the highway. As we approached it I was surprised that he had trouble finding a place to park.

Inside the gates, the old wat was – excuse the cliché – rocking! There was a rock band playing. There was a stage where Thai “lady boys” sang like girls. There were dance groups in colorful ethnic costumes. The lights were so bright the power kept going out. There were lines of delicious food vendors. (Ignoring them was a test of my vows). And then came the parade of “money trees.” Coughing up a donation is nothing compared with the work that goes into these ornate constructions by community groups, businesses and families. The focus of these gifts is the leaves: crisp new Thai 100-bhat bills (as valued locally as $20 bills here)

I had seen a similar celebration, wealthier but no less communal, at my favorite town in Thailand: Nakhorn Pathom near Bangkok, the site of a 427-foot stupa built in the late 19^thCentury by Mongkut, the beloved king who had spent most of his adult life as a monk. A standing golden Buddha with his right hand raised in peace surveys a busy commercial center. Here the celebration included a parade of school bands and cheerleaders and lovely queens and dignitaries in new Japanese cars

Nakorn Pathom

assembled in Thailand. The fiesta (and I use the Spanish-Catholic word deliberately) in Nakhorn Pathom celebrated Loi Kratong, the full moon in November. All full moon days are Buddhist holidays, but this one is special in Thailand because of the tradition of floating little wish lights on water. Elsewhere, on the southern beaches, and on the other hand, full moon holidays bring orgiastic revels by young Western tourists. The churning of the ocean perseveres.

GRIM REMINDER

What you see leaving Bangkok, more than the freeways and flats of sterile rooftops and fields of orderly vehicles, is the river Chao Phraya, reminder perhaps that in Southeast Asia the rivers were the ways and the way. Similarly, on leaving Luang Prabang you see the Mekong at a confluence with a river called Nam Ou. My partner in her internet wandering discovered a courageous little place called Riverside Lodge by a small Lao town with a costly Chinese-donated bridge across the river Nam Ou about four hours by bus from Luang Prabang. We went.

It was a line of bamboo cottages on stilts on the north bank of the wide river. It was built three years before by a Dutch man and his Japanese wife. Meals and drinks were served in the open-air lobby where upside-down geckos and who knows what else liked to skitter. Against a wall by way of decoration was a painted bomb casing, it’s nameplate corroded beyond recognition. It was, or had been, an American cluster bomb. Grim reminder.

But the wonder and inspiration of the place was the river. It’s a live river, still unpolluted, full of fish, used fully a joyfully by the people who live along it. At the Riverside Inn we could hear the children at play down in the river. They all know how to swim and how to laugh. The long-ago bombs did not destroy the culture of Laos (or for that matter, Vietnam).

We hired one of the narrow boats for a day. The boatman, skilled at sandbar dodging and rapid running, took us up river about three hours to the point where it becomes unnavigable. There was a Lao village, where children and their mothers sat in the afternoon shade under their houses. They stared at us, impassive. One boy came up to me and stared. “Sabai-di,” I said. He did not respond. Then he ran away. Tourism is not very heavily developed along the upper Nam Ou.

We had spent a lot of time by rivers in Borneo – the Sarawak, the Kinabanatang, the Danum – but this was the prize, unexpected. It was a broad river about the size of the damned Clark Fork in Montana, except it was unthreatened right then. People live along it and use it as they have for centuries. There is a highway to the village and the bridge, but the river is the connection.

I went walking up the river trail that passed our cottage. As soon as I rounded the bend, the motors of the town (150 houses at most) went silent. I could hear the random sounds of the  narrow wooden boats, clunks like when you pick up a guitar. A lone boatman came by singing something in a language and a tonic scale that I didn’t understand. Singing! Sing anywhere in a North American city except in your car with the windows closed and people will look down, embarrassed to see you, poor lost soul. It was so calming and spiritual that I just stood on the narrow trail in the fresh wet greenery and breathed.

Then I passed some workers at a limestone outcrop. Short men in T-shirts and sandals. One of them gave me the universal sign for an explosion and pointed to the outcrop. I thought, “Oh, they’ve been blasting here.” But what he was saying was, “We are about to blast here.” I walked on 100 yards and turned in time to see rocks lifting silent and slowly and turning like something from Stanley Kubrick. Birds flew from the trees. Then, BLAM! The explosion was more than sound. It was impact.

In the next half hour they blasted four more times, sudden and out of context. My illusion was shattered. It must have been that way in the war. Peace murdered. The bomb in the lobby came to mind. Grim reminder.

Writers have a problem. They talk to themselves too much, and in so doing they forget the here and now. And on that narrow trail by the river there was a problem that I forgot. It was not the blasting (although dreamy writers are good candidates for walking into explosions). It was a tiny thing that I didn’t discover until dinner.

“There’s something really sticky on the floor,” I said. “Have you noticed?” We were barefoot, but hers weren’t sticking to the boards. I looked under the table – too dark to see. I crossed my feet to avoid the sticky sensation — almost a Superglue effect. “Sticky rice?” she suggested.

When we finished dinner and walked into the light, she said, “Your feet are bloody.” I looked down. Blood smeared to the ankles of both bare feet. The left cuff of my nylon pants was soaked. I was puzzled because I felt nothing.

“You’ve been leeched,” she said.

I cleaned up in the shower and found the single source of the blood, where the leech had penetrated a vein on the top of my left foot. It had drunk its fill and left, but the anticoagulant that is part of their arsenal, along with a pain deadener, kept the blood flowing. A bandage stopped it, and I was fine.

Gave my blood in Laos, I thought. And again the grim reminder against the wall came to mind.

(C)text and photos by LARRY CALLOWAY

The first thing I noticed from the door of the Pan Am 707 at the old airport in Bangkok that day before the rainy season in May 1963 was Air America. A C47 or some other transport with that logo was parked in plain sight. We knew it was the CIA’s airline and we knew its headquarters probably was the American base at Udorn Thani up north (where somebody said all the prostitutes had gone). We knew there was a war beginning in Indochina. But all this was none of our business. We were young volunteers in President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

Forty-five years later stepping off an Asia Air jet I noticed the steel-channeled concrete at Udorn airport is still in good shape. Built for the heavy B52 bombers, I thought. “Work horses.” But Indochina was at peace now, except for border skirmishes, and I was finding my way to Laos, where we could not go back then.

I was searching for something gone. It was 1963 Bangkok, charming and safe, before the traffic and the trafficking, when commerce followed water not concrete. The best houses were teak, which came down the river in logs lashed into rafts. Jim Thompson the silk merchant lived by a calm canal in an assembly of old teak houses displaying his collection of antique art. It was admired by all — literary guests (W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward), diplomats, colleagues from the spy agency that was called the OSS in the war. The central palace of the manly King Bhumibol and lovely Queen Sirikit was surrounded by quiet temples where an occasional tourist took Kodachrome photos of monks in saffron robes or captured the irony of a Coca Cola sign beside an ancient Chinese devil.

The embassies were on a shaded avenue called Wireless because they all had radios (short wave), and you could get there by pedicab. The ambassador and other important Americans ate in the same steak house, and the main attraction for lesser Americans was, besides the bars with fascinating girls, a café called “Pie.” Americans at home knew songs from “The King and I” about Anna and the King of Siam (the old name for Thailand), and Thai silk was high fashion. “The Bridge On The River Kwai” about prisoners of Japan in the war swept the Academy Awards and Pan Am and Air America parked together as if they were birds of the same feather.

Both are now extinct. And Jim Thompson disappeared in 1967 never to be found, and his house is now a museum on a side street where the national stadium roars, and the king is hospitalized in his eighties, and Bangkok is vulnerable to catastrophic flooding because the natural drainage and canals are paved over.

BROTHERS AND COUSINS

Air America was created in 1959 to support covert operations in Laos, a landlocked country of no more than 3 million people then, caught between Vietnam and Thailand. Our man in Laos was Phoumi Nosavan, a diminutive general of the Royal Lao Army who became prime minister in a CIA-backed coup in December 1959, two months after death ended the 55-year reign of beloved King Sisavang. Phoumi was a close friend of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, his cousin and mentor, who ruled Thailand under martial law with the apparent consent of King Bhumibol. Sarit was ruthless and corrupt. But he had American friends like the Dulles brothers (Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen).

Our backup in the war against communism was Vang Pao, a leader among Hmong hill tribesmen. The hostility between the communists of Laos and the Hmong minority was not only due to the Marxist enmity toward traditional cultures (and religion). The Hmongs, long ago driven out of China, had been on the side of the French in the anti-colonial revolution. American intelligence agents who remained in Thailand after the defeat of Japan helped organize the Hmong and other ethnic minorities in an alliance with the Royal Lao Army against the Pathet Lao, counterpart of the Viet Cong. John Foster Dulles called Laos a “bastion of the free world.”

During the 1960 American election campaign (Kennedy vs. Nixon) a former Royal Lao officer named Kong Le, who now sympathized with the Pathet Lao, occupied Vientiane. What alarmed the Dulles brothers was evidence that he was getting support from the Soviet Union. On inauguration day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told Kennedy he faced war in Laos. Both men must have known the risk at hand because, unlike the nuclear sword rattlers, they knew war and were informed about Indochina. Early in his administration Eisenhower had authorized disguised American transport planes to supply the French army in its last stand at Dien Ben Phu in North Vietnam, and Kennedy had visited Indochina twice as a congressman before the defeat of the French in 1954.

Laos was far from the minds of most Americans, then as now, and so when the new president addressed the nation two months after his inauguration, he used maps showing the landlocked kingdom’s long border with Vietnam to illustrate his thesis that, in his words, “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence.” (He mispronounced Laos, perhaps intentionally.) In June 1961 in Vienna Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev declared Laos neutral, a sentiment that was signed and sealed in Geneva a year later.

So in May of 1963, as I stepped into tropical heat for the first time in my life, the American setup against North Vietnam in Indochina was this: two Buddhist kingdoms run by cousins, (Thailand and Laos) a Buddhist kingdom run by a neutral prince (Sihanouk in Cambodia), and an anti-Buddhist Catholic autocracy run by brothers (Diem and Nhu in South Vietnam). But it was a fragile setup, a row of dominoes. Hanoi was reinforcing the North Vietnam Army troops that had never left Laos despite the Geneva accord. Kennedy authorized the CIA to arm and train 20,000 Hmong guerrillas. To facilitate this the CIA was building a secret city, Long Tien, south of the Plain of Jars and had scraped airstrips, code named Lima sites, for STOL aircraft on a dozen mountains surrounding the plain.

By the end of that year everything had gone to hell. A full scale war was beginning in Laos. Sarit was dead of cirrhosis, Phoumi was cowering, Diem and Nhu were dead in a coup gone violent, and John F. Kennedy was gone, assassinated in Dallas.

As I crossed the bridge over the wide Mekong to Vientiane 45 years later, the setup was: Vietnam unified, Cambodia and Laos under its control, all three nominally communist, and Thailand again ruled (temporarily) by the military with the consent of the same king.

The Lao border bureaucrats were not necessarily friendly. The only words the officer had for me as he took my passport, photo and money at the gate and slammed shut the small tinted window were: “Sit and wait.” Which I did, for about half an hour, at the end of the bridge. Eventually another opaque window opened. My name was called, and a hand thrust forth my passport, which I snatched before the window slammed. When I looked at my elaborate visa glued to a full page I appreciated how long it took behind those dark windows to create it.

In Vientiane, a poor but modernized city, I first saw the famous Buddhist temple pictured on the visa. Next was the arch of

A Gift From The USA, Diverted

victory, where I climbed man flights of stairs to see what I could see. The story is that the huge monument was made from cement donated by USAID for construction of jet runways and diverted. Young monks on the street practiced their English with me. I saw the new and glittering the 1,500-seat cultural hall, a gift of China. I ate in a French restaurant nearby and wondered if China made such gifts to Vietnam, its historic enemy.

Transportation was by tuk tuk, a motorized rickshaw named in both Thailand and Laos for the sound it makes. While there were no automobile taxis in the capital of Laos, Nong Khai on the other side of the river was all cars. Thailand is a relatively rich country. Laos is poor. They can understand each other’s dialects – sawadee is hello in Thailand, sabaidee is hello in Laos. They practice Theravada Buddhism in both countries. The main difference is the modernization made possible by Western investment — that and, from a longer perspective, the line of remarkably adept Thai kings who looked West. Bhumibol, born in Boston when his father was studying medicine at Harvard, toured the United States in the Sixties to promote the war in English.

The tuk tuk took me to a sad little temple called Haw Pah Kaew, which is Wat Pra Kaew in Thai. Same name, translated as the temple of the Emerald Buddha. The solid jade Buddha sits in Bangkok high on its throne surrounded by security devices, constantly watched. It is a Thai national icon. Yet, it spent more than two centuries in Laos. It was plundered from this same

A Gift From The PRC

Lao temple, restored by the French, by the invading Thais in 1778. Two Buddhist kingdoms: economically apart, close at heart.

The CIA exploited the antipathy from the start in the war against communism in Southeast Asia. By 1960, according to University of Georgia historian William H. Leary, the CIA had trained 400 Thai police officers in helicopter response to communist insurgencies, and we provided the helicopters. Sarit sent the elite unit to help Phoumi in Laos. While the war was commanded by William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane, most of the air operations came out of Thailand.

There is little information about the secret war in Laos accessible to journalists like me. (Leary’s authoritative history of Air America is sanctioned by its appearance on the CIA web site.) But due to a recent posthumous medal of honor and tireless research of the American POW-MIA group, one emblematic story can be told.

LIMA 85

Early in the Vietnam War the CIA supported a sophisticated  navigational radar station called Lima 85 on a sheer 5,600-foot mountain in northern Laos. From 1967 to early 1968 it controlled one-fourth of the bombing of targets in and around Hanoi, about 120 miles east. The installation, with its rotating crews of American technicians flown in from Thailand by Air America, was top secret and, of course, in violation of the Geneva accord.

North Vietnam communists attacked it on Jan. 12, 1968, dropping mortars from holes in the bellies of two Russian biplanes as two others circled high above. One of the mortar planes crashed into a ridge and the other was shot down by a CIA sharpshooter with a rifle in an unarmed Air America helicopter. The raid was ridiculed as something out of “World War I.”

Comedy became tragedy two months later. Several thousand North Vietnamese troops on the night of March 10 attacked along the 12-mile perimeter of the mountain while a specially trained team of 35 armed climbers assaulted the summit. Of the 19 men at the radar base that night only eight survived the surprise attack to be loaded onto evacuation helicopters at first light. And one of these died a few hours later.

He was Richard Etchberger, an Air Force master sergeant working under civilian cover, who chose to be the last man rescued from a high ledge. He loaded three wounded comrades into rescue slings before he was hit by a sniper’s bullet and was pulled aboard the evacuation helicopter. On Sept. 3, 2010, President Obama presented the Medal of Honor, authorized by a special act of Congress, to Etchberger’s family. The 42-year lapse had to do with the “deniability” (a word associated with White House deception in the sixties) of the 12-year CIA war in Laos. His three sons had grown up believing their father died somewhere in Vietnam.

Americans were not the only casualties at Lima 85. The dead on the ground below included at least 45 members of an elite force of 700 Hmong and Thai soldiers under Vang Pao. He was commissioned by the CIA to defend the mountain along its 12-mile base perimeter long enough to enable destruction and evacuation of the radar site above. Outnumbered nearly 10-to-1 by the attackers, according to communist reports now available, Vang Pao fought and retreated as planned.

The strategy would have worked except for a miscalculation by the CIA and Ambassador Sullivan. Air surveillance and infra-red photography made him aware weeks earlier that the communists were preparing to attack, but he did not recognize that the ground maneuver was a diversion. As Vang Pao held off the conventional forces, the special forces swiftly ascended the cliffs and assaulted the summit. Sullivan wrote in a cable to Washington, “It appears we may have pushed our luck one day too long.”

Most of this story comes from American POW-MIA volunteers with access to documents that were not available until 1997, when the U.S. first officially acknowledged the secret war. (limasite85.us) At that time a small monument was installed at Arlington with the legend: “Dedicated to the U.S. Secret Army in the Kingdom of Laos, 1961-1973.” About 35,000 Hmong soldiers died in the secret war. As Vang Pao put it, they either had to fight or leave the country. I compare them with the dispossessed Cherokees in Georgia who fought for the Yankees in the civil war.

Thousands of Hmong people left Laos in 1975, at the end of what some historians have begun calling The Second Indochina War, taking refuge in sordid camps along the Thai border. Slowly, Congress allowed some of the refugees to immigrate to the U.S. Most settled in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Census estimates about 250,000 Hmongs and their descendants live in the U.S. But few Americans even know their name.

AN INTEREST IN DRUGS

Two movies, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” and Hollywood’s “Air America,” refer to the Hmong people. Eastwood’s 2008 feature film is a compassionate story of a Korean War veteran coming to terms with his new Hmong neighbors. “Air America” (1990) is a macho buddy comedy with lots of trick flying and a plot that indulges Hollywood’s unusual interest in drugs and conspiracy. Air America’s cool, fearless, drinking and whoring pilots fly opium from the fields of an ethnic general in return for his fight against the communists, and the opium in turn is processed in a heroin lab run by a corrupt CIA agent. The screen play was adapted from a 1979 book by Christopher Robbins, “Air America,” that in turn relied upon a 1972 study by Alfred W. McCoy, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.” McCoy charged that Air America pilots flew opium to Long Tien for Vang Pao.

Historian Leary relates all this in his history and concludes: “My nearly two decades of research indicate that Air America was not involved in the drug trade.” Still, he acknowledges, the CIA knew about it but did little until drug-use became a problem for the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. (The sale of drugs to soldiers is a theme in the 2008 Hollywood film “An America Hero.”) Leary’s history makes the case that the secret war in Laos could not have been sustained without Air America. It was serious work. And, deadly. About 100 Air America personnel lost their lives in Laos.

William E. Colby, CIA chief under Richard Nixon, in a 1990 memoir of the Vietnam war, acknowledged that some Lao generals profited from the opium trade but “not Vang Pao or his officers, and certainly not the CIA or Air America.”

In 2002 the city of Madison, Wisc., which has a large Hmong community, withdrew the naming of a park for Vang Pao on the basis of a protest by McCoy, a University of Wisconsin professor. He repeated his finding that Vang Pao was among the generals who trafficked in opium with the complicity of the CIA.

The issue arose again in 2007 when the Madison school board proposed naming a new elementary school for Vang Pao. McCoy again protested. A mom began a petition drive for reconsideration due to the general’s “controversial” past, and the head of the teachers’ union expressed “concern.” The board withdrew the name.

By then the McCoy charges were enhanced by a federal indictment of Vang Pao and nine others in a sting operation in

Vang Pao In The Sixties

California. An ATF agent posing as an arms dealer had interested the group in purchasing weapons for Lao insurgents. (The cultural clash continues in Laos. A Hmong insurgency in the Plain of Jars region was put down in 2000.) Two years later the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento withdrew all charges against Vang Pao, stating insufficient evidence, but the damage had been done.

Vang Pao died at age 81. In early February 2011 the Associated Press brought worldwide attention to his six-day funeral in Fresno, Calif. His body lay in the Fresno convention center, where CIA veterans paid their respects amid Hmong ceremonies for a hero. His family and representatives of the Hmong refugees in the U.S. petitioned the Pentagon to have him buried at Arlington National Cemetery, perhaps near the monument to the dead of the secret war. The Pentagon refused, with the rationale that the precious few grave sites remaining at Arlington are reserved for Americans. The Hmongs appealed to the White House. There was no response.

Sure he was a military hero, but there was this suspicion of drug dealing. Oh no! The insouciance in judging Vang Pao reminded me of Josef Conrad’s, “Heart of Darkness,” linked to the literature of the Vietnam war by Francis Coppola. The story – the deepening discovery of “the horror” on a voyage up a river in search of a corrupted colonial agent named Kurtz – is the plot line of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”  Except, Coppola left out the ending. He did not recognize the epilogue, in which Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, returns to London and pays a civilized visit to disclose the death of Kurtz to his fiancé. Marlowe has seen the cruelty of colonial exploitation in the Belgian Congo (now Rwanda), and she has seen nothing. “Was he respected?” is all she wants to know. Marlowe says yes he was respected. No more. The truth would be “too dark – too dark altogether.”

What if Vang Pao actually did deal in drugs? Oh no! Is that all we know about Air America and the secret war in Laos? Drug test: if positive, dishonor and arrest. If negative, you go to Arlington.

The “drug lord” concept is embedded in the pure American imagination. By contrast, the concept of “national security adviser” whispering of really good carpet bombing in the ear of an unstable president is unimaginable. Drugs threaten our children in parks, in schools. Cluster bombs threaten somebody else’s children, far away from here in a strange place strangely called Plain of Jars.

(See my next posting.)

(c)by LARRY CALLOWAY

THE JARS  on the Plain of Jarres (French colonialists named it) are empty. The bomb craters from the secret war in Laos, pockmarks of a sick strategy called “madman,” are not empty. They hold the remnants of cluster bombs that popped open in the air and birthed out baby bombs in tricky patterns. The “bomblets” (military jargon) were designed to explode and fragment at intervals, and some were destined to explode years later like forgotten land mines.

“The use of delayed-action antipersonnel weapons on the Plain after 1967 made life above ground very hazardous,” a report by the Congressional Research Service found. Villagers lived in trenches or caves. They farmed at night. One fourth to one third of

Cluster Bomb Casings

the Lao population became refugees, it said. The casualties at the height of the B52 sorties from 1970 to 1973 were estimated at 90,000 including 30,000 deaths. Each B52 bomber could drop 108 500-pound bombs from an altitude of 18,000 to 30,000 feet.

Descending to the Xieng Khouang provincial air strip in north central Laos near the new town of Phonsavan (the old one was destroyed in the war) I could see the craters, lines of red pocks in a land that reminded me of the arid part of the Colorado San Luis Valley where I live. Among the greeters of the dozen passengers in the waiting room was a young guide named Suen, whom I chose intuitively. He worked for a five-room guest house by some rice paddies on an ugly highway. Bomb casings decorated the entry. A wall of the dining room displayed war weapons.

In the morning, Suen drove me to see some craters where bomblets could be found buried in the dust. Perhaps they were duds – otherwise the area would have been posted – but I heeded Suen’s warnings. If I had picked one up it would have felt like a steel baseball with exaggerated seams. The International Red Cross has estimated that 11,000 people in Laos have been killed or injured by unexploded devices (UXOs)since the end of the war in 1975. Many were children at play or farmers at work. The accidents continue at about 1,000 a year.

The first group of jars five miles from town looked in the distance like an old and crooked cemetery on a hill. The jars were three or four feet high with enough room inside for a Lao to hide, like a rodeo clown in a barrel, when the American planes came bombing or soldiers of one side or another (Pathet Lao, the CIA’s Hmong recruits) came shooting. Suen showed me where a bullet had nicked a heavy jar.

The jars are blocks of limestone, boulders hollowed out like high Halloween pumpkins, rough inside and out, but carefullyshaped. Unfinished jars have been found at a quarry. They are perhaps 3,000

years old, and a quarter of them are cracked or broken. Nobody knows who made them and rolled them across the Plain to particular hills and swales or why. Nothing is in them except spiders and such things. A few stone lids have been found and I saw one with a shadow man carved on it, but there is no direct evidence they held human remains.

Most of the 140 jar cemeteries are unsafe. The three accessible sites are circumscribed by cables with warning signs attesting to the work of the London-based Mines Advisory Group, which had cleared away the bomblets. Some Japanese tourists followed us, shooting pictures of themselves. Craters within the cemeteries were posted. There was a hole in the bottom of one where, a boy told me, a farmer had dug looking for scrap metal, a risky enterprise.

Suen took me to two caves where villagers had lived. The last one, Tham Piew, was in the side of a limestone cliff above farm lands. A billboard at the government memorial below the cliff told a grim story in English. On Nov. 24, 1968, local farmers and their families were hiding in the cave when American fighter planes came over firing rockets. The first two missed, blowing out scars in the cliff that are still visible. The third scored a bull’s-eye, exploding inside the cave. The narrative claimed 374 died. One American response I found was that everybody in the cave was a communist combatant. Suen sat on his heels at the mouth of the cave looking solemnly at the cool green plain below. He told me his grandfather, a Pathet Lao fighter who went on to become governor of the province, helped recover the bodies.

For the people of Indochina, concluded a 1972 Cornell University study of American bombing, “Their most tangible perception of America is death from the sky.”

“BAD MAN”

At tiny Muang Kham we walked along a commercial strip – open stalls under corrugated roofing – where bomb scraps were for sale among household goods. An old man sat in front of one stall sharpening a steel fragment on a flat stone. Suen said the man was so old that he spoke French. We went inside to see the war junk, mostly cluster bomb casings with stenciled numbers and

Bomblets and household goods

U.S. suppliers. There was a pigeon-hole rack of bomblets.

Outside in the sun the old man continued sharpening his knife. Back and forth on a stone. I said hello and he said nothing. I tried bonjour and he said nothing. Then he said, “American people OK. Nixon bad man.” His expression emphasized bad in such a way that the meaning was badder than bad. Evil. I said, “Johnson not bad?” He did not respond.

His focus on Richard M. Nixon puzzled me until, later, I read some histories of the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson was a shy bomber by comparison with his successor, and for this reason he was criticized by hawkish politicians including chairman John Stennis of the Senate Preparedness Committee, who said – and some still say — we could have brought North Vietnam down if we had used all the firepower available. These code words implied nuclear weapons. Johnson bombed North Vietnam from when the first U.S. combat troops landed at Da Nang in March 1965 until the eve of the 1968 presidential election. The workhorse was the B52 bomber. His attacks on Laos were more discriminating, relying mostly on F4 fighters. It was his successor, Nixon, who secretly re-aimed the B52’s on neutral Laos soon after taking office in 1969.

Because he had campaigned as a peace maker with a secret plan to end the war and because the war protest at the Chicago Democratic National Convention had helped defeat Hubert Humphrey, Nixon could not rationally resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Still, his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was engaged in secret Paris peace talks and making secret overtures to the Chinese, and he would not negotiate from weakness. Nixon wanted to look “tough” (a frequent word in his rhetoric) in the eyes of Ho Chi Minh in the North and our man Nguyen Van Thieu in the South. So they (Nixon and Kissinger) bombed Laos. Besides, there was substantial air and fire power sitting idle at bases in Thailand and elsewhere. “We just couldn’t let the planes rust,” was the defining quote, attributed to an anonymous official by the Far East Review.

Even though Laos was neutral by agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the bombing had a rationale: arms and guerrilla fighters were moving from north to south through the Plain of Jars along the Ho Chi Minh trail. (It made more

So old he spoke French

sense than, thirty years later, invading Iraq in reaction to terrorism based in Afghanistan.) Besides, it was secret enough that nobody seemed to care except the New York Times and, well, a Pentagon  think-tanker named Daniel Ellsberg.

Early in 1971 Ellsberg wrote  “Murder in Laos” just as the ill-fated invasion by U.S.-supported South Vietnamese troops was under way. “How Many will die in Laos?” he asked. “What is Richard Nixon’s best estimate of the number of Laotian people – ‘enemy’ and ‘non-enemy’ – that U.S. Firepower will kill in the next twelve months?

“He does not have an estimate. He has not asked Henry Kissinger for one, and Kissinger has not asked the Pentagon; and none of these officials has ever seen an answer, to this or any comparable question on the expected impact of war policy on human life.”

Ellsberg concluded his article pleading for support of “the moral proposition that the U.S. must stop killing people in Indochina.“ The Washington novelty of a moral proposition had no immediate effect. Four months later Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of Vietnam decisions on high and their results, which tipped public opinion.  ( The New York Review of Books, March 11, 1971)

At lunch in Muang Kham I saw some Westerners at another table and approached them. They were young Brits and suspicious, probably because I was about the age the infrequent American Vietnam veterans who return to Indochina as tourists. The Brits were with the Mines Advisory Group, and a diplomatic conversation ensued. They said that the United States is the leading opponent of the international treaty outlawing cluster munitions (we still are). They said America spends far more money in support of the search for search for lost prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action than it does in support of UXO cleanup.

One day Suen took me to visit an ethnic minority, some Tai Dam people, in a village approached by trail across a swinging foot bridge. A woman weaving a decorative band of fabric invited me into her stilt house to see some of her work. Suen nodded that it was OK. So I shed my shoes and went up the ladder.

The woman turned on a light bulb (powered by a portable Chinese hydro generator propped on rocks in the river). As I looked at

Cluster Bomb Stilts

the textiles hung on bars in the palm-leaf dwelling I became aware of a gathering behind me. Ten other women from the village, barefoot and silent, had assembled to sell me their woven wares. Before long I was backed into a corner on a bamboo mat surrounded by the women. They began selling their textiles, all long weavings in intricate a colorful patterns. I would learn later that most of them were traditional skirt hems.

Soon it became a competition, each woman fighting to put her weaving on top of the pile. I took a fancy to a large figurative one. How much? A lady in a sort of commie hat said twenty thousand. I looked at Suen, who nodded approvingly (what did I expect?) I shelled out twenty thousand million billion rits (I had no sense of Lao currency values). This excited the rest of the women, who tried smiles and pathos and aggression. In the end, after dispersing another forty thousand trillion jillion rits, I had three skirt hems. The women folded their textiles and gossiped and padded away. As Suen and I left the village one of the women came up and gave us a cluster of bananas. Another gave us a big bunch of fresh garlic. Suen said, “We give to driver. He very poor.”

The driver had been a driver since the revolution, in 1975. And he knew where the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran. At a point where it became un-drivable, we got out and walked. The trail ran beside a river here, and there were few bomb craters. We passed a young man tending watermelons. It was dark, rich soil, but this was still the dry season. He carried water to each plant in an old metal bucket. Suen talked to him, and before we walked on the young farmer gave us three fat cucumbers. I whipped out several thousand million billion rits, and the farmer refused, until a few words from Suen changed his mind.

That evening I sat thinking with a beer at a table outside the guest house in the low sun. A bright painted planter made from a cluster-bomb casing was bursting with flowers. A vendor came by and stopped, wordless. A walking Walgreens, she carried everything from toothpaste to flashlights on a rack. I bought a trinket and didn’t argue about the price. I had been thinking about the generosity and perseverance of these people, how much I liked them. I wondered how men could send firepower to destroy the lives of women weaving skirt hems beside stilt houses, farmers watering their tiny fields by hand, vendors burdened by their entire business inventory. The bombing was indiscriminate; there was no way to distinguish the ethnicity or politics of villages from 30,000 feet.

VOICES

The explanation for this distant executive killing is in the abstract reality of taped conversations between Nixon and Kissinger. They talk like high school football players in the locker room. When, for example, they resumed bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 Kissinger told the president by phone, “They dropped a million pounds of bombs.” Nixon responded, “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!” Nixon’s only reservation was: “Johnson bombed them for years, and it didn’t do any good.” Kissinger responded, “But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy. He was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes. I bet you will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.” In another White House tape, Kissinger talks of “bombing the beJesus out of them.” (New York Times, Dec. 24, 2008)

The “them” is a dehumanized force of strangers, like scary movie aliens. The “we” are righteous commanders, blind to any moral proposition. “Bombing, even by B52s in populated areas, never seemed to raise any questions of morality inside the White House,” Seymour Hersh wrote  (“The Price of Power,” 1983)

Fred Branfman, a freelance translator and aid worker, claimed to have interviewed over 2,000 rural people in Laos and, “Every single one said that their villages had been leveled by American bombing.” His book “Voices From The Plain Of Jars” is a stream of heart-rending anonymous quotes:

– “Four planes of the jet type dropped their bombs together to destroy my village and returned to shoot twice in the same day. They dropped eight napalm bombs, the fire from which burned all my things. . . buildings along with all our possessions inside them.”

– The planes came “until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were finished, until everything was leveled and you see only the red, red ground.”

– “These human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all.”

– “In my village there was a young man who went to graze his buffalo in the forest. The airplanes dropped bombs and killed the buffalo. The young man ran away from that place, but not in time. He was hit in the waist, cut right in half. For two days you could see him like that.”

– “There were two brothers who went out to cut wood in the forest. The airplanes shot them and both brothers died.” Their mother and father “were like crazy people because their children had died.”

– “A spotter plane saw monks spreading their blankets to air in the sun. Three jets were called in. They destroyed the pagoda, which had taken so many years to build.”

– “We went into the village and saw all the houses burning and the animals dying in the fire. Then I saw my father lying with the buffalo in the plowed earth. My sister and I ran over to him, but I saw that my father already died. I wept and then I carried him out of the field.”

Cluster bomb units (CBUs) were classified as “antipersonnel weapons” because their primary function was to cut people down with high-velocity steel fragments. The secret of the weapon might have been a timing mechanism based on the number of

Craters Near Phonsavan

revolutions of each spinning bomblet. A large “dispenser” (military jargon) that popped open at 600 feet could dispense more than 500 bomblets in a pattern about 1,000 feet wide and 3,000 feet long. At first a version of the weapon was carried by F4 fighters, which had to come in low and level to make it effective. Later-model CBU’s could be dropped by the big, high-flying B-52 bombers. The dispensers plowed into the ground and survived intact, as did some of the still-explosive bomblets.

While cluster bombs were used earlier, by Nazi Germany in World War II, the refinement of the weapon was primarily of the work of the U.S. Air Force, which deployed it in North Vietnam in the summer of 1966, according to a contemporary researcher, Michael Krepon. (Foreign Affairs, April 1974)

Krepon argued for a system of civilian, or in his words “political,” review of new conventional (meaning non-nuclear) weapons. The CBUs were deployed based on narrow military considerations without regard to civilian casualties. “It appears that in this and other respects the military promoters of the weapon went to considerable lengths not to raise the broader questions,” he wrote. Civilians in the Defense and State Departments who knew about the new weapon “countered not by arguing the inhumanity of the weapon per se, but how its use would be regarded by ‘world opinion.’”

He continued, “It is a fair conclusion that military officers in the Pentagon downplayed the question of CBUs to deflect political channels from making an issue of their use, as they had done with napalm.” In other words, they had learned a political lesson from the protests against firebombs, which were used with the same intent as CBUs, that is, making large areas uninhabitable.

“As the CBU story shows, powerful forces are at work to diminish the humanitarian perspective in policy-making. Policy assumptions, bureaucratic behavior, and political imperatives all work to dehumanize in the abstract; when placed in the context of weapons development and use during wartime, they become brutally real. This is especially true when area weapons are billed as life-savers to American infantrymen and pilots,” Krepon concluded.

“BOMB,BOMB,BOMB”

Students of Hiroshima will recognize the argument. The lives the atomic bomb saved were Americans being prepared for the invasion of Japan. In announcing the Hiroshima bomb, President Harry Truman dehumanized the destroyed city by calling it a military installation. The Vietnam war and World War II defy comparison, but Nixon used the Hiroshima defense for the

Garden decorations in Phonsavan

bombing of Cambodia (and by extension, Laos) – that is, it saved American lives by halting traffic in arms.

This military argument is difficult to prove or disprove (more than 20,000 Americans died in Vietnam under Nixon), but the strategic bombing had strident military opponents during the Vietnam war. President Johnson is quoted as complaining to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Harold K. Johnson:  “Bomb, bomb, bomb. That’s all you know. . . Now, I don’t need 10 generals to come in here in order to tell me to bomb. I want some solutions. I want some answers.” (James A. Fry, “Debating Vietnam,” 2006)

Gen. David Shoup, commandant of the Marine Corps appointed by President Kennedy, wrote, “Much of the reporting on air action has consisted of misleading data or propaganda to serve Air Force and Navy purposes. In fact, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. bombing effort in both North and South Vietnam has been one of the most wasteful and expensive hoaxes ever to be put over on the American people.” (Atlantic Monthly, April 1969).  Shoup did not oppose air support of Marines on the ground, which is by nature more discriminate. (In Laos, the ground war was under command of the CIA, not the White House or Pentagon, as I will show in another chapter.)

The late general continues to be a respected idiosyncratic figure in recent military history. Among other reforms, he repudiated boot-camp brutality after the deaths of recruits at Paris Island. Martha Shoup, a former resident of Crestone, loved her grandfather and remembers playing with his collection of Marine “swagger sticks” when she was little. She has been contacted twice in the past year by researchers for new biographies of him.

Historian James Fry wrote that even Defense Secretary McNamara rejected the military arguments that increased bombing was the key to American victory in Vietnam. Unlike Germany or Japan in World War II, North Vietnam was predominantly an agricultural country with “no real war-making base” to destroy. He thought bombing would not change the resolve of the North Vietnamese leaders.

Further, McNamara argued that targeting civilians was contrary to U.S. values and military doctrine, wrote Fry. In the last years of his life McNamara also regretted his own role in planning the firebombing of Japan. (Errol Morris’ film “The Fog Of War,” 2010)

In 1998 in Hanoi, CNN interviewed Gen. Nguyen Giap, the chief military strategist for North Vietnam during the war and a hero as the architect of the defeat of the French at Den Bien Phu in 1954. He said, “The B52 is not an effective way to fight.” The defense against it was to evacuate or go underground in caves or tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels, now a sort of Vietnam national park less than 20 miles from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), are a good example. The 125 miles of narrow tunnels there were under more than 10 feet of clay, almost invulnerable to bombing. The tunnels gave the Vietcong secret access to a U.S. military base, just as Giap’s tunnels brought his troops into fortified Dien Bien Phu.

When the bombing of Laos could no longer be kept secret, Nixon the administration minimized it. Hersh records in a footnote that Kissinger, at a lunch with reporters when the Ellsberg antagonism could no longer be ignored, said Ellsberg was uninformed and, “No civilians are in the area of Laos where this operation has been conducted.” No reporter asked how he knew this, considering that a few minutes earlier he had acknowledged that intelligence in Laos was poor.

(Kissinger is still at it. In a CBS Sunday Morning interview in 2011 he was asked about the bombing of Cambodia, which he personally supervised. He responded that it was “miniscule” by comparison to “what’s going on now in Pakistan.” This went unchallenged. Kissinger got away with equating months of carpet bombing by B52s with 200 strikes by drones.)

The intentional bombing of civilians in Laos was long ago established by the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees chaired by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. A staff report said the strategic bombing was intended “to destroy the social and economic infrastructure of Pathet Lao-held areas.” It said, “Where Laos is concerned, classified American military documents have specifically mentioned bombing civilian villages in communist-held areas ‘to deprive the enemy of the population  resource.’ The population, in short, was deliberately made the principle target of American war planes.”

The Cornell studies showed that was indeed the intent. The Pentagon Papers journalist Neil Sheehan wrote in the preface: “The air war may constitute a massive war crime by the American government and its leaders.” It was, he supposed, “a level of calculated slaughter which may gravely violate the laws of war, laws the United States has pledged itself to uphold and enforce.” (Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, editors, “The Air War in Indochina,” Cornell, 1972)

Christopher Hitchens’ first count in his suggested indictment of Henry Kissinger for war crimes was “the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.” He attributed to a member of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Col. Ray Sitton, the information that Kissinger was personally involved in the command of bombing raids in Cambodia and Laos.

Bombing civilians has been going on for at least 80 years despite international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 said, “The attack of bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” American presidents and their subordinates have been able to ignore it.

MADMAN IN CHIEF

So if moral, political, military and legal indictments are set aside, what remains to prevent an American president from bombing the beJesus out of anybody who can’t retaliate in kind?

Well, there is Congress with its exclusive power to declare war. But Congress seems politically allergic to using this check on presidential power to execute war. The War Powers Act was not passed until the Vietnam war was all but over, and it has been bypassed ever since.

The second restraint is political – that is, the consideration that bombing civilians in a far land might lose an election at home, but this does not matter if the bombing is kept secret, at least until it’s over, and there’s a probability that it actually will be popular.

In 1972, for example, Nixon consulted pollster Albert Sindlinger about bombing Hanoi and was told it would get overwhelming support from the “hard hats,” which was the synecdoche for his anti-liberal populist supporters. And so, from Dec. 18 to 29 the “Christmas bombing” pounded Hanoi. It is remembered, I was told, by small monument in a crowded and rundown section of the city where a hospital was destroyed, but there is no accounting of the dead and wounded. The statistics on our side say 15 B52’s were shot down and 93 airmen were missing. Nixon, deep in his narcissism, complained later, “It was the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can remember.”

The presidency has evolved into the most powerful military command in the world, wielding the ultimate power of life and death in other nations without internal restraints or the external restraints, for now, of other superpowers. All this unchecked power in one office can become a global risk if the man in office is unstable. Long after the fact anecdotes indicate that Nixon was unstable. He was losing it, drinking heavily and not sleeping. He was out of touch.

By the spring of 1970, with the secret bombing of Laos revealed by the New York Times and student protests closing down the nation’s college campuses, Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia. When Ohio National Guard troops shot down protesters at Kent State on May 4, the campuses exploded. Four days later, with 100,000 protestors gathering on the Washington Mall, the president held a news conference in which he waivered, backing down with an announcement of a three-month limit to the invasion (Kissinger in a memoir called it “panicky”). That night between 9:22 p.m. and 4:22 a.m. phone logs showed the president making 51 calls. At dawn he wandered with only his valet to the Lincoln Memorial, where he tried to schmooze with student protesters, who were incredulous and probably a little frightened. He wanted only to talk college football.

In February 1971, after an series of dissimulations to make it look like somebody else’s idea, he authorized the secret invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese soldiers advised by American officers on the theory it would stop the North’s preparations for an attack of the South in the coming election year. Some 9,000 South Vietnamese troops died in the cynical adventure, which Hersh called “a classic military failure: poorly planned, poorly executed, and based on poor intelligence.”

He could perhaps rationalize his behavior as a clever deception that Kissinger advocated years before: the madman strategy. In a game of bargaining the madman makes the opposition believe he will do anything to win – screw the consequences. So Ho Chih  Minh would be convinced that the president of the United States was irrational, a dangerous menace with no concern for human life. In current jargon this is called, “going nuclear.” It actually worked in the early 1950’s when President Eisenhower let it leak through diplomatic channels that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea. But that was another era and another president.

Giap said, “I appreciate the fact that they (the Americans) had sophisticated weapon systems, but I must say it was the people who made the difference, not the weapons.” An 18-year-old girl studied bomber flight patterns and one day shot down a B52 with a light firearm, he said. North Vietnam never wanted to fight the U.S., but once it was clear it had to fight, the people were confident they could win, he said, because we “knew little about Vietnam and her people.” (CNN, 1998)

The threat of irrational bombing (screw morality, politics, military experience) had no effect on North Vietnam. Traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never cut off. The irony of the madman strategy is that Nixon probably was, as subsequent events and personal memoirs showed, a little mad.

WINDS OF WAR

Reporters covering presidential campaigns like to investigate character issues, flip flops, friends, fiancés, and finances but not the humanity of the candidates with regard to the most unchecked, unbalanced and consequential prerogative of the office: the authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. The last time humanity became a major issue was 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson exploited fears that Barry M. Goldwater would use nuclear weapons in Asia. Today the issue of the button in the brief case, the secret code changed daily, evokes no feelings, stirs no fears. Even the terminology of  the Sixties has been domesticated. “Nuclear option” means a parliamentary maneuver, and “the F-bomb” is not remotely in the same category as the H-bomb. Worst fears become comedy routines. The drone-delivered bombs at issue now are smaller by a factor of millions, but still . . .

The humanity of American presidents is more relevant now, the scale of things aside, because they can actually use the arbitrary power as commander in chief. They can have people killed in small ways in small countries. And the power is generally unchallenged because most politicians, worried that compassion is a sign of weakness, are reluctant to advocate the exclusive power of Congress to interfere. To the relief of most of them, these military decisions that fall short of actual war are kept secret until any opposition appears unpatriotic. The presumed majority called “The American People” by politicians pretending to represent it, loves these aggressive adventures,  particularly as diversion in these times of trouble at home. Clearly we cheered the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and we understood the need for secrecy in executing the mission. Not so popular, I suppose, are the  White House-stamped drone attacks that killed non-combatants by mistake in Pakistan. The drones fly at presidential discretion and are not subject to military discipline or rules of engagement. They are minor covert activities as opposed to a president deploying armies with Congressional approval without traditional declaration of war (Johnson in Vietnam, Bush in Kuwait, W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama again in Afghanistan), but civilians are just as dead and children just as crippled no matter what the label on the missile.

The exercise of this presidential power to have people killed in small countries is not new – and not simply the result of exotic weapons. It goes back more than half a century when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon secretly bombed the landlocked Southeast Asian kingdom of Laos.

But they are gone, long gone. Most people in the former Indochina – and they are young – have forgotten the “American War.” Or so it seems to the tourist, because they don’t debate it, even if we still do. As the region has opened to tourism, guides such as Suen, two generations removed, could be quite amiable to the rare American such as myself who came to see the most bombed (an estimated 1.5 million tons)civilian target on the planet. Suen, in fact, had a story, the cleverness of the words probably lost in translation, about a villager visiting a friend in a neighboring village and standing with him by his perfectly circular pond reflecting the sky. “Damn the Americans,” the jealous villager said. “Why did they stop before I got a fish pond too?”

In a UN-sanctioned village for Hmong refugees a fourth generation was growing and learning and watching me. Three kids dragged a tree branch in the dust. A girl carried her baby sister like a doll. Students in a dark school room squinted at their lesson pads. The village was once a Pathet Lao camp, or thought to be, and therefore, heavily bombed. The cluster-bomb casings were so common they were used in construction: house stilts, feeder troughs, garden planters, even fence posts. They were old and rusted and the children paid no notice as they played.

From the air over the farms of Laos, the craters are mirrors in fields of green. On the Plain of Jars they are only dry red-brown circles. In places they are nested like cuckoos among small dark circles, the jars. Leaving the plain I wondered again why an ancient folk went to all that trouble. Why were the jars made, to contain what? Rainwater? Grain? Wine? Dead souls? Emptiness?

Emptiness. About 2,500 years ago the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, a Taoist, wrote a conversation between a master and a  disciple who finds him seated staring at heaven as if his body were a piece of dry wood and his heart-mind a pile of dead ashes. Asked what’s going on, the master replies with an extended metaphor about the sounds the wind makes. “Angry sounds come from thousands of hollows. Have you never listened to its prolonged roar. . . rushing, whizzing, making an explosive and rough noise, or a withdrawing and soft one, shouting, wailing, moaning, and crying? . . . When the winds are gentle, the notes are small, and when the winds are violent, the notes are great. When the fierce gusts stop, all hollows become empty and silent.”

Perhaps you have heard the music of earth and the music of man, the master says, “But have you heard the music of heaven?” On the Plain of Jars for a moment in its long history there was the wind of war. Now, there is silence. The jars endure among the “ten thousand things” of earth, things described by two Chinese characters: under, heaven.

By Larry Joseph Calloway

The anti-government passion that animates politics nationally was echoing off the walls at Jillian’s studio, where I have experienced yoga classes, a Sufi zirka, a feng schui talk, a sales pitch for ionized water, and such. Crestone is not where Republicans bother to campaign. It voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in both the primary and general elections three years ago.

But here before about 50 residents on folding chairs the speakers, backed by PowerPoint slides on a big screen, were saying we cannot depend upon government – federal, state, county – for relief in the coming upheaval. The main speaker was Vickie Helm, known to most of the gathering, whose only apparent motive in organizing the discussion was to inspire the community to work toward what she called “economic sustainability.”

That title does not convey the spirit of the gathering, just as speaker probably is not the best word for Helm, who was more like an evangelist than economist. She ran back and forth placing imaginary buckets under imaginary sudden leaks in the imaginary roof until, panting and exhausted, she made her point: namely, we’re running around containing leaks without realizing the roof is about to cave in.

OK, call it the sky. Call her Henny Penny. It don’t matter to her, I thought. “In a short period of time we’re going to be going through the same thing that Greece is going through,” she predicted. In other words, our national sovereign credit card is maxed out. “The inconvenient economic truth is this: the United States is broke.” There will be inflation and devaluing of the currency, but no more funding (federal, state, local).

She said somewhere in Kansas a school board proposed charging parents $40 a week to have their kids bussed to school. (I guess that board would never consider a small general tax increase for the general welfare. Oh, no! Forget the communal spirit that used to prevail in rural America if it costs money. Similar problem in Crestone, I thought:  Here an emergency services district to replace the endangered private fire department was created by a thin margin of voters this month, but a peculiar switch of only about 20 of the voters defeated the tax to support it.)

What if everything collapsed by natural disaster or by bankruptcy of the various corporate entities that sell services here but don’t care about the community? Who ya gonna call?

How to weather the coming storm? Up flashed some PowerPoint points:  Support community businesses. Community businesses support each other. How many folks in the audience had businesses? A dozen raised their hands, and she had them stand up. How many would like to learn how to make money on the internet? Two dozen hands went up. “If I get nothing else across to anybody, it is this: The most important thing is where you spend your dollars.”

And, Helm proclaimed the importance of supporting the non-commercial collection of community efforts she called “infrastructure.” Namely, that unfunded Crestone Emergency Services District, Neighbors Helping Neighbors, the various youth programs (thank you, Lisa Bodie and others), the food bank, the charter school (building under construction), the newly consolidated library district. These things, to me, are signs of a young and enthused community with a spirit of American volunteerism.

To the infrastructure she added two information-age essentials that bind the community to itself and to the world: the Crestone Eagle, a successful monthly newspaper in a time when mass circulation dailies are falling like trees (and saving some) and, the fledgling effort to bring high speed internet to this digitally disadvantaged rural area.

Internet. Now here was a cause worth urgent consideration. Cheered on by some in the audience, Mayor Ralph Abrams of Crestone took the floor. He has been working for a year to create a community internet company, and he said it’s going to happen – to begin to fire up in the next few weeks. The company, which he will head, is called Crestone Telecom. It will bring in high-speed internet service with state of the art equipment.

This was the most hopeful project to come up at the meeting (not to dismiss the many undeveloped suggestions for green technology) because it is concrete and ready to go. Problem: the effort is being undermined by a distant corporation. In a word (or maybe two), FairPoint. The sudden unannounced competitiveness on the part of a phone company with more apparent interest in the bankruptcy code than digital engineering is a good preface for the concept economic sustainability. This is probably going to be a test of standard corporate capitalism versus Abrams’ community capitalism.

Further, the year-long drill that Abrams and company were put through by the USDA in applying for a grant under a program that was cancelled at the last minute (budget problems?) is a good case history in support of the argument that we can no longer depend upon government.

Discouraging, this distrust of corporate America and American government (might as well add the corporate media). I stood to say that for reasons of practical politics including the obvious intent of some Republicans to purge all political opposition by driving the economy into the ground, I could not endorse the increasing cynical distance from government. I grew up as a student of the New Deal, which saved America from some of the terrible mistakes made elsewhere (Germany, Italy, even Russia where the mistake began) in reaction to Great Depression I. But that was long ago in a different world.

Anything on the bright side?  Jeff WishMer, a bright young man who works for Chokurei Farm Store, married with a home in the Baca, received a warm applause when he stood to include home-grown food in the infrastructure against the Collapse. He is running for the POA board against an incumbent, Robert Garnett, who opposes the new EMS district and almost anything else that might cost money. WishMer is being criticized by some of these oldtimers because he has said he hates the POA, at least the way it is.

Distrust of government is in the American grain. I became atuned to it not long ago when I went searching in rural North Carolina for family roots. My father’s people were subsistent farmers (and, some of them, moonshiners). These Scot-Irish folks were responsible for the Whiskey Rebellion and many other insurgencies in our history. They’re still around. Take Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the writer-soldier who won an astonishing victory in 2006, defeating an incumbent Republican to give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. My grandparents on my father’s side were born just 70 miles over the mountains from his grandparents.

Webb has proposed that this Scot-Irish minority, southern in origin but without a history of slavery, has a lot in common with the African-American minority, which goes back almost as many generations. Together they could form a populist force that would revive the Democratic party and its historic principles, particularly in the Republican South (which includes Texas).

Similarly, it occurred to me that the communal sentiments expressed at the meeting in the yoga studio might be wedded with the anti-government sentiments of those  angry folks who seem to support the Tea Party. They might want a divorce, I supposed, once they realize they are being used by corporately funded professional politicians to defeat the many and strengthen government in the interest of the few. Perhaps  Crestone is not that far from Kansas, Dorothy.

Photo by Lara Calloway

A group of us with some surprise received a warm personal welcome to the Telluride Film Festival from one of its co-directors, Gary Meyer, who then ushered us in to the intimate Le Pierre theatre for a special screening, just for us. No, we were not the press – Telluride gives no privileges to the news media. And for certain we were not wealthy donors, not even purchasers of the regular $780 pass – those happy folks were all gathering with the celebrities in the center of town for the big Opening Night Feed.

What we were was pass-holding Cinephiles. Three years ago Meyer and co-director Tom Luddy created the pass (and probably the word) for film lovers on a budget. In exchange for a $400 discount, we let the festival choose the menu of films we can see. It is a tasteful menu, heavy with restored or rediscovered masterpieces as well as the characteristic new works reflecting the Telluride philosophy of film as art. (Most of us would have been drawn to this menu even if we had the more expensive pass.)

While the Cinephile Pass was not a ticket to, say, the tribute to George Clooney or the personal appearances by Glenn Close, it did entitle us to see all the other Telluride medallion tributes: to Sight and Sound Magazine, to actress Tilda Swinton, to French actor-director Pierre Etaix. Plus, the menu emphasized  programs of short films by students and hopeful new directors and the selection of six favorite films presented by the “guest director” this year, Caetano Veloso.

Mark Cousins, right, at a book signing with Ken Burns.

Consistent with the Telluride philosophy, the special screening for us Cinephiles was the premier of the first two segments of “THE STORY OF FILM” by Mark Cousins, an eloquent writer whose 2006 book of the same title is becoming the preferred text in introductory film classes worldwide.

Telluride (as I have written) is a fine, high celebration of movies as art, and Cousins is a true and poetic exponent. In the introduction to the book, he stated a purpose that certainly resonates with the Telluride Film Festival as I have experienced it for going on 20 years. “By focusing on the innovative rather than the merely beautiful, popular or commercially successful, I am trying to strip the world of movies down to its engine. Innovation drives art…“ Just so, in the astonishing series (it has more than 1,000 film clips) we learn not only the basics of the inter-cut, the parallel cut, and the match cut, but who invented them, way back in the silent era.

As a filmmaker, Cousins is one of those Telluride discoveries (think: Michael Moore, Ken Burns). His charming documentary, “The First Movie,” premiered at Telluride last year. Cousins had taken a film crew to a Kurdish village so remote in Iraq that the children had never seen a movie. He set up an outdoor screen and showed them “E.T.” Then he filmed the kids themselves and screened the result. Finally he handed out video cameras and told the kids to go out and make their own movies. The results were both entertaining and enlightening. The children, for example, came back with narrations of something nobody talked about in person – the genocidal gas attacks by Saddam Hussein. Like “The Story of Film” his first full-length film is a testament to his love and understanding of movies not only as art but as a refuge.

“Story” has 15 segments, which will be serialized this fall by the BBC. While at Telluride, Cousins was invited to the Toronto Film Festival, which planned to screen it in two days, seven hours and eight hours. Cousins autographed my copy of the book with the words, “in cinephile friendship.”

Among the other new films premiering at Telluride, I got to see two stinging documentaries on global crises – “The Island President” and Micha X. Peled’s “Bitter Seeds” – two love stories – “Bonsai” from Chile, “Goodbye First Love” from France – David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method” about Jung, Freud and a problematic woman, two lost-boy films – “Le Havre” from Finland, “The Way Home” from India – and two comedies – “Butter” from Hollywood and “Footnote” from Israel.

Myself, waiting to see "Bitter Seeds" Photo by Lara

“THE ISLAND PRESIDENT” is about The Maldives, a nation of 300,000 people living on 200 flat islands in a chain of atolls in the Indian Ocean. Mohamed Nasheed came to power in a popular uprising against the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Gayooma. Nasheen had been jailed, tortured and exiled, but he returned and defeated Gayooma in a surprisingly fair election in 2008. This is interesting enough, but the theme of the film is the probability that this scattered nation will be destroyed by global warming. As the polar ice melts, the oceans rise. The film establishes an intercut rhythm of eroding shores and gloomy music.

Director-cinematographer Jon Shenk told the Telluride audience at the screening I saw that he was drawn to the project when he heard of the young, charismatic president of a Muslim nation who seemed to represent a new political generation – and, he noted, this was before the Arab Spring was ever imagined. Shenk said his first meeting with Nasheed, after months of negotiation, ran five minutes before the decisive young president said, “OK. I’ve got to trust you.” The cameras subsequently followed him for the next 18 months.

It was a dramatic time, climaxing with the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. The summit was widely reported as a failure because the rich nations failed to adopt a standard for reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. Activists and some scientists say a return to 350 parts per million is the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change. The film makes the case, however, that the entire Copenhagen exercise would have collapsed without the skillful political work of Nasheed.

There are skeptics who say The Maldives are profiting from Western guilt and that the island nation is not in peril. But the character of Nasheed, reflected in many candid moments as well as formal appearances, earned my trust. He comes across as an intelligent politician who is both skilful and honest, a rarity in democratic politics, particularly in America. Well advised presidential candidates remember Jimmy Carter’s fatal “malaise” speech to the nation in the midst of the Arab oil embargo. He foresaw the global problems caused by our unrestrained appetite for oil and declared conservation as a moral duty. It was the perfect setup for Ronald Reagan’s winning “It’s Morning in America” theme.

“BITTER SEEDS” is the final film in the Globalization Trilogy, which began with “Store Wars” about Wal-Mart’s overwhelming effect on small retail businesses and continued with “China Blue” about jeans sweatshops. This third one, completed only a few days before its premier showing at Telluride, is about the exploitive marketing of Monsanto seeds among illiterate  traditional village farmers in India. With this film, the story of a global trade circuit is complete: Indian cotton goes to China, Chinese garments go to Walmart.

Peled told the Telluride audience that he was drawn to the rural Maharashtra region by the potential story line: the state is the location of a cluster of suicides by thousands of desperate farmers – heads of traditional families facing hopeless debt due to their inexperience with the systematic use of genetically modified (GM) seeds. The film documents the manipulative and often false marketing by retailers of Monsanto’s globally patented BT Cotton. In one TV ad a proud father drives up on a shiny new motor scooter. He tells his adoring wife and children, “No more bicycle.” And it’s all due to the high yield of BT Cotton! The film follows salesmen parading through a village proclaiming the wonders of this new seed and handing out photos and phone numbers of farmers enriched by the product. All but one of the numbers on one handbill are disconnected, and that one belongs to an apparent retailer shill.

GM seeds, among other things, are constructed to resist herbicides like Roundup, but the cotton farmers in the film weed their several-acres plots by hand. The merchandising promises resistance to certain pests like the boll weevil, but expensive pesticides are required for others like the mealy worm. GM seeds are engineered for high yields, but the system requires costly chemical fertilizers. And it requires a strict schedule of irrigation, but farmers in India depend upon rain.

For thousands of years, a very old man explains, villagers saved seeds at each harvest, planted them in the spring and fertilized with manure from livestock. They did not need to buy anything. Now, trusting the new technology, they take loans to buy the seeds, the pesticides and the nitrates. If the promised yields prove false or the rain is late (climate change, again), or new pests arrive, they go into a debt spiral that ends with a usurious money lender owning their land. (With the debtor dead, the outlawed money lenders have trouble enforcing his thumb-printed mortgage.)

This is the case made by Peled, yet it’s in the background along with the hook of the film: the thousands who have killed themselves. Any story needs a heart, a protagonist. It took months of searching and tryouts until Peled found her: a college-age journalism student whose father drank the poisonous pesticide for which he had gone into debt in a bad year. The camera follows her as she talks to people on both sides of the problem: farmers, retailers, family, orphaned survivors and the brilliant farmers rights advocate, Vandana Shiva. Monsanto as usual would not consent to any interview.

The retailers questioned by the journalism student used the defense of multiple causation, as did Monsanto in a prepared statement. This, however, is no ethno-film, and so the argument is unsubstantiated. The film is too polemical to be an objective study of the culture. It does, however, depict the results of one very heavy tradition of the rural Indian way of life: marriage dowries. Families negotiate the marriages of their daughters based upon what can be paid to the groom’s family. The payments in land, livestock, gold or  cash are huge, and inability to marry off daughters in order of birth is a source of deep shame. The debts from industrialized farming are interwoven with dowries.

In the screening I attended at the Nugget theatre, Peled was joined by Alice Walters, the famous Berkeley restaurateur, who was in Telluride to sign advance copies of her new book, “40 years of Chez Panisse.” She made an impassioned plea for natural food as opposed to the “manufacturing” represented by Monsanto. She argued, as she did in a Telluride publication, “On a local level, we simply have to go to the farmer’s market. We have to get to know the farmers, get out and understand what is happening in the fields, because if we don’t champion the farmers and the land, we’re doomed.”

But is this the answer to the global crisis (famine, grain shortages, spiraling retail costs)? In the Q & A, a hesitant voice rose from the enthused audience that had been pitching supportive softball questions to Peled. It was a blonde woman with a Midwest accent who identified herself as a mother of three young children and a former employee of Monsanto. She stood and said that the problems brought up by the movie were a source of constant discussion among executives at the St. Louis-headquartered company. Peled invited her to the microphone, inviting her to show the film to her former colleagues. She continued with arguments based on the needs to feed the rapidly growing population of the planet and to reduce pesticides. “Agriculture is going through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution,” she said, and with reference to early fears of automation added: “You can’t stop robots.” Afterwards I asked her name – Katherine Kassim – and judged that she was not a Monsanto plant (so to speak).

I wondered what the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz (a favorite of Barack Obama) would have said if he were interviewed in this film. He did field work among rice growers in several villages in Indonesia and marveled at the way they treated paddies like greenhouse tanks, doing everything by hand with simple tools. “Hordes of laborers drawn from the enormous rural population work with extreme care and thoroughness,” he wrote.  Technology, even then (1960′s), could enable 10 per cent of the workers to produce as much rice.  But then: what of the  other 90 per cent? Work elsewhere? There is no elsewhere. They would starve, Geertz observes.  ”The twin aims of agrarian reform — technological progress and improved social welfare — pull very strongly agains one another; and the more deeply one goes into the problem, the more apparent this unpleasant fact becomes.” he wrote  (“Available Light,” Ch. 2).

“GOODBYE FIRST LOVE” by the young French director Mia Hansen-L0ve (the zero is her spelling) is a simple story of nostalgia and unbearable attachment. At age 15, Camille falls in love with a manly college student named Sullivan. They enjoy their sexuality every chance they get, in secret trysts at her parents’ Paris home or their country estate. Then Sullivan drops out of school to see the world. Camille yearns for him suicidally. His letters become infrequent, then stop. Four years later she is a successful architect living with the divorced older man who heads the firm. Sullivan shows up. He has not changed, and he is the wrong man. But. . .

What stuck with me was the camera work. There are few static shots, yet this is not the annoying product of hand-held cameras. The actors, beautiful and young, are constantly in motion, walking, running, rolling in the grass, jumping into bed – and the camera follows smoothly. This induces energy, the energy of youth. And I will remember the film with a profound longing for it.

“BONSAI” is another story of love and memory – from Chile. It is literary. Director Cristian Jimenez told us, “words are important.” A young couple comes together with a discussion of Proust, which neither has read. There are complications. The story jumps back and forth between now and eight years from now. I bought the slim novel on which the story is based, hoping to understand what exactly goes on in this movie.

“A DANGEROUS METHOD” stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Viggo Mortenson as Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley as the patient who knew both men and had an explosive love affair with Jung. I told two Jungian analysts waiting in a line for another movie that Jung had an ethical problem (sex with someone under his care). They shrugged. The ethical is cultural. I have not read John Kerr’s book from which the film is adapted, but the story of the intellectual conflict between the founder of psychoanalysis and his young colleague and the character of the patient, Sabina Spielrein, is often told elsewhere. There is a foundation for the tendency of  mainstream psychological movies to reduce everything to sexuality. So did Freud. And that is why Jung broke from him, as is depicted in this film by a director and actors at the top of their careers.

The two comedies, “BUTTER” and “FOOTNOTE,” are delightful satires. The first (a sneak preview and not technically on the Telluride program) does for Iowa what the Cohen Brothers did for Minnesota. At the Iowa State Fair, I was told, there actually is a big butter sculpting competition. In this story a ruthless housewife does whatever it takes (sex, again) to defeat her unlikely competitor. The film, which will be released soon, helps me in my resolve not to take the Iowa Republican caucuses seriously.

The second was described to us by its Israeli writer-director, Joseph Cedar, as “the greatest Talmudic scholarship comedy. . . made in Israel. . . this year.” That says it. It’s thoughtful and fun.

“One of my biggest fears has been fire in the Baca,” the sheriff continued. That fear almost became a tragic reality on June 16, when an arsonist started fires 30 minutes apart at South Crestone parking lot, North Crestone camp ground and the Karmapa stupa road. The last one was positioned to flare upslope in thick forest. “One shift in the wind would have been a catastrophe,” Norris said.

Quick response by trained volunteers with six fire departments – and by neighbors including Steve Smilack near the stupa road – quenched the fires at one acre each after Norris issued an “all call.” Criminal investigation of these and two more fires about an hour later near the town of Saguache is under way.

Norris was not a scheduled speaker at the forum, and he had no position on creation of the district, but he said he was there to support the community’s volunteer emergency responders. One problem the new district would attack is the different radio channels and dispatch centers used by the Baca Grande and Crestone fire departments as well as the ambulance service. “It makes sense for everybody to be on the same page,” Norris told the gathering.

Baca Grande Fire Chief Ben Brack, the lead speaker, said in dire emergencies “communication is always the first thing to break down.” (A disparity of radio frequencies contributed to the deaths of fire fighters at the Twin Towers.)

The proposed district is a common-sense solution to several other problems, including the tort liability of the strange private department owned by the Baca Grande Property Owners Association and the subsequent possibility that surrounding governmental departments will be prevented from assisting it in the future.

Still, the new district has its vocal opponents. Their problem, expressed in anger, was a basic distrust of government and resistance to any new taxes – consistent with the Tea Party movement. Christine Chandler objected to the tax increase (offset in part by reduction of POA dues) that will affect only property owners while others get a free ride. Another opponent, Steve Winn, implicitly threatened a law suit, asking, “What court can I go to?”

Many in the crowd of more than 50 Crestone-Baca residents supported Norris’ remarks with descriptions of the horror of wild fires. Some told stories expressing gratitude toward the community’s trained volunteers.

Chandler, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of no fire, implying that Norris and others were using scare tactics to get the district created. At times screaming to be heard, she said she experienced the Mission Ridge fire at Durango a half dozen years ago and it involved explosive ponderosa stands, while here, in her words, “We’re in the desert.” Longtime fire fighters who understand the pinyon-juniper environment here were obviously astonished by this remark.

For most of the crowd the issue was not about money. Mark Jacobi, who served many years as Baca fire chief, said statistical thinking about finances doesn’t mean much when a fire gets going. “You can grouse about the money but everybody knows the incredible commitment of the volunteers,” he said. “When you talk about taxes keep in mind how much these people are giving for free.”

Brack in his opening remarks said in 61.5 square miles with about 750 houses and a summer population of perhaps 1,000, the  response to all hazards including medical emergencies falls on the shoulders of 45 regular volunteers – “a core group of people who work for the benefit of all.”

Addressing the town-country animosity evoked by the opponents, Brack said, “We share the roads, we share the stores, we share the views, and we share the emergencies. Why make it more difficult to deal with those emergencies together?”

In response to the suspicion that the town, with a population of about 135, will enrich itself by merger with the larger, richer Baca subdivision, former Mayor Kizzen Laki said the town is “perfectly happy doing what it’s doing,” and has no motivation except to help the Crestone and Baca volunteers work together better. The town now is part of the Northern Saguache County Fire Protection District, but Crestone will have more local control in the new district. Besides, she mentioned, she has friends and family living in the Baca.

As to the opposition fear – apparently greater than the fear of fire – that the district organizers will indulge in runaway tax increases, several in the audience were reassuring. Vince Palermo, known for doing his homework on local issues, reminded that the fire district board cannot raise taxes. Any mill levy including the initial 16 mills must be approved in a special  election.

The final note fell to Adam Kinney of Crestone, whom the even-handed moderator Matie Belle Lakish called upon last, noting he had quietly raised his hand several times. He told how when someone irresponsibly set a fire on his property, his home and wife and children were saved by selfless volunteer responders. He told how in another emergency they extricated his son from an oven, where he had become trapped.

“I trust you with my home. I trust you with my family. And I will trust you with my $250 a year,” he said.

A 1937 REA poster by artist Lester Beall

Crestone-Baca  is not on an equal footing with most of the nation in the category of  affordable high-speed internet service. This affects visitors from around the world trying to make reservations at the spiritual centers, home businesses trying to market their handicrafts and other goods, or local people simply trying to place internet orders, communicate with each other, and read a few  blogs. The saddest result is the competitive disadvantage the outdated system here imposes on young people growing up in the digital age. 

Internet  customers here were asked by an independent group to use a standard test to determine their data speeds and report them to the broadband agency of the governor’s office. The graphed results show a median internet download speed of  o.50 mps and an upload sped of 0.25 mps – compared with the FCC definition of broadband as 4.00 mps. 

Such are my ruminations as I sit waiting before a systemically stalled computer screen, wasting away in the shadow of dialup-era internet service and hoping President Obama has not forgotten his various pledges to bring affordable broadband internet service to all Americans. But I wonder what government can do. Can it break the surly bonds of the telecom industry, which is busy lobbying for laws that prohibit communities from creating their own data networks? A sad state of affairs. But then I  recall an inspiring visit I made a couple of years ago to a small museum at a state park down in Georgia.

The exhibits commemorate the achievements of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, he is an unlikely Georgia hero in today’s Newty politics, but in the 1930’s Democrats were quite comfortable in the South. The museum is on the grounds of FDR’s “Little White House,”  his modest retreat near the therapeutic pools of Warm Springs, where he died at the outset of his fourth term in April 1945 (no term limit then). In the museum is a replica of a 1930’s farm house kitchen, modernized. No more wood burning cook stove, ice box and kerosene lanterns – it has electric power, dramatized by a classic meter, as glassy and ostentatious as a TV screen in the early 1950’s.

FDR was beloved in poor rural America – and the agrarian South was more impoverished than elsewhere – if  for no other reason than that meter on the wall in the model kitchen. When he took office in 1933 just over 10 per cent of U.S. farms  had electricity. By 1942, in the middle of his third term,  50 per cent of the farms had electricity – no small statistic in a time when at least  half the population lived on farms.

This  fundamental of modernization, was the work of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA)  authorized by the core legislation of the New Deal in 1935. Because the  power companies would not go into  rural areas, America lagged behind Europe where 90 percent of the farms had power. FDR’s REA began financing and organizing non-profit rural electric cooperatives (the San Luis Valley REC was founded in 1938), and the wiring of non-urban America surged. Not only did the REA bring the country “LIGHT,” as one REA poster proclaimed, it also created jobs in the midst of the Great Depression.

By 1952 the government could say 100 per cent of America had reliable electric power.  Today the successor of the REA is a major division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Rural Utilities Service. The  main business of the RUS is power, but it has a telecommunications subdivision, and this would be the logical agency to take the lead in creating the digital-age equivalent of the rural electrification movement that began 75 years ago.

Back to the future: President Obama first stated his intention to bring broadband to rural America in a talk just after his election. Then in March 2009 he announced his intention to allocate $8 billion, most of it from the emergency stimulus bill, to broadband access. Conservatives on Fox News called it a boondoggle. Some said most Americans don’t want and can’t afford high-speed internet.

That was more than three years ago. What has happened? Well, Obama is no FDR. He is no John F. Kennedy, who began the manned space program. He is no Dwight D. Eisenhower, who launched the interstate highway system.  These were presidents who could have their way with the Congress.

At any rate, the emergency broadband money never reached our  rural community. The presidential pledge, however, was renewed  in this year’s state of the union address.  Obama set a revised goal of making a new technology, 4G wireless internet, accessible to 98 per cent of Americans.

On March 4, the RUS of the USDA filed notice in the Federal Register that it was accepting applications for a “Community Connect Grant Program,” with a deadline of May 3. The one-time grants from a $25 million fund would help set up broadband service in rural communities without it. In a news release at the same time RUS Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said, “Broadband is an important part of the Obama Administration’s effort to help rural America ‘win the future.’”

This spelled opportunity for rural communities where private enterprise was not providing broadband service. Right away Crestone Mayor Ralph Abrams brought together volunteers and got to work. For the next month and a half his task force met on Saturdays at the Black Bear Cafe, gathering demographic data, documenting community needs, soliciting letters of support, calculating a budget, making a business plan, exploring sources of the 15 per cent matching funds, getting construction estimates and reviewing available technology – things required by the 50-page grant application guide. (I contributed the writing of a cover letter.)

As the deadline neared,  the RUS scheduled a big rural broadband workshop for April 20-21 at the Downtown Denver Sheraton. Mayor Abrams was among the hopeful officials from around the nation seeking pieces of the grant pie. Adelstein opened the event with an announcement, in the name of the Obama administration, of $40 million in RUS loans, most of them to telephone companies, for rural broadband projects.  But that was loans, not grants.

Then Abrams and others received some totally unanticipated news, and it was bad news. Community Connect desk officers who had come to Denver from Washington – Long Chen and Janet Malaki – disclosed with great sympathy that the grant money was no longer available.

All that work: poof!

Abrams just wanted to walk out, but he had gone to a lot of trouble, so he stayed and listened. He and others heard about loans (not grants), none of which he was prepared to seek. To get a loan, the record seems to show, you need to be a phone company.

So what happened to the $25 million? I called the RUS telecom division in Washington. Malaki declined comment, referring me to her supervisor, Laurel Feverrier. I called her and after a long delay was told she was not at her desk. I left a voice message stating the question and begging for a response from her or her press secretary, even though I was not a Washington-based journalist. She did not return the call. Next day I sent her an email with the same question and plea. She did not respond.

The likely suspects in the case of the vanishing broadband grant money are telecom lobbyists and, well, the Republicans. The April 13 Continuing Resolution of Congress to fund federal government for the rest of the fiscal year makes a $16 million budget reduction in the USDA category of “distant learning, telemedicine, and broadband program loans and grants.” That must have been the trigger, even though it is  no more than a shaving off the RUS telecom budget item that comprised $1.4 billion for the loans and $55 million for the grants.

The mayor and some of his volunteers came home discouraged. They put the money mystery behind them. And they regrouped: this time, with the goal of bringing broadband to Crestone (and the northern San Luis Valley) without having to rely on the government. They are recreating a non-profit corporation, Crestone Peak, so that it can bring in a broadband “backhaul” from a provider interested in the San Luis Valley and then set up the “last mile” connectivity. A Colorado statute calls for a referendum when a community seeks to do this, but that should be no problem here. The dream of Crestone Peak is affordable high-speed internet by August.

Footnote: While internet services took a hit, the electric power loan money in the RUS budget  was not directly affected  by the Continuing Resolution. And, like a pie in the face, at the same time Crestone was being told to go back to the drawing board, two huge power entities announced they are seeking untold millions of that RUS power money for a project people around here hate.  The announcement by Xcel Energy and Tri-State State Generation in mid April was in  a mass-mailing to the San Luis Valley seeking popular support in hearings on the loan application, to be scheduled later this year.

The  handsomely illustrated mailer promoted a transmission line that would connect the San Luis Valley with the switching yards at its Calumet coal-fired power plant.  The high-voltage power line, with its tall steel towers, will have to cross the mountains near La Veta Pass.  The opposition is based on two main arguments. First,  the routing will invade some pristine mountain habitat, private and public.  Second, the power line will  enable giant solar power developments in the valley – with their production going to the Excel grid. This industrialization would have  consequences for  rural life and the environment in the valley.

I cannot help but see an irony here (and there’s  plenty of time for ironical thinking as I wait for a New York Times story  to load  on my computer screen). The Rural Utilities Service, successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s REA, now seems to be predominantly in the business of making favorable loans to phone companies and power companies.

For comments hit the headline above

For more Crestone-Baca news hit Baca Blog

Canada geese, crane in background

SONG BIRDS: I went to a Crestonian poetry show where Diane Barstow and Matthew Crowley among others performed. I said, Oh I get it now (after 47 years). Poetry is performance! So I rushed home to become a poet and all I could find for instructions was Anne Lamott’s book “Bird by Bird.”

Wherein: “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write [it] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

So, therefore, here:

Pilot SunCatcher plant (slv renewable communities alliance photo)

It would be a noisy Space Age intrusion in one of Colorado’s last pure Old West landscapes, and more industrialization would  follow it into the northern San Luis Valley.

Except for a couple of protestors yelling about jobs, most of the estimated 150 people in the packed crowd of Saguache County ranchers, retirees and quiescent Crestonians raised their voices against it.

The applicants antagonized them with a trust-us-now, ask-questions-later attitude. Their scientific experts failed to prove they had spent much time, if any, at the site. Aware they will have to make a decision in a few weeks, the Saguache County Commission sat in silence except for the chairman’s angry attempts to hurry things along.

The Dec. 6 hearing in the county court house on the application by Tessera Solar North America was recessed after six contentious hours, to be continued at a date not yet announced. The Houston-based company seeks a permit under Colorado’s “1041” law on local development to install about 5,800 innovative “SunCatchers” on about 1,500 acres of ranch land between U.S. 285 and State Highway 17 south of the town of Saguache.

The relatively low-output project (145 megawatts, or one third of 1 percent of the coal-fired Farmington, NM, plants) is a response to Colorado legislation forcing electric utilities to go 20 per cent green. But so far no power purchase agreements have been signed.

A SunCatcher is based on an invention two centuries ago by a Scot named Stirling – an engine driven by the rapid heating and cooling (and therefore expansion and contraction) of a gas in sealed cylinders. In this application each four-cylinder  engine turns a small generator. The heat source is a 30-foot parabolic dish aimed at the sun. The gas is hydrogen, which is explosive.

The works at the focal point of each dish would make noise, and a recording of the sound played at the hearing was grating. Few technical data were presented.  Tessera representatives even puzzled knowledgeable listeners by promising to put mufflers on the closed-system engines (no exhaust), and permit manager Richard Knox admitted he “misspoke” when he said engines were turbines.

Tessera consultant Matt Jones, who had just flown in from Los Angeles, engaged in a long abstract discourse on mathematical modeling of theoretical acoustical effects at the site, according to maps.  Interrupted by a member of the crowd asking if the plant would be heard at the nearby town of Moffat, he responded, “Where?”

Jones and a consultant hired by the county dueled decibels for an hour without resolving the questions: how loud will 5,800 of these engines be at various distances under various climate conditions and will they violate the state noise-nuisance statute? Vince Palermo of Crestone, who has raised the noise issue with some expertise at previous hearings, dismissed the colloquy as “bullshit,” drawing some applause.

Commission chair Sam Pace, however, summarized that both sides seemed to agree the plant very likely would produce about 65 decibels of noise at the property boundary. If so, this would be in violation of the Colorado noise ordinance for residential environments. But, as they say in philosophy 101, what is the sound of a tree falling in the forest if nobody is there to hear it? More to come. . .

Knox had one obvious reassurance: the plant would not operate at night! So, “There will be no noise except a security guard closing a door.” His reliance on imagery (“We’ll sharpen the pencil on this.”) sometimes brought derisive laughter, as when he called the SunCatcher array an “orchard.”

Knox and a company executive determined later to be Randy Etheridge estimated the plant would afford up to 50 permanent jobs, but they could not classify them at this time. Knox said there would be employment for you “if you can work on an engine, if you can wash windows.” Etheridge said there would be a need for skilled controllers and for maintenance workers “not just washing windows.”

The two officers declined to answer funding questions, although Etheridge said, “We will be applying for some of the DOE (Department of Energy) funds that are out there.” Ceal Smith, chair of an organization opposing the project, said later the main funding for similar ventures  expires at the end of the year. Etheridge brushed her off during a brief break, declining to give his name (“You can call me anything you want.”) He left two hours before the hearing recessed.

The two leading points to be considered under the 1401 statute are, first, the health, welfare and safety of the residents and, second, the effects on the environment, both natural and human.

Hydrogen, the lightest element, dissipates even through metal, so the Stirling engines will need constant hydrogen feeds. The safety of hydrogen processing was questioned by a scientifically trained resident named Larry Ewing. “How are you going to generate hydrogen?” he asked. Knox, conceding  “I’m not the hydrogen guy,” wondered why that was important. Ewing said it was important because a caustic fluid is used in one process and others are also dangerous.  After some argument, Ewing concluded, “The bottom line is you don’t know what you’re going to do.” Knox admitted it, saying, “Correct.”

When Knox read from his Powerpoint that there were “no listed fauna or flora or their associated habitats on the project site,” a woman in the crowd drew applause and laughter when she said, “Does that include cows?”

Rancher John Warner, who has 2,000 acres north of the site, objected to the presentation statement that human impact had been considered and would be mitigated satisfactorily. “Nobody came to me and asked anything about it,” Warner said.

Knox got into trouble when he responded that the point was based on typical studies. “While your ranching activity is important to your world,” he began, but was drowned out by groans from the crowd. “We knew this about you before talking to you,” Knox said. “The point is we have analyzed the visual impact for hundreds of projects.”

Local people who have lived with the capricious weather of the San Luis Valley for decades brought up other questions that the Tessera people could not answer:

- Since the only actual experience with SunCatchers is the test array at temperate Phoenix,  how can it be determined how they would work at 20-below-zero temperatures here?

- SunCatchers have to be folded when winds exceed 35 miles an hour, but the process takes eight minutes – enough warning time for valley gusts and dust devils?

- In response to a finding of “no evidence of standing water during the growing season” at the site, Virginia Sutherland showed a panoramic photo of her normally dry looking pasture in 1997 – a lake. Is it feasible to generate electricity while standing in water?

The potentially disabling issue of wetlands at the site was brought up by Jenny Nehring, a wildlife biologist from Monte Vista concerned about the valley’s bird refuges. Tessera has marked water drainages in blue on its rough map of the development, but Nehring maintains that doesn’t tell the whole story.

The hired consultant, Ecosphere of Durango, said in its report: “Assuming that the wetlands as preliminarily identified are correct, the project appears to avoid significant impact to wetlands.” Nehring says to arrive at this finding Ecosphere had to ignore the hydrous soils at the site as well as decades of Corps of Engineers reports.

“You continue to dismiss decade after decade of wetlands inventories,” she told Knox from the audience.

“We still have work to do,” he responded.

In a brief interview, Nehring elaborated: “Water has changed in the valley in the very recent past, and it is going to change dramatically in the future.”  One change will be increased annual deliveries of water beginning in 2012.

Section 404 of the federal Clean Water Act requires a permit from the Corps of Engineers before virtually any disturbance of wetlands. And any disturbance must be mitigated by replacement of lost wetlands, acre for acre. This could be costly for Tessera if the Ecosphere finding is insufficient. Nehring said Tessera would be wise to apply for a 404 permit . . . now.

(For comments, click on headline, please)

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Moffat, Colorado, a dot in a high 5,000-square-mile dry lake bed called the San Luis Valley. Pure land. Old West. Snow-dusted mountain ranges, San Juans west, Sangre de Cristos east. Collegiate peaks north, infinity south. This town is so small that nobody needs an address for the political reception (Democrat). Willow Springs Bed and Breakfast is the biggest house in town.

Halloween, but nobody is scary.

Photo by Matthew Crowley

A 39-foot rented RV rolls in on schedule. The brothers step down in their polished boots and slim fit Wranglers and fresh dress shirts and hats. John Salazar represents the 3rd Colorado Congressional District. Ken Salazar, the older brother, is Barack Obama’s secretary of interior. Former two-term Gov. Roy Romer, in a leather jacket, steps down.

They begin shaking hands with the small gathering of locals in the dirt street in front of the house, going first to people they don’t know, then to the local candidates —  state Sen. Gail Schwartz, County Commissioners Sam Pace and Linda Joseph, Sheriff Mike Norris, County Clerk Melinda Meyers.

There are issues here — the Air Force plan to resume ground-skimming training flights, the proposed solar steam generation plants, the proposed high-voltage power line, the fight over approval of gas exploration in the Baca National Wildlife Refuge — but the activists are standing down. There are no TV crews, no media mikes open for embarrassing slips. There are no screamers, no sign wavers, no guns. This is personal politics, the way it used to be.

Halloween, and nobody is mad as hell.

The congressman asked how many people are living now in the Crestone-Baca subdivision. Maybe 1,800, but many are part time, I said. He asked about the hot springs. I put the two questions together. The Salazars are sixth-generation (!) natives of the valley. The Baca subdivision is barely one generation old, but rapidly growing.  Yes, Anglos from elsewhere like to soak, and so forth, but Valley View hot springs is owned by a  land trust passionately dedicated to preserving an old ranch, an old mine, some rare bats in a cave. He must know this. He is a curious man.

Inside the B and B after the introductions and snapshots, Romer — he’s not running for anything — spoke warmly of the Salazars and coldly of what is happening to America. The interior secretary took the stairs next (the open landing made a good stage) told  of his attachment to the valley and his love of its beauty. He suggested protection of the valley in the manner of a World Heritage Site. Then he introduced his brother, saying that Karl Rove is putting extra money from his secret donors into the campaign against him. Why? Because John Salazar’s defeat would be posted as a trophy, a coup against the brother of an Obama cabinet member.

Next, the congressman took pride in his vote for the health care bill and his vote for the Obama stimulus package, which helped mediate the financial crisis. Suddenly he recognized Christine Canaly in the group and invited her to the stairs. “I used to hate environmentalists,” he said, giving her a hug. Explanation: he was a farmer and the newcomers with all their issues threatened his livelihood; then came the water fight (a clever entrepreneur was buying up water rights in the valley for future transfer to Denver) and the farmers and environmentalists united and won. “I used to think she was a Republican,” John Salazar said. “Just because you have a good business sense does not mean you are a Republican,” Chris Canaly said.

In the middle of all this came a knock on the door. It was a little kid and his mother. The boy was made up like a zombie or a vampire. “Trick or treat.” He held out his plastic pumpkin basket and went around the room. He got cookies that had  been set out for the reception. He got candy from the house trick-r-treat horde. And he got improvised contributions from the crowd. Money, I think.

As the kid walked out the door with his full pumpkin there were comments that he had a bright future. Fund-raiser, somebody suggested. Visions of Karl Rove, however, came to my mind. Undercover sycophant, agent of  empire masquerading  as a fat kid, going from corporate door to corporate door in the dark of night, sucking handouts from  Big Oil vampires, Big Coal grave diggers, Wall Street hangmen.

Halloween, I thought. Be afraid.

But an hour later we were driving slowly along F Street in Salida to get pizza. It is a classic street of late Victorian houses, perfect for haunting. Hundreds of kids in costume and their parents lined the walks. At some houses they were lined up waiting to approach the doors. Small donations, diverse candidates, door to door, person to person. American democracy. Be not afraid.

((More photos of the event here))