Her reaction, which might come as a surprise to readers of her first memoir, the bestselling “Riding In Cars With Boys,” was prayer. She prayed to her beloved Mary, and she prayed the sacred words that monks sing to open each of their  “hours” in Benedictine monasteries: ”God, come to my assistance.  Lord, make haste to help me.” She prayed for two hours until she was blessed with sleep.

Donofrio

Viking Press released her book in March with a long title – “Astonished: a story of evil, blessings, grace, and solace.” It comes at a time of worldwide focus on issues in the Church including the status of women in the patriarchy. It coincides with recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of the women’s movement. But it not polemical. It is a heartfelt testimonial by a writer with the verbal sensibility of a poet and the storytelling skill of a crime novelist.

The crime is rape. It happened to her at age 55 on the feast day of St. John of the Cross in San Miguel de Allende, the picturesque Spanish colonial town in Mexico favored by artistic expatriates. Donofrio had moved to there because of the advent of Mary in her life – the Virgin of Guadalupe pervades Mexican culture. She adores her as “the feminine side of a God who is sexless. . . a kiss on the top of my head, the sun in my heart.”

After years of struggle beginning in poverty as a teenage mother in lower Manhattan in the drug-saturated sixties, Donofrio now was able to build her own house and mingle daily with friends sipping margaritas and learning to paint santos. But soon, in her words, “God began to fade like fabric in the sun.”

Her spiritual search began anew with weekend retreats at tiny Soledad monastery near San Miguel. She began searching for places in the United States where she might stay longer and “fall in love with Christ.” The night of the rape she had been on the internet, as she puts it, “looking for a monastery to join, for Christ’s sake.”

He was a barrel-like local man, a perverted serial rapist adept at breaking and entering who preyed upon women in their fifties, beating those who resisted. There had been a half dozen rapes, but the police were complacent. When Donofrio awoke in her second-story bedroom with a knife at her throat she knew it was the town’s “one-man terrorist.”

The trauma that replayed that first night at Nada several years later was another visit by,  in her words, “the evil that can come in dreams, in spirit, in the night, through fear.”

But there would be salvation. The book cover’s promise of  “blessings, grace, and solace” is kept, and Donofrio lived it and wrote it during a subsequent year in retreat at Nada (Spanish for “nothing,” with reference to the “Nothing but God” of San Juan de la Cruz). She confesses:  “My younger, sexually active, feminist self would have been horrified to see me sequestered in a shoe-box cabin in a monastery.”

Despite her reputation as the author of a memoir that became a “chick flick” in 2001 (starring Drew Barrymore as Beverly), her new one does not fit the feminist genre. For, just as the slogan of strident feminists fifty years ago was “The personal is political,”  in this heartfelt book the personal is spiritual. And for an Italian-American girl, daughter of a police detective in Connecticut, the spiritual would be the Church.

But as with many other thoughtful Catholic women, her writing pushes the boundaries. Take her impression of the encounter at the desert well where Jesus asks the woman of Samaria to bring him water (John 4: 5-42), usually viewed by (male) scholars as important because it is the first direct revelation that Jesus is the Messiah and it shows his non-discrimination. In Donofrio’s view, however, it is “a sexy scene.”

She writes: “I think of the scene with the Samaritan woman, a disreputable woman, considered unclean, who Jesus talks to all alone, I think, a bit flirtatiously. He lets her know that he knows her, that he sees who she really is.” Donofrio is not alone in this interpretation by women in the Church of a vulnerable God, the Sacred Heart of Jesus of St. Gertrude.

It’s the spiritual the makes this book more than a story of crime and punishment. It is a story of “the dark night of the soul,” in the words, again, of St. John of the Cross.  “Are these nightmares symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder,” she asks in her cell at a place called Nada, “or are they spiritual consolations, deepening my need for God? Is it possible for them to be both?”

Her answer to these questions is the true plot of this honest memoir.

(Originally posted Sept. 9, 2012)

Knock. Knock.

Who’s there?

Argo.

Argo who?

Argo Fuckyerself.

This punch line — the line, not the whole joke — is a running gag in Ben Affleck’s “Argo,”  based on the rescue of six Americans who hid in the Canadian embassy during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. The line is at home in Hollywood. It was in the mind of Clint Eastwood during his imaginary talk with Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention. It should be propped up in big letters on a Hollywood hill. And it is especially appropriate delivered in the movie by the profane producers played by John Goodman and Alan Arkin. It got a laugh every time at the 2012 Telluride Film Festival.

Affleck is a CIA agent who persuades Goodman and Arkin to fake a movie. The rescue will disguise the Americans as their pre-production crew. They buy a bad script called “Argo” about a space creature of that name whose flying saucer lands in a desert. Affleck’s film (he produced and directed) was screened as a sneak preview, not part of the prestigious Telluride program, but the audiences related to it. They got all the inside Hollywood humor. They appreciated the suspense-enhancing tricks. They cheered at the climax.

The Telluride Film Festival is international and artful and committed to recognition of past greatness. But it is not anti-Hollywood. For example, Roger Corman received a silver medallion this year. On the stage of the Sheridan Opera House for the tribute he  looked more like a fresh Stanford engineering graduate (which he was, class of 1947) than the 86-year-old producer of more than 500 profitable movies with titles like “The Last Woman On Earth,” “The Candystripe Nurses,” “Teenage Caveman,” or “Attack Of The Crab Monsters.”

“Argo” the fake movie in “Argo” the real movie, sounds like a Corman B-list idea, although he probably would have dressed up the title to something like “Argo The Earth Sucker.” A documentary with the tribute, “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel,” praises his more artful side. Corman produced and directed one of the earliest feature films on racial integration in the South – “The Intruder” (1962) starring young William Shatner as a handsome (he mugged a lot even then) hate-spreader whom the lovely teenage daughter of a liberal newspaper publisher finds irresistible. Corman also directed a series of Edgar Allen Poe mysteries and became the U.S. distributor of Igmar Bergman films.

Even so, the tribute handout called Corman “an incredibly savvy businessman” who created a new genre in the 1960’s and schooled a new generation of talent. The genre was low-budget films aimed at the booming teenager audience that frequented America’s postwar drive-in theatres. The budding talent included actors Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Shatner and directors Martin Scorsese, Frances Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard and James Cameron. In a panel on independent films, Columbia University film professor James Schamus regretted the current lack of a Corman academy where new talent could learn the movie-making trade. “Everybody has to show up at Sundance as a bonifide genius,” Schamus said.

Corman, also a panelist, reminded the audience that in the origin of the industry, 1900-1915, “all films were indies.” The studio system took over, but the modern era of indies actually began with the 1940 Paramount Consent Decree in which the studios divested themselves of theatres.

He is an eyewitness to film history. For example, when the side issue of the place for women in the indie business came up, Corman had a unique observation. He said he had thought that as the industry opened up for women, they would be drawn to directing because of what he called “their sensitivity.” But in fact, he said, five times more women have gone into producing, the money side, and that ought to be material for a “psychological study.”

Fem producers to Corman:  “Argo. . .”

“THE ACT OF KILLING”

For news value, perhaps the most talked about film at Telluride this year was shot in north Sumatra by Joshua Oppenheimer, a documentarian whose career began with a short selected for Telluride’s Great Expectations program nearly 15 years ago. In “The Act of Killing,” seven years in the making, Indonesian thugs happily celebrate their participation in the slaughter of an estimated 1 million people in Indonesia after the Suharto coup of 1965.

A little history: Communists, the conservative army, and anti-communist Islamists were vying with each other for control of Indonesia when in October 1965, six army generals were assassinated. Gen. Suharto survived under circumstances that were never clear. In the name of security, he took over the government from aging and increasingly extravagant President Sukarno, founder of the post-colonial republic. Suharto broke ties with the Soviet Union and Red China, banned the Communist Party, and began receiving American foreign aid as well as investment capital. His family ruled for the next 35 years.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup, soldiers, organized crime, jihadists, and simple thugs slaughtered any perceived opponents, especially “communists” and ethnic Chinese. There was never a reconciliation commission, as has become common in other nations ravaged by mass atrocities. Oppenheimer in his work often heard whispers that this or that household included men who had murdered their neighbors, even their own parents. Soon he made the acquaintance of one such man, Anwar Congo, who is the primary figure in the film.

Congo is a vain and swaggering old man whose character is defined early in the film when he proudly demonstrates a killing device used in many of his executions. (Oppenheimer estimated the number at 10,500.) It is a thin 20-foot length of thin wire anchored to a wall on one end with a wooden handle on the other. He demonstrates on a shaky volunteer how he would loop the wire around the neck of a “communist” before pulling back with both hands on the handle. Congo and other neighborhood thugs began by shooting or stabbing, but, “The smell of blood was sickening, so we devised a system of strangling with wire,” he says, standing in the middle of a rooftop killing field.

Oppenheimer speculated that there will never be any attempt to prosecute Congo or his cronies because they are still feared and many others involved in the war crimes of 1965-1966 have political power. They remind citizens of their past and continue to threaten, he said, “even as governors, senators, and members of parliament.” The film includes shots of a rally of The Pancasila Youth, a militant Indonesian group said to number 3 million men, in which the violence of the past seems to be venerated.

Oppenheimer gained the trust of Congo and his cronies by talking them into re-enacting their exploits before his cameras with the idea that the scenes would be incorporated in his film – and they are.

In the sixties these poor, uneducated bullies were enthralled by American movies. Congo stands in front of the old neighborhood theatre where he and his buddies used to scalp tickets. “We’d do anything for money,” he says. The most profit came from American movies, which he points out, the communists wanted to ban. Elvis was the most popular, but there were many other Hollywood films. Congo says the idea of strangling people with wire came from American gangster movies. A cliché repeated in the film is this:  “Gangster in English means freedom.”

Were Corman productions shown at that small movie theatre in Sumatra? Is Hollywood responsible for the deaths of thousands in Indonesia? Huh?

“Argo. . . “

“WHAT IS THIS FILM CALLED?”

 Sunday morning was clear and mountainous, countering Saturday’s rain and the darkness of “Act of Killing” and another film of inexplicable political violence, “The Attack.” Like “Precious Life” two years ago at Telluride, it forces us to acknowledge the humanity involved in what politicians call the Arab-Israeli conflict. The world of an Arab medical doctor who has made his peace living and healing in Israel collapses when he learns that the death of his wife in a suicide bombing was her own doing.

Luck that morning put me in line for Mark Cousins’ “What Is This Film Called Love?” next to a bright unpretentious young woman with a “guest” pass. She was in Telluride with the primary crew of Ken Burns and Sara (his daughter) Burns’ documentary “The Central Park Five” about the boys screwed by the tabloid-driven justice system in a famous rape case. My line mate lives on the upper West Side near where I lived in more dangerous times, and she spoke the flashing bright idiom of the new graduates seeking to start their New York careers (and find apartments) in Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” one of the more enlightening films at Telluride this year.

We talked about “Amour,” Michael Heneke’s Palm D’Or winner, which depressed me in a variety of ways – not least of which was the realization that Emanuelle Riva, the tragic young nurse in “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” is now 85. My new young friend pointed out some nuances in the film that save it from being little more than a slow death watch.

Suddenly I heard my name called from the street in a Scot-Irish lilt. And there was Mark Cousins, who describes himself as “an annoyingly happy person,” greeting me. The sun rose. That’s Telluride: waiting in line is stimulating, and a director with a great memory welcomes you to his film. Cousins’ book, “The Story of Film,” is a standard text in film classes worldwide. The text and its 15-segment video are not about “The Industry” as it is known in Los Angeles, but rather about the craft and artistry of film-making. In the introduction to both he quotes the late actress Lauren Bacall: “The industry is shit, it’s the medium that’s great.”

The screen title “What Is This Film Called Love?”  has a pause-making line feed before “Love,” so there are a couple of ways to say it, but the meaning is that Cousins is a poet in love with movies as art. This personal documentary shot with a $100 video camera and edited in 10 days is an artful testament, in particular, to Sergei Eisenstein. Cousins walks three days alone in Mexico City following the path— more  spiritual than physical of Eisenstein’s “Que Viva Mexico!”  There is a radical philosophy in starting out to make a movie “with no budget, no plan,” as Cousins puts it. The radical principle is, in his words again, “Make films about what you don’t know.” And so he walks, talking to a photo of Eisenstein. “You’ve taught me how to look, amigo, ” he says, and he explores the meaning of “non-indifferent nature” and of the word “ecstatic.” (From exstasis, that is, “not static, being on the move, out of myself.”) From time to time the narrative voice, which is Cousins talking, switches to that of a woman. “The feminine,” he explained, in answer to a question.

OK, the Nugget Theatre was not filled that lovely morning. This was not a theme-defining film on the program. But it provided some welcomed balance, at least for me.

Hollywood to me: “Argo. . .”

“BARBARA” AND “STORIES WE TELL”

These were my favorites – the first from Germany, the second from Canada – because I learned from each while entranced by their skillful story telling.

As in  “The Lives of Others” a few years ago, the obsessive surveillance of Honecker’s East Germany, is the leaden backdrop of the humane plot of Christian Petzold’s “Barbara.” It’s a psychologically compelling story about two top medical doctors banished to a provincial hospital for political reasons. The tyranny of petty bureaucrats thwarts professional practice, but in a dim-witted bureaucracy intelligent victims can usually find their way. A Hollywood movie on this Cold War theme would present  life in 1980 on the other side The Wall as foreign and undoubtedly violent, worthy of a Berlin Airlift. But “Barbara” like “The Lives of Others” is a film by Germans about themselves. East and West, the twain, did meet, at Checkpoint Charlie.

“Stories We Tell” is a personal documentary in the genre of Cousins’ “make films about what you  don’t know” – but with a budget and high production values.  It’s by Sarah Polley, a Canadian actress who was part of Atom Egoyan’s ensemble. And it’s no spoiler to tell you that she discovers, in real time with the camera running, that her father, whom she initially chose as her narrator, is not her biological father. Polley – and the editing prepares you for the work’s “Frances Ha” attitude toward sex to understand this – does not give great psychological weight to the surprise, as older-era feature films would. The mystery she seeks is all about her late mother.

Besides Roger Corman, two foreign stars received silver medallions and their new films were screened at Telluride. Marion Cotillard of France stars in “Rust and Bone.” And Mads Mikkelsen of Denmark stars in “A Royal Affair and “The Hunt.” Of these I saw only the last, about a good man believed to have done bad things in a rural Danish town. From this engaging movie about a disturbed school girl’s false accusations, you would think of Mikkelsen as a sensitive actor with a great emotional range. In the stage interview, however, he characterized himself as somewhat anti-intellectual and obsessed with sports. And the clips shown with his tribute showed that he built his career on violence. His recent global fame came from his portrayal of a sadistic operative  in “Casino Royale.” Similarly, Marion Cotillard is gaining global fame from her  role in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Goodness gracious,  Hollywood, you do  corrupt  talent from elsewhere—

Argo. . .

Darwin And The Yamana People

On a summer day in January we landed at Wulaia in rubber Zodiacs from the Mare Australis, a clean new expedition crucero of Chilean registry. For now, this is the only cruise through the restricted Murray Narrows south of the Beagle Channel, a passage from Ushuaia to Cape Horn.

View of our ship from Wulaia

On the pebbled beach, with the mother ship shining like an ice berg among the blue islands of the cove, we shed our orange life vests and took a guided walk. Except for the masonry hulk of an old naval station, Wulaia is graciously unimproved. Our guide said the cruise company has leased the site from the Chilean government and plans to restore the vandalized two-story building as a visitor’s center with dorm rooms for archeologists. They have dug in the strata of discarded mussel shells and concluded the place was inhabited for perhaps 10,000 years before the arrival of Europeans.

For several minutes, maybe five, we sat in silence. It was like a sitting in a Zen do or a Dzogchen teaching except the surrounding sounds – birds in the white noise of the sea and wind – were non distracting. We merged.

Lucas Bridges, who grew up among the Yamana in a missionary family, rebutted Darwin’s judgments in his memoir, “The Uttermost Part of the Earth” (1948). Darwin’s report that the Yamana practiced cannibalism was “a shocking mistake,” he said, speculating that it was the result of a common type of miscommunication where the informant feels compelled to please the questioner by giving the expected answer. He attributed to Darwin the opinion that the Yamana in their speech repeated the same phrases over and over and so about 100 words would cover their language. I don’t know the source of this, but Darwin did write, “The language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate.” Bridges’ father, Thomas Bridges, compiled the Yamana dictionary, which runs to 30,000-words.

Psychoanalyze Darwin as you wish. Compare and contrast his early revulsion upon encountering the heart of darkness with, say, C. G. Jung’s enlightenment a century later under a tree in west Africa or at Taos Pueblo. Show how the presumption of misery was used to legitimize putting these native people “out of their misery” when they were in the way of sheep ranchers and miners 50 years later. Present murderous bounty hunters like Bruce Chatwin’s partly fictional “Red Pig,” who did or did not say killing Indians is “a humanitarian act if one has the guts to do it.” Ignore the architectural beauty of the central plaza at Punta Arenas where the sheep families built their mansions and erected a Magellan monument with subdued and dreamy Indians. But don’t blame Darwin for the genocide. He grew.

By then he was corresponding with Thomas Bridges and others, seeking objective information on how the Fuegians expressed various emotions, some of which was published in his “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872). The argument of this curious book is that all animals feel and think and therefore the “higher” powers (yes, the soul) of Man are developed, not created. (The evolution of the capacity for culture through the irrational process of sexual selection is, I think, the disguised theme of “The Descent of Man.”)

Painting by Monica Alvarado

The monument at Cape Horn

I read slow when I get emotionally involved in a book, and “Stand Up That Mountain” by Jay Erskine Leutze was slow reading for me.  Released by Scribner’s in June, it has not yet been mentioned in the major reviews and that’s a goddam New York shame. But — what’d I expect? — it’s about mountain people.

Not your Everest climbers and that sort of high achievers with money. It’s the true story of a legal  fight to save a mountain in North Carolina near the Appalachian Trail from becoming a gravel pit. Mountain people? Appalachian Trail? Environmental law? Naww, the  reviewers have heard all that before (or think they have).

I never would have known about the book except for an alert librarian in a mountain town, Telluride, CO. (Yes, I know. We’re talking two different kinds of mountain people here. More on that later.) She put the book in the centre of a display rack of recommended new acquisitions. I went home to my own little mountain town and bought it on Kindle.

Three reasons this book took my heart away to those fertile mountains not half as high as mine here in Crestone:

1. It’s good. Leutze is an artful writer and his story is personal. You can scan through it to find out who wins, but writing this careful justifies careful reading.
2. It’s true — about a case that involves all the forces and characters in current American battles over conservation of wild lands.
3. With a light touch, he does what I seldom accomplished in years as a state capitol reporter in New Mexico (a state similar to North Carolina in provincial corruption and legal idiocies): he  makes a complex legal dispute exciting as it makes its way to the appellate courts.
4. He gives a voice to the people of the Appalachian Mountains, lets them speak in their own poetic idiom. They are my father’s people (see the post that follows this). My grandfather and grandmother both were at least the third generation of Calloways in the mountains around Mars Hill, NC, about 50 miles down the present U.S. 19E from the main setting of this story.

Environmentalists — and I don’t think Leutze uses this word — have adopted a cliche-ridden institutional style that matches their opponents’ news releases. Both sides are boring us into indifference. (As with reviewers who’ve heard it all before.) Leutze is authentic and original. He lived this story, is the protagonist here. We know how he felt.

But Leutze writes a fresh and fearless prose. In despair at one point he thinks the cause  is lost “because the legal terrain and the cultural terrain favors business over nature, the tangible, the measurable, over the experiential. . . . Leaving a place alone? Letting it be because it is lovely, natural, or simply because it functions in a coherent and perfect way? There is no market for that. No profit to show, no quarterly result to report.”

But he balances his own eloquence with dialog that comes from growing up with the Mountain idiom: “rurent” for ruined, “tar” for tire, “hits” for it’s.  The “stand up” in the title is Mountain for “stand up for” or “stand behind.”  Ollie, the self described  “mountain girl” who is a central character,  reacts to his use of a Latin legal term by saying, “Why don’t you people use regular words?” there is no doubt he agrees with her.

After Luetze graduated from North Carolina Law School, he chose nature over business, moving to a cabin in the woods in the mountains of Avery County near the Tennessee border. His life of walking and fishing, planting and foraging, was peaceful until the blasting began. His education became his weapon.

He is a new kind of mountain man, the sort you will find in Telluride, a small town with an assessed valuation equal to that of some cities. The new library where “Stand Up That Mountain” was promoted is, like the high school, a new stone structure that most cities would not afford. There were miners in Telluride 40 years ago, but they are long gone and the main mine has been “reclaimed” and its tailings subdivided. The community is so fiercely dedicated to conservation (and so wealthy) that it raised some $53 million to buy off a developer who had big plans for the pastures that border the last condominiums on the valley floor.

I wondered if Telluride might be the model for the future of the Appalachians of western North Carolina, once they are conserved.

————–

By LARRY CALLOWAY (2006)

When I was a boy one of my father’s sisters gave him a tree, a sapling, and we planted it in the back yard in Denver. He said it was a black walnut from the mountains of western North Carolina, which are practically owned by the Scotch-Irish, his people. That gnarly stick of a tree survived from winter to Colorado winter, growing a few feet a year in the rich alluvial soil of our back yard.

Each summer I’d look for the black walnuts – a blossom, a green pod on a branch, a fallen clunker with a shell like a hand grenade – but the tree never bore. It needed pollination, I would learn. It needed the opposite sex. It needed to be back in Madison County, N.C., of which both my paternal grandparents were third- or fourth-generation natives. The sterile little tree kept growing, and even after my father was gone it spoke to me of roots, this family tree.

Better than the paper kind, I thought. You can’t taste a genealogy, can’t chop it up to put in ice cream or sprinkle on brownies. You can’t make fine oiled gun stocks or cabinets out of kinship charts. I didn’t care about doing the Alex Haley thing, which turned out to be fiction anyway. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to any backwoods Appalachian “holler.” I had grown up reading “Li’l Abner” and “Snuffy Smith” in the comics. I knew the stereotypes. TV brought “Ma and Pa Kettle,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Hee Haw,” Festus on “Gunsmoke,” and so forth. Hey, I could relate to these comedy characters, but I didn’t want to discover we were actually . . . related!

Then came “Deliverance” by the troubled Georgia poet James Dickey, whose inbred, demented, violent stereotypes cast a shadow on the southern mountains in general. The movie with Burt Reynolds and John Voight was a blockbuster, and “Dueling Banjos” from the sound track was a hit. It was filmed on the Chantanooga River, which runs along the Georgia-South Carolina border, but that was a little too close to home, the “home” I had never seen, and would not see until. . .

Last month I flew to Atlanta and rented a car and headed for Madison County, stopping first for directions at the home of my transplanted Colorado cousin, Dick Marx, and his wife, Joanne, whom he calls a Georgia girl. They live well near Newnan, Ga., where the late Erskine Caldwell used to write his depraved but popular novels. My cousins have a beautiful house on a huge landscaped lot at the edge of a rolling golf course in a wealthy and racially integrated gated community. No Erskine Caldwell “God’s Little Acre” or “Tobacco Road” anywhere in the neighborhood. That was my first clue about the New South, Next Generation.

Tom Wolfe, before he became the effete novelist in white, reported on the New South, New Journalism style, in a famous 1965 Esquire essay called “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Junior Johnson was – and is – a NASCAR legend: the no-fear good-ol’-boy stockcar driver who grew up running whiskey for his daddy down the mountain roads of Wilkes County, N.C., which is just a few counties up the crest from Madison County. Wolfe made the Junior Johnson legend immortal, crediting him with invention of the bold bumper-to-bumper stockcar racing technique called “drafting” and another trick that involves shooting out of curves faster than you go in. “This was known as his ‘power slide,’ and – yes! of course! – every good old boy in North Carolina started saying Junior Johnson had learned that stunt doing those goddamned about faces running away from the Alcohol Tax agents,” wrote Wolfe, and:

“If the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car up into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s read end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson.”

This game had begun a generation earlier with Prohibition, 1919-1933, but continued under an alcohol tax-collecting rationale into the Sixties. The libertarian Cato Institute makes the case that the game continues to this day as the War On Drugs and is a failure for the same reasons as was Prohibition. A New Mexico governor of my acquaintance, Gary Johnson, committed political suicide by buying the Cato line and advocating drug legalization. . . . But this is not about politics. My interest in Tom Wolfe’s little history of moonshining and bootlegging and fast cars is that my grandfather, J. R. Calloway, preceded Junior Johnson in the whiskey-running game. Except, well, my grandfather was on . . . the other side .

Same game, different uniform. Like Junior Johnson, my grandfather was a Scotch-Irish native of western North Carolina. The 1880 Census (there is no 1890 Census record) lists his father and grandfather and likely uncle as farmers heading separate households on the west fork of the Ivy River, which is a tributary of the French Broad, which drains a large region between Asheville, N.C., and Knoxville, Tenn. J. R. and my grandmother, the former Margaret Holcombe, took their young family West to Colorado, settling in 1913 in the Boulder County town of Longmont, where he became police chief within two years. For most of the Roaring Twenties he also was an agent of the Federal Prohibition Bureau.

I have no memory of him – he died in 1942 – and his only personal communication in my possession is his signature on a leaf of a gift Bible soon after I was born. A Baptist deacon, he used to give Bibles to all his grandchildren. I would have liked to hear his stories, if he told stories, because a few days ago, as part of this project, for the first time I did some close reading of some narrow old newspaper clippings that passed on to me. It seems, among other things, that on Dec. 16, 1927, my grandfather, leading a surprise raid on a farm near Littleton, busted the chief of the Colorado state police, a former state legislator named Clifford Wilder. This well connected politician had an elaborate underground whiskey distillery going, and after a notorious trial and exhaustion of appeals, Wilder went to prison in Canon City, where he stayed for a while because the Denver press exposed a plot to parole him immediately.

And there was this: “Boulder, Colo. Feb. 26 [year unknown] – A volley of shots, fired at auto tires by J. R. Calloway, federal dry agent of Longmont, Saturday night ended in the arrest of Gladys Robbins, girl wife of Henry Robbins of Louisville, after a chase of ten miles. Robbins also is under arrest.”

It seems that J. R., driving to Louisville with a warrant for the arrest of Henry for moonshining and bootlegging, encountered the pair driving the other way and gave chase across half the county, but Henry went over a hill and vanished. J. R., believing he had lost him, turned around.

“Suddenly he saw a red light in a field and drove toward it. It proved to be Robbins’ car, but Robbins, seeing the officers, started up his machine and sped to Louisville, with Calloway close behind. Reaching Louisville, Robbins jumped from the car and Mrs. Robbins took the wheel and turned into an alley. Calloway followed and began firing at the tires of the car as it again turned into a street. Mrs. Robbins became frightened and stopped the car. She accompanied Calloway to her home, where Robbins was arrested. A search in the field where Robbins had attempted to hide disclosed a five-gallon jug of whiskey and 100 pint bottles of liquor.”

You can see the game had evolved considerably by the time Junior Johnson was roaring down western North Carolina mountain roads in his supercharged Oldsmobile and learning the power slide. He would never try to hide in a field with his foot still on the brake pedal! He would never involve a woman, even a “girl wife.” I think my grandfather would have had a decent respect for Junior Johnson, for his skill and good sportsmanship if nothing else. I doubt, however, that old J. R. would have granted Junior any Scotch-Irish professional courtesy.

The Scotch-Irish! Wolfe’s essay celebrated these troublesome early invaders of the Appalachians, descendants of lowland Scots, Presbyterians who in the 16th Century under the sanction of King James I of England began occupying Ulster, displacing the conquered Catholic Irish. Generations of violence ensued, at the roots of the current conflict in Northern Ireland. The Irish called them “Billy Boys,” with sarcastic reference to William III, prince of Orange. But these future American “Hillbillies” in the hills of Ulster didn’t exactly get along, either, with the English and their discriminatory laws regarding the establishment of Anglican religion (See Amendment No. 1). And there was drought in the mountains of Ulster. So when the New World really began opening up in the 18th Century, the Scotch-Irish began sailing away. Between 1717 and 1770 alone, about 250,000 settled in the Appalachians, according to James H. Webb, the author of “Born Fighting.”

Consideration of all this by historians like Walter Prescott Webb called for an amendment to the Frontier Thesis because, it was clear, the Scotch-Irish came to North America . . . pre-adapted. And they did not make a particularly nice or civilized minority in the romantic frontier
spirit of Frederick Jackson Turner. They caused the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 in the northern Appalachians, and seventy years later, down in the heart of the Confederacy, they resisted secession, making Tennessee and North Carolina the last to secede from the Union, according to Wilma Dykeman, historian of the French Broad.

“The western mountains and the French Broad headwaters had a way of life widely separated from that of the eastern Piedmont and the Atlantic coastal plain. In both states the very instinct which had caused its people to settle in this scenic but poorer, varied but more isolated region led them naturally to be at economic and political odds with the other parts of their states,” she wrote in the 1950′s. Which is to say, no plantations and no slavery. “Thus,” she went on, “when secession came and war began, inborn prejudices of nature and belief flared into the open and the little-known rebellion against rebellion began. Began and did not end until the war ended, in fact has never yet come to an end. . . .”

So much for the homework. I was now on my way through the snarly freeways of Atlanta to find some Calloways in Madison County, population 20,000, “Jewel of the Blue Ridge,” according to a brief tourist brochure. The main attractions seemed to be a hot springs and 65 miles of the Appalachian Trail, running the length of the county. The only franchise motel appeared to be a Comfort Inn at Mars Hill, pop. 1,700, the largest town. So I stopped in Asheville.

It’s a lovely, hilly, artsy tourist town where southern planters used to spend their summers and George Vanderbilt assembled an art-filled chateau with 250 rooms on 120,00 acres and Thomas Wolfe grew up in a boarding house and lived long enough to become a raging success as a novelist in the 1930′s. Amidst the high new franchise hotels was an oldtimey motel, as out of place as a clay “XXX” jug in a wine rack. It had an imposing sign that pictured, in primary neon, a ragged man with a floppy hat and a corncob pipe and a shotgun leaning against the words “Mountaineer Inn” with half the letters turned backwards. In my part of the country, mountaineer is a positive description of people who climb mountains, but in the Appalachians it’s a nice way of saying hillbilly. The sign is pictured on the cover of a book by Richard Starnes, a professor writing on the clash of tourism and culture, who says, “Although portrayed as backward, ignorant and prone to violence, mountaineers conversely enjoyed a reputation for hospitality, quaintness, and traditional values.” Anyway, I was drawn to this old motel by my Appalachian gene.

“Madison County?” said the owner, a Greek named Chris Moutous. His wife and lovely Southern daughter-in-law behind the counter looked up. “They do a lot of fighting up there.” In the way that people in the tourist business in Santa Fe, the Asheville of the Southwest, tell Rio Arriba County stories, he liked to tell Madison County stories. And, given my experiences, I was a good listener. He told how after one election they got to fighting so hard in Madison County that the governor had to call out the National Guard. He told how he once served on a housing authority board that came up with $6 million in federal funds to replace the hovels in Marshall, the county seat, a decaying little railroad town on the French Broad where the domed courthouse seems to be the only occupied building. “We wanted to civilize them. They kicked us out,” he said.

He told how he once hired a reliable employee from Madison County, but one morning the young man failed to show up for work and never came back. “The sheriff put him in jail so he could play with his wife. He would send letters and the sheriff would just put them in the dumpster. He was in jail six months,” Moutous said. “I went up there with the priest, and the sheriff said, ‘Get out of here, you goddamned Greek.’ I got all the Greek boys here together and got $20 from each of them and paid $150 to the Democrat lawyer and $150 to the Republican lawyer, and got him out.”

By now I had seen Mars Hill and loved it – a pretty little town with a modern, well-endowed Baptist college. Even the hilltop cemetery, which I checked for Calloways (none) and Holcombes (many) was pretty. So I thought these stories might be a little out of date. “In recent years,” Moutous conceded, “people who don’t know the history of Madison County have been buying land. It used to be you could buy it for 20 cents an acre. Now it’s $20,000.”

I returned to explore more of the back roads, remembering that the day before I was nearly blown off the road by a kid doing about 80 in a F-150 with muffler cutouts — GRRREEEEOOOOWW!!, as Tom Wolfe would say. The roads are narrow and snaky, but they’re all paved now. And they access an Interstate-quality highway (the future I-26) that splits the county north and south. I kept passing an exit called “Fork of Ivy” until I realized this was what I was looking for, in plain sight. The “west fork” of the Ivy in the 1880 Census is now called Ivy Creek and the east fork is called Big Ivy River. I found their confluence under a tall I-26 bridge. A family with a 10-year-old station wagon was fishing. The old Fork of Ivy Baptist Church had a cemetery on the hill. No Calloways, No Holcombes.

Up Ivy Creek a couple of miles by a covered bridge I saw a mailbox with letters that might have once said “The Calloways.” Or was I just getting tired and prone to fiction? Then, trotting along the other way, came this apparition: a wagon of the kind that’s called a buckboard in the West, pulled by a beautiful matched team of chestnut horses. Mindful that the killer F-150 was out there, I found a place to do a safe U-turn – call me Senior Johnson – and caught up with the wagon. The congenial driver reigned in the horses and talked, but he didn’t know any Calloways and he had been living there on his horse farm only a couple of years. His sightseeing passengers didn’t know anything either, but they were fascinated that I was getting touch with my ancestral home and encouraged me to buy property, quick.

Another few miles up the road I saw the meaning of their advice: old farms were becoming new subdivisions with soothing country names carved in stone and big, big view homes dominating the coves with multiple gables and dormers and triple garages. Some were on hills cut by near vertical SUV driveways, inaccessible, I thought, to any team and wagon. And preserved perversely at the edges of the fertile lowlands: empty old paint-flaked barns and sheds and boarded up family homes. No still-houses, no outhouses, no violent but quaint and hospitable mountaineers tilling the empty fields. I decided to look for Calloways elsewhere.

On Saturday, along the roads around Mars Hill people were buying and selling. At a residential junk yard a retiree in a straw hat said there were some Calloways over the line in Buncome County. I headed that way and, at a yard sale, a woman said, yes, her tax accountant was married to a Calloway brother up there. She gave me directions. Within an hour in a sweet mountain cove at the head of Upper Flat Creek just past a vine-covered barn I saw a fresh green and white county road sign: “Calloway Road.” The country lane was no more than half a mile long, with no more than eight well maintained modular homes spaced along it. Children followed me asking questions. At last I found the tax accountant’s place and parked and got out and breathed.

“They’re gone camping,” said a gruff voice. I don’t know where he came from. He just materialized, standing there under some fruit trees – a lean, strong man in a plain white T-shirt and cotton pants. He had thinning hair and a broad forehead. Part of his nose was gone. I introduced myself and stated my business and he looked me over and gave his name: James. A Calloway like me. There was a James five generations back in the North Caroline genealogy passed on to me. We recognized some other synchronicities, common names recurring in both lineages. Then I tried out the name Lou Artie, an uncommon one, my great-grandmother, and he nodded.

“Yeah. Hard to mistake that name. She was a old lady. She lived all alone in a old house down there by the church. Us kids used to aggravate her. We’d climb up and put a bucket on her stove pipe. I felt bad when she died, the way we treated her. I was sorry we did it. They said she was part Cherokee.” James, eldest of his family there on Calloway Road, was 63. My great grandmother was listed as 38 in the 1880 Census. So she would have been over a hundred years old when James was a kid. It didn’t really compute, but I think I was on to something, and some day, maybe, I’ll figure it out. It was a Kunta Kinte moment.

My possible third cousin there under the fruit trees had been fond of his grandfather, Gilbert, who owned 400 acres here at the head of the creek. “My grandfather would have lived to be a hundred except his eyesight went bad. At 90 he could still work his team,” he said, and he described the 1700-pound draft horses that plowed the fields. He described his grandfather as a sort of conservationist, who “would skin us alive if we killed a wild animal, even a song bird.” And James seemed to have the same attitude toward nature. He had served eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps and had worked as a construction superintendent in Texas and Florida, but he always returned to the mountains.

“I’m going to die here,” he said. “It might be tomorrow. It might be 20 years from now.” He knew the uncertainties. He had been wounded twice in Vietnam. He had recently lost part of his nose to skin cancer. “Nobody every told me to wear a hat,” he said. His ex wife had long gone down the road, and his two daughters, whom he had raised, were grown. He was staying put now. He wasn’t afraid of the hard work, and he could keep up with men half his age. “This is the only place to be,” he said.

The way the land was divided among heirs of his grandfather, James got a lot of thick forest up higher in the cove, but he didn’t seem interested in logging it. “Bears still come down,” he said. “But I keep that a secret because the hunters will come and get ‘em.” On private land? “This is private property, but they sneak in. They come over the ridge,” he said. And new neighbors in the expensive house on the hill up there don’t seal their garbage, which tames the bears, fatally. There are deer, of course, and wild turkey and raccoons. “We still have copperheads. I haven’t seen a rattlesnake in three or four years,” he said with, it seemed to me, some sense of loss.

In his childhood after the war but before the 1960′s road building program, the extended family was self sustaining. They grew all their own vegetables and stored what they could – potatoes, for example, in straw-lined pits. They milked cows, butchered their own beef and pork. They didn’t have money, but didn’t need it. His mother used to trade eggs in town for coffee or sugar. And they raised corn. They would take it to the old stone mill and for grinding or trade some of it for wheat flour.

And corn fed the mash barrels that fed the still, if there was a still, although I wasn’t exactly asking about that. Instead I mentioned that my grandfather had been a prohibition agent in Colorado, probably because he had an unusual knowledge of whiskey making. “Not more than my grandfather,” said James. He recalled the trouble when he got into his grandfather’s “sipping whiskey” in a jug under the porch. Yes, his grandfather ran a still, but he gave it up because, James said, “The federal agents started giving him too much trouble.”

When roads made the area more accessible, there was income from farm products, particularly the fruit. Apples, black berries, peaches and cherries. “People would pick cherries and stop at my grandfather’s house with their buckets and pay him,” he said. We were standing under a particularly fine tree, heavy with clusters of healthy sweet cherries. They were beginning to show red. “They’re getting ready,” he said. Since there were no nets, I wondered, wouldn’t the birds get them? “Yeah, they’ll get some,” he said, “but there’s plenty left.” Would the bears get them? Naww, but the bears liked the peaches. He recalled when he was a kid picking peaches up in a tree a bear came along to eat the fallen peaches. “He looked up and saw me, but he just kept right on eating.”

Then I asked if they had black walnut trees. He looked at me incredulously. He gestured over his shoulder. There along the road was a line of gnarly trunks like telephone poles. I looked up. Rich canopies, pale green a fruitful. Do they bear? I asked. He nodded.

I shot a picture of James Calloway and wrote out some family names, including the mysterious Lou Artie, on a yellow legal tablet and gave it to him for his sister in law the tax accountant who was interested in genealogy and said goodbye.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said.

By Larry Calloway

Billy the Kid is probably the most famous New Mexican, and his story is political as hell. It’s a New Mexico story, often told. In the famous Lincoln County War of 1878 the Kid fought on the side of sophisticated newcomers who identified with poor Hispanics against the entrenched Western Anglo politicos fat with federal contracts. It was not the first conflict in this alignment, and it would not be the last.

Historian Gary L. Roberts drew a similar political picture of New Mexico in his book, “Death Comes for the Chief Justice,” about a fatal shooting in 1867 in the lobby of Santa Fe’s La Fonda. Justice John P. Slough was mortally wounded by a pistol-weilding state senator named William Logan Rynerson of Dona Ana County. Roberts took the incident to be emblematic of New Mexico’s “unenviable reputation for lawlessness, mayhem and assassination.”

But he had a political theory about it, which explains some of New Mexico’s most interesting events. Slough, like all judges, governors, and attorneys general of territorial days, was a federal appointee. Rynerson was on the other side: the elected Legislature, which then as now had its representative share of Hispanic politicians. Slough and Rynerson represented the fundamental conflict.

It developed in purest form in the Lincoln County War, triggered by the murder of William Tunstall. A young British gentleman seeking his fortune in the American West, he defiantly opened a general store in the town of Lincoln in competition with Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan. The Murphy-Dolan gang was well connected with the entrenched politicians sometimes called the Santa Fe Ring and as a result was getting rich off of federal contracts to provide beef to the neighboring Mescalero Apaches. The local Hispanic ranchers were terrorized by the gang. Tunstall’s store became a center of protest, drawing rebellious newcomers including a young Kansas lawyer named Alexander McSween and the Kid. The Murphy-Dolan gang won the war, with the Kid escaping by the skin of his teeth.

Bronson M. Cutting, one of the most memorable Senators, was typical of the newcomers from the East who engage the minority in battle against the established politicians. Born into the New York City aristocracy he arrived in Santa Fe by private railroad car in 1910 at age 23 after graduation from Harvard, seeking relief from tuberculosis. He built an adobe mansion and rode in a chauffered motor car shipped by rail from the East at a time when there were no more than three dozen cars in the state.

Cutting was a Progressive, that is, a Republican who campaigned against the very monopolistic system that accounted for his family wealth. He knew the cousins Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The New Mexico Republican Party, on the other hand, was still the domain of a 19th Century “old guard” bossed by Thomas B. Catron, the aging kingpin of the Santa Fe Ring. The Republican leaders were a wealthy land-based political group that also included Holm O. Bursum, Solomon Luna and Albert Bacon Fall. Catron and Fall were the U.S. Senators when Cutting arrived.

Biographer Richard Lowitt tells how the young gentleman from the East sought the tutelage of ethnic Democrats like Miguel A. Otero, who was territorial governor from 1897 to 1906, and Arthur Seligman, a descedent of Jewish merchants who would become governor in 1930.

Six months after statehood, Cutting bought the Santa Fe New Mexican. Before long he was in fights not only with Catron and Bursum, but also, because of his artistic sensitivities, with arts strongman Edgar L. Hewett. (Another lifelong enemy of Museum of New Mexico director Hewett was Georgia O’Keeffe.)

Cutting served in World War I as a captain in intelligence attached to the U.S. embassy in London. Back home, he began organizing Hispanic posts of the American Legion. He rose in the national organization and at one time was chairman of its Americanism committee.

He remained a Republican but sometimes supported Democrats, including U.S. Sen. A. A. Jones, who helped him with veterans claims in return. When Jones died in December 1927, Republican Gov. Richard Dillon appointed Cutting, who had financed his campaign, to complete the Senate term.

Cutting was elected to a full term in 1928 in a Republican sweep that even elected Albert Simms, who would meet and marry the Chicago publishing heir Ruth Hanna McCormick in Washington. Herbert Hoover was elected. It was wonderful for Republicans.

Eleven months later the American stock market crashed, launching the Great Depression. In 1932 Cutting was shunned by New Mexico Republicans for his politics. In a famous moment, FDR’s campaign train stopped at Lamy and Cutting accepted the future president’s invitation to stand by him on the rear platform.

In the north, Cutting created what biographer Lowitt calls a “fusion” with the Democratic Party. The election of 1932 was a landmark in New Mexico politics because FDR’s landslide victory carried other Democrats with it, and the Hispanic north turned solid Democrat, which it remains to this day.

The switch showed in the Legislature, which has been the basis of Hispanic political power when all else fails. For the first time, Democrats took control Í by margins of 20-4 in the Senate and 41-8 in the House. And a first-term congressman named Dennis Chavez, who beat Albert Simms in 1930, was re-elected.

FDR invited Cutting to his retreat at Warm Springs, Ga., where they talked for two hours. Roosevelt would be president for the next 12 years, during which his New Deal, World War II and the Manhattan Project would change New Mexico forever.

In 1934, Democrat Chavez made a bold political move Í giving up his House seat to run against Cutting, despite his strong Hispanic support. Chavez might have run instead for the other Senate seat, held by appointed Democrat Carl Hatch, who was more vulnerable than Cutting. By choosing instead to leave that Senate seat to Hatch and capture the other for himself, Chavez probably founded  the Democratic Party’s balanced ticket strategy of one Anglo and one Hispanic U.S. Senator.

Chavez based his challenge on a calculation that he could split the Hispanic vote and capture the majority of Anglos in both parties who did not like the Santa Fean Cutting. The hidden issue with the Anglos apparently was Cutting’s manhood, harking back to a frontier tradition that New Mexico could not seem to lose. It was Bursum, a Republican, who said Cutting was not “politically conducive to healthy, virile, sound government.”

Chavez and Cutting were the same age, but Chavez was the son of a grocery clerk in Valencia County. He began his career in government with a job in the engineering department of the City of Albuquerque, went to Washington as a Senate clerk for Jones, and worked his way through law school at Georgetown University Í a pattern followed by later Hispanic politicians.

And then FDR himself endorsed Chavez, even though he had not supported FDR in 1932 and even though he went around proposing a 25 per cent cut in federal spending. Cutting responded, according to historian William Pickens, by saying, on the contrary, “What we do need is an immediate expansion of employment on a colossal scale by the federal government.”

On election day all the Democrats won Í except Chavez. Cutting  was reelected by a contested count of 76,245 to 74,954. Chavez waged a bitter election contest all the way to Congress.

On May 5, 1935, Cutting took a flight to Washington to deal with a development in the Chavez contest. Air service was then was unregulated and crippled by FDR’s cancellation of lucrative  government air mail contracts. Over Missouri, the DC-2 carrying 10 passengers ran out of fuel. Flying under clouds in an attempt to make an emergency landing, the pilot crashed. Bronson Cutting and two others were killed instantly.

The senator’s funeral was in a church at Madison Avenue and E. 72 Street in New York, a few doors from his childhood brownstone mansion. Chavez was appointed immediately to the vacant seat. He is the state’s lone entry in Statuary Hall of the nation’s capitol.

The governor who appointed Chavez was Clyde Tingley, a populist Democrat who arrived in Albuquerque by train in 1911. Born in rural Ohio, he was an outdoorsman and hunter who liked to work with his hands. He had been a machinist in the automotive industry and once worked as a mechanic for the Wright Brothers.

Writer-lawyer William H. Keleher, who knew him well, describes him as garrulous, physically strong and completely honest. Carrie Tingley, his wife, was from a moderately wealthy family in Ohio. They moved to Albuquerque because she had tuberculosis.

In 1916 Tingley was elected to the Albuquerque City Council and named chairman, a position he held until he was elected governor in 1934. Tingley persuaded the Legislature to fund education by creating the state’s first sales tax. It is called “the emergency school tax.” He became a friend of FDR and traveled to Washington constantly to secure federal relief programs for the state. With the support of FDR, a polio victim, he created a hospital for crippled children, which he named for his wife Carrie.

Tingley’s fighting ways didn’t hurt him with voters. The frontier apparently was still alive and well in 1925 when his friend Tribune editor Carl Magee had published something that offended District Judge David Leahy of Las Vegas. According to historian Marc Simmons, the judge encountered the editor at a bar in Las Vegas, knocked him to the floor and began beating him. The editor pulled his concealed pistol and fired three times, hitting the judge twice in the arm and killing a bystander.

Tingley, the “mayor” of Albuquerque, drove to Las Vegas to help bail out Magee. At the city limits he was stopped by a police officer for speeding and taken to city hall, where he slugged the cop. Eventually everybody was let go, including the editor, who was acquitted in a jury trial.

Tingley needed more time to complete his program as governor, and in 1937 he persuaded the Legislature to propose to the people a constitutional amendment removing the two-term limit. As the special election day approached, Tingley was confident that the voters wanted him to continue, but there were rumors of opposition from three powerful men within his own party: former Gov. A. T. Hannet, John E. Miles and Sen. Dennis Chavez.

Keleher recalled inviting them to the governor’s office to hear the governor’s case. “The silence that followed Tingley’s statement,” wrote Keleher, “was significant and embarrassing. Finally Chavez spoke, `Governor, we have all been a good deal surprised and perplexed by your attitude in this matter. You didn’t ask our advice. Certainly you didn’t consult me about your intention to ask the Legislature to submit this constitutional amendment to the people.’

“Tingley instantly replied, `Senator, neither did I consult anybody when I decided to appoint you to the United States Senate.’” Chavez made no response, but the meeting was over. And despite Tingley’s confidence that the people were for him, the term amendment was defeated. The suggestion that three powerful Democrats could control a special election is a chilling reminder of the dark side of New Mexico politics: the so-called ®MDIT¯patr¢n,®MDNM¯ system. Villages, extended families and religiious societies, had been operating by consensus for centuries, but the control of voting blocs by political bosses was something else.

Tingley resumed as unofficial mayor of Albuquerque until 1947. He is credited with a lot of public works including the first airport terminal, the basic state fair buildings, the zoo, the UNM library, stadium and administration building, the veterans hospital, the federal building and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

A hundred years later, exiles from the dominant culture came to New Mexico in support of the land grant movement of Reies Lopez Tijerina, also seen as a Hispanic undedog. The incident that drew so many political activists from the East was the Rio Arriba County court house raid of June 5, 1967, when Tijerina and about 20 armed followers stormed the tiny town of Tierra Amarilla to free some colleagues arrested on orders of District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez. A state police officer and the county jailer were wounded by gunfire, the sheriff and a deputy were beaten and hostages were taken.

After this incident all eyes were on U.S. Sen. Joseph M. Montoya, who after some hesitation disdained the movement.

The power for the West was in Washington, and most New Mexicans knew that to gain equal footing with other Americans, they needed statehood and full representation in Congress Í by U.S. senators in particular.

As the century dawned, the Hispanic people of New Mexico  were Americanizing as fast as they could, relying as they had for three centuries on their own communities and religion, as opposed to government. The disorganized, underfunded territorial public schools didn’t even get started until after the railroad arrived in 1881. Desperate pleas to fix education would be part of political rhetoric through the century.

In his 1935 inaugural address, Gov. Clyde Tingley said: “The government of the United States, with a stupidity unbelievable today, left the people of New Mexico, recent nationals of another country, speaking another language, almost as it found them, making no provision for education in the English language, for teaching the history of the United States, or for any forward looking enterprise on their behalf.”

The theme of cultural assimilation would keep coming back, in various forms, throughout the 20th Century. “What separates the writing of New Mexico history from that of its neighbors and of the nation is the role played by ethnicity and culture in the saga of New Mexican life,” wrote historian Michael Welsh, a UNM PhD teaching at the University of Northern Colorado.

But ethnic politics can be a screen that hides other politics. In the statehood fight, the hidden issue was the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Beveridge complained that Indiana, with 3 million people, would have the same number of senators as New Mexico, with 200,000, and Arizona, with about 100,000. He must have appreciated the power of a U.S. Senator, because he had it, and he argued that future Western senators, owned by railroad-mining-logging-ranching interests, would be an assault on representative democracy.

In 1906 Congress passed a compromise that would have created one giant Southwest state to be called Arizona with Santa Fe as its capital, provided that the voters of both territories approved separately. President Theodore Roosevelt signed it into law.

Roosevelt had been elected in 1900 in part because of his association with the Hispanic “Rough Riders,” recruited from New Mexico. Their performance against Spanish forces in Cuba may have persuaded many easterners that they were ready for statehood, and Roosevelt may have felt he owed the territory something.

But politics can be cynical. Historian Robert W. Larson, also of Northern Colorado University, found a letter in which Roosevelt confided: “The only reason I want them in as one state now is that I fear the alternative is having them as two states three or four years hence.”

In November 1906, New Mexico approved joint statehood by a decisive vote of 26,195 to 14,735, with all but some Hispanic northern counties saying yes. But Arizona, predominantly Anglo, disapproved, 16,265 to 3,141.

Four years later, as Roosevelt had predicted privately, separate New Mexico and Arizona enabling acts were passed Í with unusual  safeguards indicating deep mistrust. Elaborate procedures protected against giveaways of public land. State officials and legislators were required to read and write English. The public schools were to be free of priests, nuns and religious tests. Classes were to be taught in English without allowance for instruction in any “foreign language.”

The 71 Republicans and 29 Democrats elected as delegates to the  New Mexico Constitutional Convention began work in October 1910. The constitution approved by the voters a year later balanced the “English-only” requirements with a provision that Hispanic children would never be “classified in separate schools.”

Hispanos and Anglos were well represented in the convention, but women and Native Americans were not. The constitution allowed women to vote only in school elections, Indians in none.

The political history of the century shows that issues tend to recycle. The term “liquor interests,” heard today in the round halls of the Legislature, was born in the constitutional convention. When prohibitionists were rebuffed, they blamed the 15 delegates who were in the liquor industry. Historian Larson quotes Minnie B. Owens of Belen, a distraught member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: “I ask you in the name of the Lord to help. . . put whiskey out of New Mexico. . . I have a boy and a girl to be protected and a husband and the Saloon men have every thing their own way and if we do not do something I do not know what will become of us.”

On Jan. 6, 1912, at 1:35 p.m. President William Howard Taft signed the act admitting New Mexico to the union as the 47th state. “Well, it is all over,” he said to the New Mexico delegation. “I’m glad to give you life. I hope you will be healthy.”

U.S. senators would become New Mexico’s dominant politicians, particularly as the state became dependent upon federal spending. Even the U.S. representatives aspired to be Senators, and three of them made it. Some governors tried, but none succeeded, at least by election.

Federal relief was serious business during the Depression. A third of the families in rural New Mexico were living on less than $100 a year, although more than elsewhere many lived in self-sustaining traditional communites.

The situation was worse on the Navajo Reservation, which in 1932 also suffered drought. Families lost sheep and crops and were living on corn meal. But “help” was on its way.

FDR appointed as Interior secretary Harold Ickes, who according to historian Donald L. Parman had a special fondness for the Navajo Reservation, having vacationed often at Coolidge, N.M. Ickes appointed an eastern reformer and Indian afficionado, John Collier, to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier reversed the policy of cultural assimilation that had sent so many Indian youths to boarding schools or Christian mission schools to break their ties with tradition.

Before long, day schools were being built, and 25 aimless Civilian Conservation Corps camps were set up on the Navajo Nation. Collier proposed to expand the reservation by more than 2 million acres in the New Mexico “checkerboard” area.

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee held hearings on the “Navajo Boundary Bill” in Farmington and Gallup in 1936. Floyd Lee of San Mateo, a Republican state senator and president of the Wool Growers, was typical of New Mexico opposition to the bill and to the New Deal in general. He told the hearing, which included Sen. Chavez:

“I would like to mentionÍ and you gentlemen will see it as you tour this state Í on one side of the road you will see a box car and children carrying a little piece of wood to take to school for their share to keep the school warm this winter Í our children going to school in box cars; and not many feet away you will see a $25,000 or $35,000 schoolhouse, with hardwood floors, inside toilets, and lunches served at noon. There’s where the Indian children are going.”

The administration gave up the Navajo Boundary Bill in 1938 after three years of hard fighting. Instrumental in the defeat was Chavez. Historian Parman revealed the complex reasons for this in a disquieting discussion of New Mexico patronage politics. Ickes, irrationally, held Chavez responsible for the death of Bronson Cutting. As if to spite Chavez, Ickes appointed Cutting’s former personal secretary, Edgar Puryear, as national director of the Public Works Administration, a big source of jobs in New Mexico.

In return the senator tied up the Navajo Boundary Bill. Parman concluded that the senator’s political reasoning was he couldn’t lose Navajo votes, because there were none, and he would gain support from the dominant Anglo ranchers while his Hispanic constituents didn’t care.

So Chavez told a campaign rally in Gallup, “I’ll let the Indian Bureau know that all the people in New Mexico are not Indians.”

Whether the Navajo Nation really wanted a lot of government New Deal programs and their eager administrators is doubtful. Witness Juan Solles of Canyon Corral told the Senate committee: “I am an old man but I have been raised to take care of a bunch of sheep and live on them, and if the government can help us out with a bunch of sheep for each poor family, we can make our own living.” But of course the government’s unpopular livestock reduction campaign to stop overgrazing on the reservation was taking sheep away from poor families.

“How old are you?” one senator asked.

Solles: “I don’t know just how old I am, but you gentlemen may know when we came back from Fort Sumner. I was five years old, my mother told me.” The Navajos had been captured, held for a long time at Fort Sumner, then in 1868 marched back.

Asked how many acres in grazing allotments he had, Solles said, “I don’t know; I don’t know about acres.”

World War II brought change to the Navajo Nation. Historian Parman estimated 10,000 Navajos worked in war plants and 3,000 went into military service, among them the famed Navajo code talkers. The distinguished war record of all New Mexicans, especially the heroes of the Bataan Death March, created a new image of the state, which many Americans had never even heard of until the astonishing news in 1945 that the atomic bomb was built and tested here.

The postwar period was probably the healthiest of the century in terms of New Mexico’s economy. The oil, gas and uranium industries boomed. On the other hand, ranching and farming declined, as small towns and the Hispanic political clout. Albuquerque was on its way to becoming the big central city that would dominate politics.

Along with wealth and intrusion of mass American culture  came corruption. And the case of an 18-year-old waitress named Ovida “Cricket” Coogler shocked the state. She was known in the open-gambling bars of Las Cruces as a playmate of politicians from Santa Fe. The chairman of the State Corporation Commission had been indicted with contributing to her delinquency.

When her broken body was found partially buried in the desert in March 1949, sheriff’s officers moved in and quickly disposed of the body before scientific edidence could be gathered.

More shocking was the revelation that Sheriff A. L. “Happy” Apodaca, a deputy and former State Police Chief Hubert Beasley  detained an African American man from North Carolina and tortured him in an unsuccesful effort to extract a murder confession. The three were convicted of federal charges in the crime and spent a year in La Tuna reformatory. A grand jury investigation of the gambling  produced a report on police misconduct and drunkeness.

Edwin L. Mechem of Las Cruces ran for governor in 1950 on a pledge to clean up gambling and reopen the murder case. Mechem  became the first Republican governor since Dillon left office in 1930, creating a breather in a system that mostly produced governors who were Democrats named John Í John E. Miles, John J. Dempsey, John F. Simms, John Burroughs. The Cricket Coogler was never solved, although a football player who dated her was tried and acquitted. Mechem served four two-year terms in 12 years.

A conservative Democrat with a background as an FBI agent, Jack M. Campbell, was elected governor in 1962. Campbell, the former House speaker, pushed through a public works agenda that was a political masterpiece. He got Interstate Highway construction moving after years of debilitating local opposition to  bypasses, and he built the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge and the new state capitol complex.

His chosen successor was Gene Lusk, the longtime Senate leader and son of one-term postwar Congresswoman Georgia Lusk of Carlsbad. But a maverick Republican legislator from Albuquerque  threw a monkey wrench in the Democratic works. David F. Cargo, a lawyer from Michigan who was skilled in the use of TV and one-liners, beat Lusk on the strength of a landslide victory in the Albuquerque Heights. Lusk killed himself a year later.

Cargo brought the movie industry to the state and gratified northern villages with personal visits, but he had trouble accomplishing anything in the Democratic Legislature, which resented his constant ridicule of its members.

The June 5, 1967, Rio Arriba County Court House Raid gave the Legislature, including conservative Republicans, an opportunity to respond politically. A legislative committee mounted an expensive investigation into administration involvement. Cargo’s wife, the former Ida Jo Anaya of Belen, had been a member of Reies Lopez Tijerina’s land-grant ®MD0¯Alianza.®MDNM¯ It was the Sixties! Cargo is the only modern governor to be forced to call out the National Guard to deal with civil disturbances Í following the court house raid and,  later, during anti-Vietnam rioting at UNM.

Attempts to understand the courthouse raid and Tijerina arrived at a definition of “Chicanos” as a conquered people whose land was stolen by the U.S. government. News coverage perpetuated New Mexico’s Old West mythology. The event was chief among the symbolic protests of the Sixties expressing ethnic tensions. But it did not change politics. Montoya delayed his denunciation of Tijerina, and when it came, it was couched in McCarthy-era terminology. “I consider him an enemy of the country,” Montoya told writer Stan Steiner. To which Tijerina replied he was “a patriotic son” but was not compelled to go along with every U.S. agent or Senator.

Other symbolic protests, although trivial by comparison, included a fight over use of the image of the Spanish slave-exploiter Esteban as representative of Black culture on the state’s Bicentennial medal; the chiseling off of the word “savage” on a memorial in the Santa Fe Plaza to soldiers killed by “savage Indians;” and the resistance to changing the name of the NMSU yearbook, “The Swastika,” which referred to a Native American symbol that predated Hitler.

The 1960′s, remembered romantically for northern New Mexico communes and “Easy Rider,” filmed here, was not a happy time. In addition to social conflict, there was an economic downturn. Historian Welsh points out that population growth slowed and poverty increased. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was an urban program, unlike the New Deal that helped rural New Mexico. And Vietnam drew military spending away from the weapons labs.

Rancher Bruce King won his first term as governor in 1970, succeeding Cargo. He was a Democrat in the updated tradition of Clyde Tingley Í folksy, unschooled, shrewd and garrulous. He was a masterful politician who remembered names, kept in touch with the people and loved to deal with the Legislature.

The postwar population boom created a new electorate, but many old politicians continued. Clinton P. Anderson, a Roosevelt New Dealer who represented New Mexico in the U.S. House through the war, moved up to U.S. Senator after a stint as President Harry Truman’s secretary of agriculture, with the special assignment of dealing with famine in postwar Europe.

Anderson was another tuberculosis victim who came to New Mexico for his health. He started as a newspaper reporter, then opened an insurance agency. In a typical New Mexico political deal full of insider treachery, Democratic bosses put up Anderson to run for the U.S. House in 1940 with the proviso that he’d simply hold the seat for whoever lost the Senate race that year between Chavez and his ambitious Democratic challenger, John J. Dempsey.

Anderson disclosed this in his autobiography and added that both sides approached him with under-the-table deals to double cross the other side and then filed opponents against him when he wouldn’t deal. Anderson rationalized that he was therefore free of obligation. He won and kept winning, moving to the Senate on the retirement of Carl Hatch in 1948.

Anderson more than any one built the World War II weapons labs into Cold War weapons labs with huge budgets. He had access to all the secrets as a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. And he was part of the cabal of powerful Western senators who changed the landscape with flood control projects, reclamation projects and the giant Colorado River Storage Project. Anderson earned the title of father of Medicare.

Dennis Chavez died in office November 1962. Mechem resigned  as governor in order to be appointed to succeed him in a deal that elevated the lieutenant governor, Tom Bolack, to governor. The move didn’t go over with the voters, and two years later U.S. Rep. Joseph M. Montoya defeated Mechem at the polls and stepped up to the Senate, where he would serve two full terms.

Montoya continued the tradition of bringing home the pork, crediting himself with things like the Navajo Irrigation Project and Cochiti Dam. But he was an old style politician and voters were suspicious of his personal business dealings. Montoya’s slogan as he ran for reelection in 1976 was, “He Delivers.”

Anderson mentioned Montoya only once in his autobiography, and it was a curious mention. He said one day Montoya needed money for a campaign, and he took him to the office of the wealthy Oklahoma industrialist Sen. Bob Kerr. “Bob walked over to a locked safe, turned the combination and peeled off a number of bills,” wrote Anderson, adding, “Bob Kerr certainly got the gratitude of Joe Montoya and me.”

Montoya’s defeat in 1976 by lunar astronaut Harrison Schmitt marked the end of the Anglo-Hispanic balance between the two Senate seats. Republican Schmitt would serve only one term until Jeff Bingaman returned the seat to the Democrats, but not to the Hispanos.

Contributing to Montoya’s loss was his ridicule of Schmitt as a space monkey in a speech he often delivered in Spanish but never in English. It was another of the symbolic cultural issues that underlie New Mexico politics.

A more consequential U.S. Senate election was in 1972, when Anderson announced his retirement. New Mexico wasn’t going along with the mood of the national Democratic Party that nominated George McGovern for president on an anti-Vietnam platform. Conservative banker Jack Daniels won the Democratic . Senate primary, defeating Roberto Mondragon but leaving some bitterness among the ethnic liberals. Pete Domenici defeated Dave Cargo in the Republican primary.

The retiring senator wanted to finish his career as Democratic national committeeman from New Mexico, but Bernalillo County Democratic Chairman Rudy Ortiz ran against him and, with the support of a new ethnic faction, won. Anderson’s resentment of the rebuff would come out later.

He stood back from the Senate campaign, but in the final week the Daniels people made a costly blunder. Without Anderson’s knowledge they sent an advertisement to newspapers that included a claim that Anderson endorsed Daniels. The ad was pulled at the last minute, but the endorsement made it into print in several  outlying towns.

Then on pre-election Sunday night, with a timing that guaranteed maximum impact, the wily old senator issued a statement that the ads were wrong. “I have nothing against Daniels as a senatorial candidate,” he said. “It is just that I have wanted to maintain complete neutrality.” Domenici won the election by 30,000 votes, or  53 per cent. The former chairman of the Albuquerque City Commission was the first Republican since Bronson Cutting to be elected to the Senate from New Mexico.

King had taken the measure of Domenici, defeating him by 25,000 votes in the 1970 governor’s race, and he believed the party rebuff might have made the difference in 1972. In memoir, “Cowboy in the Roundhouse,” King says, “I felt then, and I still do, that if the Democratic party had named Sen. Anderson as national committeeman, he would have maintained his firm control over the party and. . .we might have elected Jack Daniels to the Senate.”

King’s view, however, has a context. His career-ending defeat in 1994 was set up by a similar party revolt, involving his lieutenant governor, Casey Luna, and his former lieutenant governor, Mondragon.

Two future Democratic governors came out of the 1972 party takeover. Jerry Apodaca was elected in 1974 with the support of the Ortiz group. And Toney Anaya, whom King fired as his administrative aide in part because he had helped engineer the Anderson rebuff, would become governor in 1982. Rudy Ortiz would be acquitted in a bribery trial, leave the state for a while and vanish from the political scene.

Apodaca, proud and athletic, was less liberal and more business oriented than his Anglo detractors made him appear. He reorganized government along lines that still exist today. One morning at a regular news conference he introduced a visitor who said, “Hi. I’m Jimmy Carter.” Apodaca became a key player in Carter’s successful, diversity-minded campaign for president in 1976.

Apodaca had the Dennis Chavez formula going for him Ä an ethnic conservative who is not very ethnic. He had a national career going, but it faded as the nation rejected Carter for a second term and marched hopefully into the Reagan-Bush years. When he was sworn in as governor, Apodaca was introduced by his mentor Jack Campbell, who said, in so many words, “If Jerry Apodaca screws up, he’ll be the last Hispanic governor.”

It didn’t turn out that way. The last Hispanic governor would be Toney Anaya, who was elected following another four-year King administration. Anaya screwed up by making too many symbolic liberal gestures, such as his mass commutation of all death sentences to life. His administration ended in 12 per cent approval ratings, a warning that ethnic liberals are not successful in New Mexico.

The faded political careers of Apodaca and Anaya are reminders, however, of a larger political fact of life in New Mexico: the governorship is a dead end. Bronson Cutting saw this at the beginning of the century when he wrote in a Santa Fe “horoscope” for his life: “You will do best not to become governor of New Mexico. You have no enemies now and don’t want any.”

Some recent governors Í Campbell, Cargo, Apodaca Í left the state after their terms. In this context, King probably did a big favor for Domenici by defeating him in 1970.

Domenici was born into a community of immigrants, most from Lucca in northern Italy, who settled in Albuquerque at the turn of the century. Helen Dewar of the Washington Post described him as “a sandy-haired Italian from a state where ethnic politics is spoken with an Hispanic accent.”

The crucial election after his upset victory over Daniels was 1978, when he beat Toney Anaya, then riding a wave of popularity after two terms as a corruption-fighting attorney general. It was his closest Senate victory, 53 per cent. Since then he has been reelected three times with margins of 72, 73 and 65 per cent. And he has done so as an outspoken critic of the ®MDIT¯patr¢n®MDNM¯ system. Democrats accuse him of turning into a “godfather” himself. But his recruitment, promotion and funding of Heather Wilson was hard for diversity-minded Democrats to criticize because Wilson is the first woman to represent New Mexico in Washington for more than one term. She was elected to complete the term of U.S. Rep. Steve Schiff upon his death and then to a full term.

Biographies usually mention Domenici’s truck-driving days in his father’s wholesale grocery business and his half-season baseball career with the Albuquerque Dukes. He went to St. Mary’s High School and the University of New Mexico, married Nancy Burk of Albuquerque and they began a family Í it grew eventually to eight children Í on his salary as a math teacher. He borrowed money from his dad to go to law school in Denver, returned to Albuquerque and became chairman of the Albuquerque City Commission. One of his accomplishments was to revitalize downtown.

Domenici’s sudden call to national power came when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981 and was elevated to chairman of the Budget Committee. “He became a Reaganite by necessity,” said one U.S. News and World Report profile, adding, “The administration’s first rosy economic assumptions drove him crazy.”

The former math teacher did the math of lowering the deficit and stuck by the results, opposing cynical tax cuts and porky increases in defense spending. This, as the New York Times put it, “left him in the political wilderness on Capitol Hill and cost him possible higher standing within his own Republican Party caucus.” He lost to Bob Dole for majority leader in 1984. Another presidential hopeful, Phil Gramm, refused to vote for Domenici’s deficit reduction without tax cuts at the same time.

When Congress and the Clinton administration finally struck the historic agreement to balance the budget by 2002, it was Domenici who received most of the credit. But the senator’s deficit-reduction fight didn’t stop him from bringing government money to New Mexico, which now receives almost two dollars for each dollar paid in federal taxes Í the highest return in the nation. Without apology, he created the human genome mapping project at the national laboratories. University presidents signed an open letter in the last campaign, praising Domenici for his support of scientific research, including medical research into mental illnesses. “Only the federal government can afford investments on the scale required for pure discovery,” they said. Domenici rebuilt the ancient acequias in northern New Mexico as well as the air terminal and its freeway access in Albuquerque.

The senior senator discourages speculation that the state’s economy will suffer when he retires, emphasizing development of the private sector. But at the end of the century, federal dependency continues to be a problem. Historian Welsh: “The state has little venture capital, possesses a second-rate school system, relies too heavily on tax revenues at all levels for employment and services, and thus stands behind all her neighbors as the Southwest propels itself into the 21st Century.”

The politicians lined up to be U.S. Senators are legion, but being a Democrat in a Republican Senate, as is Bingaman, is probably not much fun. One way around minority party boredom is executive appointment. Democrat Bill Richardson, eight-term northern district Congressman, became U.N. ambassador and then Energy secretary. Before him, Republican Manuel Lujan Jr., Albuquerque Congressman for 20 years, became Interior secretary.

Governors probably do best when they don’t seem to care about  higher office Í or in recent times, about politics. Garrey Carruthers, elected in 1986, practiced the new style by staying cool and talking about golf. It was easy for Carruthers: he had Maralyn Budke. A bright and effective administrator with a whole career behind her as director of the Legislative Finance Committee, she  ran the state for him for $1 a year.

King, with no high office ambitions, returned with a third four-year administration accompanied by a building boom. Part of it was King’s doing. Expensive incentives worked out by his administration (and probably Domenici) lured Intel and its sattelites to Rio Rancho. Ironically, labor contractor Gary Johnson of Albuquerque was put in a good financial position to run for governor by his Intel contracts. King the rancher was 70 when he lost to Johnson the triathlete.

King in his recent book mused that politics had changed radically. When he beat Domenici in 1970, King did not even take a poll. “I knew two-thirds of the people in the state back then,” he explains. The rancher governor had learned his politics as a Santa Fe County commissioner and legislator at northern political rallies in the 1950s, when the Spanish speeches would last until midnight and the dancing until 4 in the morning. A candidate’s reputation then was communicated person to person. But by the 1990′s politics was all polls and high-production-value TV. “The grapevine  doesn’t work anymore,” King said.

On the bright side, the ®MDIT¯patr¢n®MDNM¯ system doesn’t seem to work anymore either. King was ®MDIT¯patr¢n®MDNM¯-friendly and could always count on the support of Emilio Naranjo, the Rio Arriba County Democratic chairman for more than 40 years. But Naranjo has faded with age and his retirement from the state Senate.

Johnson’s victory in 1994, and his reelection in 1998 as the first governor to serve consecutive four-year terms under a constitutional amendment, dramatized the weakness of politics as usual. The vote from traditional rural areas was overwhelmed by urban “media” areas. In the last election, Johnson challenger Martin Ch vez concentrated his campaign in Albuquerque and didn’t make the rounds in the north that used to be considered mandatory.

Johnson’s election and reelection involved a new force in New Mexico politics. Gaming interests associated with Apache and Pueblo tribes Ä but not the Navajos Ä financed a large part of both campaigns. In return, Johnson signed whatever compacts the tribes needed and defended them.

The emerging cash position of the gaming Pueblos, most of which lack oil, gas or mineral resources, comes after years of neglect by New Mexico politicians. New Mexico was the last state to withhold the right to vote from “Indians not taxed,” and the Pueblos had to fight through the federal courts to get it. They had to fight long and hard to reverse incursion on their grant lands and the act of Congress that confirmed squatters’ rights, sponsored by New Mexico Republican Holm O. Bursum. They won the landmark act of Congress in 1970 returning sacred Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo, closing it to public access.

The Blue Lake victory took years because of the opposition of Sen. Anderson. Non-economic uses of New Mexico’s public lands generally did not find favor with New Mexico politicians during the century. Domenici championed the ranchers in fights over grazing fees and privatization of grazing leases. But in 1998, voters in the north, including Santa Fe, elected a new congressman, Tom Udall, who was a wilderness advocate in the manner of his father, former Interior Secretary Stuart Udall. And the Green Party began having an effect elections, particularly in the north.

Johnson, no environmentalist, ingratiated himself the Pueblos but did not court the Hispanic ethnic vote. In fact, Hispanic leaders in the Legislature argued implicity that his campaign derision of “Manny and Ray” was ethnic politics in reverse. Most of all, his popularity was because he was a non-Democrat and because New Mexicans had grown tired of politics as usual.

The voters like to shake up the politicians. They did it when the north and the Legislature turned Democrat in 1932. They did it when a U.S. Senate seat turned Republican in 1972 and another turned Anglo in 1976. They did it in electing new kinds of governors in 1934 (Tingley), 1950 (Mechem), 1966 (Cargo), 1974 (Apodaca) and 1994 (Johnson). Through the century the people kept in “shakeup” practice by expressing their opinions in public and by voting for thousands of local political turnovers and transitions and trials that will never make it into history but kept government representative.

They’re doing it again in the 21st Century, with the nation’s first hispanic woman governor, Susana Martinez, a Republican. They have the right. It was called self government by the advocates of statehood. The thing that native New Mexicans received from the time Kearny marched in, which no other conquered people received, was the right to vote. It’s the American way. The century, in fact, is called “The American Century” globally. And that’s a pretty good name for it there locally.

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.