Mourning George McGovern

                                                           MOURNING GEORGE MCGOVERN

By Alice Slater

 It is eerily fitting that George McGovern’s passing has occurred in the final heat of a furious election campaign, precariously balanced between the Republocrats and the Democlicans, a tweedle dum/ tweedle dee choice between two corporately owned political parties. No matter how much the corporate media tries to fan the public pulse with staged debates and constant reporting on polls and money raised in this manufactured horse race, it’s apparent that on issues of corporate welfare, empowering the rich, labor rights, immigration, terrorism, the vast military-industry complex, war and peace, energy policy , poverty, and the rape of the earth, there’s merely, at best, a dime’s worth of difference between the two.  Indeed, there are third party candidates, from the Green Party, Libertarian Party, Justice Party and others who have radically different ideas from those we are hearing from Obamney/Rombama, but the corporate dominated media is having none of that and refuses to carry these other views . 

The significance of George McGovern’s failed campaign for the Presidency in 1972 is that it was born on the wings of a vast grassroots conspiracy, assiduously phoning, canvassing, going door to door, running slates of delegates to the Democratic convention, before there was an internet.  It was the last gasp of a democratic political process in the US.   The campaign to take over the Democratic Party by women, youth, gays, blacks, liberals, and other progressive Americans, started in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy to end the war in Vietnam.  That effort ended in the furious assault on our young people at Mayor Daley’s Chicago Democratic convention.  Here we witnessed on television the ugly police brutality against students and youth protesting the war in Vietnam and the fixed rules of the convention that favored those in power and ignored the results of that year’s grassroots primary campaign for Gene McCarthy, and later, Bobby Kennedy, cruelly assassinated while campaigning in LA, having entered the race after Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for a second term. 

With renewed determination, across the country we formed the New Democratic Coalition in 1968 and vowed to change the rules of the party and to capture the nomination in 1972 for a peace candidate that would finally end the war in Vietnam and address issues of civil rights, poverty, human rights, true national security---the liberal progressive agenda.  George McGovern announced as our candidate, supporting the reform of the Convention rules and all of our issues.  I went up and down my block in Massapequa, Long Island, with an army of suburban housewives, students, commuting husbands, canvassing my neighbors and making sure those who supported our platform came out to vote in the Democratic primary.   In 1970 we had primaries for local candidates and actually sent Allard Lowenstein, the brilliant progressive leader who enrolled Eugene McCarthy to challenge Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries, to Congress from Long Island.  These efforts took place all over America and when I moved to Maryland in 1970, I continued my door to door work for McGovern in Potomac.  The establishment media rarely reported on our work.   They kept predicting that Edmund Muskie would be the nominee and gave virtually no press coverage to McGovern or our campaign.  What a great surprise when our elected delegates showed up at the Miami Convention in 1972—the sixties manifest in all its glory, with youth, women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, a broad swath of progressive America—and we nominated George McGovern!   The energy was electric as movie stars mingled with peace activists, civil rights workers, women’s libbers, the gay community, and every other shade and stripe of 1960s protesters.   And we proved the political process worked!   We actually captured the nomination!!   What an awful letdown to see how the establishment fought back.   They never wrote about McGovern’s forward looking platform for peace and prosperity.   They hounded him daily for having appointed Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton to run as his Vice President who was later discovered to have been hospitalized for manic-depression many years earlier.   McGovern replaced him on the ticket with Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, but the press was relentlessly opposed to his platform and instead of talking about his WWII fighter pilot record, his outstanding values and creative ideas for ending poverty in America and ending the Vietnam War, they tarred him as a “hippie” with all the rest of his supporters and he won only Massachusetts and Washington, DC in the election. 

The establishment has closed ranks ever since.    There has never been such an open, democratically conducted nomination process as we enjoyed from 1968 to 1972, and which resulted in a true people’s choice when George McGovern was nominated.   Today we have carefully staged-managed events, designed not to upset any of the corporate sponsors, filtered through the corporate media, leaving Americans in the dark.   George McGovern’s nomination was a shining moment for a democratic political process and also, sadly, a signal to the enemies of democracy to close ranks and do everything in their power to never allow it to happen again. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s an interview I did on you tube with Kevin Sanders of the World Opinion Forum, which will feature part of this talk on its Hiroshima Day program, on August 6^th.  

http://youtu.be/xK8JmmeN2FU

The Folly of Mindless Science

THE FOLLY OF MINDLESS SCIENCE

by Alice Slater 

In 2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace.  About 600 organizations, including some 80 from Pakistan gathered in New Delhi to strategize for nuclear disarmament.   India had quietly acquired the bomb and performed one nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974 but it was in 1998 that all hell broke out, with India exploding five underground tests, swiftly followed by six in Pakistan.[i]   

The trigger for this outbreak of nuclear testing in Asia was the refusal of the US Clinton Administration, under the pressure of the US nuclear weapons scientists,  to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that precluded laboratory testing and “sub-critical” tests, where plutonium could be blown up underground with chemicals without causing a chain reaction—hence defined as a non-nuclear test by the US and the nuclear club.  India warned the nuclear powers at the Commission on Disarmament(CD) where the CTBT was being negotiated, that it opposed the CTBT because it contained discriminatory "loopholes … exploited by some countries to continue their testing activity, using more sophisticated and advanced techniques", and it would never agree to consensus on the treaty unless the ability to continue high-tech laboratory  testing and computer-driven nuclear experiments was foreclosed.   

In an unprecedented move of colonial hubris, Australia, led by Ambassador Richard Butler, brought the treaty to the UN for approval over India’s objections, the first time in the history of that body that the UN General Assembly was asked to endorse a treaty that had not received consensus to go forward in the negotiating body at the CD.  I spoke to Ambassador Butler at a UN reception where the wine was flowing a bit liberally. I asked him what he was going to do about India’s objection.  He informed me that he had been visiting with Clinton’s National Security Advisor in Washington, Sandy Berger, and Berger said, “We’re going to screw India! We’re going to screw India!”, repeated twice by Butler, for emphasis.   Unsurprisingly, India and Pakistan soon tested overtly, not wanting to be left behind in the technology race for new improved nuclear weapons which was characterized blasphemously by the US in biblical terms, as its “stockpile stewardship” program to protect the ‘safety and reliability” of the arsenal. 

As for the “safety and reliability” of the nuclear arsenal, in the late 1980s, during the heady days of perestroika and glasnost, when there was talk of a nuclear testing moratorium, initially instituted in the Soviet Union after coal miners and other activists marched and protested the enormous health threats from Russian testing in Kazakhstan,  a debate in Congress resulted in an annotated Congressional record indicating that since 1950 there were 32 airplane crashes carrying nuclear weapons and not one of them ever went off!  Two spewed some plutonium around Palomares, Spain and Thule, Greenland that had to be “cleaned up”, but there was no catastrophic nuclear explosion.  There are still some bombs unaccounted for including an airplane still missing which crashed off the coast of Georgia [ii] How much more “safer and reliable” would the weapons have to be?  Fortunately, General Lee Butler, taking command of the nuclear arsenal stopped the insanity in 1992 and ruled that the planes carrying nuclear weapons would be grounded instead of being in the air 24/7 keeping us “safe” and “deterring” the Soviet Union.  What could they have been thinking?   Sadly, there has been no corresponding move to ratchet down the lunacy that endangers our planet at every moment from some 1500 deployed nuclear weapons mounted on missiles poised to fire against Russian missiles, similarly cocked, in minutes.    

Even before “stockpile stewardship”, I remember attending a meeting with the mad scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of Dr. Strangelove, and sitting in a circle to discuss the aftermath of nuclear policy in the shadow of the crumbled wall in Berlin.  The scientists were earnestly discussing the need for AGEX (Above Ground Experiments), to keep their nuclear mind-muscles alive and limber, which eventually morphed into the diabolically named “stockpile stewardship” program.  Today, that misbegotten program is funded to the tune of $84 billion over the next ten years, with another $100 billion budgeted for new “delivery” systems—missiles, submarine, airplanes—as if the Cold War had never ended! 

At the Delhi conference, Dr. Amulya Reddy, a nuclear physicist gave an electrifying talk on the responsibility of science and its moral failures, explaining how shocked he was to find documents describing how the German scientists carefully calculated, with extraordinary accuracy and scientific precision, the amount of poison gas required per person to kill the Jews who were routinely marched to the Nazi “showers” in the concentration camps.  And at a workshop on the role of science, there was an extraordinary conversation with Indian and Pakistani scientists who pondered whether scientists have lost their moral compass because the system of higher education produced the growth of the scientific institute, isolating scientists from the arts and humanities.  They examined whether these separated tracks of learning, denying scientists the opportunity to intermingle with colleagues engaged in those issues, while narrowly concentrating on their scientific disciplines, had stunted their intellectual and moral growth and led them to forget their humanity. 

Now scientists are pushing whatever boundaries might have existed to open a whole new avenue of terror and danger for the world.  In a profound disregard for the consequences of their actions, US scientists are enabling a new arms race with Russia and China as the military-industrial-academic-Congressional complex plants US missiles in Eastern Europe and beefs up military bases in the Pacific.  This despite efforts by Russia and China to forestall this new arms race by calling for a treaty to ban weapons in space, supported by every nation in the world except the US which blocks any forward progress for negotiations.    

The US has recently admitted to cyber warfare, targeting uranium enrichment equipment in Iran with a killer virus to set back the Iranian program to build their own bomb in the basement, while at home, we are talking of massive subsidies to the uranium enrichment factory in Paducah Kentucky.  It is hard to believe how screwy this new venture into cyber warfare is in terms of providing security to the “homeland”.   After all, cyber terror is not nuclear warfare.   Any country, or even scores of various groups of individuals, can master the technology undetected, and wreak catastrophic havoc on the myriads of civilian computer-dependent systems, local, national, and global.  Similarly, the recent expansion of drone warfare, assassinating innocent civilians together with suspected “terrorists” in eight countries, at last count, with the President of the US acting as judge, jury and executioner, is the application of misbegotten science in a recipe for endless illegal war.   Just as the US was the first to use the atomic bomb, opening the door to the disturbing and uncontrollable nuclear proliferation we witness today, it is again opening the door, taking the lead in a new global arms race in cyber warfare and drone technology.   Despite Russia’s suggestion that there be a treaty against cyber war, the US is resisting negotiations, indicating their continued arrogance and disregard of what must be manifestly apparent to any rational thinking person.[iii]  There can be no reasonable expectation that scientists can keep the dark fruits of their lethal discoveries from proliferating around the world.   It is just so 20^th century, hierarchical and left-brained to imagine that there will not be others to follow their evil example, or that they can somehow control an outbreak of the same destructive technology to others who may not wish them well. 

Can there be any doubt that scientists driving US policy are out of touch with reality?  Officials talk about “risk assessment” ­as though the dreadful disastrous events at Chernobyl and Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of risks and benefits. Scientists are constantly refining their nuclear weapons and designing new threats to the fate of the Earth.  After the horrendous devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely everyone with half a brain knows these catastrophic bombs are completely unusable and yet we’re pouring all these billions of dollars into perpetuating the weapons labs, as hunger and homelessness increase in the US and our infrastructure is crumbling. The high priests of Science are not including the Earth in their calculations and the enormous havoc they are wreaking on our air, water, soil, our biosphere. They’re thinking with the wrong half of their brains—without integrating the intuitive part of thinking that would curb their aggressive tendencies which engender such deadly, irreversible possibilities.   They are engaged in creating  the worst possible inventions with a Pandora’s box of lethal consequences that may plague the earth for eternity. Still, they continue on. Scientists are holding our planet hostage while they tinker in their laboratories without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth.”  

Alice Slater is the NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Advisory Council of the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space

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[i] http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/pakistan/nuke98.html  

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents

[iii] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/germany-cyber-idUSL6E8FP40M20120425

Tone Deaf US Foreign Policy Announcements Create New Provocations in Asia

On UN Day, at a panel on Nuclear Disarmament, Secretary General Ban-ki Moon spoke about his 2008 five point proposal for nuclear disarmament, including the requirement for negotiations to ban the bomb.  It was dismaying  when the next speaker, a retired US Air Force General, Michal Mosley,  breezily assured  the audience and his fellow panelists that it certainly was now possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, since atomic bomb technology is thoroughly out of date.  He boasted that today “we” have long range attack weapons of such “unbelievable precision and lethality” that we no longer need nuclear weapons in the US arsenal.  Our conventional weapons are ever so superior to those of any other nation.   He said this as his fellow co-panelists, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, took in the full import of his braggadocio, to my extreme embarrassment as a US citizen.   Did the General consider for a moment the effect his words were having on the Ambassadors and the other non-US participants in the meeting?  His astonishing disregard for the effect of such provocative war talk on our fellow earth mates seems to be a major failure of our “tin ear” foreign policy.

 Hillary Clinton proclaimed a similarly tone-deaf policy in an article in November’s Foreign Affairs, “America’s Pacific Century”, [i]  remarking that now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, we were at a “pivot point”   and that “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic economic, strategic and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.”  Calling for “forward-deployed” diplomacy, she defined it to include “forging a broad-based military presence” in Asia…that would be “as durable and as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the Atlantic…capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and non-state actors.” She added that just as our NATO alliance “has paid off many times over…the time has come to make similar investments as a Pacific power.”

Citing our Treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand as the “fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asian-Pacific”, she also spoke of the need to expand our relationships to include India, Indonesia Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam, and the Pacific Island countries.  While acknowledging that “fears and misperceptions linger on both sides of the Pacific", and that “some in our country see China’s progress as a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America seeks to constrain China’s growth,” she blithely asserted, “we reject both those views …a thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America”.  This said as the United States aggressively lines up a host of new nations in an expanded Pacific military alliance, providing them with missile defenses, ships, and warplanes, encircling China.   What is she thinking?

Shortly after Clinton’s article appeared, Obama went to Australia to open up a new military base there with a token 250 US soldiers, and a promise of 2500 to come with plans for joint military training, promising that “we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” He also adopted the “Manila Declaration”, pledging closer military ties with the Philippines and announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia. Clinton just paid a visit to Myanmar, long allied with China, to re-establish relations there.

In her article’s conclusion Clinton bragged, “Our military is by far the strongest and our economy is by far the largest in the world.   Our workers are the most productive.   Our universities are renowned the world over.   So there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.”  Didn’t anyone tell her that the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest in the 52 years the census bureau has been publishing those figures?[ii]  Or that the United States deteriorating transportation infrastructure will cost the economy more than 870,000 jobs and would suppress US economic growth by $3.1 trillion by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers? [iii]

The tone-deaf quality of US foreign policy pronouncements is like an infant who pulls the covers over his head to play peek-a-boo, thinking he can’t be seen so long as he can’t see out.   China has responded as would be expected.  A Pentagon report warned Congress that China was increasing its naval power and investing in high-tech weaponry to extend its reach in the Pacific and beyond. It ramped up efforts to produce anti-ship missiles to knock out aircraft carriers, improved targeting radar, expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and warships and  making advances in satellite technology and cyber warfare. [iv] What did we expect?  And now, having provoked China to beef up its military assets, the warmongers in the US can frighten the public into supporting the next wild burgeoning arms race in the Pacific and what appears to be endless war.

This month, Mikhail Gorbachev , in The Nation [v], observed the US elite’s “winner’s complex”  after the end of the Cold War, and the references to the US as a “hyperpower”, capable of creating “a new kind of empire.”   He said, “[t]hinking in such terms in our time is a delusion.  No wonder that the imperial project failed and that it soon became clear that it was a mission impossible even for the United States.”  The opportunity to build a “truly new world order was lost.”  The US decision to expand NATO eastward “usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it. We are engulfed in global turmoil, “drifting in uncharted waters.   The global economic crisis of 2008 made that abundantly clear. “ 

Sadly, the powers in control of US public policy and their far-flung global allies appear to have learned nothing from the extraordinary opportunity we lost for a more peaceful world at the Cold War’s end.  We are now repeating those expansionary designs in Asia, and “thus we continue to drift towards unparalleled catastrophe” as Albert Einstein observed when we split the atom which “changed everything save man’s mode of thinking.” 

[i] Foreign Policy, America’s Pacific Century, Hillary Clinton, November 2011

[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html?pagewanted=all

[iii]http://dcnonl.com/article/id46259

[iv]http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/navy-driving-chinas-military-expansion/articleshow/10112639.cms

[v]Mikhail Gorbachev, “Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union”, The Nation, January 9/16, 2012

  

US Chair Force Inviting Drone Attacks on Our Homeland

Here's a letter I wrote to the NY Times, not published in response to their op-ed,  Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race

It borders on treason that the US Chair Force is permitted to sit at their computers, playing with their joysticks, assassinating” suspected terrorists” thousands of miles away, without benefit of evidence, charges, or trial—impersonally murdering selected targets based on “military intelligence”, a dubious proposition in these millennial times, given the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.   Does anyone believe that our computers are so finely calibrated that we are not slaughtering innocent men, women and children as well—or wreaking “collateral damage” as our military marauders are wont to call unsuspecting innocents murdered in the paths of our deadly forces?

President Obama is currently authorizing this shooting frenzy in six countries--Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, with no publishable legal authority for these unconstitutional crimes.   Even the Nazis were entitled, under America’s rule of law, to a trial at Nuremberg.  But regardless of the moral, ethical or legal considerations, what about the sheer stupidity of allowing our military to set this awful precedent that will surely result in blowback and the killing of innocent Americans?   After all, mastery of drones isn’t like arcane nuclear technology which enabled us to maintain our technical superiority, for the most part, for more than 65 years (although with the commercial push to spread “peaceful” nuclear technology to wannabe nuclear countries, giving them the keys to their own bomb factories, our technical superiority will fade).  Any computer nerd can target a drone to rain terror or death by remote control anywhere in the world.


Will somebody put a stop to our wildwest cowboys shooting off their technology, mindlessly disregarding the consequences to life and limb?   Perhaps we need a Council of Grandmothers, like the one established by the Iroquois Confederacy, with absolutely authority to remove the Chief if they felt he was engaged in an ill-advised war.  Isn’t it time to take the toys away from the boys and set our country on its proper, lawful path?

Chaos

Nuclear Chaos

Sometimes chaos comes along as a wake-up call to humanity. The double-whammy- earthquake-tsunami in Japan this week is overwhelmingly sad. To be at the total chaotic effect of the elements—to be wiped out by a wave of water from the sea, is an insult to the arrogance of modern humanity that thinks it can insulate and protect itself with technological know-how from the calamities visited upon our earth by Mother Nature. It is ironic that this catastrophe took place in earth-quake plagued Japan where scientists and engineers actually protected against this seventh largest earthquake cataclysm in recorded history, by spending billions on new infrastructure, building their homes, offices, and factories on rubber shock absorbers and reinforced pillars that merely swayed with the punch and didn’t collapse despite the enormous force from the renting of the earth—a force so powerful it actually moved Japan ten feet eastward and caused the axis of the earth to shift. Yet even the careful, methodical, Japanese couldn’t realistically anticipate the power of the tsunami well enough to protect their land against the violent onrush of the ocean in the wake of the spasms caused by the radical shift in the earth’s tectonic plates.

And while they had provided adequate technology to guard their lethal nuclear power plants even against the quaking earth, the surge of the ocean destroyed their best efforts to insure backup and shut down plans to always keep water pumping on the nuclear fuel, even during an earthquake. They were unable to avoid the loss of electricity essential to maintain and pump a constant stream of cool water to cover the radioactive fuel in their reactors, and after the pumping machines failed to deliver water to the overheated guts of the fuel vessel, they were unable to keep this foolhardy technology from “melting down” and spewing its lethal radiation across the land, and eventually perhaps across the planet, hanging like a sword of Damocles over the earth as radioactive particles are borne on the air currents that circle the globe.

More than 200,000 people were evacuated in the vicinity of the five nuclear reactors at Fukishima which may be failing. The reports are mixed and unclear from the Japanese government. We know that numbers of people were contaminated with radioactivity on their skin and clothing and that the government is distributing potassium iodide tablets to prevent thyroid cancer in people who may have been exposed to radioactivity released in a series of explosions at two reactors. Those tablets will not prevent other forms of cancer and leukemia that may increase exponentially from the release of the radioactivity at the reactors. We also know that US sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, that was sent from our military base in Okinawa to the vicinity of the accident, have now been contaminated by airborne radioactivity. Meanwhile the US mainstream media continues to downplay the catastrophic potential of so many reactors in Japan to create an environmental holocaust, where brave workers are struggling to cool their hot radioactive fuel, while industry spokespeople assure us that our reactors in America are much safer, that Chernobyl only had 50 immediate deaths, while Russian scientists recently reported that there were close to 1,000,000 cancer deaths since the dreadful accident in 1986 spewed lethal radiation over a broad swath of the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and then dispersed to many other countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

Let this chaos be a wake-up call for a time out on any new nuclear energy development. And like the massive mobilization gathering strength in Japan with emergency workers coming from all over the world to help rescue and recover the tens of thousands of people overcome in their villages by the trembling earth and fierce rushing waters, let us make a massive global effort to put a solar panel on every roof, a geothermal pump in every house and building, windmills on every windswept plain, tidal energy pumps in our rivers and seas to harness the clean safe energy of our Mother Earth.

In the words of that famous visionary thinker, Buckminster Fuller:
We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.

Nixon in China, Max Frankel and Me

Nixon in China, Max Frankel, and Me                                 February 13, 2001



by Alice Slater

This Saturday I met my friend Nellie at the Ziegfield Theater on 54th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, converted to a film house after its glory days as a Broadway Theater. We went to see Nixon in China which was being performed that day at the Metropolitan Opera and broadcast live in High Definition TV larger than life piped in to a huge silver screen with a surround sound aural system that beat the $150 orchestra seat ticket at the Met. You could see the sweat on the brow of the conductor during the overture, and just about make out the tonsils of the soprano ululating during the four separate heart-piercing high D’s as Chairman Mao’s violent wife. Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, was leader of the infamous Gang of Four that took most of the blame for the devastating Cultural Revolution that shattered so many in China during their time of terror and troubles.

John Adams the composer, as well as the conductor, has a Philip Glassian minimalist style so there’s not much to sing about in this dissonant opera. But it was great fun seeing Nixon and Mao carrying on in their groundbreaking meeting, with Pat, in her bright red dress and coat and Henry Kissinger going along for the ride with Chou En Lai. Max Frankel, the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, “reviewed” the opera today in the Sunday Times and as one who was present at those historical meetings, he was singularly unimpressed with the accuracy of the libretto. But then we had the Director of the Met talking to us on the big screen during the intermission and interviewing the singers, director, choreographer, librettist, noting what a breakthrough Nixon’s visit was to China after years of unrelenting hostilities between the two countries, ironically due to this very same Nixon’s antagonistic and provocative policies towards China. Even more tellingly, the Met Director was euphorically exclaiming to us on the historical significance of the Met’s lending its imprimatur to Nixon in China, by staging it for the first time since its debut in 1987, which just coincidentally happened to be the very day that the autocratic Pharaoh of Egypt resigned on a wave of unprecedented peaceful grassroots democracy that returned to Tahiri Square with their own mops and brooms today to clean up the mess of the last two week’s demonstrations. The live audience at the Met and our canned audience at the Ziegfield cheered wildly--acknowledging our joy at what had been accomplished in Egypt.

I had my own personal run-in with Max Frankel in 1998. India and Pakistan had just detonated their first overt nuclear tests (India had quietly tested once before in 1974 but when Clinton negotiated the Comprehensive Test Ban in 1996 and wouldn’t cut off laboratory testing and sub-critical underground tests, India broke out with a series of nuclear explosions so it wouldn’t be left behind in the technology race, swiftly followed by Pakistan). Frankel wrote a stunning mea culpa column in response, noting that the US had blown it, we had every opportunity to stop this proliferation, but we said, “I’m alright Jack. I’ve got mine” and we blew it. We did nothing to anticipate and prevent the breakout of other nuclear wannabes responding to our fierce attachment to our nuclear arsenals, unleashing potential catastrophe upon the world.

I wrote Max Frankel a long letter, thanking him for his observations and reassuring him that it wasn’t too late, we had lots of good creative initiatives to ban the bomb, we had generals, scientists, policy analysts ready to report on the enormous possibilities for ending the nuclear scourge and moving to a nuclear weapons free world, whose voices, if amplified by the New York Times would make an enormous difference in the world. He responded:


Dear Ms. Slater,
 Thank you for your note, but I am a journalist, not an advocate.

Sincerely,

Max Frankel


Several months later, Nelson Mandela announced that he would be retiring from the presidency of South Africa. We organized a world-wide letter writing campaign, urging him to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons at his farewell address to the United Nations. The gambit worked. At the UN, Nelson Mandela called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, saying, "these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction --why do they need them anyway?" The London Guardian had a picture of Mandela on its front page, with the headline, “Nelson Mandela Calls for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.” The New York Times had a story buried on page 46, announcing Mandela’s retirement from the Presidency of South Africa and speculating on who might succeed him, reporting that he gave his last speech as President to the UN, while omitting to mention the content of his speech.

I sent a copy of the front page of the Guardian to Max Frankel, writing:

Dear Mr. Frankel,

Grassroots activists from all over the world worked on a campaign to urge Nelson Mandela to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons and it was reported on the front page of the London Guardian, but I guess the New York Times didn’t think this news was fit to print!

Sincerely, Alice Slater

Three days later, I had to report to jury duty. I had been postponing my summons for over a year and this was it. No further extensions! If I didn’t serve now, they would send me to jail! I went down to the NY State Courthouse on Center Street, near City Hall and the Municipal Building. I reported to the jury room and waited in the large, smoky room where people twiddled their thumbs, knitted, read, looked at newspapers, before the days of cell phones and lap tops. One by one the citizens were called by name to report to various jury panels for voir dire, where jurors are questioned about their biases and knowledge to judge their suitability for service at a particular trial. After about two hours, they called out, “Max Frankel!” I looked up and saw this medium height, compactly built, slightly graying person walk out to the jury room down the hall. Two names later they called, “Alice Slater” and I was sent to the same jury room as Frankel. About twenty of us were standing in the marbled hallway, before locked oaken double doors, guarding the entrance to the jury room.
I went up to Frankel.

“Max Frankel?” I said.

“Yes”, he replied.

“I’m Alice Slater”.

He looked somewhat taken aback but reached out to shake my hand as the doors opened and we all filed into the jury room sitting on rows of benches to be called for the voir dire. I sat amidst a group of jurors on the bench behind his. Up on the wall was a bomb shelter sign, left over from the fifties with a fading yellow background supporting the black trefoil, a symbol of radiation. He turned around to look at me, smiling and pointing his finger towards the nuclear shelter sign on the wall. “A lot of good that will do you!” I said.

Neither of us were chosen on that jury. The next day I returned to the waiting room and there he sat, reading his New York Times and clipping out columns. And there I sat, reading my New York Times and tearing out articles for future reference. At lunch time, neither of us had been summoned and we were dismissed for lunch. I went up to him and asked him if he’d like to join me for lunch. He said he would welcome it so we strolled over to Chinatown and had a delightful meal, trading life stories and war stories. His autobiography was scheduled to be published the following month in which he describes his family’s fortuitous escape to New York from Germany, just before Hitler really got going, and his extraordinary rise to the pinnacle of the American Dream as the leading journalist at America’s most prestigious paper. He gave me his card and urged me to send him anything I thought he should see.

A few months after that he retired from the Times. We still can’t get the straight story published in that “paper of record”. I’m sure if people knew all the facts about the bomb and what’s keeping it in place, it would have been gone long ago. In that sense, we aren’t much different from the Egyptians who were kept in line for 30 years by a state controlled media and could only break out through the use of the internet. The Times is hopelessly establishment and is so immersed in the status quo, that it can’t even imagine another side to the story, or the role America plays in maintaining the nuclear terror.