A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Bangalore may be the modern face of India, but it’s paralyzed by traffic. Nothing moves. International businesses are having to relocate into the hinterland. There is, so our host Ashwin Mahesh tells us genially, no central traffic authority. Ashwin, ex-NASA researcher, educated at UW, then with a stint at NASA’s Goddard Center under his belt, returned to India to run a fine, public-interest website, india-together. From the sixteenth floor of South Tower, where he and his wife live, we are well situated to review the grid-locked traffic. Ashwin has already modeled some ideas for traffic relief which are under consideration.

  April 7

  Chennai. Here I am on the coast of Coromandel. At last a city with the feel and pace of an older time. We go to the guesthouse of the Asian College of Journalism. I give a talk to the students. Then off to a terrific Chettinad restaurant, though in my order I foolishly include curried partridge, which is disappointing as all partridges have been for the thirty-four years since I ate a good one, braised in whiskey and cream.

  I drive around with Ashwin, who’s come from Bangalore to visit his parents. We drive through the Theosophy Canter, the sanctuary of Annie Besant, also of a banyan of international repute, though now dying. Then we pace about on what is officially classified as the third longest beach in the world. There aren’t many women, and no one in bathing dress. The great tsunami of last Christmas washed in over this beach and about three-quarters of a kilometer inland, with a total of forty lives or so lost in all of Chennai.

  April 8

  We go down to a heritage center south of Chennai called Dakshina Chitra, which is really good, with excellent reconstructions of vernacular Indian architecture of an earlier time in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Looking at the wooden buildings reminds me of how much Indian architecture of the past fifty years is truly awful.

  I distinguish architecture here from landscape. Indian landscapes, whether rural or urban are certainly what one might call “thick,” just as most American landscapes are “thin.” In India, from a foot in front of one’s nose to the horizon, there are infinite medleys of planes and perspectives. There is no thin air, no emptiness. There’s the street life, the endless small shop displays and signage, the billboards above, the animals, the stalls, the cars and buses overtaking each other at sixty miles an hour.

  The overall effect is endlessly inspiriting, with palette after palette of tumultuous greens, blues, yellows, pinks, and reds deployed on saris, racks of clothes, aging advertisements. Anyone tired of an Indian streetscape or country road is truly tired of life. But the architecture itself is mostly drab cinderblock.

  April 10

  I give a talk at the Asian College of Journalism on the war in Iraq. There’s a fine turnout and many questions. N. Ram, the editor in chief of the Hindu, which sponsored the event, is unable to attend, with the rather good excuse that he was meeting the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jibao, touring Bangalore and Chennai that week.

  The Hindu, circulation a million plus, and now Sainath’s home port, maintains decent standards and reminds me somewhat of the London Times thirty years ago, when a salvo from the editorial page could alter the contours of a whole political battlefield. Ram invites Sainath and me to drop by his house in Chennai the next day, and we do so. When we arrive, his charming wife says that he cannot be with us for a few minutes because he is finishing his editorial on Chinese-Indian relations. She says this with a tinge of gravity, of reverence for the solemn rite of editorial composition that takes me back to the distant years in the ’60s when the presses at the Times would be held while the editor in chief, William Haley, wrestled unrighteousness to the ground in the “first leader,” as the prime editorial was called in England in those days. These days editorials count for nothing in the US. Few read them except for press secretaries and lobbyists. They have no weight.

  In due course Ram emerges from his editorial labors, looking weighty, and treats us to an interesting disquisition, which I correctly assess to be the burden of his impending editorial, on the evolution of Chinese-Indian relations since the late 1940s. Then he shifts to a description of his shock when he attended the reunion of his class of ’68 of the Columbia Journalism School last year: at a meeting to discuss the burning issues of the day he heard not a word of condemnation of the US invasion of Iraq, so rose to his feet and denounced it himself. He said there were several hisses from other J School grads. It was bracing to find a newspaper editor—probably India’s premier editor in terms of political clout—talking like that; bracing too to hear later that in his younger days Ram endorsed a strike at the Hindu and was promptly exiled from the paper’s premises by his father, then the newspaper’s boss.

  April 11

  Back to Mumbai. Sainath’s friend Sudarshan invites me to APNE-AAP, a foundation he runs, in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red light district along the Falkland Road. The foundation has some rooms in an old school, and these are now filled with cheerful kids. The idea is to give children of prostitutes a chance to get out of the life, get some education, get a chance. It’s the dearest dream of the prostitutes, many of whom haven’t much hope of living past thirty-five, taken off by AIDS or TB. The women working at the drop-in house get the prostitutes ration cards, take them to hospital, run savings accounts for them—over 200 when I was there—where they can squirrel away ten rupees (25 cents) or so a day for their kids.

  Without such help the prostitutes get turned away by hospitals and kindred bureaucracies. Already there are 150 kids who’ve graduated, and sixty-five currently in attendance. Only one graduate has gone into her mother’s line of business. I like the atmosphere, mercifully free of social worker sanctimony. APNE-AAP’s staff, Manju Vyas, Preethi, Diplai, and Bimbla, are all in good spirits and very impressive.

  We walk over to a huge old brothel built by the British a hundred years ago for their garrison. Back then the prostitutes were Tibetan or Japanese. These days they’re from Nepal or Bangladesh. The middlemen procuring the girls from their parents get 20,000 rupees or more from the madams. The rooms in the brothel are about ten foot by ten foot, with two tiers of beds and families of four or five cooking and chatting. When a customer shows up and forks over his 50 rupees they presumably stand outside. The girls greet us in friendly style and some of them covertly slide over their 10 rupees to the APNE-AAP women, out of sight of husband, or pimp, or madam. It costs residents 50 rupees a day to rent a bed. Five rupees buys you a bucket of water. Electricity costs 150 rupees a month.

  After an hour or so I bid them adieu and go off to the Royal Yacht Club to read for an hour or two before Sainath and his wife Sonia throw me a farewell dinner.

  As we wait for friends to arrive, Sainath reminds me of the bit in Tacitus’s Annals where he describes how condemned people were recruited to serve as candles at Nero’s parties: “they were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle.” “What sort of sensibility,” Sainath broods, “did it require to pop another fig in your mouth as one more human being went up in flames?”

  And by the same token, Sainath asks, what sort of indifference has it required for India’s rich—and the very rich in India are the among the richest on the planet—to disport while millions starve not far off, and thousands of peasants kill themselves, some of them less than fifty miles from Mumbai where much of India’s wealth is concentrated, and where “theme weddings” costing millions have been the rage? Last year an Indian steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, and his wife Usha promised their daughter Vanisha a spectacular wedding. They cashed the promise by renting Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles in France for the nuptials. The six-day-long wedding bash cost over $80 million and was attended by more than 1,200 guests including leading Indian industrialists and celebrities from the Bollywood film scene.

  Just as interesting, I remark to Sainath, as the festivities and excesses of the rich is the mindset of the policy makers, the intellectual formulators of neoliberal policies that th
ey well know will cause terrible suffering. What processes of self-exculpation insulate them from a policy (say, the planned shrinkage of India’s small farmers by 40 percent), and the execution of that policy, inflicting terrible privations and early death on millions?

  April 29

  Weather can wipe out cities forever. It’s what happened to America’s first city, after all, as a visit to Chaco Canyon, northeast of Gallup, NM, attests. At the start of the thirteenth century it got hotter and by the 1230s the Anasazi upped and moved on. As the world now knows, weather need not have done for New Orleans. There are decades’ worth of memos from engineers and contractors giving budgets for what it would take to build up those levees to withstand a Force 4 or 5 hurricane. The sum most recently nixed by Bush’s OMB—$3 billion or so—is far less than what the Pentagon simply mislays every year, without even taking the trouble to convert the appropriated cash into cruise missiles or boots.

  For much of its post–Civil War existence New Orleans was always a pretty desperate city, despite its boast of a few years ago that it had the highest number of millionaires in America’s fifty largest cities. I remember that in the year that G. Bush Sr. accepted his party’s nomination in the Superdome in 1988 some 26 percent of the inhabitants were below the poverty line and 50 percent could be classified as poor.

  The scarcely suppressed class war in New Orleans was what gave the place, and the music, its edge, and why, at least until now, the Disneyfication of the core city could never quite be consummated. Barely had the hurricane passed before Speaker of the House Hastert caught the Republican mood nicely with his remark that the city should be abandoned to the alligators and Barbara Bush followed through with her considered view that for black people the Houston Astrodome represents the ne plus ultra in domestic amenities.

  Music and street food are what anchored the city to its history. On any visit, you could hear blues singers whose active careers spanned six decades. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown finally left us last week at eighty-one. I heard him at Jazzfest this spring, and though the Reaper was at his elbow, Gatemouth Brown still fired up the crowd. “Goodbye, I hate, I hate to leave you now, goodbye. / Wish that I could help somehow. So long, so long, for now so long. / I pray that I return, return to you some day. You pray that it shall be just that way. So long, so long for now, so long.”

  May 2

  A highlight of the New Orleans Jazzfest was the tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, courtesy of Marcia Ball, Tracy Nelson, Mairia Muldaur, Angela Strehli, and special guest Irma Thomas. They were all strong, but Irma Thomas blew everyone away with “Beams of Heaven.” Not a dry eye in the Blues tent, including her own.

  On a less portentous level, a big moment for me was Ike Turner’s set, also in the Blues tent, a day earlier. Ike of course has been in disgrace ever since Tina’s descriptions of his violent abuses.

  Ike was terrific. Everything was wonderfully tacky, from the one-size-fits-all maroon suits of his band, looking like fugitives from a bad early ’60s movie about Billy Haley, to Ike’s own sequined, white, purple, and gold jumpsuit like a hand-me down from a late-Elvis wardrobe. His current Tina-like is (though you wouldn’t learn this from Ike, sparse with acknowledgement of his fellow musicians) Audrey Madison, gorgeous and with a big voice. Also a Tina-type wig. Some in the crowd thought this tasteless and left. Ike claimed that he’d just discovered her in Memphis three months ago. Jeffrey St. Clair heard him say the same thing in Portland, Oregon, back in 2001.

  Ike was a great musician as always, on guitar and piano. Of course he sang “Rocket 88,” deemed by many the first rock ’n’ roll song, released in 1951 (and immediately covered by Bill Haley). By the end the act had the initially cool crowd roaring. Ms. Audrey, with her big voice, tumultuous bosom and increasing confidence, had a lot to do with it, though you wouldn’t know this from the guy in the band who roared into the mike during Audrey’s huge finale, “Ike Turner! Ike Turner!”

  May 27

  Discussing an Iraqi faker touted by the Bush administration, I recently wrote that “In atrocity stories there are some things that don’t ring true, even when dealing with such well-credentialed butchers as Saddam and his sons. Take the story, subsequently identified as one concocted by a Western intelligence agency, that Uday had put some of his victims through a wood chipper. Anyone using these chippers knows the damn things jam if inconvenienced by anything with a diameter larger than that of a stick of asparagus, let alone an Iraqi human, however scrawny. Uday’s chipper, whose origin can probably be traced to a scene in the movie Fargo, just didn’t pass muster, same as the incubator story from the first Gulf War, first identified in this column as intrinsically preposterous.”

  I was being slightly frivolous about the wood chipper, but the letters poured in:

  Mr. Cockburn,

  I imagine this will be but one of many, but what kind of piss ant wood chipper did you train on? I routinely use a medium sized chipper that will take up to 2′ to 3′ branches of green wood, and I don’t think it would have much trouble with a person’s arm, or even a leg. (And by the way, commercial wood chippers rarely jam.) Now whether you could get a whole human through one, I don’t know, but I’ve heard of really sweet guys putting small animals through them just to watch the spray, so I suspect that if you did a bit of selective drawing and quartering you might eventually be able to do a whole body. But what mess. And what would be the point, even for someone like Uday? You’re right, the idea is farcical. But asparagus as an upper limit is off by several orders of magnitude.

  Nicholas Dykema

  Cleveland, Ohio

  June 1

  I hate surprise parties and now the scientific evidence is in. Surprise parties can kill. To put the matter in scientific terms: Emotional stress can precipitate severe, reversible left ventricular dysfunction in patients without coronary disease. Exaggerated sympathetic stimulation is probably central to the cause of this syndrome. Or, in the words of the press release from Johns Hopkins:

  Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that sudden emotional stress can also result in severe but reversible heart muscle weakness that mimics a classic heart attack. Patients with this condition, called stress cardiomyopathy but known colloquially as “broken heart” syndrome, are often misdiagnosed with a massive heart attack when, indeed, they have suffered from a days-long surge in adrenalin (epinephrine) and other stress hormones that temporarily “stun” the heart …

  The research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of catecholamines (notably adrenalin and noradrenalin, also called epinephrine and norepinephrine) into the blood stream, along with their breakdown products and small proteins produced by an excited nervous system. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to a typical heart attack, including chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure.

  Of course, many rituals in our society have a furtive homicidal intent, most notably those fraught sessions known as family reunions. Grandpa and grandma drive to the event, get mildly looped, head for home and are wiped out on the Interstate by a semi when grandpa pulls out of the rest stop. Father keels over when he opens the front door to see a plump faced man vaguely resembling the daughter who left home all those years ago saying in a throaty voice, “Hi, dad.”

  So please, no surprises.

  July 9

  The terrorists’ desire is to show the enemy precisely that they—the terrorists—are sane, but implacable. When the Conrad-era French anarchist Émile Henry carried a cooking pot filled with explosive and 120 bullets into the café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in February, 1894, touched his cigar to a fifteen-second fuse and strolled out, his plan was to kill ordinary, relatively humble people—shopkeepers, clerks and salesgirls—having a beer and listening to the band.

  “Not ‘innocent,’ ” he claimed later. “These beer-drinkers
, petty bourgeois with a steady salary in their pockets, are the ones that always line themselves up on the side of the powerful, ignoring the problems of the workers. They hate the poor more than the rich do!” Many anarchists promptly repudiated him. “At least have the courage of your crimes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie,” Henry declared to the court that condemned him to the guillotine, “and agree that our reprisals are fully legitimate.” Reprisals for what? “Are these not innocent victims? Children dying slowly of anemia in the slums … Women turning pallid in sweatshops … Old people turned into machines for production all their lives and then cast on the garbage dump and the workhouse when their strength is exhausted.”

  July 10

  A jury has found against a South Carolina doctor who referred a patient for electro-shock treatment that left her permanently impaired. The patient, Peggy S. Salters, is a sixty-year-old former psychiatric nurse. She was subjected to thirteen electroshocks within the span of nineteen days. The jury awarded her $635,177.

  The jury found that her loss of thirty years of memory and cognitive impairment—which are demonstrable symptoms of brain damage—was due to ECT. Maybe this decision will give shrinks pause before they send the next poor soul off to get battered on the head with an electric club. A press release from Linda Andre, President of Committee for Truth in Psychiatry (CTIP) adds that 100,000 patients in the US undergo electroshock annually—many against their will.

  As Andre writes, “ECT is dominated by medical cowboys who push the limits of intensity of electric shock as they please. In his deposition (May 24, 2005) in Peggy Salters’s case, Dr. Fink defended the administration of thirteen intensive ECT treatments in nineteen days stating: ‘There are no absolute limits on the low side or to the high side if you’re going to give a patient a treatment … I have personally treated patients twice a day. And there was a time when I gave patients eight treatments in one sitting, you know, on an experiment [!!] that we did many years ago. So, yes, I have treated patients with eight seizures in a morning … It was called multiple monitored ECT. It was a government-supported project in an effort to find out if we can speed up the response.’ ”