The CIA recently escalated its involvement in Iran, and they ain’t there for the baba ghanoush.
Back in June the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that America’s Central Intelligence Agency had set up a new organization whose sole task would be to focus on Iran under the direction of “Ayatollah Mike” D’andrea, an aggressive Iran hawk.
“The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action,” says the report.
This alone is reason enough to be intensely skeptical of every single thing you hear about Iran. The CIA has been a consistent utilizer and developer of the science of psyops — psychological operations in which large groups of people are deceived and manipulated into thinking and feeling a certain way to advance a prefered agenda during war and during peacetime. Relatedly, the CIA also has an extensive and well-documented history of staging regime change coups to topple rival governments all around the world, including Iran. These are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.
I agree with Johnstone. We have to be skeptical. At the same time we can't look at every uprising as a CIA maneuver. The U.S. spook machine will definitely start spinning once protests spread, attempting to maximize mayhem for official enemies. But we should not confuse this with an army of agents on the ground manning the barricades and leading the protests.
The staple for the CIA is a capital-based coup, what has been dubbed a "color revolution." The protests in Iran are the opposite of the CoRev model; they're not centered in a capital but are taking place in the hinterlands where it is hard for Western journalists to report what is actually going on. As Thomas Erdbrink noted on Wednesday (see "As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet"):
The protests that broke out a week ago in other parts of Iran — but never gained traction in the capital — have shown some signs of abating, though demonstrators are still taking to the streets after dark in many outlying provinces. Elite forces with the Revolutionary Guards Corps were deployed to three of them on Wednesday — Hamadan, Isfahan and Lorestan — to help quell uprisings there.
Rural Iranian provinces are more conservative than the cosmopolitan urban centers. (The same is true of the United States of course. Trump won because of a tsunami of rural support.) The rural areas have been bedrock for the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the CIA to stage a coup built out of this bedrock would be the same as toppling Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 with Russian-speaking patriots from Donetsk instead of the neo-Nazis from Lviv who showed up in Kiev with guns. In other words, nonsense.
We have to grant agency to ordinary people; to do otherwise would be to subscribe to a type of Gnosticism where various intelligence agencies stand in for the demiurge.
My sense is that the mainstream reporting is generally correct. This is about rural vs. urban inequality, about Ahmadinejad vs. Rouhani, about domestic politics, a perspective bolstered by reports of former president Ahmadinejad's arrest.
Intelligence agencies are good at disinformation, sowing discord and dissension, co-opting already existing movements; creating campaigns from whole cloth . . . well, look at Timber Sycamore, an epic failure that might eventually be blamed for the dissolution of the European Union.
Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with the intelligence community, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.
“I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Mr. Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.
On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.
“I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop [CIA HQ in Langley] is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”
I count no less than six stories in Sunday's New York Times devoted to yesterday's women's march. Turnout is estimated to have been approximately half a million in Washington D.C. and 400,000 in New York City. Not bad.
The women's march had its colorful symbol (a pink hat), and it had it's own Shepherd Fairey poster of a woman wearing Old Glory as a hijab:
In other words, the women's march had all the makings for a domestic color revolution: robust numbers of regular citizens, fetching symbols, a supple propaganda apparatus, all in opposition to a bloated billionaire megalomaniac. What was missing was a provocative act of violence, like the Maidan snipers or the pepper-spray storm that kicked off the Umbrella Revolution.
I don't think the intention here was to send Trump and Melania fleeing from the nation's capital. I think the goal was to put Trump on notice that if he doesn't kneel to the Deep State the color revolution machinery can be fired up again easily; and the next time, protesters likely will have plans for civil disobedience. That was the great failing of the huge protests in the run up to the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- leadership did not or could not ratchet up marches to mass civil disobedience. With Moral Mondays an established part of the bourgeois protest repertoire, I think it will be much easier now to mobilize mass civil disobedience if and when it is needed.
As Erdogan rounds up his opponents following the failed coup of Friday night/Saturday morning (for a particularly good synopsis read this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley), it is worthwhile to question the level of support the putschists received from the United States. According to McLeary and Rawnsley:
How does this end? The Turkish government is lashing out in all directions, with a high-ranking member of the Erdogan government accusing Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch. Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly claimedover the weekend that “the U.S. is behind this coup attempt.” The comments “come on top of the long-standing U.S. criticism of Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which include opening roughly 2,000 legal cases against political opponents, journalists, comedians, and ordinary Turks accused of insulting the president,” FP’s Yochi Dreazen writes.
Judging from the reaction to the coup's failure in the U.S. opinion pages, the labor minister appears to be on the money. The Gray Lady's unsigned editorial today calls Erdogan's reaction to the coup attempt a "countercoup" (see "The Countercoup in Turkey").
If the U.S. was involved it must have been in a passive role. The favored U.S. method of regime change after the shelving of "shock and awe" during the Obama administration is the color revolution format witnessed in Kiev's Maidan or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. In a color revolution there has to be a mass of protesters to act as a foil for the coup plotters. The scheme is to have the protesters elicit a crackdown by security forces. The police overreaction ignites the rebellion. But there was no popular uprising here. There were no Gezi Park protests of three years earlier.
In order for this to work the coup plotters had to take out Erdogan. When they failed to do this the coup could not succeed. Consider this from McLeary and Rawnsley:
Commando raids, F-16s. Some critical details of the scope of the insurrection emerged on Sunday, which included a daring special operations raid on the coastal resort where Erdogan had been staying which just failed to nab the leader, and a harrowing incident where two rebel-flown F-16 fighters followed the president’s plane on its way to Istanbul, locking radars on the jet, but failing to fire.
As the purge of the military continued on Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of Incirlik Air Base, from which the U.S. military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. Reports have emerged claiming Van asked U.S. officials at the base for asylum, but was refused. The Greek government also finds itself in a tough spot after eight Turkish officers flew a helicopter to Greece in a bid for asylum. Turkey has demanded their extradition.
An attempt is being made to rewrite the U.S. reaction to the coup as one of immediate and fulsome support for the Turkish government. This is not how it went down in real time. Obama and Kerry were mum until it was clear that Erdogan would survive. Then they expressed their support.
I went to bed last night thinking about Egypt. I arrived there in my mind after reading a piece that appeared on the TomDispatch web site at the beginning of last month. "Three Times When the World Broke Open -- and Two When It Might Again: In Praise of Impractical Movements," by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, is a refutation of gradualism in politics, where change is engineered in piecemeal fashion by consensus of ruling elites, in favor of sudden paradigm shift powered by the ruled masses.
Nothing to argue with there. The problem I had with the essay was one of the three examples of nonviolent change offered as proof of the potency of spontaneous revolt. The Englers applaud the Serbian student group Otpor! for sparking the movement that removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in October 2000 (what is commonly classed as a color revolution though it is named after a bulldozer), something that the military might of NATO was unable to achieve the prior year. But it is well established that Otpor! received substantial assistance from the U.S. government, including training in nonviolent resistance.
This brought to mind Tamarod, the youth-led Egyptian protest movement that purportedly collected 22 million signatures calling for early presidential elections and sparked the June 2013 mass demonstrations that prefigured the July 3rd coup. It turns out Tamarod was part of the military takeover all along.
Two stories this morning provide insight into the rough shape of "astroturf" popular uprisings a few years on. The first, "Egypt Gives Saudi Arabia 2 Islands in a Show of Gratitude," by Declan Walsh, describes how the el-Sisi government has signed over two islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba in exchange for agreements with the Saudis worth billions. The second, "Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Premier, Quits Amid Splits in Post-Revolution Alliance," by Andrew Kramer, explains how the U.S. has finally eaten its Maidan prodigy, "Yats," forcing him out in favor of the "chocolate king" Poroshenko.
Re-branding coups as popular revolts does not a revolution make. These ersatz rebellions are a ruse to maintain the old, exploitative privileges which motivate the popular uprisings to begin with. It is not a sustainable model for social transformation, to say the least.
Yesterday government officials in Hong Kong debated leaders of the Umbrella Movement on television, something that would never happen in the United States, and something which did not happen during the Occupy Wall Street protests of autumn 2011. Then protesters were dismissed as infantile Utopians who were unreasonable for not articulating a list of demands that could be conveniently translated into the political/legislative process. At the same time, Obama and the Democrats appropriated the main Occupy argument about income inequality, which carried them to an impressive victory over Romney and the GOP in 2012.
Communist Party rulers in Beijing in August offered Hong Kong people the chance to vote for their own leader in 2017, but said only two to three candidates could run after getting majority backing from a 1,200-person nominating committee, which is widely expected to be stacked with Beijing loyalists.
The protesters decry this as "fake" Chinese-style democracy and say they won't leave the streets unless Beijing allows open nominations.
"We hope the Hong Kong government doesn't become an obstacle on the democratic road for Hong Kong people," [student leader Alex] Chow added. "But that it will help us dismantle these road blocks and to lead Hong Kong people to bring about true democratic reform."
[Chief Secretary Carrie]Lam reiterated the government's position that open nominations were not possible under Hong Kong law.
"The students' voices and demands have been clearly heard by the special administrative region government, Hong Kong society and the central government," said Lam, seated on one side of a U-shaped table with four colleagues facing an equal number student leaders wearing black t-shirts.
"But no matter how high the ideals, they must be strived for through legal, appropriate and rational means."
The unprecedented open debate on democracy, that put protesters on an equal footing with Hong Kong officials who have branded their acts illegal, reflected a shift in the government's approach to engage rather than shun a movement that has lasted beyond most people's expectations.
Chief Secretary Lam was careful to note that no other nominating process exists in the Basic Law other than by nominating committee. The students of the Umbrella Movement want to abolish the constituent groups that are represented in the Hong Kong legislature and make up the nominating committee. As Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong report in "On TV, Hong Kong Openly Debates Democracy":
The students and other protesters want a more open nomination process as well as the abolition of so-called functional constituencies, which are industry, professional and social groups that are represented in Hong Kong’s legislature and in the committee that currently picks the chief executive.
The government has rejected or ignored all of the students’ demands, except for their request to talk.
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, made clear on Monday that the government would only listen to what the students had to say and explain to them how Hong Kong’s political process works. The territory has a great deal of autonomy from Beijing, and its people enjoy a broad range of civil liberties that mainland Chinese lack, including freedom of speech and assembly.
If the Umbrella Movement, seeking a more popularly democratic way to elect the chief executive of Hong Kong, dismisses the pre-selection of two or three candidates by a rigged nominating committee as a "fake," then the democracy of "the greatest nation on Earth," a.k.a., the United States is also a "fake," which it of course is.
Speaking for all plutocrats worldwide Hong Kong's top official Leung Chun-ying laid it shockingly bare the other day (which surprisingly received little comment, really no comment that I saw): that a government cannot have truly popular, wide-open nominations because then the poor will have a majority voice and they might vote themselves a welfare state. The amazing story by Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley,"Hong Kong Leader Reaffirms Unbending Stance on Elections," appeared yesterday:
HONG KONG — The Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said Monday evening that it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics.
Mr. Leung made the statement during a broad-ranging defense of his administration’s handling of pro-democracy protests that have disrupted the city for more than three weeks.
In an interview with a small group of journalists from American and European news media organizations, his first with foreign media since the city erupted in demonstrations, he acknowledged that many of the protesters are angry over the lack of social mobility and affordable housing in the city.But he argued that containing populist pressures was an important reason for resisting the protesters’ demands for fully open elections.
Instead, he backed Beijing’s position that all candidates to succeed him as chief executive, the top post in the city, must be screened by a “broadly representative” nominating committee appointed by Beijing. That screening, he said, would insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state, and would allow the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality instead. Leung Chun-ying, the chief executive of Hong Kong, supports Beijing’s lead role in screening the region’s future leaders.
Mr. Leung’s blunt remarks reflect a widely held view among the Hong Kong elite [and elite world over] that the general public cannot be trusted to govern the city well. His statements appeared likely to draw fresh criticism from the democratic opposition, and to inflame the street struggle over Hong Kong’s political future.
***
Mr. Leung said that if “you look at the meaning of the words ‘broadly representative,’ it’s not numeric representation.”
“You have to take care of all the sectors in Hong Kong as much as you can,” he said, “and if it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month.”
“Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies,” he continued.
The philosophy C.Y. is espousing is of course the American way of thinking, so American it is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers were as paranoid -- if not more so -- with popular democracy as they were with monarchy or oligarchy.
So for the Gray Lady to continue to favorably spotlight the young protesters of the Umbrella Movement who are trying to implement a form of democracy that the owners and editors of the paper clearly do not support, which is to say a broadly egalitarian system, one has to note the glaring display of bad faith. This then lends weight to the notion that U.S. mainstream advocacy of the Umbrella Revolution -- something that would never be tolerated in the homeland; look at Ferguson: protesters were not allowed to stand still let alone sit down -- is part of a Color Revolution scheme "Pivot to Asia."
After what happened in Kiev last February, no wonder Beijing is paranoid.
Yesterday summer got off to a wonderful start. I ran for the first time in two weeks. My foot and leg issues, both left and right, seem to be healing well enough now that I was able to putt around on the soft artificial turf of a soccer field located in the neighborhood while a father scrimmaged with his sons kicking the ball back and forth. The Sun was high in the east and it was still early, not even 9 AM. A guy shot hoops by himself shirtless at an adjoining basketball court. An old man, also shirtless, walked back and forth in the middle of the soccer field. And I ran around the perimeter listening to my iPod. I kept looking up at the Sun. It was all too good to be true.
I topped the day off by preparing myself a dinner of two garden burgers and three-potatoes worth of homemade french fries. I then sat down and watched the 196-minute roadshow cut of The Sand Pebbles (1966), which I had picked up at the library earlier in the afternoon.
If you ever want a cure for whatever ails you, try sitting down to a Steve McQueen movie, particularly anything he did from The Cincinnati Kid (1965) to Bullitt (1968). You'll be treated to a view of American masculinity that is long gone. Athletic, laconic, working class, always butting up against the-powers-that-be, the McQueen take on heroism does not exist anymore. Now we favor super-assassins or comic book superheroes.
The Sand Pebbles, with its story of a U.S. Navy gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River when the Kuomintang took control of China from the warlords in the 1920s, premiered at a time when LBJ's going-all-in commitment to war in Vietnam was starting to arouse significant domestic opposition. The Sand Pebbles, for its time, is a surprisingly provocative anti-imperialist statement from a major Hollywood studio (Twentieth Century Fox). The message? Nations traffic in lies and everyday people -- the sailors, the coolies, the whores, the missionaries -- are merely grist for the mill.
It has been quite some time since the last "The Colt 45 Chronicle" post. The reason for the delay is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time, my wife and I watched the whole thing unfold on television, and I think we were deeply affected by it, enough at least that I wrote a fictional account of the crackdown from the perspective of an actual Columbia exchange student who returned home to Beijing to participate in the democracy uprising. I wrote it in a letter to my friend Mark who was teaching English in Madrid.
I was motivated by the Tiananmen Square student protests but also I think I was influenced by recently having read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage(1895) as I rode the subway back forth to various temporary clerical jobs. In the introduction to my Signet paperback edition it was mentioned that Civil War veterans who read the novel thought the twentysomething Crane was actually a grizzled former combatant at Chancellorsville. Instead, he was a sensitive young man who wasn't born until six years after the Civil War but who successfully conjured up the battlefield by means of his imagination.
I thought the same thing could be done with Tiananmen. So what you get is a The Red Badge of Courage inspired rendering written in the early Grunge Age by a young man suffused with the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac. It is laughable, and I was immediately embarrassed once I sent the letter off to Mark. I think the next time I saw him I even apologized for subjecting him to it. But it is what it is.
In the weeks prior to and following the June 4 anniversary, the New York Times ran many stories devoted to Tiananmen and its aftermath. I didn't have time to read many of them, but I went back later and did something of an audit. And what surprised me was how little, despite the prodigious number of column inches, was really there. It brought to mind Hemingway's idea that whatever is edited out from a piece of writing leaves a trace presence, a gravity. Papa's directive was always to cut freely because the weight of that which is eliminated the reader will feel as if by some occult power. Well, the reverse is true. Publishing story after story regardless of actual substance will create a presence, even if it is merely a mirage. This is how thought control works in the "free" Western world where media monopolies dominate with government approval.
Probably the biggest story the Gray Lady ran was on Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua, who in 1989 happened to be the student body president of Peking University. "With Choice at Tiananmen, Student Took Road to Riches," by David Barboza and Michael Forsythe, is meant to be a morality tale where the Gray Lady instructs her readers on the hopeless venality of the Chinese government. Barboza and Forsythe begin their lengthy article by writing that
A few days after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests 25 years ago, the Chinese government filled the airwaves with a list of the 21 most wanted student leaders accused of stirring up an antigovernment rebellion. At the top of the list was a 20-year-old student at Peking University named Wang Dan, who set up an unofficial student union to mobilize his classmates to demand democracy.
There was no public mention then — and there have been very few mentions since — of the head of the official student union of Peking University at that time. His name is Xiao Jianhua. Mr. Xiao never opposed the government, and the events of June 1989 did not make him one of China’s “most wanted.” Instead, they catapulted him into the ranks of its most wealthy.
But after digesting the entire story all one comes away with is a sense that Xiao Jianhua is a smart guy who worked hard within the system to make a success of himself. There is neither a portrait of feckless collaboration nor a smoking gun of corruption to be found here. I found the most compelling passage to be a description of Xiao's devotion to reading:
He grew up in Feicheng, a poor farming village in a mountainous region of the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, one of six children born to a middle school teacher and his wife. At a young age, he was, by most accounts, a voracious reader of history and literature.
“Every morning, he’d get up at 5 a.m. and jog into the hills to study,” recalled Guo Qingtao, a childhood friend from the village and later a Peking University classmate. “He could recite every text from memory. He even read the teacher’s manuals.”
At 14, Mr. Xiao passed the highly competitive national college entrance exam and won admission to Peking University. He arrived in Beijing, friends say, with tattered clothes but ambitions to be a political leader.
“He loved politics,” said Zhou Chunsheng, his college math tutor and now a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. “He wanted to be a high official, and he was reading everything — social sciences books, Marxism, the collected works of Mao.”
Mr. Xiao’s path to power was interrupted, though, by the most momentous student protests since 1919. At Peking University, the students were not just swept up in the protests, they were among the leaders of it — the ones who led a march into Tiananmen Square, the city’s axis of political power, to press for political reforms.
At the time, Mr. Xiao was president of the university’s official student union. The duties were largely social, organizing lectures and dances, but the post was coveted because of its ties to the Communist Youth League, a launching pad for future careers in the party.
But in the spring of 1989, students at the university began to march on Tiananmen Square with a list of demands both for university leaders and for the Communist Party at large. Mr. Xiao, as the titular representative of his fellow students, was caught in the middle.
“Xiao tried to tell the government what the students demanded, but some of the activists didn’t like his conservative approach, so they set up their own organization,” says Mr. Guo, his former classmate. “At the time, he was only 17 years old and was put under a lot of pressure. Feeling powerless, he went to the library and buried himself in books.”
The responsibility of pressing the student cause fell to a history major named Wang Dan, who helped set up an alternative student association at the university and organized boycotts, sit-ins and hunger strikes.
The Xiao expose falls particularly flat when one studies Andrew Jacobs' "Tiananmen’s Most Wanted" post that appeared a day before the 25th anniversary on NYT's Sinosphere blog. A "where are they now?" of seven of the 21 Tiananmen protest leaders that the Beijing Public Security Bureau listed on a most-wanted circular issued on June 13, 1989, five of the seven ended up working on Wall Street.
Can there be any doubt that Wall Street is more corrupt than the Chinese government? After all, was it China that melted down the global economy causing untold suffering that we are still dealing with? Of course it wasn't. It was the casino capitalism promulgated on Wall Street and K Street.
But China is an unofficial official enemy, and Tiananmen was the proto-Color Revolution that failed. This autumn the Gray Lady will no doubt be celebrating the proto-Color Revolution that was the mother of all Color Revolutions, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany.
Spring 1989
Democracy. Democracy. (We're on a roll now.) Looks like it's time for an American liberty & TV monoculture, globe round and China wide. -- Columbia student leaves Morningside Heights lecture hall, leaves strolls on campus greens (who knows? we might have seen him that day as he made his way to library main, text books neatly wrapped in arms), leaves for hometown Beijing when martial law is announced. Goes and joins his buddies on the SQUARE. Not much sleep or food -- but so the fuck what? Democracy rocks on old Tiananmen. Nights in sleeping bags on the hard ground under Mongolian stars and Chairman Mao (big sir) portrait. -- The morning becomes for him timeless. Early Saturday, he hears the crow of a cock, street bred and fed, as it tramps in the damp dawn dust of silent secret garbage alleys half a mile to the east; and he wakes and rolls over to snuggle into the softness and sweet smells of Mei Ju Ne, his love. She smells like summer, he thinks.
The cock crows, and its cry rips and rises out of the east side by side with the deep blue dawn sky promising a day full of the sun. He lifts up his head and cocks his ear and says to himself: "This, this is the cockcrow of the West, of enlightenment and freedom and Columbus and New York. Here I am in my birthplace, grand ancient Forbidden City Beijing, heart of the East, and I am alive . . . to it all . . . a great Western happening being announced in the East."
He sighs, letting his head fall back on old Tiananmen, and falls asleep to dreams of Broadway bookstores, 1 trains and university coffee shops. His eyes open and he sees an egg yolk hung up in the sky, and he thinks, What time is it? -- People are crazy and running all around and a dull hum is shaking his back.
The tanks come and the soldiers come. And he says, "Fuck this shit! Who do they think they are? They want to fight. I will stay here and fight with them."
He shouts -- "THIS IS OUR FUCKING SQUARE!"
So he stays. He finds Mei Ju Ne at the southern edge of Tiananmen, the area where the troops are massing; she's with some friends checking out the situation, trying to figure out if the troops are really going to march.
He grabs her. This scares her; and pissed off, she starts screaming. Friends avert their eyes, looking down at their shoes bashful and uncomfortable. He apologizes; tells her he didn't know where she was and was worried. She looks at him, and right then -- right then and there amid the fear and tension and incredible highness of everybody -- they exchange a glance of such pure sweet kindness that at that moment they know exactly what it is that they're going to have to deal with soon.
So they cut out immediately, leaving behind buddies to face and contemplate ugly green colored army, and they hustle towards the monument at the center of the Square.
The shooting starts and the tanks roll. Students scatter. A lot of the more energetic and vocal dissidents are the first to take to their heels, while some of the laziest and quietest are the most at ease in the bam and whistle of gunfire. He and Mei Ju Ne sit close to the monument and watch everything unfold. It seems unreal to them, like watching TV -- no, bigger, like a movie with Dolby sound -- a total sensory overload: Too many people running this way and that; too many people falling; too much noise and energy and confusion and fear and hate, and blood -- all that unreal strange leaping red just there -- and death, silent stupid meek sorry death littering everywhere.
And the bodies pile up and the tanks roll on. He is mad angry and teeth grinding; he wants to sprint and explode into that weak mass of frightened soldier steel, destroying it with his strength and fearlessness. But she is crying and very afraid, and he must not abandon her. So they stay, along with several hundred others, and they wait on the monument.
Eventually they come. And he sees them coming because they're not that far off. He can see the shine of the sun bouncing off round polished helmets. He puts his arm around Mei Ju Ne. She knows. The soldiers are sixty yards away and firing live rounds. He thinks back across the Pacific, back across America, to New York City, the land of his education and enlightenment, back to afternoons inside quiet subway stations, back to afternoons on the ferry looking at Liberty statuesque and ghostly green, a time when he dreamed of home, of China -- how much he felt for it, his love and need -- and his girl.
People start to drop around him. Wails moans screams -- people dying, brains spilling on stone. The soldiers have come bayonets drawn white. He hugs her to his heart and turns his back . . . .
A death, one soul vote for democracy. A Columbia student, the paper said, went back to his hometown when martial law was declared; was one of the students who chose to stay on Tiananmen Square after the People's Army began its advance. I guess he made his decision to take it on. Old big old bad ass grandpappy Death -- just the biggest thing any of us (anybody anywhere) will ever have to take on in our little chicken-scratched sojourn on the compost heap.
Two months ago today, Tuesday April 4 (which is recorded in my date book), we made our Columbia jaunt, Mark. Somewhere among the pretty fashionable liberal university babes sheltered by ivy-strewn brick walls and charcoal-black wrought iron fences was our holy Chinese saint-to-be. Fresh from bookstore browses and cigar chomping blanknesses, our most pressing and deep-felt problem was the boredom bought by too much liberty and liberality. We have switched the conjunctions in Pat Henry's famous American formula; switched it from an "or" to a"but. "
