Anti-American Art: Gunboat Diplomacy Fail

Here's a 2006 postage stamp from the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea marking the anniversary of the burning and sinking of the American ship the "General Sherman" in 1866. The ship had entered Korean territory on the Tae-Dong river near Pyongyang. A message was sent from the isolated Korean government of the time to the ship: "You have reached the walls of our city when asked to stay put at Keupsa Gate. You insist on trading with us, which is forbidden. Your actions have created a grave situation so much so that I must inform my King and let him decide what to do with you people."

Fearing an imminent foreign invasion the Koreans attacked the ship. "The enemy ship caught on fire and began to burn. The crew faced suffocation by the stench and vapor of the burning sulphur and saltpetre. They tried in vain to put out the flames and as the smoke grew thicker and thicker they were forced one by one to jump into the water. Our troops in boats surrounded the enemy ship and captured the enemy as they tried to escape. Drill-sergeant Park boarded the ship and rescued Lee. Some of the invaders waved white flags. Most of them were hacked to pieces before they reached the shore. Others were dragged ashore alive. These tried friendly smiles and soft words to win the goodwill of our people - in vain."

Needless to say, the repulsion of this early contact between America and Korea is celebrated today in North Korea. The stamp shows the burning ship complete with burning American flag.

June 29 Is Fedaii Memorial Day

This poster of Fedaii Memorial Day was published in a magazine supportive of the Organization of Iranian People's Fedayee Guerrillas (OIPFG) back in the 1980s or early 1990s. It honors three martyrs of the struggle against the US-supported Iranian kingdom active in the 1960s and 1970s: Hamid Ashraf, Shirin Fazilatkalam, and Bizhan Jazani. I post it here not to endorse the specific politics or role of the OIPFG, but as a reminder that the struggle for social justice in Iran has deep roots; that generations of heroes have sacrificed themselves without surrendering to either religious fundamentalism or the false choices presented by predatory America.

The OIPFG was one of the major Marxist groups fighting against the Shah; when I was a college student right before the successful Islamic Revolution, exiled Iranian students held regular and powerful demonstrations at American universities in support of the ongoing struggle in Iran. I remember at first seeing almost entirely supporters of the OIPFG and OMPI (Organization of the Mojahedin of the People of Iran, a group that attempted to combine socialist and Islamic tendencies that today is more widely known as the MEK, or Mojahedeen-e-Khalq). At some point the supporters of these two organizations started to be dwarfed by supporters of the Iranian Muslim Students Association, and it was clear the nature of the struggle in Iran had undergone a significant change. (If you're a careful watcher of the movie "Cabaret," set in a Nazifying Germany in the 1930s, you'll notice the brilliant art direction has the background graffiti starting out all communisty, and by the end of the movie it ends up being all nazi. Watching this happen to the Iranian student milieu was kind of like that; I'm not actually trying to make the parallel between Nazi and Muslim just to say that the social ferment of Germany went from radical left to radical right as it seemed to have done in Iran).

The OIPFG was among the many many Iranian Marxist and Socialist organizations that were violently repressed by the new Islamic Republic. As the unforgettable 1979 Women's day chant went, "In the Dawn of Freedom There Is No Freedom." Having endured assassination of comrades, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Shah's SAVAK secret police, many secular Iranian revolutionaries soon fell at the hands of the Islamic Republic's forces of repression.

Anyway, Hamid Ashraf was an OIPFG leader killed by government agents after they broke up clandestine meeting in 1976. Shirin (Mo'Azed) Fazilatkalam was a woman revolutionary tortured to death by SAVAK in 1975. Bizhan Jazani was a theoretician of the revolutionary student and guerrilla movement in Iran; he was executed outside Evin prison in 1975.

May the future hold fewer martyrs.

A Disco Break...

It was a very hot gay pride weekend... and my computer is not in an air-conditioned room so while I recuperate let me offer up this bittersweet confection of modern Eurodisco from Robyn, a Swedish teen-star who, while now in her thirties, still dresses as if she were in her teens. Like the best of made-for-the-gays 1970s disco, "Dancing On My Own" is lyrically a fairly unhappy tune, but our heroine's spunkily combative dance moves make us know it will all turn out right. After we get even, perhaps. It's heartbreak disco, of course, but pretty fierce, and though dance music this 21st-century isn't often my cup of tea, I've been watching this video over and over again so now you get to do the same. I don't know if Robyn writes her own lyrics, but there's something gritty about these, and those for some of her other tunes. Her ouevre is well-represented on youtube: I especially recommend the interview with a Swedish TV program where she comes across as quite a complete human being. Admirable in this day and age. Enjoy/weep/dance/stay cool!

Anti-American Art: Another Scary Predator

Here's a straightforward poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL, 1983: An American bald eagle bearing an uncanny resemblance to a military airplane prepares to sink its talons into a teeny Caribbean island. The sole copy is the name of the island, "GRENADA."

The New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop came to power on the small island of Grenada in 1979. The revolutionary forces quickly established fraternal relations with Cuba and the NJM's social transformations were far-reaching. A military coup from within Bishop's government executed Bishop and a number of other NJM leaders in 1983; shortly afterwards US President Ronald Reagan sent US troops in allegedly to protect American students at a local medical school. The primary opposition to the US forces was lead by Cuban construction workers who had been aiding Bishop. After the invasion Grenada was returned to the ranks of Caribbean islands safely in the US orbit.

If you've seen the truly awful Clint Eastwood movie "Heartbreak Ridge," about how one man finds narcissistic redemption by killing some inept and overdressed commies, that was Grenada through Hollywood's eyes. Shameful.

Happy Lesbian & Gay Pride Day!

Sunday June 27 is Lesbian and Gay Pride Day in New York City, what used to be called Christopher Street Liberation Day. That's me above front and center marching in a gay pride parade in the early 1980s with my revolutionary socialist friends. That banner reads "Lesbian and Gay Libeation Through Socialist Revolution." It was, of course, bright red. Those were, as they say, the days.

I actually marched in every pride parade -- heck once upon a time we called them gay pride marches -- I attended in Chicago and New York from about 1979 to the early 1990s. I've marched with leftists and other politicos, with Pagans, with bears, and just randomly with friends. These days I'm happy to grab a half-hour peek at the parade and then park myself with some friends and some cocktails at an open-air bar and watch the party go by.

The gay pride parade, of course, memorializes the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, when the patrons of a gay bar in NYC's village refused to be subjected to yet another police raid and turned the tables on the cops. While secretive gay rights organizations had existed for decades, the days of rioting that followed are seen as the beginning of the open gay rights movement.

Here's to life! Here's to pride!

Anti-American Art: Jimmy Carter's Oasis of Doom

Iran issued this stamp and special envelope in 1986 to mark the sixth anniversary of the "Defeat of the Direct American Military Attack on Iran" at Tabas in 1980. The grim stamp shows a downed helicopter and an American corpse; the envelope's decorative cachet shows a burning American flag. This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the doomed Tabas raid.

Ordered by then President Carter, the so-called Operation Eagle Claw was an attempt to rescue the American hostages captured in the occupation of the Embassy in Tehran. An American taskforce tried to establish a secret base in the desert near Tabas: A helicopter collided with a C-130 troop transport and eight soldiers were killed; the mission was aborted. The Islamic Republic bragged that even God was on their side, He having sent a sandstorm out of nowhere to repulse the small American invasion.

More Heroic Statuary

Here's two more of my favorite heroic socialist realist statues. Above, and in detail below, is the monument "Bohaterom Warszawy," "To the Heroes of Warsaw, 1939-1945" in Warsaw, Poland. The statue shows a bare-chested woman crushed down on one knee but rising up to defend herself with a sword. It harkens back both to ancient statues of Nike, goddess of victory, but also to the 19th-century armed mermaid statue ("Sirenka") that guards Warsaw from its old city square. It was erected in 1964 at the height of the Polish People's Republic; I took these photos in 1976.


Warsaw was pretty much destroyed during the Second World War. It suffered bombardment during the Nazi invasion of 1939, but then during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1942-43 and the general Warsaw Uprising of 1944 it became a battlefield as first the dwindling Jewish population and later the Polish Home Army rebelled. Huge portions of the city were flattened and thousands and thousands of civilians were killed.

The monument really captures the heroism and desperation of the times.


This is the monument to the True Heroes of the Revolution in Managua, Nicaragua. The inscription at the base of the monument reads, "Solo los Obreros y Campesinos Iran Hasta el Fin," "Only the Workers and Peasants Will See It Through To The End" I'm not sure when after the 1979 revolution it was erected but I photographed it in 1986. It shows a young bare-chested male guerrilla with a pickaxe in one hand and a rifle in the other. The statue has a rough quality about it, and a tremendous amount of motion is captured in the lines of the figure; even his hair is wild and free.

All photos by me. Click on them to see them larger.

Anti-American Art: The Grimmest Reaper

Detail of a mural on the Avenida Bolivar in Managua in 1986: Death comes cloaked in an American flag. Photo by me (click on it for a larger view).

The Nicaraguan dictators were always special friends of the United States, and when the last Somoza was overthrown in 1979 the US wasted no time in trying to subvert the new government. When Nicaragua moved closer to Socialist Cuba and the USSR, the CIA and other forces in US government, with the full support of President Reagan, moved to finance and organize armed rebellion on the mountainous border with Honduras: the so-called Contra rebels. The mid-1980s Iran-Contra arms scandal was an attempt by the Reagan administration to illegally fund the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries with money illegally obtained from selling arms to another US enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The US-backed Contras were known for brutality and atrocity.

A modest proposal

It's clear that General Stanley McChrystal, head of the US war effort in Afghanistan, committed serious insubordination to President Obama, his boss, as reported in Rolling Stone Magazine. As of this writing, General McChrystal is heading home at Obama's request, and a meeting between the two is scheduled for tomorrow.

Now I'm not actually in the business of telling the U.S. War Machine who should be pressing its buttons. It's clear that McChrystal represents the worst of American military culture, and not only because of the repulsive counterinsurgency strategy being executed in Afghanistan or because of the casual anti-gayness revealed in the RS article. McChrystal is the embodiment of the arrogant delusion that the U.S. has the need and right to police the world, and of the big lie that turning young Americans into psychotic killing machines makes the population here at home safer.

So by all means, President Obama, you should probably fire Stanley McChrystal. But why stop there. General Petraeus? He needs to go also. Defense Secretary Gates? Him too. And before these three can plot a coup and while we're waiting for them to be brought up on war crimes charges, you should probably put them all in prison. I'd even agree that Guantanamo might be the perfect place for them...especially if you return Guantanamo to its rightful owners, the people of Cuba. Let's move on to the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yeah, fire them all. The U.S. military delegation to NATO? Time for them to go. General Odierno or whoever is in charge of the US troops left in Iraq? Have them organize the immediate withdrawal of the remaining forces and then accept their resignation. Anyone who has made a decision in the military to target Iraqi, Afghan or Pakistani civilians? Fire them. Any officer who enabled the US invasion of Iraq in the first place? Get the hook. And that military budget? I think you can find some better uses for that.

There's plenty for all those soldiers to do fighting the oil spill in the gulf, and in organizing a defensive militia and guard to protect the American people from evildoers. All those soldiers over there need to come home.

There, problem solved. Just a modest proposal.

46, El Sol

I'm late for the summer solstice! Yesterday was the longest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere. Owing to the shortage of virgins, no human sacrifice was organized for the day. Perhaps next year. Any sun gods requiring appeasement, please send a statement in triplicate with your requirements.

I'm not really a sun worshipper. I mean, I love the sun, who doesn't. But I can't really go outside and lie in it. The pale pink skin my northern European ancestors predetermined for me gets red but it doesn't really tan. Why provoke my skin's cells into cancerous subversion? Oh I love the water, as in the Caribbean, where the sun has made it warm and the goddesses of the waters have kept the water invitingly clear. But I pay a stinging price no matter how much sunblock I coat myself with.

So to the Sun I say, thanks for the warmth of the days, and thanks for not exploding into a supernova, and thanks for making the world around me lush and green, and for making a warm spot on the bed for my cat to curl up in, and for inspiring the flowers in the backyard to beauty, and for brightening the mood, and for providing much better light than eco-friendly curly fluorescent bulbs, and for glorious lightshows at sunset, and thanks for allowing me to wear bermuda shorts and sandals, and thanks for that balmy warm breeze you've sent through my open windows. Thanks for keeping the pansies on my stoop glorious, thanks for still shining when I get out of work, and thanks for what you're doing right now to all the tomatoes and fruits growing here and there so in a month or two we'll be able to taste you. Thanks for coming back every morning.

Hey, sorry about the mess down here.

Anti-American Art: Impervious to Jets

For the second anniversary of the American attack on Tripoli and Sirte, Libya issued a series of stamps practically deifying its leader Colonel Qaddafi. You can't see it on the scan, but that ornate detail around the picture of Qaddafi in the robes of a holy man is embossed gold metallic foil. While the inscription in mis-spelled English reads "2nd Anniversary of American Agression" the message is rather more focused on inducing worship of Libya's leader. He lives in a nomad's tent -- depicted here -- out back from the presidential palace, and the American attack ordered by President Reagan was in part an assassination attempt. Gaddafi was in the midst of his campaign to propagate a personal ideology around his barely readable "Green Book" (you can try it here): it's a collection of egalitarian platitudes designed to rationalize his absolute rule over the country.

Airplane Hijacking, Freedom Fighters, and the New York Times

Last week the New York Times printed a remarkable OpEd piece by Gal Beckerman of the Jewish Daily Forward entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny." The article recounts the planned 1970 hijacking of a small Soviet airplane by a group of dissident Jews in Leningrad. Arrested before they could seize their intended plane, the hijackers hoped to fly the plane to Sweden and then emigrate to Israel. Led by one Yosef Mendelevich, the hijackers hoped that successfull or not, their action "would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore." Eventually the attempt by the Soviet state to prosecute the hijackers rebounded, and a massive movement for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was born. Furthermore, as the piece puts it, "The bravery of the hijacking plotters also ignited a movement in the United States that would lead Congress, a few years later, to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld preferred trading status from the Soviet Union until it allowed tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate...As a result, not only were hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Berlin Wall and, eventually, an empire — a world-shaking transformation born from the hopes once placed on a small airplane that never even left the ground."

I am fascinated that the New York Times ran this piece, because it calls to mind other freedom-fighting airplane hijackers who the New York Times would never acknowledge in a similar way. Long before airplane hijacking came to imply the indiscriminate murder of civilians or the smashing of airplanes into office buildings, airplane hijacking was used as a desperate symbolic measure by Palestinian freedom fighters, who just like these desperate oppressed Soviet Jews, hoped it would call attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of oppressed people and snowball into events that would bring down a state that was the instrument of that oppression.

Leila Khaled was--and is--a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the left-wing faction of the Palestinian movement led by George Habash that accused the mainstream Fatah movement of Yassir Arafat of accommodation to Israel. That's her on the Palestinian wall stencil above. She led a spectacular hijacking of a TWA jet in 1969, blowing up the plane in Syria after the passengers were safely taken off. She was captured in 1970 while attempting to hijack a second plane as part of the "Black September" campaign. Released in a prisoner exchange in 1971, Leila Khaled became a spokeswoman for the Palestinian cause in later years in Jordan. The PFLP soon set aside the tactic of airplane hijackings; Khaled and the PFLP always maintained that their intention was never to harm innocent civilians in their actions, though it does seem like some actions the PFLP had connection to did unfortunately cross that line.

Now as someone who has flown in airplanes let me state clearly I hope never to be hijacked. I think it's wrong, murderous intent or propaganda-only intent, to make innocent people suffer, even if not fatally, for the faults of evil and corrupt governments. I don't think hijacking airplanes was the finest hour of the PFLP or of Palestinian freedom fighters in general. And if the PFLP didn't intend to hurt civilians, clearly those who carried on the hijacking tradition after them have had no such qualms; 9/11 RIP. But Leila Khaled was not a terrorist, only a Palestinian born in a city to which she is unable to return, and neither was Yosef Mendelevich, trapped in a country where anti-semitism ran rampant. We need not associate Ms. Khaled with 9/11 any more than the New York Times associates Mendelevich with 9/11.

Clearly, the attempted seizure of this Soviet airplane in 1970 by Jewish dissidents was inspired by the seizures of airplanes by Palestinian dissidents. We shall be quietly waiting for the Times editorial board to thank Leila Khaled for freeing Soviet Jewry. And when the struggle for justice in Palestine is finally won, and the Apartheid State of Israel is swept aside like the Apartheid State of South Africa before it, and all the citizens of Palestine are living together in multicultural secular democracy, we look forward to reading, in a reevaluation of Leila Khaled's hijacking, "not only were hundreds of thousands of Palestinians able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Separation Wall and, eventually, a State — a world-shaking transformation born from hopes the once placed on a small airplane."

(Above photo of wall stencil in Bethlehem snagged from tsweden's flickr)

Anti-American Art: Yankee Sonuvabitch

Two choice bits of Sandinista stencilry on a wall at the Mercado Oriental in Managua in 1986. At right, "YANKEE HIJO E PUTA SEGUIMOS DE FRENTE" (Yankee Son of a Whore We're Staying with the FSLN) with an outline of Augusto Cesar Sandino; at left "YANKE QUE SE RINDA TU MADRE PATRIA LIBRE O MORIR" (Yankee, Surrender Your Mother; Free Homeland or Death) with FSLN colors. Never have these two casual obscenities been used better.

Click on the photo for a closer peek.

Say Your Prayers?

This comedy video, "BP Spills Coffee," manages to capture the essence of the crisis of BP/Halliburton's Deepwater Horizon's Gulf Coast oil catastrophe. Somehow it makes me want to cry more than laugh.

On Tuesday President Obama gave a short speech from the Oval Office on the crisis and his plans to...pray for a solution to the problem. While I appreciate the complicated middle-fold in the space-time continuum that the President is trying to occupy, I found his speech cursory and confounding. The best critique of the speech I read was on the shrill and sensationalist Huffington Post, where columnist Jason Linkins suggested it sounded like a "mad lib written by [speechwriter] John Favreau."

Obama is of course right that the spill is a wake-up call about "our" dependency on oil. But not so much a wake-up call that he's advocating any specific new energy policies. Since the speech it does seem he's pushing the Senate to pass energy legislation already passed in the House, and that's a good thing. I'm sure betting Obama is regretting his ill-timed concessions to the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd just a few short weeks before BP's negligence allowed millions of gallons of crude to foul the Gulf's waters. I was excited that Obama in campaign mode focused so clearly on new energy sources like solar and wind (discounting his bizarre pandering fantasy of the imaginary "clean coal" technology), so I am glad to see him return to that focus. It will be a silver lining if this spill causes some second thoughts about new drilling and some much-needed regulatory and safety improvement.

I was fascinated to hear an interview after the speech with a local Louisiana politician who condemned Obama's words, because, she said, he was using the crisis to enact his overall socialist vision. She condemned him for his moratorium on deep water drilling, bizarrely insisting that such drilling was proven safe. As with the media's reporting of health reform, once again opposition to Obama from the right is conflated with opposition from the left. This trend reinforces the need for the "the left" to choose its formulations of critique carefully.

Halliburton, BP, and the regulators who inspected and passed Deepwater Horizons are now known to be proven cheats and liars. And this is where I think Obama is failing: he must seize control of the attempt to shut off the spewing well and clean up the Gulf. The oil companies are interested only in protecting their existing and future investments and profits. They should definitely be paying the full price of this catastrophe--the escrow fund ordered by Obama is a definite must--but they should not be allowed to lead what is actually going on there. While of course expropriation of the oil companies and nationalization of oil resources is the real solution...that's just not gonna happen for the forseeable future. Let me modestly suggest that US troops be brought home from the Middle East and Central Asia to perform the work of the cleanup. I read in the New York Times one expert suggest that BP is failing to shut off the spewing well because it's trying to preserve the well as a potential source of future income and is therefore rejecting methods that might ruin the well for the future. There is the obvious strategy of using explosives to seal off the well: if this is indeed practicable it's an example of something the government needs to do despite BP's wishes.

I'm all for prayer. It calms the mind. It connects you to spirit, to the energy of the universe. But it does not stop industrial tragedies or manmade environmental nightmares. The President's speech concluded on a hollow note; it's crucial that the full force of government be brought to ending this crisis sooner rather than later. Don't wait for BP to do it.

The prayer that seems most relevant right about now is the serenity prayer:
"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference."

Focus on that third line.

Anti-American Art: The Fiery Furnace

This stamp was issued by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) to mark the intended 1965 African-Asian solidarity conference to be held in Algiers, on the anniversary of the 1955 Bandung conference. The conference collapsed.

The stamp appears to show a group of Korean workers hurling bits of flotsam labelled "USA" into an industrial fire, presumably to reforge jeep parts into plowshares or somesuch. In the background is a more properly industrial Korean worker, and dimly in the upper right hand corner seems to be a map of Korea breaking out of chains. When tensions between South and North Korea escalated in 1994, a North Korean government spokesperson said, "Seoul is not far from here, If there is a war, it will
become a sea of fire." I wonder if this is what they meant.

The 1965 summit failed to materialize in part because of competing Sino-Soviet tensions as well as the rightward drift of the so-called Nonaligned movement.

Nicaragua 1986: the Battle of Ideas

Denounced as a beachhead of Soviet-style totalitarianism by the American government, Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution of 1979 was actually a vibrant democracy with an open civic life. What the Americans couldn't handle was that most people in Nicaragua actually supported the FSLN government. There was civil opposition from left, right, and center, with different social classes and strata tending toward different forces and parties. The disagreements were on full display on the walls of the country when I spent a few months there in 1986.

Above is wall graffiti in Managua dating from the 1984 elections. Stencils from the Communist Party of Nicaragua and its trade union federation CAUS are crossed out by a large "FSLN" and the red and black Sandinista colors: the "X" not only defaces the PCdeN graffiti, it alludes to the mark to be made in the ballot. The FSLN won handily.


Above a mural of an FSLN martyr graces a wall in Granada. A handwritten slogan reads "El llanto de las madres exigen aniquilar a los contras de Granada" or "The Cry of the Mothers Demands the Annihilation of the Counterrevolutionaries of Granada." But below the wall's upper panel is graffiti from the PLI, or Liberal Party, one of the center/right parties, reading "Yo Soy Liberal" or "I Am A Liberal" and calls to vote for the Liberal Party's candidate Godoy.


Eden Pastora was one of the heroes of the Sandinista revolution, known as Commander Zero. But he was not a socialist, and shortly after the triumph of the revolution he spectacularly switched sides and joined the side of the Contras. Here on an earthquake-ruined wall in Managua pre-triumph graffiti celebrating Eden Pastora is updated in broad strokes with the word "TRAIDOR" or "TRAITOR."


Finally here's graffiti from the walls of the ruined cathedral in downtown Managua expressing a more fundamental battle of priorities. Competing with "Sandino Vive" or "Sandino Lives," refering to the 1930s revolutionary hero the FSLN is named after, are various obscenities, mostly crude drawings of penises. The empty cathedral was, among other things, a cruising ground for gay men looking for sex and a little privacy.

(All photos by me. Click on the images to see them larger. Many more of my Nicaragua photos can be seen by clicking on the Nicaragua tag below or by clicking here.)

Anti-American Art: The Mother of All Battles

This stamp was issued in the waning days of Saddam Hussein's regime to mark the tenth anniversary of Umm Al Marik, "the Mother of All Battles," otherwise known as the First Gulf War or Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-and-allies attack on Iraq in retaliation for its seizure of the Kuwait microstate. The poorly-printed stamp is filled with meaning: a falcon shreds the American flag against a green-shaded outline map of the Arab world; a huge Iraqi flag waves in the background, the one to which "God Is Great" was added, allegedly in Saddam's own handwriting during that first Gulf War. In the background a Palestinian flag waves from the top of the Mosque of Omar, one of the sacred Muslim sites in Jerusalem/Al Quds, generally a symbol for the liberation of Palestine.

Saddam had come to power with the secularist Arab Ba'ath (Renaissance) Socialist Party. When he was backed by the United States in his bloody war against Iran in the 1980s Saddam tried to identify himself with medieval Arab heros who held off Persian invasion. When he came into conflict with the U.S., he painted himself as a defender of the Muslim world began to use much more religious language.

Here's a blustery quote from Saddam on the 7th anniversary of Um al Marik in 1998: "But God, the Most High, is digging pits on the path of the Americans. These pits, covered and dark, may get deeper with the passing of the time when their nervousness and disappointment increase. The Americans will retreat and depart, day after day, from the peak which they think they have reached when they dared to attack the glorious city of Baghdad with their bombs and missiles but the city, nevertheless, has proved to be impregnable to foreign aggression. They should, therefore, re-examine and reconsider what they are doing so that the unjust sanctions imposed on Iraq come to an end. They should also not be misled again or mislead themselves into believing that they can achieve by military aggression what they were unable to achieve by their means of malice, deception and trickery. This is because they have already tested it on several occasions and have thought after or before it that deceit, political deception by means of imposing sanctions and plotting in the dark could lead to their desired aims. The Americans must realize, and this should not be construed as a threat, that as we fought against them and endured their aggression over the past eight years, we have come to know their force and their power for causing harm, in the same manner as we presume they have known the power of the great Iraq and God's protection of it." The whole speech is worth reading for a taste of those long-ago days.

Echoes of a Past Life - Confessions of a Pornographer (part one)

I moved to New York City in 1981 to work on a socialist newspaper. The job was great, the salary subsistence level. It didn't take me more than a year or two to realize that the Big Apple was no place for no money, so while I continued for a while to design the paper on a volunteer basis, I jumped at the opportunity to take a real job for real money. My socialist paper gig had taught me the basics of professional graphic design and the publishing biz, so when my friend David said he knew of a typesetting job at a magazine company he thought the two of us could share, I eagerly agreed.

The magazine company was looking for an evening shift to cover its expanding roster, and yes as long as everything got covered, the two of us could divide up nights. Eventually David moved on to his real interest of journalism and the shift was all mine. We arrived at the office late each afternoon when everybody else was getting ready to leave. We were handed a manila folder of typed manuscripts ready to be typeset on their state-of-the-primitive-art CompuGraphic editwriter, a prehistoric dinosaur level computer with a spinning filmstrip that exposed rolls of photosensitive paper; which would then be developed in a special kind of dark-room simulating processor machine. The job was basically retyping and coding manuscripts to turn them into galleys of type that would be cut and pasted up by the art department the next morning.

There was one detail about Modernismo Publications that we needed to know. While Modernismo published a line of high-end knitting magazines in seven European languages, its bread and butter came from "Adult Sophisticate" magazines. The daytime typesetter preferred to work on the knitting magazines: she wanted little to do with "Adult Sophistication," which, it turned out, were codewords for smut. Modernismo published a line of pornographic gay magazines: Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso and Inches, and a line of heterosexual skin magazines: Juggs, Legshow, and Cinema Blue. While I was there they started an absolutely hilarious boxing magazine called Fight Beat but that's another story.

Anyway, being a red-blooded young gay man I was familiar with the gay magazines. Mandate had literary pretensions, combining legit fiction and cultural writing with fantasy stories and skin spreads, plus the occasional travel feature and actual news story. Honcho was a little edgier, focusing on hyper-masculine models, gearing its taste in fantasy in the direction of the leather crowd. Playguy, despite its catchy name, was a sort of sad orphan, showing skinny young models who looked younger than their of-legal-age-IDs, catering no doubt mostly to the dirty old man set. It was the cusp of the AIDS epidemic and while the disease was eventually going to cut a swathe through the magazine's editorial and art staff, as well as through its audience and cultural sensibility, these magazines all still adhered to a late 1970s hedonistic sensibility of newfound freedom and openness in gay male sexuality. I thought it would be a hoot to work on these.


Modernismo was owned by George Mavety, a big man almost always seen smoking a cigar. He was a sort of poor man's Larry Flynt. Rumored to have an actual family somewhere, it was not unusual to see him keeping company with some busty young blonde. Mavety was a classic entrepreneur, and while heterosexual himself, he knew the value of his property. His cultivation of gay pornography was shrewd and successful: the gay mags were staffed all with gay men and given a fairly independent editorial voice. But Mavety was well immersed in the pornography world as a whole. One day a Japanese skin magazine came to the office and took photos of the place for a feature they were writing on the American trade. That's me at my typesetting machine in the top center of this photo montage from Japan's "Bachelor" magazine. (Modernismo eventually became Mavety Media Group; George Mavety died in 2000; his gay magazines finally shut down just a year or so ago)

Of course I had to work on Modernismo's heterosexual magazines as well and that was an education. "Juggs" and "Legshow" were not "Playboy." "Juggs," whose tagline was "The world's dirtiest tit-mag" was all about women's breasts, the bigger the better. It featured chubby models, older models, pregnant models ("lactating lovelies"), anyone who would display absolutely huge breasts. Ironically, Jugg's reigning "Tit Queen," a frequent centerfold and regular columnist was the original Candy Samples--no relation to my current Drag Queen friend of the same moniker--whose breasts were each larger than her head. "Legshow" was for the legs-and-ass crowd. Both mags were mass market hardcore, which meant they could compete with anatomy textbooks for their raw display of female genitalia, but being sold on newsstands they could not show penetration or actual sex. These magazines had no literary or cultural pretensions, just crude raw fuel for male masturbatory fantasies.

The difference between the gay and straight pornography I spent my evenings typesetting was a fascinating lesson in objectification and fantasy. I'll leave a fuller discussion of that for another essay. But I took the job and became a kind of working-class cog in the real pornography industry...it was a crazy job. I'll talk about what it was like to work as a pornographer in a third essay.

Fast forward a year or two: I left Modernismo for a job at a small family-owned type shop. Turned out I was a really good typesetter. It wasn't just typing: my typographic sense and design talent and my ability to get these primitive computers to churn out better quality turned out to be a marketable skill (for a little while, anyway) and after a couple years typing smut it was time to move on. But who doesn't need extra money? I had remained friends with the editor of the straight mags at Modernismo and I asked him if I could write some stories for him. I figured even if I was a textbook Kinsey 6 of a gay man I had lots of experience in reading these stories as I typeset them, so how difficult could it be to write them? I knew I was planning to take a spring and summer off to travel to Nicaragua, and I figured I could write stories from there, send em in, and keep a small paycheck going.

I was thrilled that he agreed. He greenlighted the one story I wrote before my trip and then I sent him a small handful of stories I typed out on my trusty manual typewriter from Managua. And I got paid; not a lot, but enough to soften the blow of my return to the States after a summer away.

Now here's the thing. I wasn't going to write gay pornography, not stories I actually found hot. I was going to write crude Juggs-style porn. The stories for Juggs were hilarious to me. Compared to the gay stories with romantic subtexts, the straight stories were raw exercises in titillating escapism where average Joes lived among ravishing women wanting nothing more than pure physicality, unencumbered by actual responsibilities or real-life complications. I wanted to take the stereotypical scenarios from straight porn and the vile objectification and rude language and ridiculous cliches and see if I could subversively produce a story that I thought was amusing. And so a new pseudonym was born, Sergeant Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady.

The stories I wrote are filthy dirty, full of words I would never use and can't believe I'm going to retype for this blog. But they make me laugh every time I read them. I don't think they're exactly erotic; they're meant to be subversively over-the-top. I still had--and have--a commitment to a certain kind of (sex-positive) feminist ideal, and I didn't want to completely betray my principles, even if the scenarios I had been typesetting for so long blurred crucial lines between rape and consensuality. But I thought it would be hilarious if I, a gay man, writing in the voice of a heterosexualized lesbian, could write satirical caricatures of straight pornography and have them published as actual pornography, and that is what I did. Here is the first of these stories. I have two more of them sitting by my 'puter and will continue these in later installments of "Confessions of a Pornographer."

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"You're Under a Breast"
by Sgt. Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady
Originally published in the December 1986 issue of Juggs Magazine


[Editor's note, 2013. I decided after thinking this over and over that this writing was just too rapey to let stand. It was done with some humor that does not survive the moment, as an in-joke, and because, frankly, I was a little angry and bitter, at a lot of things. I'm not going to apologize for writing it, that would be disingenuous, but I'm gonna say it wasn't my proudest moment. So I'm pulling the actual porn story I wrote. In so doing, I'm not taking a stand against porn, or analyzing the complicated human psyche that might eroticize rape in an abstract fantasy setting; but I am taking a stand against saying that there's anything funny about actual, real rape. And I will not be adding the two other porn stories I wrote to the "Echoes of the Past" series. Sorry if you've been waiting all these years for the follow up. Live and learn. Respect each other. —ISH]

Anti-American Art: The Brink Last Time

"Yankee Imperialism, Out of South Korea" says this 1969 poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL issued to mark the "International Month of Solidarity with the Korean Students and People." Above the headline is a fairly threatening depiction of the North Korean People's Army and the North Korean flag that could be ripped from today's front pages. According to a remarkably information-free press release from Cuba in 2009, Cuba and North Korea brag of "an excellent state of bilateral relations."

Although there's a natural affinity between common enemies of the United States government, many speculate that the ideological replacement of Marxism-Leninism with the "Juche ideal" (self-reliance) in North Korea has fundamentally changed North Korea's ideological sense of self. It's hard not to think that wouldn't effect the spirit of relations with the few remaining nominally Marxist-run states. In "The Cleanest Race" author B.R. Myers argues that North Korean ideology is actually a unique and essentially racist form of nationalism. Fascinating excerpt here.

Beneath Your Feet

It's obvious that the main square in Mexico City is old. The cathedral and buildings ringing the square date from Spanish colonial days; and the stones from which these buildings are constructed from speak of earlier days, because of course many of these stones were from the glorious Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, ripped down after the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. You come to realize what it means that Mexico City is the oldest continually occupied city in the Americas.

I went to Mexico city in 1985, a few years after the amazing discovery--obvious in retrospect--that a few inches under the plaza, vast ruins of Tenochtitlan had remained undisturbed and unnoticed for four hundred years. Some careful excavation produced portions of the Templo Mayor itself (details shown above and below; photos by me), the main pyramid of the Aztec city. Other excavation revealed treasure troves of statues and artifacts.

Mexico is not the only place where the monumental past is literally beneath your feet. Elsewhere I've read that in the flat portions of both Iraq and large swathes of the American midwest, any rise or hill is not likely to be a natural formation, but the remnant of a Mespotamian ziggurat in the Iraqi case, or an Indian temple mound or burial mound in the American one. I guess there's a lesson there about what we think of as permanently important.