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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JAN/FEBRUARY 2003
In time of actual war, great discretionary
powers are constantly given to the executive
magistrate. Constant apprehension of war has the
same tendency to render the head too large for the
body. A standing military force with an overgrown
executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.
The means of defense against foreign danger have
always been the instruments of tyranny at home....
Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite
war...and throughout Europe the armies kept under
pretext of defensive need are really kept to enslave
the people and alarms of foreign danger help tame the
people.
-JAMES MADISON
Of course the people don't want war....But,
after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine
the policy....And it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along....All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked....And denounce the pacifists for
lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
-HERMAN GOERING
MARLETTE
\Ne are not a nation seeking liberty as our ancestors
once found necessary. We are instead attempting to preserve
what remains against domination of powerful cults of our own
citizens who wish not only domestic rule but Napoleonic grasp
of world supremacy. It is our own power we must reign in.
The Bush administration is conspicuously flagrant in its
rapacious grab for power domestically and in the wider world.
It not only distrusts the common intelligence of the American
citizenry but generally regards it with fatuous contempt, and like
old-time Federalists is certain only a pompous, arrogant and
self-serving elite are capable of not only ruling the people but
thinking forthem also.
With the USA Patriot Act the Bush cadre are reorgan
izing the USA into a corporate militocracy under martial law.
Attorney General Ashcroft says in Orwellian doubletalk,
“We are not taking away personal liberties, we are increasing
personal security.” He equates expanded police powers with
expanded personal liberties, and says the Bill of Rights are still
in operation where deemed “appropriate.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has instituted court
action against the USA Patriot Act, which it sees as the most
serious threat to civil liberties since the McCarthy era, “a rise to
totalitarianism in its worst form."
Cities and counties across the country are taking real
issue with the USA Patriot Act by pressing resolutions upon
local governments to “revoke all sections...which limit or violate
fundamental rights and liberties" as embodied in the Constitution
(and also state constitutions), “and to oppose any new federal
legislation which abrogates these rights and liberties.”
Last year Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first city to
challenge the USA Patriot Act. Since then at least 50 cities in
more than 30 states have or are considering local repeal of
the Act, and resolutions in both Senate and House will soon
be introduced to at least overrule parts of it.
In Oregon similar resolutions have been passed or
are being introduced in Ashland, Grants Pass, Newport, Bend,
Benton County and Corvallis, which also passed a resolution
against a preemptive strike against Iraq. Portland’s resolution
failed. Astoria’s Bill of Rights Defense Committee plans to
introduce its own resolution to the City Council in February.
These resolutions might be merely symbolic as their
critics dismiss them, but so is the flag.
It is a given that every name on petitions against
the USA Patriot Act will probably be turned over to the FBI and
other interested Homeland Security agencies — but think of it as
a rollcall of honor, that the names on such a petition are a record
of proof to history that they stood up for their basic rights and
liberties at a time when it is perilous to show such courage and
freedom of opinion.
There are two ways to challenge the Constitution: to
broaden it or narrow it. The Bush administration has worked
fervently to narrow it. We will discover if our democracy actually
works by refusing to cooperate with these new draconian laws
and by replacing them and their authors through legislation and
election.
Perhaps Bush, underneath the gunfighter facade,
is beginning to unravel. Americans who haven’t already
recognized him as a fraud might finally be mistrustful of him,
and remember that his pose as president is nothing less than
fraudulent.
A part of that sense of deceit is the unalterable fact that
Bush and his closest cadre are what are called “shirkers", having
used their status of privilege to escape war service when they
were young. One might assume someone who does that will
A FIERCE & BRAVE HEART
ELIZABETH BALDWIN 1949-2002
Beth Baldwin died on what was originally Armistice
Day, an irony because she never made a truce with anything
or anybody in her lifelong fight for justice, legal, political and
personal. Another irony might be that part of her cremated
ashes were interred in a round red can of 'Roll Ready’ cigar
ette tobacco, which more or less killed her.
The rest of her ashes are in a small red cedar box
with a Haida symbol of the ‘Bear Clan' engraved on its sides.
A Haida man she once defended for beating up a cop who
attempted to arrest him for urinating in a public place said
she was a spiritual member of the Bear Clan, strong and
indomitable. That she certainly was: This is what a long time
courtroom opponent, Clatsop County District Attorney Josh
Marquis said of Beth after she died:
“We clashed frequently on legal matters but everyone
who dealt with Beth knew her to be a formidable and well
prepared lawyer. She was zealous in defense of her clients
and never gave up. . . and always gave the prosecution a run
for its money.”
Her invincible fighting spirit is more necessary than
ever this fearful repressive time since 9/11/2001, and though
she is dead long before she should have died if there were
truly justice in this world, the fact her corporeal self is no
longer with us does not mean her legacy has to die with her.
Above all Beth was a fierce and unrelenting advocate
of the First Amendment, which states clearly and simply that
government has no right to interfere with freedoms of speech,
press or religion, or with public gatherings; or the “right of the
people to petition government for a redress of grievances,"
which as a lawyer and expert of Constitutional law was Beth’s
special advocacy.
The First Amendment is the most fundamental of the
Bill of Rights because it protects all the others (and the rest
of the amendments as well). But it is under vigorous and
intense assault by the Bush administration and its so-called
USA Patriot Act since 9/11. Dissent, the most definitive and
precarious form of free expression, is especially criticized in
the current atmosphere of bellicose patriotism and is inferred
to be treasonous. Yet now when even friends and neighbors
rebuke free speech, it is essential to resist eviscerating the
First Amendment and suppressing civil liberties
A distinguishably progressive legacy for Beth should
inculcate the First Amendment, an ongoing public display of
free speech here in Astoria where she lived and fought so
vigorously for it.
A precedent for a living monument to free expression
— and legal minds are especially susceptible to precedent —
is a tribute to the First Amendment that might or might not
already be in place at the Charlottesville, Virginia* City Hall.
It is a 7-feet high, 50-feet long chalkboard on which anyone
can write anything they wish to write.
The project is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson
Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and to the
surprise of its advocates, was approved last year (before
9/11) by the Chariottsville City Council.
Newspaper columnist Ellen Goodwin wrote of the
project, “These days we tend to think of free speech as one
of those troublesome legacies of the Constitution that we have
to tolerate but not always enthusiastically." But as she wrote,
“Free speech is not something chiseled in marble to be
admired from afar. It is as messy and temporary and as
powerful as the debate over this small space."
Indeed there was debate — as most certainly there
will be when this proposal is made to the Astoria City Council
In Chariottsville people feared swearwords, swastikas, graffiti
and hate speech — questions were asked about what should
be read by children — a debate that obviously mirrored free
speech itself. As one of the chalkboard's advocates said, “We
envision the occasional racial slur, but we see twenty people
responding as well."
This is an idea Beth would support. We talked about
it once or twice, though never considering it a post mortem
legacy to her memory. She thought the public chalkboard
more symbolic than consequential: and it seemed abnormal
that the notion of a public place for people to express their
thoughts and opinions should be as provocative as it is likely
to be Yet, as she so often said, Oregon’s own state Constit
ution has a provision even stronger than the First Amendment:
Article 1, Section 8 says “No law shall be passed restraining
the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak,
write or print freely on any subject whatever; but every person
shall be responsible for the abuse of this right ”
Beth could have written those words They were
straight from her fierce and courageous heart
- michael M c C usker
This article is reprinted from the December 2002 issue
of Hipfish which is published monthly in Astoria
‘Chariottsville is the place from which the three year
Lewis & Clark bicentennial festivities began early in January
also be amenable to appropriating the presidency without being
elected.
Our brains have been mismanaged with great skill.
The distinctly Orwellian concept of economic prosperity through
perpetual war and Kafkaesque laws designed to subdue (and
punish) dissent or insurrection by the majority of the population
who are saturated with propaganda and obscuration, as well as
placating promises that are never kept
Politics makes strange collaborators, left and right
Accusations that the groups organizing large peace demon
strations all over the country against war in Iraq have
so-called communist affiliations sound more like old swipes
about peaceniks being traitors and/or dupes. In general the
progressive movement in the USA has from its very beginning
been an uneasy coalition between various groups that range
from hardcore leftists to brie-and-Chablis liberals with a few
communists, socialists and one worlders in both center and
fringe — solidarity is the key word even if many disagree with
what exactly they are in solidarity about
Attempts to discredit the peace and progressive
coalitions are sparked by accusations that anyone who
opposes the Bushies are un-American; but Americans are
Greens, Communists, Socialists, Marxists and anarchists as
well as Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians.
An illusion of democracy is that it ensures autocratic
and avaricious persons or groups do not overpower or success
fully manipulate the instruments designed to prevent or at least
restrict their ambitions. The reality is that power and wealth are
nearly enough to abrogate and overwhelm the system — and
ultimately it is tested to its very core, as now. It works only when
the acquiescent and baffled finally react with clarity and force of
mind to thwart the abuses of their liberties and political rights.
We are citizens of the most powerful nation on earth
and it is up to us to decide which direction we go — accede to
the imperial ambitions of our present leaders and their wealthy
patrons of military and economic neo-colonialism of the planet
(Pax Americana) or demonstrate to the world our own power of
democracy and check-rein the Caesarian avarice so prevalent
in contemporary American politics.
War and peace are not abstracts. They are as personal
as coitus and death. If we invade Iraq we are turning back to the
past. The way to kill ‘evil’ is certainly not by killing women, men
and children. The world has been one long slaughterhouse. Any
cry for more killing goes back to the hyena Realizing this is the
place for the future to intersect with this new millennium.
As Abraham Lincoln said, we will be judged down to
the last generation for what we do now. Graham Greene wrote,
“There is always one moment. . . when the door opens and lets in
the future."
Bikes & Beyond
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ASTORIA, OREGON
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