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The Governor's Reservations in El Paso By Karen Olsson

0 THIS ISSUE FEATURE In Search of the ligua by Karen Olsson 8 Texas was never much interested in the welfare of the El Paso Indians, until they started to horn in on the state's gambling monopoly. Farewell to Barry G. by Nate Blakeslee 13 The memory of Barry Goldwater was not much in evidence at the Texas G.O.P. convention, and the R's may be guilty of rank ingratitude. DEPARTMENTS BOOKS AND THE CULTURE Dialogue 2 Truth to the Point 25 VOLUME 90, NO. 13 Poetry by Sue Dwyer & Editorial A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES The Death Penalty on Trial 4 Lois Marie Harrod We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are by Louis Dubose lennessee in Houston 26 dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of human-kind as the foundation Dateline Texas Theatre Review by Michael King of democracy: we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrep- One Night in Jasper 5 Stealing Home 28 resent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. by Susan Lee Solar Book Review by Lisa Tozzi Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in Political Intelligence 16 Afterword 30 publishing them we do not necessarily imply that we American the Beautiful agree with them, because this is a journal of free voices. Las Americas 18 by Michael Erard SINCE 1954 Bank-robbing Bankers Founding Editor: Ronnie Dugger by John Ross Back Page 32

Publisher: Geoff Rips James Galbraith 20 An Epistle from the Southern Editors: Louis Dubose, Michael King Baptist Convention Assistant Editor: Mimi Bardagjy Global Warning

Associate Editor: Karen Olsson Jim Hightower 21 Cover art by Valerie Fowler Poetry Editor: Naomi Shihab Nye Production: Harrison Saunders Travel Scams, Merger Scams Business Manager: Jeff Mandell & Scanning Scams Staff Writer: Nate Blakeslee Molly Ivins 22 Development Director: Nancy Williams Editorial Intern: Justin Burchard Tobacco's Death Ride & G.O.P. Pranks Contributing Writers: Bill Adler, Barbara Belejack, Robert Bryce, Brett Campbell, Lars Eighner, James K. Galbraith, Dagoberto Gilb, James Harrington, Jim High- tower, Molly Ivins, Paul Jennings, Steven G. Kellman, DIALOGUE / Jeff Mandell, Bryce Milligan, Char Miller, Debbie Nathan, John Ross, Brad Tyer. HARD CHOICE any circumstances, to provide institutional Staff Photographer: Alan Pogue The Observer is at the height of its glory. suicide. For those prisoners who are truly Contributing Photographers: Vic Hinterlang, Patricia Moore. About "A Long Journey" by Michael incorrigible, effective and humane prison Contributing Artists: Eric Avery, Tom Ballenger, King (June 5): I face a dilemma about the reform is the only permanent solution. Richard Bartholomew, Jeff Danziger, Beth Epstein, Valerie Fowler, Kevin Kreneck, Michael Krone, Ben death penalty. A life in prison is more hor- Sargent, Gail Woods. rible than death. Would Michael. King live NOT DISPOSABLE Editorial Advisory Board: David Anderson, Austin; Thanks to Karen Olsson and the Observer Elroy Bode, El Paso; Chandler Davidson, Houston; with the idea that if the defendant re- Dave Denison, Arlington, Mass.; Bob Eckhardt, Austin; quested death it could be given? • for the report on I.B.P. ("Chain of Casual- Sissy Farenthold, Houston; John Kenneth Galbraith, ties," May 22). The future of Texas scares Cambridge, Mass.; Lawrence Goodwyn, Durham, N.C.; Otto B. Mullinax Molly Ivins, Austin; Larry L. King, Washington, D.C.; Dallas me. Who will end up taking care of these Maury Maverick, Jr., San Antonio; Willie Morris, Jack- disabled people? Will it be the taxpayers? son, Miss.; Kaye Northcott, Fort Worth; James Presley, Texarkana; Susan Reid, Austin; A.R. (Babe) Schwartz, Michael King replies: Frank Apple thinks nothing of two young Galveston; Fred Schmidt, Fredericksburg. That is high praise indeed, and we shall try men losing their right hands.. should In Memoriam: Cliff Olofson, 1931-1995 THE TEXAS OBSERVER (ISSN 0040-4519/USPS 541300), entire contents to live up to it. copyrighted. 1998, is published biweekly except for a four-week interval between issues in January and July (24 issues per year) by the Texas Democracy ,I share with Otto Mullinax strong mis- KUDOS Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. 307 West 7th Street, Austin, Texas 78701. Telephone: (512) 477-0746. E-mail: observerigtexasobsirver.ot givings about life sentences,. since "life The Texas Observer has been named a • World Wide Web DownHome page: http://texasobserver.org . Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, Texas. without parole" is all too easily prescribed - winner of the 1998 Synergy Awards SUBS: One year $32, two years $59, three years $84. Full-time students $18 per year; add $13/year for foreign subs. Back issues $3 prepaid. Airmail, for: as a way of sidestepping death sentences. • for Environmental Excellence. The eign, group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. without otherwise addressing the heavy in Observer was cited for outstanding INDEXES: The Texas Observer is indexed in Access: The Supplementary equities of the current criminal justice sys-; . Index to Periodicals; Texas Index and, for the years 1954 through 1981. coverage of environmental issues, par- The Texas Observer Index. • tem. But very few prisoners actually fac- POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE TEXAS OBSERVER, tiCularly about air quality. The awards 307 West 7th Street, Austin, Texas 78701. ing death would agree that life,,even in a • are sponsored by the Citizens Environ- Texas prison, is more horrible; and.the mental Coalition, based in Houston. state has neither right nor authority; under

2 ■ THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998

lrl WE'RE ON VACATION! The Observer staff is taking its annual summer break, hoping to re-connect with family, friends, fishing, cooler cli- Chat 8t Chew With mates, and maybe even cleaner air. The Austin office will be closed July 1-15. Our next issue — Summer Books Jim Hightower 1998! — will be dated July 31. Purchase or renew a subscription to the Texas Observer be ashamed of themselves allowing Terry and you could win lunch with Jim Hightower, legendary wit, Zimmerman to hound victims right after raconteur, progressive philosopher, and the first an accident for, a signature on that [liabil- radio talk show host fired by Mickey Mouse! ity] waiver. I don't believe anyone should sign their rights away in order to get a job, The winner gets round-trip airfare to Austin and lunch at either. This should all be against the law. I Threadgill's World Headquarters with Jim Hightower, receives feel I.B.P. in Amarillo, Texas has a very a signed copy of his most recent book, There:9 weak union for allowing all of this to go on. People are not disposable, or have dis- Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow posable parts. Stripes and Dead Armadillos, and gets to Our state representatives are allowing watch the live broadcast of Hightower's this in Texas. It looks like to me our repre- nationally syndicated radio show. sentatives are looking out for the big businesses and forgetting about the people So subscribe today! You'll also save who make these big businesses BIG! 56% off the cover price. Su Klumpe Greeley, Colorado ❑ I want to subscribe to the Texas Observer. STAND CORRECTED Name The reviewer's notation, "Succeeding Address Dobie, Graham has spent..." in the May 22 City/State/Zip Observer article on Don Graham's Giant Country could be misleading ("Between 11] 1 year: $24 ❑ 2 years: $48 ❑ 3 years $72 Mythology and Experience," by Michael New Subscription Renewal King). Mody Boatright was the first after ❑ ❑ Dobie to teach "Life and Literature of the Southwest." An instructor in English in• To be eligible, subscriptions must be received and paid in full by August 15, 1998. The Observer will the 1940s, I took the course under Profes- provide round-trip airfare for one person, from any Texas airport served by Southwest Airlines; hotel accommodations will not be provided: Valid only for full-priced subscriptions (student-rate subscriptions sor Boatright, and subsequently graded excluded). One entry per one-year subscription; two entries per two-year subscription; three entries per papers his students wrote for it. • • three-year subscription; in the case of gift subscriptions, the recipient will be entered in the drawing Carl Wright unless .the payor, in writing, requests otherwise. Please address all questions to the Texas Observer, •Lockhart .307 W. 7th Street, Austin, TX 78701; (512) 477-0746; [email protected] .

MARVELOUSLY WILD, • Y' all are a much-needed voice in these tently disappointed in the fact that it. • nal and, indeed, Texas itself, as something wild times. shunned the arts-and culture as a whole, worth any consistent serious attention. So,

Keep it up.. • • dealing. almost exclusively with Texas, it-was years before I picked it up again, DR. Marvel while hoeing a hardball political line only, only to see this issue, which was a delight. Via Internet at times shying away, from truly. sensitive Poetry edited by Naomi Nye, an essay on issues: The' Observer was often useful, • the old gringo, Zapatistas, Books and the DULL AS TEXAS?, but, like Texas, dull. Though the journal • Culture, right along with sensitive state is- Thanks for your fine issue of March 27..I• continued to do good things, its narrow. sues. Great things. I may even take out a have been reading the Observer since the, scope in a state which needed so•much subscription that I dropped long ago. • sixties, and. though I have always seen the. more, while other Texas journals practiced Jimmy Jackson importance of the magazine, I was consisr the same failure, ,made me•dro.p.the jour- Austin

JULY 3, 1998., THE TEXAS ,OBSERVER .• 3 EDITORIAL Innocents Abroad San Jose, Costa Rica, June 12-13 One by one addressing the court with the rhetorical formalism that characterizes legal proceedings conducted in Spanish, the representatives of six countries joined Mexico in a case that might have been styled: The Hemisphere vs. the United States.

egal counsel for Costa Rica, El sular office. "You heard the representatives Virginia in April, and a conflicting ruling by Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, of the Inter-American Commission on the smaller, less-established O.A.S. court, Paraguay, and the Dominican Re- Human Rights," Beltran said. "There are Crook said, could appear "unseemly." public all appeared at the classical- three or four areas in which a foreign de- The ridiculous was left for Catherine L tainee is extremely vulnerable: understand- Brown. Any ruling, she said, that creates revival house that serves as the seat of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, to ing the legal system; familiarity with lan- "special rules relating to consular notifica- present variations on a theme: that foreign guage; awareness of legal rights; and the tion in cases in which the death penalty is nationals arrested in any country, and in knowledge that he has a right to an attorney. imposed ... will have no implications for particular foreign nationals who might face The hours that immediately follow arrest countries that do not impose the death execution, must immediately be informed greatly influence the outcome of the trial." penalty," and therefore would distort the of their right to see their consular officials. "universal character" of the Vienna Conven- And — that access to consular officials is urteen of Mexico's U.S. capital con- tion. In other words, countries that apply the an individual's human right, guaranteed by victs are awaiting execution in death penalty would be unfairly singled out. Article 36 of the Geneva Convention. Huntsville. California is second, Along with several reasonable arguments — The Organization of American States court Fholding thirteen on its Death Row. related to delay in response from foreign was set up in 1978, to enforce the American But, Beltran said, "California doesn't execute consuls and foreign nationals who when ar- Convention on Human Rights. The United with the awful regularity of the State of rested claim to be U.S. citizens — Brown ar- States is a member of the O.A.S., but the Sen- Texas." Other nations had an interest in gued that access to consular offices might ate has not ratified the treaty that would make Texas. Honduran director of consular affairs give "a foreign national more favorable the U.S. a member of the court. Nonetheless, Mario Fortin Midence told of flying from treatment than a national." the State Department dispatched four lawyers Tegucigalpa to Arizona — in a futile attempt She also discussed the case of a Mexican to San Jose. State Department lawyer Cather- to stop the execution of one Honduran citi- convicted of committing murder for hire ine Brown said the U.S. is concerned that an zen, then traveling to Huntsville to attempt to when he was nineteen: "He had lived in the unfavorable ruling might result in access to stop the pending execution of another. And United States since he was four. He spoke consular officials becoming part of due pro- Claudio Marmolejos, the Dominican Re- fluent English. He has an American stepfa- cess in U.S. criminal prosecutions. public's representative to the O.A.S., told ther. He was familiar with the American ju- Mexico was indeed arguing that the cases the seven-judge panel that a Dominican cit- dicial system and had a previous relationship of its thirty-nine citizens on death row in the izen had been executed in Texas — with no with an American lawyer, whose assistance United States (where they had not been in- notice of his right to see a consular official. he had requested." Mexico, Brown argued, formed at the time of arrest of their right to see The response of the U.S. attorneys — a "would have this court assume that every a consular official) should be retried. "I know procedurally competent team of innocents foreign national is unfamiliar with the re- the U.S. government will not respect this abroad — ranged from the ridiculous to ceiving country's language and law." court's ruling...,' . ' Mexican government attor- the sublime. The sublime was an interesting As the trial began, the Washington, D.C., ney Ruben Beltran said to reporters. "But a fa- jurisdictional argument. The case, State De- office of Amnesty International, one of five vorable ruling can affect some courts in the partment attorney John Crook argued, is not advocacy groups testifying on behalf of United States. Over the past three years, some appropriate for an advisory opinion because Mexico, released a report raising concerns judges in the United States have taken the lack it is "contentious" and involves disputes of about seventeen extra-judicial executions in of consular access into consideration." fact and law. Crook also argued that the court Latin America — and seventy-four state- The Vienna Convention requires all signa- could create problems by handing down a sanctioned executions in the U.S. tories to comply with its human rights provi- ruling that contradicts the forthcoming deci- "It was clear from the tenor of a number sions. So Mexico is asking for an advisory sion in Paraguay v. the United States, under of oral presentations this afternoon...," opinion that would require those signatories consideration by the United Nations Interna- John Crook observed, "that this is directed — especially governments that apply the tional Court of Justice. Paraguay is demand- at one country and one country only: the death penalty — to advise any foreign na- ing reparations for the family of a United States of America." Nothing, it tional arrested .of the right to speak to his con- Paraguayan citizen executed by the state of seemed, was lost in translation. — L.D.

4 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 DATELINE TEXAS One Night in East Texas BY SUSAN LEE SOLAR

Editor's Note: Following the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, Texas, in the early morning of Sunday, June 7, Susan Lee Solar accompanied a Spanish journal- ist to Jasper, acting as a translator for a report for the Spanish press. Solar later provided her own account of the visit to the Observer. "One Night in East Texas" is an edited excerpt.

Jasper, June 10 e arrived a little after 6 p.m., a bit too late to hear Jesse Jack- son preaching at a local black church. As the faithful filed in Wfor a devotional scheduled to follow Jack- son's sermon, a middle-aged deacon stood outside the front door. He said nothing like this murder had ever happened in Jasper. Not long after, we heard a different, more complicated story. A Jew Don Boney, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Al Sharpton, Jana Birchum Around the corner from the church, Jesse Jackson, and Rodney Ellis, attending the funeral of James Byrd, Jr. James Byrd, Sr., visibly depressed and shit out of this nigger." drained, sat with a friend on the front porch ing from Hawaii with her mother, one of But Byrd's neighbors told us that the of his home. He directed us within to his his two daughters. three men accused of the murder had re- daughter, Clara Taylor, who had taken Later that evening, James caught a ride cently been hanging out at a black-owned charge of speaking to reporters since the with another sister to the home of friends, barbecue joint. That night some regular pa- murder, three nights earlier. Taylor, at fifty a whom he joined for dinner. From there, he trons, at a private party nearby, had seen year older than her brother, teaches science ONE PERSON WE INTERVIEWED SPEC- Berry's grey and white truck pass back and at a Houston junior high school. The house ULATED THAT BYRD'S KILLING WAS IN forth several times. They now believe the was full of family and friends, but after a FACT AN OFFICIAL RETRIBUTION, AND men in the truck were looking for a victim. few minutes of conversation we were inter- THAT EX-CONS BREWER AND KING Either James Byrd, Jr., was particularly un- rupted by a group of F.B.I. agents, who filed lucky, or he was the man the killers were into the room to interview the family as part WERE NOT JUST DRUNKEN RACIST looking for. of the ongoing investigation. THUGS, BUT HIRED MURDERERS. While we waited we talked with Calvin ccompanied by Birdlong, we drove to Birdlong, who had directed us to the Byrd had walked a short distance for an anniver- the place where James Byrd died. home from the church. Birdlong works at sary celebration with old friends. Between After hearing reports of a body the local funeral home which handled 1:30 and 2, early Sunday morning, Byrd left A found on the edge of town, Birdlong had James Byrd, Jr.'s remains, and he volun- to walk home. Sometime during that walk, helped police officers locate and collect teered to show us the road, on the eastern he was picked up by the truck that carried parts of the body. Most were very small edge of town, where late Saturday night him to his death. The truck was owned by a pieces, strewn along the road since marked Byrd had been murdered. young white man known to Byrd,. Shawn by investigators with spray-painted red cir- Taylor had told us that on Saturday af- Berry, who apparently offered him a ride. cles, a few labeled for evidence. One circle, ternoon, the whole Byrd clan — except Berry was accompanied by John King and alongside a culvert directly in front of a James' son, named after his father, who is Lawrence Brewer, Jr., and according to well-kept yard, is marked "HEAD" -- iden- in the Army and stationed at Fort Benning, newspaper accounts, Berry has blamed his tifying the spot where Byrd's head, one Georgia — were together to attend a two companions for what happened next. shoulder, arm, and neck were found. niece's bridal shower. James played with Outraged at Berry's invitation; his compan- The spot is near a parking lot beside a his year-old granddaughter, who was visit- ions told him they were "fixin' to scare the

THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 5 JULY 3, 1998 black church, across the road from a black cemetery. According to press reports of the autopsy, Byrd was still alive when he was chained, face down, to the bumper of Berry's truck. The road he was dragged along is not densely populated, but there are several well-kept homes, occupied by black residents. Birdlong says the neighbors heard nothing out of the ordinary that night. We crossed a wooden bridge. Just to the left, as Huff Creek Road heads out of town toward Newton, is a single-lane, dirt road leading into the woods. Berry told police that King drove the truck a mile down that road to a spot where King and Brewer stripped, beat, and according to Birdlong, castrated Byrd, before chaining him to the bumper. At that spot, Byrd's clothes and a set of wrenches with Berry's name on it were found Sunday by police investigating the report of a body. The wrenches led po- A Members of the family of James Byrd, Jr. attend his wake Jana Birchum lice to Berry and his friends. Inside Byrd's slacks was a receipt from a local grocery mors circulting among the black residents e returned to the Byrd home and store where on Saturday he had made some of Jasper, stories later echoed and supple- talked with Clara Taylor, who purchases with his food stamp card. Since mented by the neighbors and friends holding W graciously gave us twenty min- Byrd's brutalized features were unrecog- vigil outside the Byrd home. The stories call utes at the end of a long day of similar, nizable, the card allowed police to identify into question the official version of the Byrd difficult conversations. Taylor attributed him as the victim. murder, as a random killing by racist ex- the family's strength to their Christian We drove slowly along the road, follow- cons in a town otherwise undisturbed by ac- faith, their closeness, and their ability to ing the trail of tire tracks, blood, and red cir- tive racism. True or not, the stories reflect an recall, with humor, remarks of the fun- cles. As night came on, the sounds of crick- atmosphere of deep-seated racial fear and loving James. Byrd was nicknamed ets and birds filled the air. A few cars passed, mistrust in Jasper: tales of young black men "Toe," because of an old injury, and was most with black occupants. Alongside the in the drug trade, assassinated and their bod- well-known in the community as an excel- culvert where Byrd's head, shoulder, and ies left in dumpsters; a man murdered at a lent singer and trumpet player, who enter- arm had been found, a pair of policeman's nearby lake and dumped in a black commu- tained at community gatherings. There white plastic gloves still lay in the grass. nity swimming pool; a black federal agent had been little time, said Taylor, to let the Recounting the search for body parts and murdered and "disappeared" while investi- shock and horror of the murder sink in. evidence, Birdlong said that because of his gating local police corruption; drug-dealing Considering the accused murderers, she own working familiarity with death, he had in the town allegedly financed by white pro- wondered, "How did they get this way?" been emotionally unaffected. But later he fessionals (using black youngsters for distri- and longed for some expression of re- angrily described how he would like to see bution) who then collude with white offi- morse. But she realizes she should not ex- the slow and painful execution of Byrd's cials to cover up the crimes. pect remorse from declared racists, who murderers. It was a common sentiment Inevitably, rumors have also followed the apparently did not consider her brother a among Byrd's neighbors. murder of James Byrd, who in the past had human being. Taylor said she believes the We turned into the church's dirt parking spent some time in'jail for petty crimes. Sev- murderers deserve the death penalty. lot, across from the cemetery. Birdlong eral people who knew Byrd well said that She ended by saying Jasper had been ba- pointed to tracks from Berry's truck, which like many former inmates, Byrd had become sically a good place to live, but still, a person had apparently criss-crossed the rough sur- a skilled self-taught lawyer, had filed suit "should not be naive and believe things are face in order to more thoroughly mutilate against local officials (even appealing to the as they seem to be." As we took our leave Byrd's body. It seems likely that just after state Supreme Court), and had given legal her nephew, James Byrd III, arrived from the truck left the lot, Byrd's head flew off advice to local black businessmen. One per- Georgia, to join his family in mourning. ❑ and banged into the nearby concrete cul- son we interviewed speculated that Byrd's vert, hard enough to bash a hole in his skull. killing was in fact an official retribution, and Susan Lee Solar is a writer and environ- While Birdlong directed us along the that ex-cons Brewer and King were not just mental activist who is running for governor murder route, he told us of stories and ru- drunken racist thugs, but hired murderers. as an independent, write-in candidate.

6 ■ THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 BERNARD RAPOPORT American Income I ife Insurance Company Chairman of the Board and EXECUTIVE OFFICES: P.O. BOX 2608 WACO, TEXAS 76797 (254) 751-8600 Chief Executive Officer Educatiow is True illiaalth Part Two BY BERNARD RAPOPORT This article, continued from the last issue, was originally delivered It was an engineer, Dewey points out, who first comprehended as a commencement address by Bernard Rapoport at the College of bacteria; a Unitarian minister who first isolated oxygen; a chemist Education ceremonies at UT-Austin this past May who tested the theory of infection; a school teacher who unraveled the laws of heredity. The theory of evolution was propounded by a n his award-winning book The Clash of Civilizations and the Re- man considered unfit to be a university instructor. Dewey concludes, making of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington shares with us a therefore, that what our society needs is a "minister of disturbance, Ilife-and-death bit of thinking. I quote him because these are words a regulated source of annoyance, a destroyer of routine, an under- that can save our society in the coming years -- if we understand miner of complacence." them and act accordingly. I would submit that you assume that role in society. In fact, in m "Civilizations decline," he writes, "when they stop the application position as former chair of the Board of Regents of the University of of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that Texas, I; dub each and every one of you "Ministers of Disturbance." the rate of investment decreases. This happens because the social Annoy us, destroy our routine, undermine our complacency. In groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for other words, enrich us with your ideas and your inspiration. nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes ... which distribute the Reading Dewey's words, I thought of a poverty of imagination that surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective meth- continues to afflict us right here on this campus. The term we use is ods of production. People live off their capital and the civilization "affirmative action," a term that locks us in to political patchwork think- moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay." ing and blocks the kind of creative solutions we so desperately need. Some would say we are at that point now The poverty that exists Let me say publicly that I am totally committed to affirmative action, not only in our country, but throughout the world, is a warning to but to me affirmative action means that every newborn child in this na- which we must pay heed. tion will have good nutrition. Affirmative action means that every child It's a warning also that we risk the consequences of a poverty, not will be reared not only with love and care but with discipline and direc just of material goods, but a poverty of ideas, of imagination. We're tion. Affirmative action means that every school has a vibrant Head living off our capital, instead of investing in the resources we will Start program, and every resource necessary so that our children can need to thrive in a new and unfamiliar century. be educated to be productive citizens of a new century. It means that Again, we must look to teachers — to you who are our brokers of we eliminate school district lines so that we can ensure that every child knowledge and wisdom — to rescue us from the stultifying effects has the same amount of financial resources for his or her education. of poverty. That would be action, action that affirms— affirmative action that Poverty. There is an ocean of difference between being poor and breaks the bonds of impoverished thinking. being impoverished. I know the difference firsthand. I was raised in a I've seen affirmative action at work — in action, if you will — in my very poor home. From early morning until late at night, my mother hometown. In Waco, there is a school built by one woman who be- worked to maintain a home and family, and my father pushed a cart up lieved that young black children can excel in school if given the op- and down the dusty, unpaved streets of San Antonio's West side.... portunity. Mrs. Larue committed herself to providing that opportu- We were poor, but I didn't know it We had enough to eat, we had nity. She did it, and if you don't believe me, come to Waco, and I will good books, we had music to listen to. And every night we had loud, take you to Larue's Learning Center. In fact, a visit to her learning passionate discussions — okay, arguments — about politics and eco- center ought to be a course requirement for U.T. education majors. nomics and religion. So we were poor, but we were not impoverished. It is unbelievable what Ms. Larue has accomplished, and yet not un- Today poverty is synonymous with lack of education. And lack of believable at all An Indian philosopher once said, "Believing may be education breeds all kinds of poverty — poverty of hope, poverty of difficult, but the need for believing is inescapable." It is, indeed, in- opportunity, poverty of imagination. Poverty, it seems to me, is why escapable if we are to be the kind of poverty fighters I have been trying young people resort to violence. We can't justify it, but we can cer- to describe this evening, the kind of wealth maker that Ms. Larue is tainly understand it. The anger and frustration and hopelessness It is easy to be cynical and skeptical. Being cynical means knock- just become overwhelming. ing down, tearing down. It is hard to believe, because when you do So your job as teachers is to eradicate poverty, or to be more pre- believe, you are impelled to do and to commit. You are energized to cise, poverties. Your job, your challenge, is to eradicate poverties of achieve that which you believe. Our challenge — yours and mine — the spirit so that the world will be a richer place for all of us. on the eve of a new century is to believe as we have never believed Your job is to rescue us from a poverty of ideas.... before that we can eradicate poverty — poverty of the mind, the I'm reminded of an observation by one of the master teachers of the soul, and the imagination. twentieth century, the philosopher John Dewey. More than fifty years I am excited, because I have a sense that you understand the chal- ago, Dewey pointed out that the discovery of the laws of mechanics, of lenge and the adventure that lies before you. I wish you courage and chemical combination, of evolution didn't rely on old knowledge. These enthusiasm, and I look forward with great hope to the better world discoveries, he wrote, "always entail the destruction of or disintegra- you will be helping to build. tion of old knowledge, before the new can be created."

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 7 FEATURE In Search Of The Tigua BEING SOME BRIEF OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE INDIANS OF EL PASO, THE TEXIANS OF AUSTIN, AND THE SUNDRY DEVOTEES OF BREAKFAST BINGO. by Karen Olsson

1. THE GOVERNOR in mid-May, even as clouds of thick, grey Mexican smokeni were drifting over Austin, casting the entire city into a torpor, a dis- turbing letter arrived at the Governor's mansion. An expedition had been commissioned to travel some 800 miles to the West, and latter-day explorer Kimberly Kiplin, of the Texas Lottery Commis- sion, had discovered a newly-founded Cibola at "Speaking Rock": the Casino of the Tigua Indians. Reporting back to the Governor, Kiplin wrote of untold riches — cascading through hundreds of slot machines — and complained that this aboriginal wealth is in fact the rightful property of the Crown: "Since Texas law prohibits casino-type gaming, I do not understand how the Tiguas' casino- type activities are lawful."

One can only imagine what tremors of moral consternation must Karen Olsson have stricken the Governor upon reading such a sentence. Surely George W. Bush — who just a moment earlier had been, perhaps, owns several Las Vegas casinos that stand to lose Texas business drowsily reviewing his latest remarks on the slight increase in res- because of Speaking Rock (according to San Antonio Express-News piratory complaints due to airborne particulates — awoke with a columnist Carlos Guerra); (3) an action taken on behalf of the Texas jolt. As he is a careful and benevolent ruler known to seek frequent Lottery Commission, which likewise might lose business to the counsel, the Governor must have called for a round of closed-door casino (according to various commentators). meetings, strategic deliberations, extended phone calls, et cetera, et Maybe El Paso developers asked Bush to do it: the Tigua are un- cetera, et cetera, before taking action. Nevertheless, it was not long deniably a litigious group, having filed various claims of titular and before he summoned the capitol scribes, and extended a long, ac- usage rights to large tracts of land, and to 100 miles of canals and cusatory finger Westward through the Smog. On Sunday, the sev- ditches in El Paso County. This has alarmed area property owners enteenth of May, townspeople could be seen scurrying out into the and title insurers, since new deeds now note that property may be miserable haze to retrieve their Austin American-Statesmans, then subject to claims by "any Indian or Indian tribe, including but not retreating into their air-conditioned kitchens to read an extensive re- limited to the Tigua Indian Tribe of El Paso." port on the Governor's latest mission, by Capitol Bureau Chief Ken Or maybe Bush wants to quash a potential source of campaign Herman. "I don't think they [the Tigua] ought to be having casino- funds for Democrats: the Tigua gave $10,000 to State Representa- style gambling in their buildings," Bush declared to Herman. tive Gilbert Serna (who lost in the primary), and have contributed "There ought not to be casino gambling in the state of Texas, any to other El Paso candidates. shape or form of it." The first three explanations, for the moment, are more likely than Although the Governor assured Herman that his decision to attack the last two, since Bush's War on Gambling has not just targeted the Speaking Rock was not politically motivated ("My job is to enforce Tigua. Back in November of 1996 — just as the Tigua were about to the law. I can't make political decisions when it comes to enforcing introduce slot machines at Speaking Rock — the Governor's general the laws, and I won't.") interested parties and observers alike imme- counsel wrote to U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg of San Antonio, asking diately began speculating as to his motives. Bush's denunciation of that he investigate Indian casinos. (The Kickapoo tribe had opened a the casino has been variously described as: (1) an attempt to appeal casino on its Eagle Pass reservation, earlier in the year.) to the Baptist bloc of the Republican Party (this according to Demo- Blagg did not act, and Bush turned his attention to the thousands cratic gubernatorial candidate Garry Mauro and Tom Diamond, the of "eight-liner" gambling machines that have proliferated in truck tribe's attorney); (2) a favor to Richard Rainwater, a former business stops and shopping plazas throughout the state. Last year he unsuc- partner and current campaign contributor of the Governor's, who cessfully tried to persuade the Legislature to outlaw the machines,

8 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 and in January, Attorney General Dan Morales issued an opinion declaring the eight-liners illegal. A Dallas appeals court has since ruled that Morales lacked the authority to do so, but law enforcement actions have been taken nonetheless. One evening in early May, for instance, eighteen officers of the Garland police department and the Texas Department of Public Safety stormed into Gold Touch, a Garland strip-mall arcade. No resistance was offered by the two customers present, or by the co-owner and atten- dant, who were taken into custody. Twenty-three eight liners were discovered, along with several artistic renderings of dogs engaged in gambling. Officers confiscated bundles of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills as evidence.

2. THE CASINO y denouncing the Tigua casino, George Bush initiated one of those ceremonial skirmishes that politicians ritually per- Bform via the media: Bush opponent Garry Mauro declared himself more or less in favor of the casino (though against gambling itself); Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes likened opposing the casino to opposing illegal drugs; Mauro accused Hughes of comparing the Tigua to drug-dealers. Meanwhile tribal attorney Tom Diamond filed suit against Bush, alleging that "George W. Bush and his political agents are interfering with the federal legal rights of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo ... through deceitful and un- truthful statements to the press...." A cloud of political smoke had appeared over the Capitol, min-

gling with the Mexican conflagration, and obscuring whatever it A Joe Sierra Karen Olsson was that Kiplin had discovered in El Paso. I was curious about the source of so much grandstanding, and I set forth in search of it. purple vest, purrs each number-letter pair into his microphone. I arrived at Speaking Rock at midday on a Friday, at which time Early on in my visit to Ysleta I attended the Saturday breakfast business was brisk. The casino edifice, an adobe hybrid of fortress bingo session, where $20 buys an entry for eight rounds of bingo — and convention center, occupies a large chunk of the Tigua "reser- with a chance to win $500 each round — and all you can eat from the vation" — bits and pieces of land, about fifty acres total, in the buffet of burnt pancakes, fruit, biscuits, bacon, and some sort of town of Ysleta, east of El Paso. All day and night (Speaking Rock chick pea stew. Having never played high-stakes bingo before, I was never closes) vans shuttle passengers back and forth between the assisted by the stolid, friendly woman sitting across from me. (Bingo casino and the parking lots. These vans are decorated with the un- is a pretty straightforward game, but certain technical terms indicat- likely image of a Chippendales-worthy, half-nude eagle dancer, ing winning board patterns — "double corner postage stamp," "2 rising triumphantly out of a pile of coins and cash. wild Ws" — require explanation for the uninitiated.) I was playing Though the casino now has poker, blackjack tables, and over manually, using a special oversized blotting marker (price: $1) to 400 slot machines and other so-called amusements, in 1993 it mark two game sheets containing six bingo grids each. My adviser, opened with bingo only. When you enter, the bingo room is still who plays several times a week and loses, by her estimate, an aver- the first thing you see, and the bingo players seem more or less rep- age of $70 each visit, had bought electronic entries. This meant she resentative of the Speaking Rock clientele, albeit slightly older, on did nothing but watch the game progress on a portable grey device average, than the poker crowd. Bingo players sit for hours at long, that automatically records which pairs have been called. narrow, salmon-colored tables, inside a banquet room whose walls Bingo as played at Speaking Rock doesn't occasion much con- have been burdened with pastel Western landscapes. This Western versation. Sitting next to me was another woman, marking her theme, though echoed by the antler chandeliers, is basically over- sheets by hand, who said she was no great fan of bingo. She'd whelmed by the illuminated displays of numbers and letters, the stayed up all night playing slot machines; giddy and exhausted, she television screens, the electronic advertisement for something was winding down with the bingo session. A native of Panama called the "Eagle Dancer Jackpot," and the giant, forlorn-looking whose husband, an oil company engineer, doesn't think much of stuffed animals (Bugs Bunny, a flamingo, the Sugar Smacks frog, her gambling, she'd been to casinos in other countries, "but noth- the Tazmanian Devil) propped behind the number-caller's podium. ing like they have here." Before I could learn her name, the two of During the games the players, most of them middle-aged Hispanic us were scolded by my adviser, who returned from the bathroom to women, observe a nearly perfect silence as the number caller, a find that the round had begun and neither of us had noticed. We re- mellow-voiced man wearing a tuxedo shirt and an embroidered turned to our game sheets.

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 9 As the game wore on I found myself watching two players at the ans, who were recognized by President Lincoln. They remained next table: a wearily handsome old man in a faded guayabera and, a unacknowledged for most of this century. couple seats over, an intent old woman with a toiletries case full of When he was growing up, Joe Sierra remembers, the Tigua lived hot pink bingo markers. The man languorously smoked his way like other colonia residents along the border — in run-down through a pack of Pall Malls while he marked his sheets; the woman, shacks, scrounging for food and work. "There were three kids, and an intermittent smoker, attacked her sheets after each call. They we lived in a two-room house with no utilities, no plumbing, a dirt never looked at one another, but occasionally one would mutter floor," he says. "We ate leftovers from Camp Zaragoza, the pris- something sideways. After a while, I assumed they were married. oner of war camp ... and from the pig farm." Sierra remembers picking through the city dump with the other children; adults 3. THE TIGUA worked as farm laborers or highway construction crew workers. Sierra began serving on the Tribal Council as a young man, dur- shoshort walk from the casino is the Tigua housing project, ing the sixties, and says that over the years, "Mostly I've seen built with the help of a federal Housing and Urban Devel- politicians try to use our people to gain something." The United pment grant in the mid-1970s. Brown stucco houses with States finally acknowledged the Ysleta del Sur Tigua in 1968, wooden carports line a few quiet blocks, and in one of these houses lives Joe Sierra, who is listed in the El Paso phone directory as "In- dian Joe." At fifty-five, he has eleven grandchildren, and his de- meanor is grandfatherly. I met him on Sunday afternoon in the dirt yard behind his house, which contained two large igloo-shaped ovens, a pile of mesquite branches, a few plastic chairs, and a bark- ing dog. He wore his long hair bound in a ribbon. Sierra gets up before dawn to make Pueblo-style bread, which he bakes in the ovens and then sells to the casino. He has enormous hands and forearms, suited to the job. Speaking Rock, he says, has been hugely beneficial to the Tigua. "There has been some opposition, but that's internal to the tribe. As far as the casino, it's increased our quality of life." The tribal rolls currently list about 1,400 members, 500 of whom live in Ysleta. Not long ago, most were welfare recipients. The Tigua originally migrated to the Rio Grande Valley from New Mexico in 1680, after other Indian groups rose up against the A Former Tigua homes Spanish in the Pueblo Revolt of that year. The history of the Tigua tribe in Texas has never been entirely agreed upon, beginning with when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an act that rec- the circumstances of that migration. Three hundred seventeen ognized the tribe and relegated the administration of its affairs to

Tigua Indians from the homonymous Isleta Pueblo, near present- the state, of Texas. The trickle of state aid the Tigua received after day Albuquerque, accompanied Spanish Governor Antonio de that wasn't enough to lift the tribe out of poverty, Sierra says. Otermin in his retreat from Santa Fe to El Paso. The following year, Every so often a legislator came along with some plan supposedly after an unsuccessful attempt to reconquer the pueblos, Otermin re- intended to help the Tigua. Some years ago, for instance, the turned to the Texas settlement with a second group of Tiguas. It is Tigua had a chance to reclaim Hueco Tanks, a popular rock- still debated whether these two groups of Indians accompanied climbing destination whose stone walls bear Indian inscriptions. Otermin willingly, or were forced to go in chains. (Next to the A rancher had sold the land to El Paso County, which in turn had casino lies the reconstructed seventeenth-century Ysleta Mission given it over to the state, in anticipation of its eventual transfer to which, according to a 1936 Texas Highway Department plaque out- the Tigua. "In '69 or '70 there was a state senator who didn't have side it, was "Maintained By Franciscan Missionaries for the Civi- a state park in his district," says Sierra. "And he came to us and he lizing and Christianizing of the Tigua Indians, Pueblo Revolt said, 'If you give us Hueco Tanks — which is a sacred place for Refugees." Next to that plaque, a 1970 State Historical Survey us — if you give me Hueco Tanks, I'll give you the whole budget, Commission marker simply states that the Indians "accompanied whatever you're asking for.' fleeing Spaniards," and on the other side of the mission, a more re- "So we were caught in another shuffle of the cards, thinking, cent National Trust for Historic Preservation sign diplomatically as- which card are we going to play? Do we take money for the kids to serts that "Spanish records show that during the escape south, some be educated, or the state park? We didn't have a choice," Sierra Indians joined Governor Antonio de Otermin in flight to the Pass of says. The tribe took the money — it wasn't enough to provide for the North. History as recorded by Tigua oral tradition maintains that better education, according to Sierra — on the condition that the Indians were forced to accompany Otermin.") park would hire Indians. But few Tigua were ever hired, he says, Because the Ysleta Tigua lived in Texas, they were not accorded since most of the applicants didn't meet minimum educational re- federal tribal recognition along with the New Mexico Pueblo Indi- quirements for the jobs. "Their [politicians'] mentality is, let's give

10 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 them a little and they'll be happy forever." Last year the tribe distributed $8,000 of casino profit to every man, woman and child listed on the tribal rolls; casino money has also funded the construction of a day care center, a health clinic, a se- nior citizen center, a new tourist center, and new tribal government offices. The money distributed to the children is put in a trust, and, Sierra says, "If they don't close our casino the kids will be fixed for life — the best education they want, the best lives they want." Sierra is employed by the Texas Film Commission as a location scout. He's worked for a number of movies, including Last Man Standing and Courage Under Fire, and likes Chuck Norris much better than Bruce Willis. He's not directly involved in the casino operation, but the casino seems to have encouraged entrepreneurial ambi- tions among the Tigua: Sierra is the original proponent of the tribe's plan to buy a 68,000-acre ranch in Valentine, which would double as a tribal hunting pre- serve and a dude ranch THE TIGUA LAWSUIT AGAINST BUSH for European tourists. IS, IN LARGE PART, AN EFFORT TO STOP HIM FROM MAKING he Tigua's STATEMENTS THAT THREATEN current gov- THEIR BUSINESS. T ernor is Vince Munoz, who took the job in December 1996, following a bit- ter struggle for the position that ended in the ejection of several former officers from the tribal rolls. If Sierra is the elder statesman, Munoz is the corporate officer. "I'm responsible for all the tribal programs, the federal programs, and I'm also responsible for all the business aspects of the tribe," he says. "Basically, it's like a C.E.O. position, and I oversee everything." Munoz, one of ten siblings, grew up two blocks from the tribal government building. A smiling, heavy-set man, he wears thick A Vince Munoz Karen Olsson gold rings and expensive-looking shirts, and his office looks like a Munoz won't disclose the casino's annual revenue, but it's prob- C.E.O.'s, with a big shiny desk and executive swivel chair. He ably about $600 million. (The tribe recently renewed its offer to re- even has his own public relations consultant, a man named Marc turn a certain percentage of revenue to state and local government, Schwartz, who sits in on my interview with Mutioz and offers oc- an offer it originally made in 1993, when Ann Richards refused to casional comments. negotiate with the Tigua. In newspaper reports of the renewed "He [Munoz] was the one who started the actual casino. He was offer, the 3 percent share going to the state was quoted as being the gaming commissioner that started it," Schwartz tells me. worth $1.8 million, which would put the total revenue at $600 mil- "I don't like to give myself credit sometimes," laughs Munoz. lion.) The tribe has opened a gas station, "Running Bear," next to "Actually the whole casino started out from a cultural center and a the casino, and plans to become El Paso's Mobil distributor, build- restaurant. Wyngs [the restaurant] being my brainchild at that point ing twenty more gas stations in the process. in time, back in 1985." Governor Bush's threats, however, have caused the tribe's "He started all of those," says Schwartz. "He's kind of the busi- lenders to hesitate over those plans, since the casino is its one sub- ness — well, let's put it this way, the marketing guru of the tribe." stantial piece of collateral. The Tigua lawsuit against Bush is, in In 1992, after viewing presentations from over forty companies large part, an effort to stop him from making statements that and visiting other Indian gambling facilities around the country, threaten their business. the Tigua struck a deal with 7 Circle Resorts to manage its casino. The next year the tribe opened a bingo hall, adding poker tables 4. THE LAWYERS and a blackjack-style game in 1994, and slot machines in 1996. The casino now employs 900 people, 110 of whom are tribe t was Tom Diamond who helped the Tigua push for federal members. (Munoz estimates that of the 500 Tigua who live in recognition in the 1960s, and he has represented the tribe ever Ysleta, there are about 250 adults of working age. Because of the since. "It's almost as if someone had preordained this as my casino and other businesses which depend on the casino, such as goal in life," he says of his work with the tribe. cleaning services and gift shops, unemployment within the tribe is Diamond, who trained as an engineer and served in the Army below — Munoz claims it is 2 percent.) fore going to law school, first encountered the Tigua on July 4, 1963.

THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 11 "I went down to San Elizario for a party of the teachers' union," he says. "Jack Salem, who was news director for Channel 4, started talking about how they needed a lawyer to help these Indians." "I'd never heard of them," Diamond says. "I thought, the government takes care of Indians." But Salem persuaded Diamond to go meet tribe member Pablo Silvas, who also said the Tigua needed a lawyer to help get government recognition. Diamond met a second time with Silvas "and two other old men. They looked very Indian to me, but hell, I didn't know." Diamond called Bernard Fontana, a University of Arizona an- thropologist, for help. "Of course I had to get a white guy to tell me these were Indians," says Diamond. "We arranged to meet at the chief's house. This house had a dirt floor, no windows, a ladder to the roof, a shrine, and paper bags BEFORE WHITE PEOPLE SHOWED UP, full of medicine. "TEXAS HAD MORE INDIANS THAN ANY And there was a OTHER STATE IN THE UNION," DIAMOND rooster outside in SAYS. "THE NAME OF THE GAME HERE a cage." HAS ALWAYS BEEN, GET RID OF THE After the two of INDIANS, ALL THE INDIANS." them had left, Di- amond queried the scholar: 'Dr. Fontana, are these Indians?' And he said, that is the best Indian museum I've ever been in my life." According to Fontana, the beat-up white rooster was in keeping with a now-extinct tradition, in which the chief keeps a caged eagle in front of his house. Over the course of more than thirty years, Diamond has amassed what he calls "the best archive there is of an Indian group" — much of it now housed at the U.T. Center for American History — whose 30,000 pieces include explorers' accounts, Spanish surveys, nineteenth-century monographs, extensive chronologies, and A Torn Diamond Karen Olsson newspaper articles. Persuading Texas to declare the Tigua an In- dian Tribe, in 1967, and getting Congress to do the same a year The point of all the Tigua's lawsuits, Speer suggests, is not ac- later, was only the beginning. Diamond has continued to file claims tually to possess all of West Texas, but to use the claims as lever- on behalf of the Tigua. Through him, the tribe has asserted title age to buy land on favorable terms and annex it to the reserva- claims to much of El Paso, and aboriginal usage rights to six coun- tion. The tribe, for example, sued officials of the Texas ties — Hudspeth, Culberson, Jeff Davis, Brewster, Presidio, and El Department of Transportation after it heard the department would Paso — in all, an area in excess of 21,000 square miles. seek bids from prospective buyers for a small piece of land near Within the same downtown El Paso building where Diamond the casino. The tribe has offered to settle the suit by buying the works, seven floors above his firm's suite, is the office of Jim land at "fair market value" — that is, without bidding. "They're Speer, attorney for the El Paso County Water Improvement Dis- buying more and more land," says Speer, "and [the Tigua hope] trict Number 1. The Tigua sued the water district this spring, it all becomes reservation." seeking control of a large portion of the county's water system. To Diamond, criticisms of the Tigua from George Bush or any- "There's a saying around here that God made the world, but Tom one else are simply the latest in a centuries-long series of attempts Diamond made the Tigua Indians," says Speer. to deny the Indians their due. Before white people showed up, Diamond has, at least, established one version of Tigua his- "Texas had more Indians than any other state in the Union," he tory, and because all Diamond's lawsuits have been filed in Fed- says. "The name of the game here has always been, get rid of the eral Judge Lucius Bunton's Pecos court, known for its "rocket Indians, all the Indians." docket," the defendants have just a few months to try to counter After all, the governor, as the Tigua are fond of saying, oversees years of research. (One rather strenuous sentence in Speer's an- a slot machine with 10,000 terminals: the state lottery. The thrust of swer to Diamond's complaint reads, "Alternatively, if Plaintiff Diamond's argument, that Bush is beating up on the Indians for po- ever established any aboriginal right, which is denied, Defen- litical purposes, seems accurate enough. Unless the Governor man- dant denies that the United States has never extinguished such ages to shut down the casino at once, however, the tribe won't need aboriginal right, because, in fact, the United States has extin- to play the downtrodden victim. At long last, the Tigua — or is it guished any such right, if it ever existed (which is not admitted Tigua, Inc.? — have more than just right on their side. ❑ but still denied).")

12 ■ THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 FEATURE Farewell to Barry G. BY NATE BLAKESLEE Barry Goldwater, perhaps the best-known Republican of his era, was buried scarcely two weeks before the beginning of the 1998 Texas Republican State Convention, held June 12-14 at the Fort Worth Con- vention Center But there was no eulogy, no memorial resolution in honor of Goldwater offered in Fort Worth — not from the State Republican Executive Committee (now composed entirely of conservative evangelical Christians); not from the candidates who addressed the throng of 16000 Republican activists gathered in the Convention Center arena; and certainly not from the delegates themselves.

1:0:03 arry Goldwater had told the 1964 Republican Na- thored by Lambert, directing tional ConVention, "Extremism in the defense of the party to deny funding and liberty is no vice.... Moderation in the pursuit of support to any candidates justice is no virtue," thereby declaring himself the who refuse to endorse a ban embodiment of what was then the party's right on the late-term abortion wing. Yet in recent years, Goldwater had become procedure commonly re- something of an icon for the party's moderates — ferred to by conservative largely because of his staunch opposition to the as- Christians as "partial-birth cendance of the religious right, which came to dominate the party in abortion." It's the same his home state of Arizona, as it did across the South and West in the amendment Lambert, in his twilight of Goldwater's more than six-decade career as a Republican. role as a self-described "He was an honest man," said Cooke County delegate Robert J. "rogue elephant," brought to Kalima, of the man who once told reporters that Jerry Falwell de- the floor of the Republican served "a boot ... right in the ass" for what he had done to the party. National Convention in San A few veterans of the Texas G.O.P. still remember Goldwater for it. Diego two years ago, embar- A Tim Lambert Standing just outside the blue floor-to-ceiling curtain separating his rassing many national district's caucus from the rest of the vast exhibit hall area, Kalima ex- G.O.P. leaders and prompting a heated debate. (Although the Lam- plained in a low voice how he had found himself sitting between two bert amendment failed in San Diego, it sparked a congressional ini- pro-choice Republicans earlier that morning. "They're here, they're tiative that resulted in a ban on the procedure, vetoed by President just kind of quiet," said Kalima, whose own voice was barely audible Clinton). In Texas, as party chairperson Susan Weddington later ob- over the amplified prayers of caucus chairpersons and the raucous ap- served, the procedure is already illegal, so the Lambert amendment plause of delegates. Kalima was born in depression-era Nebraska, and does not call for a change in state law. says he was raised in the "old school G.O.P.," which meant limited But, as Lambert explained to the A.F.A. banquet, that was never government, fiscal responsibility, and individual freedom — but not the point. The point, both in San Diego and now in Fort Worth, was intolerance. "Now they're more interested in excluding people," he to force a vote on the issue, and to get rid of those who failed the test. whispered. Among the many buttons on his weathered vest was a It's a tactic for purifying the state party, and has worked well in the newer pin that read, "Texas G.O.P.: Big Enough for Everyone." past. In 1992, Lambert challenged then-party chair Fred Meyer to For the last decade, abortion has been the primary litmus test by grant a roll-call vote on a similar amendment, seeking to deny fund- which Texas Republican activists, party officials, and candidates ing to any candidate who did not support the official party platform. judge one another's ideological purity. Since 1992, true believers Meyer, the last secular Republican to chair the party, objected that like Republican National Committeeman Tim Lambert of Lubbock the state election code does not allow the party's executive commit- have sought to incorporate into the state party platform and rules a tee to dictate how the campaign committee spends its cash, and "zero tolerance" logic, designed to purge moderates and consolidate therefore enforcement of the amendment would be legally suspect. conservative Christian control of the party once and for all. At the "But we said, 'That's all right, we want a vote anyway,"' Lambert American Family Association's Liberty Banquet (held the night be- told the banqueteers. His faction forced a division vote of the sixty- fore the convention in the ballroom of the Worthington Hotel in two member executive committee, requiring those opposing the downtown Fort Worth), Lambert announced another raising of the amendment to stand. "We took names," Lambert recalled, pausing bar on abortion. He informed his audience of roughly 500 A.F.A. for effect, "and we replaced those people in 1994." Lambert and members that, earlier that same afternoon, the State Republican Ex- company did the same thing in San Diego, despite the urging of na- ecutive Committee had adopted a party platform amendment, au- tional party leaders to let the issue drop. This time around in Texas,

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 13 the religious conservatives had their own hand-picked chairperson, selection were floated in the Susan Weddington. On Thursday afternoon, Weddington gladly weeks preceding the conven- brought the Lambert amendment to a vote of the executive commit- tion, including replacing the tee. To thunderous applause, Lambert informed the banquet that the Republican primary with a amendment had been approved — unanimously. caucus system (not used in Lambert's amendment also called on the executive committee to Texas for at least seventy- amend its bylaws to give itself the power to direct the campaign com- five years), or some hybrid of mittee on all funding decisions (apparently moving even further afoul the two, with the intent of of the state election code). In a subsequent interview, Weddington in- greatly enhancing the power sisted that the amendment was "not a major change" in the way the of party activists at the ex- party operates. "Every party has to make decisions about who they pense of the general popula- fund," she said. "This is no different." Governor Bush and other tion of voting Republicans. statewide elected officials aren't so sure about that, however. "I think Not surprisingly, most of we ought to have wide-open primaries and let the will of the people the party's statewide candi- decide who the candidates are," he told reporters following his ad- dates aren't enthusiastic A Susan Weddington dress to the convention on Friday afternoon. "Any attempt to make it about the proposals. Asked if

harder to get nominated, or , to narrow who the decision-makers are, is she had any thoughts on the Lambert amendment, an unusually terse something that I will resist," he said. Bush's warnings apparently held Susan Combs, candidate for Agriculture Commissioner, replied sim- little sway with party delegates. On Sunday, they proposed a floor ply, "No." Between caucus drop-ins, Land Commissioner candidate amendment to the party platform, directing the executive committee David Dewhurst expressed his opposition to abolishing the primary. to distribute to all Republican candidates an official questionnaire, de- "Americans want to be directly involved in electing their representa- signed to ascertain his or her degree of support for the platform. The tives," he said. And Dewhurst dismisses the populist arguments of amendment was approved overwhelmingly. party activists like delegate Mark Sowntag of McKinney, who have The apparent split between Bush and Weddington highlights the argued that eliminating the primary reduces the power of big money frustration of the party's most faithful with the results of this spring's in the races. "You can't win an election today with money — you Republican primary, in which virtually every conservative-backed must have grassroots support," said Dewhurst. nominee for statewide office was defeated by a more moderate oppo- While it never hurts to have both (Grassroots Dewhurst, for his nent. A particularly stinging setback was right-wing favorite Tom part, has already spent buckets of personal money on his own behalf), Pauken's loss to John Cornyn for the Attorney General nomination. it's true that the party needs the Christian right — who supply the ac- It's also no secret that religious conservatives aren't crazy about tivists, the issues, and the fervor — if they're going to fulfill their oft- George Bush. In San Antonio Christian radio station KSLR's straw repeated goal of sweeping all statewide elections, plus gain a major- poll for the 2000 presidential nomination (conducted during their live ity in the Texas House (where they need a swing of only eight broadcast from the convention floor), the governor didn't receive a sin- members). But turnout was low in the primary, suggesting that many gle vote from the station's listeners, who favored instead Gary Bauer, activists had stayed home, and there are rumblings of disenchantment James Dobson, or Pat Buchanan. Other ideas on controlling candidate with Republican leadership in Washington and in Austin. "The rank

American Family Assocrati w story about Patricia Ireland, presi s, can only, describe:as the National Organization for Women. Oblican party, came from the bottom, s am went to the CongresS Twenty minutes before a scheduled de- the top. "They just' don't understand that asking for hearings on thoSe things [recent bate with Ireland on "The Today Show," thisciS a movement," he said Missile 'technology transfers], and the Bauer found himself seated alone in the If you really Want to understand pop- mantra of "Trade, Trade, Trade" drowned green room with the nation's top feminist, ulism in this country, don't talk to Patricia out everything elSe. I am hear to tell you engaged in a battle of wills over the last Ireland. Instead, go see Gary Bauer speak. tonight: I don't care who I irritate, I don't remaining jelly donut. Ireland got the He will talk about What is wrong with Care what corporation I make mad, I don't donut, Bauer said, "but I'm happy to tell Anierica, as all populists do. Every time care what kepublian I tick Off, I will fight you it was the last thing she won that he says "militant secularism," mentally in- On this issue in D.C. until we get a foreign morning." During the show, Ireland ac- sert the words "corporate greed." Presto, poliPy worthy' of the American people!" cused Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and you've got Jim HightoWer. - In fact, hefty That brief diatribe earned Bauer his first

14 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998

Atimmoimmosiiimimissiummuiewswommw. and file just want our message to be put before the American people," credit for giving the national Republican party a hard shove to the said Mark Sowntag, "and our elected officials have yet to do that." In- right, from which it has never looked back. The difference is that stead they compromise. Tim Lambert summed up the frustrations of Barry is dead and can't defend himself from being branded with the the social conservatives: "What good does it do us to have a majority, "M" word, whereas Wentworth still has a career to live out in a party if our leaders don't lead?" If Focus on the Family president James that has now become, for all intents and purposes, a church. As the Dobson or Family Research Council president Gary Bauer, who gave Senator was parrying reporters in the halls of the Convention Center, the keynote address at the A.F.A. banquet (see "Gary Bauer, Pop- Goldwater's name was invoked once more in the name of Modera- ulist," page 14), ever make good on their occasional threats to leave tion — this time by the Log Cabin Republicans, who rallied across the party, Sowntag says there is little question that the party activists the street from the Convention Center to protest being excluded, once would follow them. Bauer left Thursday night for the state Republi- again, from the biennial proceedings of the party to which they be- can convention in Iowa, where he reportedly promised his supporters long, simply because they are gay. Inside the hall, official party that he would seek the presidential nomination in 2000. spokesman Robert Black compared the Log Cabin members to the But if there was tension under the surface in Fort Worth, the daily Ku Klux Klan, and said, "We don't allow pedophiles, transvestites, or papers uniformly reflected that it rarely broke into the open. Al- cross-dressers, either." though the prayer-filled rooms and the party machinery belonged No fewer than three speakers at the small rally invoked the former entirely to the Christian Right, the public program and media Arizona Senator, as one of the fifty or so persons in the crowd held a spoonfeeding was undoubtedly Governor Bush's show, elegantly hand-lettered sign that read "We Are the Party Moderates." Texas orchestrated to provide a public demonstration of party unity and a Log Cabin president Dale Carpenter likened his fellow gay Republi- showcase for a presidential candidate who can appeal to both wings cans to Mississippi blacks in the 1950s — an analogy that didn't of the national party. Unlike previous conventions, when seem quite as far-fetched as it might sound, as his small group was Buchanan, Ralph Reed, and other potential rivals for votes or media quickly surrounded by rabid homophobes who wandered over from attention made ceremonial appearances, no non-Texan national fig- the convention, screaming and waving hateful signs and banners ures were invited to address the delegates. And unlike two years with slogans like "There's no such thing as a Christian fag." The ago in San Antonio, no floor fights and few public squabbles dis- slogans got worse from there. "These are the same people who were turbed the cheerful atmosphere of consanguinity. The governor had the racists in the old Democratic party," Carpenter said after the nothing but good things to say about Weddington, and the "rogue rally. "They've all come over here to the Republicans." elephant" himself, Tim Lambert, even gave a glowing introduction And who deserves much of the credit for attracting them? Yes, for Kay Bailey Hutchison, who in 1996 had been targeted for cen- Barry Goldwater, whose outspoken opposition to federal civil sure by pro-life partisans for her perceived weakness on abortion. rights legislation in his 1964 landslide loss to LBJ earned him and Bush had a simple explanation for the relative equanimity that char- the party a consolation prize: of the six states Goldwater carried, acterized the conference: "We want to win," he told reporters. five were Southern states that hadn't gone Republican since Re- construction. The party has built on the foundation provided by 'm not a moderate," Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth Goldwater ever since. As the state of Texas nears completion of

told the Fort Worth Star- Telegram on the last day of the con- its slow slide over to the G.O.P., those few Republican activists vention. Neither, of course, was Barry Goldwater. It was Gold- who still take an occasional drink should be raising a glass to Iwater's iconoclastic 1964 presidential campaign that many now Barry.

stream of an Americ an delegates e- eocracy more closely resembles the the a e wit nounc util deregulation (which the darker chapters in the history of populism the answers are the same. official platform endorses) as a scam than it does any progressive vision for the And yes, if you knew where to look, cooked up by big business? future currently on the table. What's re- there were other glimpses of what most It's a confused brand of populism, of markable is that in a political system in would call a progressive brand of pop- course, that has working people debating which both parties are increasingly domi- ulism at the state Republican convention. the merits of a flat tax versus a national nated by corporate interests, the words and How about the delegate from Houston sales tax — either of which would leave ideas of a 100-year-old movement of with a paraplegic son who managed to them losers. And it's a strange appeal that Texas farmers can still move everyday bring a proposal on medical marijuana to draws a comparison, as Bauer likes to do, Americans of any stripe. — N.B.

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 15 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE

TAKE ME OUT TO ••• the cleaners. Like a long fly ball gradually twisting foul, the convoluted negotiations between the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority and Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane have finally, and inevitably, resulted in dumping the $240 million cost of building a new downtown ballpark directly into the public's lap. Despite the sports authority's previous insistence that McLane would have to share the construction costs for the new stadium with the taxpayers, the final agreement re- veals that the Astros' financial commitment is limited to a lease arrangement, involving yearly payments totaling $7.1 million. For their part, McLane and the Astros get to keep revenues generated at the stadium (in- A Young Cambodian women hand out free cigarettes ENFACT's 1998 People's Annual Report cluding those produced by non-baseball events), an income stream estimated at $20 the U.S. Senate held what was billed as a never been to Africa," he explained help- million annually. That's on top of giving "hearing" on an African trade bill, barely fully, adding that despite the bill's title and the Astros the naming rights for the sta- noticed by the U.S. media, permanently de- the announced subject of the hearing, the dium, an asset that may be worth as much as voted to Kenneth Starr' s ejectamenta. Cap- bill has nothing to do with trade. $50 million in these days of high-profile ital — like water, ever seeking its lowest He might have added that the democratic corporate sponsorships. point — is weary of paying a dollar a day in process, as practiced in the halls of Congress, In return, the sports authority heroically Indonesia, especially when wages are half has nothing to do with democracy. wrestled three hard-fought, key concessions that, or less, in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus from McLane: the right to keep 50 percent the African trade bill, which like its "free GEORGE W. WILSON? June 17 was also a of all net revenues generated from the sale trade" cousins in Asia and Latin America, bad day for public participation in Texas. of brick pavingstones to be installed in the will go a long way toward recreating the Governor Bush snubbed yet another delega- front of the ballpark; the guarantee that original "Golden Triangle" (sugar, slaves, tion from Mexico seeking a meeting over sports authority members would have office money) except that instead of having to ship the proposed Sierra Blanca nuclear waste space inside the stadium with a clear view of the slaves all the way here, the sweatshops dump in West Texas, which the Governor the playing field; and thirty-six season tick- will go there. Out of sight, out of mind. supports. Two years ago, in 1996, it was ets — no doubt to be available on a first- Citizens groups, like Public Citizen's schoolchildren from Acufla seeking a meet- come, first-serve basis to every Houston cit- Global Trade Watch, have been battling this ing at the Bush residence who were turned izen. How's that for playing hardball? pernicious bill for months, and were fired up away by an aide. This time it was a dozen Dazzled by the prospects of bringing to join the fray at the Senate hearing June 17. Mexican legislators, including some of the major league baseball into a downtown But when they arrived at the hearing room, most respected members of the federal Sen- area that is turning into a hot real estate they discovered that a mere eight seats — out ate, who had been trying to arrange a meet- play for big investors, public officials criti- of two hundred — had been reserved for the ing with the Governor for a month. Many cal of the deal are hard to find. A typical republic. The rest were taken by the corporate were unaware that Bush had refused to meet sponse is that of city councilman Orlando backers of the legislation, including the lead with them until they arrived in Austin and Sanchez, who told a Houston Chronicle re- corporate sponsor, Chevron, which held a pri- heard the news that the Governor had in- porter that he had not seen the lease agree- vate lunch for those who had testified in sup- stead assigned his secretary of state, Alberto ment, "but I'm sure the sports authority did port of the bill. Global Trade Watch Director R. Gonzales, to handle the delegation. an excellent job with it." Lori Wallach, who's been a public interest Bush spokesperson Debbie Head said no Fortunately for baseball fans, Sanchez's lobbyist for more than a decade, experienced a slight was intended, but the consensus relaxed attitude toward his role as a public first in official arrogance: she was physically among the officials was that Bush should watchdog probably disqualifies him from removed from a public hearing room. have made time to see them. "We feel this joining the ranks of real umpires, who gen- When outraged citizens, alerted by High- is evidence that Bush is actually in the erally refrain from calling a ball or a strike tower Radio, called chief sponsor Arizona same category as Pete Wilson," when it until they've seen the pitch. Senator John McCain's office to complain, comes to relations with Mexico, said Fed- an aide frostily told them they had no idea eral Senator Norberto Corella of the P.A.N. GOVERNMENT BY LOBBY. In mid-June, what they were talking about: "You've Secretary Gonzales did little to assuage the

16 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, PROTECTING THE EARTH FROM THE SCUM OF CORPORATE AMERICA. dressed in black and carrying oversized "Hijas del Quinto Sol," a conference weapons, while standing in front of a New on Latina literature and identity, will York City skyline. The caption reads: "Pro- take place in San Antonio July 23-25. tecting the earth from the scum of the uni- Sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural verse." Posters for The Big One feature Arts Center and St. Mary's Univer- Moore dressed in black and wearing dark sity, the third annual event will fea- sunglasses, carrying an oversized micro- ture a keynote address by Cristina phone while standing in front of the same Garcia, as well as readings by Rose- New York skyline. The caption reads: mary Catacalos, Cecile Piiieda, Sylvia "Protecting the earth from the scum of cor- Lopez-Medina, Graciela Limon, porate America." Emma Perez, and Achy Obejas. For Judge Collins rejected the Miramax ar- more information, contact Bryce Mil-' . gument that their advertisements are paro- ligan at (210) 271-3151. MICHAEL MOORS r\ dies, protected by the First Amendment,

) L3 saying instead that they probably infringe Columbia's copyright. PUSHERS AT LARGE. In March, Philip Mor- • Moore had no public comment on the rul- ris C.E.O. Geoffrey Bible told a Minnesota ing. However, usually well-informed court suing the tobacco companies that he sources told the Observer he is delighted that does not "set money above public health. I group's fears that the dump will endanger anybody might mistake him for Tommy Lee place them all at the highest ranking." border residents. Asked why the state could Jones. He was only hoping for Roy Orbison. Three years earlier, Bible wrote to Philip not have put the dump in East Texas, Gon- Morris stockholders, "Our one all-consum- zales said the soil was too soft and porous. PREACHER SMITH goes to Washington. San ing ambition is to create wealth for the "So they admit they are worried that their Antonio's eagle-eyed freedom-fighter, owners of Philip Morris." canisters may leak," said Diputado Alejan- Maury Maverick, Jr., spotted Congressman That's just one of the institutional dro Jimenez, president of the federal com- Lamar Smith pontificating on the House hypocrisies of the tobacco companies docu- mission on ecology and the environment. floor and thereby confirmed that Smith can mented in Global Aggression: The Case for "The fact that the Governor would not meet distort the Constitution with the best of World Standards and Bold U.S. Action Chal- with us is going to work against him," them. Smith joined the high demagoguery lenging Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco. The Jimenez predicted. In Washington, the supporting the Istook ("Religious Free- new report, published by the public interest Compact that would open the dump to dom") Amendment — the Christian right's group INFACT, Boston-based, covers the other states has been sent to a congres- latest (failed) crusade to impose its theology corruption and dishonesty of the tobacco sional conference committee, where pro- on schoolchildren. Smith took up the cause, corporations in the U.S., and their increasing compact legislators are expected to try to predictably, by blaming the Warren expansion overseas in search of new markets strip two amendments: one limiting the site Supreme Court for changing the meaning of and weaker government regulation for their to just Texas, Maine, and Vermont, and a the separation of church and state, and then poisonous products. The report is particu- second providing improved legal standing proclaimed, "The Constitution does not pro- larly strong on tobacco industry marketing to for local residents to sue on grounds of dis- tect freedom from religion. It guards against children; and the companies' determination crimination. having one religion imposed on us all.... to evade or rewrite all laws regulating to- This amendment requires that those who ex bacco internationally, and then to corrupt or ONE FOR THE SCUM. Filmmaker Michael press their religious beliefs receive the same day-government efforts to intervene on be- Moore may have succeeded in embarrass- treatment as those who express nonreligious half of iinblic health. ing Nike C.E.O. Philip Knight into slightly views." Apparently Smith believes that if INFACT calls for a boycott on these improving working conditions in his over- the government wishes to impose religion companies and their other brands (Kraft, seas sweatshops, but he got slapped down on its citizens, that's perfectly okay as long Post, Maxwell House), to press for interna- by a federal judge for making fun of as we get to choose from an exhaustive tional regulatory standards to end the Columbia Pictures. That was the June 2 smorgasbord of available creeds. Coming "global tobacco epidemic." "If current judgment of U.S. District Judge Audrey B. soon to your school district thanks to Con- trends continue," says Executive Director Collins, who ordered Miramax Pictures, gressman Smith: accredited instruction in Kathryn Mulvey, "half a billion of the 5.5 distributors of Moore's current film, The Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., billion people alive today will be wiped out Big One, to stop using the film's promo- etc.... No atheists or secular humanists al- by tobacco." For a copy of the report, con- tional posters which parody the advertising lowed. That'll teach those millions of back- tact INFACT, 256 Hanover Street, Boston, for the Columbia film, Men in Black. sliding, atheist toddlers that Sunday School MA 02113; (617) 742-4583; infact@igc. The Men in Black advertisements feature happens seven days a week. apc.org; www.infact.org. ❑

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 17 LAS AMERICAS The Mexican Bank Heist BY JOHN ROSS One morning in May, a gang of nine thieves carrying automatic weapons relieved a Banamex shopping mall branch of an undisclosed sum„ and disappeared into Mexico City traffic Police pressed the banks customers for details of the robbery. It was the city sixty-second bancazo of the year — right on pace with 1997 but an old-style stick-up One new wrinkle in the bank robbery business is the "psychological" holdup in which a lone thief, never displaying a weapon, passes a threatening note to the teller — and calmly walks away with the loot

he psychological M.O. is an apt Peniche, who paid a pittance for the Banco came when the Mexican peso fell apart metaphor for the biggest bank heist Union and then the Cremi, both of which three weeks after that now-reviled presi- in Mexican history — in which he looted to the tune of $2.2 billion before dent left office. Tthieves walked away with a half- winging off to Monte Carlo in September With Mexico on the brink of bankruptcy, trillion pesos ($65 billion). The odd twist to 1994. Despite an Interpol dragnet, Cabal Ernesto Zedillo began his presidency with this cold-blooded caper is that the banks are remains at large, although Mexican televi- an agreement to abide by International holding up the public, and the note they use sion recently filmed him at his estate in Monetary Fund and U.S. conditions — in to do it includes this threat: if the public southern Spain. Angel Isidro Rodriguez exchange for a $50 billion bail-out. One does not pay up, Mexico will fall into an (alias "El Divino") was another of Ortiz' condition reportedly required by the White economic decline that will make the 1995 mistakes. Together with his relatives, El House (no written agreement was ever re- collapse seem like good times. The extor- Divino emptied the vaults of Banpais be- leased) advanced the N.A.F.T.A. date for tion seems modeled on the U.S. banking in- fore fleeing on his yacht to Ibiza. El Divino U.S. penetration of the Mexican banking dustry scheme that sucked $200 billion was extradited to Mexico on June 2 after an system. A second more public stipulation from taxpayers to cover the plundering of eighteen-month legal battle; despite multi- dictated by the I.M.F. pushed interest rates the savings & loans in the mid-eighties. ple warrants charging the embezzlement of up beyond creditor capacity to pay. Mas= But the Mexican scheme has a history of 400 million pesos, he was not jailed, be- sive defaults soon had the banks in techni - its own. Back in 1982, with oil prices plum- cause white-collar bancazos are not consid- cal bankruptcy, and Ortiz was eventually meting and debt default looming on the hori- ered a serious offense under Mexican law. required to pump 14 percent of the Gross zon, President Jose Lopez Portillo became so Another Ortiz mistake, Jorge Lankanau, Domestic Product, 552 billion pesos, or enraged at bankers who salted away billions is doing hard time at the Topo Chico peni- $65 billion = through the Protection Fund, in U.S. accounts that he ordered their banks tentiary near Monterrey, after trying to es- to rescue the banks from their own folly. nationalized. Pounding the podium before cape house arrest last fall. Lankanau appar- The debtors came in all sizes. At the bot- Congress, he swore that the bankers would ently blew billions of Banco Confia tom of the heap were the farmers of the never return "to sack us again." depositors' pesos in an offshore investment debtors' association known as El Barzon, Ten years later, President Carlos Salinas, scheme. The Confia bank and 200 branch who were dispossessed by 400 percent in- whose presidency was distinguished by du- offices were recently snapped up by Citi- creases in interest rates. The moratorium on bious privatization of state enterprises, sold corp at a fire sale price of $45 million; payments instigated by El Buz& quickly eighteen banks to hotshot stockbrokers, en- overall, foreign banks have absorbed about spread to the cities, literally bringing the trepreneurs, and heavy campaign contribu- a fifth of Mexico's banking system since banks to their knees with what the powerful tors for $12 billion -- an error that has now the peso collapsed in December 1994. Mexican Bankers Association (A.B.M.) cost the Mexican government $65 billion. It has been Mr. Ortiz' great good fortune derides as "the culture of no pay." Guillermo Ortiz (the man who supervised (though not necessarily that of Mexican At the top of the pile were bankers and the privatization as Finance Secretary and is taxpayers) that his mistakes have been cov- industrialists who quickly divined that the now president of the Bank of Mexico) con- ered by the National Bank Depositors Pro- Protection Fund could be their own road to cedes that he might have made a few mis- tection Fund (also known as FOBAPROA), the goldfields. Of 440,000 outstanding bad takes in the selection process: twelve of the established in 1990 to safeguard deposi- debts covered by the Fund since 1995, 604 eighteen banks he sold off have since been tors' accounts — and, now, the speculation debtors claimed half the largesse dispensed taken into receivership by the government. of the bank owners. The Protection Fund by the banks. Who were these "preferred One of Ortiz' biggest mistakes was a was first deployed to offset a series of Sali- customers," and how had they incurred Tabasco state tycoon named Carlos Cabal nas-era financial scandals, but its real test their debts? The A.B.M. won't say, citing

18 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 the sanctity of banking secrecy. But the dais, the gobbling up of twelve busted (Both Gurria and Ortiz are precandidates for history of some of the hand-outs is well banks by industry leaders under shadowy the P.R.I. presidential nomination.) documented. Lankanau's Confia received terms, and the general perception that the Meanwhile the center-left Party of the 26 billion pesos to cover his offshore deals. Mexican banking system has been trans- Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.) and the Cabal Peniche received 680 million pesos formed into an enormous laundromat for conservative National Action (P.A.N.) to bail out his El Camino hotel chain; 41 the international drug cartels. The recent Party, which together hold a majority in the billion was delivered to El Divino who, in round-up of Mexican bankers, run by the lower house of Congress, first want to turn, lent millions to Cabal and Lankanau U.S. Treasury and code-named Operation probe charges of fraud and financial incest before fleeing justice on his luxury yacht. Casablanca, did little to lessen this percep- in the accumulation of the FOBAPROA Now the government and the bankers tion. On May 18, U.S. Treasury Secretary debt. "Once the Finance Commission and the preferred customers want to dump Robert Rubin and Attorney General Janet knows what kind of loans the banks made the $65 billion tab on Mexican and to whom they made them, taxpayers, by transferring the we will evaluate what is really Fund to the public debt, a public debt," affirms Barzon mechanism that would triple leader Alfonso Ramirez Cuel- domestic indebtedness. Con- lar, a P.R.D. congressman who verting the Fund into public is the commission's secretary. debt means that every Mexican The P.R.D. is also demanding will now owe his or her gov- an audit of each bank's fifty top ernment 5,700 pesos (about customers, a petition that has hit $800) more than they previ- the brick wall of banking se- ously owed — before interest. crecy. If the Mexican people balk at With the government tied up bearing this burden, warn by political infighting, no relief Ortiz, Zedillo, and the A.M.B., appears in sight before October, the bottom will fall out of the a delay the Zedillo administra- economy. "The cost of the cri- tion fears will breed uncertainty sis must be absorbed by all and capital flight. The banking Mexicans," insists Carlos crisis, combined with slumping G6mez y Gomez, A.M.B. di- oil prices, the Asian drama, a rector and C.E.O. of the Span- growing trade deficit, and a ish-based Bank of Santander plunging stock market, the (formerly Banco Mexicano). prospect for the next five Gomez y Gomez says little months is unsettling. about the benefits. One further unsettling ele- In April, President Zedillo ment that could make Ortiz' sent a banking reform initiative A From Sharing the Pie by Steve Brouwer Steve Brodner doomsday scenario a reality, is on to Congress, but the bill was lost in the Reno announced they had cracked the a lawsuit the Barzon has advanced to the debate over the president's efforts to legis- largest money-laundering case on the U.S. Supreme Court, which would prohibit the late limits to indigenous peoples' autonomy. books: 200 suspects, among them twenty- banks from capitalizing interest payments With that measure now shelved, congres- six Mexican bankers, were arrested. Oper- (i.e. charging interest on interest). Barzon- sional attentions have returned to Zedillo's ation Casablanca fingered three Mexican istas, who have won similar decisions from banking reform package. The reforms banks operating in the U.S. for laundering provincial courts, gather daily outside the would give Ortiz' Bank of Mexico, a sort of $120 million in drug profits, and dealt the court building, sometimes with brass bands central bank, autonomy over money supply credibility of the Mexican banking system in tow, to pressure the justices into a favor- and exchange rates, and grant similar auton- a blow from which it may never recover. able verdict. Should the High Court decide omy (from Ortiz' bank) to the Banking and But the fate of Zedillo's reforms is uncer- in favor of the debtors, "It will be a death Stock Commission (C.N.B.V.), a regulatory tain. Congress seems absorbed by presiden- blow for the banks," suggests Enrique agency. In addition to converting the Protec- tial elections two years off. The P.R.I. wants Quintana, the dean of Mexican financial tion Fund to public debt, the Zedillo pack- the FOBAPROA issue out of the way as writers. ❑ age would permit 100-percent ownership of soon as possible and claims that delay will the Mexican banking system by foreign trigger economic crisis. Other observers, John Ross is the author of The Annexation banks. such as independent Senator Adolfo of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the I.M.F. The need to revamp the C.N.B.V., an in- Aguilar Zinser, suggest that the issue is Sharing the Pie, by Steve Brouwer with il- house regulatory agency presided over by being manipulated by Finance Secretary lustrations by Steve Brodner, is available bankers, is underscored by myriad scan- Angel Gurria to tarnish Ortiz' good name. from Owl Books (Henry Holt & Company).

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 19 JAMES GALBRAITH ► The Butterfly Effect Small actions can have large consequences. The mathematics of chaos teaches that a butterfly, flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a chain of events leading to a hurricane at Cape Fear. They call this "the butterfly effect "

n March 24, 1997, the butterfly development model — a collapse which, which our technological edge in the world was named Alan Greenspan. That for unexplained reasons, has not taken economy is based. day, he flapped his wings just down Taiwan, or China. But since this crisis Alan Greenspan seems aware of these once, raising the interest rate by was made in Washington, there is nothing dangers: he spoke of them vividly in an im- one-quarter0 of one percentage point, about much that can be done about it in Seoul or portant speech six months ago. But there re- five percent of then-prevailing values. Djakarta. Reforms of domestic policies in mains an intransigent faction at the Federal Global currency instability started just developing countries may be necessary. But Reserve, people with secure bases in the about then. The Thai crisis hit three months they cannot cure a problem caused by poli- Fed system and inflexible minds, who favor later amidst speculation that the Fed might cies in the large financial centers. higher interest rates under all conditions. act again. After that, it wasn't just the Asian By the same token, the vast capital in- And so the debate is between those who say Rim currencies — Korea, Malaysia, the flows into the United States in 1997 — the "raise rates" and those who say "not yet." Philippines and Indonesia — that fell. So portfolio investments that fueled the boom Under these conditions, to hold the line is did the yen. So did the Taiwan and Aus- in the American stock market — were the best Greenspan can do, and such a stale- tralian dollars. And so did an index repre- started by the Federal Reserve. And the mate must always end in a rate increase — senting the euro. Indeed there was a world- never, until much too late, in a rate cut. wide devaluation, leaving only the pound THE DOLLAR WENT UP, AND ITS There are, so far as we can tell, no voices and the dollar flying high. CLOSEST DEPENDENCIES, LIKE at the Fed calling outright for rate cuts. Yet Seen this way, the so-called "Asian crisis" SUHARTO'S RUPIAH, WERE THE today, the first priority is that interest rates was not restricted to Asia. Nor did the mar- GREATEST VICTIMS. THIS IS A CRISIS must come down. Further steps, such as a kets suddenly discover that particular coun- OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. Tobin Tax on capital flows and speculative tries suffered from inefficiency, corruption, transactions, could help stabilize the global deficits, inflation, or other internal disorders. consequences for the American productive markets. The loan to Japan was a good Instead, Asian and non-Asian currencies economy are now surfacing in a vast in- step, of which more may be needed later. have moved in striking parallel, often day by crease in the U.S. trade deficit, as exports Special steps toward Russia are urgently day. The differences were of degree: since tumble and cheapened imports flood our needed, as that giant country, a security March, 1997, the currencies of Europe, markets. These consequences will multiply issue for the entire globe, continues its slide Japan, Australia and Taiwan have fallen if we fail to act quickly — and correctly. toward disaster. about 20 percent; a cluster of the Philippines, Today, some say U.S. interest rates By stemming capital inflows, such ac- Malaysia, Korea and Thailand fell 40 per- should rise. Though we sometimes hear the tions might send stock prices downward at cent, and Indonesia fell 80 percent. claim that this would deflate our stock bub- first — a boom based mainly on capital in- Roughly speaking, currencies collapsed ble, the short-run effect could be the oppo- flows will not continue when they stop. But in proportion to their dependence on Ameri- site: a higher interest rate could drain more over a longer time frame, stock prices will can capital. Those hit hardest were those capital from overseas and push stocks up- recover if U.S. economic growth is sus- that have relied most on our investments, ward. But that effect would be temporary. tained by an early recovery of the world that had the least resident wealth of their And it would come at the cost of yet more economy, of other currencies and of our ex- own, that were most caught up in construc- collapse in the world economy and a larger port markets. The alternative — more global tion booms financed by short-term inflows. trade deficit for the United States. instability and more of our own debt-driven When U.S. interest rates started to rise, dol- In the end, down this path lies disaster. If bubble, followed by a prolonged collapse — lar-sensitive investors came home. The dol- the first dose fails and rate increases are re- would be infinitely worse. ❑ lar went up, and its closest dependencies, peated, eventually the structure of U.S. like Suharto's rupiah, were the greatest vic- household debts, already at dangerous lev- James Galbraith is a professor at the LBJ tims. This is a crisis of the American empire. els, is bound to crack. The collapse that School of Public Affairs, U.T.–Austin, and It is also a crisis of the "Washington con- would follow would be massive and long- author of Created Unequal: The Crisis in sensus," that doctrine of deregulation and lasting. It would be the end of the dollar American Pay, to be published in August open capital markets. Much nonsense has era, the end of the post-war growth age, by the Free Press. This essay will appear in been written about the collapse of the Asian and the end of the global development on FOMC Alert, an economics newsletter.

2Q ■ THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 JIM HIGHTOWER Congress on Welfare If a welfare recipient is caught buying candy bars and sodas with food stamp, you can bet that a member of Congress will be up on his hind legs about i4 spewing spit and fulminating ferociously in pious outrage that tax money is being spent on "luxuries" for the poor et this very same member of values in their own pockets. It would make now, you get to do all of this yourself! Congress will make what they a flim-flam artist blush, but it's all rational- Kroger is one of the brave adventurers call a foreign "fact-finding" trip ized as "economic progress." Take my pioneering this no-clerk policy, having in- (you would call it a junket) and local phone company — please! I'm a cus- stalled the U-Scan Express System in fif- demand that we taxpayers provide every tomer of SBC Inc. — and you probably teen of its supermarkets. Likewise, A&P, travel luxury imaginable. Take Congress- will be, too. It has long controlled phone Finest, King Sooper and Winn-Dixie are man Floyd Spence — please! This South service in Texas, and four other states. But trying out the technology. A Kroger Carolina Republican led a delegation of six last year, it took over Pacific Telesis, giv- spokesman claims that the U-Scan pro- other lawmakers on a ten-day jaunt to Asia ing it control of local phones in California vides an "extra service" for customers. last year, supposedly on a fact-finding mis- and Nevada. This year, it has grabbed But, as Greg Denier of the United Food sion regarding our national security inter- Ameritech, giving it five more states in the and Commercial Workers put it: "In gen- ests. To help find facts, the spouses of most upper Midwest. Now there's talk of it eral, making customers do the work for of the members took the trip, too. The Hill merging with US West, giving SBC seven- themselves is not customer service." newspaper reports that Spence and com- teen western states and control of local ser- Bingo, Greg! pany flew to Asia aboard a large, luxury jet vice everywhere in America outside the Kroger also claims that this new elec- provided by the Pentagon, costing us deep South and the Northeast. I just got my tronic system is necessary because it's hard $825,000 just for the plane. We paid for a bill from this leviathan, and its new slogan for the supermarkets to find workers these full crew of stewards, as well as escorts to is: "Your friendly neighborhood global days. Wrong! It's hard for them to find take care of the lawmakers and spouses communications company." I kid you not! workers without paying them a decent while on land. For the flight, taxpayers pro- If SBC Inc. is so friendly, why does it keep wage, and that's what's really behind this vided thirty-six bottles of wine, twenty-one raising my rates at the same time it claims latest technological invasion of our lives. cases of beer, and eleven bottles of hard that its mergers make it more efficient? The However, there will be at least one of us liquor. We also provided such travel sup- truth is that these mergers have nothing to human beings left working in the store. plies as sun block, eye drops, playing do with efficiency and everything to do You see, not only does the U-Scan system cards, film, shaving cream, deodorant, and with greed. Big shareholders make a killing make you do the work, but it also doesn't breath mints. And, of course, we paid for as a result of these mergers, investment trust you to be honest. So the supermarkets their fine dining abroad, their first-class ho- bankers get fat on fees, and C.E.O.s make focus special video cameras on you as you tels, their cocktail receptions, the tours for millions from their stock options. For ex- "self-checkout." This, in turn, requires a the spouses, all their ground travel, and ample, on the recent SBC takeover of clerk to sit hour after hour at a central sta- even tips for their hotel bellhops. Then, on Ameritech, the C.E.O. of Ameritech per- tion monitoring the video screens, ready to their way back — undoubtedly weary from sonally can walk away from the deal with sound the alarms and bring in the gen- all their fact-finding — these congressional $44.6 million. darmes if you try to slip a Butterball turkey travelers stopped for a two-day layover in When that "Megamerger Deal-Wheel" past the electronic eye. Hawaii, apparently for a nice, relaxing starts spinning it's the elites at the top who It's all part of the Brave New World round of golf at our expense. get the goldmine — while the rest of us get Order in which there is no service — and But at least they're on guard against poor the shaft. no real jobs. ❑ people getting candy bars. SCAN THIS! Jim Hightower's radio talk show broad- THE MERGER SCAM Time for another trip into the Far, Far, Far- casts daily from Austin, on over 100 sta- Step right up, folks, and take your chances Out Frontiers of Free Enterprise. tions nationwide. His new book is There's on the "Megamerger Deal-Wheel." It's a Today, Spaceship ' Hightower takes you Nothing in the Middle of the Road but game where corporate executives waste bil- deeper than you might want to go, into Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, and lions of dollars in investment capital buying what supermarkets claim is the latest in his political action newsletter, the "High- each other's companies, then close down high-tech, consumer "convenience": do-it- tower Lowdown," is forthcoming. Find him local factories or branches, fire thousands yourself checkout lines. Yes indeed, no at www.jimhightowercom, or e-mail: of employees, raise prices for consumers, clerk to scan your basket of groceries, take info @ jimhightow er. corn. and put billions of dollars in inflated stock your money and bag your purchases —

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 21 MOLLY IVINS Money for Murder As we watched the tobacco bill die an unnatural death last month, it left only sour satisfaction to those of us who believe that money runs American politics. We now have the cleares4 most definitive proof any long-suffering campaign-finance reformer could ever hope for, that money counts more than the public interes4 more than children health, and more than people,'s lives, in a political system so corrupted by money that it stinks to the highest heavens.

ur politicians can twist this truth, phony studies trying to prove it wasn't true. happening to working families. I give them they can distort it, they can spin it We know that tobacco executives lied to reassurance, they will have a nice chance to 'til they're blue in the face, but Congress, they savagely went after whis- vote for an increase in the minimum wage the truth still sits there bigger tle-blowers from their ranks, and they de- later on, and we will see how distressed than0 Godzilla. The tobacco industry has liberately made their product more addic- they are about all those working families been spending between $4 million and $5 tive, knowing that it kills. To be blunt that they are agonizing about and so dis- million a week for eight weeks now on about it, the tobacco industry has murdered tressed because this is a regressive tax. radio and television advertising to defeat millions of people. Morally, it is just as "The reason it is a regressive tax is be- this bill — a total of at least $40 million just guilty as Adolf Hitler. cause it is the tobacco industry that has tar- in the last two months, according to Ira It was different when we thought they geted the needy and the poor and the work- Teinowitz of Advertising Age magazine. didn't really know or weren't sure or were ing families of this country. It is the And that's not counting the money that big tobacco industry that is to blame. It isn't tobacco has sunk into the political system. TO BE BLUNT ABOUT IT, THE TOBACCO these families. How elite and arrogant it is Between 1987 and 1997, Philip Morris INDUSTRY HAS MURDERED MILLIONS for those on the other side of the aisle to Company contributed $8 million to politi- OF PEOPLE. MORALLY, IT IS JUST AS cry these crocodile tears for workini fami- cians, RJR Nabisco contributed $7 million, GUILTY AS ADOLF HITLER. lies and their children, who are going to and so on down through the big tobacco get cancer. Those working families care companies, all of them major, major politi- just ignoring the evidence. But now, we about their children. They care about them cal contributors. know that they knew — that they have no less than those who come from a differ- Three out of four current members of known for decades — that they were ent socioeconomic background. How arro- Congress — 319 representatives and sev- killing people. And they kept on doing it gant can you be? How insulting can you be enty-six senators, according to Common for profit. to make that argument on the floor of the Cause — have accepted tobacco-industry Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get U.S. Senate?" PAC money during the past eleven years. A a man to understand something when his Of course, the bill wasn't perfect. The total of $30 million. The soft money given salary depends on his not understanding it." money should have gone into health care, by tobacco directly to the political parties But this is not a question of "not understand- especially children's health care, as has exploded: more than $3 million in 1997 ing." Big tobacco understands, all right, and Kennedy and Senator Orrin Hatch origi- alone. Philip Morris has been the Republi- has engaged in a massive cover-up. nally proposed, but even this imperfect bill can Party's top soft-money donor for three Tobacco and its bought tools in died, because tobacco paid the political years running, giving more than $1 million Congress have twisted this bill in every piper and called the tune. ❑ to the party each year. And you wonder why fashion imaginable, claiming that it will re- Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott does- sult in an uncontrollable black market for n't like this bill? cigarettes, that it will help wealthy trial ANDERSON & COMPANY How long, 0 Lord, how long? There are lawyers, that it's a "big government" solu- COFFEE studies going back to the 1940s about the tion, and — my personal favorite — that it TEA SPICES link between tobacco and cancer. The first is a regressive tax on the poor. TWO JEFFERSON SQUARE surgeon general's report warning that That last bit of blatant hypocrisy, com- AUSTIN, TEXAS 78731 smoking causes cancer appeared in 1964. ing from legislators who have never cast a 512-453-1533 Every year since then, the evidence has vote to help poor people in their lives, Send me your list. caused Ted Kennedy to go into one of the mounted and mounted and 'mounted. Name Thirty-four years, 50,000 studies, and mil- finest rants heard in the Senate for years: "I listened to those crocodile tears of our Street lions of smoking-related deaths later, we now know that the tobacco industry fought colleagues on the other side of the aisle City Zip to suppress the information and paid for about how distressed they are about what is

22 TH8 TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 MOLLY IVINS Anti-Politics in Fort Worth Perhaps the most curious thing about the Republican Party of Texas at this point is that it is not really a political organization. I suppose we could quibble over definitions, but if you compare the Republican State Convention to the recent Southern Baptist General Convention in Salt Lake City, youtl see a lot more similarity between the issues concerning those two groups than to the issues at the upcoming Democratic State Convention. The Republicans just do not have a very political agenda.

t the Republican State Convention, partment stores and banks, the relocation about that one for a while.) the top issues were: (1) abortion, of manufacturing jobs overseas, particu- Now this is in a state that has been cov- (2) school prayer, and (3) moral larly in the clothing industry, and other ered with a cloud of pollution from burning AL values in general. Of what is, I facts of economic life, I could just as well rain forests in Mexico, Guatemala, and believe, the foremost political problem of have been having a conversation with Honduras for weeks. Most of the fires were our day, the one that dwarfs all other — the Michael Moore, the populist writer and started by individuals working in their own system of legalized bribery we call cam- main character in The Big One. Absolutely best interest. At the souvenir stalls in the paign financing — nary a word was heard, no difference. Exhibit Hall was a cute number that read: even though the leading sponsors in both A similar curiosity: While much was "Pave the Rain Forest." House and Senate are Republican. heard on school prayer, nothing was heard I assume that is supposed to outrage the If you assume — and I do = that the cor- about the environment. This was during the enviros. But maybe I'm missing some ruption of American politics by money is the age of global warming, when the heat prac- deeper plan: If we pave the rain forests, root cause of almost all of our other political tically knocked you over every time you we'll sure as sin need prayer in the schools problems, this is an odd omission. The party left the convention center. Yet the entirety* and everywhere else — not that prayer platform, in one sentence, opposes any and of the state G.O.P. platform on the environ- would do much good at that point. Since all reforms. That's especially curious, given ment consists of praise for private property, Republicans are well-to-do, maybe they that there is a real populist feeling about the and a recommendation that the government think they can just stay in their air-condi- Texas G.O.P. these days, a real sense of or- do nothing about the environment. ("The tioned homes and ignore the environment, dinary folks against the elites. environment is best served by individuals though I don't quite see why they assume The most common reading of the Rs working in their own best interest." Think their trees, their grass, their corn, and their these days is that they have a dangerous cattle aren't going to dry up and die along split between cultural conservatives and with everyone else's. economic conservatives. But if you look be- Oddly enough, the economy was not neath the surface, it's actually a split be- much of a topic either. An old political tru- tween populism and corporatism, except ism has it that the only two real political that debate is not happening. questions are: "Who's getting screwed?" An example: I talked with a lovely and "Who's doing the screwing?" As woman who is active in the populists have often pointed out, the G.O.P. because her daugh- old political paradigm of poli- ter lost a baby at birth — tics as a spectrum that runs such a traumatic experience from right to left is actually ir- for the entire family — and it left relevant: the real political spectrum her with terribly strong feelings runs from top to bottom, and the about the evils of late-term real political questions are the abortion. It also happens same as ever. that this woman and her Again, the populist in- husband run a family- stinct on the R side is no- owned business that „,. ticeably strong. makes children's 1 There is a real re-

4 • sweaters. As "Im• -4(0',..; rq; sentment of "coun- • 1.•; " --'444tr we talked about ". •*,: • • -• try-club Republi- • ..41:6 • 4 ' • • • the mergers of de- • - • • •1 ,,. • ' ' ••■ 4. ' •44• 4 A 1, cans,” to use the • • , 0 MAUI( q-f

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 23 common stereotype. Not just resentment ing all the divisive social issues — the Is- but suspicion, even a touch of paranoia: the took Amendment on "religious freedom" This is Texas today. A state full of platform still contains a demand to investi- (read, mandatory school prayer), abortion, Sunbelt boosters, strident anti-union- gate the Trilateral Commission, an old etc. — eating up what little remaining time ists, oil and as companies, nuclear weapons and power plants, political right-wing bugbear, and the delegates in- Congress has to do anything. This in turn hucksters, underpaid workers and sisted on floor debate of proposed rules upset the moneybags, who are especially toxic wastes, to mention a few. changes out of suspicion that the people peeved about Republican efforts to vilify running the party might somehow be trying Clinton for trading with China. (F.Y.I., for BUT DO NOT DESPAIR! to put one over on them. those who don't follow politics: The real T HE TEXAS Again, what was not debated — political China lobby in this country is American issues — seemed to me the most striking business. Mess with their trade agreements, feature of the convention. The state G.O.P. and they'll bolt to the Clinton Ds.) server wants Congress to stop funding the Interna- In chess, that's called a fork. The Rs also TO SUBSCRIBE: lack a national leader they all like (this is tional Monetary Fund, "because the IMF 307 West 7th Street, props up foreign tyrants and gives Ameri- why they so mourn the Great Communica- Austin, TX 78701 can tax money to international bankers." tor) and are stuck with Newt Gingrich, who Now I know for a fact that the corporate has changed sides so many times, it's ludi- donors who support the party no more agree crous. I'd say this split is quite serious for with that than they can dance the lead in the Rs at the national level but far less so at "Swan Lake." I think the way the I.M.F. the state level. While the Christian right is structures loans is pretty ungodly myself, not crazy about Kay Bailey Hutchison, or but no serious political debate would frame even George Dubya (he's too country club the issue as "I.M.F. or No I.M.F." for their taste and his father's son), they are In recent weeks, both wings of the Re- united by the prospect of victory. ❑ publican Party have threatened to bolt because the other side is in the ascendant — Molly Ivins is a former Observer editor and though it's hard to say how serious they a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Tele- 307 West 5th Street are. James Dobson, the right-wing radio gram. Her new book, You Got to Dance Austin, Texas preacher, threatened House Speaker Newt With Them What Brung You, is in the (512) 477-1137 Gingrich and the other congressional lead- bookstores. You may write to her via e-mail ers and as a consequence, we are now see- at [email protected].

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24 ■ THE TEXAS OBSERVER .JULY 3. 1998 BOOKS & THE CULTURE

Celebrity Her Life Returns to Her like a Test in Did he die Seventh Grade or write a book? For some time she thought she It's all the same. could continue as her dog continued I heard his name. to carry his great heart on the same rounds, Would I know her down the streets of New Hill, by a look? I hear she's famous where the lace-curtained windows sallowed and not nameless. and the fence kept in the rabbi's goats. If he died She thought she could walk the routine lane I'd remember. around the field of corn where children There'd be a fuss: like the ones who had been hers had torn he wasn't us. the green ears and stomped them onto the ground. They couldn't But it was August, the cicadas crackled live forever, in the wild carrot, and the ground was but I'll miss them. Tell Me II Whoever. dry and prophetic. In the woods beyond she Your lie began to hear gunshot, too early to be legal, is my exaggeration. I trim the truth finely and it seemed if her heart was once again in to fit the facts. her mouth like clay. What was wrong? You sometimes tell me No one was dead, no one was missing, what you think but her life had become a tedious school. I want to hear. Sometimes She sat at the head of the row, where she must take when you tell the truth her spelling test to the end while the others passed there is air in it theirs one up. She remembers how hers returned for us to fly in with little x's on it, the letters she had misplaced. before we sit down and mourn So this is how the heart and the earth are linked what is missing she thought, the heart at earth's beginning, —SUE DWYER the earth at heart's end. She wondered if she would ever spell anything right again. —LOIS MARIE HARROD

ue Dwyer is a social justice activist living in Toledo, Ohio. Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, She worked many years as an English teacher, is on the edi- and Green Mountains Review. S torial board of Linkages, and has published chapbooks of her A poetry editor's insomniac wondering: do the people whose poems, including The Chili Sauce Factory and RaSpberry Season. poems we place side by side like one another's work? I have an in- Lois Marie Harrod's most recent book of poetry, Part of the stinct Dwyer and Harrod would, though the size and style of their Deeper Sea, was published by Palanquin Press in South Carolina. poems vary greatly — there is something refreshingly true and to- Her earlier books include Every Twinge a Verdict and Crazy Alice. the-point in both their voices. (If Dwyer wrote the test, I think Har- Her poems have appeared in many journals, including American rod might like it better.) —Naomi Shihab Nye

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 25 BOOKS & THE CULTURE Tennessee in Texas A Visit to Hell with the Young Tennessee Williams BY MICHAEL KING

NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES. and worked on revisions for several years. A play by Tennessee Williams. Though Nightingales was never produced, Directed by Trevor Nunn. the company's interest provided the con- Alley Theatre, Houston, June 10–July 3. tacts Williams needed to launch his career, with the 1945 Broadway premier of t's been a good long while since a The Glass Menagerie. theatre could boast the premiere of In the Alley production, compiled by a new play by the legendary Amer- Vanessa Redgrave and director Nunn from ican master Tennessee Williams, three complete versions and additional re- but last month, thanks to a combi- lated material in the Williams archives, the nation of diligence and good for- three-hour Nightingales takes the form of tune, Houston's Alley Theatre twenty-two feverish, brief scenes, each an- could proclaim exactly that. Not nounced by a tabloid "headline" above the About Nightingales, a 1938 Williams script stage. The Alley has borrowed the neigh- 1excavated by Vanessa Redgrave from the boring Aerial Theatre to allow a ware- playwright's University of Texas archives, house-like traverse staging, with the audi- arrives on the Alley stage as an extraordi- ence looming on either side; until the nary collaboration between the Alley com- violent climax in the oven-like Klondike, pany, Vanessa and Corin Redgrave' s Mov- scenes alternate between the prison cell ing Theatre, and England's Royal National block C and the warden's office, at opposite Theatre, under the direction of the Na- Corin Redgrave and Sherri Lee Nobby Clark poles of Richard Hoover's nightmarish, tional's Trevor Nunn. The relatively brief monochromatic set (complete with the war- Alley run is a continuation of the critically- Nightingales was initially drafted for an den's black-and-white American flag). In acclaimed London opening at the Cottesloe assignment in the twenty-seven-year-old this noirish context (the editor of the pub- Theatre in March, and the companies are Williams' playwriting class, under Federal lished text, Allean Hale, plausibly suggests hoping for additional productions in New Writers' Project veteran E.P. Conkle and as a direct influence the 1935 Wallace York and London. This is the second co- Edward Charles Mabie at the University of Beery prison film The Big House), Williams production of the Alley and the Moving Iowa. Asked to compose a play based on a conceives a titanic struggle between the Theatre; in 1996, the companies staged current event, Williams took as his subject brutal and corrupt warden, Boss Whalen Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra in an August 1938 news story from the (delivered with villainous relish by Corn repertory in Houston and London. Philadelphia County prison in Holmesburg, Redgrave), and the thuggishly defiant boss A new Williams play of any sort at all Pennsylvania. In response to a hunger strike con, Butch O'Fallon (the Alley's James would be news enough; particularly over bad food, prison officials had locked Black, a two-fisted, razor-wielding match serendipitous about Nightingales is that the twenty-five prisoners into an airtight, water- for the tyrannical warden). Reading the play is a grandly ambitious and powerful less steam shed known as the "Klondike," newspapers, the prisoners note with awe the work — youthfully raw and rough-edged in capable of being heated to 200 degrees. In rise of Hitler and Mussolini; among other execution, but marked with the large ges- what Newsweek called "one of the worst notions the young Williams toys with is a tures and baroque flourishes of Williams' prison horrors in American history," four sort of plainspeech political allegory. greatest plays. Much more than just a liter- prisoners were scalded to death. (At the sub- Caught between these implacable forces ary curiosity, the play certainly merits per- sequent trial of prison officials, the Klondike are the play's figures of romance: prison manent entry into the Williams repertory. was revealed to be a regular torture method trusty "Canary Jim" Allison (the National's Moreover, based on a '30s Pennsylvania used by officials for at least a decade.) Finbar Lynch), a would-be writer desperate prison uprising and composed in the agit- Williams later submitted the play (ded- for parole, and Eva Crane (the Alley's prop style of the WPA' s Living Newspaper icated to "Clarence Darrow, the Great De- Sherri Parker Lee), the warden's initially program, Nightingales has a surprisingly fender") with other scripts to a competi- naive secretary who discovers both corrup- topical resonance, painfully reinforced by tion sponsored by New York's Group tion and love in the prison's little corner of recent news about contemporary conditions Theatre (it was the first manuscript for hell. Canary Jim, brutalized by the warden in American prisons. which he adopted the name Tennessee), and despised by his fellow inmates as a

26 = THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 traitor, is a prototype for the sensitive, mis- experimentation carried out on largely un- sometimes seems a reluctant undergradu- understood intellectuals who move through witting prisoners at Holmesburg, including ate saddled with an uncongenial term Williams' mature plays. When Eva recites uncontrolled experiments with hallucino- paper, and Eva oddly wavers between a Keats to him, he vows one day to write, but gens, radiation, and dioxin.) mousey steno and a sophisticated "not about nightingales." Trevor Nunn's staging of the play faces temptress. Yet Lynch and Lee, in collaboration with the company and their utterly shameless playwright (who can't resist awkwardly tossing in, for bad measure, some pop-Freudianism about "repres- sion"), somehow manage to make their cell-crossed love affair dramatically con- vincing — a willed clearing of human pos- sibility within the savage forest of Holmes- burg. Meanwhile, the prison itself swells into the young Williams' angry metaphor for the entire, godforsaken, Depression- devastated social universe. It's a big canvas he painted, with un- abashedly broad strokes of social protest that grow directly out of the theatre of the thirties, and which would never return to his work in quite this form. Yet Not About Nightingales returned to Williams' thoughts twenty years later, in the foreword he wrote in 1957 to accompany the publi-

Finbar Lynch as Canary Jim in Not About Nightingales T. Charles Erickson cation of his Broadway hit, Orpheus De- scending (yet another play about a Nightingales is undeniably sensational, the interpretive problem head-on, brazenly grotesquely baroque corner of hell). These bombastic, and excessive, and one can embracing the melodrama without hesita- were the words that, forty years further on, imagine that an older Williams would have tion or apology. Corin Redgrave's Boss sent Vanessa Redgrave hunting through cut and shaped the play to a more theatri- Whalen is a sleazy, wheedling, scurrilous Williams' papers in Austin: "I have never cally efficient length. But what might seem blackguard (although perhaps with a little written anything since then that could com- the raw material only of melodrama in other more taste of down-South than Pennsylva- pete with it in volence and horror." The hands, becomes in Williams' a remarkable nia might normally bear), opposed by Nightingales archetypes, sexual and social, theatrical gargoyle, full of sound, fury, James Black's inevitably Cagneyesque 0'- would continue to float through the grandly idealistic outrage, and fearlessly ro- Fallon as an especially rope-end version of Williams' dramatic cosmos — Blanche mantic yearning. In his journal of the time a Dead End Kid. In the cell block's foxhole and Stanley and Big Daddy and Blue Williams described the play frankly as a there's a misbegotten and terrorized-into- Roses. The stunned, conflicted, mesmer- melodrama, although Vanessa Redgrave madness sailor-boy (Mark Dexter) beloved ized, and thoughtful "canary" would con- notes that on a news clipping about the by a faithful midwestern mom (Sandra tinually attempt to escape, and memorial- Holmesburg story he had also written, "If Dickinson); a quiet and victimized negro ize, his cage. you think my play is melodramatic — Read who becomes a martyr to the cause (Dion This!" Indeed, the Philadelphia prison tale Graham); even a delicate, sensitive black (akin to Shakespeare's more Jacobean queen (Jude Akuwudike). The warden is sources) seems to demand the outsized, also a drunken womanizer with his lickerish 5 %WO bloody-handed treatment Williams has eye locked on the hapless secretary; the given it. How else to depict the institution- boss con is visited in his dreams by his one- TA l(111Labor Intensive Radio alized torture of prisoners over many years, time taxi-dancing sweetie (Dickinson for which the Holmesburg Klondike had again, with a Hollywood Bronx chirp). Radio of the union, by the union been specifically outfitted with a bank of At the center of this forest of theatrical and for the union. oversized steam radiators. (In a grisly coin- types are the young lovers, Jim and Eva, (News tips: call Paul Sherr at cidence, the Alley opening coincides with whose courtship in this outlandishly 512-448-1935) the national publication of yet more brutish context is as breathless as it is un- Tuesdays 6:30-7:00 p.m. Holmesburg outrages. A new book, Acres believable — sweet nothings ring a little KO.OP 91.7 FM of Skin, by Allen Hornblum of Temple Uni- hollow in the immediate shadow of rape versity, is an exposé of years of chemical and mayhem. As written, Canary Jim

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 27 BOOKS & THE CULTURE Say It Ain't So, Joe How Sports Franchises Take the Money and Run BY LISA TOZZI FIELD OF SCHEMES: Giuliani should be required to read Field entertainment to another. "If you draw How the Great Stadium Swindle of Schemes, by Joanna Cagan and Neil de- larger and larger circles away from the Turns Public Money into Private Profit. Mause. With the hearts of devout sports place where the sporting event actually oc- By Joanna Cagan & Neil deMause. fans and the minds of investigative journal- curs, it's more and more likely that you're Common Courage Press. ists, the authors look at Cleveland, Balti- going to have a zero-sum game. In the case 226 pages. $22.95. more, and scores of other cities where, con- of Wisconsin, it may well be that you're trary to the claims of sports tycoons and taking money away from a dog-racing eorge Steinbrenner's politicians, "sports-themed urban renais- track in Racine when you subsidize Brew- threats to move Yan- sances" have done little to help taxpayers, ers baseball." Baade concludes, "Far from kee stadium from its urban residents, or even the sports fans who generating new revenue out of which other , historic home in the fund these sports palaces. Like waterside public projects can be funded, sports in- Bronx are as much "historic" malls and other development pro- vestments appear to be an economically part of spring for New jects often touted as revitalizing decaying unsound use of a community's scarce fi- Yorkers as bluebon- city centers, the result, in many cases, in- nancial resources." To put it simply: stadi- nets are for Texans. stead reinforces the "dual city": a place ums and arenas do not make money for the He wails year after year: Yankee Stadium is white surburbanites, seeking entertainment, municipalities that build them. tooG old, the neighborhood too dangerous to only visit, while the mostly minority resi- Nevertheless, the authors note, the coun- draw crowds, and there is no way the Yan- dents of poor and working-class urban try is in the midst of an unprecedented sta- kees can remain competitive without a new neighborhoods reap few of the promised dium-building boom. Between 1980-90, stadium. Never mind that the franchise is benefits. U.S. cities spent roughly $750 million on the most profitable in professional sports, By 1997, almost half of the country's building sports arenas and stadiums. The won the World Series in 1996, and sits atop 115 major sports franchises were either al- bill for the nineties is expected to be up- its division with the best record in baseball. ready getting new or renovated facilities, or wards of $11 billion, in public expenditures When a 500-pound expansion joint broke had "requested" them (threatening to split and tax abatements. Municipalities large loose at Yankee Stadium days before its town if the facilities weren't forthcoming). and small are being held hostage by team seventy-fifth birthday in April, fans were In Texas, every major franchise in the state owners (who claim a new stadium is worried less about the threat to public safety is demanding a new home — except the needed to keep the team in town), and sold than that a hunk of metal roughly the size of Texas Rangers, who already have a out by politicians (who claim the team a car battery might finally make Steinbren- sparkling new "old-fashioned" $191 mil- must stay if the city wants to remain "major ner's dreams of a publicly-funded stadium lion ballpark in Arlington, courtesy of the league"). on the west side of Manhattan (estimated to taxpayers. Field of Schemes pokes gaping Until the late forties and fifties, most pro- cost more than $1 billion) come true. holes in the argument that a sports team is fessional teams played in privately owned With decaying infrastructure all over the an essential ingredient to urban revitaliza- facilities, built with the team owners' city, troubled schools, and underfunded ser- tion, a boost to a city's image, and some- money. But by the nineties, 77 percent of vices, the idea of spending more than a bil- thing that will keep people coming to and stadiums and arenas were publicly owned. lion dollars to build a new home for the rich- spending money in the city. The book cites During the same period, sports franchises est franchise in baseball may seem compelling evidence to the contrary. have become increasingly valuable invest- laughable. But Mayor Rudy Giuliani — the Among the authorities quoted is economist ments. Some teams, after receiving a public very same mayor who has slashed social ser- Robert Baade of Lake Forest College, subsidy for a new stadium, have doubled in vices to the bone — is more than willing to whose 1994 study for the Heartland Insti- value. And unlike other varieties of corpo- cough up the dough, trying to sell New tute (a conservative think tank) found that rate welfare — say, tax breaks to keep or Yorkers on the faulty premise that a new among the thirty cities with new stadiums bring a factory to town, which might at least ballpark (or two) would boost the city's or arenas, twenty-seven showed no eco- guarantee some decent jobs — stadiums economy. "If the Yankees and Mets both nomic impact on their local economy over create few jobs, and those are mostly low- had new baseball fields, and they were draw- a thirty-year period. Even when there is paying, even below minimum wage, often ing what the Indians and the Orioles draw," some economic impact, Baade argues, in- for "parking garage attendants, hot-dog Giulani said recently, "we would make back creased municipal income is merely a re- sales people, waiters and waitresses," ac- the cost of the stadium in a few years." sult of a shift in spending from one form of cording to John Ryan, head of Communica-

28 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 tions Workers of America Local 4309 in out improving either the quality of the game easily breakable lease. Cleveland. "None of them are jobs that the or the enjoyment of the average fan," the au- mayor hugs his kids and says, 'I hope you thors write. "Along with their cousins, the C agan and deMause know first hand can get one of those jobs someday.'" club seats — sort of an open-air corporate how sorely sports fans' love for Meanwhile, several studies indicate a suite of prime seats with expanded legroom their teams has been tested by tremendous "opportunity cost" in the hun- and waiter service — luxury boxes are about "free-agent franchises demanding money dreds of millions of dollars in tax money money, pure and simple." as proof of loyalty." (I've known Joanna that could have been spent Cagan since our college elsewhere. The Cleveland years, and can personally Teachers Union has calcu- vouch for her devotion to lated that tax breaks given the Cleveland Indians.) In- to the sports complex pro- deed, the book's strength ject has drained $3.5 mil- lies in the stories of spirited lion from the school sys- fans — like Frank Rashid, tem. (By contrast, a recent co-founder of the Tiger Sta- New York Times article re- dium Fan Club in Detroit, ports the Indians' company and John Aranza and Hallie revenue has more than dou- Amey of Save Our Sox in bled since the opening of Chicago. Community ac- Jacob's Field, and net in- tivists and sports aficiona- come has jumped from less dos have been brought to- than $4 million in 1993 to gether as unlikely allies, by $22.6 million last year.) "In their cities' plans to gut his- a typical scenario," the au- toric ballparks — plans thors explain, "a municipal- • From the cover of Field of Schemes which show no regard for ity will float hundreds of history, the surrounding millions of dollars in municipal bonds in Meanwhile, the seats Joe Taxpayer can neighborhoods, or the taxpayers. order to afford the massive initial expendi- afford are pushed further away. Luxury In the great stadium swindle, the little ture and then pay off the bonds with in- boxes and club seats represent additional guys generally lose. "We did everything we creased taxes, lotteries or even general city corporate tax breaks, since they are de- could do, legally and politically," says funds.... By shackling themselves to these ductible as business entertainment ex- Rashid after losing his battle to save Tigers massive debts (and often massive cost penses: up to 40 percent of the price of cor- Stadium. "We used the system. We tried to overruns), cities may very well have al- porations' purchases are underwritten by believe in the system. I don't believe in the lowed the further deterioration of local the federal government. With some new system anymore.... If you don't have money schools, roads, and public services." stadiums boasting as many as 200 boxes and power, the system will not work for you renting at up to $70,000 per season, per- — that's one thing I've learned." eanwhile, just about every source haps another $5 million annually in indi- Despite Rashid's somber assessment, of cash, from tickets' to hot dogs to rect public subsidies will thereby be trans- Field of Schemes closes with the authors' de- Madvertising, that should benefit ferred to team-owner pockets. fiant optimism: a belief that if enough people the building's owner — the municipality — Yet owners in every professional sport are armed with the truth, they can stop the instead brings riches to the team's owner. continue to act like spoiled brats, demand- millionaire owners and politicians from the Even name-lease rights (which in exchange ing what the other kids have, and given the professional pocket-picking that is destroy- for millions, turn a sporting venue into a willingness of government officials to ig- ing cities and ruining the teams that bear giant billboard with a corporate name like nore public opinion and economic realities, their names: "The effective blackmail that "TWA Dome" or "Compaq Center"), are and to fork over millions, the taxpayers can professional teams wield over cities is not considered part of the team's revenue, even hardly blame the owners for asking. A new good, it is not correct, and it is not eternal. It when the stadium is publicly owned. arena is, hands down, the biggest value- is the consequence of a particular state of af- In 1966, the stadium that introduced the booster for a sports team, drawing in curi- fairs in which public agencies have, become world to Astroturf and indoor baseball — ous fans and yielding millions of extra dol- beholden to private power. It can be the Houston Astrodome — also invented lars in luxury-box receipts and advertising changed, and it's worth changing." "luxury boxes," which have been a driving revenue. According to Financial. World force behind stadium construction ever magazine, those yearning to make a killing Lisa Tozzi. is. an Austin writer, assistant since. "Over the course of the twentieth cen- in the sports world should find a team that politics editor at the Austin Chronicle, and tury ... no innovation can match the luxury meets three criteria: low current revenues, a. baseball fan. She confesses having- once . box for sheer money-making power, with- no new stadium yet in the works, and an occupied a stadium luxury box.

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 29 AFTERWORD Names for Americans or the Discriminating Onomastist BY MICHAEL ERARD Editor's note: Faithful readers of the Observer's "Dialogue" page may recall a recent exchange over the use of the word "Americans" to denominate "citizens of the United States of America." One reader complained (March 13, 1998) that such usage, depending on the circumstances, may be "arrogant, lazy, sloppy, ignorant, hegemonic, or bigoted." The editors responded, nonetheless, that in most con- texts, "Americans" remains the correct term. Another reader wrote (April 24), "I ... would be ashamed to use the word `American' to refer only to the people of the U.S.A." As the following essay demonstrates, the argument is hardly a new one. ecently, I stumbled over an essay America." "U.S.A." was established in the race," he insisted. Forus to be distinct from by H.L. Mencken: "Names for Constitution's preamble, adopted by the what he called the "riff-raff colonies," Irv- Americans." Mencken, of course, Constitutional Convention in 1787, and fi- ing suggested we change our name to "Ap- Rwas not only a trenchant editor nally ratified by all the states in 1790. palachian" or "Alleghanian." "U.S.A." and commentator on American life, but also But for one brief shining moment in would have remained untouched. If Irving studied and wrote about American English. 1776, the "U.S.N.A." was engaged in a war had prevailed, not only non-Anglo-Ameri- More than sixty years after its first publica- with Great Britain, because treaties with cans would have been insulted; Western- tion, his multi-volume history, The Ameri- the French for some reason included a ers, for whom the Appalachians are distant can Language, remains highly regarded. In "North." In keeping with the treaties, on foothills, eventually would have balked. "Names for Americans" (first published in May 19, 1776, Congress briefly approved But in any event, his indignant proposals 1947 in American Speech), Mencken con- "U.S.N.A." for use on bills of exchange. failed to catch on. (By the way, Mencken's siders a problem which has plagued our col- But on July 11, they changed it back, and essay is also entertaining for its catalog of lective life and language since colonial we've been the "U.S.A." ever since. state-derived names, including the obser- times: what do we call ourselves? The earliest alternatives to "American," vation that while "Texan" is "harsh, abrupt, Mencken begins by noting the uneasy Mencken reports, were "Columbian" (1789), ungainly," and troublesome for poets, it's history of the conventional term. "The right "Columbard" (1807), and "Columbiad" better than the available alternatives.) of 'Americans' to be so called is frequently (1807), which by 1812 was "reduced to the Over the years, the Europeans have challenged, especially in Latin America, level of a name for a new-fangled cannon." chimed in too, with "Usonans" (1892; but so far no plausible substitute has been "Fredonian" (1803) was considered "'potent British), "Usian," "Statesian," and "Wash- devised." Not that many haven't tried — and melodious' by its coiner, partly because ingtonian" (1928, French). In an 1816 glos- the history of neologistic alternatives of- of its resemblance to "Macedonian" and sary, John Pickering noted that French fered by journalists, poets, politicians, "Caledonian." However, the name was writers distinguished Americans from housewives, cranks, hacks, and humorists ridiculed by everyone else. In 1827, "it was Caribbeans by calling us "Anglo-Ameri- is nearly as long as the nation's. Indeed, adopted unchallenged as the name of an in- cans," partly because "Fredonians" (who, our nominal anxieties are so old, that as dependent republic that a band of American by the way; spoke Fredish) sounded too early as 1837, Mencken finds the call-and- adventurers sought to set up in Texas." He ridiculouS to take seriously. (The French response trope of the argument over mentions also "Unisian," "United Statesian," may have been on to something: in the "American" already well-worn: "'What is "United Statian" (1844); also (from the Marx Brothers' 1933 film, Duck Soup, the name of our nation? Are we North Spanish name for Columbus) "Colon" and Groucho becomes the unlikely President of Americans? So are the Cherokees. Are we "Colonicans" (1837) — the latter an obvious a bananas republic named "Freedonia.") Anglo-Americans? So are the Canadians. satire, since the language spoken in Colonica Throughout subsequent years, periodic at.: Americans of the United States? So are the is "Colonic." tempts to rename ourselves persisted, most Mexicans.'" The writer concludes: "'We In 1839, the nation was still young, and recently with "Uessian" (1936), "UeSieari" have no distinctive name.'" not the only former colony in the henii- (1939), and "U-station" (1946): TheSe pro.; "United States of America" appeared as sphere. Washington Irving complained, that posals, Mencken writes, have "shated the the name of a political entity for the first time the French and the Spanish failed to under- dismal fate of all the rest." in the Declaration of Independence, when stand him to be an Ang/o-American, and Mencken himself prefers.none Of the in- Jefferson replaced "colonies" with "states." it's apparent why he insisted upon that dis- vented names explicitly, though he cheets Only a few documents of the period speci- tinction. "I • want an appellation that shall the demise of 'onomastic engineering .prci- fied the "United States of North America." tell at once, and in a way not to be mis- jects.,1-le also doesn't endeavor to explain Franklin's draft of the Articles of Confeder- taken, that I belong to this very portion of why "American" might be a problem in the ation suggested "United Colonies of North America ... that I am of the Anglo-Saxon first plaCe —1)6i-14S becatise he doesn't in

30 • THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 3, 1998 , fact see much of a problem, particularly macho (1871; Costa Rica; "variously a jack Chile, Dominica the Republica Domini- when there are rules for special usage. Like mule, a billy goat, or a man of large cana, Salvador the Republica de El Sal- international languages (e.g., Esperanto) stature"), misters and mistera (western vador, Uruguay the Republica Oriental del and spelling reform, alternatives to "Amer- Colombia), and cheles (in El Salvador, Uruguay, etc." Any "plausible substitute" ican" are weirdly utopian to those who find Guatemala, and Nicaragua, literally, "the for "American" will fail to fit this pattern. this world (and this language) perfectly us- name of a dyed cotton stuff'). As a dissenter, one could, of course, make able. Mencken quotes Pickering: "The gen- Still, a formal name is required. For the U.S.A. an exception, or perhaps create a new rule, for which the U.S. becomes the sole enforcer. Either way, one would be contradicting — and simultaneously rein- forcing — the conventional political arguments about Yankee hegemony. Q.E.D. But for Mencken, if all other countries (and particularly in their own languages) follow a linguistic rule, perforce we must also, in our English. Contemporary observers might suggest Mencken escapes a moral hook, by assuming a consensus that may not even exist. One of the writers to "Dialogue," for example, dismissed the presumed grammatical consensus with, "they're all going to be white guys I betcha." Mexicans, Peruvians, and Colom- bians may well resent being called "white guys," but the objection does raise an un- derappreciated problem, that of letting common usage dictate the language, a la William Safire. When an invisible majority — a wholly imagined "speech community" — is proposed as the presumed final arbiter of linguistic ambiguities, the process may itself be used for unseemly political purposes. And in this particular case, of multi- A Groucho Marx listens to the call of Freedonia in Duck Soup lingual national titles, there's no hemi- spheric "speech community" at all. eral term American is so commonly under- Mencken, the solution belongs first and Mencken's logic does distinguish the stood (at least in all places where the foremost to English, not to other lan- names of political entities, to which this English language is spoken) to mean an in- guages. Thus, he suggests that we need to rule applies, from the names of geographi- habitant of the United States, and is so em- be able to derive "America" from "United cal formations. Unfortunately, "America" ployed except where unusual precision of States of America" with a rule that is con- happens to name both. However, when we language is required." sistent in this hemisphere. He proposes a restrict ourselves to naming citizens and "American" has always been more prob- rule borrowed from Gabriel Louis-Jaray, of residents of a country, rather than inhabi- lematic hemispherically, where the issue the Comite France-Amerique, in 1928: tants of a place, we must, indeed, call our- isn't distinctiveness as much as Yankee ar- "The rule is for each nation to be called selves Americans. That every other country rogance. (The usual charge, made in a di- after the name which follows the word Re- in the hemisphere follows the same rule alect descended from classical Latin, goes public, Empire, United States, etc. The of- makes "American" that much more secure. something like this: "American inscribes ficial title of Brazil is the United States of And everyone else? Already they seem U.S. political hegemony in language as a Brazil, and that of the United States the — according to Mencken, anyway — to

part of a larger colonializing discourse.") United States of America. Accordingly, the know who they are. ❑

In Spanish-speaking countries, where use of American is proper." norteamericano is formally standard, and In a footnote, Mencken substantiates the Austin writer Michael Erard has written estadounidense as perennially prescribed rule by providing the names of other Latin for the Observer about higher education, as it is popularly unapplied, a variety of in- American countries. "Argentina is the Baptists, grackles, and other topics. And in formal forms proliferated: yanqui, gringo Republica Argentina, Brazil the Estados the words of Kinky Friedman, "He's a fine (Pama,an but certainly more general), Unidos do Brasil, Chile the Republica de American."

JULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER ■ 31

THE BACK PAGE

July 1, AD. 1998 1<:› 1>1)<=> aptist co ubenticat *Aar( la ear in Salt

annual Southern BaptistB Convention this yee never could our Dear Friends, ILake want City, to thank Utah. all What 8,300 a oftruly you special for attending group! Without all of your dedication and hard work, w have succeeded in passing such an ambitious and proactive platforms.on theI know back. if our Lord Jesus Christ were assing a big p withSome us today, of you 'He were would worried give each that andthe reasonevery one we ofadopted you a plan this year to reach out to Mormons was be- ert people of the *Jewish faith had failed. On the contrary! Those of you managed to to meet delegate Mort Steinsaltz, from Holland, Michigan, know how successful cause our 1996 mission to whothat programhad the opportunity has been. (Mort Co is not, as I heard one person complaining, "the only darnjew we ather the first of many Hebraic newcomers to the true faith!) Also, I want to remind one and all what a tremendous accomplishment it was to approve such a pro r convert:'family platform. but I know everyone was as excited as I was about our resolution stating that wives must sub- ds. As my own helpmeet, Patricia, told more than one secular reporter, submission is not succeed. mit to their husban Now, it may have been a let-down that some of the other Back-to-the-Bible proposalsa did not a four-letter word! Many of you worked long and hard to requireystem the useof measurement. of stone tablets Still instead others of were pper, in and favor many of the more knee- s high leather sandals proposal,return introducedto the cubit byjerry Longworth of Cedars, Kan.sas. (They sure looked great pushed extra hard for a oung pastor from Waco who provided the Biblical justification for phonics in- otion to put a phonetically-spelled version of the New Testament in every atience is all part on you, Jerry!) And they m spired many to support his When those programs did not pass, some of you went home a little disappointed. But p motel room. . xpect these ideas will be back next year e of God'sIn the gamemeantime, plan, andplease I keep the members of the Men's and Women's Missions in your prayers. The Missionaries' Send-off Breakfast is always one o the most special parts of thewo convention,rld? I know and that this the year men was of

noour exception: Armed Fellowship what better Brigades way CO will reaffirm make thea difference relevance in of our Christ violence-stricken in today's schoolyards. And last night fortune to talk to Tom Henderson of St. Louis. offeeTom's hours wife, along Ruthie, the is India-Pakistan leading this year's border. eries of c • afely, ands that Ruthies lemon poppyseed cake is already a big IInternational had the good Women's Mission, which will hold a s in 2000. Tom reported that the ladies have arrived Rapture hit. It sure sounds as if God has seen our ladies off to a good start. eeing you at next year's convention and awaiting the I look forward to s Yours for the Father,

PetetS011. Reverend Paige