From the archives: notes on the development of a Latino identity (2005)

The original version of this essay was written for members of the U.S. socialist organization Solidarity and subscribers to the Marxism email list moderated by Louis Proyect. I signed it with the pen-name Joaquín Bustelo, as, at the time, I was employed by CNN and thus barred from publicly expressing my own personal point of view – a very striking illustration that American "freedom of the press" exists only for those who happen to own one.                                                                                                                    –José G. Pérez

The most popular show in television's first decade: a Latino
band leader married to an American redhead

When I was growing up in the 1960's, there was a lot of talk about "WASPs" being the dominant group in the country. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. You don't hear the term used much anymore because reality has changed -- it was changing even then.

In the 1930's and early 1940's a steadily growing American ruling class consensus emerged that a whole bunch of folks who until then had been "not quite white," if I can so express it, would become "white." They decided to largely tear down the distinction between the "WASPs" and the "white ethnics."

World War II, the postwar GI Bill, and then the 25-year economic boom gave a tremendous impetus to this trend as did the need to cohere the U.S. population against the "International Communist Conspiracy" in the first 15 or 20 years of the Cold War.

Fred Feldman (who is Jewish and I think was born in the early 40's) wrote recently on the Marxism List that when he was growing up, his family was very conscious that they were becoming "white," acceptable, of equal social standing with other "ethnics" and these European "ethnics" were achieving roughly equal status with the WASPs.

Latinos were most decidedly included in this "whitening" policy. Darker-skinned ones would, of course, continue to be considered Blacks and treated as such, but European-descended "white" Latinos were just the most exotic variant of a spectrum that included Poles, Jews, Italians, Russians and so on. (I'm not sure if Germans or Irish had achieved equal status by then, but to the degree they hadn't, they, too, were included).

You can see that from the popular culture at the time. Zorro as a Robin Hood of the American West. West Side Story. But most of all, "I Love Lucy."

That was the most popular show in the 1950's, television's first decade as a mass medium. And it was a light domestic comedy centered on a Cuban band leader who was married to a white American redhead. And they even had a baby together. And it wasn't a specifically Cuban thing, because after the Cuban Revolution, Ricky Ricardo suddenly became "Mexican." (Whether white privilege was also meant to be extended to the recognizably indigenous descendants who make up the big majority of the Mexican and Chicano people is, of course, another question.)

Think about that. Back then, in the 1950's, the America of McCarthyism and white supremacist resistance to segregation, in the midst of a wave of terrorism against Black folks, what some people today would reject as "miscegenation," was considered a perfectly good theme for light entertainment to sell laundry detergent and washing machines with.

The Democrats in 1960 even had so-called "Hispanic" Viva Kennedy committees. And, fittingly enough with this broadening of "whiteness," Kennedy was an Irish Catholic.

It should be remembered that around 1960, Latinos were a very small percentage of the population concentrated in five states of the Southwest and a very few cities on the Eastern seaboard, mostly in the greater New York metro area, with small populations in a couple of other industrial centers like Chicago and Detroit.

That the trend towards Latinos becoming "white" stopped at some point is obvious and that it had to do with the 1960's, the anti colonial revolution, etc., is also pretty obvious. But a more basic reality undergirds this. I think "non-white" status nowadays generally flows from imperialism and follows the patterns of imperialist domination. The people who trace their roots to "third world" countries --colonial and semi-colonial countries-- by and large get second-class (or worse) treatment here.

In the United States, it is difficult to understand this because of the deeply entrenched paradigms of "race" and "color."

The U.S. started out as a European (mostly English, but not just) colonial-settler state. It developed and prospered to a large degree thanks to the expropriation and genocide of native peoples and the genocidal enslavement of Africans. The social construct of "race" grew out of, and helped to justify this system.

It is important to understand that U.S.-style hereditary "race" is an entirely and exclusively political and social category without any grounding in genetic or evolutionary science.

The most genetically diverse human population is that of sub-Saharan Africans, generally posited by "race" thinking  as being a relatively homogeneous group in its genetic inheritance as opposed to the more diverse Europeans or Asians.

In reality, the opposite is the case: there is a greater richness in genetic variation among so-called Black people than there is among the rest of the human population put together.

So why do "all Black people look alike?" Because evolutionary pressure changes skin pigmentation very quickly within a given population. Black skin protects those living in the tropics against sunburn and skin cancer caused by exposure to the sun.

People from Latin American don't necessarily fit very well into the "color/race" American social constructs and stereotypes. Latinos identify on the basis of factors like language, culture, history without any necessary "color" or "race." One of the leaders of the Latino immigrant rights organization in Atlanta, for example, is as "white European" as one could want, but nobody in Latino movement circles thinks of him as anything but Mexican and Latino although all his genes and even his last name come from Poland just a generation ago.

In the 1960's, there was, AFAIK, no self-identified generically "Latino" movements anywhere in the United States. The movements were (for moderates) Mexican-American or Puerto Rican-American; for radicals Chicano or Puerto Rican. New Mexico was an exception, but only terminologically: the long-standing Mexican-descended community there often self-identified as "Hispanos" but that was recognized in the movement as just the local name for Chicanos.

Despite that, anybody from any Latin American country who lived in an area where these movements were active was always welcome and the radicals from other Latino backgrounds would usually join whatever the majority group was. I remember well some Puerto Ricans who were leading activists in the Raza Unida Party in Oakland, California -- especially one couple of a "white" man with blue eyes and a Black woman.

Visiting Puerto Rico on assignment for the Militant newspaper, I met with leaders of pro-independence socialist student groups who I found out years later were Cuban; one of the most prominent figures in the independence and student movements of those years was singer-songwriter Roy Brown, who had been born in Miami in 1950, his father an Anglo, his mother Puerto Rican, grew up in both countries, and radicalized --as a Puerto Rican-- in New York when he was 17.

This fluidity of identity flows from another reality, which is that in addition to many specific "national questions," there is also a national question of Latin America as a whole.

Or, if you don't want to think in terms of "national questions," think just that there are different peoples, like the people of Cuba, Mexico and so on; but all of them form part of the people of Latin America as a whole.

This is not an arbitrary creation like "the people of all the countries whose names start with the letter 'U.'" This is a self-identity that goes back centuries based on geographic, historical, cultural and other factors, but not on "race" or "color." And in the past century it has been re-enforced by an increasingly common adversary/oppressor, U.S. imperialism. Thus Latin Americans speak of "La Patria Grande" [the big homeland, Latin America] and "la patria chica" [the individual country].

As martyred Chilean President Salvador Allende said, «Soy un hombre de América Latina, que me confundo con los demás habitantes del Continente, en los problemas, en los anhelos y en las inquietudes comunes.» ("I am a Latin American man who blends into the other inhabitants of the Continent with common problems, desires and concerns.")

José Martí's Cuban Revolutionary Party had a Puerto Rican section that was the main organization of Puerto Rican patriots at the end of the 1800's, the two islands being Spain's sole remaining colonies in the New World. That's why the flag of the two countries is the same, with only the colors switched. Puerto Rican poet, patriot and feminist Lola Rodriguez de Tió, who also penned the original words to La Borinqueña, Puerto Rico's national anthem, wrote in those years, "Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pájaro las dos alas. Reciben flores y balas en el mismo corazón." (Cuba and Puerto Rico are, of one bird the two wings. They receive flowers and bullets in the same heart).

Dominicans played mayor roles in leading the Cuban insurgents in Cuba. (A half century later, in the 1940's Fidel and some friends were active in a movement to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Trujillo: this has always been a two-way street.)

The dream of all the great Latin American revolutionaries was to create a giant republic South of the Rio Bravo and the Florida Straits, at least of the Spanish-speaking nations.

The Cuban revolutionaries around Fidel when they took power viewed that as the beginning of a Latin American revolution, and exactly 45 years ago [1960] were holding a congress of youth and students in Havana under the banner, "Make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of Latin America." (And none worked more for this than one of Cuba's greatest national heroes, the Argentine Ernesto Che Guevara).

And Latin American unity is very much a central tenet of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.

Within this broad Latin American national question you have the specific questions of individual countries, Bolivia's sovereignty, for example. And within that question you have the question of the systematic political disempowerment for 500 years of the big majority of what is now Bolivia, the indigenous peoples. And in the Caribbean basin you also have the legacy of the enslavement of Africans.

It is not at all predictable from some formula how these national questions within national questions will all shake out, nor when. And the struggles that emerge around this, the defeats and victories, will have a tremendous impact on the consciousness of Latinos in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

Right now the trend in Latin America is "Bolivarian" -- towards integration, Latin American unity, especially on the Left. The thinking is fairly straightforward. It is much easier to imagine a federation of several socialist countries being able to defy the U.S. than a single smallish country like Venezuela or a couple of countries like Venezuela and Cuba.

This is re-enforced by globalization, and it is notable that the most important media initiative of the Venezuelan Revolution is an international news and information channel to counter the imperialist CNN called TeleSur which just began to broadcast. And that is a partnership between people in Venezuela and several other countries, very much with the idea of creating a Latin American Al Jazeera.

If you look at domestic (U.S.) Spanish language local and national TV news, you will see that it is very heavy on news from Latin America --with the emphasis on one or another specific country in local news varying from market to market, depending on the makeup of the local population. The weight of Latin American political developments on this sector of the U.S. population is growing as the development of technology over the past 20 years has tremendously reduced the cost of communications.

The political and social weight of immigrants in the overall Latino population is growing, with a massive net influx of perhaps a million people a year (both legal and undocumented). Latinos are now settling in many more states, notably those in the South with better economies (TN, GA, NC, but not SC, for example).

These immigrant flows are scrambled in terms of national origin. Just recently the board of a Latino group I'm a part of had breakfast at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall owned by a Cuban where we discussed tactics to defend Mexican and Central American immigrants with a legislator of Puerto Rican origin while a Uruguayan waitress served us breakfast cooked by Guatemalans.

But in addition to that, we have now a new reality in the United States that developed in the last decades of the 20th Century. Because we have had for some time Hispanic communities of greatly mixed national origins, there is also a growing layer of young Hispanics who are the product of marriages between Cubans and Puerto Ricans or Mexicans or Colombians, whose primary national identity, so to speak, isn't specifically Mexican or Guatemalan but Latino. And even those whose parents may trace their roots back to the same specific country have grown up in this mixed environment.

In this sense I Love Lucy's "Ricky Ricardo" should probably be remembered as the first "Latino" because although identified as a Cuban for most of the show's run, the allegedly "Cuban" culture that was projected as his went from Carmen Miranda fruit hats (Portuguese-Brazilian) to Uruguayan/Argentinian tangos (there's a huge brawl with both countries claiming to have originated it) to Mexican Mariachi music. And, of course, the genuinely Cuban stuff was very heavily African.

You also have a phenomenon, especially in the long-established Puerto Rican and Dominican ghettos, of Latino Afro-Americans. I don't mean Black Latinos who identify with their African heritage, I mean people who identify both as U.S. Blacks and as Puerto Rican or Dominican.

In this field of increasing cultural cross-fertilization and multiple identities, you have political and social factors operating.

The change in the atmosphere of the Latino communities over the past five or six years has been palpable. At the end of the 90's no states had implemented the federal diktat to deny drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. The full force of the federal cutoff of social services to immigrants of the 1996 Clinton-Gingrich immigration reform act had yet to be felt. You had the usual nativist rants from the yahoo right, but the Republicans had gotten their fingers burnt with Prop. 187 in California and were a little more circumspect. The economy was booming. And the undocumented population was thought to be only a few million.

Now the community feels besieged. "Dred Scott" laws and state constitutional amendments are pending in quite a few states, I think 13 by the latest count. These are sweeping pronouncements whose effect is to say the undocumented are not persons under the law, they have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.

And the idea is already being applied without being approved. In a couple of towns in one northern state, several Latinos have been arrested for "trespassing" for just being there, being out in the streets. In Georgia there are a couple of counties and townships that have made fines (to be more precise: forfeited bail money) for driving without a license significant sources of revenues.

In Michigan right now, the cherry and other fruit crops are in crisis because immigrants have been too scared to come to that state where ICE --the new name for la migra-- has been very active especially against the Arab community but also impacting the Latino community because a lot of us look "Arab."

The big change of course, was 9/11. But this happened to coincide with the application of the Clinton-era decision that social security numbers would be required to get drivers licenses (supposedly to track down "deadbeat dads" who weren't paying child support). It went into effect in October of 2000, but many states were late in complying, and when they did, the post-9/11 ID requirements for airplane and rail travel compounded the issue. From the point of view of Latino and other immigrants, the United States is a country with a strict internal passport regime, one in which it is difficult, even dangerous, to travel using a common carrier.

But there are other changes as well. Everything I see and read suggests that the huge immigrant wave unleashed by NAFTA (which ruined the corn-growing peasantry in Mexico and with them much local commerce, artisans and so on; as well as coincided with the closing of maquiladora plants as the capitalists shifted production to Asia) hasn't subsided and may well be accelerating. And there's not just Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, tons of people have come here as tourists and stayed. In Atlanta the increase in the southern cone population is palpable since the Argentine economy cracked up. And there's a ton of people coming daily from countries all over the Pacific rim.

In Georgia, nearly 15% of births are now to Hispanic women, nearly 20% to immigrant mothers. Nationwide around 22% of all births are to Hispanic mothers and 23% of immigrant mothers. Officially there are 44 million Latinos now, unofficially, 50 million is probably a better estimate. This demographic tsunami in quite palpable and visible in the "hyper growth" states of TN, NC and GA, and the turbulence and dislocations such a massive population shift causes are being manipulated by right-wingers with the aid of the media in the post-9/11 political climate.

The impact in the Latino community is to tend to drive it together because, frankly, the racists don't care what kind of "spic" you are. As far as they're concerned, everyone who is recognizably Latino or even "foreign" (Third World foreign, white brits are o.k.) by their features, name, manner of speech, dress or self-identification is part of an "alien invasion," part of a "reconquista."

The intermingling of populations of different national origins is leading clearly to a cultural cross-fertilization and an emerging "Latino" or "Latin American" culture and identity which mixes with the similar phenomena that arise from globalization in Latin America as a whole.

Thus, in places like Georgia, the self-identification of the leading activists, and their branding of the movement, is very much "Latino" and not exclusively or narrowly Mexican (the now dominant national origin group). And U.S.-Spanish language and Hispanic-aimed media overwhelmingly speak in terms of Latinos and Hispanics when referring to the community and population and in self-identifying, if for no other reason than that this broadens their potential reach and audience.

How all this will play out in the end is anyone's guess. But this is some of the background and current tendencies as I see them.

Joaquín

Bernie, AOC and the Chartist movement of British workers in the 1800s

What the founders of the modern socialist movement called the first working class party in history came together in Britain in the 1830s around a petition called the People's Charter. It demanded a series of democratic reforms, such as universal male suffrage, annual parliamentary elections, and a salary for the members of parliament so that regular working people, and not just the rich, could be legislators.

The recent and somewhat humorous spat around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's saying she couldn't afford to rent an apartment in DC until she started getting her regular salary as a Congresswoman in January reminded me of the Chartist movement and its demand for a paycheck for legislators.

Because if newly-elected members need to spend the two months between the election and the swearing-in ceremony on getting ready, then they should be paid.

I say somewhat humorous because the talking gasbags on Fox news tried to shame her for what they viewed as her pecuniary embarrassment.

They did not even suspect that in fact they were helping her to drive home a political point that's been at the center of all she's been doing: this is not "that government of the people, by the people, for the people," that Lincoln evoked in his Gettysburg Address, but rather one of the very rich..

So it was awesome to see her respond:

There is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed.
Mocking lower incomes is exactly how those who benefit from + promote wealth inequality the most keep everyday people silent about 1 of the worst threats to American society: that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

That response denouncing the sense of shame and embarrassment that the rich and their media try to drill into us reminded me of an article by Marx where he says the uplifting of the working class wasn't mainly a question of money but of dignity: "the proletariat ... needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread."

Which brings us back to the Chartist movement, because Marx and Engels, the founder of the modern socialist movement, said the Chartists were the first working class party. But in fact they were nothing like what we think of a party. They had no ballot line and didn't run candidates, no real centralized national structure, etc. But the essence of a "political party" was there -- people that shared a common outlook and had organized themselves as a distinct group around demands for changing the government.

I believe that's what Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and a few others in Congress and state legislatures represent: the beginnings of a worker's party in the United States. The essence of it is a coalescence of politicians and groups that share an identification with the working class and a series of common immediate goals ($15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, legalization of the undocumented, etc.).

Right now they are allied with a broader progressive wing in Congress and throughout the Democratic Party.

But you can still tell which are the socialists and conscious working class representatives because they are the ones that tell you that they cannot change things, only we can do it, and place themselves at the service of the social movements.

There is a debate among many socialists, including in the Democratic Socialists of America, about this approach of running on the Democratic Party ballot lines and caucusing not just with the more progressive democrats but even with the traditional neoliberal hacks like Nancy Pelosi. Some turn their back on using Democrat ballot lines while others insist that is OK provided we proclaim that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed or refuse to have anything to do with the traditional democrats on the ticket.

But I think this system of alliances is dictated by the logic of the situation in Congress and most of all by the fact that most working people do not yet understand the difference between a Bernie Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez and a Pelosi or Schumer.

They seem to be differences about how far we can go or how hard we can push for certain reforms. But in reality, the real differences are about class.

And there lies the main problem: working class consciousness is barely being awakened.

So by and large, even as you explain the inadequacy of the moderate "liberal" proposals, in a showdown with the right you usually go along with the moderates. This is an approach known in the movement of a 100 years ago as "critical support." We want those who still follow the moderates to see we will not stand in the way of the more modest proposal, and, on the contrary, since we haven't yet convinced most people that is not a solution, we want it to be adopted so they can see for themselves that it falls short.

A good example of this logic is Obamacare. Because people have seen in practice its problems and limitations, support for Medicare for All has been growing.

Can these tactics work? They are derived from long experience of the socialist movement but there has never been a situation comparable to ours, where working class consciousness had been absent for about a half century. And tactics are concrete for a specific time, place and circumstance.

But we should remember that while ultimate success may very much depend on what we do, not so for ultimate failure. This incipient working class radicalization might be reversed if the ruling class decided to grant significant concessions. And with the huge super-profits they have been reaping, they have the resources to do it.

--José G. Pérez

The DSA statement supporting the fight to oust Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is right

A few days ago the Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement supporting the popular movement that is demanding the immediate resignation of President Daniel Ortega and his spouse and vice-president, Rosario Murillo. It opposes any intervention or interference by the United States or other countries in Nicaragua's internal affairs, but points out that there is no evidence at all to back up Murillo's charges that the movement is a creature of the United States or other forces from abroad.

On the contrary, the movement arose spontaneously the day after the government announced cuts to social security benefits and increases in social security taxes. It was immediately met by deadly repression under orders from Murillo. By all accounts, she is the one who really runs the government day-to-day, not Ortega.

A few members have objected to the DSA statement. I wrote an explanation of why the statement is right in an online forum, and wanted to share an edited version here.

Of those who have taken a public stance, the big majority of FSLN leaders and prominent cultural figures that were part of the revolution are staunchly against today’s FSLN. Some fought and lost an internal fight to save the Frente, in the early 90s.

Others broke with him after his stepdaughter Zoilamérica Narváez Murillo accused him of having repeatedly sexually abused her starting in 1978, the year she turned 11. And recently, even Daniel’s own brother, Gen. Humberto Ortega, has begun asking for his ouster after many years of having little public presence.

I am still in touch with friends and comrades in Nicaragua who report virtually no one from the old days is with the Ortega-Murillo regime. Not just the big public figures but the people I knew and hung out there that are still around.

Politically, in the early 90s Ortega headed the most radical left faction in the FSLN, against forces headed by former vice-president Sergio Ramírez and Henry Ruiz, one of the nine Commanders of the Revolution who collectively were the leadership of the FSLN during the revolutionary years.

Once he won full control of the FSLN, he turned sharply to the right, allying with a liberal party. A key moment was his stepdaughter’s accusations, because he needed the support of other parties to avoid being stripped of his parliamentary immunity. And he got it.

After that he divvied up positions on bodies like the supreme court and elections commissions with his friends, obtained the support of the most prominent opponent of the revolution in the 1980s, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, by supporting a law that bans abortion under all circumstances whatsoever, said to be the most restrictive in the world, and other reactionary social policies.

As president he has headed what is essentially a neoliberal regime but one that tries to use ties to Moscow and Beijing to strengthen his hand against American companies and institutions. The regime had favored extractive industries and given to a Chinese company the right to build a trans-oceanic canal to compete with the one in Panama.

But it also has social programs that benefit the poor but tie them firmly to the FSLN, what we call clientelismo (“client-ism”) in Latin America. And a cautious but vaguely leftist foreign policy, as it relies on Venezuelan oil which it receives at on preferential terms.

Student protests started on April 18, after the regime announced higher social security taxes and lower benefits. They were met with gunfire, and the country exploded. The repression was led by his spouse and vice-president Rosario Murillo, who daily preaches a bizarre combination of religious and political propaganda followed by a disorderly list of government events and exhortations. This goes out M-F on an audio-only mid-day TV broadcast. This is the one following the first massacre.

If you need more convincing that it is the people rising up against a repressive, authoritarian regime, and you are intimate with the history and culture of the Latin American left, go look for the songs. Nicaragua has an extraordinary number of trovadores and cantores, and I couldn't find a single one who isn't with the movement, but also found quite a few new ones.

I know there are lots of comrades who were intensely involved with the Sandinista Revolution and it turned out to be one of the most significant experiences of their lives, as it was for me.

But we must not let sentiments or slogans imported from the past blind us. As socialists, we have a duty to tell the truth, no matter how bitter it may be.

--José G. Pérez

Don't ask for the notes and testimony of Trump's interpreter at the Putin meeting

In the wake of the New York Times story last Saturday about a national security investigation of a sitting president and whether he was working for a foreign power, a great hue and cry has arisen about the interpreter's notes from a Trump meeting with Putin, demands for an explanation of why they were destroyed, and undoubtedly there will soon be demands that the interpreter testify as to the contents of the conversation.

Me (left) as defense interpreter at the Managua trial of
American aviator of fortune Eugene Hasenfus in 1986.
Foreground: CIA weapons for the counter-revolution.

I am an interpreter. I have been for more than half a century if you count informal settings when I was still in high school. Professionally (getting paid for it) since the early 1970s. In the 1990s, at CNN en Español, I recruited and led the first team of full-time broadcast interpreters ever, at least that I know of.

In my lifetime, I have interpreted in person for many government officials including heads of state; at God knows how many conferences and meetings; during innumerable privileged conversations such as those between an accused client and their lawyer or between doctors and patients, and of participants in live news events.

And I have never preserved my notes. Ever.

There are two concerns that make the idea of asking for an interpreter's notes or testimony objectionable. The first is ethical.

An interpreter is not a party to a conversation, a negotiation, or any sort of proceeding. They are an extension of the speaker. A piece of their tongue. Part of their larynx. An interpreter is not separate from the speaker. We are a prosthetic device that allows the speaker's vocal chords to do what they otherwise could not do. Ideally, any doubt by a speaker in their interpreter should be as unimaginable as the trust they have in their own mouth saying what they think they are saying on account of, well, it's their mouth.

The second concern is practical, and it is difficult to describe to someone who is not an interpreter.

Our job is to convey as clearly and accurately as we can the plain content and meaning of the speaker, preserving the tone and register of the  utterance. We do not "translate" words. Our job starts where words end.

We convey meaning -- but not just the literal meaning, but whether the tone was respectful, even ceremonial, whether it was just everyday normal or even downright contemptuous. We use the same linguistic "register," because the way you speak in the courtroom is different from the classroom and is again different from a boy's high school locker room. Which one is used is up to the speaker, and the interpreter replicates it because even at this level, the medium is the message.

Doing that requires an extraordinary focus on the immediate task at hand, which means that neither the interpreter's notes nor the interpreter's recollections are reliable for any purpose after the fact.

Interpreting requires you to be conscious of the context, the overall conversation, yet it prevents you from absorbing its overall message, meaning or import. What an interpreter most remembers --at least this interpreter-- are the things that proved most challenging.

The single moment I most remember as a  broadcast interpreter at CNN is "Hail Mary Play." This was in 1991, towards the end of a speech by General H. Norman Schwartzkopf after the First Gulf War describing the tactics of the military forces opposing Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. As I remember it, I had absolutely no clue what it could possibly mean and God knows how I muddled through in the middle of a live broadcast.

I just looked for it on the Internet, and found it.

Looks like it was not a speech, but a military briefing. It was not after the war but on the second or third day of a ground campaign that had been preceded by weeks of air attacks. It was not at the end of the hour-long event but towards the beginning, 5-1/2 minutes after he started. And my panic must have lasted at most a second or two, because the general immediately explained the "Hail Mary" reference. It came after he said that by knocking out the its air force, the U.S. had blinded Iraq's military:

Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what could best be described as the Hail Mary play in football. I think you recall, when the quarterback is desperate for a touchdown at the very end, what he does is, he steps up behind the center, and all of a sudden every single one of his receivers goes way out to one flank, and they all run down the field as fast as they possibly can and into the end zone, and he lobs the ball. In essence that's what we did [ map 2 ] . When we knew he couldn't see us any more, we did a massive movement of troops all the way out to the west, to the extreme west ...

That redeployment was not small. It involved two armored corps (huge tank-heavy formations) and a couple of extra divisions (one a French division, the other the 101st airborne). I think the last time forces on this scale had been deployed for an actual operation that was then carried out had been during the Second World War.

There really was no ambiguity. This was all accompanied by very detailed maps and charts on an easel next to the general, there simply was no way for an interpreter to get lost. I'm trying to figure out now why my panic then, because by then I'd been an interpreter for presidents and ministers and mercenaries, not just played one on TV. And on the war biz, I'd been a war correspondent covering an actual war (a civil war in Nicaragua) and had actually become familiar with all sorts of things military. So you'd think that I would have had the confidence by then to believe that even when thrown a curve ball, I'd muddle through.

But what I remember is the "Hail Mary Play" panic. The leap into the void because there was no choice, you had to take the next step even though you knew there was not going to be anything solid underneath your feet when  you took that step. And what you don't remember is that in fact there was something solid there, the ground continued just like before.

So that's my point. The interpreter's recollections are dominated by their subjective experience, the highlights and challenges of a particular session to them and to their job.

You might say, well, that was almost 30 years ago.

But I've recounted this same anecdote, about my panic at the end of Schwartzkopf's speech, dozens of times beginning, I am sure, while the memory of the event was still fresh in everyone's mind. Back then I might have been more precise that it was towards the end of the war, not after, but the heart of it would have been the same: I had no idea what it meant or how to interpret it on air and thus crashed and burned most spectacularly.

I did not realize when I started to write this post that this event that I knew I would use as an illustration would turn out to be a much more convincing proof of my point than I imagined. What I actually remember is that in the flow of my work as an interpreter, there was a moment --an instant-- of absolute, heart-attack panic, and therefore my memory of it was unreliable. I did not know that the Internet would absolutely prove it beyond even an unreasonable doubt.

Imagine that fraction-of-a-second panic in a private meeting between the two people that control nuclear arsenals so vast that even the cockroaches might not survive if unleashed. And then Congress and the public being told the single most outstanding moment of the meeting according to the only other American present had been ... say ...

"Fuck the cockroaches," which  Trump said sending the interpreter into such a panic about how coarse the Russian version that later, when you ask about it, the linguist has completely forgotten that our guy's next words were "what I really care about is people not being harmed."

OK, not bloody likely with our Donald, but still ...

--José G. Pérez

Make Trump an offer he can't refuse: the wall for the registry date

For Trump, "The Wall" has always been a bullshit issue: a symbol of "America First" white supremacy triumphant, and not at all a measure with any practical significance.

Why of no significance? Because the wall is already there. Some 702 miles, 1,130 kilometers, of physical barriers first proposed under Democrat President Jimmy Carter that began to be built under Democrat Bill Clinton.

It was called a "fence" mostly because calling it a wall when the commie one in Berlin was still a recent memory would have been a bad PR move.

But Trump does want to call it a "wall," I guess to prove he's just as mean as Stalin used to be. And replacing a few segments of existing metal spikes with metal spikes covered by concrete. Why? My guess is that is would be easier to engrave "TRUMP" in gold letters on a concrete surface, you know, for photo ops.

What Trump really wants is not a construction project, but to create a wall of racism, but for that reason, every dollar Congress approves for his phony physical wall is another brick in Trump's wall of bigotry and discrimination.

This is how legalization was done in the 1930s
and how it should be done now -- just register

Unless, of course, the money is solely for painting "TRUMP" in gold letters, because it is accompanied by a sweeping measure of acceptance and welcome for immigrants and their communities.

That's where "the date" comes in.

What date? The registry date.

WTF is a registry date and what good is it? I'll let the official U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services web site answer:

Aliens who have continuously resided in the United States since January 1, 1972, are of good moral character, and are not inadmissible, are eligible to adjust to legal permanent resident status under the registry provision. Before the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 amended the date, aliens had to have been in the country continuously since June 30, 1948, to qualify.

From back in the day when most people who had come to the United States were European, and the 1920s anti-immigrant hysteria had subsided, there is a provision in immigration law that says, basically, if you have been living permanently in the United States since a certain date, let the government know and you will be recognized as a permanent resident.

It is a simple, direct and effective mechanism for  mass legalization of immigrants based on the iron-clad logic that those who have been residing permanently in the United States are in fact permanent residents thereof.

So I think we should make Trump and offer he can't refuse: sign the change in the registry date and we'll give you the wall.

But if Trump doesn't want to, is there any way to stop him from refusing?

As of January 3, the Democrats have a majority in the House. Simply decide that nothing gets to the floor, goes to the Senate or gets to the President for his signature that does not include a sentence to the effect of: "The registry date is changed to January 20, 2017."

Nothing. Zero. Zip. No military spending. No disaster relief. No mother's day proclamation. Like, nada.

And why that date? I think January 20, 2017 --the day Trump became president-- would be a nice gesture of gratitude, allowing The Donald to add "no one is better at amnesty for illegal aliens" to the list of things that no one is better at than him. If he wants, he can even call it by its true name: justice for the undocumented.

--José G. Pérez

People not voting is the fault of the system and its politicians, not the people

I am fucking sick a tired of hearing congresscritters and other members of our political class, and their news media acolytes, attack the people for exercising their democratic right to give elections the finger.

Never mind this election we just had; look at the big one. For two years before a presidential election we are subjected to a constant 24 X 7 X 365 bombardment about how we get to decide the ultimate fate of life, the universe and everything!

No-one is allowed to say different. There's not even a single letter to the editor, never mind a columnist or TV gasbag that disagrees. When did you ever read a column saying, "don't vote. It only encourages them?" Or hear a TV or radio political pontificator explaining what you can hear on any bus in any American city: "If God had meant us to vote, she would have given us candidates."

Then comes the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a year divisible by four without a remainder. Almost 66 million vote for Queen Hillary, 63 million for Trumpus Maximus, and six million between them for the Greens and Libertarians, there to show how even weirdos, perverts and the clinically insane can have their own presidential candidates.

And, oh yeah. There's 100 million, give or take, who say, "take this election and shove it!"

Why would they say that? Well consider the numbers I reported above: 66 megavotes for Hillary. 63 for Trumpus, so The Donald is president.

Do you realize that in just about every  other country in the entire world, when they want to cram a president down your throat, at least they have the decency to pretend that the person got more votes?

And then there's the Senate. The nearly 40,000,000 people of California will once again be represented by Diane Feinstein, who will have the same exact status and power as John Barrasso, who is being sent to the Senate by the fewer than 600,000 people of Wyoming.

We have 500,000 --that's right, half a million-- elected positions in this country but the vast majority are not really elected, they're imposed by the dominant political machine in the area. Then there are the contested elections, where politicians sell themselves through a legalized system of bribery known as "campaign contributions" although there's also the modality where the rich people will buy both candidates and then let the people freely choose which one is better at fooling them.

Beyond "elections" we come to the Holy of Holies, John Roberts and the Supremes. It's a dictatorial constitutional convention with nine delegates appointed for life. I say dictatorial in the strictest, scientific sense of the word: an authority bound by no pre-existing laws. They "interpret" (invent) the constitution as it serves the purposes of the majority of these robed reactionaries of the ruling rich ... and whoever holds their puppet strings.

Liberals and self-styled "socialists" who berate the people for not exercising their "democratic" right to vote should concentrate instead on getting rid of our slave owner's constitution and replacing it with one that provides for a democratic republic instead. And I don't even mean a socialist one; just a plain old standard-issue bourgeois democracy would be a great advance.

--José G. Pérez

11-11-11 and the memory of a hundred years

It was on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month that the guns fell silent a century ago. The war to end all wars had ended. It would take but a few years to learn that it had been the overture, not the finale.

The First World War gave us a League of Nations, a ban on poison gas, restrictions on the ships and tonnage of navies. But World War One did not end the arrogance of the Great Powers that were great only in avarice and conquest.

Nor could it stop the advance of scientists. Their accomplishments would be feted in a quarter century by the radiance of a thousand suns burst at once into the sky of a cold New Mexico desert night.

A false dawn. Not dreams but nightmares. Remembrance Day they call it in many countries, that day 100 years ago when they told us it was the last day of the last war. Remember what came after.

--José G. Pérez