The Tina Modotti mystique encompasses two main questions about this artist who has been dead for more than half a century. Why, today, is she so loved? And why did she quit doing art?

…the steps of tomorrow will pass by to see…

It’s obvious why Tina is an iconic figure to many women. Her career as a fine-art photographer spanned only seven years and produced a relatively scant body of work, yet she was and is remarkably influential. Nobody awarded her a graduate degree in art, or any other credentials, yet her original prints sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and her name is known wherever the photographic art is meaningfully discussed. There are several biographies, and the novel Tinisima is based on her life. Another book imagines a poetry journal, channeling Tina’s voice as it might have been, if she had actually kept such a record in her last years. Films have been made about her – the fictional Love Never Forgets, and a 1983 documentary, among others, and she was a major character in the Hollywood movie Frida. The band Fugazi wrote “Recap Modotti” and the punk rock group Trash Wednesday wrote “Stop Tina Modotti,” and somebody wrote a stage play. Diego Rivera depicted her in several of his Chapingo murals. When she died, friends put together a 52-page booklet about her life, with memorial words from many prominent people in various fields. The poem Pablo Neruda wrote for her is carved on the tombstone.

…myself am heaven and hell…

As a young woman, Tina lived like a free person, granting herself the same rights as any man. Though this disappoints some feminists, there was always a man in her life. In those days, getting along without one was almost unthinkable. The story goes that once, at an artsy get-together, a party game required writing something personal on a slip of paper. Hers said, “Tina Modotti – profession – men!”

It’s totally clear how she meant it. In the art life, people usually rank higher than possessions, and nobody tells you whom to love, or not to. The eras of life are defined by the person you were with. Thinking back, trying to place the date of an event, the first clue is to recall who was in your bed and/or heart at the time. Then, where you lived and worked, and finally, what year it must have been. Tina related to each successive lover as a guru who led her through a new stage of intellectual and spiritual growth. Her life was the kind that becomes a legend, or a stereotype, causing parents to warn their kids away from the art world. She was everything a mother didn’t want a daughter to grow up and become. In those days, “adventuress” was the mildest word for such a female.

Naturally, modern women adopt Tina as a role model. More puzzling is why men are crazy about her, even those who, when they meet up with her type in real life, think “slut.” Okay, she was a beautiful nude model who couldn’t get pregnant. That much is undisputed. She was also a homewrecker who grabbed somebody’s husband, and then wasn’t even faithful to him. A deadbeat who skipped out on rent, and was involved in scandalous lawsuits and other high-profile court cases. The paramour of a hit man. An accused murderer and a presidential assassination conspiracy suspect. An international fugitive with police records in several countries. A turncoat who denounced former friends, consigning them to torture and execution.

…I will not call injustice grace…

Born Assunta Adelaide Luiga Modotti, she went by many names, including Tina Modotti de Richey, a title of the “noble” class, strange indeed for a future Communist. Rose Smith Saltarini was the name she gave the police when questioned about a murder. On undercover missions, her aliases included Maria Ruiz, Maria Jimenez, Renee, Tina Kontreras, Carmen Ruiz Sanchez, Vera Martini, and many others.

Let’s get the political thing out of the way. It’s okay to hate communism as much as any other system, but in those days communism had at least two things going for it. First, for those who cared about their fellow humans, the Party was the only game in town. It was them or the Quakers, whose lifestyle might not have suited Tina. And, for a while anyway, the Communists were the only ones who resisted Mussolini and Hitler, while everyone else let them be. Regardless of the horrors communism brought about, it still gets points for identifying fascism as the most virulent form of capitalism, a concept which has been well proved, but which we seem unable to grasp even today.

…yesterday this day’s madness did prepare…

So, how does a Communist Party apparatchik become a symbol of humanitarian commitment and a hero of the intelligentsia?

For Tina, who spent long periods as the darling of the art scene and the toast of the town, the easiest thing in the world would have been to stay in those roles indefinitely. Yet she gave up the life of a wastrel socialite, in favor of relevancy and usefulness. She is admired for turning her back on the rewards of being, so to speak, homecoming queen, opting for poverty and authenticity. And rightly so – but that’s not the whole story.

Born in rural Italy, Tina was a real red-diaper baby. Her father was a moderate anarcho-syndicalist who agitated for better working conditions for mill hands, and one of her baptismal sponsors was a radical socialist. She was less than two when the family moved to Austria and took up habitation in shabby migrant workers’ quarters. When she was nine, her father went to America to try his luck, while mother and siblings returned to Italy where they lived in dire straits. Tina had to drop out of school at 13 and work 10-hour shifts in a silk mill. Child labor was the norm in that time and place, so she was no worse off than many other kids. At home, the fuel for heat and light often ran out, and so did the food. To buy a day’s worth of groceries, Tina once sold the scarf that was her favorite (and only nice) possession.

…the glories of this world…

In America, Mr. Modotti tried several careers that didn’t work out, but he was perpetually young in spirit, a constant self-reinventor. Eventually he prospered enough to send for Tina, who traveled alone to San Francisco when she was 17. For two years she worked in a shirt factory and volunteered with the Italian Aid Committee and Italian Red Cross, where she learned event organizing, fundraising, and many other useful skills. Already forced by circumstances to be multilingual, she learned English fast, and found a job assisting the most chic hat designer in a fashion-conscious city.

Tina’s creative impulses were deeply stirred by the 1915 International Exposition, with its thousands of artworks and artifacts from all over the world. In her early twenties she acted in many theatrical productions and hung out with the North Beach artistic set, “King of Bohemia” Sadakichi Hartmann and similar weirdos, who even in those days were cultural tourism magnets. She modeled for at least a dozen accomplished photographers and painters, and appeared in several silent films. In the only movie where she played the lead, the plot concerned love’s triumph over ethnic prejudice.

…the loveliest and the best…

It’s a cliché that Mediterranean women ripen early and then age quickly, and this seems to have been true of Tina. Only about five feet tall, she was described as doll-like. One man said she was “not trying to be beautiful – but born beautiful.” The camera loved her, and she could command the stage. She was, by all reports, aglow with “sacred fire,” a description one is tempted to dismiss as extreme, unless one has actually known such an incandescent person.

It’s obvious that during her golden years Tina enjoyed being beautiful, but part of her might have been annoyed even then. Much later, in legal trouble and hounded by the press, she complained that in the United States, everything was seen from the “beauty” angle. When she refused to speak to reporters, they reassured her that they would only write about how pretty she was. “Evidently women here are measured by a motion-picture standard.” And even though she herself had been a movie actress, Tina didn’t approve. She wanted the press to write about how people were being mauled by their governments.

Even in early photos, in certain lights and angles, Tina’s features seem actually coarse, and one woman who met her said her hair grew too low on her forehead. Descriptions almost always mention a tragic expression, a perpetual aura of mourning. Janet Flanner invented this phrase for another woman, but it seems that Tina also “represented the admirable principle of sad self-sacrifice.” By 1939, when she was only 43, a new acquaintance described her as a badly dressed little old lady.

One man spoke for both himself and his fellow Tinadolators by citing her “truly extraordinary graciousness.” She wasn’t just a man-pleaser, but had a genuine gift for relating to all ages and genders. She has been characterized as sensitive, a good listener, and always gentle and tranquil, even in the midst of catastrophe. One lover said she never pretended to be anything she wasn’t – although that turned out to not be strictly, factually true. She kept her share of secrets, and told more than her share of lies.

Tina had the capacity to fall in love for the first time over and over again, and the ability to believe that each one was, at last, the destined great love of her life. While convincing the current flame that he was the only man in the world, she could at the same time make it clear that he wasn’t the only man in her life. To be totally absorbed in and fiercely loyal to a current lover, while at the same time retaining the friendship and esteem of former ones, is no easy task. But Tina had the skill and the heart for it.

Profession – Men!

She could easily have been a kept woman. Many men would have been proud to support her in style, in return for exclusive access to her favors. She deserves credit for not taking that route. However … in 1924, Edward Weston wrote that his latest portrait of Tina showed a woman “who has suffered, known death and disillusion, who has sold herself to rich men…” What was he saying there? And later, visiting poet Kenneth Rexroth characterized her as a high-class courtesan. Was it only because of the slander the newspapers threw around, or did he have other information? Much later, the Russian operative she spent many years with would, when feeling particularly vindictive, call her a “high-class whore.”

Profession? Maybe. Men were definitely her occupation. She liked the kind who, as Patricia Albers puts it, “dedicated themselves with crusading zeal to high-minded vocations.” There were plenty of casual liaisons, but only a handful of really important ones – Richey, Weston, Guerrero, Mella, and Vidali.

…waste not your hour…

In the San Francisco days, the man in Tina’s life was the fancifully named Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey – not quite the name he’d been born to in Pleasant Valley, Oregon. He worked as a bellhop at an upscale hotel, which sounds pretty cheesy, until you reflect on the opportunities to meet famous people, the potential large tips for procuring goods and services, etc. Kind of makes you wonder exactly what he had going. The persona he wore in the art world was that of a French Canadian aristocrat. His drawings show a definite Aubrey Beardsley influence, but Richey was no creampuff. His political cartoons appeared in a Communist magazine at a time when thousands of leftists were being harassed by the government. He took Spanish classes, and was a published writer who regularly sold stories.

Tina with Richey on their honeymoon

Richey and Tina collaborated on the art of batik, and some of their creations sold as wall hangings, pure art objects. Designers, including Tina herself, made the fabrics into clothing. She sewed like an angel, and could afford good materials to make fashionable outfits. In those days, movie actors provided their own wardrobes. Given her fondness for dressing up, her creative imagination, the available stock of exotic fabrics, and her ability with the needle, she must have had a ball. Later on, she became known as the first woman in Mexico to wear blue jeans. The shirt-and-pants ensemble for darkroom work looked, on her, like a stylish mechanic’s jumpsuit, many years ahead of its time, fashion-wise. Her sense of costume always remained, even when its purpose changed. When serious political commitment took over, her look became no-nonsense secretarial.

photo by Arnold Schroder

Darkroom outfit

Whatever Tina turned her hand to, she was capable of great focus. A friend described one of her Mexico City apartments as possessing “simple good order…easy efficiency.” She loved music, but surprisingly, was never a good dancer. Along with works by such literary stars as Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence and Roger Fry, Tina’s poetry appeared in a 1923 issue of The Dial.

Supposedly, Tina and Richey got married – it was even in the newspaper – but biographer Patricia Albers discovered that there was no legal wedding, and theorizes that the marriage was faked so Richey’s mother would keep paying his allowance. Also, he’d divorced his first wife, and although Roaring Twenties radicals advocated free love, telling people you were married simply made things easier all around. Just as Tina’s stage career was getting solidly established, she abandoned it to follow him on some mysterious adventure. Then they stayed at a ranch near San Luis Obispo and enjoyed a honeymoon replete with corny snapshots, Omar Khayyam poetry, and lots of horizontal quality time.

…into the dust descend…

At the end of World War I the couple moved to Los Angeles and lived in the classy Bryson Apartments, whose tenants included several silent film stars. Their place was decorated with zen sparseness and ethnic textures, in the style favored by generations of grad students. Richey mentored Tina, taught her some French and Spanish, and shaped her taste. She gratefully absorbed his tutelage and flourished under his approval. They were at the center of a thriving bohemian community, au courant with all the cutting-edge philosophy and art.

Edward Weston was a professional photographer with four sons and a not-so-great marriage, but his wife had money. Even though he won prizes and praise, by around 1919 he was sick of being a pictorialist, and got mixed up with the real artists. Of course he immediately fell for Tina. Eventually, she spent a month posing for him and they started an affair. Weston made it with all his models, but Tina was in a class by herself. When they weren’t together, she wrote him hot letters. Aside from the physical passion, she seems to have been impressed by Weston’s single-mindedness, which made Richey look like a dabbler or a poser. Weston introduced her to the words of Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger,” a precept that served her well in future days.

Photo by Edward Weston, 1921, at what was supposed to have been their parting

Richey accepted a job in Mexico. Tina met with Weston for what was supposed to be the last time, but something transpired between them that led to a new level of understanding, and she made up her mind to continue the clandestine affair. This meant going after another movie role, as a reason to stay in LA. Richey left for Mexico and missed her like crazy. Weston, too, started to think of going south, but ultimately, Tina went alone in February, and on the train received a telegram that said Richey was very sick with smallpox. When she arrived, because the disease was contagious, she couldn’t see him, and then he died.

…some little talk awhile of me and thee…

1922 was a year of mourning, in which Tina organized a seven-artist show that included Weston’s photos of her, and works by her dead husband. Returning to California, she paid Weston for his sales. He encouraged her to take up photography, and she did, learning on the job as his studio assistant. But she thought about moving to San Francisco, and acted like their affair was not to be resumed. Weston wasn’t getting along with his wife at all, and decided to go to Mexico, where his art photos had been so well received. Somewhere around this time, Tina found out that fibroid tumors would prevent her from ever being a mother. By November, she and Weston had decided to go to Mexico together for a trial marriage. She would be darkroom helper and household manager, and provide adult supervision for his son Chandler, who was coming along.

The following year they finally made it to Mexico City, which was in a state of intellectual and artistic ferment. After putting a great deal of work into a house that turned out to be impossible, they cut their losses and moved into the city center, renting a little place with wrought iron gates and leaded windows. As photographers, they were both wild about the cloud formations. Tina organized an exhibit for Weston and her work appeared in the political magazine El Machete. They were in with the in crowd. When invited to a costume party, they would put on each other’s clothes.

For a while, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston really were one of the great Art Couples, and the fact that it didn’t last “forever” doesn’t matter. In later years, Tina assured him many times of his significance to her as “the one important being, at a certain time of my life, when I did not know which way to turn…” She always acknowledged his influence and guidance, and was especially grateful to him for turning her on to photography, “…a work that I have come to love with real passion…”

Even when living in the same house, they never shared a bedroom, and Tina would have overnight guests. The open relationship idea had sounded good in theory, but Weston remarked, “Next time I’ll pick a mistress homely as hell.” Tina was not as jealous of his affairs. It wasn’t long before political differences came between them. On a train journey, Tina annoyed Weston when she insisted on traveling in the 2nd-class carriage, while he and his son used the first-class tickets they had bought beforehand. He believed that artists thrive best as individualists, not collectivists.

There was another political upheaval, and a lot of wealthy people, who would normally have been photo studio clients, had to leave the country. The couple’s household, though partly supported by Mrs. Weston, was poor. They had weekly parties and passed the hat for rent money, and when they still couldn’t pay the landlord, did a midnight flit. Broke, and increasingly pressured from home, Weston planned to leave Mexico, but Tina wasn’t ready to. They weren’t a hot item any more, and her political zeal was off-putting, but they both wanted to stick together as artistic partners. They talked about starting over together in New York. She organized another show for him. Her own work was exhibited for the first time, in a group show sponsored by the government. Finally, Weston and his son took the train back to LA. For eight months Tina and Weston wrote to each other. She kept the commercial studio going with both their names on it, but didn’t make much money. She took a job in a bookshop but found it so inimical, she quit halfway through the first day. Even when their future as a couple looked very improbable, Weston was still the most important person in her life, as shown by a 1924 will that left him her possessions.

…how can we dance when our earth is turning…

Tina’s own photography, as opposed to the commercial stuff, grew laden with message. A typical caption reads, “People waiting in front of the National Pawn Shop to go and pawn their poor belongings.” In her pictures of working people’s hands, a part of something stands in place of the whole. In poetry, it’s called synecdoche; in the visual arts there is probably a different word for it. One photo shows a man’s sandaled feet with gnarled toes and thick pointed toenails. They could be mummy feet. This picture really is worth a thousand words at least. It would take more than a thousand words to express what this picture does. When she photographed a baby drinking lunch from its mother’s breast, Tina’s renowned people skills must have come into play. Even in our own enlightened times, public lactation is frowned upon. What must it have been like, back then?

Photo by Tina Modotti

Photo by Tina Modotti

Photo by Tina Modotti 1926 or 1927

It’s not as if Tina just woke up one morning and discovered social consciousness. She was saddened by the destitution of Mexico’s oppressed classes, but could not have been surprised – not after her own childhood in a big impoverished family. Even when she was the reigning cultural diva of Mexico City, rain and cold came through the roof. Over her lifespan, she occasionally stayed in some posh digs, but mostly it was dumps, especially when she got older. She shunned the lure of wealth, and went for voluntary simplicity, and yes, that is admirable – but the impressive part is that she didn’t go into it blind. Tina already knew the grinding reality. Many who come from that background don’t ever want to be reminded – “No more wire hangers!” But Tina didn’t run from the fate of poverty. Having escaped it, she went back, contemplated it, and then chose it. Having chosen it, she didn’t chicken out.

Tina joined the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas and organized her fellow Italian expatriates into the Anti-Fascist League of Mexico. She joined Red Aid, a worldwide organization whose purpose was to help orphans, strikers, prisoners, and other victims of the class war. But art was not forgotten. She set up a Weston-Modotti exhibition in Guadalajara, and hung out with a pair of Communist artists who educated her thoroughly on the life of the average peasant.

…departed, may return no more…

Weston came back, this time with a different son, Brett. Now, Tina openly entertained a series of lovers and Weston fooled around with the servant girls – a classic piece of Yankee imperialist exploitation, if you wanted to look at it that way. Which Tina might have done. When someone becomes a True Believer, whether in communism, Christianity, or whatever, everything is re-examined through that lens. At any rate, she and Weston worked together in the studio and went out together as a couple, perhaps conscious of their image as a team. Tina was no longer his model, and they probably weren’t physically involved with each other any more. At one point Weston tried to seduce an American visitor, who turned him down because he was taken. He protested that he and Tina were no longer an item, but the woman told him, “we have all believed in the legend of Weston and Tina…. and I still want to believe.” He also pursued the sister of the man who turned out to be Tina’s next important love.

Tina acquired a Graflex camera which freed her up to move around outdoors and capture shots spontaneously. On a trip back to the States, she visited the Richeys in LA and went through her stored belongings, ritually getting rid of her old life as Madame Richey. She decided to keep only the things necessary for photography. She met many prominent photographers through the Weston connection, though she regretted in a letter to him that none of her old acquaintances took her seriously as a photographer. It sounds like she was still devoted to the art, and not feeling too much conflict between it and her political side. But, disappointingly, work wasn’t going well. “I just feel impotent – I don’t know which way to start or turn….”

…And then no more of thee and me…

“Workers Parade”- the photo where all the sombreros are seen from above – is considered a major step in Tina’s development as an artist, and possibly the tipping point that ultimately led her away from art altogether. She consistently hung around with political types. One friend was an American who had served time for refusing the draft and who later, as a journalist, chronicled the Fascist takeover of Italy. Tina was involved with Pablo O’Higgins, and Diego Rivera took on the job of politically educating the pair of them. She had known Rivera for a long time, and was chosen as the documentary photographer of his work. It wasn’t long before Rivera’s wife Lupe Marin named Tina as the “other woman” when she separated from him. Then Rivera went to Russia, and Tina formed other attachments.

Campesinos - Photo by Tina Modotti

Artists and writers led the movement toward re-visioning Mexico as an Indian place, not a Spanish place. Tina’s friend Frances Toor started Mexican Folkways magazine, and every issue carried an ad for the Weston-Modotti studio. Weston was commissioned to take pictures for Idols Behind Altars, a book written to prove that Mexico’s Catholicism was only a thin veneer over the old indigenous faith. (If you find a first edition at a yard sale, grab it, the going price is around $80.) Naturally Tina was invited to assist, and they set off with young Brett into the wilder parts of the country whose infrastructure was in even worse shape than usual, having recently been ravaged by floods. Also, another revolution was in progress, in which 80,000 Mexicans died (including Tina’s friend and possibly lover, Galvan), so the trip wasn’t exactly a stroll in the park. The workload was heavy, and of course both photographers did their own stuff, too. This was when Tina really got into portraying the working class, especially women.

Weston wrote of “the barrier between us,” and left Mexico in late 1926, certain that he would never see it or Tina again. Even after their affair, her letters to him were confiding, nostalgic, and always appreciative. One of the later ones, penned in a time of great trouble, told Weston how much she longed to talk with him. “You might not agree with all I would say – that does not matter – but you would understand…” Working through problems with Weston as “listener” seems to have been a very therapeutic process for her. We should all be lucky enough to have someone like that. Later, when it became clear that her Mexico days were numbered, she shipped boxes of cherished books to Weston for safekeeping. The last letter he got from her was written three months after she moved to Moscow.

But in 1927, Russia was only a looming shadow in Tina’s future. She was still in Mexico City, at a new address. It was in the same apartment building as the Mexican Folkways publisher, and she became a contributing editor of the publication. The place was tiny but she installed a darkroom and made some money from reproductions of her Diego Rivera mural photos. Since frescoes can’t be loaned to other institutions, her pictures toured the world and won acclaim for Rivera.

The next man to win Tina’s heart was Xavier Guerrero, who was a Tarahumaran Indian and (of course) a politically obsessed artist. Here’s a wonderful description from biographer Pino Cacucci: “Guerrero did not aspire to be understood. He did not explain how he thought and did not try to convince anybody of anything.” A contemporary writer noted that Guerrero was “renouncing his art out of dedication to the Communist Party.” Under his sway, Tina devoted herself to humble tasks on behalf of the Party – typing, translations, selling newsletters. She joined the Hands Off Nicaragua Committee, and turned her lens even more toward the people considered to be the lowest of the low. Her art was now consciously “sending a message.” Around this time, Weston shipped her a package of his seashell photos, and she was blown away. If things had been just a bit different, the excitement kindled by his new direction might have been the catalyst to send her back into art for art’s sake. But no.

Xavier Guerrero 1923

Tina and Guerrero set up housekeeping, lending their living room as meeting place for the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party. Tina told Guerrero she had never loved anybody as much. (Co-incidentally, she never modeled for anyone again.) Suddenly, he was summoned to Moscow for a three-year course of study, a great honor he wouldn’t have thought for one minute of refusing. He left, with the understanding that Tina would dutifully wait.

She tried hard to be a good drone, adjusting her beliefs and making personal concerns like love, sex, and art subservient to the needs of the Party. She made self-consciously meaningful still-life compositions: sombrero, ear of corn, guitar, bandolier, etc. El Machete published more of what she herself called propaganda pictures, excoriating the custom of child labor, the contrast between rich and poor, and similar evils. Still balancing two worlds, she mentored Manuel Alvarez Bravo, probably the only person left by then with whom she could really talk art.

…the vision of fulfilled desire…

Then she met Julio Antonio Mella, one of the numerous militants dedicated to freeing Cuba from U.S. imperialism. Seven years younger than Tina, he was the veteran of a well-publicized 18-day hunger strike in a Cuban jail. She photographed him, of course, and one of those portraits became the most widely-recognized example of the “revolutionary” meme, until overtaken by Korda’s famous shot of Che Guevara.

When Mella came on the scene, Tina was still technically bound to Guerrero, even though he was on the other side of the world. Tina struggled with this, because according to the dour Communist rules she tried to follow, one lover at a time was considered enough. But Mella was irresistible. An anguished “Dear John” letter was dispatched to Moscow. Guerrero tersely replied, “Received your message. Goodbye.” Flash-forward: Guerrero was still in Russia when, a couple of years later, the winds of change deposited Tina there. She sought him out and they had a stark ugly meeting where he contemptuously refused even to speak. Finally, he said he wouldn’t discuss it. “Now there was nothing more to be said between us,” Tina reported, “and, for him, I do not exist.”

Julio Antonio Mella, photo by Tina Modotti

With Mella, Tina established another household where, as so often before, she was perennial hostess. (Sometimes, after making sure the guests were having a good time, she would slide away to the darkroom for a spell.) Restless students came around, eager to have their impressionable minds influenced. Frida Kahlo, still in her teens, met Diego Rivera at one of these gatherings and joined the C.P.

…where some buried Caesar bled…

One day in early 1929, Mella was tipped off that a couple of Cuban hit men were looking for him. That very night, as he and Tina walked home, he was fatally shot. When making a statement to the police, Tina gave a fake name, which turned out to be a very bad move. The press announced that one of Tina’s other lovers had paid to have Mella killed. She was interrogated and put through the ordeal of re-enacting the crime, at the scene, at the same time of night, for the benefit of the police. When they finally let her go home, the cops had tossed the place and confiscated many of her belongings, and she couldn’t stay there anyway because it was under seal. She was made to give a complete history of her relations with men, and to explain why Guerrero had abandoned her. An official asked if a man who really loved her would give her up for the sake of ideology. “If the person is worthy, yes,” she said. “Revolutionaries’ love is not something isolated from their activities, but rather is related to their political ideals.”

The public uproar over Mella’s death included a six-hour funeral procession, memorial gatherings, speeches, the usual kinds of demonstrations that occur when a popular leader is assassinated. Tina took pictures of him laid out for a burial appropriate to a hero and martyr. The Party put Rivera in charge of an independent investigation. He boisterously defended Tina, and the police lightened up and started looking at Cuban suspects. Still, her entire love life had been spread before the public eye, and the low-rent press also trashed Mella, printing excerpts from a juvenile diary as if they were the writings of the adult man. Finally, having suffered trial by public humiliation, Tina was officially cleared of any connection with the murder.

Nobody knows for sure who killed Mella, although the smart money says the Comintern put out the contract. In other words, he was killed by his own side. Although Mella was a staunch leftist, he was not, in the eyes of the Moscow bosses, much of a team player. He was an evader of Party discipline and, frankly, a bit of a loose cannon. That hunger strike, for instance, was not a heroic act, but a display of bourgeois self-indulgence. Punishing the captors by self-starvation was a notion that could only come from the deluded brain of someone who had always had enough to eat. To these hyper-commies, a hunger strike was as decadent as bulimia, as childish as holding your breath and turning blue. Also, they didn’t want Cuba invaded, or not just yet, anyway. The guys in Moscow had plans for everybody, and any insurgent on the ground who didn’t accept the big picture, as laid out by HQ, got the boot.

…the worldly hope…turns ashes…

Portraits and reproductions continued to provide Tina with income, and she was hired by artists to document their work. In one year, her photos were on the cover of New Masses four times, and her international reputation grew. The political scene erupted with more riots and assassinations. She went to Oaxaca to chill out, and found women known as Tehuanas who wore vibrant colors and bossed the men around. She took a lot of pictures, including one of herself in the local costume, an aberration because normally her wardrobe no longer displayed the least bit of flair.

The government turned up the heat on the Communists, to which Tina responded by doing undercover work, such as smuggling out information from jailed comrades. Diego Rivera married Frida Kahlo and quit the party. Tina considered them traitors and cut them out of her life. Much has been inferred from her portraits of marionettes and puppetmasters, but whatever she consciously or unconsciously expressed through her art, Tina embraced the Party. The man she loved was killed before her eyes. She was accused of it, and dragged through the mud by the media. When a life is reduced to ashes, sometimes being a True Believer is the only thing that remains. Perhaps she thought that backing out of her political commitment would mean all the previous work, pain, self-abnegation and sacrifice had been in vain.

…one by one crept silently to rest…

Over the years, before, between, and during the love affairs already discussed, Tina had other involvements. One of her first boyfriends was a waiter/bank clerk who later amassed a fortune in the billions. She probably made it with Johan Hagemeyer just before leaving for Mexico with Weston, and probably made it with General Manuel Hernandez Galvan while living with Weston. The romance with Diego Rivera is thought to have lasted about a year, though there’s no proof it ever happened at all. Rivera’s wife was convinced of it, however. Another Communist painter, Pablo O’Higgins, fell in love with Tina, and it might have been mutual. They were “intermittent lifelong lovers, more tender than passionate,” is what Patricia Albers concludes from her research. At 28, Tina had an affair with a dashing 19-year-old called Pepe Quintanilla. A certain German author noted, “If only I had been able to win her away from Weston, my life would be very different now.” There were probably others, but by the time the Mella scandal died down, her career as a femme fatale was pretty much over.

…stumbling in the dark…

Party official Vittorio Vidali was a homie, who came originally from a town near Tina’s Italian birthplace. Many of the Communists were suspicious of her free-wheeling ways, but Vidali thought she was salvageable, and besides, in his own unique way he loved her. They had met at a demonstration concerning the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, and Vidali undertook to educate her in realpolitik. For instance, she was to forget about the altruistic, compassionate desire to save two innocents from the electric chair, because these wrongful executions were inconsequential. The important thing was, the case showed the whole world what the U.S. government was really like. When she met the Nicaraguan rebel Sandino and volunteered to join up as a guerrilla/photographer, Vidali’s criticism was harsh. Tina was too naïve to realize that the Comintern didn’t really want Sandino to succeed. To the party bosses, he was just another local yokel interfering with their long-range plans.

It’s hard to imagine Vidali as Tina’s suitor. Contemporaries described him as a brusque, ruthlessly ambitious caveman of a womanizer who drank way too much. One labeled him “the scariest guy I ever met.” A Communist Party operative who worked with Vidali called him “demonic” – and who would better know? On the plus side, he was courageous and good at thinking on his feet. Still, he was not a man who would have occurred to anyone as a match for Tina, and her remaining friends wondered at her choice. Yet their partnership turned out to be spectacularly long-lasting, at least in relative terms. She may not have intended it, but events conspired to deliver her into his keeping. Many of these events were shaped and helped along by Vidali, who had since 1927 been working for the agency that later became the KGB.

…how do we sleep when our beds are burning…

In 1930, someone tried to kill Mexico’s president. As on any such occasion, the authorities took advantage of the excuse to move against dissidents who had been under their scrutiny for various reasons. Tina was arrested. She protested by hunger striking – and no doubt reaped Vidali’s scorn. She was held for two weeks and then kicked loose with 48 hours to get out of the country. She couldn’t take much luggage, and had to pitch a lot of photos and negatives. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the only person not afraid to associate with her, asked to keep them, and bought one of her cameras. Of her hundreds of friends, Bravo was the only to attend her departure. Him and the police. This woman who had maintained an ongoing salon for the cultural and political misfits, who had extended massive hospitality to out-of-towners, and helped newcomers acclimate, was deported and nobody came to say goodbye. Her only passport was for Italy, whose government wanted to lock her up for several reasons, including a 1927 speech where she declared that the land of her birth had been “transformed into an immense prison and a vast cemetery.” Since then, agents of Italian fascism had made life miserable for her relatives, driving one of them to suicide.

…you know not why you go, nor where…

The ship took its time heading for Europe. On the journey Tina was consoled by the knowledge that, wherever she might end up, work was there to be done for the revolution. During a stopover at a US port, she was kept in detention for many days, then, in Havana, confined to an army quarantine facility for three days. Vidali, for reasons known only to himself and the Comintern, just happened to be on the same ship – in disguise and with false papers, of course. He invited Tina to Moscow, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. When they landed in Holland, the Italian extradition order awaited, and the Dutch authorities wisely didn’t let her disembark. Red Aid scrambled for a solution, and obtained for her a German visa. The Dutch gave her x number of hours to get across their country and out the other side.

Berlin groaned under massive unemployment, and Hitler was on the rise. Surrounded by people who spoke a strange language, Tina was destitute and dependent on the Party for her continued survival. Well, not totally. The worldly bohemian affinity group included some politically like-minded friends who helped her adjust. Tina considered asking the Party for an undercover assignment in Italy, so at least she could see a few relatives. Vidali showed up and she ran the idea by him, but he shot it down and once more suggested Russia.

No. But a few months later, yes. By the end of the year, Tina had a room in the same Moscow residence hotel as Vidali.

…deceived entrapment through belief…

If there’s a formula to Tina’s relations with men, it seems that up until now, she had adjusted her politics to fit the man. Now it appears she chose the man because of her beliefs. In devoting herself to the Party, she basically handed herself over to Vidali, who was fond of quoting Lenin: “Everything that is done in the proletarian cause is honest.”

In Vidali’s case, “everything” probably included playing a part in the assassination of Mella. If it was ordered by Moscow, he would have been in on it. Albers says, “One shudders for her to imagine a scenario in which she unwittingly lived with the man behind the murder of the love of her life.” If Vidali was culpable, how could Tina not, at some point, have suspected, or even known? They were a couple for eleven years, by far her longest relationship – although they did spend quite a lot of time apart, traveling on secret missions. Sometimes, they would be sent to a foreign place together, each being the only person the other knew or trusted.

…alien you find you feel at home everywhere…

But all this was still in the future. Tina and Vidali soon shared an apartment, in a building full of immigrants even more disoriented than Tina. She knocked on the neighbors’ doors and asked, in their native Spanish or Italian, about their problems, and then solved those problems. It must have been a satisfyingly direct way of helping.

The Party gave her some resettlement funds and a job with the Red Aid relief organization. She took Russian lessons and became fluent enough to translate newspapers. As interpreter, Tina escorted distinguished foreign visitors on guided tours. She authored pamphlets against capitalist warmongers and the like, and wrote for the official magazine, sometimes under the pen name of Julio Antonio (in honor of Mella) or Maria, the Latino equivalent of Jane Doe. She learned spy tradecraft, the whole nine yards. For the Party, she went all over Europe on dangerous undercover jobs, moving money around, sneaking Communists out of Germany before the concentration camps got them, and so on. Spain arrested and deported her. She was promoted to the Executive Committee of Red Aid. In the last letter Weston ever received, Tina said, “I am living a completely new life, so much so that I almost feel like a different person…”

Friends found her increasingly silent. Her mind was the repository of many secrets. It must have been easier simply not to talk at all, than to risk saying the wrong thing. Reticence made good sense, and may have been emotionally necessary, too. Sometimes saying a thing out loud makes it real. Maybe Tina’s feelings were better left unacknowledged, even to herself. In his memoirs, Vidali recalled her self-indoctrinating words, such as: “I convinced myself that the slogan ‘the Party is always right’ is just and necessary.” In 1933, she was re-assigned to Paris where, between spy missions, she organized the World Congress of Women Against War and Fascism. 1935 found Vidali transferred to Spain and Tina back in Moscow, where she was one of the many comrades who pitched in to help build the Metro subway. There’s evidence that she worked on a propaganda film, and it’s certain that she hung out with the cinema people. Sergei Eisenstein was very impressed, and used his influence to bring about an exhibit of Tina’s photos at the university. She was posted back to Paris, and never returned to the Soviet Union.

…take that, and do not shrink…

Next stop was the Spanish Civil War, which the Communists considered crucial. “If we lose here, we lose everywhere,” Tina told a friend. Not content to be a desk jockey, she gravitated to the midst of the worst danger and need, and even survived the bombing of a building she was in. She was in the field as often as possible, organizing the construction of latrines, orphanages, blood banks, and first aid units; relocating patients to safer areas; moving headquarters. The challenges were enormous and daunting. Whole cities full of wounded and shell-shocked civilians had to be evacuated.

As Sister Marie, hospital administrator, she dressed in a nun’s habit and dealt with the mess left when dozens of nurses were poisoned by the enemy. She never shirked a task, however difficult or lowly – if the floor was dirty, she washed it. Already suffering from congestive heart failure, which caused her legs to swell, she would work until her superiors ordered a few days of bed rest. When La Pasionaria, “the most famous Communist in Spain” was a patient, Tina sat up nights with a gun in her lap, doubling as nurse and bodyguard. The ideal portrait of Tina Modotti, expressing both her spiritual/creative/nurturing and her militant side, would portray her as a nursing nun with a rifle.

She and Vidali never had their own place but stayed in borrowed quarters, offices, or friends’ homes. Horrid as he was, she doesn’t seem to have been intimidated. A neighbor, who overheard some differences of opinion between the two, is on record vouching for Tina’s dexterity in verbal combat. Vidali worked his way up to propaganda chief for the International Brigades, which were made up of idealistic youth and experienced anti-fascists of all flavors who converged on Spain from everywhere, to fight for a just cause. By this time, Party doctrine had become very fundamentalist, to the point where there was only one way to be a good Communist. Soviet agents were on the scene not only to help the loyalists win. In the chaos of war they found and made opportunities to eliminate any of their own people who fostered personal interpretations of the Party line.

…shadow of a soul on fire…

Tina wrote, “I never would have believed that I would be so strong and not lose my head in a situation where the wind of collective insanity is blowing.” Unfortunately, however, she did lose something, and wrote a letter of denunciation that led directly to the political assassination of a volunteer in the International Brigades. One writer call this her “tragic fall from grace.” And there may have been other similar cases. Albers says, “Unlike her companion, Tina never physically harmed anyone, but it is now clear that she shared his responsibility for Communist atrocities.” Many of Tina’s biographers repeat the words she spoke about Vidali: “He is an assassin. He has dragged me into a monstrous crime.”

Back in 1920 or so, during her glamour epoch, someone took a picture of Tina in one of her gorgeous costumes, and captioned it with a quatrain from the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Indeed the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my Credit in this world much wrong:
Have drown’d my glory in a shallow Cup,
And sold my Reputation for a Song.

Other translations say “have drowned my honor.” The Rubiyat is about the splendors of wine, and alcohol wasn’t Tina’s downfall. But the prophetic lines, “Indeed the idols I have loved so long / have done my credit in this world much wrong” are certainly right on, when applied to her political beliefs.

In Spain, Vidali was known as Commandante Carlos, and you definitely didn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. He was an interrogation squad boss, and is said to have been responsible for 400 executions. Ernest Hemingway wrote to a friend that Vidali not only ordered executions but personally carried them out. Imagine this: your domestic partner comes home from work with a burn in the webspace of one hand – the shooting hand. Do you really want to hear what happened? Can you afford to know that hand got burned from firing so many bullets into the backs of so many human heads today? Do you want to be touched by that hand? For Tina, life with Vidali must have been awfully strange.

…this was all the harvest that I reaped…

The two of them were reassigned to France, and Tina could take along nothing but the clothes she stood up in. In the spring of 1939, using a refugee visa issued to “Dr. Carmen Ruiz Sanchez,” Tina boarded a ship and returned to Mexico, where Vidali soon joined her. He collaborated with the Nazis to undermine the Mexican government, and played a large role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. It was a bleak existence, living in other people’s spare rooms. Tina was an illegal alien, already deported from the country once and afraid even to greet old friends in the street. The Party sent her on more missions, to the US and Europe. When Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler, it took the heart right out of her, and in fact her physical heart disease got worse.

Eventually, her presence in Mexico was legalized and she found work doing translations and so forth, and of course continued working for the good of the Spanish refugees. For the first time in a decade, she and Vidali finally got a place of their own. In 1941 he disappeared for three weeks, which he spent in prison. God knows what he had to do or promise, to get out. They had to move again, this time to a shack built on a rooftop. Tina made the best of it, telling visitors that the real house was the 360-degree view of Mexico City and its attendant volcanoes.

January 5, 1942 was the day Tina died, at the age of 45, having packed an astonishing amount of life into those years. At the time, the Soviet secret police were experimenting with drugs that could make death appear natural. Some people have put together that fact with Vidali’s arrest and miraculous release. Did he agree to assassinate his own woman? Diego Rivera suggested that Vidali did it, or caused it to be done, because Tina knew too much. Interesting, in the light of what Tina once said to a military man, about her partner – “I hate him with all my being. Yet, despite that, I must follow him until death. Until death.”

…your reward is neither here nor there…

The effort to reconcile the creative impulse with political philosophy has stymied many an artist. Haskell Wexler explored this dilemma in Medium Cool – how can a journalist just observe and document and report – how immoral is impartiality? When is it appropriate to stop observing and start doing? The artist and the political activist are very different, and when they try to coexist in one person, the results can be messy. An artist thrives on autonomy and abhors being told what to do. A political activist is either an obedient minion, or exults in forcing other people to do things. There are of course many exceptions, but trying to make art serve ideology can produce dismal results. There is art that spontaneously makes a political point, and that’s great, but on the whole, a shotgun wedding of politics and art must fail.

It seems like the tension between art and politics was a constant throughout Tina’s life. One biographer pinpoints 1932 as the year when she renounced photography. But it wasn’t that cut and dried. It’s doubtful there was a day when she abruptly said, “I’m not taking pictures any more, from now on all I care about is the poor.” All the parts of her were always there – it’s just that the proportions changed. Her abandonment of art isn’t a question of “when,” but was a gradual process that happened in stages. The “why” was a combination of factors.

…of my base metal may be filed a key…

In the early days, in San Francisco, when Tina lost contact with her mother and siblings because of the war in Europe, she might have had some self-lacerating thoughts like, “Here I am prancing around on stage, having bouquets thrown to me, while who knows what my loved ones are suffering?” Even the experience of starring in a film wasn’t gratifying to her, perhaps for similar reasons. Maybe she realized, even then, what she later wrote to Weston, around the time she joined up with the Communists: “I cannot solve the problems of my life by losing myself in the problem of art.”

Her career as a commercial photographer didn’t last long. Maybe she thought that refusing to use her gift to make money would cure her malaise. In 1927, her brother wrote a letter responding to the series still life photos picturing sombrero, hammer & sickle, etc. “…you little liar, you once told me that one cannot express social concerns through the art of photography. You are the one who has proved yourself wrong.” She probably thought the propaganda pictures were the answer, the necessary synthesis between art and activism. Others, who saw that kind of thing as a dire abuse of talent, could have warned her, and probably did, about how destructive it would be to the real artistic impulse.

After Mella’s death, knowing her days in Mexico were numbered, she wanted a retrospective exhibit. It was the only significant show within her lifetime, and was hung in late 1929 at the National Library: “The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition in Mexico.” Tina made sure the venue stayed open long enough to accommodate working-class people, who were amazed that anyone had taken the trouble to document their lives. She renounced the idea of doing any more “perfect platinum prints” for the rich. Now, she would only produce gelatin silver prints, which many more people could afford. But still the sacrifice wasn’t enough.

Diego Rivera separated from the Party at a Central Committee meeting, accusing himself of collaborating with the petit-bourgeois government by accepting mural commissions. “This contradicts the politics of the Comintern and therefore the painter Diego Rivera should be expelled from the Communist party by the general secretary of the Communist party, Diego Rivera.” This bit of satirical guerilla theater suited Rivera, but for Tina the conflict was very real and troublesome. In red circles, it became increasingly difficult to be both an artist and politically correct. Making art was symptomatic of bourgeois individualism, and that wasn’t good

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears

By the late 1920s, Vidali was really working on Tina’s head. “Doubts are a luxury that we still can’t afford,” he insisted. Sorrow and regret were also luxuries. Real power lay not in one’s passion for a cause, but in the ability to suppress the passion in order to triumph in the long-term struggle. He believed emotions should be reined in, governed, and channeled toward the greater purpose – while art required the outpouring of emotions. Around this time, and not surprisingly, Tina wrote of her feeling that the “sacred fire” within her had been extinguished. Photography was no longer a means of self-expression, only a way to make money for her political work. But not off the government. At some point she turned down the offer of an official post, photographer for the National Museum. Soon, the question was moot – she was just another deported refugee who landed in Europe as an exile and had to start from square one.

…my clay with long oblivion is gone dry…

In Berlin in 1932, there was not much of a demand for photography, either artistic or commercial. The Graflex camera was the only piece of gear Tina had brought along. Logistically and financially, the difficulties were enormous. A darkroom isn’t something you just throw together out of common kitchen items. The establishment of a business is bureaucracy-intensive, but Tina needed to keep a low profile. When she was able to take some photos, she found the European light so different from that of Mexico, it was like learning all over again. The various possibilities for survival as a photographer were explored, as so many other questions had been, in letters to Weston. She told him her recent work was crap. “I have felt like giving up photography altogether,” she wrote, “but what else can I do?”

Then came the next big upheaval, the move to Russia. Once there, she sold the Graflex camera and bought a Leica, proving that photography was still on her mind. But soon the camera went out on long-term loan to a teenage boy she was mentoring. Maybe she had come to see art as an immature trait. Because she’d had the chance to live out her artistic fantasies, there was no need to artificially hold onto her own youth. As she transitioned to age-appropriate seriousness, the trappings of art could be passed on to the next generation. The Party offered her the post of official photographer but she turned it down. Maybe she still had enough respect for her art, to feel shame at prostituting it for this low purpose. Or maybe she felt it would be uncommunistically self-indulgent to have a job she liked, even if it was done for the glory of the Party. Perhaps she didn’t want to produce work less worthy than what she’d done at her peak. The renowned film director Eisenstein had called her the best, and where do you go from there? Better to let it be. Maybe she put art aside because a huge, sweeping change is easier than a bunch of niggling adjustments and compromises. Maybe giving up art was preferable to bending it to political purposes. Maybe she’d forgotten how to do it any other way.

…’tis nothing but a magic shadow-show…

“I put too much art in my life,” Tina had written to Weston years before. “Consequently I have not much left to give to art.” But during the Spanish Civil War, it was no longer a question of putting too much art into life, but of putting too much energy of all kinds into basic survival. At a Party congress she met Robert Capa and other world-class photojournalists, including one who recommended that she take up photography again. Tina told this woman, “Two tasks cannot be done at the same time.” By then she seems to have concluded that not only self-expressive art, but even documentary art, had no place in her life.

Peter Byrne, a harsh critic, says Tina’s political work had “separated her from generosity, openness and love,” making art impossible. During the final years in Mexico, important people offered her good money for portraits, which she turned down. In 1940 she went on one last photo expedition, as a guide for two young Americans, but didn’t take pictures even when offered a camera. Two years before she died, Manuel Alvarez Bravo tried to loan her a camera and the use of his darkroom, which she refused very sadly with the words, “Not now.”

“Not now” could mean “Maybe someday.” “Not now” could mean, “Not after all the things I’ve seen and done. Not ever.” We’ll never know. The paradox is, Tina Modotti abandoned art to do something meaningful and real. Yet, despite her best efforts to the contrary, it is for her art that she is remembered.

Subtitles
…the steps of tomorrow will pass by to see… – Pablo Neruda
…how can we dance when our earth is turning… – Midnight Oil
…how do we sleep when our beds are burning… – Midnight Oil
…deceived entrapment through belief… – Fugazi
…alien you find you feel at home everywhere… – Fugazi
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears – film title
all others – Omar Khayyam

RELATED: The Tiger’s Coat

Somehow the public doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the significance of the issue.
Herbert Scoville

How can we dispel the notion of some people that anyone will survive a nuclear war?
Dr. Yevgeni Chazov

“Duck and cover” don’t make it.
Anne Alexander

There is no plausible scenario for the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict between the two superpowers that does not carry with it the dangers of catastrophic escalation.
Kurt Gottfried, Henry W. Kendall, John M. Lee in Scientific American

Nuclear winter presents “a real danger of the extinction of humanity.”
Carl Sagan

Given a little carelessness, life on this planet may be made impossible.
Bertrand Russell

Unless we survive, there can be no just society or any other kind.
Roland N. Stromberg

What shall we do without us?
Kenneth Patchen

Had a dream, it was war
and they couldn’t tell me what it was for
but it was something they could lie about
something we could die about, you know.
Roger Hodgson

If they didn’t’ know what they were doing they wouldn’t be in Washington – and they’re not there!
Mort Sahl

I think the leaders of the freeze movement know more about these weapons systems than does the President of the United States.
Herbert Scoville

Whoever gives another the authority to act on his behalf, must accept personal responsibility for the results of that delegated authority.
Leonard Read

There are so many Sorts of Fools, such an infinite Variety of Fools, and so hard it is to know the Worst of the Kind.
Daniel Defoe 1724

I abhor two principles in religion…The first is obedience upon authority without conviction; and the other destroying of them that differ from me for God’s sake.
William Penn

…it is not thus, it is not thus,
it is not thus
that the whole round world is broken.
Kenneth Patchen

Those to whom the survival of mankind is more important than victory in the next election must strive to enlighten the public while there is still time.
Bertrand Russell

This organization has one goal and one goal only – to start the process of dismantling the nuclear weapons in order to protect life.
PRO-Peace statement

President Reagan would not have begun negotiating in Geneva nor discussed arms control with the Russians in 1981 were it not for the antinuclear movement in the US and Europe.
Herbert Scoville

My greatest hope is that my work may have contributed to the prevention of future wars.
Pablo Picasso

RELATED: Nuclear Annihilation Insurance

1985 flyer

Note: this is the text from the 1985 flyer. The quotations are in a separate post.

There is no such thing as nuclear annihilation insurance, and anyone who thinks there could be is tragically deluded. If you have a notion that nuclear war is survivable, if you think there would be anything at the other end worth surviving for, this message is for you.

Oh, you have a shelter? Is your bomb shelter equipped to withstand 30 million degrees F?

At this very moment people are making “contingency plans.” Plans for how to keep your charge account bills coming, through the U.S. Mail which is guaranteed to be up and running with only a single day’s interruption of service. Of course everyone will have an address, due to the marvelous evacuation scheme which promises to get everyone neatly resettled within three business days after global cataclysm.

Sound like a crock? You bet it does. Do you have any conception of how pitifully, laughably inadequate the evacuation plans are? Or any idea how naïve it is to believe there will be anyplace to evacuate to, or any way of getting there? Missiles arrive within thirty minutes of launch. How far can you drive on the San Diego Freeway during the biggest rush hour in history?

Even supposing that evacuation were workable, will you be one of the refugees or one of the hosts? Even if it were possible to survive a “limited” nuclear exchange, would you want to? Will you be among the many thousands of severe burn cases, or among the walking wounded whose job it will be to nurse them?

Nuclear War – If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen Them All

It can’t happen, you say? Consider this:

• The nuclear policies of both superpowers rest on the concept of “unacceptable damage” at the very least.

• The purpose of NATO is to initiate nuclear warfare.

• The present administration has ignored or refused six major chances to delay our present course toward apocalypse.

• Some very intelligent people say the chance of accidental nuclear war is quite good. In 1980 it almost happened – because of the malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip.

There won’t be any veterans of WWIII. There won’t be any Time-Life Books series about it. The probability is very high that the beginning of nuclear war would lead inevitably to the end of everything.

Nuclear War – Oh, No, There Goes My Career!

If you’re not horrified by the nearness of total destruction, you haven’t been paying attention. Nuclear warfare is not cost-effective. After it there will be no markets, no goods, no customers, no profits. If you’re concerned about any other issues it behooves you to first be concerned about nuclear war. Of course it has the potential to solve a lot of social problems. No more apartheid No more conflict between pro-choice and pro-life. No choice. No life.

Wasn’t Once Enough?

As Voltaire said after the orgy, when invited to another: No thanks. “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” As an anonymous teenager said after trying a popular drug: “Once is curiosity, twice is stupidity.”

The worst thing happening in the world today is the belief people have been brainwashed into, that nuclear war is acceptable, necessary, even inevitable; that the “other side” wants it.

In the street a man is beating his wife. One neighbor turns up his radio and takes care to stay away from the window. Next door someone peeks out through the shade. Another neighbor picks up the phone to call the authorities, realizing too late that the line has been cut. Down the block a man stands on his porch and watches, expressionless. Someone else rushes to intervene, not heeding the risk to himself.

We each have our own way of dealing with the rightly named Unthinkable: the prospect of total devastation of the planet and the death of everything on it. We can throw ourselves into partying and turn our backs on the horror. We can let it into the fringes of consciousness and pay it with nightmares. We can kid ourselves into complacency, blind faith in the leaders who will surely take care of us and bring about a “victory” for our side. We can stare it in the face, numb as rabbits paralyzed by oncoming headlights. We can try to stop it, using any and all means at our disposal no matter how futile or hopeless the task may seem.

Give Peace a Chance

A good place to start would be a weapons freeze: Stop all testing, production, and deployment of bombs, warheads, and delivery vehicles of all types. When you consider that enough nuclear warheads already exist to blow up the world about 70 times over, freeze is not such an unreasonable proposition. Better yet, and the only acceptable course if life on earth is to continue – TOTAL MULTILATERAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT. Quite simply, take the weapons down. Dismantle them. We figured out how to put them together, surely we can figure out how to take them apart.

Making a Difference

There is no such thing as Nuclear Annihilation Insurance. Not that we can buy with money. But there are other things we can do. Virtually every profession, religion, and ethnic group has a peace group within. Examples of these specialized groups include architects, atomic scientists, atomic bomb survivors, computer experts, lawyers, Asian Americans, Constitutionalists, mothers, gays, professors, librarians, doctors, teachers, and psychologists. In Los Angeles alone there are dozens of groups working for peace. If your town has more than fifty people in it, chances are there’s a peace group.

We need to find ways to let the politicians and general on both “sides” know they do not have our permission or approval in their insane pursuit of Armageddon. We can view Threads or The Day After to get a real feel for what it is we’re dealing with here. We can educate ourselves by reading some of the many informative books on the nuclear threat and the peace alternative.

Some people create art which expresses their anti-nuclear convictions. Some alter billboards and paint slogans on walls. Thousands of people will interrupt their lives to go on a nearly year-long walk to Washington in 1986, to make the elected officials and the rest of the country and the world aware of the strength of their feelings. Thousands are arrested every year in acts of civil disobedience directed against nuclear warfare preparations. Some have gone so far as to damage missile silos and other military property in protest. Some refuse to hand over part or all of the taxes the government demands to buy our destruction. Did you know the seemingly insignificant federal excise tax on your phone bill is specifically earmarked for military use? If we continue to pay now, we will surely pay later.

There are innumerable ways to make a difference, and all of them worth trying. No idea is too wild when compared to the alternative – the end of life on this planet. One prominent scientist proposed an exchange between the superpowers of millions of children – a war prevention plan which has historical precedent.

Wake Up Today: The Future Can Still Happen

The first and most important step toward turning this mess around can happen in only one place: the mind. Your mind. Believe that reversal is possible and that insanity can be ended. Believe that the people, the citizens, of other nations don’t want nuclear warfare any more than we do. Believe that people can say no. We can say no. And that’s the only insurance we’ve got.

P. Robinson 1985

RELATED: Nuclear Annihilation Insurance Quotations

Patriot: a painting in oil by Dale Hartman

I heard a child ask his mother this not long ago. It’s a good question. The answer is, an upside-down flag is a distress signal. It’s a serious thing, a cry for help. It means somebody is in trouble, often a whole lot of somebodys. It means something is wrong and needs to be fixed. It means the ship is sinking, the fort is burning. This is not a frivolous gesture, and should never be used as such. Nobody anywhere should ever, ever display a flag upside down unless they really mean it! Below is another example of an upside down flag. It’s here so you remember what not to do. Not unless you are absolutely certain that a situation fully qualifies as an imminent disaster! Not unless something is definitely circling the drain!

Here are some places where you can learn more about this revered symbol:

PrisonPlanet

“Upside Down, Torn, and Tattered”

Threat of Death Should Cause Distress Signal, Not the Other Way Around

More of The Hippest Things Anybody Ever Said About Politics

The people in Berkeley and in New York don’t need my pictures. That’s not where the battle’s going to be won. Tom Laughlin (of the Billy Jack movies)

The U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? Think about it – it was written by very smart people, it’s served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we’re not using it anymore. Jay Leno

Just because something works doesn’t mean it is desirable. Sy Leon

A piece of blank paper is the only thing in the world I have a serious ambition to control. Peter Levi

When Dick Nixon was going like this and smiling, what do you think he was telling you? ‘Fuck you four times.’ Swami X

Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition … is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. … Of course we’re nonpolitical. The real power always is. C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, 1945

The government can’t give out more than it takes in, and since the process of taking and redistributing costs something, the government actually gives out less than it takes in. This is why all “share the wealth” programs are actually “share the poverty” scams. Jim Lewis

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate – and quickly. Lazarus Long

In my grandparents’ generation, they felt enlightened to know multiple languages and have lived in several lands. Now today, there are dummies who can’t even spell or speak in English properly but they feel threatened by Spanish or Korean. Everything is a threat to some people. Marc Madow

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. Groucho Marx

From time to time, writers have engaged in politics. Its effect on them as writers has been injurious. W. Somerset Maugham

Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important. Eugene McCarthy

Autonomy and cooperation make government irrelevant. Luke McGuff

Think like a free man and you will not be a slave. Menander

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. H.L. Mencken

I’d be perfectly fine with all the rules and red tape if we didn’t have to wait in line for so long that the people in the line eventually develop their own regional dialect. Dennis Miller

I regard politics as a thoroughly foul, rotten world. We get nowhere through politics. It debases everything. Henry Miller

Government is the only agency that can take a useful commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless. Ludwig von Mises

Revolutionaries’ love is not something isolated from their activities, but rather is related to their political ideals. Tina Modotti

The one must be sacrificed for the good of the many, until the many are all sacrificed, one by one. Ward Moore and Avram Davidson

Conservativism used to be defined by a fear, if not a loathing, of government. Now conservatives pay deference to the state. Bill Moyers

The enemy is not conservatism. The enemy is not liberalism. The enemy is bullshit. Lars Erik Nelson

I don’t believe democracy should have a totally professional military force. I believe the military should be in large number made up of people who don’t want to be there and will help make the generals honest. Willie Nelson

I would be willing to get along with less information about this or that officeholder’s tax return or bedroom activities if I could get him or her to speak more clearly about maters of public policy. Edwin H. Newman

To have a career you need a society to have it in. You go off and you make works of art and you present them here. You’re glad to be making a contribution. America doesn’t provide that society any more. Phil Ochs

We conservatives don’t have gulags because they aren’t tax deductible. You can’t leverage gulag assets, and gulag merchandising rights are worth zilch. P.J. O’Rourke

People took politics seriously in those days. They used to start storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election. George Orwell

History is a bloody testament that sincerity can achieve atrocities which cynicism could never conceive. Jack Parsons

With my own weapons, design and color, I have wanted to conquer the conscience of mankind, so that this knowledge can lead us each day a step ahead on the road of liberty. Pablo Picasso

I’m more comfortable allowing individuals to be stupid, than requiring they not be. Brick Pillow

Prisons and schools are baby-sitting institutions so that we don’t glut the labor market. Baba Ram Dass

It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it. This applies to any alleged sacrifice for those one loves. Ayn Rand

(re: NATO, IMF, World Bank, GATT, WTO)
One of the oddities of the political situation in the United States since [WWII] has been the persistent belief on some sections of the right that the creation of these and similar international institutions are threats to America; when it is these institutions – backed up by force, over and covert, which have enabled the United States to consume substantially more than its share of the world’s energy and minerals. Robin Ramsey

I don’t wave a flag for anything. I’m a musician. Keith Richards

Of course, like the cliché’ moth courting the trite candle, the lit-up libertarian runs a constant risk. Is it not finer, however, to sizzle whole in the flame of freedom than to slowly stew to pieces in one’s own diminishing juices? Tom Robbins

I don’t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts. Will Rogers

Liberal – one whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is not. L.A. Rollins

Events are only real in the present tense – before they happen they’re hype, and after they happen they’re spin. Douglas Rushkoff

The criminal law can be used to prevent anti-social action on the part of those who do not belong to the government. Bertrand Russell

Much of the difficulty in attempting to restructure American and other societies arises from this resistance by groups with vested interests in the status quo. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted. Carl Sagan

Politicians fuck with people. That’s what they do. That’s their job. Every day they get up and wonder who they’re gonna fuck with that day. They they go and do it. John Sandford

I have a friend who’s collecting unemployment insurance. This guy has never worked so hard in his life as he has to to keep this thing going. He’s down there every week, waiting in the line and getting interviews and making up all these lies about looking for jobs. If they had any idea of the effort and energy that he is expending to avoid work, I’m sure they’d give him a raise. Jerry Seinfeld

I have no country – and the more I see of countries the better I like the idea. line from film The Shanghai Gesture

From Nixon on, every paranoid suspicion about the dirty tricks of government had proved an underestimate. Samuel Shem

I suggest that we resist apparent solutions that require victims to surrender their freedom, and freedom of expression, as a means of survival. Mary Simmerling

Many hackers tend to be reflexive liars….at least the ones found in newspaper and TV news stories – [they] can be counted on to perform for the listener, telling the gullible just about anything he or she wishes to hear. The result has been that almost any claim, no matter how nonsensical, has been published. George Smith

It is part of the sordid reality of our times that Hollywood is about the only institution left in our country big and powerful enough to challenge the influence of state propaganda that controls our lives with hardly a murmur from the same journalists so incensed by Stone. (re the JFK film) Sam Smith

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. C. P. Snow

The simple truth of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. Thomas Sowell

As estimated by the Bureau of National Affairs, the dollar cost of corporate crime in America is over ten times greater than the combined larcenies, thefts, robberies and burglaries committed by individuals. Gerry Spence

I used to believe that a real unitary world government would be a good idea but I changed my mind because of something Lenny Bruce said about the Soviet Union- if you want to imagine what it’s like in the Soviet Union, imagine an entire country run by the phone company. Norman Spinrad

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Lysander Spooner

The average fifth-grader these days doesn’t know whether Japan is a state or a city; wonders what happens when you get to the “edge” of the United states on a map; doesn’t know, and can’t understand what a glacier is, and even believes that the government is there to protect him! Rev. Ivan Stang (The Church of the Subgenius)

Let my own life go on undisturbed, and my private affairs prosper – and I don’t give a continental whether the government is being run by a Communist, or a Seventh-Day Adventist, or a Hottentot. Gertrude Stein

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space. Gloria Steinem

That’s how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn’t bother with, which means that there is probably no reason for it. Neal Stephenson

Good health turns out to be a positive by-product of the pursuit of other things. Edward Tenner

Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Paul Theroux

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. Henry David Thoreau

Anyone who puts his own conscience above the state is an anarchist. Allen Thornton

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then–we elected them. Lily Tomlin

Washington is like Calcutta, full of beggars, only they wear $1500 suits and don’t say please or thank you. Traffic

Liberalism, free-thinking and open inquiry will never object to appear in company with their opposites, because they have the conceit to think that they can quell those opposites; but the opposites will not appear in conjunction with liberalism, free-thinking and open inquiry. Anthony Trollope

You may be willing to give up your rights, but I won’t let you give up MY rights. Hal Turner

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy. Mark Twain

Q. What’s the difference between God and the Government?
A. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away; the government taketh and giveth away. Unknown

A policeman’s job is easy only in a police state. Unknown

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Unknown

No bird flies too high when he flies with his own wings. Unknown

You can always find free cheese in a mousetrap. Unknown

Sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. Unknown

When the government tells me not to do something I feel that it’s my patriotic duty to immediately go out and do it. Rico Vaselino

The American Revolution was over in 1781; Washington wasn’t elected our first president until 1789, and he was not elected by the people in a free election but by the select, male-only Federal Constitutional Convention. Michael Ventura

There is only one party, which is People with Money. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves – in other words, they just become better tyrants. David Foster Wallace

I am so weary about having been consistently right in all my political predictions for ten years. It is so boring seeing it all happen for the second time after one has gone through it in imagination. For you and Duff and Randolph life must be all one lovely surprise after another. Evelyn Waugh

Mom and Dad are biology, but you’re most like sick
if you get your kicks from politics.
Wean yourself now. Clean your own diapers.
Watch out for shoe tiers and nose wipers.
William Wharton in Scumbler

Fraudulence has become a national virtue and is well thought of in many circles. E. B. White

Since this is my first official government rapport I have chosen to write it by hand, because my favorite government documents are handwritten and they seem to work okay. Mason Williams

The Academy…Nobody seriously thought they’d rally behind the Branch Davidians and give the documentary Oscar to Waco: Rules of Engagement, perhaps the most chilling, revealing documentary about our present police-state mentality….Why recognize a new, present villain like the ATF….when you can trot those photogenic Nazis out, year after year?…You’d think impending murders would have some clout over ones committed fifty years ago, but nooooooooooo, not to the guys who cut the checks in Emerald City. Cintra Wilson

All governments are evil in one way or another. Leonard Woolf

In my Utopia, people would more or less give up on politics. Steve Wozniak

A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well. Stephen Wright

When you’ve seen one stifling transnational media conglomerate, you’re seen them all. Jamie Zawinski

I wouldn’t call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either. Edward Zehr

The Hippest Things Anybody Ever Said About Politics

Big Brother is like the Uncertainty Principle. You can’t tell where he is and how fast he’s moving at the same moment. Dr. Agon

Apathy, lack of caring, isn’t the problem. The problem is caring too much about the wrong things. Anne Alexander

We weren’t put on this earth to be politicians. Jeff Ament

Once people have learned how to disengage their souls when being abused by the powers that be, the powers that be lose traction rapidly. Kirsten Anderberg

Don’t make the mistake of equating anarchy with liberty. Anarchy is liberty only for the strongest and cruelest. Real liberty is when people respect each other’s liberty, and are willing to voluntarily restrain themselves from doing things that impinge on the liberty of others. Carl Aron

So far, I’ve concluded that politics is all bullshit, but I haven’t worked up any political ideology much more sophisticated than that. Ace Backwords

This is a country with 250 million people who don’t want any news from Washington and, even if they did, wouldn’t expect any news from Washington because they don’t think Washington could pour stale beer out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Governments exist to limit freedom. That’s their job. And to the extent that utterly unbridled liberty seems to favor the reptile in us, a little government is not such a bad thing. But it never knows when to quit. John Perry Barlow

For them, the question is always, “What kind of government intervention should we impose on the world?” They never think that maybe we shouldn’t. Dave Barry

To remain distinct within the mass we must be branded with a series of numbers and must recite them to be known and served and allowed to pursue our lives. Jacques Barzun

A reminder from history: the American Revolution was not financed with matching grants from the Crown.
David Bayles and Ted Orland

Every anarchist is in part a hedonist and wants to enjoy his freedom. Fighting is too likely to interfere with that enjoyment. Ned Beaumont

Because I don’t have a job, because I don’t have children, I can get up and say something at a public hearing other blacks can’t say. I can’t be threatened about my job or my children. MaVynee Betsch

Today, problems aren’t solved, they’re attacked. Like the War on Poverty. Remember that? I’m happy to report that it’s finally over. The poor people have all surrendered. Swami Beyondananda

Conspiracy Theory, Unofficial Definition: Anything which, were it true, we couldn’t handle. Steve Bhaerman

We can probably do more for peace and freedom in the world right here, on our own turf, than by exporting ideology to the rest of the world which has perhaps had its fill of our imperial outreach offerings. Bob Black

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis

Capitalism with its appeal to greed was not on the face of it an attractive system, but it provided a counterweight to the power of the state, besides quickening the life of society by providing competition. Socialism, or rule by bureaucracy, meant, I thought, the dead hand on everything, the life-destroying tyranny of the anonymous. Gerald Brenan

Give government the weapons to fight your enemy and it will use them against you. Harry Browne

One’s got to be against the government, any government, because the people in it are bad people or else they wouldn’t have got in. Anthony Burgess

Public work should be avoided by men who care for their own peace of mind. Daniel Hudson Burnham

Drug control is a thin pretext, and getting thinner, to increase police powers and to brand dissent as criminal…. I now suggest to all competent young people that they emigrate to Canada, before they get busted. If you have a record, it is much more difficult. William S. Burroughs

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. George W. Bush

Christianity may be a powerful tonic, but Hislam remains the one true faith of the Republican party. John Calderazzo

Nothing could be more inaccurate than the lazy assumption of the policy elites that groups such as the Freemen and the various militia movements represent anarchistic ‘anti-government’ tendencies. If anything, the so-called anti-government forces of the radical right are among the most fanatical devotees of legal authority among us. Paul F. Campos

Politics is so corrupt even the dishonest people get fucked. George Carlin

It seems what is most feared by a lot of people is somebody else’s ability to act in an organized manner. Casale

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Douglas Casey

Some people are cursed with personalities that disqualify them for anything except strident movements and, when one comes along, they tune up and howl. Dick Cavett

The way to move society on its axis is not to play politics. It is to persuade teachable people to think as you do. And the best way to do this is to be a good personal living example of the philosophy you hope to spread. John Chamberlain

The privileged people who actually run the country, they don’t want the state to have power to go after people like them. So they’ll actually protect the civil rights of people they hate if they come from the right class. Noam Chomsky

We seem to think having everyone vote works when it comes to running a country that can start wars, appropriate property, and execute malefactors, yet we assume it’s a bad way to run a business. The Cluetrain Manifesto (four authors)

A mixed herd of both sexes and all ages is the easiest kind to manage. Cowboy saying

Politics means nothing more than the ability to make the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice. Quentin Crisp

As soon as you talk about social or political responsibility, you’ve amputated the best limbs you’ve got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and pull and mold you and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective. David Cronenberg

The only way the Bill of Rights will protect you from much of anything nowadays is if you hold it over your head when it rains. Samantha Crouse

Legislative interference with the habits of the people produces the sneak, the spy, the fanatic, and the artful dodger. Aleister Crowley

Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in. Robertson Davies

The sad truth is that individuals will always be under-equipped. We’re always going to have smaller engines. The CIA or whoever is always going to have the bigger infrastructure. Mark Dippe’

Dissent is seen as a form of betrayal. Free speech is seen as being most appropriately exercised when it is not exercised at all. Democracy is maintained by not thinking democratically. E. L. Doctorow

Neither charm nor patience nor endurance has ever wrested power from those who hold it. Frederick Douglass

Politics is an indigenous art form cultivated primarily by lawyers. Politics is about the only way for lawyers to get a little excitement. Peter Drucker

If one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. Will Durant

The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Albert Einstein

I didn’t even know those people out there had gotten shoes yet, much less learned to read! I mean, if they could read, then they must have seen there were other names on the ballot than Reagan or Nixon. Harlan Ellison

It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s ‘prop-agenda’. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. Brian Eno

By the time anybody gets around to saying “leadership”, it’s all over. Werner Erhard

The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in particular are monuments to the right to doubt, and to the right of one person to doubt the rightness of 200 million. Steve Erickson

(about Russia) There has been a dictatorship there for so long, with so little real resistance, you must ask yourself how much sympathy you can have. Orianna Fallaci

There are these 12 guys running the country, and they all went to the right schools and they’re all trained for their jobs and they all have drawers full of classified information and they all have direct lines to the White House. So they resent it terribly when outsiders, like the American people, try to butt into their foreign policy. Jules Feiffer

Free your ass and your mind will follow. Gerry Fialka

It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth, a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest, where the rulers have minds like little children and the lawgivers believe in Santa Claus. F. Scott Fitzgerald

(On Hitler, 1936) He has a fine library of six thousand volumes, yet he never reads; books would do him no good – his mind is made up. Janet Flanner

I think Nixon did this country a great favor when he reinstilled in the American people a mistrust of government. Carol Fondiller

I don’t say this is a bad country – I say countries are bad. FrancEye

Gentlemen, you see we have been living under anarchy, yet the business of living has gone on as usual. Be careful; if our debates go on too much longer, people may come to see that they can get along very well without us. Ben Franklin

The liberal views of Robert Montgomery, professor of economics at the University of Texas, made him unpopular with the Texas legislature. An investigation was set in motion. When he was asked if he favored private property, Montgomery replied “I do – so strongly that I want everyone in Texas to have some.” John Kenneth Galbraith

The truth, as always, will set you free, but first it will make you sound dangerous. Kaye Gibbons

How small of all that human hearts endure/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Oliver Goldsmith

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. Barry Goldwater

It is hard to give understanding to someone with no will, and more difficult to give will to someone with no understanding. Baltasar Gracian

It is true, of course, that war not only arouses suppressed forces slumbering in us, but also really does librate some people, be it from a hated environment, the slavery of daily work, or the burden of one’s own personality. That is one of the mysteries that will perpetuate wars forever. George Grosz

You are strangling freedom but the soul of the people knows no bondage. Graffiti in Moscow in the 70s

Coming back into this country is more horrifying than leaving. Graffiti

Politicians are like polkas – they have different names, but they all sound alike. Graffiti

Politicians are like diapers. They both should be changed often, and for the same reason. Graffiti

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the words ‘poly’ meaning many, and the word ‘tics’ meaning blood-sucking parasites. Larry Hardiman

The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise. Sam Harris

A lot of people who say they want a smaller government really do – it’s just that they want to be it. Dale Hartman

Freedom is doing what you want, when you please, and not being made to do anything. Freedom is not having to spend time with people in whose company you don’t want to spend time. Pat Hartman

What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. George Hegel

Politicians are required to be full of shit because they have to thread their ways to the top through the hordes of amibitious, narcissistic, amoral, back-stabbing dickheads who run things in Washington. Cynthia Heimel

Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man, the most you can do is kill him. Robert Heinlein

The notion of making the government behave as if it were really around to help people is radical in itself, and will cause tremors in the community that you cannot tell where it will lead. Karl Hess

The nonconformist is a more stable type than the conforming individual. It is the average man of today who shows the most striking differences from people of other ages and other civilizations. The rebel of today is twin brother of rebels in all ages and climes. Eric Hoffer

Identity politics, based on racial and gender categories, and on nihilistic assumptions that power is all, culminate in a posture in which the rules of civility and democratic process, not to mention the principles of academic freedom, are dismissed as so much social mystification. David Horowitz

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds, I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
A.E. Housman

If you don’t have a flag sticking out of your ass, you must be a communist. Chrissie Hynde

Medical bureaucracy creates ill-health by increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependence, by generating new painful needs, by lowering the levels of tolerance for discomfort or pain, by reducing the leeway that people are wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing even the right to self-care. Ivan Illich

Everyone who has ever lost someone he or she loved in a war has an obligation to talk back to these chest-thumping jackasses who are so anxious to get other people’s sons killed. Molly Ivins

People ought to be free and the way to keep people free is to keep people in charge of politicians rather than the other way around. Paul Jacob

Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future. P. D. James (character)

The idea of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. Thomas Jefferson

It’s one thing to sacrifice truth for fairness. It’s another thing to sacrifice truth for success. You can only sacrifice an ethical principle for another ethical principle. Michael Josephson

To believe in conspiracies, one must assume that the government is organized. That is a leap of faith I am unwilling to make. PM Kellermann

I have discovered what previously I didn’t believe possible – that politicians behave in private life and say exactly the same things as they do in public. Their stupidity is inhuman. John Maynard Keynes

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. Martin Luther King

To vanish, to take a powder, to cut and run – from an army one can’t fight for, a community one can’t live with, or a directive one can’t obey – can be a legitimate political act, and sometimes the consummate political act. Walter Kirn

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. Henry Kissinger

The War on Terror was never a war in the traditional sense. It is, instead, a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser. Naomi Klein

The game that our politicians play with us is one of constraining political decisions to one of two equally worthless alternatives and portraying them as “the only game in town.” Thomas L. Knapp

Pseudo-patriots will employ their perverted nationalistic views of Americanism to work for their own freedom but to deprive others of theirs. Joe Knight

This is what we wanted, back in the Sixties. And now we have it. It used to be that only people with pigmented skin would get beat up by the cops. Now, anybody can get beat up be the cops. White grannies, Girl Scouts, nuns, anybody. Equality. Will Knott

(Originally published September 25, 2002)

After the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it was enlightening to read news from elsewhere, like the BBC and Pravda. The mirror hasn’t been invented yet to let us “see ourselves as other see us,” but foreign newspapers come pretty close.

Jam Echelon Day, a protest against electronic surveillance, had been scheduled for October 21, 2001. I wondered if it would be called off, but apparently it was still carried out by thousands of people, who sent e-mails with trigger words in the subject lines. According to the organizers of Jam Echelon, the apparatus is so huge it would be impossible to seriously impact it by any amount of toying around. Still, public awareness was increased.

Mr. Cheney and his friends warn that the Middle Eastern bandits want to “take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies.” Like solar power, perhaps? I’d like to see them try. The renewable resources folks have been saying for years that with a crop such as, for instance, hemp biomass, we could not only become energy-independent but incidentally save the American farmer, the topsoil, the Alaskan wilderness, and the lives that are bound to be squandered in future petroleum wars. Sound too good to be true? It is, but only because it won’t be allowed to happen. No amount of goodness or truth can overcome America’s addiction to anti-drug hysteria. Any plan as sensible as growing hemp has a snowball’s chance in hell.

Of course the U.S. military is busy training and arming a whole new batch of developing countries and factions – just like we did with Osama and the boys, among many regrettable others. The U.S. military seems to be a slow learner. As a child the first joke I ever heard was, “Why did the moron keep hitting himself on the head with a hammer?” “Because it felt so good when he stopped.” Will we ever stop?

In February, New Scientist reported that less than 1% of the blood donated in response to the 9/11 disaster was actually used. Blood, like other perishable organic products, has an expiration date. It only lasts for so long, and then it is just biohazardous waste. Thousands of pints of donated blood were destroyed – one source says 50,000 units, others say from 4 to 10 times that amount, but even the lowest estimate is appalling.

There are also disturbing reports of warehouses packed to the rafters with donated goods and huge amounts of money undistributed – as recently as September of 2002, a billion dollars is said to be sitting around unused. Incredibly, fund-raising campaigns are still being conducted by well-meaning organizations. On the other hand, the rent for all those warehouses does need to be paid.

A column in Entrepreneur magazine claims that since the attack, American workers don’t care so much about salaries and promotions, what they want is meaning, significance, spiritual values, and to make a difference. Thanks a lot, whoever thought up that theory. What a splendid excuse for employers to scrimp, downsize, cut benefits, and then give themselves raises.

The September attacks were a boon to every government official and career military person with a long-cherished master plan for How Everyone Should Live. By the next day, a number of these plans, some ostensibly benign, others palpably sinister, were brought out for an airing. The President encouraged us to each give 4,000 hours or 2 years to national service. He says voluntary, but some of his buddies want mandatory. It brings back the old days of Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. If two years of national service is good, fifty years is better. Why not just move to someplace where they’ve already made arrangements for giving your whole life to national service? Or stick around here a while longer and do the same.

One local businessman took the President’s national service exhortation to heart and leaped to answer his nation’s call. To serve the public good, on Friday and Saturday nights he hops in the van emblazoned with the name of his business, parks downtown, and then at bar closing time, he drives inebriated revelers home. (And gives interviews about it.) The fellow Americans he serves in this way are mainly college women less than half his age – a mere coincidence, don’t worry about it.

It’s been said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. The worst tragedy to hit our country in decades has provided fertile soil for a whole garden of con artists. It didn’t take long for websites to spring up touting fraudulent charities. There’s a proliferation of “advance fee” scam e-mails, elaborate tales of wealthy refugees who need to get money out of belligerent countries and you can help, and get rich into the bargain. The Secret Service gets around 100 calls per diem from victims or potential victims.

In photos of the burning twin towers, many people perceived Satan in the smoke, which is their privilege and right. In fairness, I hope they all grant the same courtesy to those who see Jesus on a tortilla and a human face on Mars.

In November I heard someone say, “I’m not going to talk about the war any more except to God,” a remark that resonated on more than one level. (I believe, by the way, that the true Muslim fundamentalists are the reasonable ones, and the villains we have trouble with are the lunatic fringe, and the whole nation of Islam shouldn’t be judged on the basis of their behavior.) In this conflict, both sides have dragged the Deity into it like never before. Both sides claim to be God’s favorite children. It’s weirdly reminiscent of the Smothers Brothers: “Mom always liked you best.” Given the way humans have been acting lately, it can’t be easy for God to like any of us very much.

(Originally published September 18, 2002)

In literature, the events of 9/11 resulted in a fine piece of satire, “French Intellectuals Deployed to Afghanistan to Convince Al-Queda of Non-Existence of God;” and a sublime personal statement, the Tamim Ansary essay that circled the earth via e-mail. And a letter to the President from Amber Amundson, whose husband was killed in the Pentagon crash, asking that he be excused from the “list of victims used to justify further attacks.” And a funny Allen Thornton take on the Afghan version of TV guide.

A widely-read magazine offered advice on which books to read for comfort and guidance during our national time of confusion. One recommendation was Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, an old favorite of mine. And the various writings of C.S. Lewis on pain, grief, and miracles. I would have added to their list his Screwtape Letters, the sections that discuss the effects of war on the soul. But when it comes to a book that makes some kind of sense of the whole thing, my pick is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, a brilliant study of delusion and the roots of tyranny everywhere and at all times.

Personally, I discovered an odd connection. One of my all-time top ten desert island movies is Remember My Name, which for some incomprehensible and probably reprehensible reason never made it to videotape. I’m in awe of Geraldine Chaplin’s portrayal of a recently freed convict who decides to get her husband back. The movie had Alberta Hunter on the sound track, and also starred Anthony Perkins and his real-life wife Berry Berenson – and she died as a passenger in the plane that hit the Pentagon.

It is said that on VH1 and public radio, the “unofficial anthem” for the 9/11 attack was Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah.” As performed by its creator, Leonard Cohen, this just happens to be one of my all-time top ten desert island songs. Its refrain is, “Even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” Unless Buckley wrote new lyrics, I don’t see the connection. But here’s a strange thing: many years ago Leonard Cohen wrote another song, “First We Take Manhattan.” This one was in the voice of, from the point of view of, and could be considered sympathetic to, an international terrorist.

In the USA, images of the World Trade Center provoked a public reaction that was at first aversive. In late September of 2001, everybody in the entertainment business was falling all over themselves to remove images of the twin towers from album covers and book jackets. Then there was a quick rebound to attraction. By December, the New Yorker was running an ad for a $449 decorative metal wall sculpture, “Remembrance” by name, featuring the towers.

Perhaps the most amazing sequel of the destruction is the transformation of the hole in the ground into a tourist mecca. The number of visitors in the past year is said to exceed three and a half million. (It’s too bad three and a half million people don’t stay home and read Eric Hoffer, which would be more useful and to the point.) The tourist total is supplemented by vendors, whose free enterprise was forbidden and trade restrained on the actual 9/11 anniversary when they were told not to peddle anything. But wait – how can this be? The entrepreneurial spirit is a bedrock value of our nation. What’s more quintessentially American than a bunch of people selling stuff?

The human face of Afghanistan, for me, has always been the girl on the cover of National Geographic 17 years ago. Eleven or twelve at the time, she had a solemn, wary, spooked expression and amazing eyes, the irises gold near the centers, then turquoise, with gray rims. Last year the photographer set out to find her again and astonishingly, considering the chaos in that part of the world, succeeded. Sharbat Gula is now the mother of three living children, a handsome woman still, but showing the effects of her rough life as a refugee. .

As homeland security buffs in U.S. salivated over the prospect of biometric face scanning as a way to keep tabs on potential saboteurs, the rulers of Afghanistan were unable to adopt this measure. Their most subversive foes, the courageous Muslim women who videotaped and smuggled out evidence of the worst criminal excesses, could never be indexed and tracked by this means because of the Taliban’s own repressive law requiring women to cover their faces with veils. Hah! We were told that irony died on 9/11, but rest assured, it still thrives.

Not long ago I read the memoirs of the Dalai Lama’s mother, who described the old ways in her homeland, and it made me wonder why Americans are so sentimental about Tibet. The condition of women in that society sounds as shitty as anything the Taliban ever cooked up. When a Tibetan girl married, she became the property of her inlaws, with the rank of household appliance, a labor-saving device the son presented to his parents in recompense for the trouble and expense of his upbringing. The new bride became, and remained, a drudge, on call 24/7. No degree of ill treatment was deemed abusive. Traditionally, a Tibetan woman was at the mercy of her husband’s parents and a slave to their every whim, with no say about any aspect of her own life or those of her children. Can Chinese communism be any worse?