Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)

Introduction

It is said that the automobile industry created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world, chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems—cities and a world for cars, not for people.

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It is small wonder that most Americans are not the least big cognizant of the plight of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia; the mainstream press here in the United States does not even recognize the struggles of its own indigenous population. From our perspective, the systematic statist degradation of primitive and indigenous peoples and their spirited refusal to submit to the powers of progress are central to the complex question of social domination all over the world.

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a review of

Los crepusculos de Anthony Wayne Drive/The Twilights of Anthony Wayne Drive, a bilingual edition by Hernan Castellano-Giron, translated by Emil Efthimides. Operation D.O.M.E. Press, Detroit, 1984.

This is a bilingual collection of poems by the exiled Chilean poet Hernan Castellano-Giron. Hernan was born in Chile in 1937 and lived in Santiago where he studied and taught at the University of Santiago. After the military coup in 1973, Hernan was forced to leave the country and found refuge in Italy during 1974 to 1981. He presently lives with his wife and son in Detroit where he is teaching Spanish.

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Humankind truly was not meant to fly, and birds keep trying to tell us so. As people and their flying machines continue to overpopulate the skies, not only do plane -to-plane collisions increase, but bird to plane collisions drastically increase as well, especially since new technology has created sleeker and quieter engines which sneak up on birds and scarcely give them any warning of their approach. Needless to say, it is the birds which must attempt to change their natural flight patterns to avoid fatal collisions.

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It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m jogging my two or three miles on the track at the downtown Detroit YMCA overlooking the gym where a group of about sixteen mostly black men are playing basketball. The man and woman who were running when I started have finished, so I’m alone and keeping an eye on the game to fight the boredom of running on an indoor track.

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The tales of violence go on-and-on.

There is a bold arrogance that comes with class privilege and economic security and comfort. Certainly there are exceptions, but for the most part there is little or no sympathy in affluent communities for the plight of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed.

¿“Te compadeces de los destechados?” I asked one of my students, after explaining the Spanish verbal phrase “to sympathize with” and the noun for the homeless, “los destechados.” No, he answered, in slow, perfect Spanish, I don’t sympathize with the homeless. And when asked why not, he confidently explained that there were plenty of jobs for people if they really wanted to work, and then went on to complain about welfare fraud. A middle-class black student, whose family recently moved to the suburbs from the city, denounced AIDS victims, telling me they got what they deserved, they made their choices, opted to take drugs, chose to be gay or not to use condoms.

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How quickly and easily feminism, like all ideology, is used to affirm the language of power and powerlessness. The superficiality and marketability of its demands have been evident since its inception; but now feminism is being used to openly celebrate middle and upper class comfort, to revel in consumerism and the empty benefits of capitalism.

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It already seems like a long time ago, but this past June three of us from the Fifth Estate staff headed out by train to New Mexico for our first Earth First! (EF!) Round River Rendezvous (RRR). This was the tenth annual RRR, which EF! describes as its yearly “tribal celebration.”

Needless to say, after the past couple of years of argument, discussion and heated exchange between Fifth Estate writers and people in EF! (see FE’s Fall 1987 through Spring 1989), we undertook the journey with excitement and a bit of trepidation. We were anxious to meet more of the faces behind the words, and though we had received warm invitations from several EF! individuals, we also received a few not so warm challenges to attend, and we weren’t sure we’d be welcomed by all.

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It is said that the automobile created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world--chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems. Cities and a world for cars, not for people.

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In his appendix on language in the world of 1984, George Orwell explains that “Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.” Newspeak was created for the ultimate purpose of thought control. By reducing the English language (Oldspeak) to a utilitarian skeleton, dispensing with all verb tense irregularities and syntactical complexity, and by scaling down word choice to a bare minimum, it destroyed the ambiguity of human communication and would eventually “diminish the range of human thought.” Most people had not yet adopted Newspeak as their only means of communication, but it was intended that by the year 2050 Oldspeak would be made totally obsolete by the new Party language.

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Having consistently destroyed organized Palestinian political and military resistance to Zionist colonial conquest, Israel must now contend with what is fast becoming a massive and generalized civil revolt.

The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank Strip over the past several months of sustained protest approaches 100. After years of obfuscation and U.S. media silence on the plight of the Palestinian people, we now read daily descriptions of Israeli response to the ongoing protests that rivals and even surpasses state violence in South Africa: gunfire attacks on demonstrating youths, systematic night raids on Palestinian camps and villages, indiscriminate beatings, tear gas and rubber bullet attacks, deportations, censorship, overcrowded and inhumane prisons, mass jailings.

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a review of

The Modern School Movement: Historical and Personal Notes on the Ferrer Schools in Spain, Contributions by Pura Perez, Mario Jordana, Abel Paz and Martha Ackelsberg, published by Friends of the Modern School, c/o Abe Bluestein, 55 Farmington Rd., Croton-on-Hudson NY 10520, 37 pages, $3. Available from FE Books.

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Discussed in this article

I...Rigoberta Menchu. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, translated by Ann Wright, The Thetford Press, Thetford, Norfolk, England, 1984.

Indian women and U.S. military attache George Maynes, observing a demonstration (1982).

Although circumstance has forced Rigoberta Menchu, a twenty-three-year-old Quiche Indian woman, to tell her story in Spanish, the language of her oppressors, she speaks it from her Quiche heart with an honesty, a directness, and a simplicity of language characteristic only of one who is close to the earth.

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a review of

Some Winded, Wild Beast, by Christina Pacosz. Black & Red (Detroit, 1985), 97 pages, $2.50.

This review is long overdue. Christina Pacosz’s voice has been an important one to many of us in Detroit ever since she and Fredy and Lorraine Perlman discovered each other, and Black and Red published this, her third collection of poetry, Some Winded, Wild Beast, in 1985. I have had the opportunity of hearing Christina read her poems and prose twice in the past five years, and both times I was struck by the strength and expressiveness of her voice and her vision.

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From photography collection ‘Resistance to the Detroit Incinerator, 1986–1990.’ All black and white images: Millard Berry.

There were a number of inaccurate and misleading statements made in E. B. Maple’s both congratulatory and critical article on the Evergreen Alliance and its May Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes in the last issue [FE #329, Summer, 1988].

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reviewed in this article

Juliette Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society, 1980, translated from the French by Michael Pallis, Zed Press, 1982.

French sociologist Juliette Minces has written an informative introduction to the extremely complex subject of the subjugation of Arab women. One cannot read this study without feeling great remorse, frustration and empathy for the plight of these women who remain physically, psychologically and emotionally enslaved by a deeply ingrained tradition of hierarchical power which depends on their very enslavement for its continued existence.

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