Personal Scatologies

[Steelhead]

I love the fact that "grip," Paul Mackin, Henry M. and the rest of the
sensitivity crowd were driven into such an ecstatic state of giddiness by
Mascaro's recent torrent of invective.  More than anything, it demonstrates
the intellectual aphasia that riddles the cortex of so many these days. I
can almost hear them skipping in delight, their glasses of white California
zinfandel raised to the precise angle of Madonna's wrist in Evita, the
delicate fingers on their other hands secretly plunging oyster crackers
deep into the camembert, when no one is looking....all to the chakra
soothing sounds of something sad by Brahms or, if they feel *really*
cerebral, Erik Satie--aural Prozac.

I'm a shit, you say? OK. But do you recall the scene in Mailer's the
Executioner's Song, when that mountebank of true crime Larry Schiller has
his great epiphany about Gary Gilmore, the oppressiveness of Mormon society
and the ghostly purple landscape of the Wasatch Range of northern Utah,
while he takes this tremendous shit?  Everything he'd kept crammed up
inside for weeks, it seems, explodes in one mad rush, all runny and
scorching hot. Your post reminded me of that, Mascaro. And I say:  'Bout
time you lost that battle with civility. Civility is the supplicant
demeanor of defeated liberals and, no doubt, will be proven to cause colon
cancer--all that repression, making the intestinal juices work overtime,
day after day, semester after semester, while the world goes to Hell or,
more likely, to Shell. Let my prose be your enema any time and as Joe Walsh
sez: Welcome the Club.

But while your post was fun to read, I remain befuddled by many of your
positions. Do you really not understand the seething hatred of academics
held by many of us in the Other World? Over the fact that the campus, once
a powerful force for social change and justice, is now a dead zone (been to
Berkeley lately?), populated by smug elitists who detest and despise their
students, who proclaim that Texts have no reality, no instructive purpose,
theory being the only thing. Don't you see how many of us who have been
reading Pynchon for more than twenty years revolt at what the academics
have done to him, how they've routinized his writings, blurred his images,
deadened the words, drained out the moral and political tenor of his work?
How it would especially rile many of us for this fate to befall Pynchon,
one of the few contemporary American writers of stature who has avoided the
academy, fled it, mocked its critical parlor games and ridiculed its
intellectual pretensions and political obsolescence?

Enough. That's your gig and you're welcome to it. About mine you seem to
know almost nothing, except that "journalists have done more damage to the
world than academics." Touche. But I'm not *that* kind of journalist. At
least, I don't think I am. I started writing for money back in the
mid-1980s and got an early taste of censorship and the horrors of our time
in Panama.

In 1985 we were living in Panama City. I was writing off and on for the
leftist newspaper La Prensa, reviewing films and books, writing about
rainforests and the struggles of the Mayan peasants. I was also shipping
back to the states stories about US activities in Latin America, about the
narco-traffickers, the sugar companies, the brutal antics of the Contras,
and the ongoing slaughter in El Salvador. This was the time when Manuel
Noriega ruled Panama with an iron machete, backed by drug money, US arms,
and hard-assed intelligence operatives like Dewey Clarridge and Thomas
Clines.

I made two good friends in Panama City, one was a political journalist
named Guillermo Sanchez Bourbon. Perhaps some of you have read his
writings, which in my admittedly biased opinion are better than any of the
political journalism of Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes.  The other was a
doctor, writer and political maverick, Hugo Spadafora. At the time, Sanchez
Bourbon was publishing  brilliant exposes almost daily on the political
nightmare in Panama, tracing its roots back to George Bush's days at the
CIA and his cozy relationship with the acne-splayed dictator Noriega and
the Cali Cartel. Meanwhile, Spadafora was instigating a political
rebellion, writing columns, making speeches on the radio, gathering support
for a run against Noriega from progressive leaders in the region, such as
Costa Rica's Oscar Arias. This was a time and a place when writin' was, in
Ishmael Reed's phrase, fightin'.

Then on September 15, 1995, Hugo Spadafora turned up missing. Sanchez
Bourbon feared the worst, that Hugo had been detained by Noriega's PDF, the
CIA-trained police force, locked up and perhaps beaten or tortured.

Bourbon's fears were horribly understated. Spadafora had been grabbed off a
bus in the small town of Concepcion by four thugs from the PDF. They hauled
him to the local police station, stripped him naked, tied him to a chair,
and hacked at his thighs with machetes until the tendons were severed. He
was unable to move his legs, unable to close them, when one of his
torturers took the stem of a rose-bush, about an inch thick and covered
with sharp spines, and shoved it repeatedly up his ass. They broke his ribs
with a baseball bat, pried his fingernails off with the sharpened point of
a pencil,  beat his genitals with a nightstick until they turned black and
his testicles swelled to the size of oranges. They did this because of what
he had written, what he had said; because of his opinions.

Hugo was still alive, perhaps still in some strange state of consciousness,
when they drove him to Corozo. There a PDF goon, a cook from the local
barracks if I recall, slowly killed him by severing his head off slice by
slice with a carving knife.

Soon after Spadafora's death the threats against journalists became
intense. Having a two year old with us at the time, we decided to flee
Panama for the more settled circumstances of southern Indiana. We left a
lot of friends behind. Many spent time in jail. Some died. Sanchez Bourbon
went underground for nearly a year, but he continued to churn out
remarkable stories that helped turn the tide against Noriega. One of the
two books Sanchez Bourbon took with him was a volume of Lorca's poetry; the
other was my old copy of Gravity's Rainbow. He said those books helped him
survive and helped him write his stories.

I know what he means. In fact, I'll never forget.

Steelhead