Wow, an entire AP obituary and not one word about his racist or gay-bashing legacy. The human turd’s sycophants even went as far as to compare him to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom also died on the Fourth of July. They even called him a patriot!
Helms was no patriot. He hated everyone who wasn’t like him–white, male, straight, privileged. Since that only includes a tiny percent of the American population–he hated most Americans. Therefore, he hated America.
One Amendment from Column A, Another from Column B
A week ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy was a liberal hero. Joining the court’s four liberal jurists, he declared that while 9/11 may have changed everything, it didn’t change the constitution. Despite statements by the Bush Administration to the contrary, Guantánamo is not a legal no-man’s land. POWs being held at America’s Devil’s Island now have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.
“Thank God,” an editorial cartoonist friend told me after Kennedy cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision restoring habeas corpus. “We were one vote away from fascism.”
Antonin Scalia’s dissent–“[granting Guantánamo detainees the right to a fair trial] will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed”–was widely ridiculed as baseless and hysterical.
What a difference a week–and your politics–make.
Then Kennedy cast the swing vote in another major decision. Declaring Washington D.C.’s handgun ban unconstitutional, he accepted the NRA’s argument that the Second Amendment’s reference to “a well-regulated militia” is not a conditional clause. Wherever they live, Americans are indeed entitled to purchase and keep a handgun.
“What an idiot!” my friend e-mailed me. “Doesn’t he get it? Kids are going to die!” Shades of Scalia; irony included free.
“À la carte” airline pricing–$2 for a Coke, $15 to check a bag, $30 for a coach seat that sucks 95% as much as the regular ones–pisses people off. When it comes to constitutional questions, however, we Americans like to pick and choose our favorite parts of the Bill of Rights like items from a Chinese menu: one from column A, another in column B.
Liberals revere the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. The right to bear arms, not so much. With conservatives, it’s the other way around. Sometimes they clash over the meaning of the original ten amendments. It’s freedom of, not from, religion, say right-wingers. Freedom from, argue advocates of the separation of church and state.
The recently concluded Supreme Court session highlights Americans’ unique refusal to accept the Bill of Rights in toto. Republicans decried Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down the death penalty for someone convicted of raping a child. They applauded the court’s approval of an Indiana law requiring voters to show ID at the polls.
Reactions to Supreme Court rulings are rarely related to whether or not the nine justices correctly interpreted the constitution. They’re political. Law-and-order conservatives like their justice Taliban style, tough and vengeful. Thus their dismay that capital punishment for rapists could be deemed cruel and/or unusual. States with GOP-dominated legislatures like voter ID laws, not because they think they don’t violate the equal protection clause, but because they tend to reduce turnout among Democrats.
Partisanship is healthy. Creating your own Constitution around your personal stand on the issues is un-American.
As a holistic advocate of the Bill of Rights, I agree with the D.C. gun ban ruling. When the Constitution was signed in 1787, all land-owning white men–the class of citizens whose voting rights it guaranteed–owned (or were allowed to buy) guns. A “well-regulated militia” was usually an ad hoc affair, a group of guys called up for up to a year (often less) to respond to the threat of, for example, an Indian attack.
Today the Bill of Rights applies to everyone, even illegal immigrants. Moreover, while militias have gone the way of the musket, it’s a fair bet that the government would ask ordinary citizens to use personal firearms to defend U.S. territory in the event of an invasion–i.e., form militias. Why, then, shouldn’t the 18th century right to own a gun, which applied to everyone covered by the Constitution at the time, apply to everyone now?
There’s also a practical argument. As history proves, every government falls. Every nation gets invaded. No one knows when it will happen in any given case, but thus far it’s proved inevitable. When the U.S. government turns against its people, gun nuts will be in a far better position to resist than the double decaf latte types on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We’ll all be praising Charlton Heston’s memory when foreign troops are marching down Broadway.
But practical arguments aren’t legal, much less constitutional, arguments. Either you agree with the Bill of Rights–all of it–or you don’t.
If liberals think the right to own a gun is antiquated, if they think the ability to resist future government tyranny is less important than reducing the number of young men getting gunned down in cities like Washington, they have a perfectly defensible argument. And they ought to do something about it. They should convince two-thirds of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment abolishing or amending the Second Amendment. Crafting an argument over principle around 18th century grammar and punctuation is tacky and embarrassing.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Vital Businesses Need Nationalization
The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump.
“You’re kidding me,” I moaned.
“It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.”
There has to be a better way, I thought.
And there is.
It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery
Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros.
Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It’s 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with…with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.
One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they’re oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources–and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth.
But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don’t consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low.
Unlike corporations, governments don’t care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you’re cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can’t, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work.
Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela’s socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. “If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I’m going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them,” he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up.
Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez’s determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat’s Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. “This government needs to tighten the screws,” he said in February 2008, promising to “intervene and nationalize the plants” belonging to the two transnational corporations.
Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves.
When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn’t, it isn’t just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.
The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices–a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. “Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action–or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets–to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon’s underlying causes,” reported Forbes.
So the G8 ministers punted. “Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study,” wrote the magazine.
The problem isn’t the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It’s capitalism. A sane government doesn’t leave essential goods and services–food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education–to the vicissitudes of “magic” markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by–indeed, owned by–the government.
Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn’t get an education.
Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California’s Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater’s atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations’ fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.
No one should pressure industries that produce things that people need in order to live to turn a quarterly profit. No one should go hungry, or remain sick, because some commodities trader in Zurich figured out some nifty way to take an eighth of a point arbitrage spread between the price of a hospital stock in New York and in Tokyo.
P.S. If you’re reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.
(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Cartoonists drawn to San Antonio
San Antonio News-Express
June 25, 2008
Vital Businesses Need Nationalization
The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump.
“You’re kidding me,” I moaned.
“It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.”
There has to be a better way, I thought.
And there is.
It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery.
Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros.
Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It’s 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with…with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.
One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they’re oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources–and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth.
But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don’t consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low.
Unlike corporations, governments don’t care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you’re cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can’t, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work.
Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela’s socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. “If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I’m going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them,” he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up.
Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez’s determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat’s Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. “This government needs to tighten the screws,” he said in February 2008, promising to “intervene and nationalize the plants” belonging to the two transnational corporations.
Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves.
When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn’t, it isn’t just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.
The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices–a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. “Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action–or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets–to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon’s underlying causes,” reported Forbes.
So the G8 ministers punted. “Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study,” wrote the magazine.
The problem isn’t the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It’s capitalism. A sane government doesn’t leave essential goods and services–food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education–to the vicissitudes of “magic” markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by–indeed, owned by–the government.
Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn’t get an education.
Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California’s Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater’s atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations’ fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.
No one should pressure industries that produce things that people need in order to live to turn a quarterly profit. No one should go hungry, or remain sick, because some commodities trader in Zurich figured out some nifty way to take an eighth of a point arbitrage spread between the price of a hospital stock in New York and in Tokyo.
P.S. If you’re reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
The System Works? Not Really
Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain “disappeared,” possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.
For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied “unlawful enemy combatants” (or, as Dick Cheney called them, “the worst of the worst” terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence
against them in a court of law.
Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America’s latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other American gulags, will now be allowed to demand their day in court. Since the government doesn’t have evidence against them, legal experts say, most if not all of “the worst of the worst” will ultimately walk free. “Liberty and security can be reconciled,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
In short: Oops.
“America is back,” Barack Obama has said he will tell the world if he becomes president. Even if McCain wins, Guantánamo will probably be closed. Torture will be re-illegalized. Which is really, really great. But there’s a problem. How do we give back the four years we stole from Murat Kurnaz?
In December 2001, Kurnaz was a 19-year-old German Muslim studying in Pakistan. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani security services, who delivered him to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty. He was flown to Guantánamo concentration camp, where he received what The Village Voice‘s Nat Hentoff calls “the standard treatment: beatings, sleep deprivation, and special month-long spells of solitary confinement in a sealed cell without ventilation.”
He went on hunger strike, and Kurnaz’s tormentors apparently worried he might starve to death. After 20 days “they gagged me and shoved a tube up my nose, stopping several times because the tube filled with blood,” Kurnaz remembers.
What did this “worst of the worst” do to deserve such treatment? Nothing. But don’t take my word for it. Six months into his ordeal, the U.S. military determined, there was “no definite link or evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”
The U.S. government knew Kurnaz was innocent. Yet they held on to him another three and a half years.
Oops.
It would be comforting if the torture of innocent men sold by self-interested bounty hunters were an aberration. It wasn’t. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis confirms the horrifying results of a Seton Hall University study. “Only eight percent of Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces,” reports McClatchy. “86 percent were turned over to the U.S. by Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance,” a coalition of Afghan warlords. “The bounty hunters were often the source of allegations.”
Right-wingers say security matters can only be entrusted to the military. “The courts,” writes Richard Samp of the pro-government Washington Legal Foundation in USA Today, “simply lack the expertise and resources to justify second-guessing military experts on such issues.” Maybe. But the military is run by liars.
“The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush Administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren’t ‘the worst of the worst.’ From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn’t belong there.”
At least six died at Gitmo. (The Pentagon characterized a spate of suicides as clever acts of “asymmetrical warfare.”)
Oops.
Deranged leaders who carry out horrific acts of mass murder and oppression with the consent of the people are hardly new to American history, reminds Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States. “Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s,” he told a commencement ceremony at Southern Methodist University. “Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the Cold War McCarthy era, and from there the civil liberties climate in our time.”
So many oopsies! But those are temporary excesses, Weinstein reassures. “Self-corrective forces at work in American society”–lefties, liberals, a single swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court–always pull us back before we careen off the brink. Disaster is avoided.
Which would be fine if it weren’t for the problem that: (1) one of these days, Justice Kennedy won’t be around to restore the rule of law. The other problem being (2): a lot of “witches” get drowned during our periodic episodes of madness.
No one was ever held accountable for blacklisting actors or massacring Native Americans. Such tacit endorsement of villainy sets the stage for the next outrage committed during a future “temporary madness” driven by national security worries. Apologies are rare. Penance is scarce and stingy. The government stole the homes and businesses of Japanese-Americans and shipped them to concentration camps during World War II; decades passed before Congress cut them checks for a measly $10,000.
We think we Americans are good people who do bad things when we’re not on top of our game. “Self-corrective forces,” we pat ourselves on our collective backsides, always kick in before we go too far.
But that’s not really how it is.
Some Americans are good. Other Americans are bad. And the good ones are often lazy, willing to let the bad ones get their way.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
The Empty Politics of Singularity
As an African-American, Ward Connerly uses his skin color to draw attention to his otherwise unremarkable politics: he’s a right-wing Republican who hates affirmative action. Now this ideological freak is using Barack Obama’s racial heritage (half of it, anyway) to argue that racism is all in the past.
“The entire argument for race preferences is that society is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” Connerly told The New York Times after Obama claimed the Democratic nomination. “The historic success of Senator Obama, as well as Senator Clinton, dismantles that argument.”
Connerly said he “choked up” at the sight of Obama’s victory. “He did it by his own achievement. Nobody gave it to him.” Well, sure. Except for a little help from Chicago’s Daley political machine (a.k.a. white guys). Obama may also have benefited from a race-based preference when his application arrived at Columbia College. (Shout-out to my former colleagues at Columbia’s office of admissions and financial aid: free beers for a week for an hour in the archives.)
Behold the politics of singularity. If one (half-)black guy can make it, anyone can. Those who fail have no one to blame but their own lazy, excuse-making selves.
Seven years ago, conservatives like Connerly were pointing to George W. Bush’s cabinet appointments, 50 percent of which went to women or people of color, as proof that minorities no longer had anything to complain about. “If you look at my administration, it’s diverse, and I’m proud of that,” Bush said of Colin Powell and Condi Rice, charter members of African-Americans Against Blacks. Minorities may well have followed the right’s edict to quit whining and start working. But the rise of Alberto Gonzales to attorney general, for example, only helped one Latino: himself.
Even within the White House, tokenism has limits. “The Bush Administration,” found a Newsday study of 2,800 political appointees, “is not nearly as diverse as it appears…Blacks held 7 percent of administration jobs under Bush, less than half of the 16 percent they held under Clinton…Women won 36 percent of Bush’s appointments, noticeably fewer than the 44 percent of Clinton’s.”
Reflexive churlishness aside, after watching my fellow citizens passively accept torture, concentration camps, domestic surveillance, government kidnappings, two useless wars and two stolen elections, Obamamania is fun. It’s refreshing to be proud of my fellow Americans. Those who vote in Democratic primaries, anyway.
So the Democratic Party isn’t racist. What remains to be seen is whether America is. Will general election voters support a thoughtful, vigorous and handsome African-American running against a rigid, aging militarist pushing the policies of the most unpopular president in history?
To prevail in November, Obama must win the votes of millions of whites who supported George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Though not necessarily racist themselves, these swing voters were certainly willing to tolerate Bush’s racism. Bush famously beat McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries by waging a whispering campaign about McCain’s “black” daughter by a prostitute (actually, she was born in Bangladesh and was adopted). He also spoke at Bob Jones University. “Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established,” BJU administrators wrote to students in 1998–a ban that remained in force when Bush went there.
McCain is the lamest GOP candidate since Bob Dole, running in the least propitious year for Republicans since 1974. If a black guy can win, this is the year.
To be sure, an Obama victory couldn’t have happened in 1964, when I was one year old, or even 1980, when I was 17. (Reagan won that year by winking at the KKK and decrying black “welfare queens.”) Obama’s inauguration would mark America’s long, but undeniable progress since LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. A biracial president with a Muslim parent would broadcast to the world that America’s post-9/11 madness is finally winding down. But it would hardly mean that minorities, or women for that matter, had achieved equality.
Disparities in healthcare highlight some of the many inequities in an American economy suffering from staggering disparity of wealth.
Just last week a Dartmouth study showed that African-Americans with diabetes are five times more likely than whites to lose a limb to amputation. Blue Cross and Blue Shield released another survey the same day, this one showing that even African-American women who have medical insurance stand less of a chance of surviving breast cancer than whites. “The death rate for black women from breast cancer was the same up through 1981,” said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and a professor at Emory University. “Every year, the death rate has gotten more divergent. The difference for black women and white women in 2005 was greater than it was in 1995, and it is greater in ’95 than it was in 1985.”
Everywhere you look, it sucks to be black in America. Swimming classes cost money. African-Americans don’t make as much money as whites. So they don’t sign up their kids at the same rate as whites. It might not sound like a big deal–until you learn that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, black children between the ages of five and 14 drown at two and half times the rate of white kids.
Good for Barack Obama. But our national obsession with the triumph of the individual (while ignoring disasters suffered by millions) reminds me of the old joke about the man in the car driving past a hitchhiker at 60 mph. Their average speed is 30. But they’re each enjoying a different experience.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Originally published in Men’s Journal magazine in 2008:
High in the remotest mountains of the remotest province of the remotest nation in central Asia, a breathtaking lake is poised to unleash an inland tsunami that could kill 5 million people. Our writer couldn’t resist being one of the first outsiders to see it on foot. By Ted Rall
“Make it to the chaikhana,” I’d comforted my bleeding feet and burning lungs throughout our 14-hour trudge, “and you’ll be fine.” Turkic for “tea house,” chaikhana is the locals’ tongue-in-cheek nickname for what turned out to be a Neolithic-style campsite, a jumble of enormous boulders broken off the grey-white zigzag Pamir mountains that towered over the gorge we’d been following all day. But now, warm and dry in my sleeping bag, completely exhausted, blistering sunburn soothed with Noxzema, sleep was out of the question. Impending doom echoed off the canyon walls in surround sound.
I wasn’t worried about local Taliban-trained guerillas. And I didn’t think once about dangerous Caspian tigers (though officially extinct, Tajiks say they see them all the time). Snow-capped mountains brittle as glass were falling apart directly above our heads, SUV-sized boulders and slate missiles shaken loose by a barely perceptible drizzle. Crack! A rock the size of a basketball grazed our donkey driver, nearly killing him. We moved closer to the river, with the ominous roar of late spring snowmelt rushing down the Murgab River just outside our tent.
“Did you hear that?” I asked my wife.
“Yeah,” she said. “The water—it sounds like it’s flowing faster. Like there’s more of it. Can we do anything if it happens now?” It.
Even 12 hours’ warning wouldn’t help. “Where could we go?” I replied. “Over those mountains? There’s 10 feet of snow up there.” But there wouldn’t be any warning. Just a deafening roar. Then nothing.
We were still two days’ climb from Lake Sarez, a freak of nature at 11,200 feet known as Asia’s Sword of Damocles. Here, in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), a sparsely populated knot of forbidding mountains in the poorest backwater I’d-like-to-buy-a-vowel-Stan of the former Soviet Union, four cubic miles of water rests high above the Pamiri plateau, held back by a jumble of rocks.
The physics are simple. The potential devastation is incomprehensible. No one knows when this dam will break, but in the most seismically active region on the planet, where major earthquakes of 6 or 7 on the Richter scale are routine, most geologists’ computer models warn it’s inevitable that a wall of water half the height of the World Trade Center will scour this gorge and barrel down one mountain valley after another, taking out hundreds of villages and towns in four countries over 1,200 miles—the distance from New York to Kansas City.
Five million people would die. It would be the worst natural catastrophe in human history, and it would catch the world completely by surprise.
We landed at Dushanbe airport at two in the morning; it took another four hours for the baggage handlers to rifle through our stuff for valuables. After checking in at the downtown Hotel Tajikistan (a rundown Soviet-era cement pile under renovation before a five-star Hyatt allegedly opens later this year), we paid a visit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I promised not to blow up the dam, and then stocked up on food. With nearly total unemployment and an economy so flimsy that paper currency occasionally stops circulating in favor of barter, you have to bring in all the supplies you need.
I’d seen it all before: In 2001 Tajikistan’s only link to the West was its torturous “Baby Flot” state carrier Tajikistan Airlines, which offered anytime, anywhere flights, as long as you traveled on Saturday and only to Istanbul. Ten years after independence, phone calls were still routed through Moscow. Dushanbe nights were punctuated by AK-47 fire as exhaustion brought an inconclusive end to a decade-long civil war between the authoritarian central government and a coalition of radical Islamists and democratic reformers. Tajikistan had consulates in just three countries, the same as the Taliban on 9/11.
The Tajik embassy in Kazakhstan was a ruined flat in an Almaty housing project, with a red, white and green Tajik flag duct-taped at a 30-degree angle to the front door, the plastic doorframe riddled with bullet holes. “You should not go,” the ambassador told me then, clearly unaccustomed to visitors. “Tajikistan has nothing for anyone.”
Well, it certainly had something for me. Tajikistan is weird, inconvenient and offers little in the way of conventional tourism. For those willing to make the trip, this remote cultural kaleidoscope offers breathtaking scenery, some of the world’s tallest mountains, and a front-row seat to an epic struggle between lingering Soviet authoritarianism and rising Islamic fundamentalism in an impoverished country forced to invent its history and culture from scratch after 1991. Here, far from the prying eyes of the world, geopolitical fundamentals are being reassessed. Tajikistan’s water resources could become even more desirable than Kazakhstan’s huge oil reserves and Turkmenistan’s limitless natural gas.
Today Tajik embassies circle the globe. No more hanging around Ashkhabat waiting to see if your visa application will require yet another bribe; I Fedexed my passport to Washington and got my visa days later. Though Tajikistan Airlines continues to ply the Stinger-missile-targeted skies between Istanbul and Dushanbe, an extra hundred bucks buys you edible food, a sober pilot and a climatized cabin on Turkish Airlines.
But Lake Sarez is locked in old Tajikistan, where Lenin’s statue remains ubiquitous in the hope that Vladimir Putin will come to his senses and invite them back. Gorno-Badakhshan is sealed off from the rest of Tajikistan by an endless series of roadblocks—payback, government officials freely concede, for the province’s decision to declare independence during the civil war. A GBAO permit issued by the Office of Visas and Registration, domestic surveillance bureau of the Tajik KGB, is the only way to get past military checkpoints, still manned until recently by Russia’s 201st motorized rifle division. Access to the Bartang River valley, the jumping-off point to Lake Sarez, requires a letter from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the agency concerned with earthquakes or terrorist attacks on Usoi Dam. Well-placed gifts shortened the two-month wait to a couple of weeks. Our fixer suggested we use the wait to triple our normal 10-mile-per-week running regimen to prepare our lungs for the rigors of high-altitude climbing—even by Central Asian standards, the Pamir mountains are intimidating.
On an early visit to Dushanbe, a local drinking buddy had regaled me with the terrifying threat posed by Sarez, trying to warn me off. “Not even Tajiks can go to the Pamirs,” he said. “It is forbidden. And anyway, it’s too dangerous.” After that, it was all I could think about.
Our rust-red ’01 Mitsubishi Montero was packed with our Tajik team—driver, translator, and mountain guide—plus replacement parts for the car (no repair shops in the GBAO), jerry cans of gas (no gas stations), gear, cases of water and a dozen enormous winter melons (no markets or bazaars). If everything goes well, the drive to Barchadev, the village nearest to Lake Sarez, requires four 16-hour days on back-breaking dirt roads through land littered with spent ordnance and ruined tanks from the recent civil war. More than once our mountain guide, Umar Abdulloev, pointed out promontories where pro-Dushanbe forces had tossed bound and gagged Pamiris accused of sympathizing with the United Tajik Opposition into the swollen river below.
We lost our brakes a couple of times. As our driver Kamal worked on repairs, elderly women brought us blankets and chai. We were stopped at countless checkpoints manned by teenage soldiers, but never encountered the mujahedeen of the Islamic Movement of Turkestan (IMT), notorious for the 2000 kidnapping of four American rock climbers and nearly toppling the Uzbek government during summer offensives launched from anarchic Tajikistan.
We were more scared of our driver’s music.
A thirtysomething soccer fanatic with an easy laugh, Kamal was the best traveled of the bunch. On trips to Abu Dhabi and Beijing he’d picked up the mixed emotions of capitalist malaise. “I make money, I can travel everywhere,” he mused. “But Soviet times were better. Nobody had as much freedom, but we didn’t have to work hard.” Kamal plugged in a tiny MP3 player. He swore it held 25 songs. We counted eight. “This one is by an American basketball player,” Kamal explained as Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” came on for the tenth time that afternoon. But it was sweet deliverance after Limp Bizkit’s cover of “Behind Blue Eyes.” We heard the same rotation every half hour, day after day.
A century ago, the mountain people of eastern Tajikistan were completely isolated. There were no roads. Each village worshiped gods and spoke a dialect of Pamiri distinct from neighbors around the next mountain. Usoi was one of hundreds of such hamlets nestled along icy rivers in the high Pamirs, thousands of feet above the tree line and snowed in more than half the year. As they’d done for centuries, Usoi’s families relied on subsistence farming and fishing the Murgab River near their stone and mud houses, as oblivious to the world as it was to them.
At 11:15pm on February 18, 1911, the tectonic plate beneath the Hindu Kush resumed its inexorable drift into the Pamirs, pushing them upward and jolting the Murgab valley with a powerful 7.4-scale earthquake. A nameless mountain above Usoi exploded in a massive rockslide that wiped away Usoi and its 54 residents before settling into a sprawl of rocks two miles wide and half a mile deep. “After the collapse, tremors continued for a few more days,” researcher O. E. Agakhanianz paraphrased surviving eyewitnesses in 1989. “Dust settled only after three days and rocks kept falling from the slopes for 15 more years.” The Murgab River began backing up from the site of the new dam, named after the village it entombed. Eight months later, rising water claimed the next village upstream: Sarez.
Today Lake Sarez is 37 miles long, a mile wide and 600 feet deep. It continues to creep upstream through a deep gorge bordered by spectacular 18,000-foot peaks—an area called “the roof of the world.”
Not everyone worries that an earthquake could shatter Usoi Dam. Another quake might instead dislodge a rockslide into the lake, creating a wave that crests the dam and erodes its foundation. Other experts, noting that Lake Sarez is rising eight inches a year, think the dam will eventually succumb to the weight and buckle. Most agree on one thing: as long as the Murgab River keeps feeding the lake, the lake level will keep rising. When it nears the top of the dam, disaster is inevitable.
“Some 1,500 people live directly below the lake in the Murgab gorge,” Moscow State University professor Samuel Grigorian told a United Nations conference in 1998. “With the nearest villages 19 miles from Sarez, a flood wave moving about 16 feet per second would reach them in less than an hour. They would all be killed.”
I asked Umar whether he thinks much about the destruction hanging over his head. His smile vanished. “Every Tajik worries about Sarez.”
We had hoped to stay at the only hotel between Dushanbe and Sarez in the border town of Khorog, but it was booked up by Doctors Without Borders (but not, apparently, without reservations). We swung up the Bartang River road, a laughable mess of holes so brutal the government provides ramps for motorists to repair shattered axles. “Why don’t they use that money to fix the road?” I asked. Kamal shot me a “stupid question” look in the mirror.
We spent the night at a home stay in Khijez, a Bartang Valley oasis of slender birch trees, lush grass and grazing goats surrounded by majestic snow-capped mountains. There were scattered signs of international assistance: a small hydroelectric generating station donated by France, a bridge from Japan, rusted tins of rapeseed oil marked “Gift of USA.” Chump change. The Tajik government can’t afford a future for the residents of Khijez, the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to shore up and/or bypass the dam. I thought to myself, can’t the U.S. use five million new best friends in the Muslim world? Our dinner hosts were kind but fatalistic. I asked the father about his two daughters, smiling gamely in the doorway. Did they attend school?
“No one here sends their children to school,” he replied. “Why should we? We’re all going to die.”
We rolled into Barchadev, nursing concussions, achy tailbones and incipient altitude sickness. We planned to spend a day adjusting to the altitude, then start hiking the 19 miles up to Lake Sarez. We checked in with the village headman, a father of eight with an impressive Osama-like beard who runs the local Sarez alert station. Without a working transmitter and sure to be washed away with the rest of the village, he rents it out as a guesthouse. We were the first visitors this year.
“How many expeditions last year?” I asked.
“Six,” he said. “But none made it past the chaikhana.” A day’s hike north.
Bad news: Snow was forecast for the mountains. There would be no time to acclimate. We hired a donkeyman, crashed at the warning station/guesthouse, and set out before dawn along the Murgab River, which leaches out the bottom of Usoi Dam to form steep, ferocious rapids. Wincing under a piercing sun that burned our heads and shoulders while failing to make a dent in the 35-degree late-June chill, we trudged up the slope over dicey goat paths and thousands of unstable boulders. The donkey stumbled repeatedly on the sliding rocks, nearly losing his life and, more relevantly, our gear. Our ankles twisted left and right, forward and back. Umar’s sneakers fell apart. Every hour or so we’d encounter a rusty solar-powered monitoring camera a Swiss team had mounted on the walls of the canyon. I couldn’t avoid the image of a roaring inland tsunami around the next bend.
I sat next to our mountain guide Rashid Tashmoradov as we refilled our water bottles from the Murgab. Stoic and less helpful in tight spots than the donkey guy, Rashid decided I was worthless after I confessed I hadn’t served in the military. He would walk fast, ramrod straight, wait for us to catch up, and then rush forward again. “How are we doing?” I asked.
“You are not alpinists,” Rashid said, his glare oozing disgust.
“I never said we were alpinists,” I pointed out. “We’re journalists. We’ve come to see and write about Sarez.”
Umar pointed out where a rope suspension bridge once crossed the river, connecting to a semi-paved Soviet-era path on the north side. Last year, a young Russian climber had fallen from the bridge. It wasn’t a big drop, maybe eight feet, but his body, dashed on the rocks, was never recovered.
“Last year, the water rose one meter and took it out,” Umar said. That was four times the previous rate of increase. The path was now underwater.
An unimpressive run of muddy slush filled the bottom of a small crevasse. “Glaciers like that are thousands of years old,” Umar translated for the donkey guy. “They’ve melted away in the last year or two.” Global warming is upping the stakes at Sarez.
Looking back down the valley, it was easy to envision floodwater gushing toward Barchadev and beyond, turning south at the Murgab’s confluence with the Bartang River. The 75-mile Bartang Valley, cultural and spiritual heartland of the Ismaili Muslims, would lose 30 villages and 7,000 people. The Bartang empties into the Pyanj, a large river that marks the border with northern Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan. Six hundred miles downstream from Lake Sarez, the flood would cross into another time zone. Even this far downstream, Scott Weber of the U.N. Department for Humanitarian Affairs told New Scientist in 1999, “the wall of water would still be as high as a two-story house.”
The city of Termiz in southern Uzbekistan is home to 140,000 people, the Uzbek-Afghan Friendship Bridge that the Soviets used to invade Afghanistan, and currently a German airbase with 3,000 NATO troops. Termiz would be obliterated. The water would keep going. The Pyanj is a tributary of the Amu Darya, which Alexander the Great knew as the Oxus. The flood path would continue along the Amu Darya, roughly marking the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, before emptying into the shrunken Aral Sea, 1,200 miles downstream of Sarez. The flood would actually do the Aral more harm than good, dredging up heavy metals and toxic sediments currently locked in the dry seabed.
The ancient Silk Road cities of Khiva and Turkmenabat (100,000 people total) would be destroyed, as would most of the arable land in Central Asia. Five million people—mostly residents of landlocked deserts that routinely reach 125 degrees—would be drowned by snow melt.
At the chaikhana, we pitched our tents in the shadow of a boulder to protect us from falling rocks and scrounged dead brush for a fire. As darkness fell, we fled for our sleeping bags, teeth chattering despite two layers of long underwear. I thought about how we were masters of shitty timing: I hit Islamabad the day of General Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup d’état. We picked New Years Eve 2000 to check into a Jordanian hotel targeted in the Millennium Plot. Usoi Dam might be a century old, but given our luck, it would pick that night to collapse.
Fortified by a can of Russian mystery meats and a rock-hard nan bread we’d picked up in Dushanbe a week earlier, we loaded up on river water—we wouldn’t see any more before Sarez—and headed up mountain tracks too thin to place both feet side by side without risking a tumble down into the river, soon just a bright blue pencil line hundreds of feet below. It was a brutal climb: 15 miles of 30- to 45-degree incline over wobbly boulders and bottomless holes. Two hours in, my six bottles of water were gone. I didn’t urinate; I was sweating it all out. I had welts on my shoulders, a grinding left knee and aches in every muscle and joint. Parched, blisters opening in the craters of older blisters, freezing and sunburned, I ordered myself to keep placing one foot in front of the other.
I was fighting against vertigo when a sudden wind came perilously close to knocking me over a cliff.
“Keep going!” Umar yelled from behind. I froze.
“I can’t move.”
“You’ll fall off if you don’t,” he said. I took a step. Gravel rolled away, dropping into the gorge. I picked a stable-looking slab of slate and stepped forward. One more step. Another. The slate slid off behind me. We scrambled around foot-wide ledges, sweaty hands pulling brittle shale from what looked like solid rock. It was the most physically challenging thing I’d ever attempted.
Even Rashid, leading our sad, thirsty troop across a random route between mountain passes, was suffering. We hadn’t seen the donkey or his attendant since morning. No one spoke. It was silent, lifeless—no scrubby plants, no birds, not even the buzz of a bug. By mid-afternoon the steep climb leveled off, with huge black boulders stretching out for miles.
“Umar!” I cried, pointing down. “Usoi?”
He smiled. “Yes, Usoi.”
As I thought about the villagers buried under millions of tons of rock, I knew one of my goals of this trek to Lake Sarez, to get a sense of the scale of the place and evaluate the threat it posed, was impossible. Standing in the middle of Usoi Dam, I couldn’t see its edges. I came over a rise, expecting to see the lake, only to encounter more dam.
Until I didn’t.
A glimpse of azure water appeared ahead. I shouted: “Sarez!”
Actually, it was Shadau, a smaller lake adjacent to (and sometimes connected with) Sarez, fed by a tributary of the Murgab. Sarez was still several hours of bouldering away. We soldiered on, thirst leaving our tongues thick and cardboardy.
Umar told me Rashid was surprised we hadn’t crapped out after the chaikhana. I asked why.
“Most Tajiks can’t do it,” he said. “Foreigners never make it.”
“So—are we alpinists now?” I asked.
He didn’t smile. “No,” he answered. “You are not alpinists.” But he didn’t glare.
I could report that I walked up to the new monitoring station at Lake Sarez and proudly shook hands with its employees. (The old one, a 1960s-vintage hunting cabin, is threatened by the rising lake.) But that would be a lie. “Water,” I croaked. As usual, Rashid glared at my weakness. My head felt like it was in a vice. I downed a gallon jug and collapsed in white dust under the station’s corrugated tin roof. When I awoke, I took in Sarez. It was like a lake on an asteroid, reflecting the awe-inspiring snowy peaks all around on its still, glassy surface, already less than 50 meters from the top of the dam. Mineral deposits had turned the water an inorganic process blue. Airless, lifeless, simultaneously hot and cold, a third of the way to the cruising altitude of a passenger jet, everything screamed get out—you’re not supposed to be here.
Yet there we were. Dead tired, breathless, brains and eyes burning from the sun, and unlike almost everyone else who’d seen this strange place, we didn’t come by military helicopter. Lake Sarez is indisputably beautiful—eerie and anomalous, a source of delicious water where big fish swim in schools. In recognition of its dual role as threat and promise, Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon recently proposed that its water be piped out and bottled. The place would be a tourist attraction if it wasn’t so completely inaccessible.
Every six months a new team of leather-faced locals chopper in from Barchadev to take charge of the facility for the Ministry of Emergency Situations. The four men hang out, play cards, drink vodka, and surf a sporadic satellite Internet connection. They’d planted a few saplings, but in the barren soil the dry sticks stood like gravemarkers, testimony to the futility of hope. At one point someone shouted: A butterfly! It bumbled along, searching in vain for something living to land on. The men hadn’t seen an insect in months.
They’re supposed to report anything that happens—earthquakes, rockslides, an 800-foot-high wall of water heading west—using a military radio connected to Dushanbe. Most of the time, however, the signal isn’t powerful enough to broadcast. Not that it would matter if it did. There’s no real evacuation plan. Relations with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, two nations that would lose millions of people, can charitably be called “strained.” It’s all very “Omega Man.”
With only enough vodka for the four ministry employees, our request to crash was rejected. The next day, we’d look around the lake and begin the brutal climb out. As we left, the boss made what may or may not have been a joke:
“We’ll be the last four men left alive in Tajikistan.”
I’ll be signing books at the MoCCA Arts Fest in New York City this coming Sunday, from 12 noon to 2 pm at the NBM table. This will likely be my last appearance at MoCCA, which I helped found.
