CLINTON ST. Q U / PLY vol. 5. No. 1 Spring 1983 STAFF CONTENTS Co-Editors Jim Blashfield Lenny Dee Peggy Lindquist David Milholland Design and Production Jim Blashfield Production Assistants Sharon Niemcyzk David Milholland Proofreaders Walt Curtis Theresa Marquez Stan Sitnick Ad Production Peggy Lindquist Stacey Fletcher David Clifton Ad Sales Linda Ballentine David Clifton John Denton Lumiel Dodd Typesetting Richard Francis Barry Hertz Irish Setter Jill Wilson Camerawork Paul Diener Contributing Artists Jim Blashfield Kent Dixon Fay Jones Henk Pander Mary Robben Steve Walker Contributing Photographers David Milholland Richard Posner Thanks Art in Form Bob Bogue Ike Horn Paul Loeb Ben Marx Doug Milholland Ed Reckford Al Schwartz Seattle Art Commission Steve Warner Advertisers call 367-0460 322-8711 EDITORIAL /f there is to be any hope for an economic righting of the good ship USA, the right kinds of questions must be asked. While Democrats and Republicans haggle over the morsels to be thrown to the jobless, multinational corporations are profiting to an unprecedented degree as they move our industrial base overseas. Tom Bender, in a recent issue of RAIN, points out, “Between 1945 and 1970, U.S. firms established more than 8,000 subsidiaries abroad, with an employment growth rate of 3.5 times domestic employment. Thirty three percent of the assets of our chemical and pharmaceutical industries, 4O°/o of our consumer goods industry and 75% of our electronics industry have been moved outside of the country. Today, one out of three employees of U.S. firms is located outside the U.S.” Is it no wonder that the U.S. jobless rate continues to rise? There is a new book out, Trading With The Enemy, by Charles Higham, which dramatically points out that this is not a new problem: “ What would have happened if millions of Americans and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy’s fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sos- thenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler’s communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops?" Today with the enormous flight of investment capital overseas, we are again faced with corporations placing the security of the nation on the back burner. The immoral investment behavior of the multinationals does the rest of the world little good, what with their forced dependency on exportable one crop economies in lieu of balanced planned growth. Couple that with overseas investments being closely tied to repressive regimes and you have a situation that only benefits a select few. Is there any politician running for the White House in 1984 who would dare to suggest that these multinational giants are bringing the world economy to ruin? Yet, the facts speak for themselves. It leads one to ask who actually rules the land of the free and the home of the brave. Until this question becomes the overriding issue of the day, any hope of long-term solutions to our economic ills is for naught. f f t was L° shortly after being installed f in Washington that the Reagan Administration first trotted out its plans for El Salvador. They were going to make the place safe for business by shoring up the government there with guns and money. Reagan saw it as the exciting first test of America’s regained honor and strength. Alexander Haig could be seen stretching his wings and sharpening his beak. Virtually nobody outside of the “New Right" liked the idea. The public and press were outraged or wary. The benefits of helping the undeniably violent military triumph over a guerrilla force arising from the luckless peasantry were simply not overwhelmingly evident. And the press seemed, in general, not to withhold this view from the public. There were many reports on the gory details of the military’s way of doing battle: kidnappings, hideous tortures, routine executions that left bodies heaped in “dumps” every morning. Reagan then somewhat retreated from, his original position when it became apparent that Americans weren’t buying this war. In fact, it now appears that what he was doing was digging in, re-educating the public through the press in order to make the proposition more palatable. We have been told that Nicaragua is a hotbed of Communism run by a group of tyrants who treat tribes of natives cruelly and deny their citizens such basic rights as a free press and political affiliation. And that that country is only a Soviet outpost, a foothold for grabbing the whole of Latin America while we sit on our duffs talking about human rights in El Salvador. Certainly, there have been several gaffs in Reagan’s public relations campaign, notably the captured Nicaraguan guerrilla who was supposed to confess all on national television and instead, told the damaging truth, Cover Jim Blashfield Learning to Live Nonviolently Simeon Dreyfuss............ 4 Thirteen Ways of Looking at Trident David Milholland...................12 Sonnet Pat Teeling...................... 12 Queen Elizabeth Mary Robben.....................16 Nicaragua Patty Somlo .....................18 Hendersons on Tour Dana Hoyle.....................20 Trojan Holiday Joseph Stevenson......... 21 From Alchemy to Algeny Peggy Lindquist Henk Pander.................... 26 Windows of Vulnerability Richard Posner................30 Mold Culture Jim Blashfield..............32 The Clinton St. Quarterly is published by the Clinton St. Theatre, 2522 SE Clinton, Portland, OR 97202, (503) 222-6039. Unless otherwise noted, all contents copyright © 1983 Clinton St. Quarterly. and the doctored documents intended to prove a massive transfer of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador. But all in all, it has been surprisingly successful. Reagan is asking now for an additional $110 million, in part to fund a major drive to destroy guerrilla base camps and to separate civilians from the guerrillas, a sort of “rural pacification” involving search-and-destroy missions, say the papers. The President tells us that the need for this program is urgent. "If El Salvador falls, no country in the region will be safe and our own security will be affected." And if he has not won Congress over entirely to his point of view with his domino set, he has made them uneasy. House Speaker Tip O’Neill sounded like he was on a shaky fence when he said, “ there’s just a strong feeling around here that it's another Vietnam situation. At the same time, nobody wants to see that country go Marxist." The U.S. has pursued a policy in Latin America for over 50 years of installing and supporting governments for the benefit of U.S.-based business and it is a policy which has rarely resulted in any good for the majority of Latin Americans. If we now wish to separate the civilians from the guerrillas, I doubt that $110 million is enough. What are referred to in the press as “marxist rebels” and "the enemy” are the same desperate and fed-up citizens they were two years ago. Reagan is inventing the elements required for the real war he longs to fight: communist guerrillas, global strategies, massive weapons buildup on the other side and those ubiquitous dominos. And the previously skeptical press is now passing these chimeras along to the public as though it were reality. PL Clinton St. Quarterly 3
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