James van Luik

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr. Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr. Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr. Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr. Paul said.

“The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

MARK AMES

(Interviewed by Jan Frel)

What got you interested in American rage murders? Did you have an inkling about what their underlying cause might be before you started piecing the articles and background information about them together in a systematic fashion?

Columbine. I had just flown home from Moscow to visit a friend who was dying of cancer when Columbine happened, and my first, unmediated reaction to the news was something between sympathy and awe. Officially everyone was horrified, but a lot of friends I talked to, ranging from artists to yuppies, told me they had the same reaction, that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were like heroes, and we were all surprised it didn't happen sooner. So I started to ask myself why I had this sympathy, why it was so widespread (and sympathy for the killers is incredibly common, just highly censored), and that led me to look at the larger phenomenon of rage murders.

On my next visit there was a massacre at Xerox in Honolulu. At the time I was trying to cover the start of the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, and I felt overwhelmed by the intolerable insanity of the culture, and that feeling of being crushed, and then I remembered, "This is why I left the US for Russia in the first place." That was when I finally linked the two, workplace and school rage murders. These weren't the works of psychopaths -- they were people fighting against something intolerable that many of us know is there, but hasn't been named yet. There isn't a Marx to give a name to post-Reagan middle-class pain. How do you fight against something horrible, oppressive, and debilitating before it even has a name? Especially when everyone, especially middle-class people, sneer at it and refuse to believe it's valid.

When you're too deep in the culture, you start to think that the most horrible/mundane aspects are normal and just the way things are. When you're outside of it for awhile, it's a little easier to see the insanity and brutality for what it is.

Your thesis that these rage murders are effectively failed slave rebellions takes you back in your book to consider in some depth the circumstances of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. At what point did the parallels start to dawn on you?

I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn't exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the '90s. No one in the "liberal" Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called "privatization" programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the '90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would "have to die off" before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia.

Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil. Later I looked at the details of these American rage murders -- they were all similar, mostly normal Middle Americans attacking seemingly "at random." If they weren't psychopaths, which they aren't, then that meant their attacks were very deliberate, that they were attacking something as a response. That's when I decided that it was the culture which was viewing the murders "at random," the culture which refused to see the purpose.

I simply assumed, from experience in Russia, and from looking at modern rage rebellions, that early slave rebellions would be completely misunderstood in their day as random acts of crazed evil just as modern "rage rebellions" are, and from the evidence I uncovered, it seems they were.

How much blame do you place on Reaganomics for the changes in the workplace that you argue lead to rage attacks?

Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America's Heart of Vileness -- its penchant for hating people who didn't get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

I hate to sound like a Clintonite here, but let's remember Hillary Clinton became the most hated human being alive because she tried to give most Americans the opportunity to lead longer, healthier lives, while these same Americans adored goons like Sam Walton, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump -- everyone who has dedicated their lives to transferring wealth, health and pleasure from the masses to a tiny elite. Liberals are hated in America precisely because they want to help people, which is seen as "patronizing."

You can see how this kind of cultural insanity, unleashed by Reaganomics after decades of New Deal (relative) harmony, could make someone snap, when the cognitive dissonance suddenly strikes on a very personal level, and you realize that you've been screwed hard by your own dominant ideology.

The implication of your thesis, of course, is that millions of Americans are living lives in many respects no different from slaves -- in some respects eagerly, and willfully. I suspect that's a realization for many people out there that they just won't be able to face, and you will no doubt draw some attention for saying so. You also argue that part of human nature -- despite conventional precepts about a universal human desire for freedom -- is our capacity and desire to be ruled, to obey, and to accept hierarchy, as well as adapt to almost any circumstance at all and eventually regard it as normal ... until there's a breaking point.

Why do you think we have all of these "wage slave" and "temp slave" T-shirts and e-jokes around? Americans like to turn everything painfully true into a little quip, as if by quippifying the painful truth, as if by becoming self-aware of one's shameful and intolerable existence, one partially nullifies one's pain. This is what you'd call "slave humor." Slaves did the same thing, turning their pain into quips. And remember, there were almost no slave rebellions at all in America, less than a dozen.

As for the slave tendency in humanity, I think it's a lot stronger in America than in most other countries in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion. Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate Rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel.

And this in turn creates pointless rebellions like modern workplace and school rebellions, just like our early slave rebellions were carried out in totally pointless, seemingly random ways. Or it creates a mass of quipping slave-comedians, like we have today.

You demonstrate that there is absolutely zero accuracy in the psychological profiles that "experts" have assembled to predict what kind of young student might start another Columbine, and you instead advocate profiling schools that could prompt a deadly massacre. What are some of the tell-tale signs to look for?

White kids. Just look for white kids, and you'll have a potential Columbine. When I said that the school should be profiled rather than the kid (since the Secret Service and FBI have both concluded no profile of a Columbiner is possible), I meant something larger than just the school campus -- I meant the entire culture. Our culture today is completely insane, the disconnect between how our propaganda says our lives are, and how our lives actually are. And let's face it, white middle-class kids are far more deeply invested in the dominant cultural lies, and therefore more easily destroyed by the rupture when those lies become untenable, than minority urban kids are.

Why do you think American communities and workplaces go to such depths to fashion cultural cover-ups about the origins of these massacres?

I don't think it's a conscious decision. It's in our DNA. These attempts to ascribe rage massacres to video games, lax gun control laws, Hollywood, war-mongering violence, etc., are analogous to the deluded way Americans viewed slave rebellions. For example a doctor who reported on a slave rebellion on the slave ship Hope in 1776 wrote, "The only reason we can give for their attempting anything of the kind, is, their being wearied at staying so long on board the ship."

Our culture reacted to slave rebellions and runaways with a mixture of genuine hurt that anyone could be so ungrateful, to savage anger and horror, and this allowed us to be incredibly brutal when we put the rebellions down and took preventative measures against possible future slave rebellions. I believe that colossal cultural delusion, combined with an unlimited capacity for brutality, have been features of American culture since the very first Thanksgiving dinner party.

You repeatedly cite how calm the attackers are while the killing is going on, how they consciously avoid the people who treated them nicely, and how many of the victims sympathize with the impulses of the rage killers. Were you surprised at how "rational" -- input leading to output -- these rage attacks look within their context?

No. In fact, I have to admit it pleased me to learn this, because it proved that these people are not sick freaks like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. This is what makes rage massacres so threatening and unique. They appeared out of nowhere in the annals of crime, starting up in the mid-1980s, just as Reaganomics took hold. The rage murderers were often very well-liked at their offices or schools. They were often seen as harmless. They were middle-class, trying to get by.

The fact that they were rational in their massacres proved that they weren't out to kill for pleasure, but rather they were striking against something larger than just human blood. They wanted to kill the Beast, and many employees or students represented a part of that Beast, while others clearly did not. That is to say, their rational behavior during these massacres proved that they weren't sick -- quite the opposite, their problem is that they couldn't live by the Lie any longer.

If you would, briefly describe the circumstances of a rage murder in America that happened recently through the lens of your book's analysis.

Recently a sick man living in Georgia who couldn't afford the medicines he needed to stay alive and healthy, yet who at the same time was a classic "anti-big government" type and fan of Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph, shot a postal worker seven times so that he would be thrown into a federal prison where the same "big government" would be obliged to give him the medicines he needed. There was a lot of sneering on the internet about this, but this case is way beyond irony, so far that it swings back into flat American reality.

The guy was a classic white American sucker who bought into the very Reaganomics ideology that ruined his life; he cracked; he went postal, though in a direction not yet tried before, and he did it explicitly to get thrown into jail so that he could survive. In other words, it's got to the point where society treats its explicit prisoners better than its implicit, unrecognized prisoners.

3. SLAIN PUERTO RICAN REBEL DIDN'T HAVE TO DIE

JUAN GONZALEZ

A former naval intelligence officer says he knows for a fact that Puerto Rican nationalist fugitive Filiberto Ojeda Rios didn't have to die in a shootout with the FBI.

He says he knows this because he told FBI agents a year ago where they could find Ojeda - even telling them where he liked to eat.

"What they did was an injustice," the former Navy officer told me last week. "No matter what Ojeda did, he was still a human being. ... They could easily have taken him alive."

The informant, who asked not to be identified, has given his account to the Justice Department's Inspector General's Office, which opened an independent review of the shooting last week.

FBI Director Robert Mueller requested the review after top officials from the island's various political parties, including pro-commonwealth Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vilá, and several members of New York's congressional delegation publicly criticized the FBI's handling of the incident.

And yesterday the Puerto Rican commonwealth's own Department of Justice subpoenaed weapons and records of the FBI's operation.

By the time of his death, the 72-year-old Ojeda, a onetime musician turned revolutionary, had become a legendary figure on the island.

A founder of the militant pro-independence group called the Macheteros, he had been on the run since 1990 for his role in a $7 million Wells Fargo armed robbery in Hartford in 1983.

During all those years, Ojeda frequently gave interviews to Puerto Rican reporters, routinely disseminated pro-independence proclamations, and was even spotted at times at protest marches.

Despite a reward on his head that reached $1.1 million, he popped up so often in public that Puerto Ricans openly joked about the FBI's apparent inability to find him.

But on the afternoon of Sept. 23, a special team of agents dispatched from the United States surrounded Ojeda's farmhouse hideout in Hormigueros, a small town near the island's western coast.

According to the official version, Ojeda opened fire from inside when agents moved in to arrest him. One agent was wounded and Ojeda was shot beneath the clavicle in the initial shootout.

The fugitive's wife, who was with him at the time, surrendered immediately. She later claimed the agents opened fire without warning and that her husband offered to give up in the presence of well-known Puerto Rican journalist Jesus Davila, but agents refused.

Over the next 20 hours, the FBI team sealed off the area and would not allow Puerto Rican police near the scene. By the time they entered the house the next day, Ojeda had bled to death.

The long delay, officials say, was caused by waiting for bomb detection units to arrive and check for possible booby-trap.

But even those who oppose Ojeda's radical views and methods aren't buying that account.

Many are especially furious at the timing of the operation.

Sept. 23 is the anniversary of El Grito de Lares, Puerto Rico's failed 1868 independence revolt against Spanish colonialism. It is a date commemorated each year by the independence movement with a march to the town of Lares.

At the very moment federal agents were moving in on Ojeda's hideout, a taped speech of his was being played at the Lares event.

"I'm a statehooder, but I see the FBI was trying to humiliate all Puerto Ricans by going after him on El Grito de Lares," says the former naval officer who provided the agents information. "I feel I was used."

In early 2004, he claims, he and two of his friends met with FBI agents several times. They told the agents that Ojeda was living in Hormigueros, and that the fugitive often ate at El Conejo Blanco, a well-known restaurant in Hormigueros popular with independence supporters.

"All they had to do was set up surveillance at the restaurant and they could have picked him up," the informant says.

He says he also identified other spots on the island that Ojeda frequented.

"I wanted him arrested, not killed," he said.

But when the agents failed to act by early this year, he says, he broke off contact and stopped offering any more information.

"I didn't do it for the money, and never received a penny," he insists.

When I called FBI headquarters in Washington, they referred all my questions to the San Juan field office, but agents there did not return several calls for comment.

Meanwhile, press reports in San Juan claim federal officials have begun to pay out part of the $1.1 million reward for Ojeda to two informants.

4. WORLD SOCIAL FORUM, VENEZUELA: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

DEBORAH JAMES

January, 2005, Brazil

President Chávez addresses the teeming Gigantinho stadium in Porto Alegre, Brazil on the last day of the World Social Forum. The massive crowd cheers wildly; thunderous applause explodes each time he appeals for Latin American unity and denounces the Bush agenda.

I talk with him later that evening, wondering what it feels like to be the most popular politician in Latin America in decades. "The poor of Venezuela - and of the entire continent - are waking up. They are building the dream of Bolívar - to create a united Latin America free of interference from the United States."

Something remarkable is happening in Venezuela. For the first time, the President has challenged the business elite head-on, fighting - and winning - a David-and-Goliath struggle to recapture the national oil wealth from a tiny elite and put it to use to the benefit the poor majority.

President Chávez was elected in 1998 on a platform to more fairly distribute the nation's oil wealth, and to bring the country out of massive poverty and inequality. The traditional elites fought back hard, organizing a coup in 2002 which the US government was the only developed country to endorse. A massive popular uprising brought him back to office within 48 hours. An oil strike/worker's lockout later that year only served to hand over control of the massive oil company from the traditional elites to the government. And a referendum last year - organized by unrepentant coup leaders, financed with support from the U.S. Government, and designed for his ouster - instead consolidated Chávez's democratic mandate in a 59% landslide.

Flash forward to January, 2006, Venezuela

In recognition of the unprecedented changes happening there, this year the World Social Forum is moving to the country with the most mobilized citizenry and the most progressive government in Latin America - Venezuela.

The WSF has played a major role in uniting the world's social movements, Indigenous communities, women's rights activists, human rights organizations, environmentalists, intellectuals, and students, creating the vision of Another World Is Possible, as well as the space for us to build it together.

This is where the largest public mobilizations in human history - the February 15, 2003 protests against the war in Iraq - were hatched. Last year, over 120,000 people came from almost 100 countries around the world to participate, including thousands of people from the U.S.

The Social Forum provides a unique venue for learning from each other's struggles across boundaries and for sharing strategies across borders towards a truly global peace and justice movement. Latin Americans have been mounting impressive victories - electing progressive governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina; stopping the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); Bolivian peasants kicking Bechtel out of Cochabamba; Uruguayans passing a constitutional amendment against the privatization of water; Mexicans defending the right of the most popular progressive presidential candidate to stand for election next year.

And there's a new buzzword flashing across television and internet screens across the continent: regional integration. Farmers across the hemisphere uniting in the Via Campesina; poor people's movements gathering in the network COMPA; anti-free trade groups organizing together through the Hemispheric Social Alliance.

Venezuela is taking this vision of people's integration and putting real governmental resources into giving it a scope incredible to imagine. Under the banner of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, Venezuela has developed a real alternative to the defeated FTAA. The wide variety of ALBA projects prioritize real development, social equality, and strengthening national economies - rather than structurally adjusting their economies around multinational corporate interests. One of ALBA's first achievements is the health care-for-oil program involving 20,000 Cuban doctors and nurses providing primary, preventative community health care across Venezuela - in exchange for cheap oil that keep Cuban cars and factories running.

Chávez, along with President Lula of Brazil, led the effort for the southern cone nations to unite with the Andean countries to birth the South American Community of Nations last fall, a promising new endeavor. Venezuela, along with Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, recently launched the first Latin American news channel, TeleSur, to offer an alternative to foreign corporate media. And they are working to establish PetroAmérica- the first fully integrated, Latin American energy company.

Flash back to January, 2003, Brazil

I'm attending the WSF for the first time. Glancing out the window of our hotel, I'm surprised to see security swarming the parking lot. Why on earth would the secret service stake out the World Social Forum? It finally dawns on me: Chávez has arrived. Stepping out of the elevator I see him, chatting amiably with the crowd as he tries to make his way across the lobby. I know nothing about Venezuela, and just take snapshots from a distance. Finally, I screw up my courage. "Compañero Presidente!" I call

He turns around. He talks with Medea Benjamin and me for a good ten minutes. We are trying to stop the war in Iraq before it starts, we say. (We failed.) He is fighting a war in his country against poverty, he says. (He is winning.) He invites Global Exchange to bring a delegation of women for peace to Venezuela.

Was that really the president of Venezuela?, I ask myself. He seems like such a regular guy. Four months later, I'm on a plane.

The weekend of my first trip, we travel to a tiny village near the Andean city of Merida to film Aló Presidente, his weekly four-hour live traveling talk show. We visit a research facility for potatoes, an Andean staple. He explains to me as we walk among the baby plants, "we in Venezuela import potatoes from Canada, while our own farmers don't have work. Now we are investing in the necessary technical assistance for farmers to produce food for our own people. That is food security."

A scientist describes the "new varieties" being developed that fit Andean soil and climate, resist disease, and produce prodigiously. Ignorant of traditional plant splicing techniques, I inquire skeptically about to the process involved in developing these so-called new varieties. The researcher looks confused. "She's concerned about genetic modification of the plants - because that leads to corporate control of the food supply," Chávez tells the scientists.

My jaw drops to the floor. Here is the leader of the country with the biggest reserves of oil outside the Middle East, and he sounds like one of us. More important, except of course for the not-so-negligible fact that he's the president, he acts like one of us. Challenging the corporate, conservative way of thinking; visioning alternatives based on people's human needs; and organizing for change. In fact, Venezuela's implementation of land reform, credit and technical assistance for small farmers, sustainable agriculture, and subsidized food for the poor represents various aspects of the agricultural model advocated by progressive communities for years. In Venezuela, I learn, food is to eat, not just to export.

Another World Is Possible: And it is Happening in Venezuela

On my next visit a month later, I witness the beginning of a true revolution in education. In Cuba, the night before the launch of the literacy campaign with Presidents Chávez and Castro, the former tells me that "based on their own successful literacy campaign, the Cubans developed the model pedagogy, and trained all of our literacy facilitators. They are also printing a small family library - a dozen volumes of literary giants - for each graduate. And now more than 50,000 Venezuelans are volunteering in their communities to teach - and to eradicate the scourge of illiteracy in our nation."

To live in a country where all of the grandmothers can read! The excitement gleaming in his eye shines like a beacon. A few months later I visit a literacy center, and speak with 70 year old Ana. "I'm learning to read and write now because Chávez has called on me - on all of us - to study. We old people need to be educated so we can participate in the rebuilding of our country. I've never voted in my whole life, but nowadays even old grannies like me count - you can bet I'm going to vote next election!" Two years later, the program has taught over 1.5 million Venezuelans to read and write, and the country is now certified as illiteracy-free by UNESCO.

Later, I visit a high-school equivalency program for adults. Roraima is a 36 year old mother of two who's worked as a maid her whole life. Now she has a future, she tells me. "I had to drop out of high school in 9th grade to work, so my brothers could go to school. Now I'm getting my GED, and then I will go on to the Mission Sucre [the universal college access program] to study to become a social worker. Then I will be able to help others as Chávez has helped me, and give back to my community." Her voice quakes with the honor of it all as she tells me, "do you have any idea, any idea at all, what it means to me, a dropout maid, to become a high school graduate of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela?" Tears well up in my eyes every time I think of her.

The literacy campaign, the high school and college education missions, the health care for all program, these are the backbone of a wide series of programs putting oil money to use for the benefit of 24 million instead of a few thousand. Massive land reform and rural assistance programs combined with subsidized food stores that reach over half the population are building food security and food sovereignty step by step.

The Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Venezuela fought hard for Chávez in the referendum, proud of the new rights they consolidated in the national Constitution, including language rights and land rights in Mission Guaicaipuro. And Afro-Venezuelans have used participatory democracy to demand that the entire grade school curriculum include the contributions of African descendants - and won.

And one of the most innovative programs combines state investment in strategic industries with job training and regional cooperation agreements, to build opportunities for Venezuelans and diversify the oil revenue base. Rather than "stifling business" or "choking the economy" as free trade fundamentalists predicted, employment has taken a dramatic upturn and the economy is growing faster than any other in Latin America.

Bringing in all home: U.S. Policy towards Venezuela

These ambitious programs have distinguished Venezuela as one of the most progressive democracies in the world. Nonetheless, the Bush administration continues to fund coup leaders in their efforts to destabilize the government. Even the Organization of American States and Carter Center's certification of the August 2004 referendum as free and fair, and presidential approval ratings topping 70% this summer, haven't convinced the Bush administration to back off.

That's because the threat that Venezuela represents to the Bush agenda isn't in the false claims of supporting terrorism, supposed laxity on drug trafficking, or any alleged lack of democratic credentials. It's precisely because in Venezuela, like at the World Social Forum, people engaged in participatory democracy are creating a world based on life values, not money values - and the movement is growing.

After Hurricane Katrina, Venezuela offered to send 2,000 emergency personnel to New Orleans to help, an offer that was never accepted by the U.S. Government. On a recent New York visit, President Chávez visited poor communities in the Bronx, and promised to provide discounted oil for poor Americans through the Venezuelan-owned gas stations of Citgo. He denounced the illegal occupation of Iraq, and received the largest applause of any speech at the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

In response, the Bush administration has so far refused to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, the "bin Laden" of the Western hemisphere, to Venezuela to stand trial for the terrorist bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people in 1976.

Now Venezuela, home to a peaceful revolutionary process that has brought education and healthcare to millions through the redistribution of oil profits, will host the World Social Forum this January, 2006. When we dreamed during the first WSF in 2001, that Another World Is Possible, we had no idea we would see it within our lifetimes - in Venezuela.

Here in the U.S., we couldn't stop the war against Iraq. But we can be part of the wave of progressive values and victories spreading across the Americas, and learn from a country where oil is a source of social equality and development, instead of a cause for war.

And who knows, we might even learn how to get a better president.

5. THE MEETING THAT NEVER WAS: PAT TILLMAN AND NOAM CHOMSKY

DAVE ZIRIN

"I don't believe it," seethed Ann Coulter.

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was "fucking illegal" and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman's death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as "an American original--virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be." She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article's source was Pat Tillman's mother, Mary.

Mary and the Tillman family are relentlessly pushing for answers to the questions surrounding Pat's death in Afghanistan. They want to know why it took the Pentagon five weeks to tell them he died in a tragic case of friendly fire. They want to know why they were unwitting props at Pat's funeral, weeping while lies were told by eulogizing politicians. Mary is now hoping that a new Pentagon inquiry will bring closure. "There have been so many discrepancies so far that it's hard to know what to believe," she said to the Chronicle. "There are too many murky details."

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling "a side of Pat Tillman not widely known--a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books...to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author." Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, "I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, 'You know, this war is so fucking illegal.' And we all said, 'Yeah.' That's who he was. He totally was against Bush." With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman's transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn't play their game. To the Pentagon's chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

But when Tillman fell in Afghanistan the wheels once again started to turn. Now the narrative was perfect: "War hero and football star dies fighting terror." The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to hit the press, so the President found it especially useful to praise Tillman as "an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror." His funeral was nationally televised. Bush even went back to the bloody well during the presidential campaign, addressing his team's fans on the Arizona Cardinals' stadium Jumbotron.

We now know, of course, that this was all a brutal charade. Such callous manipulation is fueling the Tillman family's anger. As Mary Tillman said this past May, "They could have told us up front that they were suspicious that [his death] was a fratricide, but they didn't. They wanted to use him for their purposes.... They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that." A growing number of military families, similarly angered, are criticizing the war in Iraq through organizations like Military Families Speak Out.

As for Chomsky, whom Ann Coulter would undoubtedly label "treasonous," Mary Tillman says a private meeting was planned between him and Pat after Pat's return--a meeting that never took place, of course. Chomsky confirms this scenario. This was the real Pat Tillman: someone who, like the majority of this country, was doubting the rationale for war, distrusting his Commander in Chief and looking for answers. The real Pat Tillman, the one with three dimensions, must stick in the throat of the Bush-Coulter gang, a pit in the cherry atop their bloody sundae.

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2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF RAGE, MURDER AND REBELLION

BY

MARK AMES

(Interviewed by Jan Frel)