Muzzle Velocity
A Constant State of War
Like most people, I’m against war. Even though in my 72 years of life, the US has been in constant warfare. Sure, there are wars we must fight. But since World War II, this has not been the case. The big ones like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were stalemates or long-term defeats. War for the US, although it costs lives and billions of tax dollars, is about consolidating or expanding power for the ruling class–the powerful and wealthy capitalists and corporations. Having lived through these, I’ve witnessed how war also detracts from failures of the economy (and/or things like the Epstein files).
Failures created by those who run things (often to the ground). People die for distractions.
These wars, despite being the costliest part of our national budget, are not necessary. They’ve been used to create a massive military industrial complex, with defense and tech industries profiting while the rest of us struggle with work, housing, healthcare, clean energy, safe streets. The US defense department hires more people in the world from public funding (while Wal-Mart is the world’s largest private employer). Think about this and you’ll find a connection. If most public funds are for war, and most private capital goes to low-paying jobs in cheap stores, this tells us a lot about our “amazing” economy.
It’s an economy built on death and poverty.
War, of course, also comes home. The growth of the police state, mass incarceration, especially now with ICE and so-called border security, which has led to the recent shootings and murders of US citizens as well as undocumented persons in concentration camps. Today many sections of the country have been militarized with an “army” not beholden to the Constitution, international law, or common decency, but to one man: Trump.
The Trump Administration and Israel’s bombing strikes against Iran at the end of February not only took out the Ayatollah Khamenei (an unhealthy 86-year-old man), but killed around 800 persons, including 100, mostly children, in a girl’s school, as well as six U.S. military personnel. And for what? Those children dying are simply not worth it. Just like the millions of noncombatants who died in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This is a disaster for the Middle East as well as the United States.
MAGA ideologist Steve Bannon came up with a strategy called “muzzle velocity” to overwhelm news outlets with multiple simultaneous information and actions. It’s an apt metaphor. It comes from the speed of a bullet or shell from when it leaves the barrel of a firearm. You can see how this relates to mass shootings in schools, churches, and shopping malls–the bullets come out fast and furious. Most mass shootings are from right-wing gunmen (or propensities in that direction). The Trump Administration does this with ongoing executive orders and national and international acts. This year alone these included several military attacks around the world, including in Syria, Nigeria, and in extracting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. It also included murders at home like those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
MAGA is at war on many fronts–including with America.
As for me, even in the throes of barrio warfare, getting shot at and shooting back, I eventually turned against all such wars. This happened most decisively when at sixteen years old I did a life-changing thing, which stays with me still, an act of defiance, of resistance, even if my maturity level couldn’t comprehend the extent of it, although my heart did. I stood up during a police riot at Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970 in the largest anti-war protest in a community of color at the time: The Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War.
I had been a Chicano gang member, drug user, in and out of jails, and homeless. But something in me couldn’t run away from the sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers in riot gear, with tear gas and batons, as they attacked a peaceful crowd of around 20,000 people. This was a non-gangster thing for me to do. A rage rose up in me stemming from the overt and covert discrimination and dismissals of Mexican migrants, some newly arrived, many here for generations, that existed in the streets, in schools, in churches, and behind bars.
After Black people, Mexicans had more people lynched during the 20th Century. None of our stories were told in the mass media, in movies, or in books. We were pushed into the lowest rungs of society–the farmworkers, housecleaners, and industrial laborers. Segregation and restrictive covenants forced Mexicans to live with other poor people or our own teeming barrios because we couldn’t access housing in most parts of the country. During the Vietnam War, when people of Mexican descent made up less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, we were 22 percent of the war’s casualties–along with disproportionate numbers of casualties among Blacks, U.S. Indigenous peoples, Puerto Ricans, and poor white workers.
The Chicano Moratorium woke me up from a kind of slumber. A spark that lit a life-long fire. I refused to run away as law enforcement officers rushed through the Moratorium participants, striking left and right. I ran towards them, rage-thinking (not really thinking). Soon enough, I got struck on the back of the head by a baton and fell to the ground that now had blood, not just mine but from others. Deputies took me to the nearby East L.A. Sheriff’s Substation jail, then juvenile hall, finally to the Murderer’s Row of the old Hall of Justice jail. While hundreds were arrested and let go in an hour or so, I “disappeared” for several days and nights along with four other “Cholo” gang members. Deputies wanted to charge us for the people killed in the so-called East L.A. Riot. I won’t go more into this now except to say the deputies had to let me go when community members finally found me. No charges filed because, in fact, the police had killed those people, including Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar.
It took another two to three years, but I eventually left the gang, the crime, the heroin. After the Moratorium I hung around the militant Brown Berets and other Chicano activists. I attended radical study circles. I went to other marches, rallies, and talks. I connected with Black radicals and white union leaders in Watts and the Harbor area. I remember how many of the activists didn’t trust me for a while–it wasn’t easy to leave the drugs, and I had two more major arrests after the Moratorium (one in which I got convicted, served in the Men’s County Jail).
I went one step forward, two steps back, but somehow the Moratorium set me on a new trajectory of conscious revolutionary study, writing, and organizing.
I didn’t transform through religion, as others might have, which is valid nonetheless. For me it was the revolutionary anti-capitalist circles that helped me become gang-free, crime-free, and drug free. By age twenty, I got married, began work in a steel mill, and expected my first of four children. I was moreover working class: my parents worked, from picking cotton in South Texas when my mom was nine years old to garment industry sweatshops, and my dad, although highly educated in Mexico, laboring in factories, construction, retiring as a custodian. My work in industry, which also included a lead foundry, a papermill, in construction, as a truck driver and carpenter, stabilized my life. I made another significant turn when in 1980, like Ruben Salazar, I became a journalist, working over the years in daily and weekly newspapers, for magazines, and in news radio. I also turned to poetry and fiction writing. I now have seventeen books in all genres.
Once as a freelance reporter, I had machine guns pushed against my head by Mexican soldiers when I covered uprisings of Indigenous people and campesinos in the old country in the 1980s. In those years, I also reported on the Contra War in Nicaragua and Honduras, even getting shot at by .50 caliber bullets and bombed twice.
I’ve been in wars. And I lived through the US wars of empire. This is why I now stand for peace at home and in the world. The American people should understand how we are being pulled away from peace and our own interests by war mongering. Why Trump’s reasons for attacking Iran are not meaningful since they are mostly lies (he’s not the first, and won’t be the last).
Presently it’s anybody’s guess about what will happen with Iran. Or what’s happened to Venezuela. Or to Minneapolis and other US cities with Trump’s troops. It’s the politics of chaos. Instability to keep us off balance.
Muzzle velocity.