It’s good to be back. Nearly a year off and Ballistic Helmet has returned stronger than ever. The heads have proliferated across the Midwest with more heads in Chicago now than any other US city. The zine is in print again with a new mandate to produce ten issues in twelve months, of which this is the first, and a strong one at that.
We hear more from Aaron Fishbone who writes of his experiences in Jordan. As I read Aaron’s accounts, I can only think of what a wonderful thing it is that someone as thoughtful and caring as Aaron is out there engaging with people. He is infectious. At the end of his journey through Jordan, he hikes to the mosque atop Mount Aaron, the place his namesake is said to be entombed—a father of the Hebrew people. Having made it there, Aaron reflects on the nature of the relation amongst a disparate “people”—a people spread across continents and time. As he says, “it raised more questions than it answered”. If only the world had more of Aaron’s doubt, more of his questions, and more of his compassion. Instead, so many of us walk the earth cocksure and proud, armed with the means of self-destruction, floating through space with the collective memory of a goldfish.
Also in this issue, radical professor emeritus George Salzman reports from Oaxaca. Along with Salzman’s article and photos, we’re happy to feature photographs from Indybay reporter Bradley Stuart who has been in Oaxaca since 18 August. Stuart collaborates with our own BH head Jon on the indymedia.us website and we hope to bring more on Oaxaca and Stuart’s photos in particular in the coming issues.
As you’ll read in Salzman’s article, la marcha de las caserolas (the march of women beating their pots and pans with wooden spoons) seized the state TV and radio station in Oaxaca. For three weeks the station broadcast the voices of the people—the people who in fact own the airwaves yet normally have no access to them. Not only did they broadcast accounts of their own lives under neo-liberalism, but they showed videotapes of the living condition in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. As Salzman puts it, “One can only imagine the level of global grassroots solidarity if the media, worldwide, were controlled by popular groups instead of transnational corporations.” Ballistic Helmet exists in that spirit of solidarity.
It couldn’t be a better time for the helmet to be strong. We’ve recently witnessed Israel wage war on the people of Lebanon. The US helped plan, supply, and condone the violence, motivated by the possibility that a war against Hizbullah might knock out an armed faction that would almost certainly strike Israel in retaliation to a US war on Iran—a war that has already been planned and is likely to occur after the midterm elections this November. The administration has already begun spewing its propaganda and engendering fear about the nuclear threat of Iran, of which it has no evidence. They have positioned themselves, through outrageous demands from the UN (expiring today), to gain diplomatic justifications for aggression. It is a repeat of the run up to Iraq. One can only hope the administration’s gross miscalculations on Hizbullah have forced them to reconsider the plans for Iran. But, as history has shown, their aptitude for schizophrenic optimism is unbounded.
It is as apparent now as ever that the political leadership across the board in this country is morally bankrupt. <Ya basta! We must construct a new cultural economy, one which exposes this bankruptcy, one that values the dignity of people throughout the world, one that manufactures dissent rather than consent. Only we can.
David
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