I am Submarine U-571

They say that the bellybutton of the world is a Guatemalan lake with two volcanoes. There is a place there I like to visit, with an excellent view of two perfect blue cones rising out from the surface of the lake. Most of the hotels in the area are built in an ecologically sensitive manner, using local materials, solar power, carefully manicured grounds, and designed in a way which provides an exquisite counterpoint to the beauty of the landscape. A much more famous Guatemalan destination is the city of Antigua—also full of elegant buildings with beautiful gardens, though made of thick stones rather than stucco or recycled bottles. Hotels in both locations have staff who dress in traditional indigenous clothes. But here at the lake they dress that way because that's the way they dress all the time—in Antigua the Guatemalan staff usually wear a uniform designated by the hotel and change into Western clothes when their shift is over. It all contributes to a beautiful environment for the tourists who buy rooms and drinks—but what in the city of stone is a sort of play-acting at the way things used to be, here, overlooking the docks of Santa Cruz is something still woven into the fabric of peoples' lives.


I was there on a Saturday, a day when people are encouraged to dress themselves up in outfits from a rack of used clothes, the men often in drag. We sit in the dining hall eating fried chicken, and for dessert a younger man spending a few months working at the lodge brings out coffee. I talk to him later—and he tells me that the scenery with the lakes and volcanoes, reminds him of his home state. Later on in the evening the tables are pushed aside for dancing, and a guitar performance of the owner's favorite songs.


Later still a group of about seven guests is drinking beers under the open sky, discussing a movie called the History Boys, which almost everyone in the group has seen. I sit in a sleeveless white dress and confidently expound at length on my interpretation of whether the movie should be called “homo erotic.” In retrospect I realize that, like the boyish teacher in the movie, I am picking my arguments based more on the reaction I hope to provoke from others than on what I actually believe myself. Finally, the guy from Oregon takes a deep breath. “No, it's not OBvious. That's not the way I look at it. And why are we spending so much time talking about this when we've already established that the way you define the word is different from the way everyone else at this table defines the word?” The definitiveness of the Oregonian's response reminds me that I am advocating a point of view I'm not completely sure should be advocated. After a pause, he starts to tell us about his adventures in the kingdom he calls Saudi.


Getting to the hotel was a little complicated. It was five o'clock, and I wasn't sure when the boats stopped running, but took a chance on one going to the place nicknamed “gringotenango” in hopes that there would still be one to the hotel at Santa Cruz. One boatman, who senses my uncertainty—promises me a charter for seventeen bucks. I end up paying. I am frustrated when I learn that boats run until six, and that I have rewarded some one for deceiving me by paying him ten times as much as I should have. But I also realize that, as with so many transactions, it's an issue of information as much as morality. If the terms of service had been clearly posted when I made my decision, the opportunity for antisocial behavior would not have existed. Our culture's focus on individual responsibility and culpability, sometimes gets in the way of analyzing how social conditions involving multiple individuals creates moral hazards which make the fruits of darkness more rewarding than the fruits of light.


Earlier I had visited another program where I had worked. Because of difficulty with funds the place is currently semi-abandoned, though some of the plantings still thrive. Walking there, I am surprised that an area which was full of cornfields two years ago is now filled with Avocado trees and enclosed with razor wire. As I walk I hear some one call my name. There must be something about my gait, because he's the fourth person in my life to recognize me at a distance after several years, not by my face, but by the way I walk.


I'm surprised to see him here. When I was last here, three masked men knocked on some one else's door to deliver a message that he would be killed if he didn't leave. Now he's working next door at the avocado farm—and seems just as jovial as when we worked together two years ago. Having been through multiple situations in Guatemala where people received death threats, it's interesting to notice how things unfold. It often feels like a Victorian mystery novel in that you work through a progression of explanations, each different than the last, but each seeming consistent. The difference is that in Victorian novels some one like Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple shows up to solve the mystery, and in Guatemala you almost never get to that final chapter. Of course, Sherlock Holmes was an opium addict, and it may be that the only people who could clear things up in Guatemala, are those with skeletons in their own closets. After hearing several contradictory stories with the ring of truth, you realize that information behaves the same way whether it is true or false—and that for definite resolution, you need not just the wisdom of Solomon, but the decisiveness he used to determine the true mother of a disputed baby.


One of the explanations was that the threat came from a person we knew and worked with—some one who seemed generous and friendly and hardworking—and whom I was once assigned the responsibility of making a phone call to, but neglected to when I was sent outside the country for a week. Some one I spent an enjoyable afternoon touring lakeside cabins with a woman who later ended up in a relationship with the man who received the threat. It was odd to consider that some one whose handiwork and self-assurance I admired might have sent a message like that, and that some of my own actions may have played a part. And if it wasn't him, it might well have been some one who in the right circumstances, would have displayed an equally good-natured side. It's strange to consider that if you have one group of friends in Guatemala you report on the human side of the impoverished victims of violence—but with another group of friends you might well end up humanizing impoverished peasants who end up participating in intimidation. Sometimes you meet both in the same family. Some one once asked us to leave because he said his own sons had threatened to kill him if he kept on talking to the people from human rights. People often attribute threats to the after-effects of the civil war, but I have also heard of threats made previous to it, by members of their own village, who recognized their power being threatened by some one stirring up people with new ideas—not so different from what the elders of Athens did to Socrates. Most of these threats were conditional rather than existential, “stop what you're doing, or die,” the type of message people in the United States can afford to communicate with lawsuits. People in Guatemala habitually attribute contemporary violence to the sort of secret organizations which were active in the eighties, but now that the code has been established, even people without clandestine connections can take advantage of it. In any event, my friends' attitude suggests that he wasn't permanently traumatized. But it does mean that instead of working in the office of a non-profit, he's working outside on an avocado plantation which didn't exist when the threat was sent.


I see other things in Guatemala as well. I sit in a cornfield and discuss the plagues of caterpillars menacing the trees and gangs menacing the town. I drink wine in the Spanish cultural center with a woman I met in Huehuetenango and shake hands with a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the hammer and sickle.


The name of this essay is taken from a movie about World War II. It is the name of a submarine, which midway through the movie changes hands. At one point it is occupied by a group of sailors obeying the commands of the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler, the only person ever to occupy that office. Later it is taken over by sailors obeying a chain of command leading back to Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States. Tom Lehrer has a song about the rocket scientist who during the Second World War, built rockets first for the Germans, and then for the Americans.
“When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down.
'that's not my department,' says Werner von Braun.”
And, depending on what vocabulary you use to analyze the situation, the change in personnel of the U-Boat is not significant. Throughout the movie, it is occupied by military men, following orders to kill people. That's why people shout “you're just like them.” You could say such an attitude is the opposite of Werner von Braun's cavalier perspective towards the machinery of death, but it shares his sense of equivalence.


Some people say we shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II. You can construct alternative histories in which Hitler's Totalitarianism burned itself out, or Hitler and Stalin eventually annihilated each other. You can point out that the end of our involvement in that war was a forty year cold war with our erstwhile allies. I have visited farms begun by C.O.s from World War II who helped create the basis for searching for an alternative to what General Eisenhower later recognized was the menace of the military-industrial complex spawned by that war--by people who thought like Werner von Braun. It is not necessary to agree with every use of American military power. Dr King opposed the war in Vietnam, but felt that he would have fought against Hitler. Joschka Fischer of the Green party sent German troops to fight with us in Afghanistan, but not in the Bush administration's preemptive strike on Iraq. But although some things can be unbundled, it is very difficult to accept the precedent of Nuremburg and the prevailing definitions of War Crimes unless you accept that American military power can serve the cause of justice.


I have many friends in different parts of the United States. Some are lawyers living in the capital, others are farmers living several hours outside. Both I suspect voted for Obama, but in terms of their political views on things like drug policy, or Israel, or social issues, their perspectives are significantly different. And despite voting for the same party, it would be difficult for the lawyers in the capital to really understand the lives of the farmers. And in many ways the farmers lives and attitudes are much more similar to those of the Republican neighbors they go to church and county fairs with. One farmer received a phone call threatening to destroy his irrigation system if he shot the wrong deer while trying to protect his bean planting from being eaten. But I suspect there were some ways his the lives of those two people living off the land, had more in common with each other, than with the lawyer in the capital. It was because of the farmers that I first learned about going to Guatemala—where I had the opportunity to witness the much bigger urban/rural divide in that country.


The organization I served with originally worked with farmers in rural areas. Studying the civil rights struggle, you notice how it took the work of generations of NAACP organizers working to make sure that some one like Thurgood Marshall could be trained not just to make arguments white men could have made, but to give the lie to the assumptions of Jim Crow by his very presence before the Supreme Court. To make sure that when Rosa Parks stayed seated when the law said she should move, there was a network of people who had her back. In the flickering light of kitchen fires I witnessed the quiet strength of a race full of individuals who, I hope are laying the groundwork to contradict their marginalization with something more definitive than verbal disputation.


Later, however our program shifted focus, and although volunteers were based in rural areas, our activities were shaped by the decisions passed down from lawyers in the capital. A chain of individually reasonable decisions often led to us operating one way in one region and completely differently in another. We were a non-violent, non-military organization, but handling the apparent contradictions sometimes forced us into odd coping strategies. At various points, after receiving assignments from the people the folks in Washington had put in charge, my partner and I would look at each other and mumble “I'm just an enlisted man.” That was the most psychologically effective model for dealing with directives which didn't make sense to us, but which we had given up trying to argue with. The Lawyers handed out T-shirts saying “Silence never changed the world, let loose your voice.” One Guatemalan I didn't meet through our organization pointed out “If it weren't for people who kept their mouths shut in the eighties, I would be dead.” On the other hand, others had similar stories about how people speaking up kept them alive. The folks in the capital often talked as if a certain way of doing things was Obvious, and peoples' lives are at stake. But you could arrive at different conclusions depending on who you listened to first. Now thankfully the organization is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay, and perhaps the energy from a city which is a cultural rather than a governmental capital, will change the patterns of interactions.


The second time I went down to Guatemala I answered a call for emergency presence, and I looked forward to spending more time in the glow of kitchen fires. After we arrived, the lawyers changed their minds. In certain circumstances foreign presence can be an asset, in others a liability. And although our organization had been founded to carry on a vision of unarmed bodyguards, when it came to the legal case, it generally seemed that the Guatemalans we worked with felt safer with a police presence. I could see why, but it also seemed like outsourcing a critical part of our reason for being. In some ways it felt like another manifestation of the urban rural divide: peasants can often find work for children to do, children in the city have little productive role, they just need to be driven to soccer games and have their braces paid for. So, a lot of my time I spent in the capital, watching movies on a DVD player which had been donated by an executive director. The people in charge distrusted mainstream movies, but I sometimes felt that they represented how it felt to be working abroad better than the statistics our administrators quoted us at our informational meetings. It was hard to tell what was really going on, many significant events happened off-camera, and it often felt that the disagreement with members of your own organization loomed larger than anything you were supposedly accomplishing. And with so much being relayed second or third hand, figuring out how to behave in situations of imperfect information seems more important than “figuring out what's really going on.” I could often see how decisions made sense individually, but when bundled together they trapped people in catch-22s. I tend to be a contrarian—and often have views which conflicted with my supervisors, whether I worked in restaurants, planning, engineering, tourism, farming, or accompaniment. It is interesting to note that the non-ideological organizations generally seemed much more accommodating of differences of opinion. They didn't necessarily change their mind when I said I thought we were wrong, but they let me vent as long as I bussed my tables, wrote my reports, or picked my vegetables, like I was supposed to do. It was odd that my supervisors in Guatemala reacted as if the frustrations of thwarted idealism were something they had never experienced themselves. Of course, unlike farms and restaurants we didn't really have a product, so I couldn't be judged on anything other than whether I was giving them unconditional personal loyalty.


Teaching American history in China last year I ran across a section on the birth of second-wave feminism a few decades ago. In addition to their frustrations at home and work, women were also frustrated when they tried to help out at radical organizations. Often they were stuck making and serving coffee while the men made plans. Understandably they felt that with their education and commitment they had more to offer than merely serving coffee, while white college boys monopolized the definition of “the movement.”


When I was in Guatemala the second time, and the representatives of the embassy came to visit, the women running our organization suggested that having a man serving coffee would be an excellent way to demonstrate their commitment to “fighting the Patriarchy!” I don't mind serving coffee, I spent many happy years working in restaurants, and it seemed better than watching another movie. But I had viewed serving coffee to businesswomen and professor's wives to pay my way through college as conforming to the assumptions of the system, not challenging them. And when I volunteered to come to Guatemala, I hadn't come to fight the patriarchy, I had come down to help the Maya people, many of whom are themselves patriarchs. There is a series of negative stories about the conquistadors told in Protestant countries, which is called the “leyenda negra.” In Latin America there is a similar “leyenda negra” about the Yankees. I sometimes got the impression that my supervisors were subjected to these stories, because when they got back from meetings with our Guatemalan allies they would make cutting remarks as if I should feel personally responsible for every native American massacred by the US Army. Once the collective punishment starts being handed out, it's not possible to be innocent, but it is possible to be innocent of casting the first stone. Making people feel discontented can be a good thing, but only if you have a plan to channel that discontent rather than just leaving it to fester into self-hatred. If you're trying to raise awareness so that people do more than just stand idly by—a good supervisor should be able to come up with something for them to do when they do make a commitment. Asking some one to serve coffee to representatives of the Bush administration and calling it “fighting the Patriarchy” strikes me as a good signpost for the limits of what “consciousness-raising” by white college kids of either gender can accomplish.


There is a mathematical concept called an asymptote—which is when a curve continually approaches a value which it never actually reaches. Sometimes that feels like a metaphor for social change movements, especially the sort rooted in progressive ideology. We were trying to find a “different” approach. For a lot of NGOs it seemed to be getting away from the profit motive. But hostility toward the profit motive often manifested itself as a suspicion of people doing things which made them happy—whether there was a direct monetary reward or not. “Trying to find a different way of doing things” served as a wildcard people with organizational power played whenever they felt suspicious of some one else's pursuit of happiness. It felt like Harlan Ellison's Invisible Man, and the narrator's encounter with “the Brotherhood”--though the gender is different this decade.


I contrast that with my time by the lake—the hotels and restaurants, and the avocado plantation, all based on the profit motive, and therefore trying to develop a product other people would be willing to pay for. And the man who served coffee had a speaking role, he actually got to talk to the people he served coffee to. Changing what it means to serve coffee, so that the person in that role can meaningfully disagree with the people he serves it to, strikes me as more significant than changing who serves the coffee. And I thought of the difference between the people who wore indigenous dress because they were paid to, and those for whom it was an organic part of their lives. If asking men to serve coffee constitutes fighting the Patriarchy—I think a lot of for-profit institutions in Guatemala served a lot more coffee than we ever did. And the fact that they don't have to apologize for being a business, or searching for things which make them or their customers happy, means that they are able to carry on playing guitar, building sustainable buildings, and creating jobs for indigenous people.


This date is famous for a surprise airborne attack on the homeland which took place some years ago. Like so many things, our conversational habits lead us to search for a single point in the system at which to place blame. It should also be remembered that it is far more difficult to ignore the heroism of the members of the working class who wear uniforms like those of the FDNY and NYPD than before that attack. When placing blame, some people blame the man who a few days later, spoke of a race between only two horses. Others, in the habit of talking as if all human beings are puppets of Langley, smugly blame blowback from the CIA. If you think about it, it doesn't do much harm to Yankee power to have people making each other afraid of the organization HW Bush used to run. And the current system traps everyone. It can't be much fun being the president of a superpower if you have to apologize for saying you don't like to eat broccoli.


In any event there were probably many individual decisions without which things might have happened differently. One was made by the rulers in Riyadh, to whom Osama bin Laden had offered his services a decade prior to expel Saddam from Kuwait. But instead of accepting the offer, the Royal house prioritized their relationship with their fellow oil barons in the Bush administration. Some would say Washington was far more qualified to deal with the situation than bin Laden and his irregular tactics—but it was outsourcing a function some one with extensive experience in the highlands of Afghanistan probably felt should have been kept in-house. It is quite possible that bin Laden's subsequent career was not what he planned all along, but would have been significantly different if the princes had placed ties of belief over ties forged by dealings with that black liquid.


A few years ago, I read a book by Muhammed Yunus, a man who studied in the state of Tennessee before returning to Bangladesh and originating the idea of mircrolending. He advocates a double-bottom line, combining profit with other goals. He talks about working in an province dominated by guerrillas. After his banks were established, some of the guerrillas became his best workers. “They just needed something to fight for, and we were able to give them something better than terrorism.” Muslim men who had studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to end peoples' lives instead studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to improve them. These factors determine whether young men get jobs as defenders of the social order, or create jobs for the defenders of the social order. Like the boatman who took advantage of my ignorance by the lake, carefully observed instances of antisocial behavior can also create information which can help people understand how to create a world with fewer reasons for antisocial behavior. And getting through to an understanding of the dynamics of the system and the role information plays in it can be more important than a focus on what other people “should” think or do.


Had those ruling the land currently called Saudi Arabia behaved differently, there would still be another reason to remember this day. Vive Chile! Vive el Pueblo! Vive los trabajadores! [emailed September 11, 2009]