Activist Reviews
A Rocky Road to Peace

A Patriot After All: The Story of a Chicano Vietnam Vet
By Juan Ramirez
University of New Mexico Press
1999; paperback, $15.95

Review by Jan Barry

he path to peace, and peace work, is often long, twisting, and hard.

Surviving Vietnam battlefields, he struggled to find peace of mind. By his own account, he drank too much, took drugs, went AWOL. Drummed out of the Marines with an undesirable discharge, he robbed fast-food joints with a toy gun, high on the addictive rush of living dangerously. Realizing someone could get hurt, he gave up the bizarre sprees, enrolled in college and volunteered with the United Farm Workers grape boycott campaign.

“I was looking for something far removed from the war and the violence that I had committed on my heart and soul,” Ramirez writes in a frank, unflinching memoir telling a redemptive tale of how a macho Chicano GI became a peace advocate. His searing account offers insightful lessons for peace organizers looking to encourage such transformations in hot-tempered youngsters and adults.

Ramirez tells a classic story of how hard it is to be raised in a violent society and become a peaceful person. His career as a boycott activist, for instance, was cut short when he punched a cop who stopped him for drunk driving. He spent time in jail, raging until beaten senseless by guards. He asked a friend to lie in court about his less-than-sober condition. “I was ashamed of myself,” Ramirez recalled of his botched sally into civic activism. “Besides my drinking, my temper started to interfere with my UFW work, an obvious problem given the organization’s commitment to nonviolence.”

Intent on self-improvement, he worked to gain a college degree. In a politics course on Southeast Asia, a fellow student challenged his brooding silence on the war. Ramirez stormed out of the room and dropped out of college. “The blasting I had gotten from that woman brought all my guilt and shame about the war to the fore of my consciousness. I could not bear the thought of being confronted again,” he writes, describing an all-too-typical reaction by war veterans when pressed to talk about themselves.

That incident happened in 1975, the year the war ended. By that time, he says, “I had been convicted of drunk driving twice, assault on police officers, and resisting arrest during barroom brawls twice.” In subsequent years, he held and lost various jobs and underwent treatment for alcoholism and group therapy for veterans. “When confronted by the rest of the group,” he admitted, “I lashed out: ‘I don’t have the same problems as the rest of you guys in here.’” He felt his problems stemmed more from discriminatory treatment as a Mexican-American, as well as from drinking and drugs, than from engaging in combat.

Eventually, aided by a number of friends, acquaintances and lovers, Ramirez confronted his nightmarish war memories and worked on healing long-festering emotional wounds he had been self-medicating with booze, the buzz of street drugs, and bluster. He won an appeal for an honorable discharge, returned to college, and began speaking to high school classes on his views on war. At last, he writes, “I found a way to use a terrible life experience constructively.” He had found his voice, rough-and-tumble but articulate, to describe the battle many ex-soldiers wage to become productive citizens.

“What I have to say, and I’ll say it the day I die, is that we were wrong, and it is wrong to kill other people in the name of religion and ideologies,” writes Ramirez, who now runs a landscaping business in California. “As a veteran, I feel that what I can contribute, is to help heal the country, not just for my own sake but for all the lives that were sacrificed—Vietnamese and American.”

Jan Barry is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns.

Revisiting the Classics

The Shifting Sands of Righteousness

Casablanca (1942)

Review by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

efore media mogul Ted Turner cornered the classic movie market—before cable, even—Casablanca (1942) used to play pretty often on television. Four generations of my family watched it hundreds of times, holding our collective breath for our favorite part.

It’s not the legendary scene in which embittered saloon keeper Rick Blaine (played, of course, by Humphrey Bogart) says, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” The moment we love is more political:

In a corner of Rick’s Place, a group of inebriated German soldiers are singing the Nazi paean “The Watch On the Rhine.” The heroic Resistance fighter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried) strides up to the house band, eyes flashing, and says, “Play the ‘Marseillaise.’” The band leader glances at Rick. Rick nods, once. The band plays the first few notes of the French anthem, and Laszlo sings the words. The Germans sing louder. One by one, the habitués of the bar join in the “Marseillaise.” The Germans sing still louder, but they’re no match for the pro-French civilians. Drowned out, the soldiers give up in disgust. The “Marseillaise” comes to its stirring conclusion, and with tears in their eyes the patriots in the bar cry out, “Vive la France!”

Watching, tears in my own eyes, I always murmur along, “Vive la France.” It took 40 years for me to notice that they’re shouting “Vive la France!” on African soil.

That wasn’t my first critique of Casablanca, despite its anti-Nazi message. I had known for decades that its gender politics are antediluvian, to put it kindly: When Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) tells Rick, “I don’t know what’s right anymore … You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us,” she’s characterizing her role throughout the movie. And its racial dynamics are firmly entrenched in Hollywood of the 1940s. Most films of the time had no Black characters; Casablanca has one, Sam, the piano player portrayed by Dooley Wilson. Sam is Rick’s friend as well as his employee; yet when he calls Bogart “Boss”—even though the café’s white staffers also call him “Boss”—the title carries the weight of a century of Black stereotypes.

Looking Back
How do we revisit the classics, anyway? Whether we’re looking at pacifism’s biggest hits or pop culture favorites, it’s clear that few creators have been able to transcend their eras entirely, even when they’ve had political insights that were ahead of their times. In 1852, for instance, a fervent New England abolitionist set out to write a novel that would expose the immorality of chattel slavery once and for all. She succeeded; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin roused such anti-slavery passions that during the Civil War, President Lincoln was reputed to have described her—only half in jest—as “the little lady who started this big war.” Yet a century later, her hero, the superhumanly virtuous slave called Uncle Tom, had become African-Americans’ symbol of Black servility.

Or look at the work of Charles Dickens (a far better writer than Stowe). Dickens’ 14-plus novels laid bare every cruelty, hypocrisy and abuse spawned by the bumpy incorporation of industrial capitalism into the British class system, from the Poor Laws to the factory system to the traffic in women that was marriage among the wealthy classes. Yet Dickens was capable of playing to his readers’ worst impulses, as with the intensely anti-Semitic portrait of character of Fagin, the master thief of Oliver Twist. More to the point, he fiercely disapproved of those who tried to change the system; his radicals are bloodthirsty tigers, his union organizers cynical manipulators, his ambitious workers corrupt hypocrites, his rebellious women fallen sinners. All his heroes know their place and stay in it.

So, too, with those classic films that offered, in their time, some quantum of social criticism: They contain moments of insight—and moments of blindness. Take Charles Chaplin, whose brilliant comedies were also telling satires of the class system; with the partial exception of Modern Times (1936), Chaplin could depict women only as objects of desire. Showboat (1936) was consciously groundbreaking in its inclusion of both Black and white characters, yet cast the Black ones—even the great radical actor-singer Paul Robeson—in gratingly stereotypical roles. The powerfully anti-militarist Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) made the Burmese people of little consequence in the struggle for Burma between Japan and the Allies.

Back to Casablanca. Like the novels of Dickens and Stowe, like Chaplin’s films and Showboat and The Bridge on the River Kwai, it was on the right side of at least one issue when it was made, its love story a showcase for its characters’ anti-Nazi heroism. One nation’s “ownership” of another—like France’s of Morocco—was a non-issue, even to those segments of U.S. and European society who thought of themselves as opposed to colonialism (except, of course, for the Irish, who had a different perspective on colonialism from the rest of Europe). Fighting imperialism was on a back burner until the more pressing problem of Fascism was solved.

None of that stops me from returning to Casablanca with love, as I do to Dickens. I forgive them their trespasses against one or another aspect of my politics (I relish and therefore don’t have to forgive their sentimental excesses, but that’s another article). How do I revisit the classics? As they are, not as they might have been.

Nonviolent Activist editor Judith Mahoney Pasternak has written about the movies and popular culture in several books and for progressive media including Pacifica Radio, Tikkun and the late Guardian Newsweekly.