Editor’s Note:  The article below was written during the dark days following the World Trade Center tragedy. It is reprinted now, March of 2012,  on the occasion of Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday.–-Hardly Waite.

A. J. and Munro

by Gene Franks

When I was young,
They packed me off to school
And taught me how not to play the game.

–Jethro Tull.

Back in the dark, dark days of World War II when I started to first grade in Okemah, Oklahoma, the town where Woody Guthrie had started to school two and a half decades before me,  I had to make a hard decision on the first day.  On the playground I was told that at Lincoln School  you had to be in A.J.’s gang or in Munro’s gang.  There was no in between.  You were with A. J. or you were with Munro.

The gangs rode imaginary horses,  chased each other around the red brick school building,  and shot at each other from ambush with imaginary guns.  Those were the old, uncomplicated days when a kid could point a finger at another kid and say bang without being turned over to a policeman or a psychiatrist.

Being a greenhorn, I did not personally know either A.J. or Munro, but I learned quickly that A.J.’s gang were the good guys and Munro’s gang were the undesirables.  Of course, I quickly said that I was in A. J.’s gang.   Whenever asked, I said proudly that I was in A. J.’s gang.

I did not know how A. J. got to be leader of the gang, because he was a pretty ordinary kid. But I was proud to be in his gang.

In the ensuing weeks, I caught only an occasional glimpse of Munro.  I was not even sure that the person I saw was Munro.  But I was sure that Munro was dirty and had long,  greasy hair and crooked teeth.   He needed a haircut.  We guys in A.J.’s gang were in the majority.  The big majority.  We had haircuts from the barber shop and good clothes. Our moms made us comb our hair.  Probably Munro did not have a mom, or she did not love him or make him comb his hair. I did not want anyone ever to think that I was in Munro’s gang.

By the time I graduated  from 4th grade at Lincoln School, I was no longer so intent on belonging to A. J.’s gang.  In fact, A. J. and Munro were  gone and a new generation of leaders had replaced them.  The Munros by that time did not look so dark and scary, nor did the A.J.s look so gallant.  As I got older, it got harder and harder to tell the A.J.s from the Munros.

I never saw Woody Guthrie.  He had left Okemah and was in California  writing and singing about the Depression before I was born. Woody Guthrie was hated in Okemah, my hometown and his.

My favorite song in my early years was “The Oklahoma Hills Where I Was Born.”  The man who wrote this passionate love song about a state that never treated him very well, Woody Guthrie, the great balladeer of the Depression,  was openly scorned and ridiculed.  I heard ugly, smutty stories about his family. The man who wrote

This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York Island,
From the redwood forest to the gulfstream waters,
This land was made for you and me

was accused by his country of being a Communist and so was hated in his hometown. In Okemah, the Communists were as feared and as hated as the Jews and the Catholics. Woody had been cast into Munro’s gang, and I caught on that I no longer could stomach being part of A.J.’s.

Now that I am older and the line between the good guys and the bad is blurred,  I am again being told that I have to be in one gang or the other.  In the same words and with the same bravado that were used by the schoolground bullies in 1945,  the President is telling us: You are with us or you are against us.  We are good, they are evil.  If you’re not with us, you are against us.

The problem is, no one seems to know who “we” are or or who “they” are.  We are told that we are at war against “the terrorists.”  Who are the terrorists that I am told that I hate? Are they dark men with crooked teeth whose mothers do not love them?  Am I being told to hate  the Irish terrorists or just the dark-skinned terrorists?   Are we going to hunt down Henry Kissinger?  The Chileans are anxious to “bring him to justice”  for his many and considerable acts of terrorism against their country.  Will we hunt down the killers of the 600,000 Iraqi children under five who have been taken from mothers who loved them by U.S. bombs and sanctions?  If so, will we start chronologically with the President’s father, or work backward from  Madeline Albright and Colin Powell?   Madeline Albright said that killing a half million Iraqi children was “worth it.”   Can anything possibly be “worth” killing half a million children?  Half a million is 150 times the number of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001. Imagine the anguish of the mothers of Iraq.

Now, in October, 2001, people are putting American flags on their homes and their vehicles to tell the world that they belong to A.J.’s gang. I do not have an American flag on my home or my truck. It is not because I do not love America but because I do not want my flag to be mistaken for a vote for vengeance on an ill-defined enemy.

Once, after an act of great violence had killed innocent people,  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. heard the outcry for vengeance and retaliation. He said in a speech: “To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.”

Dr. King was a great Christian. Our President does not seem like a Christian to me. He seems more like the bully, bragging in the schoolyard.  “You are with us or against us. We are good, they are bad. We will win. They cannot hide from us.”

The fate of our country may well be decided by how many of us “have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate” and  stand in the middle ground of reason.

This land is your land, this land is my land.

This land does not belong only to the members of A. J.’s gang.

This is Woody. Not Me.

Where is Dick Cheney, now that We Really, Really

Need Him?

The Oil Crisis in the Gulf Rages On. 

    “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
    A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

Editor’s Note:  Tiger Tom wrote this piece smack in the middle of the BP Oil Dilemma in the Gulf.

Dick Cheney has always been there when America needed him.

When we needed someone tortured, Dick Cheney was there.  When we needed to protect our rich from taxation, Dick Cheney was there.  When we needed someone to look after corporate interests and assure that our elite were never inconvenienced by government interference, Dick Cheney was there for us.  Whenever we needed a country bombed, a village torched, or a democratically elected government in a Third World country overthrown, Dick was there to get the job done.

But now, when we have a hole in the Gulf floor that’s spewing oil with the fury of ten thousand galloping horses, Dick Cheney has dropped out of sight.

I, Tiger Tom, ask you if it is reasonable to expect Barack Obama to fix an oil leak.  What does Barack Obama know about oil leaks?

But Dick Cheney has been an oil man all his life.  He was director of Halliburton,  the biggest oil well fixer on earth.  If Dick Cheney can’t fix a leaky oil well, who can?

It is time for America’s hero to do his stuff.

Dick Cheney Facing The Hole

So I, Tiger Tom, propose that Dick Cheney be flushed out of his hiding place and encouraged by a red-hot poker applied to his slimy ass to dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, plunge his snarling puss into the hole in the pipe, and plug the leak with his head.

That’s my plan for fixing the leak.  Do you have a better one?

Parking Attendant in Jakarta Brings Water Treatment Industry to Its Knees

Pure Water Products Model 77 Countertop

Countertop water filters are simple but effective devices. They require little in the way of installation, and they are easily moved from place to place.

The diverter valve (A) replaces the faucet’s aerator. That’s all there is to installation. Screw off the aerator, screw on the filter’s diverter valve and the filter is ready for service.

To operate the filter, turn on the cold water faucet and allow water to run into the sink. Then pull out the small knob on the diverter valve. This diverts water from the sink faucet through the small tube to the water filter housing(B). Inside the housing is a replaceable filter cartridge. Water passes through the filter cartridge, then leaves the filter through the spout (C), from which you fill your container. To turn off the filter, just turn off the cold water faucet. The diverter valve will pop back into place restoring your sink faucet to its normal operation.

More about countertop water filters

The classic countertop style shown above is quite versatile. It can be made into a double or even triple filter simply by attaching single units together.

Now almost all countertop units use replaceable filter cartridges, although a few of the old-style disposable units are still sold.

By far the most common application of the countertop is to provide high-quality drinking water by removing chlorine and other chemicals from city tap water.This is accomplished with a simple replaceable carbon cartridge. However, by providing the proper specialty cartridge a countertop unit can be made to reduce such diverse contaminants as cysts, lead and heavy metals, fluoride, nitrates, and even bacteria.

The countertop unit shown above is the classic style which sits beside the sink and has its own spout.

Double Countertops offer twice the filtration capacity as well as extended treatment potential.

There are other less popular styles. One, which uses the “return” diverter, has two hoses rather than one. The diverter valve sends the water to the filter then a second hose brings the filtered water back to the diverter valve to be dispensed into the user’s container. Go here for a picture of a unit with a “return” diverter.

Technically, the tiny “end of faucet” filters sold in retail outlets and the pour-through pitcher-style filters are also countertops, but being purists, we’re going to confine our discussion to the two main styles described above.

More about countertop water filters.

“Outside of a dog, a countertop water filter is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to drink water.” –Groucho Marx.

How Permeate Pumps Work

Permeate Pump

Unlike electric pumps that boost inlet pressure to reverse osmosis units, the unique “permeate pump” enhances performance without actually providing additional pressure for the inlet side of the unit. The permeate pump, instead, greatly reduces the back pressure from the RO unit’s storage tank. This allows the RO membrane to take full advantage of the pressure that it has.

Permeate is water treatment jargon for the product water of the reverse osmosis unit–water that has been treated by the membrane, the water you’re going to drink. Brine is the rinse water, the water that is carrying away the impurities rejected by the membrane, the water that will ultimately go down the drain.

The pump works by storing the hydro power of the brine, the reject water, and using the energy to power the permeate under pressure into the unit’s storage tank.

RO storage tanks in undersink units use air pressure to push water out of the faucet. With standard RO units, the unit must force the water into the storage tank. This robs it of pressure and thus efficiency. With permeate pump units, the pressure from the reject water is used to overcome this back pressure from the tank and to power the permeate into the storage tank.

The result is a quite remarkable increase in unit efficiency. Since the RO unit can fill the tank much faster without the hindrance of back pressure, far less reject water is used and the permeate, or product water, is purer.

Here’s how the flow through the pump works, with reference to the picture above:

Brine In. Black Tube. Water leaves the membrane housing’s brine port and goes to the pump, under pressure.

Brine Out. Yellow Tube. After providing power that is stored in the left side of the pump (think of it as winding a clock spring to store energy for later use), the brine exits and goes to the undersink drain pipe via the yellow tube.

Permeate In. White Tube. The permeate from the RO unit’s membrane enters the right chamber of the pump. There is no back pressure. The permeate collects in this pressure-free chamber until the brine side of the pump releases energy and powers it out of the chamber.

Permeate Out. Orange Tube. Powered by the stored energy from the brine, the permeate water is forced into the unit’s pressurized storage tank via the orange tube.

How The Pump Works

For more about permeate pumps from our main website.

See also on the Pure Water Occasional’s  site,“The Amazing Permeate Pump,” by Gene Franks.

And, by the way, when you talk about reverse osmosis units, don’t display your lack of understanding by calling the brine “waste water.” It isn’t. The brine is as important a part of the RO final product as the permeate itself. The brine performs the essential function of carrying away the impurities and keeping the membrane clean. It isn’t “wasted” any more than the water you wash your hair or or mop your floor with is wasted.

Say “waste water” once more and you’ll feel this wrench on your knuckles.

The Island of Diego Garcia, B 52s and You and Me

A Letter from Lindsey Colleen to any interested people in Britain and the U.S.A. about injustices elsewhere

Dear people of Britain and the USA,

I write from Mauritius. You may not remember quite where that is. Although, then again “The Overcrowded Baracoon” by V.S Naipaul, especially since he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, may just stir a memory, if ever you came across his bitingly accurate travelogue where Mauritius is depicted as a lousy hell-hole of a place. His story was banned by the Mauritian government at the time.

Or the word “Mauritius” may evoke the equally accurate tourist brochures showing luscious green islands, where it never rains of course, a place so perfect for visitors to holiday in, that there are no people actually living there. No factory workers on piece rates, no sugar cane workers in that hot sun, no computer workers linked to satellite, not even hotel workers as human beings. Maybe just as stage props for dreams.

But there are people living here. In all the contradictions. And some of us have a link with you. Through our shared history. That’s how it is that I come to write to you, who vote in and are citizens of Britain or the US? I, who vote here and am a citizen of Mauritius.

It’s all because of an island.

Where Is Diego Garcia?

It’s a particular island that you, over there, and us, over here, share responsibility for. Only maybe you don’t know that you share this responsibility. And while we know we do, we can’t do enough about it so long as we are on our own.

This island is being used for waging war.

In Mauritius, it is hard to find anyone who agrees to the island, part of our country after all, being used for B-52’s to set off from to go bombard the cities of Afghanistan. Our hearts ache to see the children in the rubble the next morning. Maybe there is someone here who agrees, but I haven’t met the person yet.

The Mauritius Foreign Affairs Minister did publicly “give assent”. So he agrees. But he only says it in his formal speeches as representative of the state. At a political party rally, he would certainly not try it. The people are too angry with “America”.

I’ll share the story with you, the story about the island. It is a “small story”. But it is one that will perhaps help understand the deepness of the rage felt in so many places against the powers that be in your countries. A rage often wrongly projected on to “Americans” as a whole. A rage that sometimes makes it hard for people world-wide to pardon the ignorance amongst ordinary folk in the US and Britain about the role of their elected governments in “the rest of the world”. (The rest of the world is such a big place.)

And this rage here, and I would think elsewhere in the rest of the world, too, has somehow got mixed up with the horror that spread on the day of the attack on the World Trade Centre, an attack by missiles made up of passengers and aimed at the level of the hearts of the Twin Towers. Causing collapse. And the terrible emptiness left at Ground Zero. Giant in rubble. Enough to cause everyone on the planet insomnia. And yet somehow the recurring image, no matter how much I try to wipe it from my mind, is that of Goliath being felled by the hand-made sling of the new millennium, a carpet-cutter.

And then? As if bombarding Kabul from B-52’s could rout out young men with carpet cutters.

But, I am speaking today, in particular, of an island. The island of Diego Garcia. And the role of the Diego Garcia military base on it. A US base it is, in the Indian Ocean. In the Republic of Mauritius, more specifically. And curiously, just one week before the 11th September came and changed everything, the Bush administration announced that Diego Garcia was being expanded to take in all the hardware and troops from US bases in Europe that, they added, would from then on be gradually phased out.

The story I will tell is so evocative that you may not have believed it, were it not for all the articles in November last year on the High Court in London’s stinging judgment against the British state in a case brought by people from here. The time had come around for a court action for the right of inhabitants to return to the island, when all the relevant facts, after a 30-year period of being held under secrecy laws, were “declassified” in Britain, in 1998.

The story is another story of a terrible emptiness.

In 1965, in the preparation for the Independence of Mauritius, the Harold Wilson Labour Government in Britain decided to act illegally and to cut out part of Mauritius and hold on to it, as a condition for Independence, which was to be “granted” in 1968. This kind of blackmail is against the UN Charter. A colonizing power cannot impose conditions on a part of itself, that is to say, on one of its colonies, in exchange for Independence.

Britain then tagged on some of the Seychelles Islands (Seychelles was still a colony too), and made up a new fiction of a “colony” on 8th  But whatever the price, the US Government is the receiver of the stolen goods.

We want to close this base down.

We want the terrible emptiness of the tarmac runways out! And the concrete docks out! We want the emptiness of all the military hardware out, too. We want to regenerate the coral around these islands. And the palms.

Living life. We want Diego Garcia to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site immediately on the closure of the base.

But, more than anything, we want to heal the terrible emptiness in the hearts of a people forcibly removed. We want to heal the tearing apart of a country. We want people to be free to go back home.

There have been UN resolutions, year after year, for the reunification of Mauritius through the return of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos. Only the US and UK governments voted against. But these two votes have, so far, been enough.

The 1995 UN “Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear-Weapons Free Africa” was signed by all the countries concerned, but on the insistence of the representatives of your two countries, there were the infamous “dotted lines” scribbled in around Diego Garcia.

So Diego Garcia is not “nuclear free”. And nor are Pakistan and India. Which is all the more reason for all of us to say “no” to war. And “yes” to the closing down of the base.

I write to ask if perhaps you could start by writing to your MP’s and Congressmen to inform them that the theft of the islands and the receiving of stolen goods was done without the knowledge of the people of your lands, that the forcible removals of our people were done behind your backs, that your people would never have condoned this ultimate violence, that you want the people of Diego Garcia to return to their homes, that a Court judgment has granted them the right to return, that the base is illegal and must be closed down.

That the base must be closed down in any case.

We ask this to be included as part of the movement towards ending the war. As part of the movement for peace.

And as we all know, peace only comes with justice. And justice only comes when we find out about injustices being committed near and far, and all over the rest of the world, so we can put a stop to them. It is these injustices that sometimes breed the ideas that sometimes breed terrorism.

At other times, the injustices breed rioting. In Los Angeles and in Mauritius. In Harare and in Northern Towns in Britain. In Algeria and in Indonesia. And whether it is terrorism or rioting, it brings in its wake, repression.

So, we need coherent, conscious movements against the war, and for justice worldwide. And justice, as we all know in our hearts, is only born in the movement towards equality. The e-word. You are not allowed to say it in good company anymore. It is only permissible in reference to past revolutions.

But it is, curiously, precisely the e-technology that may help now.

We live in a world of sufficient technological advancement to permit a much better form of democracy than we ever dared dream of before. Democracy at the work place. Democratic control over finance. Where democracy will be much more than casting a vote to choose between two political parties, both financed by private companies, once every five years, where you live or where I do.

Democracy in which human rights in all spheres – political, civil, economic, social, cultural – gain broader and broader definitions through our struggles, wherever we are.

Democracy where human beings gain in dignity. Democracies from which guns and land-mines are not exported to prop up dictatorships in countries unknown, nor to make profits from warring factions in countries elsewhere in the world. We have to inform ourselves and act. Together.

So that dog stops eating dog. And horse horse.

Lindsey Collen, For LALIT, in Mauritius 16th October lalmel@intnet.mu

Lindsey Collen was born in South Africa and lives in Mauritius. She is the author of several novels “There is a Tide”, “The Rape of Sita” and “Getting Rid of it”. “The Rape of Sita” won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region in 1994 and was longlisted for the 1996 Orangeprize. Her latest book is called “Mutiny”. She is a human rights’ activist in Mauritius, active in the women’s right’s movement, in the movement for social housing, in an organisation for adult literacy and in the political organisation, Lalit.

For a brief, Americanized “history” of Diego Garcia, with map, please go tohttp://www.infoplease.com/spot/dg.html.

For a complete and well-documented history of the British/American theft of Diego Garcia, please go tohttp://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=diego_garcia.

Secret US Prison on Diego Garcia

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