photo: nndb.com

DEMAGOGUE: An orator who appeals to popular desires or prejudices to further personal interests. (Oxford English Dictionary).

Example: Adolph Hitler.

Here are some snippets from Ann Coulter’s latest book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America:”

“Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power…(they) transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush-derangement-syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.”

“Although it is accepted wisdom that the Allies were too harsh on Germany after World War I, leading to World War II, in fact, the truth is the opposite. We didn’t crush Germany sufficiently the first time.”

This girl is good.

Most Tea Party-ers can manage only to spit and scowl and produce sentence-fragment beer-drenched ideas. But Ann? She can take those dribbles of rage and shape them into a voice. No, her ruminations aren’t based in much fact or real history. Hers are thoughts drenched in the slobber of an angry mob. Myths, molded into truths.

Thing is: the more you say something, and the harder you say it, what you say becomes, in all our minds, fact. That’s a pretty neat trick.

Maybe Obama’s folk should try it.

The argument itself is insulting. Not taking race into account in the application process simmers with racism. The message is: keep everything equal across the board. Whites, Asians (who are the predominant population in colleges), African Americans, Latinos, just ignore their cultures. If the non-white folk have what you need to get in, welcome. But if you don’t, you’re out.

Because if you don’t have that beloved 4.0 (or above) grade point average, you’re just dragging down the universities.

In high school I averaged a C, sometimes a B-. I got into a small Catholic college because I wanted to be a priest. The college had a seminary inside. That’s the only thing that got me in: the beloved Church’s desperation to have more unmarried clerics in their crew.

Two years later I left the seminary (yeah, over a woman).  I most students who need bucks to finish, I got desperate. Dad was an Appalachian coal miner, fifth-grade education. Mamá an immigrant from El Salvador and a secretary. Not much cash there. But they pitched in.

At the University of Iowa I checked in with the student aid office. The fellow looked up that gobble-di-gook name of mine and said, “May I ask, are you Latino?” “Yes,” I said. “Well,” he said, you know we have scholarships for minorities. I think we can get you around fifteen hundred.”

Fifteen hundred for the rest of my time in college (two years were left me). But man I milked that money for all it was worth. I worked on my grades. There was something empowering about Iowa’s gift. It sparked off in me the recognition that most of my life I had ignored my Latino side (Why? Shame? Living in a white world? Hell I don’t know). That money–the only money I’ve made off of my culture–propelled me into a deeper commitment to my studies.

And here’s when you have to boast in order to prove an anecdotal point: I am the first halfbreed-pocho college grad from both my working-class cultures, due to the scholarship, Dad’s ass-busting risks going down a shaft every day, and Mamá’s scraping under the sofa for change. My ninth book was released this past week. I’ve told stories on NPR and now do commentary for PBS. I’ve made a movie. I hold an endowed chair in writing at Mount St. Mary’s College in L.A.

I didn’t do this all on my own. Another thing about Latinos: most of us recognize that we don’t live in a bubble. We may be individuals, but we live in a collective of support: comunidad. Familia. That may sound trite. But I tell you, it’s real.

Most working class “minorities” (we’re slowly becoming the majority. BOO!) don’t have much access to cash. But we’ve got access to our roots. And if a university decides to allow a little off-white skin color in, taking the chance that someone in our reservoir of half-educated bilingual East-LA vato-tongued youth will rise up as a leader, artist, scientist, then that school’s all right by me. Because it’s stripping away at racism.

Hey: maybe that’s the real reason why the Tea Party ilk want to sieve the brown folk from the colleges. They’re  afraid that more of us will get endowed chairs & write books & give our opinions over national radio. God knows what will happen to the country if that happens.

There was a logical reason for this: The New York Stock Market plummeted three years previous. When the U.S. gets poor, the rest of the world gets poorer. And in countries like El Salvador, the poor get desperate. So they organize.

That pissed off and frightened the Salvadoran Oligarchy: 14 families who owned the nation. So they sent in that guard dog Martinez. And he shut down the organized masses by killing them.

The 14 families weren’t alone: the whole country wanted to be saved. And they too believed that Martinez would save them. You could have called them the “Tamale Party:” growing admirers of a demagogue who would become their savior.

Martinez, like Hitler, also did what everyone else before had failed to do: he fixed the Salvadoran economy. He created jobs, got people back to work, started little wars with other Central American countries. He pulled the country up by its bootstraps and got it running again. My mother remembers that people admired him for that.

Martinez was a great leader. Psychotic, but great. The 14 families had done something brilliant: put somebody in power who was clear in his politics, with no allowance of questioning.

Tamale Party. Tea Party. I watched the recent Republican debates, and was relieved to see what idiots they are. But I also got worried, because we’re desperate these days, and will turn to anyone to will promise they’ll pull us out of this economic quagmire.

But the Tea Party has yet to find a good Martinez. Or Hitler. Someone with a huge, larger-than-life personality. A really, really professional demagogue. Someone who will rise like a spark that hits the gas tank.

It doesn’t help that Barack Obama is the new Jimmy Carter. I liked Jimmy,  but he too depressing for our American Dream beliefs (that we can all become Donald Trump). So we elected a guy who promised happy, happy days ahead.

But Barack (and I voted for him) is worse than Carter. He yawps platitudes. He’s lost his cojones.

The timing is perfect: the Tea Party grows like burning daisies. They’re looking for someone who will fix this mess up quick. They’re keeping a watch out for their own General Martinez. Or that other guy.

What I love about McNair Scholars: they hang out. They talk.  I love it when students stay in a classroom after class just to pasear.

That for me was the best part of college. We used to get together with our professors after class. Back then you could have a drink with your teacher, which, for us was usually scotch. Today you can’t do that, and it’s not important because it’s just being there that matters.

Everyone agrees that colleges today are regressing into vocational technical schools, especially with for-profit shams of universities raping students’ checking accounts with empty promises of employment. Bad times.

Mine is a very strong liberal arts college (Mount St. Mary’s in LA), but we also get the pressure to quantify our disciplines. You know, such as “Quantify the essence of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and show its practical influence upon the Dow Jones.” Show that, with an English degree, you will definitely get a good-paying job. Or better, screw English & become a business major. No offense, business majors; but as the cancer of marketing roots itself  in the nation’s universities, the capacity to think in terms of philosophy, literature and art, turn flaccid. Desiccate. We’re dropping in the civilization polls. Philistines. Scratching our asses with a stick.

So here are these tremendous young men and women in a small classroom at CSUN, talking with professors and other students about U.S. politics in Central America and how we’re pushing our Manifest Destiny hegemonic-erection into every crevice of the globe. Even without the scotch, it just don’t get no better than that.

Romilia's chasing the bad guys once again.

Ya know, the other day I blogged about letting go of my movie “Tamale Road.” Sending it through the front door, like a child going off to college. Goodbye. How it hurts.

Don’t get me wrong: it does hurt. Hurts to finish up a story & send it out to the world, not knowing if (like your kid), it’s going to get tromped on or shepherded or forgotten.

But this year, when my two daughters returned to college for their second years, it didn’t break my heart as it did last year. I was able to say, “Love you, see you when you want to come home, and have a great semester and did I tell you I love you?” They took off, and I got back to work.

My work now is sending the newest Romilia Chacón thriller, Blood Daughters,” out into the world. Started the book tour in New York, and it was just a good time (those two most beautiful woods in the English language for a writer: “Sold Out”)

. There she went, my FBI girl Romilia, taking on the bad guys. I read from the book. People bought it up. That’s what it’s all about.

I’ll be on the road for the next four months, telling the world about Blood Daughters and happy to sign copies. That’s not so bad.

The movie is about my mother, me, and a lost family: When Mom was a child, her father was murdered. She was taken away from her family. Two summers ago I, after running around every corner of El Salvador, I found that family. This summer we reunited Mom with her Reyes kin, after a separation of eighty years.

After two years spent in El Salvador and behind the editing desk, it is finished. Of course, there will be weeks of “rewrites.” As any novelist (a literary novelist) will tell you, writing is rewriting. You go over and over the manuscript, tightening the syntax, making each sentence (which is the DNA of a book) spark and crackle and light up the night.

Making this movie has been writing a memoir, only with a Canon XH A1Click to view slideshow. camera and Final Cut Pro. You begin with an idea, a story, only to be surprised, even shocked, at its ending. Writing or documentary filmmaking is like driving at night: you can’t see your destination, but the headlights, which show you only a hundred feet ahead, are enough to get you home.

You don’t work toward an ending; that kills any story, as it has become formulaic. All you do is follow the characters, watch what

they do. Once you’re in pretty deep, the characters go from stick figures to living, demanding people. And they take you into a woodland that you’ve never before visited.

I suggest this to my students; and, rightfully so, some of them turn afraid. It’s most frightening to follow behind a story, ignorant of where and when it will end. It will take you to the voice–at times loving, other times cruel–of your mother; to the movements of an abusive uncle; to the friend who saved you from some spiritual oblivion. It is excitement, wonder, and pure terror. The writer breaks the rules of the threatening voices in your head (that mother, that uncle). They take you there, safely, to the place you’ve been tauaght not to go.

I write because the words keep me alive.

Van Nuys: The Beverly Hills of the San Fernando Valley

The truth finally came out when my son David invited Arnold over. They planned to walk six blocks up to the movie theatre in our neighborhood. Arnold’s mother put a stop to that. “I don’t think that’s safe.” Arnold, mind you, walks all over his Sherman Oaks neighborhood. But that wasn’t gonna happen in Van Nuys.

“Why the heck is everybody scared of our neighborhood?” my daughter Emily asked over dinner. I had no ready answer. We have kids over all the time, because we’re a popular house. Only because I cook a lot. I make homemade Doritos and bake honey wheat bread. And up until recently, the parents didn’t mind making the drive to Van Nuys and letting little Arnold come by for a play date.

But now Arnold is bigger, thirteen, and he’d love to walk the mean streets of Van Nuys with David. Something our kids do a lot. They walk to McDonalds, to Maria’s Pupusería for Salvadoran food. Just to get out of the house.

I try to put myself in the other parents’ shoes. We’re seen as the rough area. More homeless, fewer Starbucks. The streets in our neighborhood have been quietly ignored by Town Hall, so the potholes work on the bottom of your car. Unlike neighboring Encino and Sherman Oaks, most of the faces you see on my block are Guatemalans and Armenians, Vietnamese and Salvadorans. Ironic, as I remember a friend in West Hollywood warning us when we first moved here, “Oh, you won’t find any culture in Van Nuys.”

Pawn Shops, 99 Cent Store, & Salvadoran Pharmacies (where they sell magic candles)

I try to empathize with our friends’ fears; but it’s gotten old. Have they seen drive-by shootings in my neighborhood? Have they witnessed bank heists, or drug busts? (Okay, so I’ve witnessed a few drug busts when I walk my dog) I don’t think that’s what they’re afraid of. I think it’s what they see when they drop their kids off: the struggle of working class America. The inevitable growth of poverty during economic chaos. I think, just maybe, they’re afraid that the way things are going, they’ll be living here soon.

Our old pal

Get a case of ameobic dysentery.

While filming the documentary “Tamale Road” in El Salvador this summer, my son Jose David got amoebas from eating french fries off the street. Fries that are loaded with dirt kicked up from tires and grime from handfuls of dollar bills and the sweat of a woman’s work.

It hit Jose David so hard, he passed out on me. He’s six feet tall; I’m a wee five eight. I had to carry him over my shoulder and toss him into the back seat, where he vomited all over his mother. And I mean all over.

He spent two days in the hospital. His body sucked in six bags of IV’s. This was nothing new to the doctor, a specialist in gastronomical illnesses. ”Good you got them out of the countryside fast.  But they’ll be fine. They’ve got enough in them to get through this.”

Which is Central American doctor-talk for They’re not from here. They’ve eaten well all their lives.

When my wife Michelle and I lived in Nicaragua and Guatemala in the nineties, ameobas and food poisoning and cysts and worms crawling up your throat were dinner table talk. We took Flagyl every six months or so, after losing liquid from just about every orifice. Flagyl rips through you like a pilgrimage of lit torches. But man it works.

Just spit 'em up.

In our first days there, I noticed a girl, about six, walking in front of her family’s one-room house. She had blonde hair. Her stomach, large as a watermelon. A doctor in our  group explained it. “Blonde hair, malnourished. Her stomach’s loaded with protozoan shit.” He gave a guess as to how long she’d still be around.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Jose David after the third IV, “I’ll never eat fries again.” And from that vat of nausea and fever, he figured something out: “Not to compare, but now I’ve got a taste of what the poor go through.”

Yep.

Poverty’s one of those subjects we get squishy about. Guilt mostly. I see two reactions in LA regarding the homeless: some folks help them out. Others disdain them, and aren’t hesitant to show it. I’ve watched a good friend, a wonderful guy, berate a vet under a bridge who’d held his hand out too long. I’m not sure where that anger cromes from. Maybe it’s fear that, in these days, a lot of us could end up on the curb.

I hated watching Jose David vomiting up green bile and something that looked like smashed Oreos. But I was happy about his analysis.

It’s a lot of work, staying healthy in Morazan, El Salvador. Water: boil it for twenty minutes so the hard shells around the ameobas break and the wiggly guys burn. Food: If you can’t peel it or boil it or burn it, don’t eat it. When friends offer you tamarindo juice, either try to find out where the water came from or toss it out the window when they turn their backs. I got good at that.

And when all else fails, just head home. I mean, we’ve got that option, right?

Our beloved herb

The DEA’s been tromping around the Los Angeles National Forests. They’re storming into marijuana farms and ripping out all the grass. It’s the war on drugs: get ‘em where it hurts. Burn out their crop.

Believe me, it doesn’t hurt. The growers are doing dandy. It’s a big national forest. Lots of places to set up shop.

Face it: the DEA’s fighting a ludicrous battle. We see their helicopter landings on the evening news, dropping alongside a hiking path and storming into the woods. They look so powerful, so potent, storming in with their guns and their weed eaters.

They’re about as potent as a vasectomy.

It’s becoming obvious: If we legalized and taxed the bud, we could pay off our national debt in ten minutes. People wouldn’t go to jail on a drug rap, only to come out of prison a trained gangster (or dead). They could smoke their doobie and wash it down with brandy with no fear of reprisal.

But I’m for legalizing it for a different reason.

Entire Mexican families are slaughtered by the drug cartels that we buy the marijuana from. And, since so many of us are lighting up, there’s no end to the massacres.

This is the one time (that I know of) that my students think I am sooo uncool.  I’m arrogant. A self-righteous prig. They  get pissed off. I wonder why?

U.S. business is good for the cartels. When we’re lighting up in Des Moines and Paducah and Portland, we don’t get the whiff of blood that the border’s bathed in.

That’s why medical marijuana is so wonderful! It’s a nice, slippery slope toward legalization. During prohibition, my great grandmama used to sell “elixir” for colds, flu, broken bones, headaches, shingles, and bad marriages. 90 proof elixir, cooked up in her cabin. Maybe she helped repeal the idiotic law.

Prohibition was a joke back then, and it’s a joke now.

So let’s start a movement: We’ll all just swear off the bud until those idiots in D.C. make it legal, taxable, and on sale at your local Albertsons. We’ll fast from the grass until the Mara Salvatrucha gang stops taking machetes to the children of dope dealers.

Who’s with me?

Here’s a terrific article about the pot plantations in our beloved Los Angeles National Forests:  http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/08/18/28305/pulling-pot-plants-drug-enforcement-angeles-nation/

I just finished reading The Art of Memory by Francis Yates. It deals with the skill of remembering through image techniques–creating images to remember a word or a name. Through images a professor can memorize the names of all her new students in three minutes. A man can memorize the numbers of his four credit cards in a handful of seconds. You don’t need a photographic mind for this; it’s a skill you can learn.

We’re quickly losing that skill.

According to Yates, the first blow to memory came, ironically, with the invention of the printed word. No longer did Homer’s disciples need to memorize, verbatim, The Iliad. You didn’t need to create images to remember something. You could just write it down.

Yates wrote her book in the sixties. She died before seeing the techno-boom.

I’ve written against the Kindle. But It’s not the Kindle that vexes me, because it’s just another book. In comparison with all the other inventions, the Kindle may be the least harmful to our memories (like a novel, it fills our heads with images).

But other machines rip the images out of us and make us forget things that were once so important. The smart phone dials the numbers for us. The GPS  tells you to turn right and drive four-point-three miles down Route 66. No need to remember the way home.

Twitter could be an exercise in how to write quick, concise phrases. But most are sudden eruptions of thought,  poorly written and forgotten in a tweet. Texting? I’ve had students write business letters with and lol and omg. They’ve forgotten how to write.

But we don’t forget stories. We remember “Once upon a time.” That phrase is hidden within every novel: “Once upon a time there was a man who spoke to a young woman through thick glass and ate rude people.”

Novelists must remember the past. Faulkner’s thought “The past is not dead. It’s not even past” is the storyteller’s creed.

Think about your own story: The image of that first kiss with Hannah Mae O’Brien in second grade will thrill you to your dying day.

I once told my nephews a story about my dad: how he once pulled his ripped finger out of the beak of a two-foot wide turtle, wrestled the animal into the river and, with a jagged edge knife,  filled the river with turtle blood. My kin has never forgetten the image. They’ve asked me to tell that story over and again.

But now there are fewer storytellers. Everyone’s too busy looking at a screen. The only images we see are virtual. They vanish with one finger-swish across the screen.

I feel us slipping into oblivion, where only the machines remember.