ustxtxb_obs_1982_02_12_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

tween the end of the Civil War and the last recorded skirmish at Leech Lake, Minnesota, in 1898. The number is 943, including many large-scale encounters. Most resulted from broken treaties, most What links Polanski and Deere and my friend, the turtle fisherman of Isla Mujeres, is a denominator Deere described like this: . . our human rights were given to us by the Creator, and not by man. We want only to live by these human rights.” Again, that’s about what Polanski told me 38 years ago, and it is about what Cantu said that warm afternoon on his turtle boat and it’s not unlike some phrases drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Cantu, a refugee from the Allende overturn in his own country, the one that CIA spooks called “de-stabilization,” had escaped from torture in a Chilean prison for having upheld a free government. That torture included, he told me with remembered pain, the administration of strong electrical shocks to his genitals. He was all but castrated by the process and he was entirely impotent. Cantu had been, in Chile, an optometrist, and something of a dreamy intellecarrested, police seized from his library some writings by that dangerous Norteamericano, Henry David Thoreau. He quoted for me a passage I have toted around as baggage ever since. Thoreau was talking about what amounted to the theft of half of Mexico by the United States: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that it cannot be without disgrace to be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government.” I think Polanski is now dead, along with his dreams. Cantu is peddling turtle flesh in Hispaniola, and probably will never make it back to Chile. Deere? He adds up the sad arithmetic of his peoples’ history, and he knows an uphill scuffle when he sees one. But he goes on preaching, literally that, not only in the U.S., but abroad at Third World meetings in Africa and Europe usually as a representative of the American Indian Movement. I confess that, having met a few Indian leaders in New Mexico and Arizona, I approached Deere’s press conference with a very large grain of salt. I have seen about as many red Elmer Gantrys as white ones, relatively speaking. I had to swallow the salt. “Are you a violent man?” I asked him. He fixed his eyes on mine long enough to give emphasis to a slow, low-voiced reply: “I think there probably will have to be violence.” And then he handed me a copy of a speech he had made at an international conference. A couple of excerpts: “Today, all over our country, historians and anthropology people have dug. up the earth to find the history of the Western Hemisphere. But they have not found any jail houses. They have not found any prisons. They have not found insane asylums.” “In the Western Hemisphere, when our value system changed, another value system came. . . . That value system, of money, has separated us from the natural way of life. That value system we find to be destructive. And your families aren’t doing too well, either.” This, to a mostly white audience. Another thread ties together, for me, Polanski’s loss of his country, Cantu’s loss of both country and manhood, and Deere’s quixotic journey. My own country was partly responsible for what happened in Poland when the Soviet government shredded the Yalta agreements. My own government almost singlehandedly destroyed the Allende government. As for Indians Deere said it: “Go read some more history.” But before I do that, I believe I’m going to go watch Barton Creek water moseying through the escarpment and read some lines of Stephen Crane’s to the squirrels: `Think as I think,’ said a man, `Or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad.’ And after I had thought of it, I said, ‘I will, then, be a toad.’ I am going to do this because I cannot forget three brief conversations, in Poland, in Mexico, in East Austin. And then, once, now and future toad, I am going to act on an imperative necessity to holler “fire” in this crowded theater because the damned thing is on fire. A Walk on the Supply Side Reaganomics a ‘Riverboat Gamble’ By Alfred J. Watkins Austin Many Washington observers now conclude that Reagan’s supply-side advisors are either arithmetic incompetents or economic dunces. And at first glance, the critics would appear to be correct. Al Watkins is an Observer contributing editor and an assistant professor of Government at UT-Austin. This article is the first of a four-part series on Reaganomics entitled “A Walk on the Supply Side.” Instead of the low interest rates and inflation-free prosperity Reagan promised, the economy is plunging into a recession that many economists predict will be the worst since the 1929 crash. Government deficits would disappear by 1984, said Reagan. Now according to even the most optimistic projections, they are expected to soar above the $100 billion mark in each of the next few years and recent Congressional Budget Office analyses suggest they will be closer to the $200 to $250 billion range. Even David Stockman, the wizard of OMB. seems to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of his boss’ economic program. He was sent to the Reagan woodshed after telling Atlantic Monthly that the President’s tax package was a “trojan horse” and confessing, “none of us really understand what’s going on.” Unfortunately, this disillusionment with Reaganomics comforting as it may be to progressives and some antiReagan businessmen may be premature. Reaganomics is definitely not “Keynes in drag” as Wall Street investment banker Felix Rohatyn disparagingly described it in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last THE TEXAS OBSERVER 11