Monday, January 24, 2011

Battered by Capitalism, But Never Broken: John Ross, 1938-2011

Last week brought word of the passing of John Ross, the 73-year-old journalist best known for chronicling the utterly unique and inspiring saga of the EZLN, known more commonly as the Zapatistas. Based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, the Zapatistas burst into the international consciousness on January 1, 1994, attacking army posts on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. Although their initial military victories were followed by a strategic retreat into the Mayan villages from whence they came, their courage and charisma (embodied by the otherwordly, pipe-smoking, media-savvy raconteur Subcommandante Marcos) inspired the struggle against corporate globalization that won stunning victories from the streets of Seattle to the streets of Cochabamba to the ballot boxes of Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador, in the intervening years. And Ross, like John Reed and Ambrose Bierce in the days of Villa and Zapata, recorded this Mexican Revolution in Rebellion From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas (1995), The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the IMF (1998), The War Against Oblivion: Zapatista Chronicles (2002) and Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible (2006).

John Ross was in his mid-fifties by 1994, however, and had been toiling in the trenches of poetry and journalism for many years by that time. Born to New York Communists and coming of age in the Beat era, his public debut as a poet followed a Charles Mingus concert, and he was later instrumental in arranging bookings for Billie Holiday and Jack Kerouac. Like other of the Beats, he found a spiritual and political home in Mexico, punctuated by long stays in the Bay Area (including 18 months in prison for refusing to be drafted in 1964) and Arcata, California. Murdered by Capitalism, published in 2004, is something of an autobiography, interspersed with a speculative biography of E.B Schnaubelt, a lifelong radical from an earlier generation, who also made his way to the redwood forests of Humboldt County, California, after agitation on behalf of the eight-hour working day in Chicago led to violence in Haymarket Square in 1886 and then the framing and execution of four anarchists, including Civil War veteran Albert Parsons. Between Ross and Schnaubelt, who narrate the novel from the latter's gravesite (fueled by the shots of whiskey Ross shares with the long-dead Schnaubelt, whose epitaph provides the title), the struggles of the Haymarket martyrs and the Wobblies are connected with the Beats, the Sixties counterculture and the Zapatistas. It is an artistic and historical tour de force, striking just the right tones of irreverence and earned nostalgia, celebration of triumph and melancholy over missed opportunities: in short, the story of the American Left over the last 125 years or so.

But there was no finer embodiment of that history than Ross during his all-too-short 73 years. Greenwich Village Beat poet and jazz lover, West Coast Maoist and imprisoned draft resister, Humboldt County forest defender, and, finally, Mexican expatriate rebel journalist and champion of the most inspiring and internatinally-galvanizing revolutionary peasant army since the anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War. And I'm going to have to disagree with Joe Hill here: I think we should mourn this loss with some good tequila and a few puffs of Humboldt kind, and then we should organize like hell.