“Geezer in the Hole”: The Reality of Aging Behind Bars

Over the past few years there has been a growing interest in the increasing numbers of older prisoners. At times this interest has been accompanied by some piddling gestures to alleviate their miserable situation–for example, theoretically granting them leave to die “in the free world,” or perhaps showing sympathy for granny having to climb up three tiers of bunks to get a night’s sleep, or gramps asking for a cane (denied because it is a possible weapon) so he can get to the toilet without crawling.

Nonetheless, the dominant view from the corrections industry and most of the public is that these people did the crimes and now they have to do the time–even if the time reflects absurdly the long sentences instituted in the 1980s and 90s, and creates a new cohort of septuagenarian prisoners. In fact, most of the new interest in aging inmates actually has to do with money. According to a recent AP article:

The ACLU estimates that it costs about $72,000 to house an elderly inmate for a year, compared to $24,000 for a younger prisoner.The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the number of men and women in state and federal prisons age 55 and older grew 76 percent between 1999 and 2008, the latest year available, from 43,300 to 76,400. The growth of the entire prison population grew only 18 percent in that period.

“We’re reaping the fruits of bad public policy like Three Strikes laws and other mandatory minimum sentencing laws,” said David C. Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, D.C. “One in 11 prisoners is serving a life sentence.”

With prison costs escalating and states overwhelmed with deficits, letting granny and gramps out of the clink suddenly doesn’t sound so bad to some state officials. Old prisoners are expensive, and if we must take care of them, then why should local and state government’s foot the bill. Better to let the federal government pay instead, through Medicare and Medicaid. The leading predictor of criminal behavior is age (young), so there’s little risk involved in letting the geezers go; all that’s keeping most of them behind bars in the nation’s insatiable taste for punishment.

With all this in mind, I am reprinting an article that just appeared on Solitary Watch, another blog where I am editor along with Jean Casella. It is the story of Robert Platshorn, leader of  the “Black Tuna Gang” of marijuana smugglers in the late 1970s, an experience described in his book The Black Tuna Diaries. In 1980, he received what was then an unprecedented sentence of 64 years in federal prison. 

When Platshorn was released on parole in 2008 at the age of 65, he was the longest-serving non-violent marijuana offender in America. But as he wrote in a blog post for High Times earlier this year, that distinction ”won’t be mine for long. Many sentenced after me will soon be able to claim my title. They are serving LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE and will never get to spend another minute as a free man.” When Platshorn was convicted, he writes, “no one received a life sentence for marijuana. That changed in the early 80′s as Reagan stepped up this insane failure of a drug war.” According to Platshorn, several other non-violent marijuana offenders, including  Billy Deckle, are now in their sixties and seventies, and will likely never be released.

Here is what they have to look forward to: Surviving day to day in an environment so dangerous that a slip of the tongue often ends in death. Since the elimination of parole, federal prisons are populated mainly by young, uneducated, aggressive inmates serving absurdly long sentences. They have little hope and nothing to lose. Violence has become endemic in a system that has little or no reward for good behavior. Prison gangs find older non-violent inmates easy prey.

Inadequate medical care. It costs the taxpayers billions to provide even minimal health care for older inmates. Yet these are the people least likely to commit a crime after release. An older marijuana offender serving a long sentence is likely to die in prison for lack of medical care…

An extremely unhealthy diet. It becomes an obsession, trying find enough decent food to maintain good health. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s no longer possible. When I entered prison in 1979, the budget to feed an inmate for three meals a day was $2.62. When I left prison in 2008 it had shrunk to $2.25…This has to pay, not only for food, it has to cover repairs and replacements for kitchen equipment, civilian salaries, and eating utensils…You don’t have to be an economist to figure out, that since Bush decimated the prison food budget, the cost of inmate medical care has skyrocketed. Especially for older inmates, many of whom require a special or restricted diet…Now, the Bureau [of Prisons] will say that they provide special diets for those who require them. And it’s true. Sort of! Those diet trays usually contain so little edible food that the starving sick geezer ends up eating a piece of deep fried breaded sewer trout or a hunk of fried breaded mystery meat, just to stave off the terrible never ending hunger pangs. The results, a sick geezer who now needs expensive medications and has little or no chance of surviving a long sentence. Most of those geezers would pose no threat to society if released. It’s even worse when the geezer is serving forever for marijuana, a harmless substance, and an effective medication that is now legal in many states. How would you feel if that old pot smuggler was your Uncle Billy?

Geezer in the hole! “The Hole”! Segregation!…The Federal Bureau of Prisons thinks it sounds better if they call it the SHU (Special Housing Unit). Take my word for it, it ain’t special in any way you’d like to experience. During my almost 30 years in 11 different federal prisons, about 3 ½ years were spent in segregation. They got it right in the old movies, “the hole”. Now you might ask, why would a nice non-violent old dude wind up in the hole? Lots of reason! Someone “drops a note” saying the old dude’s life is in danger. Result many months in the hole. He gets in a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s self-defense. Into the hole! Uncle Billy gets caught coming out of the chow hall with an apple or a cookie in his pocket. The hole! The old pot smuggler has been forced to work in the prison factory because he owes a fine. A tool disappears from his work area. Everyone who works in that area is tossed in the hole. And so on and so on. Now what happens is: he has to eat whatever shows up on the meager tray that comes through the slot, or starve. Mostly he eats all the starchy crap because he’s been flat on his back all day and night, and he’s bored to death. Meals are the only break he looks forward to. Each time he leaves his cell his hands are cuffed behind his back. This is especially painful for an older inmate. He has to be cuffed while he crouches backwards with his hands pushed out through the lower food slot. This usually means Uncle Billy will forgo his three weekly showers and exercise periods. It’s no big deal when your young and supple, but for a geezer it’s a different story. The only way I can express it is, if you are over fifty, spend 90 days in the hole and you come out two years older. Fatter, slower, more depressed, and less likely to recover physically or mentally.

Its time for all the Uncle Billys to go home…

Blame It On the Geezers: Matt Bai’s Generational Theory of Politics

In Sunday’s New York Times, Matt Bai argues that it’s old people who are disproportionately driving the Tea Party Movement, and especially its anti-government venom and its strong racist element. “According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously,” he writes. “A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.”

 

Based on this data, and on the history of the last 70-odd years, Bai constructs a theory that divides American politics largely along generational lines:  

[A] sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys…

 

In other words, we are living at an unusual moment when the rate of progress has been dizzying from one generation to the next, such that Americans older than 60, say, are rooted in a radically different sense of society from those younger than 40. And this generational tension — perhaps even more than race or wealth or demography — tends to fracture our politics.

 

These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations, but they are more indicative of how young and old Americans approach the issues of the day, generally. Older Americans now — no longer the New Deal generation, but the generation that remembers Vietnam, gas lines and court-ordered busing — are less enamored of expansive government than their parents were. They fear changes to their entitlement programs, even as they denounce the explosion in federal spending. They are less optimistic about the high-tech economy, more fearful of the impact of immigration and free trade.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Mostly, what’s wrong with it is what’s left out. Bai (who is 41) mentions that todays old folks “lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s.” But who, exactly, does he think was carrying out the marches and riots? The exact same age group, of course–made up of my own generation and that of the Baby Boomers.

 

These people are today, for the most part, over the age of 60–the precise age that places our roots, Bai says, in a “radically different society.” Despite these apparently rotten roots, the generations that Bai criticizes (with a hint of oh-so-condescending compassion) managed to accomplish the following:

 

1. Launched and fought the Civil Right Movement, in which several dozen African Americans and a handful of white lost their lives, and hundreds more were beaten and arrested. Compared to this, the accomplishment of younger generations–voting for a black president–was a cakewalk.

 

2. Protested against and eventually shortened the Vietnam war. These protests were large, fierce, and widespread, and went on for years. Unless I somehow missed it, I’ve yet to see a comparable antiwar movement mounted today, among the young people Bai celebrates.

 

3. Supported the War on Poverty–not only with our rhetoric, but with our paychecks. (The top marginal tax rate in 1965 was 70 percent; now it’s 35 percent). In contrast, today’s Democratic party, starting with Clinton and continuing through Obama, has pretty much abandoned the poor to their fate. So today’s bourgeoise youth can declare themselves “progressive” without having to give up a thing.

 

The gist of Bai’s article is that our society will improve as we bigoted old geezers to die off, and make way for more broad-minded generations. But I wonder: Are there any among the younger generations who are going to fight the kind of fights we fought in this brave new world? If there are, they’d better stand up now. 

Robert N. Butler, 1927 – 2010: Visionary Psychiatrist and Champion of Elders

If you’re like most people, you may find that at about age 70, life begins to close in on you. You’re supposed to be retired by then with an adequate pension and/or a 401K–only you don’t have a pension, your 401K went down in the big recession, and to tell the truth, you  don’t want to retire anyway. You want to work, but there the job market is tight, age discrimination is rampant, and thanks to the Supreme Court, there’s virtually no way to fight it. You don’t have the money, or maybe the nerve, to strike out on your own, unless you call flipping burgers striking out on your own.

The advertisements for retirement investments and hair color keep telling you that 70 is the new 40, that you’re only as young as you feel. AARP’s magazines say the same thing–but the world they depict seems unreal and, to tell the truth, somewhat revolting. Because you don’t feel young–you feel old. And in today’s America, that’s hardly a happy feeling. You feel shoved aside, irrelevant, a relic waiting to hurry up and die. You realize you can’t remember things as well as you once did, have more and more of the proverbial “senior moments,’’ and start wondering how long it will be until you sink into dementia, maybe Alzheimer’s, at which point your life will really be over.

There’s precious little in our society that acts as an antidote to any of these thoughts. But for the last half-century, there has been one man: Dr. Robert N. Butler. A psychiatrist, activist, and visionary, Butler died on Sunday at the age of 83, and is being eulogized in the obituaries as the founder of modern gerontology, the man who coined the word “ageism.’’ Butler founded the National Institute of Aging at the NIH, and helped found the American Association for geriatric Psychiatry and the Alzheimer’s Disease Association; he also launched the first medical department devoted to geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.  He wrote influential books, advised politicians, counseled the World Health Organization, and he founded and ran the International Longevity Center in New York. 

Through all of this work, Butler inspired thousands, perhaps millions of people to think differently about growing old, and to treat aging and the aged differently. For old people, that transformation is even more profound, because it means thinking differently about yourself. I am one of those people whose thinking was changed, in some significant way, by Robert Butler and his work.

I was lucky enough to meet Butler a few weeks ago at a week-long series of seminars his International Longevity Center put on annually for a small group of journalists, called the Age Boom Academy. That one week produced some of the most astute briefings on every aspect of health policy and the challenges ahead that one could hope to take in–from research on Alzheimers, to the political assault on Medicare and Social Security currently underway in the administration and Congress, to the day-to-day work on the ground across the City of New York. What I had feared might consist of a bunch of self-serving medical and psych professionals was instead an immersion into the real world of the politics and economics  of medicine, tempered always by Butler’s vision. Despite his concerns for the scandalous lack of funding for research on Alzheimer’s and the aging brain, as well as the growing shortage of doctors trained in gerontology or even general practitioners, he approached his work with unyielding  optimism. I had no idea he was battling a life-threatening illness.

On Monday I was on a train on my way to New York, where I had an appointment this week to sit down with him to further discuss his ideas, when I received an email and learned that he was gone. Although he had acute leukemia, Butler reportedly had been working until three days before his death. At 83, he had seemed like he was in the prime of life–not because he acted like he was 40, but because he had succeeded in redefining 83 as a different kind of prime, for himself and for others.

 In a speech not long ago at the American Academy of aging, Butler quoted Proust from In Search of Lost Time, “If we mean to try to understand this self, it is only in our innermost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” He saw that quest as part of the journey into old age, and gave it significance and dignity. He said in his speech:

In the 1950s, psychology, psychiatry and gerontology textbooks devalued reminiscence and memories. Reminiscing was condescendingly called “living in the past,” and phrases like “wandering of mind,” “boring” and “garrulous” were used to describe elders who looked back. Actually, reminiscence was thought to be an early diagnostic sign of senile psychosis–what is known today as Alzheimer’s disease. However, I was seeing a different picture in vibrant, healthy individuals who were engaging in a fascinating inward journey.

More than fifty years later, Butler’s ideas are widely respected by psychologists and social workers, many physicians and research scientists, and even some policymakers. As far as they have caught on at all with the general public, it is thanks to his tireless work. He like to point out that demographics was on his side: More and more, elders will outnumber youth, and the voice of the geezers will grow stronger and stronger.

I was pleased to see, this morning, an eloquently written obituary in the New York Times by Douglas Martin. Fittingly, it included some remembrances of Butler’s past. As Martin notes, “Dr. Butler’s mission emerged from his childhood.” His parents split up less than a year after he was born, and he went to live with his grandparents on a New Jersey chicken farm. 

He came to revere his grandfather, with whom he cared for sick chickens in the “hospital” at one end of the chicken house. He loved the old man’s stories. But the grandfather disappeared when Robert was 7, and nobody would tell him why. He finally learned that he had died.

Robert found solace in his friendship with a physician he identified only as Dr. Rose. Dr. Rose had helped him through scarlet fever and took him on his rounds by horse and carriage. The boy decided he could have helped his grandfather survive had he been a doctor. He also concluded that he would have preferred that people had been honest with him about death.

From his grandmother, he learned about the strength and endurance of the elderly, he wrote. After losing the farm in the Depression, she and her grandson lived on government-surplus foods and lived in a cheap hotel. Robert sold newspapers. Then the hotel burned down, with all their possessions.

“What I remember even more than the hardships of those years was my grandmother’s triumphant spirit and determination,” he wrote. “Experiencing at first hand an older person’s struggle to survive, I was myself helped to survive as well.”

Butler spent his life passing on that painful but profound gift to thousands of other people. I feel fortunate to have been one of them.

Sick of Journalists? Read This Declaration of Independence

Journalism, as it is practised in the United States today, is largely the work of technocrats, trained in expensive journalism schools. There is another kind of reporting, that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida B. Wells and the old school muckrakers. They were not just fact gatherers, and they hadn’t gone to school to learn their trade; they were journeymen, fellow workers with a passion for making America live up to just the sorts of values we celebrate on Independence Day–values which all too often ring hollow.

Djelloul Marbrook is a poet, fiction writer, and retired newspaper editor (Providence Journal, Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal, Washington Star). He blogs at djelloulmarbrook.com. Marbrook’s got a plan that frees journalism from the confines of mainstream publications–which in addition to being circumscribed and commercialized, also have no way of paying for themselves, and are dying a slow death. 

The concept of citizen journalism is nothing new. But Marbrook brings a new twist to the idea: he wants to harnass “one of our most spectacular natural resources, the aging.” Retired old people have the skills and the time, he says, to “undertake the kind of restlessly inquiring journalism that has been sold out for quick profit.” I’d argue that there’s another advantage, as well– something that happens to some of us when we reach a certain age. We’ve just lived too long to take any more crap, and while we may be creaky and forgetful, our bullshit detectors are keener than they’ve ever been.

Here, then, is Marbrook’s modest proposal for an army of muckraking geezers:

Here we are, a graying nation overlooking what may be one of our most spectacular natural resources, the aging. Instead of imagining what they can do for us, we can’t imagine how to care for them.It has been many years since idealism was a vital force in our newsrooms and the offices of media owners. Idealism has long since been trumped by the next dollar and the one after that. Newsrooms have been shrunk to shells of their former selves.media have dropped, to investigate local, county and state government, to look under all the carpets that now bulge with wrongdoing.

No amount of campaign finance reform or revising the two-party system, as California has just done, will ever be as effective as scrutiny of local government. Only the vigilance of an informed electorate will rescue us from big money and ignorant or reckless candidates. Money, here as everywhere else, is at the root of the problem. The media giants that have gobbled up the local and regional press have decided that it’s too expensive to cover local affairs properly. The people themselves must step into this vacuum, and there is a way to do it.

Among our retirees are the forensic accountants, the financial analysts, the medical people, the conservationists, the scientists—the vast range of talents and disciplines that reflect our society—who could undertake the kind of restlessly inquiring journalism that has been sold out for quick profit.

It is a myth that editors and writers are the only ones who can conduct such inquiries. We don’t need polish as much as we need truth. And remember—any group of retirees is very likely to include a writer or an editor or two, someone who can polish the findings of others, just as rewrite people used to do in newsrooms.

What has changed that might make this idea feasible? The hyper-commercialization of the press, of course, but also the advent of the Internet. And it is precisely this kind of development, this kind of social use of the Internet, that the communications giants are now trying to prevent by bribing legislators into giving them the right to limit access to the Internet by imposed pricing tiers.

We have all read stories about retirees looking for creative ways to express themselves, to challenge themselves. Well, here is a challenge that could actually change the country in a very big way. Never mind the Tea Party with its bags of resentment, here is something positive to do, and it doesn’t depend on ideology. Yes, you will have disagreements with your collaborators, just as news people have always had, and often your opinions will be sorely tested by the facts, but remember that journalism is not about the proof of an idea, it’s about truth. Some notions, some hunches will prove out, some won’t. Some good guys will turn out to be bad guys and some unlikable guys will turn out to be the good guys.

You think your local or county government is corrupt? Do something about it. You can. Gather a group of people, not like-minded ideologues, but skilled people of every persuasion, pick something to look into, and do it, post it on the web and watch the monkeys fall from the trees. Worried about libel? I bet you can find a retired lawyer to vet your posts.

This can be done all around the nation, and what will result is a nation dotted with the kind of feisty local news organizations that we once had before the corporate giants chewed them up and spit them out as trivial mush.

Start anywhere, with whatever interests your group. Make a list and see what excites your colleagues.

Or, if you’re a loner, fine, go it alone.

Think of it—an online newspaper that has guts, that isn’t bribed by its advertisers, that can take pictures, investigate events, and publish hour by hour. It’s a revolution waiting to happen. And it won’t take a huge investment. No bankers, no licenses.You don’t need journalism degrees, you need nerve, verve, will power, and the skills you acquired in long careers, whether in nursing or mechanics or policing or accounting. As many skills are relevant as there are in society, because journalism is about everything.

You don’t need to join another fractious, angry splinter group. You don’t need to picket. You’re stronger, much stronger, than that. You can actually force the politicians and corporations to change by exposing what they’re doing and not doing. And that is exactly why the media are now owned by the corporate giants, so they won’t have to worry about scrutiny.

There are few limits to what you can do. Some of you can write about gardening or astrology while others of you pore through records in town hall or the school administration. Whatever your creative impulse is, there is an outlet for it in a citizen journalism.Remember this: if we do not exercise our right to examine public records, that right will wither, and soon the government—whether local, state or federal—will claim that we don’t have the right. That is why what has befallen local journalism in our country is so disastrous. A right that is not exercised soon vanishes…

What I am saying, as an old-timer and a retired journalist myself, is that you retirees can do it. And, if you find the right business minds among you, you might even be able to create viable business models that will eventually create jobs in journalism. You can do it, I promise you. There is nothing magical about journalism. It’s just dogged work, the will to find out, and a reasonable mastery of the language. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t need credentials. But it needs the high ideals that corporate greed has stomped.

 

Roszak’s “Making of an Elder Culture”

Few may remember it, but before the advent of Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare in the 1960s, the old were widely viewed as a spent force. Nobody talked about happy retirement, in part because, these were people who remembered only too well the Depression. Few looked forward to leisure worlds because the poor house was too recent in so many people’s minds. Before old age entitlements, tending to the old was viewed as the job of the family. If you didn’t have a family, then it was charity–you joined the begging class. And even if you did have a family, you lived knowing that the young and middle aged couldn’t wait to get rid of you.

The same is more or less true today. Some days it seems the entire city of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, is on a mission against the old. Of course, nobody would ever say that. But there is a war against the old going on here in the form of a vigorous, largely uncontested attack on entitlements—a fighting word for conservatives and conservative Democrats who simply can’t stand Roosevelt’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, and everything the stood for.

In his book The Making of an Elder Culture, recently published by New Society, Theodore Roszak, the cultural historian who more than three decades ago wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, sets out some of the grim history of old people in American society, and in doing so places elders within our current political world.

The old were in fact the worst victims of industrialism, primarily because they were not deemed worth saving. They belonged to that class of unwelcome dependents called the impotent poor—those who could not provide for themselves…as comfortable as many middle-class elders may be today, they share with all older people a long sad history of bleak mistreatment they would do well to remember. For generations the old have suffered wrongs inflicted on them by harsh public policy and often by their nearest and dearest….in the modern western world where the old have been seen as the claim of the dreary past upon the bustling forces of progress.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, Roszak writes, “aged workers became poor. The workhouse and county home were little better than the concentration camp. They were fed gruel, bedded down on straw or bare wood…they had no place to turn  save for their children…They were pictured as withered, toothless, bent, lean.’’

You must remember that as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, there was no senior lobby. The political pros never talked about a senior vote. Today all that has changed–yet Roszak sees in today’s entitlement wars a serious threat to the well-being of elders.

In the same way that organized labor was once regarded as a potentially tyrannical force able to achieve its own selfish ends, entitlement critics began characterizing seniors as a threat to the democratic process…

Nobody of any political stripe wants to risk the charge of granny-bashing,but the facts are clear. In the United States, gaining even  modest degrees of security in retirement has been a struggle against business leaders, political conservatives, and free market economists for whom money is the measure of all things.

Always remember, Roszak says, “the well-to-do are the first to tell us that there is not enough to go around.”

In his book, Roszak envisions a society in which rather tan cutting social programs for the old, we will extend them to younger people. Noone would resent Medicare, for example, if we had universal health care for Americans of all ages. He sees a future where the old and the young join to create a new world devoted to common humane goals: ending poverty at all ages, assuring education–laying the planks of a new society on the New Deal and LBJ’s social welfare project. Such ideas face an uphill battle in today’s political culture–but are no less inspiring for that fact.

I’ll be writing more about Roszak’s work in future posts.

Time for Hell’s Grannies to Ride Again

This is not a good time to be old in America. In addition to dealing with the usual burdens of aging–our aches and pains, and our worries about senility and death–we now have to contend with a backlash against the supposedly greedy geezers who insist upon clinging to life in definance of the public good.

On one side, we have pundits like David Brooks babbling on about old people stealing the nation’s wealth, and billionaire geezer-basher Pete Peterson bankrolling a campaign for an “entitlement commission” to cut Medicare and Social Security. Why should we expect a government handout just because we’ve worked and paid taxes all our lives? (Never mind that Wall Street has already decimated our retirement savings and home values.)

On the other side we have the champions of age-based health care rationing, led by “ethicists” like Daniel Callaghan, trying to convince us to go gently into that good night, while our corrupt system of medicine for profit goes on unrestrained. How would you like to be denied a kidney transplant or even a new hip, on the grounds of enlightened “cost-benefit analysis,” while the drug and insurance companies continue to rake in their profits?

It’s no wonder elders around the world are taking matters into their own hands. The only thing that’s surprising about the German geezer gang described in yesterday’s post is that it doesn’t happen more often. You hear about other incidents every now and then: an oldsters’ crime wave in Japan, or an octogenarian bank robber with an oxygen tank in San Diego. Maybe soon we’ll be seeing more elderly sapper gangs in action.

In the meantime, a reader dropped me a line last night with a reminder that there is indeed a precedent for all this, deftly portrayed by Monty Python. Seems to me that it might be time for Hell’s Grannies to ride again.

German Geezer Gang Kidnaps Financial Advisor Who Lost Their Money

The British Daily Mail today reports on what it calls a “gang of Old Rage Pensioners” in Bavaria who are accused of kidnapping and assaulting their financial adviser because, they said, he had “taken us for a ride.”

Keep in mind that this colorful account is from a British tabloid: Terms like “torture” are there for sensational effect, the events are still under contention, and none of the geezers has yet been convicted. According to NPR’s “The World,” the old people are charged with abduction and grievous bodily harm–the latter, apparently, for injuries caused when they hit the financial advisor with their walkers.

The four German seniors said they were so incensed over the losses that American-born investment specialist James Amburn incurred that they hatched the plan to kidnap him in a bid to get their cash back. They are charged along with an accomplice of kidnapping, illegally confining and causing grievous bodily harm to Amburn, 56.

But the court also heard that Amburn himself is now under investigation by authorities in Karlsruehe for suspected fraud.

Amburn was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, west Germany, where he was bound with masking tape and bundled into the boot of a car after being hit over the head with the walking frame of one of his kidnappers.

Prosecutors charged the two married couples, aged between 60 and 79, as well as the co-conspirator, with carrying out the kidnapping in order to recoup losses amounting to £2.3 million in investments that soured due to the international financial downturn.

According to the prosecutors, kidnappers, Roland Koenig, 74, and Willy Dehmer, 60, attacked Amburn outside his home and bundled him into an oversize cardboard box which they wheeled to the boot of a silver Audi saloon car.

He was driven 300 miles to a house on the shores of beautiful Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria – but not before escaping at a service station. His elderly abductors recaptured him and beat him with the walking frame, causing Amburn two broken ribs.

The court in Traunstein heard prosecutors describe the kidnapping and torture as ‘almost surreal–except it happened.’

For four days Amburn was kept in the cellar of the house in June last year, beaten and tortured by the pensioners who saw their comfortable retirement dreams evaporating before their eyes.

Another couple, retired doctors Gerhard and Iris Fell, aged 63 and 66, who arrived to assist the kidnappers, admitted their roles in the plot. Mr Fell was not in court due to illness.

Koenig and his wife Sieglinde, 79, made a partial admission but he, bizarrely, told the court that Amburn was there ‘willingly.’ He said he and the others had met Amburn in Florida in the 1990’s and they possessed holiday homes in the state. ‘He said he was a business adviser and promised us yields of 18 percent on our savings,’ he told the court. ‘At first that happened–but then he took the p**s.’

They met up co-incidentally with Dehmer who told them Amburn owed him $690,000. Together, say prosecutors, the plan coalesced to ‘teach him a lesson.’

‘The fear of death was indescribable,’ Amburn said, adding that he was beaten and tortured during four days of captivity in a cellar room where he was held naked. 

He was rescued when he was ordered to send a fax to release funds from a Swiss bank and managed to scribble a message on it for the recipient to call police. He said: ‘I told them that if I sold certain securities in Switzerland they could get their money and for this I had to send a fax to a bank.’

Allowed out of the cellar for a cigarette break in the garden while the kidnappers awaited their loot, Amburn attempted to escape over a wall. In the pouring rain he ran down the street pursued by his captors in the Audi A8 they had used to transport him to the house. Several people saw him, but Roland Koening shouted: ‘He’s a burglar!’

Amburn was then dragged back to the cellar.  Shortly afterwards, the Swiss bank telephoned police in Germany and a team of armed commandos stormed the house.

His captors now face a minimum of five years in jail each when the trial concludes in March. Their lawyer Harald Baumgaertl insisted before the court that his clients were not ‘big criminals.’ But the prosecution disagreed, saying they showed a ‘high degree of criminal energy.’

The World According to Howard Zinn

In his 2002 autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn wrote:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

There was nothing naive or sentimental about Zinn’s positions. He had seen firsthand the worst that humanity was capable of, and simply chose to confront it as a challenge rather than accept it as our final destiny. 

In this excerpt from the 2004 documentary also called Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn describes his experiences as an Air Force bombadier in World War II, which helped inspire his life’s work. The “great question of our time,” he later wrote, is “how to achieve justice with struggle, but without war.”

Howard Zinn’s legacy is the millions of people he has educated–and will continue to educate–through his personal example, his writings, and myriad projects based on his work.  Here’s one of my recent favorites, an illustrated video on American empire.

Auschwitz Survivor Raps Against Racism

The London Independent has a story today about 85-year-old musician and Holocaust survivor Esther Bejarano, who is collaborating with a multiethnic hip-hop band with an anti-racist message. Their first album, Per La Vita, was released last year, and a documentary about the band is being shown in German schools.

Esther Bejarano says music helped to keep her alive as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. Now, 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp, she has teamed up with a German hip-hop band to get her anti-racism message to today’s youth.

“It’s a clash of everything: age, culture, style,” Ms Bejarano admitted in an interview to mark Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday. “But we all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against racism and discrimination.”…

The daughter of a Jewish cantor from Saarbrücken in western Germany, Ms Bejarano studied piano at home until the Nazis came to power and tore her family apart. She was deported to Auschwitz, where she became a member of the girls’ orchestra, playing the accordian every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived at the death camp.

“We played with tears in our eyes,” Ms Bejarano remembered. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.” Although she survived, her parents and sister, Ruth, were killed.

For 20 years, Ms Bejarano has played music from the past – Yiddish melodies, tunes from the ghetto and Jewish resistance songs – with her children Edna and Yoram in a Hamburg-based band called Coincidence.

About two years ago, Kutlu Yurtseven, a Turkish rapper from Microphone Mafia, asked her about a collaboration to combat the growing racism and anti-Semitism in Germany. The octogenarian thought hip-hop “was really a bit too loud” but saw it as a way to reach Germany’s youth.

“We want to keep the memories of the Holocaust alive, but at the same time look into the future and encourage young people to take a stand against new Nazis,” she said. “I know what racism can lead to and the members of Microphone Mafia are immigrants and have experienced their share of discrimination as well.”…

Their audiences range from teenage immigrants at urban youth centres to an older crowd that might be expected to favour a more classical approach. “They love it,” Ms Bejarano said. “Even some of the older guests climb on the chairs and dance.” She said it can be exhausting to perform with young people, but she chuckled: “I’ve educated the boys. We’ve lowered the volume and I told them to stop jumping around all the time.”

Mr Yurtseven said: “I asked Esther how she can make music after Auschwitz, and she said if they had taken the music from her, she would have died.”

78 Year Old Jailed for Senate Anti-War Protest

Tetaz at an anti-war protest inside the Hart Senate Office Building, 2007. Photo by Lori Perdue.

Just a week ago, members of Congress were celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., with lofty paeans to his methods of nonviolent protest. But these platitudes go out the window when it comes to protests within their own decorous halls of power. On Monday, a D.C. Superior Court judge, part of the federal system, sent 78-year-old Eve Tetaz to jail because her chosen form of dissent, while nonviolent, “demeaned the act of protest”–and because she has simply refused to stop. 

Since 20005, Tetaz has been arrested 20 times and convicted 14 times for anti-war protests involving Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. Tetaz told the judge: “I believe that nonviolent protest against government policies will continue to be the only authentic form of individual political action.”  But she has mounted most of her protests in a city that, since 9/11, has taken on the character of a moated fort. In our nation’s capital today, it is notoriously difficult to mount any sort of demonstration, and civil disobedience is not tolerated. As reported in Tuesday’s Washington Post:

On Monday, an obviously frustrated Judge Lynn Leibovitz sentenced Tetaz to 25 days in jail and placed her on probation for a year after a jury found her guilty of disorderly conduct in October. Prosecutors say Tetaz and at least three other people attended a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing May 21, stood up as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) began to speak and yelled out: “No more blood money! Stop the war!” Police said Tetaz and the other protesters then threw dollar bills into the aisle of the Senate chamber. The money had been covered in Tetaz’s blood as well as the blood of the other demonstrators, drawn from each by a doctor friend. 

Standing next to Jack Baringer, her court-appointed attorney, and wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m not disturbing the peace, I’m disturbing the war,” Tetaz often smiled as Leibovitz criticized her decision to disrupt a Senate speech and pass out blood-tainted dollars. The move, Leibovitz said, “demeaned the action of protest” and bordered on assault. “Ms. Tetaz has repeatedly over time ignored court orders and our laws,” the judge added. She sentenced Tetaz to 75 days in jail but suspended 50 days — unless Tetaz is arrested again while on probation for 18 months.

Tetaz is the model of what I call a radical geezer, whose idea of “retirement” is having plenty of time to devote to the thing that matters to her most–her work with the group Witness Against Torture. Tetaz doesn’t let her “physical limitations” stop her, according to the Post:

She carries bags of medications for glaucoma and heart trouble. She also has leukemia, which doctors said they can treat with medication. Judges must speak loudly or she has to wear headphones to be able to hear the proceedings.

Widowed since 1995 and with no children, Tetaz says she’s the perfect demonstrator. She has no responsibilities. She is retired after spending 30 years teaching English in D.C. public schools including Eastern and Dunbar, as well as a brief time in 1948 when she taught school in Harlem, N.Y.

Protesting isn’t new to Tetaz. During the Vietnam War, she and other demonstrators were arrested on the steps of the Capitol. She spent three days in jail. “It’s often the poor, uneducated, inner-city kid who has no other recourse than the streets or the Army,” she said, days before Monday’s sentencing. “I’m fighting for him.”

Tetaz, like many of her fellow demonstrators, is spiritual. She often speaks of wanting to “follow Jesus” and lives a simple life in an Adams Morgan apartment with two cats and a bird. “In everything I do,” she said, flashing her large smile, “I want to be a reflection of my faith.”