Interviews: Congressman Jim McDermott

A little departure from our normal interviews today; I had a chance to speak with Congressman Jim McDermott (WA-D) . Mr.McDermott is a politician who in the last few years has not only listened to the concerns of members of the punk community, but has become involved directly with them through his work with Punk Voter as well as his recent work with Anti-Flag on the Depleted Uranium bill:
H.R. 2410 -- The Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act.

Mr.McDermott talked to me about why he became involved with Anti-Flag and why he keeps fighting his uphill battle against entrenched interests who seek to prevent positive changes.

On Friday, he held a joint conference with Anti-Flag talking about his bill to study Depleted Uranium use, which, as of today the bill has 39 co-sponsors comprised of 38 Democrats and one Republican. He continues to work hard on getting the bill heard and finding out what kind of risk both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians face from the use of this weapon. You can read about that here.
You can cick Read More for our discussion.

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Hello Mr. McDermott?

Yes.

Yes, well thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Sure, my pleasure.

I guess the first thing I want to talk to you about is a little bit about just your overall kind of career - where you started off.

Well I was a physician training in the mid 60s when suddenly I had to face my two years in the military.

Right

After medical school I owed two years to the military. This was during the
Vietnam War. I had my passport and wondered what to do. In the end, I
served two years as an officer in the Navy. I was the Chief Psychiatrist
and the Long Beach Naval Station in Long Beach, California, dealing with casualties coming back. If you saw the movie Apocalypse Now, you saw the kids that tried the Navy thinking they’d stay out of the military, suddenly wound up to their ears in it, that’s where John Kerry was. So I came back from that really angry and upset
and decided I was going to go into politics to stop the war.

So I got involved and gradually of course the Viet Nam war ended, but I got hooked on politics realizing the tremendous possibilities there are for changing the world. And, uh, it never goes as fast as I want but I’ve been working at it ever since, and was in the same legislature for 17 years, and then I went from there to, I dropped out and went to Africa as a physician, I moved in the Congo for 7 or 8 months and the I came
back and ran for Congress in 98 and I’ve been here ever since. My goal has been to get a National Health Plan, so I really came to Congress clearly with my own mind made up why I was there.

that’s the first step in trying to kill an issue in government, is that they try to push you off to the margins - sort of marginalize you and make you seem like you’re crazy

Right and I guess you’re - the fact that you’ve been seen more first hand probably gives you a unique perspective on the effects of both, y’know, psychological things and something like depleted uranium which is a very real physical thing.

Yeah, I was, one of the things that went on during the Vietnam war was the use of Agent Orange. And in the course of my training and working after my military experience, I met a lot of veterans who in one way or another had been exposed to this and were having various kidney problems or problems with their wife having miscarriages - there were all kinds of things going on and the military always denies that being sprayed with Agent Orange had any effect on you whatsoever, it was
just something you washed off and then you went on your way.

Well, more and more the evidence built up and 15-20 years after the war they finally decided there was in fact a lot of illness caused by that. So I - when I got in to this Iraq business and people presented the idea of depleted uranium to me. To me it was like, Yogi Berra says its like déjà vu all over again, well I've seen this before, this was not - I’d seen this syndrome of government denying and
the fact being that later on down the road. So I decided I was going to try to get them to look at it now. And so far we haven’t been successful, but you know invariably I’m one of those people who believe you don’t get anything done if you don’t keep trying, so that’s what I really love, and that’s how I got involved with these guys at the record.

Right and I mean do you find it odd that you’re getting so much pushback when you’re not proposing a ban you’re just proposing further study.

Well you know that’s the first step in trying to kill an issue in government, is that they try to push you off to the margins - sort of marginalize you and make you seem like you’re crazy or something, but, no I don’t find it the least bit odd, in fact it raises the question further. If you don’t want to look, then why not? If you’re so afraid of looking, what’s going on out there that you don’t want me to see? And that’s really
basically, I think they do themselves harm by not having, putting this study through. They’d save the veterans, they’d save a lot of anxiety from people who think that may be the cause now, and or they might find that they really do have a problem that they better be thinking about.

Right, right.

Either way it’s a win-win situation as far as I can tell. But they see it as a lose-lose, and they don’t want to, it makes you wonder how much they really care about the veterans sometimes.

On that note, we hear a lot of reports about scientific studies on issues like global warming, and how even if a scientist makes a conclusive argument one way or another, it tends to be pushed out if it doesn’t follow the party line. Even if the study was done, are you confident that you would be able to make a difference in the long run considering their attitude towards other scientific work?

Well I guess the way I’d put it is this - I think that - I can’t give any guarantees about anything in life, except that I can give you the guarantee that if you don’t try, you’re gonna lose. And my view is that I’m going to try to fix what I think is not fair, and if I’m wrong, well then I’ve wasted my time. But if I’m right, then in the long run we’re better off, and I don’t accept the principle that "if
you’re not sure you’re going to win don’t try it."

That’d be like going up, buying a pair of skis and going up on a ski slope and saying "Well, geez, I don’t know if I’m going to get down without breaking my leg so I don’t think I’m going to ski" No one would ever ski if they operated that way. The way you do it is you put the skis on, you lean forward, you figure out whether you break your leg or do you slalom down the hill.
The military is afraid to put the skis on and lean to go over the hill.

That’s refreshing to hear. That relates to another issue I wanted to talk to you about, particularly in that this interview was going to be for a lot of younger people between y’know say 15 and their late 20s, and y’know a lot of people really do have, especially at this age, have a kind of a defeatist attitude about government.

There’s - I can understand why people might feel distressed. I’m a lot older than they are and I’m distressed so I can sure feel that’s its not unreasonable to be distressed but it’s unreasonable to quit. It’s unreasonable to quit because if you quit they win. And I refuse to let them win, I mean that’s just my feud with life, is that I’m not going to let you get me because I was afraid to try or afraid to look. That’s the
end of you and what do you do then?

Right. And you’ve been working with a lot of youth organizations like Punk Voter and Anti Flag, and what exactly is your goal from these kinds of partnerships?

Well first of all, this is the future and I’m talking about the life they’re going to live. I’ve got kids, I’ve got two kids, they’re not real kids anymore, I mean my daughter’s 39 and my son’s 37, but I’ve got grandkids, I’ve got one that’s just born and one that’s two and a half years old, so I’m really looking at the future, and at some point I’m going to be gone and my kids are going to stand around and
say "why did grandpa let this happen?"

I want my kids to say "My grandpa tried to fix it." And maybe it won’t work, I mean I (laughs) I gotta concede that it might not work. But I’m not going to concede it without a fight. And that’s basically how I view this, I think it’s a fight, and I think its one that we can’t afford to not go out and see if this is going to affect us because its our soldiers that are walking
around in that stuff, its our - its my kids and my neighbour’s kids that are walking around in that stuff out there and if we let that become as kind of a low level we’re going to wind up in -.

I went into hospitals in Iraq before in September of 2002, before we went to war, six months before we went, I was in Southern Iraq, in a hospital in Basra and the pediatrician took me to a room and showed me all these young kids with leukemia and said that
the rate of increase of leukemia was 600% and the number of children born with serious defects, not just cleft lips and things like that, but no eyes and no ears and all kinds of awful things, and that had increased almost 600% in the ten years since we bombed Iraq in 1991 in the first Gulf War. Now that dust has been laying around for ten years, people have been walking around, kids have been playing in the dirt - kids eat dirt, and all kind of stupid things. And so here
you’ve got a whole generation of kids being exposed, and their mothers and fathers walking around in it and breathing it in their mouths, and its getting into in their sexual organs and so ultimately it affects the kind of children they produce. So when you see that, I don’t know whether this is caused by the depleted uranium, what is going on in Iraq, but I saw an epidemic of child leukemia and an epidemic of malformed children.

It’s so bad in Iraq that a mother, when a
baby is born, does not say "Is it a boy or a girl?" she says "Is the baby normal?" That’s the question. So when you’re at that level, that’s when you realize that there’s really something wrong here. That we’re not looking at this and trying to figure out what is actually going on here. This is - there’s something wrong with us if we won’t even look.

That’s very sad and not just a little disturbing. One thing that definitely I hear a lot of from people in my peer group is that they find that despite the fact that they agree with Democrats on the issues, there are very few who seem to kind of have that steadfast resolve. There’s yourself, there’s people like Russ Feingold and a handful of others, but for the most part they find that people who are trying to speak to them are kind of wishy washy
about different issues. I mean Senator Clinton tends to be very middle of the road, not wanting to offend anybody, and its kind of left people feeling, you know, a little emasculated by the party. Do you think anything can be done about that?

Well, I don’t like to say anything about anybody else in politics but my own, and I think that what has to happen is that these people have to get involved and say "We’re backing him or her, we’re not backing that guy because he’s a mealy mouth; we don’t want to hear no mealy mouth". There’s a lot of mealy mouths out there. And I really think that they can have an impact if they get involved. I meant you’d be surprised -
that’s why I did openings here in Seattle for Pearl Jam and I did them for punk rock, Anti Flag guys and I did a lot of effort to get young people out and get them involved in this campaign this year because I thought it was important and we lost. And I mean, I was mad as hell when we lost. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to go out there tomorrow and try again. I mean life, if you quit every time you lost, I mean then you would never do anything because you
can’t win all the time, sometimes you lose. Sometimes it’s frustrating and certainly dealing with adults is frustrating. I’m not going to say that my generation is always doing what we said we would, but you don’t get anywhere if you quit.

I’m a stubborn Irishman. If I think something’s a good idea, I’m not going to quit, and we’re going to get there.

Right.

And I will not quit, I’m going to - I’ve got my grandkids to think about and by god I’m going to have them have a chance. If I don’t succeed, I will try, I did the best I could.

You mentioned that one of your great goals is universal health care of some kind. Now most studies show that people are in favour of that and yet it seems like something that’s been increasingly difficult to push through.

Now here again, I’ve been making speeches for single parent health care since 1972 (Laughs). But I’m a stubborn Irishman. If I think something’s a good idea, I’m not going to quit, and we’re going to get there, and I’ll tell you why we’re going to get there. Genetics, the human genome is being studied and pretty soon we’re going to know a lot about our where our future is genetically.

And at that point the insurance companies
aren’t going to want to get - there not going to want to insure you for anything that you might possibly get. At that point there’s no point in insurances, so I think that we’re going to be driven by the advances of science towards a single parent system. I think we ought to do it today rather than wait for ten years, more people will have lost their lives and suffered in ways they don’t need to suffer and we would take the bull by the horns and go after it. But
I’m one of those who think that there is every reason to keep pushing.

An old lady handed me a button one day from the ILU, the International Longshoreman’s Union, from 1947, which was for single payer health care, I mean that old lady was about 85 years old and she was still out there handing those buttons out, well, I gotta respect people like that. I respect people who hang in there and keep pounding away at what they think is right. That’s sort of my way of operating.

Right. Okay, now I mean I guess I probably should mention the Depleted Uranium Bill one more time, um, now based on the fact that there’s a petition right now to urge people to get co-sponsors for the bill, if enough people co-sponsor the bill is there a chance that it will have to be tabled?

Definitely. Oh yeah, you know, if enough people sign the bill, then you can pull it out of Committee essentially by just saying - we have the votes and we’re just going to start dealing with this issue. And I think it’s a hard way to go.

It would make much more sense if the Chairman would take it up and if the Democrats get in, I think we will bring it up. But until we get the Democrats in, we have to go this tough way around and it's hard man…

Right, right,

There’s this thing about John Kennedy where it said when he sailed a boat, he didn’t worry about where the wind was he tried to change the wind, and that’s really what I’m trying to do is change the wind. If the wind isn’t going in the right direction I want to change it, and get it over in another direction, and that’s really what I think your attitude has to be, and that’s why I like Anti Flag, I mean these guys, they didn’t want to be
drinking and getting into trouble so they sat in their garage and made music, and now they are big stars but they’re straight as hell.

I went in their green room and I said y’know "Can I have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine?" and they said "we don not have any alcohol in here, there’s no drugs in here." And y’know these guys are walking the talk and I like those kind of people because - they lost, they tried to get the vote out and it
didn’t work and they worked on The Opt Out Bill and now they’re working on this. Actually you can look on the congressional record and you can find the day that I gave a speech about them and I think we actually have a speech on my website, if you can get it, of my - of me standing down there with a picture of these guys with orange and black hair, spiky hair sticking up -

And I said y’know "Look at these people, these are our kids. They’re important and we’ve got to listen to what they’re worried about. And besides which I’m not going to worry much about the hair cause I had a Mohawk when I was 14."

(laughs)

He said "Dad, don’t you remember Black Flag? And Rage Against the Machine and all those people?" and I said "I used to block my ears and run away, I didn’t
like that music." But that’s what they’re listening to, so if they’re listening to Anti Flag, I want work with them.

I still remember when I got it. My Mother went down the barber shop yelling at the barber, and he said "Well he said it was alright." Sort of a manufactured a little truth there. Y’know these kids were listening to that music and I don’t necessarily like them but when I was talking to my kid about them he said "Dad, don’t you remember Black Flag? And Rage Against the Machine and all those people?" and I said "I used to block my ears and run away, I didn’t
like that music." But that’s what they’re listening to, so if they’re listening to Anti Flag, I want work with them.

You mentioned that you started off protesting the Vietnam war so I’m sure protest music is something you’re very close to.

Sure. But I remember when my kid said to me "Dad, what do you want for Christmas?" and I said "Oh I don’t know, why don’t you pick a record that you and I can listen to together." and that’s how I got to know about U2

Right.

He bought me U2 and I like U2 and I happen to think that Bono and those people are really, they walk the talk. On AIDS and Africa and all the things they’re up to, so my view is that I’m looking for people who walk the talk and I get excited by that and then I want to help in any way I can help.

Right. Well, thank you very much sir, I really appreciate it and I have to say your constituents are lucky to have you.

Thank you.