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.
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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 theyâd stay out of the military, suddenly wound up to their ears in it, thatâs 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 Iâve 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 Iâve 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.
thatâs 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 youâre crazy
Right and I guess youâre - the fact that youâve been seen more first hand probably gives you a unique perspective on the effects of both, yâknow, 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 - Iâd 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 havenât been successful, but you know invariably Iâm one of those people who believe you donât get anything done if you donât keep trying, so thatâs what I really love, and thatâs how I got involved with these guys at the record.
Right and I mean do you find it odd that youâre getting so much pushback when youâre not proposing a ban youâre just proposing further study.
Well you know thatâs 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 youâre crazy or something, but, no I donât find it the least bit odd, in fact it raises the question further. If you donât want to look, then why not? If youâre so afraid of looking, whatâs going on out there that you donât want me to see? And thatâs really basically, I think they do themselves harm by not having, putting this study through. Theyâd save the veterans, theyâd 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 itâs a win-win situation as far as I can tell. But they see it as a lose-lose, and they donât 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 doesnât 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 Iâd put it is this - I think that - I canât give any guarantees about anything in life, except that I can give you the guarantee that if you donât try, youâre gonna lose. And my view is that Iâm going to try to fix what I think is not fair, and if Iâm wrong, well then Iâve wasted my time. But if Iâm right, then in the long run weâre better off, and I donât accept the principle that "if youâre not sure youâre going to win donât try it."
Thatâd be like going up, buying a pair of skis and going up on a ski slope and saying "Well, geez, I donât know if Iâm going to get down without breaking my leg so I donât think Iâm 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.
Thatâs 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 yâknow say 15 and their late 20s, and yâknow a lot of people really do have, especially at this age, have a kind of a defeatist attitude about government.
Thereâs - I can understand why people might feel distressed. Iâm a lot older than they are and Iâm distressed so I can sure feel thatâs its not unreasonable to be distressed but itâs unreasonable to quit. Itâs unreasonable to quit because if you quit they win. And I refuse to let them win, I mean thatâs just my feud with life, is that Iâm not going to let you get me because I was afraid to try or afraid to look. Thatâs the end of you and what do you do then?
Right. And youâve 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 Iâm talking about the life theyâre going to live. Iâve got kids, Iâve got two kids, theyâre not real kids anymore, I mean my daughterâs 39 and my sonâs 37, but Iâve got grandkids, Iâve got one thatâs just born and one thatâs two and a half years old, so Iâm really looking at the future, and at some point Iâm 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 wonât work, I mean I (laughs) I gotta concede that it might not work. But Iâm not going to concede it without a fight. And thatâs basically how I view this, I think itâs a fight, and I think its one that we canât 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 neighbourâs kids that are walking around in that stuff out there and if we let that become as kind of a low level weâre 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 youâve 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 donât 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.
Itâs 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?" Thatâs the question. So when youâre at that level, thatâs when you realize that thereâs really something wrong here. That weâre not looking at this and trying to figure out what is actually going on here. This is - thereâs something wrong with us if we wonât even look.
Thatâs 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. Thereâs yourself, thereâs 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 donât 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 "Weâre backing him or her, weâre not backing that guy because heâs a mealy mouth; we donât want to hear no mealy mouth". Thereâs a lot of mealy mouths out there. And I really think that they can have an impact if they get involved. I meant youâd be surprised - thatâs 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 doesnât mean Iâm 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 canât win all the time, sometimes you lose. Sometimes itâs frustrating and certainly dealing with adults is frustrating. Iâm not going to say that my generation is always doing what we said we would, but you donât get anywhere if you quit.
Iâm a stubborn Irishman. If I think somethingâs a good idea, Iâm not going to quit, and weâre going to get there.
Right.
And I will not quit, Iâm going to - Iâve got my grandkids to think about and by god Iâm going to have them have a chance. If I donât 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 thatâs been increasingly difficult to push through.
Now here again, Iâve been making speeches for single parent health care since 1972 (Laughs). But Iâm a stubborn Irishman. If I think somethingâs a good idea, Iâm not going to quit, and weâre going to get there, and Iâll tell you why weâre going to get there. Genetics, the human genome is being studied and pretty soon weâre going to know a lot about our where our future is genetically.
And at that point the insurance companies arenât going to want to get - there not going to want to insure you for anything that you might possibly get. At that point thereâs no point in insurances, so I think that weâre 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 donât need to suffer and we would take the bull by the horns and go after it. But Iâm 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 Longshoremanâs 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. Thatâs 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 thereâs 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 weâre just going to start dealing with this issue. And I think itâs 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 manâ¦
Right, right,
Thereâs this thing about John Kennedy where it said when he sailed a boat, he didnât worry about where the wind was he tried to change the wind, and thatâs really what Iâm trying to do is change the wind. If the wind isnât going in the right direction I want to change it, and get it over in another direction, and thatâs really what I think your attitude has to be, and thatâs why I like Anti Flag, I mean these guys, they didnât want to be drinking and getting into trouble so they sat in their garage and made music, and now they are big stars but theyâre straight as hell.
I went in their green room and I said yâknow "Can I have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine?" and they said "we don not have any alcohol in here, thereâs no drugs in here." And yâknow 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 didnât work and they worked on The Opt Out Bill and now theyâre 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 yâknow "Look at these people, these are our kids. Theyâre important and weâve got to listen to what theyâre worried about. And besides which Iâm not going to worry much about the hair cause I had a Mohawk when I was 14."
(laughs)
He said "Dad, donât 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 didnât like that music." But thatâs what theyâre listening to, so if theyâre 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. Yâknow these kids were listening to that music and I donât necessarily like them but when I was talking to my kid about them he said "Dad, donât 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 didnât like that music." But thatâs what theyâre listening to, so if theyâre listening to Anti Flag, I want work with them.
You mentioned that you started off protesting the Vietnam war so Iâm sure protest music is something youâre 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 donât know, why donât you pick a record that you and I can listen to together." and thatâs 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 theyâre up to, so my view is that Iâm 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.