Datelines
al., Kimberly French et.
Doctors Deface Tobacco Industry SEATTLE Police in Seattle hauled in a handful when they caught a man wearing surgical gloves hiding in the shadows of a cigarette billboard early one cold morning...
...The sugar workers of Hacienda Camili in Negros are typical...
...If it had been known forty years ago what is known now about the health risks of smoking, there's no way cigarettes would be allowed for sale," Blum says...
...In recent years, Guard units from many states have played war games in Honduras, and nine were scheduled to go in the first half of 1986...
...We mostly satirize the image of sex and glamour," says Lippman...
...The same slogan might be applied to this textbook...
...Many of them got interested when they were in medical school, tiring of seeing the same liver and lung ailments over and over...
...Koch approved the out-of-context use...
...The American Medical Association is just now calling for a ban of cigarette ads...
...We're talking about an overwhelmingly bad book, a piece of out-and-out propaganda...
...Lippman is an active member of a group of more than 3,000 fuming medical doctors who call themselves DOC (for Doctors Ought to Care) based in Augusta, Georgia...
...Aman uses Get Oregonized in class and defends it as a good teaching tool: "It raises issues, but no text is the last word...
...This textbook was funded by entrenched economic interests which are fighting to keep their heads above water...
...Light comes from a small oil lamp...
...The aide "wasn't opposing us," Warren says, "but she seemed to be buying time until we went away and dropped the issue...
...It's a mistake to portray this whole controversy as another chapter in the animosity between Portland and the rest of the state," says Sonja Grove...
...On this occasion, she has shared a meal of rice, mangoes, and canned fish with the woman who lives here, some neighbors, and the visitor who brought the food...
...They got the meeting two weeks later, but came away empty-handed...
...Sometimes we eat frogs, snakes, rats, or lizards...
...Just as you would drain a swamp to get rid of mosquitoes that carry malaria, I go after the carrier of the disease—advertising...
...Lippman had complained to the Seattle school board, which owns the land on which the billboard stands, but had gotten no satisfaction...
...To the slogan Camel Lights: It's a whole new world, Lippman added: of cancer...
...The mad medic models himself after an Australian group called Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BU-GAUP), which is, says Lippman, "10,000 billboards ahead of me...
...The workers say they don't have the money to pay the debts and don't earn enough to save...
...Nobody but DOC has demonstrated like this against an industry that is killing five times as many people as were killed in Hiroshima every year in this country...
...On the radio, I hear that they will take the land of the rich people," says Vista...
...It's more fun than rock climbing...
...On the back is a large outline of the state of Oregon with the letters "GO" boldly in the center...
...We usually eat only rice and camote [a type of sweet potato], casava, or banana," she says...
...After his arrest, Lippman threatened to turn the case into a publicity stunt, so charges were dropped...
...Vista, a slight, thirty-two-year-old woman wearing a faded T-shirt over a blue-and-white cotton dress, is secretary of the local chapter of the sugar-workers' union...
...Earlier meetings with his aide had been "very frustrating," according to CASA staffer Bob Warren...
...Opponents point out that the book never mentions state government, contains no index, and includes a glossary filled with such twisted definitions as "Resource: Supply saved to be used when needed...
...At a second meeting with the governor's aide, the activists got their answer: Governor Dukakis opposes Massachusetts troops ever training in Central America, and he will direct the secretary of public safety to inform the Guard's major general of his path-breaking decision...
...The lease agreements between the state and the Federal Government seem to indicate that Massachusetts has relinquished control to Washington...
...If DOC bus benches are designed to look like cigarette ads—same designs, same typefaces—but alter some of the words...
...The close of If you smoke, please try carlton turns into please try to quit, and It's the Ritz becomes It's the Pits...
...Campaigns like the one in Massachusetts are under way in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and other states, some of whose Guards are, like Maine's, scheduled to go to Honduras this year...
...Each state's governor may decide how its Guard is deployed, and Massachusetts is one of several states where campaigns have been mounted to persuade governors to refuse Washington their troops...
...It looks like the tags on chicken packages in supermarket meat cases here that announce Grown in Oregon...
...For the last eight years Aman has taught fourth grade in Lebanon, a mill town about 150 miles south of Portland...
...The text outlines, for instance, three ways to kill coyotes, echoes the timber-industry position that old-growth forests are "less productive" than second-growth, claims wilderness areas "produce no wood products because no trees are cut," and maintains that pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are necessary to agriculture...
...The Boston Globe lauded his decision on the National Guard, calling it "a signal to opponents of contra aid to wake up and start firing back...
...Plantation owner Felipe Lacson, a thirty-four-year-old ethnic Chinese, says he fired the men because they stole his fertilizer and sold it, after he told them he could not give them an off-season loan to buy rice...
...But the union has suffered severe harassment and repression by the military and hired thugs...
...Some troops are slated to build roads restricted to military purposes...
...The Massachusetts decision followed a six-month campaign by the Central America Solidarity Association (CASA) and Citizens for Political Participation and Action (CPPAX), endorsed by the Boston Pledge of Resistance...
...One escaped...
...At the same time that the Textbook Commission was considering whether to recommend approval of the book, district curriculum committees and school principals began to receive letters encouraging them to adopt the text...
...they allow families to survive in the slack time...
...In 1970, when televised cigarette advertising was 'banned' by Congress—at the behest of a tobacco industry alarmed at the success of counter-advertising among adolescents—the sales of cigarettes resumed an upward course...
...The cover is a muddy bluish-green montage of fish, wheat, cows, and mountains, with a small truck driving around a mountain base...
...The Lung Association is just now protesting sponsorship of sports events...
...He sits on blue bamboo furniture in an elegant home surrounded by a concrete wall...
...Massachusetts Won't Invade Honduras BOSTON As the Pentagon increases its penchant for sending National Guard troops on war maneuvers in Honduras, activists who oppose U.S...
...Simeon Drevfuss (Simeon Dreyfuss, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, is a free-lance writer in Portland...
...In January, Governor Michael Dukakis announced that the Massachusetts Army and Air National Guard will decline all invitations to train in Central America, making him the first governor to take such a stand...
...In a state dependent on natural resources for economic health, Get Oregonized has become a rallying point in depressed rural areas...
...Lacson is wearing metal-rimmed glasses and a pink La-coste shirt...
...Lobbying for acceptance of Get Oregonized is intense in districts throughout the state...
...Now they are trying to set the agenda, and those who think we ought to teach children to work with our natural resources rather than taking the money and running are left scrambling on the defensive...
...Now there's no profit, or it's very small...
...It's very seldom we eat fish or meat, and there is no milk for the children...
...Since then, Governors Joseph Brennan of Maine and Madeleine Kunin of Vermont have followed his lead, and Mario Cuomo has said he would keep New York's unit out of Central America...
...Milk costs eight pesos [forty cents] a can...
...The peasant rebels demand structural changes in agriculture to end a near-feudal system that denies land to most farmers and condemns them to penury as tenants or plantation workers...
...When I was an intern working in clinics, two-thirds of the stuff was caused by tobacco and alcohol," says Rick Richards, current president of DOC...
...A Textbook Case of Influence PORTLAND, OREGON No one would call the textbook Get Oregonized a slick and polished publication...
...In leaflets asking, "Will Massachusetts Invade Central America?," they opposed not only the Guard maneuvers but also the use of a National Guard base on Cape Cod for counterinsurgency training of Green Berets (who later train the Nicaraguan contras and the army of El Salvador) and the base's use by the Navy Seals, the outfit responsible for the mining of Nicaraguan harbors...
...There are no chairs or beds...
...DOC claims that sales should never have been allowed at all, much less pushed on the public with multimillion-dollar ad budgets...
...I was assigned to cover the wood products industry...
...And she disputes his story about the fertilizer, saying the workers had permission to take it and sell it...
...Dukakis refused to take a stand...
...The only world view presented is that natural resources are there to be exploited for personal or corporate wealth," says James Davis, education director for the Portland Audubon Society...
...It lives up to none of the criteria for textbook adoption...
...Membership in the National Federation of Sugar Workers, organized in 1971, has grown to include 70,000 of the 300,000 sugar workers in Negros...
...The average earnings are seventy-five cents to a dollar a day...
...DOC buys media time and space and sponsors speakers' bureaus for school classes on a shoestring budget, with volunteer time from member physicians...
...So he seemed to have some degree of authority over base procedures...
...The Louisiana Purchase, for example, is said to extend "from the Missouri River west to the Pacific Ocean," when its western boundary in fact was the crest of the Rocky Mountains and its eastern boundary was the Mississippi River...
...We've got just as much at stake...
...11 DOC tennis tournaments parody tobacco-industry sponsorship with a clown named "Martina Nosmoka-nova," a "Marble Row" of cigarette deaths, and courtside slogans such as Smokers Are Dying to Bring You Tennis...
...I've had enough...
...The sugar workers get only 120 days per year of paid work, and the loans are traditionally a planter's obligation...
...They cannot get work at Hacienda Camili because, they say, the owner does not appreciate their membership in the National Federation of Sugar Workers...
...They say he told them, "You and the union are subversives...
...The book is filled with "basic errors in writing mechanics, style, usage, and grammar," says George Venn, an English professor at Eastern Oregon State College...
...The billboard featured one of those curly-blond-haired mustachioed macho men lighting up...
...Intended for use as a fourth-grade social-studies text, the book was paid for by timber, agricultural, and business interests...
...The government has made contact with the rebels in hopes of achieving a cease-fire, but peasants who have spent years in the hills are not about to turn in their rifles simply because Ferdinand Marcos is gone and the new president is committed to human rights...
...But the answer isn't to step into the past and bring our children up for a world which has ceased to exist...
...The violence has not dimmed the peasants' hopes...
...So have smoking-related deaths...
...Their goal is to satirize the advertising of unhealthy products aimed at children, and their principal targets are tobacco (Ten-Year Supply—Only $7,000) and alcohol (Killer Time), and sometimes junk food (Coke Adds Weight...
...Planters get around the law by paying piece rates...
...Vista's husband and the other men leave the village before dawn to walk three miles to a plantation where they earn eighty cents to a dollar a day cutting and loading sugar cane...
...The textbook, they say, simply teaches children economic realities...
...No longer are they content to oppose school programs they don't like...
...Most graphics are crude line drawings, many pictures have no captions, maps contain little detail...
...At the same time, independently, Alan Blum was doing anti-smoking bus benches in Miami...
...Kimberly French (Kimberly French is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...The culprit was Michael Lippman, M.D., medical director of the North Seattle Public Health Center...
...Although the agricultural minimum wage comes to about $2.25 a day, Nita Cher-niguin, a representative of the Federation, says, "Not even 20 per cent of landlords adhere...
...Get Oregonized'has sparked the most heated education controversy Oregon has seen in years...
...It was my fourth billboard of the night," says Lippman...
...I have never seen such intense lobbying for the acceptance of a textbook," says Sonja Grove, who claims she received letters about the book before she ever saw it...
...We don't have anything...
...The doctors freely mix the lingo of medicine and Madison Avenue and use multimedia tactics: 11A DOC rock video shows a man with a Mohawk hairdo and Kiss makeup eating a handful of cigarettes...
...In struggle, when all people are united, maybe things will be better," says Vista...
...If something is not of economic value it's presented as having no value at all and therefore being expendable...
...The children get diarrhea, because sometimes we eat only vegetables growing wild on the bank of the river, or they only chew sugar cane," she explains...
...If we can do it peacefully, it's better, but maybe we cannot do it peacefully...
...Nor is there running water...
...mona R. hochberg (Mona R. Hochberg is a Boston free-lance writer and a member of the Green Berets/ National Guard Task Force in Massachusetts...
...For the poor people, that's a good idea...
...Marlyn Vista sits on the bamboo floor of a rough wood shack built on stilts in a village at the edge of the plantation...
...Life on the Plantation NEGROS, THE PHILIPPINES The people's revolution in the streets of Manila that brought Corazon Aquino to power has not stopped the guerrilla war in the countryside...
...In late January, a hundred demonstrators rallied at the State House, carrying signs that thanked the governor for his decision on the National Guard and asked for a meeting on the Green Berets...
...We can't afford to pay them more," says Lacson...
...It's time we had a textbook that tells it like it is, right from the coyote to clear cuts," says Donald Kruse, who is on the Board of Education and belongs to three groups that funded the text...
...Not following the lead of his New England neighbors is Governor John Fununu of New Hampshire, who not only sent his Guard troops to Honduras in April but also paid them a personal visit on location...
...Also in 1985, nine youths active in the union were arrested by soldiers, tortured, tied together, and brought to a field to be shot...
...It represents a complete shift in tactics by conservative, pro-business organizations," says Karen Throop of the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon...
...Six union organizers were murdered in 1984, and three disappeared in 1985...
...Historical and geographical inaccuracies also mar the text...
...A Board of Education hearing on the book brought hundreds of people from all corners of the state to testify about lumber-mill closings and financially strapped farms...
...Authority over use of the base is unclear...
...Everything is referred to as a crop, from trees to wheat to wildlife...
...Rod] Fiedler [the book's editor] told me that wood products are something we've got to hit, because just like farming and ranching they're basic to Oregon's economy even though the people in Portland might not be aware of it...
...The sugar planters are caught in the middle...
...But, says Karen Throop, "There aren't dozens of people being paid to fight this book...
...There are odd changes in the typefaces, as if revisions were made by different printers...
...We tell them their breath will smell, their teeth will turn yellow, and they won't look like the people in the ads...
...Ask your rice consumption from the union," was Lacson's advice, according to Vista...
...Counter-advertising seems to be the most effective approach, according to Blum...
...The Green Berets are definititely a stickier situation," says Lisa Fithian, a CPPAX representative...
...It's teachers and students and parents that direct what learning takes place...
...The peasants have even less, and they have decided to fight for themselves...
...Twelve-year-olds don't care about what's going to happen fifty years down the line...
...So those of us who have gotten a look at it have to do some organizing of our own...
...intervention in Central America have seized an opportunity...
...But use of the Cape Cod base by the Green Berets remains problematic...
...This January, the decaying bodies of three union organizers were found in a highly militarized part of the island...
...Petitions with 2,000 signatures asking Dukakis to keep the state's Guard out of Central America were submitted in November along with a request from CASA and CPPAX for a personal meeting with the governor...
...The two doctors met at a conference in Kansas City and founded DOC...
...the family sits and sleeps on the floor...
...Lucy Komisar (Lucy Komisar is a foreign correspondent who recently returned from covering political events in the Philippines...
...The Board voted 6-to-l to approve the book, so school districts are now free to choose it from among six texts approved for fourth-grade use...
...I look at the spread of cigarettes according to the medical model," Lippman says...
...I should have seen the controversy coming," says Mike Aman, one of the twelve teacher/authors of Get Oregonized...
...The most dramatic decline in cigarette sales occurred between 1968 and 1970, when cigarette advertising and counter-advertising coexisted on television...
...This whole experience has been one shock after another," says Sonja Grove, a special education teacher in Portland and a dissenting member of the State Textbook Commission which recommended that the State Board of Education approve the book for use in schools...
...Farm workers do not readily admit to direct contacts with the New People's Army...
...others are to stage combat maneuvers with the Hon-duran army, in obvious preparation for war against Nicaragua...
...11 A radio spot transforms New York Mayor Ed Koch's denunciation of gay bathhouses ("They are selling death") into a statement on cigarette companies...
...Doctors Deface Tobacco Industry SEATTLE Police in Seattle hauled in a handful when they caught a man wearing surgical gloves hiding in the shadows of a cigarette billboard early one cold morning last December...
...It could get the governor in heat with the Federal Government...
...I'm leaving you," his girlfriend snarls...
...the river serves as community toilet, bathhouse, and laundry...
...Yet a year before, when Cape Cod residents complained that torture training was conducted at the base, Dukakis declared that only "conventional" training, not torture or counterinsurgency training, could go on at the base...
...He says the twenty-six families here already owe him $2,500 for three years' debts...
...I often 'reface' billboards when they're low to the ground and when I'm incensed...
...Seven workers were killed and buried on the plantation of the mayor of Kaban-kalan in 1980...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
