2005: Bad Year for Goliath
How About David?
By Rebecca Solnit 
To say that it was a bad year for Goliath doesn't mean it was exactly a good one for what George Bailey, in annual holiday It's a Wonderful Life reruns, calls "the little people." U.S. public opinion has almost caught up with the rest of the world in opposing the war, but Iraqis are still being bombed and American soldiers are still dying.
I write this from Buenos Aires, which attracts activists from afar for its progressive social movements, but up close is more compelling for its armies of the poor -- such as the cartoñeros who come out after dark to collect recyclables, families pushing huge loads through the summer night toward whatever pittance a pile of old cardboard brings in. In the same way, you could focus on how Hurricane Katrina damaged the Bush administration's standing, but the suffering of people displaced on roofs, and then in sports stadiums, and now out of view (but in hardly less precarious circumstances around the country) might matter more.
The most compelling images of 2005 are those of war, flood, and riot, but perhaps the most summary one wasn't even of human beings. It was a novelty photograph that appeared in many newspapers in late September of a huge non-native python that choked itself to death trying to swallow an alligator in Florida. It proved a lasting image of overwhelming and unsuccessful greed. All around the world this year, the snake choked and the alligator refused to see itself as lunch -- if you will let "alligator" stand in here for "civil society," for all the groups, organizations, publics, and citizenries who stood up for their rights.
Nobody did this better in 2005 than the extraordinary Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which in March brought one of the biggest prepared food corporations on Earth, Taco Bell's owner, Yum Brands Incorporated, to its knees. Or, you could say, choked it on its own fajitas and forced it to swallow a compellingly better set of working standards for those who pick the tomatoes that get diced up and sprinkled by the kids in starchy blouses atop your -- if you weren't part of the enormously successful Boycott the Bell campaign -- tostada. The largely immigrant workforce, based in the bleak Florida town of Immokalee, had been organizing for more than a decade, and their campaign to raise the price for picking tomatoes by a penny a pound (a measly sum that nevertheless nearly doubled many workers' salaries) was inspired. Creative in specific tactics like theatrical performances and marches as well as in coalition-building with college students, religious groups, and others, the CIW made undocumented farmworkers powerful again -- and they are taking on McDonald's next. 
Speaking of food, just what kind of corn is in your tortilla anyway? A few years ago, microbiologist Ignacio Chapela, then an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a report demonstrating that bioengineered corn, though banned from being planted in Mexico, was nevertheless springing to Frankensteinian life there, contaminating that country's corn crops. The preeminent science journal Nature published it with an unprecedented caveat, though the real cause for concern wasn't Chapela's credentials or methodology but the threat his work as a scientist and critic -- of, among other things, Novartis' funding of his department -- posed to multinational corporations. (A subsequent independent study validated his results.) Chapela was then denied tenure at Berkeley by a committee that appeared to have major conflicts of interest. After a two-year campaign that included demonstrations, teach-ins, and other forms of ruckus, a higher tenure review committee overturned the decision of the highly politicized departmental committee that had rejected him. It was a small victory, but an emblematic one in this year of crumpling Goliaths.
Back in Mexico, Vicente Fox's party, the PAN, attempted to disqualify Mexico City's Mayor Manuel Lopez Obrador from next year's presidential election over a tiny legal technicality. It was a move as bald-facedly overblown in its grounds and biased in its agenda as the impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton (which, this year, had the handy, if belated, effect of making it harder for Republicans to object to special counsels pursuing perjury charges). About a million people marched in Mexico City to condemn this blatantly corrupt move, a popular opposition that the PAN found, ultimately, irresistible. The charges were withdrawn and Obrador is now favored to win next spring; he will likely become a comparatively uncorrupt and progressive president for a country that has long deserved far more.
The great conundrum of recounting recent history is this: Individual names have to stand in for movements that generally remain not just nameless but often overlooked; the antiwar movement in this country, for instance, became "Cindy" for bereaved mother and outspoken activist Cindy Sheehan. That focus obscured out-of-the-limelight achievements in counter-military recruitment, in defending and supporting conscientious objectors, and in other forms of resistance that preceded her heroic stand, and even Sheehan's innovative power was due in large part to the thousands who marched with her, camped with her, held vigils with her, got arrested with her, and supported a movement that is, by its definition, plural. You could say that, again and again, we mistake the hood ornament for the engine that moves us forward -- or backward, since pro-war neoconservatism gets called "Bush" as often as the peace movement is dubbed "Cindy."
2005: Election Surprises 
There were some interesting elections this year. Los Angeles voted in that city's first Latino mayor since the nineteenth century, the progressive Antonio Villaraigosa, after years of dour businessmen; and San Diego nearly elected Donna Frye, the surfer-environmentalist who had already won the mayor's race the year before as a write-in candidate but had been disqualified on a technicality akin to hanging chads. (Thousands of those who wrote her name in didn't also check the right box, though their intent was perfectly clear.)
Crossing the border again and heading south: In Chile, on December 11, voters brought a socialist feminist, Michelle Bachelet, very close to the presidency. (The run-off is next month and, though her election is expected, the country may yet swing right rather than left.) In Bolivia, the stew was even thicker as indigenous leader Evo Morales, head of the Coca Growers Union and a far-left activist, actually took the presidency this week. Bolivia has been an extraordinary country over the past few years, with an insurgent, mostly indigenous peasantry that has ousted a couple of presidents and determined the course of national policy, including successful fights against the privatization of resources such as natural gas and water. Morales represents not just another leftist in power in Latin America, but perhaps the first indigenous person to assume such a position, at least a symbolic end to what has been nearly half a millennium of colonialism in Bolivia.
Morales, however, may be the next Salvador Allende -- his election signifies so divergent a vision for the Americas that U.S. citizens should be prepared to contain their government's potential reactions. (The situation is likely to bring up fears of the ugly years of the 1980s when, in the name of anticommunism, the Reagan Administration attacked the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and supported state terror in El Salvador and Guatemala.) Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has made a sport of thumbing his nose at George Bush, and though he is a demagogue more than a true populist, he owes his current reign and perhaps his life to the people in the streets who reversed the coup in Caracas in 2002 -- which the Bush administration loved and aided.
Elections in both South and North America have been less interesting for the individuals who got elected than for the way they have expressed popular will. Even the best candidates seem to have fallen far short of the ideals of the electorate. People here reach far beyond where their so-called leaders ever arrive. They seem to be heading toward something that perhaps leaders as such cannot address. There is an incipient sense in movements around the world that democracy needs not only to be redefined but redeployed in some as yet unimaginable form; that another world is possible, but we are still figuring out what it could possibly look like. Of course, decent elected leaders aren't the biggest issue now; indecent ones, elected or not, are.
2005: Goliath Totters 
And speaking of Bush, it was a pretty good year for people who stated all the most inconvenient facts or (as they liked to call it way back when) spoke truth to power. Even the powerful piped up surprisingly loudly sometimes -- from Congressman John Murtha who decried the whole damn war and highlighted the American wounded (so often forgotten) to Senator John McCain who took a heartfelt stand against torture -- even if the moment had come for ambitious Republicans to regard Bush as something akin to an Ebola-infected chimp. And a bad year for those who would only state the facts convenient to the powerful: the downfall of Judith Miller and the humiliation of Bob Woodward tainted the country's two leading newspapers, which had tolerated their "access journalism" (think: sycophancy) in ways that damaged both the media and democracy. Those plummeting stars grudgingly, belatedly fingered some of the Bush administration's key players on the way down. (As a much better journalist, Robert Scheer, pointed out, had Miller spoken up sooner, the outcome of the presidential election might have been different. Thank you Judy, and a more sincere thank you to the San Francisco Chronicle, which quickly hired Scheer when the Los Angeles Times, whose Chicago owners have been yanking its chain hard lately, fired him.)
Commentary 
The United States has always been the land of second chances and proud of it. So, in the true American second-chance spirit, Tomdispatch has given Rebecca Solnit, our favorite optimist, two shots at nailing this year to the wall -- and both have turned out splendidly. (That's not surprising, since 2005 generated enough material for twenty end-of-the-year pieces with something left over.) The early-bird version of her take on 2005, 
