news story / By Frank Bardacke

Can’t Win for Losing

John Ross, March 11, 1938 — Jan. 7, 2011

(Feb. 3, 2011) (Editor’s note: This is an edited version of an homage that originally appeared in CounterPunch, the progressive newsletter from Petrolia.)

John Ross died recently at age 73, a victim of liver cancer, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan.

I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

His political story is remarkable: born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie and stood vigil at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of 20, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco 18 months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata, where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984 he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

That’s the political story. Then there was John. Even in his 70s, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

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