Get To Know
Ben Marble
By Rob Kall
23 September, 2005
Opednews.com
On
September 22, I did an almost 90 minute interview with Dr. Ben Marble,
the 35 year old ER physician, rock musician, father, husband, and the
guy who told Dick Cheney to Go Fuck Himself. This is an edited transcript
of the first 50 minutes of the interview.
If you havent
read it yet, heres a great article telling
you the story of Bens dialogue with Vice President Cheney.
Rob Kall: What
went through your head before you spoke to Cheney.
Rage, I guess rage,
somewhat. The sum total of everything, with the inadequate response
on the local scene but also the New Orleans area, with the images I
saw of the people dying in the streets. Plus the things I saw first
hand myself, And the incidentw here I was not allowed to go to my house
to try to salvage things. The MPs forced me to drive a long way around
when I was almost out of gas, when the gas station lines were three
hours long. It was the sum total of those things. So I thought, I
think I should say something. I felt like I was speaking for a
lot of people other than myself and I know that a lot of people are
unhappy with this administrations policies in general and so,
I felt like I should say something.
Rob Kall: So,
after you said it and you hightailed it out of there, a little bit while
later, some police came back. Who came back and what did they do to
you?
What happened was,
I said it at first, the first timeGo fuck yourself Mr. Cheney
and there was this appalled, stunned silence and I decided I wanted
to make sure they heard it so I said it again, Go fuck yourself
Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself, and then at that point I started
walking away and I said, Go fuck yourself asshole.
And the reason I
started walking way is because these secret service guys were looking
at me with this wild eyed crazy look on their face and I didnt
them to perceive me as a threat and give them the excuse to shoot me
or something. So I was walking away from them and I walked past the
guy who patted us down and I waved at him and told him
have a nice day and then I walked back home.
Well after that,
a few minutes went by I noticed my friend Jay Scully was still b ack
at the press conference. SO I called him and told him come on
back Jay, we gotta get moving stuff. A few minutes later he came
back. The first thing we did when he got back was, he said that the
tape had run out. So we took the tape out. It was a Sony mini DVD. Theyre
only 30 minutes of video, each DVD. So went ahead and took that one
out and hid that one, just in case they came by and tried to confiscate
it and I put a blank on in its place. Then Jay and I started moving
stuff. As we were moving stuff, two military guys wearing MP armbands
and green fatigues came by, saying they were looking for a guy wearing
an orange shirt who had cussed at the vice president. And at the point
point, I said Well, thats probably me. And they were
like, Oh really, that was you, and they said, Were
going to have to detain you for questioning. You are not under arrest.
Were going to have to put you in handcuffs. Do not run.
I was like, Like
Im gonna run. You dont have to tell me not to run. You all
have the machine guns, not me.
They put me in the
cuffs, at which point they started walking me to the parked police car,
near the train tracks that they wouldnt let me go through before.
I told Jay, Jay, turn that video camera back on, so he picked
the video camera back up and started filming. And he shot some video
of me and the cops and all that. Well then they put me in the car. They
questioned me. They asked me questions like Why did you do that?
Are you planning on hurting the Vice president.?
Rob Kall: What
did you tell them when they asked you why you did that?
I said well, if he can say that on the floor of the United States Senate,
the last time I checked this is the still the United States of America
and I have the right of the freedom of speech, and if he can say that
on the floor of the senate where people are supposed to be civil and
courteous, then I think I have the right to say it in the middle of
the worst disaster in the history of our nation.
Rob Kall: Yeah!
And they didnt
know what I was talking about. I said, I follow politics and he
said that to a senator in the middle of the senate. And theyre
going, like, Oh really? He did that?
And I said, He
did. Some of them seemed to kinda of think it was funny but most
of them were pretty angry and upset and had the hope we ride him
to jail mentality.
Rob Kall: How
many were there?
At one point there
were probably eight to ten of them.
Rob Kall: All
carrying machine guns?
Probably four of
them with guns. The guys with the guns were in the military, and then
t there were some police officers and then some plain clothes guys who
I believe were the secret service guys. They detained me for fifteen
or twenty minutes and they took the camera away from Jay. I was in the
back seat of the police vehicle and I noticed they had my camera in
the front seat. Now I dont know what that did to the camera, or
if they did anything, or maybe Jay just messed it up, but the video
he shot of me in cuffs didnt work, its corrupt. For Whatever
reason that is, it did not work.
So they held
you for fifteen or twenty minutes, interrogated you and let you go?
Yes. They said,
Well, apparently you havent broken any laws, youre
free to go. They took my name, my social security number, my address,
my place of employment and they said if they needed to get in touch
with me they would give me a call.
Rob Kall: Have
you had any further contact from them or been in touch with them?
No.
Rob Kall: So,
have you been political. I know you were aware of Cheney cursing out
Leahey. Have you been active in politics.
For a long time
I was, I think, like a lot of Americans, pretty apathetic towards politics,
because it seems like both sides
I wish there a viable third party
but it seems that with the two party system youre getting two
sides of the same coin kinda deal, where they both seem to interested
in, in not doing whats right for the American people and doing
whats wrong, for their agenda and their pocketbook.
I did start becoming a little active. You know Ive been playing
guitar since I was thirteen years old and started writing songs when
I was 20 or so. I had written several songs which kinda had a political
edge to them and they did pretty well on mp3.com and I was in my band
dR. O, and we did real well on mp3.com and just to make a long story
short, our claim to fame for dR.O on mp3.com was we had more number
ones than any band in the world. We had 26 genre number ones on mp3.com,
we had listeners in over 100 countries. Yahoo life magazine labeled
us the supergroup of cyberspace.
Rob Kall: Cool.
How would you describe your sound.
Its sort of
alternative hard rock.
Getting to the political
activism point of it, on Sept. 11, of 2002, 2003 and 2004 I was in New
York to play a concert called the September Concert, which is a free
music, city-wide event where musicians come from all over the world
to play music in New York, after 9/11, of course, to basically not let
people forget about it. In 2004 I decided to stage a one man protest
in front of the United Nations. And I played a song I wrote, Four More
Wars, that I wrote specifically for the protest. That was a month before
the election. It flabbergasted me that people still voted for this person,
that, to me, anybody with half a brain wouldnt vote for this guy.
Everyones allowed to vote for whoever they want to, but my personal
opinion is that this is the worst administration in the history of our
country.
If you look at the
list of accomplishments that W. Gump has, I call him W.
Gump because hes an overachieving simpleton and hes the
worlds most famous cheerleader, the mess doing the agenda of Cheney
and Rove
anyway I played that song four more wars. Basically,
the chorus of the song is are you for more wars? Vote for George
Bush, for more.
Hes the war
president, if you vote for him, guess what youre going to get.
Youre going to get more wars, because apparently thats all
he knows how to do is start war after war without legitimate reason.
Now I must backtrack
and say that I was behind the president when he went into Afghanistan
. I thought that was certainly justifiable and needed to be done, but
then somewhere along the line he got off track and was misled, I dont
know if
Sometimes I like give him the benefit of the doubt, that
hes being a little naïve and being misled by his handlers
spoon feeding him all this bad information as far as justifying a war
in Iraq when anybody should have known it was a bad idea. I think most
people who follow politics at all thought it was a bad idea. Even his
father thought it was a bad idea, if you look back at the historical
writings of Bush seniorabout things turning into a quagmire,
which is what we have now.
And then you have
Donald Rumsfeldeverything that comes out of his mouth is the opposite
of truthOh, its not a quagmire. Its not like
Viet Nam. Anything he says you can just turn it 180 degress and
thats the reality of the situation. To me, hes our version
of Baghdad Bob.
Anyway, I did that
protest. I videotaped it and played the September concert that year
and people went out and voted for him anyway. I still cant understand
or fathom how people re-elected him.
He took the largest
surplus in the history of our nation and converted it to the largest
deficit in the history of our nationin a mere three years. Thats
a pretty astounding accomplishment.
Rob Kall: Hes
got three more years. What do you think hell do in those next
three? My God!
Well its pretty
scary to think of what he could do in the next few years. I think its
pretty obvious to everyone now that were headed on a downward
spiral as a nationour worldwide credibility, he has utterly destroyed
it. Hes basically given Osama Bin Laden everything he wanted.
Hes gotten our troops out of Saudi Arabia, which is what Osama
wanted. Hes basically bankrupted our nation, which is what Osama
wanted. Hes given Osama more jihadi recruits than he could have
ever dreamed of. How many times does he have to keep giving the enemy
the exact thing that they want? What they want is a holy war and hes
giving them the holy war that they want. Ive told people for years
that I think World War Three started on September 11, 2001. And it has
just taken a while for the people of the United States to realize that.
I think the rest of the world realizes it, but we dont. The majority
of Americans still dont realize it. They dont want to admit
it
Rob Kall: What
are the implications of World War three starting then?
Hes already
said its a global war on terror numerous times. Rumsfelds
said it. How many nations do you have to have attacked before you call
it a world war? Spains been attacked. Londons getting attacked.
Were getting attacked. Granted those terrorist attacks are random
and all thatbut there are a lot of other attacksIndonesia,
Russia
The thing I fear most is that eventually if either Russia
or China line up against on the opposite side, we are in serious trouble.
Fighting the war against terror alone is bad enough, but if China or
Russia were to line up against us, like, if we were to attack North
Korea or if we were to attack Iran, we cannot beat China and Russia.
We would have a hard time beating one of them alone, but theres
no way we can beat both of them.
Theres a fallacy
that we won the cold war. That whole premise that we won the cold war
totally forgets that China is a very viable nation and is actually the
other superpower. Theres this myth that were the only superpower
in the world. Well thats just BS. China is kicking our butt economically.
They have the largest military in the world. How can people say were
the only superpower.
Rob Kall: China
is the only ASCENDING Superpower.
Correct. And they
have the capability and the structure in place that will allow them,
eventually, to surpass us because their work ethic is so phenomenal,
plus they have five times the population we have. I dont know.
Its a scary thing. Its a good idea to remain friends with
as many people as possible, specifically people like China and Russia.
But theres something here, historically, that we have that nobody
else has ever had in the history of mankind. And that is the greatest
communication tool of all timethe internet, which allows people
from all over the world to become friends with one another. Lack of
communication has been the classic cause of war throughout time and
now we finally have a tool that breaks that down. Were kind of
losing our excuses to keep fighting these wars when we have the ability
to communicate with the people we may consider our enemy and talk to
them and try to work problems out. But then you get leaders like Bush
and either youre with us or against us and dont want any
compromise and go around just attacking nations at his will, starting
unprovoked wars. And the rest of the world looks to us as a leader.
Hes setting the precedent that its okay to just attack this
country or that country and take it over just because we feel like it.
WE make up some lame reason why were going to do it and then it
turns out it wasnt true. But hey, well make another reason
while were there.
What happens when
Russia decides they want to take a country and take it over, or China
decides they want to attack Taiwan and take it over. Hey. Taiwan has
WMD. Were going to invade Taiwan because they have WMDs theyre
going to use on us. What kind of justification can we use to argue against
them doing that? We certainly dont, with everything going on with
the economy the way it is, hurricane Katrina and now Rita, do we have
the wherewithal to try to stop China from taking over Taiwan if they
wanted to. I dont think we do really.
Rob Kall: Since
you had this Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame moment, has it changed your
attitudes or your politics or beliefs any way? Strengthened, weakened,
intensified?--
Well, something
kind of odd happened. Ive received literally thousands of emails,
95 to 98 percent of which were supportive. A few were not. Some were
threatening.
I got on a website,
democraticunderground.com just to talk to some of these people that
were sending me these emails and ****** the extremists on the left are
just as hypocritical as extremists on the right. I tried to discuss
issues with compromise and what I see as real world solutions. I consider
myself a realist. People try to label me a liberal because of what I
said, but I think of myself as a realist and, so I got on that website
and was trying to just discuss some issues and debate a little
.
And after about two days, they banned me from the site. They couldnt
handle any dissension from their dogma. I was basically pointing out
their hypocrisy and then suddenly my threads were locked (discussion
threads on an electronic bulletin board) and they removed me
.
To me that just proves that they want to point the finger at the right
wing for being extreme and theyre just as extreme in their views.
For instance, we were discussing the gay marriage issue. I tried to
think of a realistic compromise for that issue, because I tried to see
both points of view on that issue, which, from the right wing perspective,
the word marriage, has historically, for thousands of years, has always
been between a man and and a woman. Thats just history. You cant
negate history to satisfy a politically correct agenda. And I agree
with that. I call the left wing extremists the PC utopia fascists because
they have this politically correct utopia vision in their minds and
thats nice, utopias a nice idea, but reality is nowhere
close to utopia.
Rob Kall: Whats
your opinion on gay marriage? Where do you stand on it?
I have no problem
with homosexual couples. I tried to offer a compromise. Why cant
there be a simple compromise based on the reality of the sexual preferences
of the individuals and have two termsone, homosexual marriage,
and two, heterosexual marriage? Very simple, based on the sexuality
of the people involved. It seems like a pretty simple, realistic solution
where both sides are getting what they want. Homosexuals would be getting
their legal rights as far as benefits, insurance, etcetera and but no,
they couldnt have it that way. And the thing is the right wing
people wouldnt want to have it that way either
. But I think
homosexuals should have something.
Now someone else
suggested, Why dont we have a civil union? and I said
fine, I would be okay. I would be fine with a civil union and get government
out of church altogether. Just have civil union as the legal term for
all couples regardless of sexuality. And I think thats a fine
compromise too. But when I pointed out the hypocrisy of what they are
saying
theyre demanding that we change the definition of
a word that has been that way for thousands of years, just to fit their
political agenda to me thats just wrong. You cant just suddenly
say, OK, were gonna call oranges grapes because it fits our political
agenda and if you dont like calling oranges grapes, then youre
a bad person and youre ignorant and youre a bigot, because
you wont call oranges grapes. You understand my point there.
Rob Kall: It
doesnt seem like thats worth throwing you off their bulletin
board.
They took away my
posting privileges and basically said I couldnt post there anymore.
Rob Kall: Thats
an experience youve had, and my question is, has it changed your
attitudes or beliefs since youve been through all this?
I dont think
so. I pretty much feel the same way. I think maybe it has strengthened
them a bit. A lot of people in the local area are not too happy with
what I said, because I live in Bush country. But I have a right to say
what I want to say and if they dont like it then they should leave
to China.
I ask Dr. Marble
about work, and he replies he wants to avoid discussing his job, but
then, when I ask him about how things have changed, he tells me that
before the storm, a typical night in the ER might see 70 patients. Then,
when the storm hit, for a week or two, it was up to 500 patients a shift.
Whats it like now.
Actually, the night
shifts are kinda slow because of the curfew and people dont want
to venture out after curfew because theyll go to jail. So basically,
at night, only the really sick people tend to come in
During the
day its still pretty busy. Its leveled off. I think were
just seeing 80, a hundred or so. That first few weeks after, it was
very intense.
Rob Kall: Did
you see any patients who died?
There was a man
who came in, and the thermometer would only read up to 110 and it said
he had a 110 fever and it wouldnt go any higher. That was a friend
of mine. The real heroes are my co-workers. Dr. Miranda had to work
on that guy, Dr. Seglio, Dr. Patterson, the nurses. These people have
really been working their butts offthe nurses, the staff. This
to me is the saving grace of everything that has happened. Weve
had nurses, doctors, etc. from all over the country come in. Theyre
not from FEMA, theyre not from Red Cross. They just came in their
own vehicles and they just got here. They flew and the drove. I had
people who worked ground zero they worked the tsunami who
just camefrom California, from Michigan, from Minnesota, from
New York from all over the countryany state you could name pretty
much and they just showed up. They had their stuff packed and they got
here. Then I hear stories of people who tried to go through one agency,
the Red Cross or something like that, well youre on hold.
Youll have to take this class for a week and then well send
you down there, and theyre watching the news and seeing
people dying and theyre saying, you know what, Im
not waiting. Im going. And they left on their own.
Rob Kall: So
they bypassed Red Cross and FEMA and they started getting to work.
They just came.
They just came by the droves.
Rob Kall: Would
you say that the work that got done there got done in spite of FEMA?
You hate to knock
help because they have helped in a lot of waysthe Red Cross, FEMA,
the Salvation Army, etc. But they dropped the ball in a lot of ways
too. Those first four or five days were really bad.
The national guard
was a tremendous help in maintaining law and order because the first
few days there was looting rampant here in Mississippi. You heard about
looting in New Orleans. There was plenty of looting here on the Mississippi
coast. I witnessed it with my own eyesjust driving by and people
are in a Radio Shack or K-mart and people are walking out with arms
full of stuff. And that was before the national guard had a presence.
Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth,
Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit
Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter
Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and
Positive Psychology.