AUTHOR AND LECTURER
While the current anti-war movement has her dipping deep into her bottomless bag of activist theater tricks, Benjamin is more than just a sidewalk vaudevillian. She's the author of eight books, official observer at a dozen international elections and, thanks in part to contacts developed during her unsuccessful Senate run two years ago, has developed into a popular lecturer. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader calls her "a rising player" on the national progressive scene.
Five feet tall, and no more than a veggie burrito over 100 pounds, she can't lift her left arm above her head, the result of having it twisted behind her back during the estimated four dozen times she's been escorted off the premises. She rarely spends more than a few hours in jail, and San Francisco police Lt. Morris Tabak said, "She's always been very professional when we've dealt with her."
For the past two months, this mother of two -- one is a 12-year-old; the other, from a previous marriage, just graduated from college -- has shuttled back and forth to Washington, sleeping on friends' couches while she lobbies legislators by day and corrals fellow anti-war activists by night. Colleagues and adversaries agree she's tireless. The toll: She and her husband spend only two days a month together.
"While you see Medea all of these places, what she's really good at is organizing behind the scenes," said Deborah James, who has worked with her at Global Exchange for nine years. James wouldn't have been able to help lead the widely-noted interruption of Secretary of State Colin Powell at Earth Summit II in South Africa last month, "without knowing Medea. I was kind of trying to think what she would do there."
WORLD OF CHANGES
Yet before she adopted the name "Medea" as a Tufts University freshman, she was Susie Benjamin, self-described "nice Jewish girl from Long Island." A high school cheerleader who dated the school's top athlete. Benjamin jokes that her mother's favorite form of protest was "returning something at Saks that she had kept for a year."
Her father, Al, is a well-to-do developer, who says he has "donated hundreds of thousands" of dollars to Global Exchange over its 14-year-history. No strings attached, say both Al and Medea Benjamin. Al has supported Jewish- related charities; Medea supports a Palestinian state. Said the daughter, with a smile, "It's best that families don't talk about some things."
"I admire Susie because she is always true to her own heart," said Al Benjamin; only her family still calls her "Susie." "Even when I totally don't agree with what she's saying."
Young Susie Benjamin's first major experience with the big, bad world happened when her older sister's GI boyfriend mailed home the ear of a Viet Cong(I dont' know if I believe that or not). It jolted the 15-year-old Benjamin out of her insulated Long Island life.
During a trip with friends to Tijuana two years later, she was shocked to see young children starving on the street.
She spent a year at Tufts, and then told her parents she would continue her studies abroad. Once overseas, however, she dropped out of school and bolted across Europe and Africa. She hitchhiked alone, supporting herself by teaching English, picking grapes and doing odd jobs.
By now, Susie had become Medea. Long fascinated by the Greek tragedies, she tried on other names -- "Io" Benjamin didn't ring -- until deciding to reclaim "Medea."
"I just didn't believe the story," she said wryly of the classic tragedy. "What woman would kill her kids for a guy? I think she was a strong woman, and some people just made up the story to discredit her."
RAPED IN FRANCE
Overseas, her fearlessness blossomed. When Benjamin was 19, she was raped in France by a man who gave her a ride(SURE!). Yet she continues hitchhiking, spending last summer thumbing across Sicily with her college-age daughter. "Once, I got mugged two blocks from work (in the Mission District)," she said. "Does that mean I stop walking to work?"
In Africa, she gravitated to refugee camps, trying to save children from starvation. She tears up, remembering the 3-year-old boy dying in her arms in Mozambique. Blunting the world's inequities that allow some children to starve and others to grow up in comfort would become her life work.
She returned to New York and, after passing undergraduate equivalency tests, earned master's degrees in economics and public health. She returned to Africa and then went to Cuba with her first husband, who was coach of the national basketball team; Benjamin hates sports.
Yet at first, Cuba's comparative social equality "made it seem like I died and went to heaven." Then she bumped into the limitations of free speech while working at a Communist-run newspaper; she was deported after daring to write an anti-government article. She headed to San Francisco in 1983 for a job with Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy. She and her husband split up shortly afterward.
By the time she landed in San Francisco, she began thinking about doing something that would incorporate her growing number of interests.
UNBOUNDED CURIOSITY
"Medea likes to say that I radicalized her, but she was already pretty radicalized by the time she got (to college)," said Joan Gussow, a professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Teachers College Columbia University, where Benjamin earned her public health degree. "She was always asking questions, always wanting to know how things fit together."
Benjamin believes all of her pet struggles are related. Whether it's Cambodian sweatshops or California energy providers, Benjamin said they're all the fruits of wealthy corporations owning mainstream media, holding politicians in a money-girded hammerlock, and stocking university boards of regents with their top corporate officers.
The result of this influence, according to Benjamin: The average citizen or worker can't be heard over the jangling of corporate coins(which she should know about since she got hers from her rich father). So she, often backed by Global Exchange's $4.1 million annual budget and international Rolodex(all Communists), is their mouthpiece.
Her fearlessness has drawn the admiration of political adversaries like former South Bay Republican Congressman Tom Campbell, who got to know Benjamin during their Senate race. The one where Benjamin's lasting TV image is her being hauled away from a debate to which she wasn't invited.
Even though Campbell disagrees with Benjamin on everything from Iraq to her disruption of Rumsfeld's Congressional testimony, he understands her motives.
"She's very well-informed and researched on all of her issues. I wish her views to be heard," said Campbell, who vainly fought for Benjamin to be included in his 2000 Senate debate against U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
"I wish she didn't have to resort to theater so often. But our system only hears people who are of the two major parties."
Others defend her omnipresence.
SEEN A LOT
"Would you say that Wal-Mart is in too many locations or that Disney has too many characters," said consumer advocate Nader, a former Green Party presidential candidate. "She has seen a lot of tragedies around the world. You don't forget the stuff that she's seen."
It was on a trip to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s that she met her now- husband Kevin Danaher, a tough-talking activist. He asked the then-vegetarian out to dinner -- to a steak restaurant. They've been together ever since.
"While I wanted to save the world one child at a time, Kevin always says, 'Let's get the bastards who are doing it to these kids.' "
Don't you just want to ship her to Cuba?