While the European events of WWII may play a big role with a Jewish population they are not as significant to many others, especially most Muslims. Why should they be? These events only affected some Muslims with the creation of Israel. America backed U.N. Resolution 181 primarily because of the events in Europe during the war. If the U.S. had really believed in democracy they would have supported Palestine being returned to the Arabs at the end of the British Mandate. After all Britain had previously supported Arab independence with the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915, two years before the Balfour Declaration was issued. England and France eventually said, “No” to both the Arabs and Jews with the Sykes-Picot Treaty and divvied up the spoils of the former Ottoman Empire between themselves.

Shortly after the Balfour Declaration President Wilson rightly observed on July 4, 1918,

The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or political relationship, rests upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery. If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed upon than this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the People’s rights, though it is kept within the forms of law.¹

Twenty-nine years later and another world war under our belt, the U.S. sang another tune. Truman pragmatically observed when questioned regarding his overruling a report by the State Department advocating against the creation of Israel, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”² This support from the Truman Administration was borne out of guilt and political expedience. It is notable that Truman refrained from championing having all those displaced Jews sent to New York instead of Palestine.

Sixty-two years after the creation of Israel the west is still consistently battered with images of WWII by Israelis and Jews as some type of bastardized excuse for nearly any type of crime or aberrant behavior they might be guilty of. In July 2009 New Jersey resident Ben-Ami Kaddish pled guilty to spying for Israel. The top secret documents he sent were far more extensive and damaging than those Jonathan Pollard, another Jewish spy handed over to Israel. For sixty seconds the media had a field day playing the holocaust card and whining that M.R. Kaddish was too old to stand trial and that the events occurred years ago. Kaddish was eventually convicted of a single offense and sentenced to pay a $50,000 dollar fine. Kaddish’s reply when Judge Pauley passed sentence, “No problem.”³ Obviously spying for Israel pays well.

The media along with Representative Jane Harman and the usual suspects, AIPAC and ADL were also very instrumental in getting the trials of AIPAC spies, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman derailed. Oddly enough the federal official who was not Jewish and involved in passing information to Rosen and Weissman is presently doing hard time for his part of the crime.

In September, Toronto journalist and author, Naomi Klein and a group of artists signed a letter calling the Toronto Film Festival on the carpet for celebrating Israeli filmmakers. Klein likened the recognition as the same as celebrating California wine during the 1960’s grape boycott or South Africa during its apartheid history. She and the other signers were instantly labeled anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. Some went as far as offering absurd rationalizations how Klein could be Jewish and an anti-Semite too. This was no doubt why activist Jane Fonda backed down faster than a turkey tossed from a 747 when confronted by this monolithic lobby.

Most recently holocaust politics has played a big role in the Roman Polanski case. Polanski, who was convicted of drugging and having unlawful sex with a minor, has been a fugitive from American justice for 31 years. The Los Angeles Times ran two articles and an editorial on Polanski in their October 1, 2009 edition. When was the last time a movie director warranted three pieces in a single issue, none dealing with his latest hit film? All three articles invoked the holocaust as some excuse for not sentencing Polanski. One piece even went as far as to mention the fact that the director was arrested on Rosh Hashanah. As if the Swiss police were lying in wait for Polanski like nefarious Nazis to capture him on a Jewish holiday. According to this line of thinking then any Catholic pedophile should be given a pass on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Regarding Polanski’s arrest, Peg Yorkin was quoted, “My personal thoughts are let the guy go. It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things.” It is highly doubtful Ms. Yorkin would be expounding such ideas if it was her 13 year old daughter who was drugged and sodomized. The fact that a woman would defend Polanski only serves to demonstrate how warped the thinking is of those practitioners of holocaust politics. Bringing the events of WWII in as some jaundiced defense for Polanski also smacks of gross elitism. The thinking is that what happened to Polanski’s mother being sent off to a camp is so traumatic it would be cruel and unusual punishment to send him to prison. Guess what, prison is supposed to be punishment for committing a crime, especially one as socially unacceptable as pedophilia. The logical end to this type of thinking would be to give all Chinese-American rapists a pass since over 6 million Chinese civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese during WWII.⁴ The most time Polanski can ever do is 16 months. That is less than two years for brutally stealing a young girl’s childhood.

This use of holocaust politics allowing Israel to summarily dismiss the Goldstone Report and rationalize that Ben-Ami Kaddish is too old to prosecute only makes the argument that Jews considered themselves above the law, specifically because of events which occurred 70 years ago in Europe. Of course there are those exceptions, Bernie Madoff who stole primarily from Jews, and certainly wasn’t a beneficiary of holocaust politics is now doing time. It does beg the question that if Polanski’s case is so ancient that the Los Angeles D.A. shouldn’t bother with it, then an explanation is certainly due as to why so much of the government’s time and money was spent seeing that alleged Nazi guard, John Demjanjuk was deported for a crime that he already served time for and was found not guilty of by an Israeli court.

Debra Winger is on record saying, “The whole art world suffers from such arrests [Polanski’s].”⁵ Hollywood and the media continue to bellyache about Mel Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest and he didn’t touch a person, let alone a young girl. Where is Winger’s support for an artist like Mr. Gibson? When the cast of Seinfeld recently reunited the media was conspicuously silent about Michael Richards’ racial invective against African-Americans at a comedy club in 2006.⁶ Obviously Mr. Richards’ crime was old news and wasn’t worth bringing up.

Accountability is something all countries and persons should face for their actions. No one should be above their country’s laws. No country should be above international law. Considering Israel’s recent war crimes and the fact they are chomping at the bit to bomb Iran, the dropped cases against AIPAC spies and the excusing of a convicted pedophile it should give one pause to wonder if the consistent use of holocaust politics has created a chosen group that is above criminal prosecution and accountability for their crimes.

1. President Woodrow Wilson speech on Independence Day July 4, 1918, text in Tannous, Izzat. 1988. The Palestinians: Eyewitness History of Palestine Under British Mandate. I.G.T. Company, New York, p. 72.
2. ”Harry Truman,” Wikipedia; also quoted in “Anti-Zionism,” ed. by Teikener, Abed Rabbo & Mezvinsky; also in Cape Cod Times “The Sorrow of Truman,” Sean Gonsalves, Nov. 28, 2000.
3. New York Times, “Man 85 Avoids Jail Time for Giving Military Secrets,” Benjamin Weiser, May 29, 2009.
4. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, Iris Chang,
5. ”Euro outrage over Polanski arrest,” Variety.
6. It is a public record that Michael Richards committed the act mentioned in the article. YouTube videos of the occurrence were the first to break it. It was also covered on Huffington Post at the time.

But the current financial crisis—and impending societal collapse in the US—threatens Hollywood’s hegemony over the celluloid screen.

As inventor and independent financial analyst Max Keiser reported in his blog for Huffington Post, bond trader Cantor Fiztgerald recently filed an application with regulators with the intention of launching an exchange that allows users to hedge and speculate on the financial performances of movies.

Keiser, host of The Oracle on BBC World and podcast Truth About Markets, predicts that “the Cantor/HSX futures will actually drive the prices of stars, films, marketing and the industry as a whole DOWN:” a topsy-turvy world of rivals selling out rivals and driving down prices—perceptions included—for high prices are good marketing in America. Indeed, Max predicts the Hollywood cartel—at the forefront of the consciousness industry since the 1920’s—will enter into a period of infighting as each studio struggles to be the vanguard of Hollywood.²

The theory of technical primacy encapsulates the importance of Hollywood, arguing that Hollywood—a comparably new innovation in the arsenal of imperialism, especially leading up to and after World War II—played nearly as important a role as military and economic forces in bringing about allied victory during World War II.

For example, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war became one of the most frequented subjects of the U.S. motion picture industry: from 1942 until 1945, out of the 1,700 movies produced in that period altogether, approximately 500 depicted a pro-war stance.

In fact, the cooperation between Washington and Hollywood’s War Activities Committee in the face of international conflicts was so penetrating, that few agencies within the federal government were not represented by Hollywood, the White House included. Demonstrating symbolically the importance of this relationship, was the U.S governments approval of something like 4,000 members of the U.S. Film Industry—directors, studio bosses and sales managers—to wear military officer uniforms. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era.

Hollywood represented a new form of imperialism, not in idea or intent, but rather in effectiveness. It penetrated the public’s consciousness and reoriented social values, as demonstrated by the aforementioned change during the 1950’s in European consumer habits.

The brain is infinitely more advanced at synthesizing data than modern computers. The cornucopia of modules responsible for the gross sum of our realities, nonetheless, functions largely at the realm of the subconscious. In other words, upwards of 90% of our daily experiences are understood separate from our own awareness. In a speech for the leading managers of the U.S. film industry on November 5, 1961, Edward R. Murrow quoted Carl Sandburg:

I meet people occasionally who think that motion pictures, the product that Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fallacies that is current…Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of your personality. All movies good or bad are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institute on earth, an audience that runs into the estimated 800 million to a billion, What, Hollywood’s more important than Harvard? The answer is, no as clean as Harvard, but nevertheless, farther reaching.

Others echoed this disposition:

“The film is to America what the flag was once to Britain. By its means Uncle Sam may hope someday, if he be not checked in time, to Americanize the world.”³

“If one were to write the history of economic imperialism, the American film production would be one of the most interesting chapters.”⁴

In a study for the State Department, the Institute of Communications Research recommended the liberal use of film, stating: Films are especially suitable for unsophisticated audiences…it makes no difference what we have to show them. You will find this true almost anywhere except perhaps among intellectual groups where they are blasé about it. There is a fascination that films have for people. Even among intellectuals there, they come to be critical…You can do anything you want to them (sic) as long as you don’t drive them away.”

There is a multitude of ironic motifs teased easily out of Hollywood films of the 1950’s, many of which not so different from the recurrent themes of Nazi cinema. An internalization of self-censorship as a result of the McCarthy show trials in the 1950’s sent Hollywood film dollars to politically safe westerns, all-encompassing of subtle allusions to a slimy, collectivist red menace.

Hollywood had mustered so much clout, that the industry could dictate the movies of other countries. In Germany, for instance, Hollywood blocked the subsidizing of the German film industry after the war, a once formidable competitor. Due to widespread devastation in Europe and much of the world after the Second World War, Hollywood had secured a dominant position as the bedrock of the global consciousness industry. In fact, the dominance of the Hollywood cartel was so widespread, that it wholly negated the undertakings of a free market in terms of cinema.

The influence of American culture in Europe after the Second World War was enormous—some have referred to it as the new Monroe Doctrine; that is, the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine. The postwar period was a period of huge opportunities for victors, allowing the U.S. to build upon the old European dream of U.S. democracy as a way of life that secured a high standard of living for the masses, and also had the financial means to organize a comprehensive cultural program that embraced all facets of life. One such cultural program, implemented by the U.S., stated as its mission the use of “each material and psychological medium to create respect, even awe in the lifestyle of America, and also to undermine other political philosophies;” and so they did, on up through today. However, representing the power of the consumer, Hollywood did open up its content during the creedal passion period of the 1960’s to reflect the general sentiment of the population at that time, as well as to keep the cash flow coming. Films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket portrayed war in a much more critical light than, say, John Wayne films of the 40’s and 50’s.

These days, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and Department of Defense occupy entire floors of Los Angeles office buildings so as to ensure films fulfill the agenda of those institutions. In exchange for high-tech, tax payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear, Hollywood allows the military to censor scripts to suit their needs.⁵

Southern California’s reign as the epicenter of American culture might very well be over. The state of California is shambles, and one of the country’s most populous regions—approximately 24 million people call the agglomeration home—is also one of the most fragmented and therefore compromised, for its ability to act in a unified, cohesive manner, should it need to, is severely limited. The problems facing southern California are multi-faceted, especially when multiplied over all major facets of life—economic, social, cultural and environmental. The five-county region that makes up southern California ought to be watched closely over the next decade, as it very well might serve as an example of what industrial collapse is. That is what this series is about, but first: Hollywood.

Fittingly, art is imitating reality. A new wave of Hollywood disaster flicks coming this fall reflects the actual position of Hollywood, if not the world. Unlike disaster flicks of the Atomic-Age and Watergate which dealt with the fall of civilization, the new flicks deal with the struggles of post-apocalypse existence. The wave of post-apocalyptic manuscripts is aimed at cinemas and TV screens, where battles with cannibals, the acquisition of survival techniques, and the struggle to keep one’s humanity will be portrayed in stunning detail.

In January expect The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington stars as the fierce protector of a book holding the key to mankind’s redemption in an American wasteland wrought by war. NBC’s Day One features a gang of neighbors trying to survive and come to terms with devastation and a beyond dilapidated and useless infrastructure. The Film adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, due in October, includes footage shot during recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina.

According to Rob Kutner, writer for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, escapism plays a part in the latest glut of apocalyptic cinema, since “people are less concerned about their house being foreclosed when it’s being taken over by mutant appliances.” Perhaps some of these films serve social engineering programs by way of predictive programming.⁶

By portraying on the big screen a world on the edge, when, in fact, the world is on the edge, engineers in Hollywood predispose audiences to accept extreme austerity and catastrophe, causing them even to expect it, as opposed to sacrificing the crazy-quilt lifestyle of society for true human community and overcoming. A process of gradual and subtle inculcation, predictive programming creates an environment in which feedback loops of expectations generate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Despite the seriousness of the issues tackled by Hollywood this fall and winter, most of the films strive to avoid moralizing the collapse—a tactic that has been historically lethal at the box office.

What we have in store, according to Roger Smith—an executive at the research firm Global Media Intelligence and a former film executive who oversaw Terminator 2—is “the film version of the Cuban Missile Crisis; we have to get the edge of extinction each time.”

I’d place a bet that, were Hollywood to go bust, the human species would have a better shot at surviving than if not. Indeed, U.S. movie box office grosses for July 31-August 2 were down 21.5 percent from a year ago 21.5 percent, though many Hollywood officials would be quick to deem those statistics insignificant.⁷

With summer blockbuster grosses down, Hollywood continues its struggle to find a place in a digital world that eats old business models for breakfast. In a bid to seek new audiences, IMAX Corp. partnered in June with China’s largest film studio to release three Chinese language movies, representing the first time Imax shows foreign-language films on its giant specialty screens.⁸

New technologies, venues and business models have both benefitted and hurt those businesses which rely on intellectual-property rights. Hollywood has yet to adequately take advantage of the digital positives, such as marketing and distribution, while prosecuting effectively the negatives—negative, at least, in their view—such as piracy. Prosecuting alleged pirates in a court of law has had mixed results. The MPAA, although less-so than the music industry, has indeed also taken this route, though it in many ways has proved inefficient. “You have to do some enforcement,” says Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, “but we have to do more than that, and the focus has to be on technological solutions and on doing a much better job educating people about the impact of piracy.”⁹

Will a Hollywood futures market hasten the loosely knit cartels downfall? Keiser seems to thinks so.¹⁰

Look for studios to sabotage each other’s projects by short selling and ‘naked’ short selling competing projects on the Cantor Exchange to drive the perception of a film’s popularity down before it’s released. No problem, just spend more on marketing. More money will be made trading box office futures than at the box office. Inside information will become legal. Milton Friedman will rise from the dead and advise the Honduran government. Brat Pitt will star.

1. Reinhold Wangleitner. 1994. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. UNC Press, Chapt. 8, The Influence of Hollywood.
2. Max Keiser. Will Hollywood Futures on the CantorExchange Kill Hollywood? Huffington Post, 8 December 2008.
3. Warning by London Morning Post in 1923.
4. Rudolf Oertel.
5. Nick Turse. Hollywood is Becoming The Pentagon’s Mouthpiece for Propaganda, AlterNet, 22 May 2008.
6. John Jurgensen and Jamin Brophy Warren. Hollywood Destroys the World. Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2009.
7. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Summer Box-Office Sales Cool Down. Wall Street Journal, 3 August 2009.
8. Lauren A. E. Schuker. Imax Set to Partner With Chinese Studio. Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2009.
9. William Tripplet. On The Future of Movies. Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2009.
10. Max Keiser. Dr. Blankfein Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Goldman Sachs, Max Keiser, 2009.

Trotsky wrote that “every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art.” While one might be hard pressed to justify most television shows and most pop music as art, they are what pass for culture. Once, a conversation with a friend who worked as a college faculty member turned to the question of whether film and music reflected or created popular trends and thought. In other words, does the culture we absorb influence us or do we influence it. Naturally, there is no conclusive answer to this question, and we did not reach one that day. However, there are some clear examples of each. To begin with, television shows like the quasi-fascist 24 and its less unnerving predecessors like the 007 series of films exist to instill a fear not only of the enemies of the state but of the state itself. Thusly, we are encouraged by these obviously propagandistic works to ignore or consent to whatever illegal and immoral actions taken by those who claim to protect us. Furthermore, we are subconsciously trained to identify the state’s enemies as our own. Reality shows like Cops further this consciousness.

To substantiate the other side of the coin let me turn to the most popular rock band of all time, The Beatles. These young men arguably began as consumers who picked up musical instruments and replicated the music of their musical heroes, most of whom were bluesmen from the United States. They went on to become the most popular rock group of the 1960s and a cultural phenomenon with out parity. When the band grew their hair long and talked about LSD, were they propagandizing a new way of life or were they reflecting a way of life already in existence? To put it differently, did the Beatles and other rock bands lead the youth of the western world into the counterculture or did the counterculture consume the bands into its community? There is no clear answer to this, of course. The relationship was symbiotic at best and parasitic at its worst. Just like the later phenomenon of hip-hop, the streets created the music and the music in turn mutated, reflected and popularized the culture. Unfortunately, the aspects which were popularized were those that challenged the dominant system the least. In rock music that turned out to be the sex and drugs. In hip hop it turned out to be the sex, drugs and money. Politics and the sense of community were removed in favor of an individualistic pursuit of gratification. In other words, the capitalist ethos prevailed. This makes sense, of course, given that we live in a capitalist society and the companies that produce the music are instrumental players in that society’s economy.

Even on the occasion where something truly remarkable that serves a purpose beyond titillation comes into the cultural marketplace–a phenomenon seen in cinema and music more than television–the coverage of the work and its creators is often trivialized if it is covered at all. This was brought home to me recently as I watched the coverage of the Golden Globe Awards at a friend’s house. Little was said about the meaning of the films presented but thousands of words were wasted on the clothing worn by various actors and actresses as they walked around outside of the event showing off for the cameras. In the media coverage the following day, more print space was used describing people’s clothing and who they were with than on the works that were nominated. When it comes to music, reviewers tend to delve a bit deeper. However, at the end of the year, it is usually the musical works that made the most money that are celebrated in the media events viewed by the general public. This usually means that the works with the least meaning are those which are publicized most. This in turn propels even more sales, leaving works of consequence to linger in the CD bins until they are dropped by the industry.

Books are quite similar. Hundreds, if not thousands of titles, are rarely acknowledged by the media, while certain authors monopolize the sales charts and the minds of the reading public. I see this phenomenon daily as a library worker. Thousands of dollars are spent buying books that read very similar to the last work by an author, while other literature is never ordered. Well-read people end up reading materials that not only endorse the thought processes of the dominant culture of consumption and alienation, but are convinced that they are consequently somehow more enlightened than those that don’t read. Once again, we return to the question of which influences which. For example, are second- and third-rate crime authors like Patricia Cornwell popular because people like her writing or are these authors popular because the advertising budgets behind them convince people that they should read them precisely because they are popular?

I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Machine Gun” from a concert he performed in Berkeley in May 1970 while people rioted in the streets against the US invasion of Cambodia. This song is not only a prayer for peace and love. It is about the massacre of Blacks in the streets and Vietnamese in the jungle. It is also a cry for an end to greed and the wars it causes. It is a condemnation of the masters of war and a cry of defiance. I don’t think it will be appearing in a commercial any time soon. Do you think Obama has this song on his iPod? Would it make a difference if he did?

I was enthusiastic about working on this event because for some years I have found myself unable to muster any sense, other than an intellectual sense, that the organizing going on around me had any connection to my own life, to its rhythms and routines, which remained weirdly but happily untouched by the wars, strife, oppression, environmental collapse, destruction of the public sector, and so on that have accompanied this whole historical period of capital triumphant in this society where its triumph was most absolute, right down to our collective consciousness.

It’s funny: bohemians have always been thought of as an edge class, starving in garrets, harassed by cops and so forth, but as a debt-free, non-addictive, childless, already down-scaled bohemian in a highly resourced city with rent control, I discovered the ironic luxury of being able to maintain a considerable level of stability and distance from the cataclysms that were crucifying the American working class and decimating the American middle class, whose core values of consumption and security as identity, which were used to hog-tie them so effectively, were never mine to begin with.

But of course that’s also largely because my back was never up against America’s deadly wall of bigotry based on color, class or sexual orientation… Ah, yes, the “chains of privilege,” a young white anarchist I met once remarked, with a kind of knowing condescension, when I neither proudly nor remorsefully described this scenario to her. As if she had escaped those “chains” merely by reading Derek Jensen. Yeah, well, whatever. I prefer to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: we are all in the net, but some of us are looking for the scissors…I don’t romanticize either relative privilege or the lack of it in this society. If the struggle wasn’t always for personal survival, it was, universally, about the meaning of living in the world.

Enter the arts. If there is one thing that redeems the highly compromised American experience for me, it is the fact that there continues to be fervid artistic expression here, at the grassroots: you can kill your TV and never listen to commercial radio, never read the bestseller list or go to any show that costs over $20 and you will still find it everywhere, in cities, suburbs and small towns, from bar bands to street theater, slam poets to storytellers, alley murals to raves and free festivals and much of it is more heartfelt than good, but a lot of it is really good. Or something or someone always emerges out of it that is really good.

And if that someone or something doesn’t get too sadly huge and self-parodying and then implode because of that gaseous mind-fuck that is American super-stardom (I’m sorry, but it’s impossible not to reference the death of Michael Jackson here) then it all serves to keep soul-death at bay. Not for the privileged who can’t necessarily buy freedom from soul-death even with box seats at the Met and record-setting auction buys at Christie’s, but for the hundred-fifty million plus Americans whose collective net worth is now worth less than the richest 400, and whose collective soul-death you might have long expected from the starvation diet that commercial mass culture gives them, but who still persist, when they experience it, in being touched and thrilled and awakened and moved by song, dance, image and word, happening live and in front of them. Which is precisely why, one thinks, art is so vilified and ghettoized and attacked as immoral by the relentless guardians of the status quo, and those millions are constantly slipped the mickey of high-gloss, soul-dead, remote-controlled entertainment instead, because art awakens people, because it enables them to see themselves differently when they experience it, and even more when they make it. And that’s when the uncomfortable questions can begin.

So, our optimistically titled Jobs for Artists! event attracted a good crowd even without any of the local media outlets, alternative or otherwise, plugging it, in fact many of those present seemed to have found out about it through my artist friend’s Facebook page; welcome to Organizing 2.0. We heard from Gray Brechin that over 8 million people were employed by the WPA at its height, and even though it only lasted seven years it left behind infrastructure, architecture and public art that were an expression of a belief that there is actually such a thing as a common good, a belief that in a country where manufactured polarization and hate-your-neighbor is what sells the most air time, seems increasingly hard to hold. We heard from Arlene Goldbard about a new manifesto calling for national “cultural recovery” and how to get it, being drafted by some of the arts activists who made it inside the White House doors in May. And we heard some gently nuanced head-scratching and bemusement from Jeff Chang about a generation at the crossroads, a generation of political latch key kids entirely abandoned by 30 years of Reaganomics and pushed to the corners by racism that had still managed to emerge as some sort of new American mainstream. Now what? Many of its members were entering their forties and might be reaching a point where they needed some kind of guidance from the past to show them how not to fall into the chasm that the future is opening before them. Even as they got a symbolic tip of the hat from the administration that is officiously trying to paper over that chasm with IOUs while still refusing to touch even the fretwork on the fundamental structures that created it. They’d been welcomed in, then told, in so many words: yes, well, we’re a little bit trapped by the chains of privilege here, so prove to us that you can bring some sort of movement to bear on (insert social issue here), and we’ll see what we can do…maybe…

We were moved by these speakers’ knowledge and insight to contemplate organizing a whole series of events locally to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the WPA next year, as a way to knit the past to the future and say: look, what up, if we’re talking about not just recovery but actually trying to turn this into a sustainable society BITL (before it’s too late), then artists at the community level are already playing a role in that process as fundamental as solar panel installers, transit planners and urban farmers. As fundamental as the schools in which many more of them would be working if the schools weren’t being starved to death. If enough people had the wisdom to see this when the country was on its knees, and in the teeth of exactly the same cobra-like animosity we get from today’s America First-ers, the neo-con punditry, maybe, well, maybe, if we push for it, we could too…

But the real revelation of the evening came during the Q&A at the end, when a man stood up and denounced these intelligent and passionate speakers as, in some not-too-subtle way, deluded sell-outs or actually dangerous for not using their time to vituperate the Obama Administration as the enemy. As if they had been wholly duped by the siren song of that supremely devious administration instead of taking a hard look at where any and every possible doorway for social progress might be right now and trying to figure out how to put a foot in it. Because their talks didn’t follow the correct line and thrust the flag of our oppression in our faces, they were therefore useless, possibly even pernicious.

He was an exemplar of the old (well, aging) sectarian left that still believes, in the absence of any supporting evidence, that you revolutionize people by standing up in a room and lecturing them in a way that implies just how ignorant you think they are and then urging the people whose intelligence you have insulted to leap up and take to the streets with you.

But beyond making me aware once again how our Bay Area niche shelters the politically marginal like limpets in a shrinking tide pool, his exercise in futility was the source of an unexpected revelation. When he chided the presenters for being “a-historical” (because they didn’t think they were living in 1933 or 1968 perhaps?) and lamented the “lack of support in the unions for the arts” and I thought about the last US manufacturing jobs flowing south and/or drying up altogether as the most recent consequence of capitalism’s periodic passing out the Kool-Aid, and the fact that 90% of US private sector workers under 40 will have had no experience of unionization in their lives anyway, and a super-majority will not have had it even in their parents’ lives, I realized that I was in the presence of something ghostly, fading, and unlikely ever to return in force to this country.

That something was not left radicalism, or social revolution, or mass organizations, or mass movements. Or even, theoretically at least, trade unions. It was the industrial model of organizing, which arose out of the industrial model of work, and was passing into history with it. Marx, that starry-eyed dreamer, thought that the very fact that workers were being thrown together in enormous numbers on the factory floors of Europe would give those workers a sense of themselves as a class and of their common interests as such—bringing them to full self-awareness and in fact, revolutionizing them. And left organizers have consciously or unconsciously hewed to that paradigm ever since. But Marx, the prescient and hard-eyed economist, also saw that capitalism survived its self-generated crises by constantly revolutionizing the means of production. What he didn’t anticipate, perhaps, was the degree to which the technological revolution which reduced the number of workers needed in any given operation would also revolutionize the mobility of capital. And the combination of those two factors, or what we’ve been calling corporate globalization for the last decade or so, enabled the second process to far outstrip the first. The factory floors dwindled and scattered around the globe, while imperial wars, bread and circuses were deployed effectively (with Europe perhaps focusing more on bread, the US on circuses) to defray class consciousness and social revolution in the global north and west, and starve it out in the south and east.

But now, in the final coup, the industrial model of mass production already on the ropes here has been revealed to be generative of a possible global ecocide, and not a place we can afford to go back to anyway. Whether the product is cars or cows, it is poisoning the bodies of both producers and consumers and denuding our planet of its vital resources. And in fact, another offshoot of industrialism, the industrial model of education, has worked largely to keep us uninformed, uninspired, and uncritical: that is, to poison our spirits as well. And yet the left, even the non-sectarian left, has internalized this obsolescent industrial model and kept on applying a factory-floor analysis to social conditions and articulating an assembly line view of what human beings are, generating diminishing returns and emptying rooms in droves as history spun out from under it.

Enter the arts again. What struck me most about the brief upsurge of mass organizing in the US that first took on globalization itself, beginning in Seattle, was the amount of creative expression that accompanied it. It was as if the medieval carnival, which the Russian critic Bakhtin identified as the wellspring of democratic and participatory culture, had melded with the march, the sit-in and the lock-down, as if somebody was finally trying to say: look, this is not just part of what we want, but of what we are. Not bread and circuses, but bread and roses. But what was even more inspiring was the realization that the conscious carnival was not just a kind of elite fin de siècle phosphorescence that cropped up at these ultimately quixotic but still necessary mass mobilizations. It was actually going on all the time, far below the myopic radar of the mass media or of much of the left itself. Beyond the intermittent demonstration, in the every day life of the street, public art, or community art, was at work in every corner of the country making our creative abilities collective and expressly putting them at the service of society.

This is by no means to imply that art itself was organizing people to struggle, or transforming society. Even revolutionary art movements do not a revolution make. The Surrealists and Dadaists found that out in the early 20th century, when in spite of all the wonderful paradigm-shifting that was going on in the arts, Europe went and annihilated a whole generation in a bloody bankers’ war. Others have been finding it out ever since; Chuck D already knows it and The Coup will figure it out sooner or later. We learned when the first decade of the 21st century launched a jet-propelled version of the Crusades that it’s not enough to put big puppets in protest marches. We actually have to start thinking of ourselves, collectively, in different ways. But (with a nod to Marx again) we will really only be able to do that in a profound and sustained way when our material conditions demand it. And that time may be coming, but evidently it is not yet.

What the arts can do, meantime, is give us ways to think about ourselves that aren’t based on internalizing some machine-model of human society or psychology. For example, human creativity has infiltrated modern communications technology, developed to spy and make war, and turned it into something like a natural structure called a rhizome, an underground root system through which chemical information is transmitted even over extensive distance, and life is sustained. And this is quite useful. But even more fundamentally, art can still happen if every system crashes, every plug is pulled, every ideology fails us and mass society shrinks to ten people around a fire. It doesn’t need technology, it just needs human beings.

Art is not really a hammer to shape reality, as Brecht declared. But neither is it a mirror, a glossy, dead, reflective surface. It’s a portal, by walking through it you find that it functions simultaneously to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Like the natural systems we are barely literate in anymore, and desperately need to rediscover, its real purpose is to reduce entropy and waste, and to continually generate possibility. It’s more than a pretty but superfluous outgrowth of our evolution; if we are to continue to evolve, it will be our most crucial partner in that process. It will have to fulfill an ecological role, infiltrating all the mechanisms that are failing us now: commerce, science, politics, education—to turn them back into living things.

Thus what inspires me about cultural activism and some forms of green activism today is that, from their starting points in the arts and ecology, they envision ways of thinking about what human beings are and what our fundamental needs are that don’t rely on industrial paradigms. Global awareness is growing that these paradigms are racing on to our general destruction, even as we have tried and failed, since Marx, to use their own tenets to oppose their consequences in oppression and war.

It’s early days to know whether ecological and creative models of organizing will actually arise en masse out of the detritus of industrial society and rescue Marx’s dream from its rusty shackles, but the disorderly ferment that occurs at the local level (where all politics starts and finishes) when we start looking for ways to build creative, participatory and ecological economies is way more promising than the death-struggles of America’s mega-unions, as they eviscerate one another in pathetic turf battles like polar bears on a melting ice berg and continue to stuff cash into the pockets of the millionaire politicians who cluck their tongues and then, like the overpaid call girls they are, waltz off into the night with their big business patrons’ arms wrapped around their waists. Or than the non-profit corporation (that about says it all) left for that matter, just as much a machine model, trussed to the apron strings of private foundations and beginning to discover, since the financial crisis began, just how expendable it is to them. Both are mechanisms that in the era of globalization have proven successful only at organizing people to fight each other over crumbs, in a creepy battle royal. Neither currently offers us a way forward through collective consciousness-raising (remember when we used to use that term?), that is, through developing an integral understanding of our nature as creative, social and ecological beings.

The late Carol Tarlen, a San Francisco poet, organizer and clerical worker, expressed with a poet’s vision and concision the essence of the existential problem when she wrote a poem for Korean garment worker Jean Toer-Il, who immolated himself to protest working conditions:

   His clothes soak gasoline
   his face sweats gasoline
   his hair shines gasoline
   he flicks the lighter
   flames surge up his arms and back
   illuminate the dark alley
   of his labor.
   we are not machines he cries
   fire consumes his flesh
   we are not metal he screams […]

   I am flames
   I am not a machine
   I am not a machine
   I am spirit
   I am light
   I am love

We need these understandings, these expressions, that can take us in a lived instant from the deepest obscurity into the brightest illumination, we need them to infuse everything we do. How fortunate for us they continue to be out there, all around us every day.

Tall and self-assured, Freedia is a powerful performer and brings an undeniable energy to the play. During rehearsals, says Lucky, “when Freedia comes in, the cast lights up, and everyone does their best.” Freedia is best known as part of a community of gay rappers self-identified as sissy bounce artists. She rejects that label, saying, “I’m a gay rapper, don’t get me wrong. But there’s no such thing as separating it into straight bounce and sissy bounce. It’s all bounce music.”

Bounce is the name given to the style of New Orleans Hip-Hop recognized for a distinctive beat and call-and-response lyrical style that owes much to Mardi Gras Indians and other local cultural traditions. Although not widely listened to outside of the south, bounce dominates New Orleans clubs, and is so identified with the poor neighborhoods of the city, it’s sometimes called “project music.”

“When you hear bounce,” says Lucky, people in a club go wild. “They just forget about it. They throw their hands up in the air, they catch the wall.” However you label Freedia’s music, she is one of several gay rappers who have broken down barrier after barrier to become some of New Orleans’ most popular musicians.

Spreading New Orleans Culture

Catch Dat Beat attempts to spread the love of bounce, and it proves infectious. The play advertises that it has no profanity or “obscene body gestures,” (a challenge, when capturing the bounce experience, which often involves a lot of both). Lucky Johnson is a cousin of popular director/actor Tyler Perry, and like a Tyler Perry script, Catch Dat Beat has positive characters and an accessible story. The basic story follows a hair stylist (played by Freedia) who throws a block party to show a visiting cousin how New Orleans gets down. There are moments of conflicts (will Freedia’s grandfather, played by Lucky, accept her sexuality? Will police break up the block party?) but the show is really about celebrating local culture. Lucky also acts in the play, along with bounce trendsetter Tenth Ward Buck

The second act of the show recreates a block party on stage, and features short appearances by many of the biggest names in bounce. During the opening weekend, the crowd rose cheering to their feet as stars including Ms. Tee, Gotti Boy Chris and Katey Red took over the stage.

Lucky wants Catch Dat Beat to help popularize bounce and New Orleans. He structured the play around a block party to show that New Orleans celebrations are really about building community and supporting your neighbors.

“Growing up in less fortunate neighborhoods, your parents would have card games, or suppers,” explains Lucky. “Say Miss Carol across the street’s light bill was due. Miss Carol would have a supper. Everyone in the neighborhood would buy a plate to help her pay the light bill.” In other words, continued Lucky, the block party comes from this tradition, and is ultimately about “how a people are able to come together in a time of need.”

Lucky has produced many of New Orleans bounce hits, and sees producing as a way to support positive work. “I can’t sign a hip hop gangster rapper,” he says. “I don’t advocate killing and drugs or slap that bitch. I’m not into that. I’m not gonna put my money behind it. If you come to me with something that says ‘get on the dance floor and have a good time,’ then I can support it.”

He is excited about all of the play’s actors, heaping praise on the accomplishments of Tenth Ward Buck and Freedia. “Buck was the first in so many ways,” he says of his star, listing his accomplishments. “The first to speed up bounce, the first to take an R&B track and bounce it out.” Through more than ten years of albums, plus a film, an upcoming book, and his dedication to working with youth, Buck has earned the praise.

As for the star of the show, “Freedia is outstanding,” says Lucky. “Every time he’d get the mic, he’d just light up the room.” Buck also Is quick to praise Freedia. “As Freedia was coming up, a lot of people tried to drag him down,” Buck says. “And he didn’t care about what they said, he kept moving forward. I don’t care if you straight or what, everyone is bouncing to Freedia’s music.” In fact, the sissy bounce community that Katey Red birthed ten years ago with her album Melpomene Block Party has rejuvenated the form, and gay rappers like Freedia have gone from a novelty to a central part of bounce culture.

Conquering Obstacles

Bounce music faces many obstacles on the way to national popularity. It is in many ways so distinctly New Orleans, with most songs featuring neighborhood-specific references, that it’s hard to imagine a bounce party in any other city. However, elements of bounce have appeared in songs by national acts like David Banner, Mike Jones and Beyonce.

Here in New Orleans, bounce artists bring lines around the corner when they perform. Freedia believes bounce will keep growing, and isn’t worried about any potential obstacles. She has struggled in a sometimes-homophobic music scene and become one of the leading stars — gay or straight — in New Orleans. “We been working really hard all these years of getting people to accept us,” she says. “Maybe get throwed at and screamed at, but over time all that has changed. All the hard work has finally paid off.”

With a show at this year’s Jazz Fest by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, as well as a photo spread in hipster music magazine XLR8R, the music form is clearly reaching new audiences. “For me it was the determination to change the people and make them love what we do,” says Freedia. “And that’s what my job was. When I became a gay bounce rapper I said that I was going to change it and make people love me, and make them love gay people.”

“People say negative things,” about gay rap stars, acknowledges Lucky. “I don’t care, at the end of the day it’s about the message. People who are homophobic, it tells me about that person’s character, because god loves us all no matter what.”

* Check out Ya Heard Me, the definitive Bounce Film.

In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the “essential metaphorical thrust” of the film, which he said aimed “to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring “a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war…”

Rosenbaum indicted “the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”

In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: “It’s definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It’s about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents’ generation.”

But Rosenbaum’s Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film’s central relationship between Michael and Hanna.

Michael’s passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.

Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant’s favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don’t want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally — or perhaps surpassingly — guilty comrades.

The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna’s illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.

As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. “My parents, my teachers, everyone.” The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: “The only question is why you didn’t all just kill yourselves?”

Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the the Holocaust. The film’s underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge. Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.

Power’s book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world — in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere — over the past hundred years. “The key question” writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, “… is: Why does the United States stand so idly by? The most common response is, ‘We didn’t know.’ This is not true.”

“Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it,” Power says. “Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.’” It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand any action. Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act. U.S. officials “were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.”

Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government. We are, in this moment, as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich. We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation. Starting well before the invasion of Iraq — which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred — we knew the “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses. But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren’t sure.

In his Sunday column entitled: “What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us,” Frank Rich remarked upon this “American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago… Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.” Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, “How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead ‘normal’ lives while genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad. If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors.

For Bernard Schlink, this knowledge, that his parents’ generation denied, “makes me aware how thin the ice is on which we live.” Schlink believed that German culture and institutions like courts, universities, churches, unions and political parties “all seemed so solid.” And yet it all broke down, “relatively easily.” In America too. Somehow we allowed our government to invade a country that had committed no aggression toward the United States. We allowed our government to declare an emergency in order to violate human rights of many thousands of individuals, to commit torture, to incarcerate people for years without trial or hearings of any kind. And today we continue the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. We continue to jail and abuse individuals without charges. And we all know it’s wrong. And it’s time to deal with it before our “land of the free” is irreparably compromised.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has laid out The Case for a Truth Commission (Time, Feb 20). As Leahy says: “For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans. We need to get to the bottom of what happened — and why — to make sure it never happens again… to find the truth….

“But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America’s reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it…. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.”

It’s not just our right. It’s a fundamental need. German society is still — and may always be — in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years. Samantha Power is now an adviser to Barack Obama. Nobody knows better than she does the moral imperative for admitting and redressing the moral lapses of government. We must hope that she wields her influence to make the machinery of government responsive to the deepest needs of our culture. Karl Rove continues to flaunt congressional subpoenas to testify. He figures he can stonewall indefinitely, that there will be no day of reckoning for lawless U.S. officials. We must do everything in our power to prove him wrong.

Less well-remembered now, but no less worthy of mention in this company, was Terry Southern.¹ Southern was and is primarily known as a satirist, I suppose, but that’s like saying the guys who designed the atom bomb were “just” mechanics. He wrote both satirical and non-satirical pieces in a variety of genres: journalism, novels, short stories, screenplays, reviews, and precocious, unclassifiable mélanges of fact and fiction.

Probably the best-known work attached to his name is Dr. Strangelove, the classic Cold War farce-majeur of nuclear annihilation. Director Stanley Kubrick is Strangelove’s originating genius, of course, but Southern collaborated with him on its unforgettable screenplay. The extent of his contribution is apparently still contentious, and this may be an indication of why his career path led him to greater obscurity than many of his peers. The movies have been a cruel medium for many writers, and Southern’s later writing was almost entirely in collaborations on screenplays.

But if you read any of his prose, you’ll see that his particular sensibility, highly involved with depicting the clownishness and deadly “preversity” (his preferred rendering of this term) of the powerful is there throughout the film. You can bet that signature dialogue from each of its indelible cast of characters, and possibly their monikers themselves, from General Buck Turgidson to Colonel “Bat” Guano (“If indeed that is your name,” as Peter Sellers’ Captain Mandrake remarks tellingly during a crucial exchange) come from Southern. And personally I would hazard that General Ripper’s obsession with Russian infiltration of “our precious bodily fluids” through the monstrous Commie plot of fluoridation, which initiates the whole chain of events that ends in Armageddon, is a Southern contribution as well. And thus many equally brilliant touches in one of the world’s great satirical works, in any medium, of any age or land.

Another Southern collaboration, with Mason Hoffenberg, produced the novel Candy, in which Voltaire’s iconic innocent Candide is reconceived as a dim but preternaturally sexy small town girl who travels far (and wide) and finds her ultimate happiness in a very preverse manner. On his own, Terry Southern is perhaps best known for the novel The Magic Christian, a less transcendent but intermittently brilliant lampoon of human greed. Both of these stories became not-so-great movies, their wild imaginativeness stunted by a medium that Southern may have had too much confidence in, after experiencing it at its best with Kubrick. Later interviews with him indicate that he saw the medium to which he’d hitched his fortunes with a very jaded eye.

That’s why you need to read the stories. Southern’s short stories, both satirical and “serious,” are distinguished by prose mastery, subtlety and a truly mind-blowing range of genre and subject matter, possibly unique in U.S. fiction, from the magic realism avant la lettre of a Texas dirt farmer battling a mythical sea-monster in his melon patch, through the minutely examined lives of tragically hip expatriates in Paris, and insider views of the French working class, to the anomie and casual sadism of disaffected young boys. Whether the boys in these stories are in south Texas (where Southern grew up) or New York City, the dialogue is always pitch perfect and the milieu is coolly exact.

Most of his best stories were collected in the superb 1967 anthology Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, along with some classic pieces of New Journalism, such as “Twirling at Ole Miss,” from 1962, which Tom Wolfe considered foundational to the genre. Here Southern reports on a baton-twirling convention at the eponymous deep South university, full of creamy white pubescent girls in drill team fetish attire, at the height of the dogs-and-firehoses period of the Civil Rights movement. His voice is deadpan and his eye for the telling detail is dead on. There is an exemplary moment in his visit to the college library, when he opens a first edition copy of William Faulkner’s Light in August and finds it raggedly inscribed with “Nigger-Lover” on the title page.

Southern’s most creative period was spent toiling in what he dubbed the “Quality Lit Game,” the smug and self-serving world of New York magazine publishing. This world can only be barely imagined by most of us today, not because it’s gotten any less smug and self-serving, but because it’s so diminished in cultural power. But through those then-ascendant, smoke-filled Madison Avenue corridors Southern rambled in a drug-enhanced state of ribald bemusement. He gives us inside looks in completely crazy-ass pieces like “Blood of a Wig,” whose fantastical sequence of events still grounds itself in a kind of realism with fly-on-the-wall boardroom dialogue, in the form of editors who say things like “let’s stroke this one for awhile and see if we get any jism out of it.”

Southern, somewhat like his contemporary Lenny Bruce, was fascinated with our night-selves, the unexpurgated utterers of all that language that narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes tend to fear and despise. This marks him as a spirit impossibly out of synch with our times, but quintessential in his own. The stuff he dredged up out of the mid-20th century psyche has all seen the light of day many times over now; concupiscence among the powerful and repressed no longer has the power to shock most of us. Incest, necrophilia, coprophagy, whatever: it’s a commonplace of 24-7 news feeds. And yet, in some way because the times demanded it, Terry Southern made his own uniquely delicious froth out of it all, that’s still tasty today. And still radical, even if it doesn’t shock. (The two qualities are often confused.) Why? Because he forces us to permit ourselves to imagine anything, and his wild and generous humor shows us what a pleasurable act such imagining can be.

Southern’s fecund sexual fantasies are always so over the top as to be self-satirizing—which this feminist critic at least would say is quite an apt way of looking at bourgeois male heterosexuality. For a slightly different take on gender relations, there is his gleefully mock-outraged letter to Ms. Magazine in the posthumous collection edited by his son Nile, Now Dig This! (which contains a whole section dedicated to Terry’s spoof complaint letters). He admonishes the editors that if women wish to be taken seriously as full citizens in modern society, they will have to stop acting like “rutting [...] wildcat[s],” during sex: “moaning, sobbing, writhing, scratching, biting,” and so forth (Southern’s italicized list of shocking female copulatory behaviors is much longer). There is an unusual generosity of spirit here—often lacking in satirists from Jonathan Swift onward—that is the antithesis of misogyny or misanthropy.

I haven’t even begun to talk about his boundless love of drugs. You’ll have to experience that for yourself; suffice it to say that avid consumer doesn’t do justice to it, and that Southern’s reality is always somehow like a drug experience, even when no drugs are involved. Now Dig This! contains a hilarious transcript of a conversation with Burroughs, as he and Southern go through a bag of pharmaceutical samples Terry has acquired in a mostly futile quest for the real thing. Terry’s exclamation-pointed enthusiasm for the trial and error method of drug testing is dryly riposted by the world-weary Burrows. It’s an overlooked classic of drug literature. Southern paid for that exuberance with his health of course, in later life, as everybody does. How drearily real.

So why am I invoking Terry Southern now, when he’s been gone for almost 15 years? Because even in another landmark period for the triumph of folly, I’ve found no other writer in any medium who can generate the deep, hard, hearty and (still) surprised laughter at quintessential Amur-rican absurdity that Southern can, and who is able to do so precisely because of his mastery of the written word. Almost regrettably for those of us who savor the power of words alone to move and enlighten, Southern was not a lit snob: he moved into film and basically left fiction behind because he saw the cinema’s potential to tell the stories he wanted to tell in a powerful way. And so we have Dr. Strangelove, thank God. And of lesser brilliance but still worthy: The Loved One, Barbarella, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. He even took a stab at writing for Saturday Night Live, but it was way too tame, by the early ‘80s, when it was largely considered to have gone seriously bad anyway. He would have had to survive into the era of cable, perhaps, to find a home in TV writing.

And even so, I don’t think so. Southern lived until 1995 but produced almost nothing of note from the early 1970s onward. The times had changed, you see. The historical moment from and to which he spoke most eloquently, when “All Power to the Imagination” was not an empty slogan, was utterly gone. (His unforgettable piece “Groovin’ in Chi” about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, suggests that that hope-slaughtering horror show may have been precisely when and where it died.) While our lives have continued to be coldly revolutionized in the technological sense, far too much human failure, particularly of the social imagination, has intervened since that statement was made for it to resonate in the same way with us now.

While some may think the U.S. has become more a more open, more culturally sophisticated society since Terry Southern’s time, I have my doubts. Rather we often seem to me like weird masochists choosing to keep ourselves in cultural lockdown, breathlessly mouthing the words “individual freedom” and “creative potential” and “no limits” and what-not, while our corporatist system, looking metaphorically like the gruesome self-caricature of the late-period Mae West dressed in red-white-and-blue burlesque house lamé, gleefully and unstintingly whacks us with its Naugahyde cat-o-nine tails. Oh, Freedom™.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t fresh and marvelous (and funny) stuff bubbling out there today amid all the homeland insecurity, or that there won’t continue to be. Reports of our cultural death tends to be greatly exaggerated. At the same time, factors too numerous to list here—everything from demographics (an aging U.S.) to global economics (an impoverished U.S.) and the exhaustion of natural resources (ditto)—all of which affect the production of culture in ways we ignore at our peril—bode against another upwelling of creative energies in the U.S. with the transformative power and scope of Southern’s time in the foreseeable future.

So now in this metaphorical late winter light, as we wait for some chance of another spring, let’s raise a joint or a syringe or a glass or a spoon and toast Terry Southern. Reading his best work gives you the pleasure of believing again, however fleetingly, that anything is possible and everything is permitted.

1. A host of other Southerniana is available here.

Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin — A clever and funny tale about Kafka’s beetle Gregor Samsa and the world of the 20th century. This latter subject ultimately turns the humor in this story into tragedy, which transforms it from just a good work of fiction into a classic one.

Subterranean Fire by Sharon Smith — This history of labor’s struggle for economic justice in the United States is a necessary and hopeful read for those who earn a wage in these times of economic uncertainty.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak — Nominally a work written for the young adult market, this work unveils the emotional horrors of war and oppression while simultaneously celebrating the everyday beauty found in human existence. It is about the casualties that the masters of war ignore.

The Scar of David by Susan Abulhawa — The beauty in this story is not in its few moments of joy and happiness or its even rarer moments of hope. No, the beauty lies in the stories of a people determined not to die. In a young girl’s belief in family and friends. This story is a story of Palestine. The writing here echoes the finest couplets of Gibran and Rumi.

People’s History of Sports in the United States — Dave Zirin has composed a wonderfully written, well-researched, and very readable story of US sport and its meaning to the oppressed and those who fight with them against the rulers. Like any sports book, there are stories of glory and prowess. This book is about the playing field and its role in the struggle for freedom and equal rights. It is about the rulers attempts to keep sport safely in the realm of nationalism and the status quo and the struggle of some athletes to make their efforts much more than that. Zirin makes it clear that it is a also a history that continues to be written.

Where the Wind Blew by Bob Sommer — Sommers’ novel is an emotionally taut tale. Like the strings on his old girlfriend’s cello, the story is tuned perfectly. One twist of the pegs to the left or right would make the story less than what it is–either too flat or mere melodrama. Where the Wind Blew is an intelligent and sensitive treatment of a time when the apocalypse was always just around the corner.

Born Under a Bad Sky by Jeffrey St. Clair — Most of the book is made up of hard-hitting articles regrading the destruction of the environment and exposes of those determined to continue that destruction. The jewel of the book lies in the last 116 pages of narrative. Titled “The Beautiful and the Damned,” this section is St. Clair’s beautifully rendered tale of a trip down some of the US West’s best known rivers. Seemingly inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, Aldo Leopold and the sheer beauty of the natural surroundings it describes, “The Beautiful and the Damned” does more than end Born Under a Bad Sky with a flourish, it conveys it into the genuinely sublime.

War Without End by Michael Schwartz — This is the best book on the US war in Iraq published in English to this date. It is comprehensive in its breath, revealing in its detail, and relentlessly radical in its critique. Michael Schwartz explains not only what the US has done to that country and its people, but why it is still there. Furthermore, it explains why there is a good chance that US troops will be there forever unless massive public protests are mounted against that presence.

The Duel — by Tariq Ali This is an important book. There has been very little published in English about Pakistan that doesn’t merely parrot the positions of the Pakistan government, the US desires for that government, or some combination of the two. It is written in an engaging and accessible style. As the US widens its war against those who would defy its designs into Pakistan, it becomes essential reading for anyone who refuses to accept the Orientalist narrative spewed by the policy makers in Washington, DC. Ali has written a history that explains and interprets the reality of Pakistan that is free of western prejudices and self-serving assumptions conceived in the foreign policy bureaucracies of DC and London.

The Trip Into Milky Way by Gary Corcoran — Trip Into the Milky Way (Coldtree Press 2007) is a novel of flight and it’s a story of love. A beautifully told tale of one man’s journey from the military draft and toward himself during the US war on Vietnam, this occasionally humorous, often heart-wrenching novel is a tale of a generation that serves as a metaphor for a nation that lost its way. The story is a story of wandering. Sometimes the wanderer is lost and sometimes he is just wandering.

GB84 by David Peace — GB84 is nothing short of stunning. It is a novel about the savagery of capitalism. Jackboots and legalized police beatings of unarmed strikers. Secret hit squads and government/corporate-sponsored organizations of police pretending to be miners whose job is to convince the strikers to scab. Democratic forms and fascist realities. The war of the super rich against the workers. This is David Peace at his best

The Lightning Thief Series by Rick Riordan — This is a delightful series set in modern times that features modern children of the gods and humans battling it out for the future of the Earth. It is also published for the youth market, but its appeal transcend the industry’s intentions. An introduction to Greek mythology that makes it all seem very alive.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by MT Anderson — One more set of books supposedly for the Young Adult market that transcends its intended market. The story of an American slave sold into a house of Enlightenment scientists in Boston who are attempting to discern the differences between Europeans and Africans, this two-volume set is a look at the role the slavers played in the American colonists’ war for independence and how the aspirations of the African-Americans of their times were manipulated by both sides in the conflict. It is also a unique telling of a young man’s intellectual and emotional growth into adulthood and a paean to the joys of classicism — musical and literary.

I also believe a mention of my 2007 novel Short Order Frame Up should appear here. Here are some comments from readers and reviewers regarding that novel.

“Ron Jacobs has created a working-class brew of language and music, a quasi-bitter, semi-sweet world of weed and sport, of love and violence, of not-so-innocent innocence up against the walls of racism and power. A compelling story, alas, and an underlying reality of life in America.” -Marc Estrin, author of Insect Dreams

“With Short Order, Ron Jacobs delivers something I haven’t come across since the works of James Baldwin: a great anti-racist novel. Powerful and political without being preachy. Poignant without being treacly. It’s stunning.” – Dave Zirin

and one more…..

Finally a novel about social and racial justice wrapped in the digestible genre of a murder mystery and set in Baltimore, a town that divides the north from the south and embodies the hopes and prejudices of post-60s America. Short-Order Frame Up is charged by its keen eye for historical detail and social conscience. But the devotion to context never interferes with the relentless pull of the story. A finely written but disturbing novel that probes the lingering bruises on the American psyche. –Jeffrey St. Clair

I used to think we were all a bunch of clowns.

Where did I get the arrogance, the audacity, the sheer chutzpah to believe we were equal to clowns, who after all, are entertainers, in their own way, make-up artists, acrobats, performers who get paid at the end of the night, scrub off their grease-paint, twist off their rubber noses, and sleep well, while we, we are merely children in the audience bedazzled and beguiled by the clowns while outside the big top, under the benevolent watch of the Strong Man, The Knife-Thrower and Lobster Boy (”support our freaks”) our parents are signing away the family farm, our inheritance, and that of our children, to the Ringmaster, who orders the Strongman to bugger Dad while Lobster Boy and Knife-Thrower do unspeakable things to Mom, for after all, they got paid for the gig, gotta make ‘em earn their freak. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t be natural.

That we dare flatter ourselves with such attributes as clown, buffoon, jester, jackanapes, lummox, oaf…another testimony to our unmitigated gall.

Communication Breakdown in the Great Beyond (Apropos Fox, not Cox)

How telling that the television ghost-hunters (all right, we’ll go along with it: “there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio,” yadda yadda yadda) were worried about entering the haunted basement because of the POWER PROBLEM. That is, there was no place to hook up their fancy high-tech ghost hunting doo-dads, so they had to bring down a generator. Interesting that even in the “other world” communication depends on non-renewable – or re-incarnationable – energy sources.

Cox Says “No!” to Unmarketable Drugs

We paranoids don’t do well with hallucinogenics. Then again, maybe it’s the epoch; it’s not like I’m hanging out with Grace Slick on a warm June night in San Francisco, circa 1967. The sixties had pot and acid; the seventies had heroin and Quaaludes; the eighties cocaine and Ecstasy; the nineties anti-depressants; and our current era a mishmash of anti-depressants, benzodiazepams, and highly caffeinated “soft drinks.” Booze and nicotine throughout, of course; the timeless “legal” drugs we are actually encouraged not to “say no” to — don’t let the anti-smoking ads fool you; besides encouraging smoking as an act of rebellion via corn-ball reverse-propaganda, the hardest drug of all to kick is Nicotine gum. It’s like chewing cocaine.

We’re All Better Now: The Post-Election Irrelevance of Cox

The modern president is like a systems administrator of a system that’s been fixed for years with minor “patches” and “upgrades,” only making it even more complex and subsequently closer to chaos, a system that can only be “fixed” by a complete “power down” and rewrite of the kernel and OS code; no matter how colorful and dazzling the screen-saver, it’ll only save what it’s meant to save – the screen; thousands of lines of code between pressing a key and the instant appearance of a letter or number on the screen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if The Board of Trustees (whoever they really are) sat McCain and Obama in a room and said,

“We need an articulate, relatively young, black man to take off some of the heat, ease tension, bring back that Kennedy/MLK sense of hope and ‘change.’ Sorry, John, you represent the so-called ‘old school.’ Barrack, you’re in. Congratulations. No hard feelings, John. Our men at Diebold have been instructed to give you a number of ‘red states’ so it won’t be an embarrassment.”

“Yes. I understand, sir. Congratulations, Barrack.”

“Thanks, John. If there’s anything I can do, you let me know.”

Comedians as Letter “C”

Ten pies-in-the-face, “to-go”, for the clowns who managed to take a once outrageous weekly (5 minute) skit on the real Saturday Night Live 1975-80 (imagine if, after 1970, they hired a four new guys every couple of years to write and play crappy music and called them The Beatles or The Doors? What’s in a name?) into hour-long ACTUAL mainstream “news shows” with ACTUAL mainstream guests (who they josh around with with all the investigative chops of Jay Leno) and call it “comedy.” For some reason this pisses me off even more than the fucking election, which is at least a “sort of” funny joke. This “Fake News” using “actual mainstream news” with some limp, sponsor-approved “satire” would make Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and the real “SNL NEWS” satirists WISH they were dead, if they weren’t already dead, and therefore, most of them being dead, damn proud of it. What did I just say?

Modrun Media Medicine: a Possible (Mis?)Reading of Cox

Actors, formerly lowest of life forms, became icons — literally – once their owners had the technology to reproduce their images so they could earn money off the actors not merely from one or two stage performances a day, but thousands of movie screenings a day throughout the world, not to mention magazines, memorabilia, free media publicity etc. Unfortunately, the actors, never the brightest of the lot, took this to mean that they themselves were somehow more important.

Surgeries don’t matter anyway, especially for women, who once they pass 40 have to wait till they’re over sixty or so to play 40-year-olds and such. Cheaper for celebrities to dress in diapers as a means toward regaining lost youth and more effective than surgery; also, they can “grow into them” as they age…

But the surgeries made them look like teenagers strung out on heroin. So the Owners began to harvest real old people, the ones who still had enough memory left to remember lines (not that it mattered much; in film, you only have to say one or two lines between ‘takes’); also, the old people died before they became annoying; so the owners told the filmmakers to make movies about old people; but the young people weren’t interested in seeing such films; so the Owners had Big Media churn out magazines, websites, television shows etc. portraying the old people as desirable, THE PEOPLE to be; so the young people began buying fanzines and going to films starring old people. Soon the young people wanted to be like their heroes. They tried heroin, but that didn’t work well for more than a few weeks, or minutes, for most; so the stores began selling old people masks and props to make the young folks look old with sagging breasts and low scrotums like melting wax; and the wealthy young people had this done via surgery; so everyone, even the doctors who lost so much business making old people look young — which was way passe — were happy….

To Paraphrase Cox…

Capitalists and their “enablers” cannot be reasoned with or “talked to.” There is no dialog. If there were enough space, and a lot less people, that would be fine with me. They stay where they are, I stay where I am, and we’re happy as pigs in poop with our own peculiar notions about what “is” is. However, Capitalism, which began as a malignant tumor some 500 years ago (some would say “Civilization” itself which began around 8000 years ago), has metastasized to engulf the globe. There is no “escape” unless you’re rich enough to buy a temporary Disneyland off the coast of some third world “paradise” which will, ultimately, be engulfed by the tidal waves of climate change “inspired by” industrialism and post-industrialism – whatever that is. We are what we eat, (i.e., the planet).

The ultimate goal of capitalism is one “legal” Man – the Chief Executives and Board – celebrating absolute monopoly over the wasteland, all the while eying each other hungrily and wondering “gee, who will ‘we’ exploit next?”

…and Add My Own Two Cents

That said, once someone crosses the “line” into my “space,” and worse, threatens to eliminate me in order to occupy said “space,” I don’t think “love” or “tolerance,” as preached by capitalist clergy, are the affectations that are in my “best interest.” In such situations, an absolute devotion to defending “one of god’s creatures” (i.e. moi) BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, is in order. Just a thought.

American Bards and Cox Reviewers

Of course, Cox’s Sick Planet , if it’s read, as it certainly should be, will probably generate all sorts of “opinions” among the millions floating around “the information super highway that’s gonna bring us all together” these days, including this one. But I prefer to think of opinions not “like assholes, but like original minds; not everybody has one.”

Beyond Cox and Evil

Maybe all that mumbo-jumbo (see Ishmael Reed) mythopoaeic poppycock about the “dead king” sacrifice which culminated in Jesus appeasing his mean old dad for the sins of mankind in order to save mankind was not as wickedly conceived as the mind of mankind is capable of and consistent in conceiving.

Men hate and fear god. The way they hate and fear THE CORPORATION. But like THE CORPORATION, the old testament god, Yahweh, is invisible, immortal, untouchable. But Jesus, his “representative” on earth, was quite mortal, visible and touchable. Better yet, he was capable of being harmed.
Men nailed him to the cross in vengeance, their only means of redress, against the merciless, implacable, unreachable Yahweh.

So what might this mean in terms of seeking “redress” against THE CORPORATION?

In an EMERGENCY SITUATION, such as ours, one must come to terms with whatever interpretation of the cosmic order one may have, then put a lid on it and let’s get down to brass tacks – and use them…

Concluding Unscientific Post-It^TM

those who can’t do, leach
those who can’t sing, preach
those who can’t grab, reach
if
   agent manage sale
then
   go to beach
else if
   agent manage fail
then
   prayer (pitch) = beseech

The music ranged from British dance hall ditties to folk tinged ballads with some serious hard rock in between. Then there was the John Cage/Stockhausen mishmash of sound called “Revolution #9”. A counterpart to the other song titled Revolution (known as “Revolution #1”), “Revolution #9” was meant to be the chaotic sounds of revolution as conceived by John Lennon. At times reminiscent of a political protest and other times more like a football game, the entire collage reminds many listeners of a trip on LSD. “Revolution #1″, on the other hand, represented a debate going on between the Beatles, within John Lennon’s mind , and in the larger society over the merits of revolutionary change and the forms any such change should take. Chairman Mao and dogmatic cadres or Fabian-like evolutionary change spurred by a revolutionary change in consciousness. Of course, this latter possibility was also open to interpretation. Would this change in consciousness be towards the “new man” that Che Guevara wrote about or would it be the new consciousness Timothy Leary spoke of and Charles Reich would attempt to denote in his 1970 book The Greening of America?

The Beatles didn’t have the answers. Indeed, they were asking the questions like everyone else. However, in the convulsive year that was 1968, when all the pillars of what already was were being challenged, there were many who did think the Beatles had the answers. One of these was the aforementioned Charles Manson. His conclusions regarding the tunes “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies” combined with a racist and apocalyptic vision fueled an exceptionally gory spate of Hollywood murders and a particularly surreal series of spectacular trials. White Panther John Sinclair, meanwhile, wrote an open letter to John Lennon regarding the latter’s apparent hesitation regarding the political upheaval and dramatic shift to the left among the youth of the world. The letter was responded to by Lennon and was read by millions of readers in underground newspapers across the world. To be more precise, the letters concerned the single release of the song and not the album release. This difference was essential, primarily because the lyrics that read

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

On the single version, go like this on the album version

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out (in).

The latter version obviously showed some ambivalence on the part of the Beatles (or at least John Lennon) regarding an approach that ignored the fact of the violence being used against the protesters. One other aspect of Sinclair’s argument had to do with these lyrics:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

It was Sinclair’s contention that both the institutions and one’s mind needed to be freed. Lennon eventually came around to a mode of thinking considerably closer to Sinclair’s. In fact, he helped spearhead a campaign to get Sinclair released from prison after he was sentenced to ten years for giving a narc one joint of marijuana.

But the four songs mentioned above were not the album. “Back In the USSR” poked gentle fun at the American rockers who celebrated the United States as the greatest place to be while conveniently ignoring its legacy of racism and war. “Julia” is a beautiful poem to Lennon’s mother, his first son and even Yoko Ono—the “ocean child” of the lyrics. “Blackbird” is a song about Rosa Parks and her refusal to move when ordered to do so by the realities of American apartheid. As we all know, that refusal was a pivotal movement in the struggle to rid the nation of that disgrace. George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was inspired by an epigram of the I Ching and is one of the most beautiful songs ever composed by a Beatle. Ad infinitum. I’ll let the reader fill in the spaces regarding the rest of the selections on this double disc.

Everyone had (or has) their favorite Beatle. Mine was always John Lennon. Similarly, everyone has their favorite Beatles song(s) and album(s). Without a doubt, mine is the White Album.

The recently released Che: A Graphic Biography stands among the latter. Drawn by one of the most political of all the underground comix artists from the 1960s and 1970s–Spain Rodriguez–Che is the story of the revolutionary Che Guevara. Spain’s detailed drawing and direct storytelling is more than an introduction to Che Guevara. It is a classic of the graphic genre. In the past, Spain used his radical passion and artistic skills to tell the story of the Spanish anarchist military hero Buenaventura Durruti. He created one of the most interesting characters and scenario in comix fiction in his Trashman series and drew some of the most intricately beautiful singular panels that ever appeared in the Zap Comix series. The editor is Paul Buhle, a longtime radical, a founding member of the defunct journal Radical America and a writer who has at least two other radical comix to his credit: the 2007 release Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History and Wobblies.

Che is drawn in a manner quite similar to the Trashman comics. Quasi-proletarian in its styling, the story is told in a shorthand that emphasizes landmark moments in Guevara’s personal and political life. The reader follows the journey told in Che’s Motorcycle Diaries and watches as Spain points to incidents and people that educated Che to the ways of the capitalist world and moved his worldview towards revolution. From there, the reader is taken to Mexico where Che begins a commitment to the Cuban revolution. Key moments in that revolution and Che’s role in it are drawn and told. From there Che goes to Africa and then to Bolivia where he meets his end at the hands of the CIA.

Spain was always the most politically radical of the underground comix artists. His work never shied from putting his belief in the need for revolution and freedom on the page. There’s a panel in an early Trashman comic that features a billboard in the dystopian future inhabited by Trashman and the humans he fights for and against. The message on the billboard reads –in a clear reference to the behavior modification theories of B.F. Skinner made popular among some in the power elites in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity–”Beyond Freedom and Dignity Lies Fascism.” That message, delivered in the offhanded manner that it was yet in the context of the proletarian counterculture superhero Trashman fighting those who would use their money and power to control us all in their pursuit of profit, has remained with me as much as Marx’s admonition to lose our chains.

Che was not a superhero. He was a man. Despite the current fascination with his image and its use by many around the world, that is the most important lesson of his life. He worked constantly to change himself into the new man he hoped to create in the world, but he existed still as a human being like the rest of us. Spain’s comic biography of him reminds the reader of that fact. Simultaneously, it reminds us that we too are capable of creating similar change in ourselves and the among our fellow humans.

Comics like Spain’s Che are more than pictures. They are more than the words put sparingly on the page. They are a medium designed to help their readers imagine a world defined by the ink lines of the artist in an effort to bring the story alive. In the case of Che Guevara, the dynamism of the story is more than enough to turn those lines from two dimensions into three. Combined with Spain’s comparably dynamic artistic style, the contradictory force that was Che Guevara is truly brought alive in this work.

Normally such a move would provoke all the derision this writer can muster. Live at Shea is an exception, however, for two reasons. One: this is The Clash! This is the band that politicized punk rock from its very inception, and brought rebellion back to rock ‘n’ roll in a way that still inspires to this very day.

Two: the album is a glimpse into a period in the band’s history that was simultaneously exalting and tragic — between things begun and ended, between the power of great music and ideas and the power of right-wing fear and reaction.

The Clash’s decision to open up for the Who on the mega-stars’ “farewell” tour of American stadiums in the fall of ‘82 was itself an ideological quandary. The Clash was the biggest they had ever been, and were arguably one of the biggest groups in the world. Combat Rock was proving to be their most successful release to date, and was fast on its way to platinum status.

It seemed that the band’s incendiary message was reaching more people than ever before. For a group poised to take over the world, a stadium tour seemed the logical next step. For a group that had always taken an unflinching radical stance, though, stadium tours represented all that was wrong with rock ‘n’ roll. Everything from the flashy stage shows to the overpriced tickets smacked of how capitalism was ruining music.

Furthermore, as biographer Pat Gilbert puts it, “The group had always preferred the intimacy of medium-size venues. It was this philosophy of being able to see and communicate with their audience that lay behind their week-long residencies at modest venues . . .” In other words, stadiums were where all the democracy and solidarity of music was crushed by piles of cash and elitism.

The Clash justified the move by figuring (and rightly so) that the tour was a way to reach even more people. Sound logic, no doubt. The America that The Clash was returning to had entered a new and scary era. The rightward drift of official politics in the US mirrored the same in Britain. A year and a half into his presidency, Reagan had already crushed the air traffic controllers’ strike and signaled that he had more of the same in store for women, Blacks, and anyone who dared defy the new Washington consensus.

Combat Rock was filled with impassioned calls-to-arms, urging young people to dig their heels in and resist the upcoming onslaught. In an interview years later, Joe Strummer would recall his thoughts on the advent of Reagan/Thatcher: “[When] Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. . . . it was hard to tell who would be worse, but we knew that a tremendous struggle was ahead . . . their tendencies leaned to the far-right if not fascism.”

* * * * *

When The Clash took the stage at Shea on October 13th, rain was coming down in sheets. The prospect of playing in front of 50,000 screaming fans was indeed daunting. Bass player Paul Simonon recalls that “it felt a bit like miming because there were so many people there.”

Yet listening to the album today, one would never guess that the group was so nervous. Footage of the gig shot by documentarian Don Letts shows the four members throwing themselves around the massive stage with the same swagger and confidence that they brought to the countless club dates they had performed in previous years. Strummer even jokes with the audience at one point: “Will you stop talking at the back, please? It’s too loud. It’s putting us off the song, here! We’re trying to concentrate so stop yakking!”

The moments of raw power and vitality are numerous on Live at Shea. The opening notes of “London Calling” are punched out so forcefully they could shatter concrete. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” possesses a rolling raucousness that can’t even be heard in the studio recording. And “Career Opportunities” — the only song from their first album played that night — carries all the immediacy it had when it was first performed by four unemployed punks in North London five years previously.

By the time the group finish off their set with a blistering version of “I Fought the Law,” they are holding the audience in the palm of their hand.

And yet, it’s also apparent that this is a band not too far from disintegration. Just prior to the tour the group had sacked drummer Topper Headon due to his growing heroin addiction, thus putting an end to the “classic” Clash lineup. Terry Chimes, drummer for The Clash on their first album, had been brought in as a last minute replacement.

The sudden change in personnel is evident on some tracks. While Headon had a background in myriad musical styles, Chimes was much more of a straight rock drummer. While he pulls-off the rap and dub beats during the group’s medley of “Magnificent Seven” and “Armagideon Time,” his playing is hollow and often sluggish.

Other more prominent schisms within the group are evident too. Those familiar with the group’s version of Eddy Grant’s “Police On My Back” will notice a section of the song when Mick Jones’ lead guitar part is strangely missing. The story here is that Strummer had walked up to Jones and physically grabbed the neck of his guitar to prevent him from playing.

The rift between Jones and the rest of the group had been growing for quite some time. He had disagreed with bringing original manager Bernie Rhodes back on board. He claims to have merely “gone along” with Topper’s sacking. And his original mix of Combat Rock had been shelved in favor of bringing Glynn Johns in to produce the final version.

Chimes was privy to how this bitterness was affecting the daily workings of The Clash: “By then Joe and Mick obviously had a difference of opinions on a range of things . . . They had devised a system where they didn’t have to confront each other all the time — there was an avoidance going on, which covered up the fact there were deeper issues there.”

* * * * *

Less than a year after the concert at Shea, Jones was kicked out of The Clash. That a founding member whose songwriting and virtuosity on the guitar had been an indispensable part of the group could be kicked out was evidence that their existence had become increasingly rudderless.

Combat Rock’s defiant protest hadn’t been enough to stave off the consolidation of Reagan/Thatcherism. As the heated struggles of the ’70s were pushed into bitter defeat, anyone with The Clash’s firebrand left-wing politics was forced into either abject obscurity or milquetoast compromise.

Compromise was never something The Clash was good at, and they continued to soldier on sans Jones. But with the movements that had long inspired The Clash — from the anti-racist forces to the Sandinistas — fighting for their very survival, the ground on which they stood became shakier by the day. It didn’t take long for one of rock’s most relevant groups to become a caricature, a music industry parody of what a “left-wing” band is supposed to look like.

“The worst moment was realizing that there was no way forward,” said Strummer some years later, “like the gap between rhetoric and the actuality. For example, talking about all the issues that The Clash raised and what your daily life would have been like if we’d have stayed together. . . You know, you’d never really have a life that would be real and yet you’d be expected to say something real about life to real people and make some real sense.”

Not long after the release of their universally panned follow-up to Combat Rock, the group would call it a day. The concert at Shea would simultaneously be their apex and the beginning of the end for The Clash.

One can’t help but listen to Live at Shea Stadium without remembering Strummer’s quip that “rock ‘n’ roll is played on enemy ground.” If a group like the Clash can walk into the belly of the beast and bring the same verve and immediacy that they delivered to anyone who ever listened to them is a testament to the power of truly great music. Knowing that they would be among the many brilliant political acts that imploded in the Reagan ‘80s makes these fleeting and final moments of greatness all the more prescient.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
I dont know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels
I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through
Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on – running on empty
Running on – running blind
Running on – running into the sun
But Im running behind

– from “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne

Screaming in the Rain

I was on my way home from doing a radio interview in Reading, Pennsylvania. It was very cold, windy and pouring rain. As I got closer to home, I found myself driving down a road where many of my campaign lawn signs had been planted. I noticed that one had blown over and was lying in the street. I pulled my car over the side of the road, jumped out of the car and began screaming at the sign as I picked it up, straighten it out and re-planted it. “You’re not going to lay there on the road, in the rain and get hit by a truck. You’re going right back where you were and do your job”.

That was the first of three stops I made. When I jumped back in the car after yelling at the third lawn sign, it just dawned on me that I had ruined a very good pair of shoes and perhaps a very good blazer while saving around five dollars worth of lawn signs. But it took me until I got home to realize what had happened. It wasn’t about the price of the lawn signs and it wasn’t about wrecking my shoes and blazer.

Why would a 62-year-old man with a couple of university degrees jump out of his car on a cold, windy day in the pouring rain and start yelling at lawn signs insisting to them that he wasn’t going to let them lay in the rain drenched street and get hit by a truck? It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that what had happened began to coalesce in my consciousness.

This is what it’s like to run for Congress as an independent. This was a metaphor I could’ve never constructed consciously. I never gave a thought about wrecking a pair of shoes and a blazer in order to save five dollars worth of lawn signs. It was what I simply had to do. This is what I’ve been doing every day for the last nine months.

Why did this happen today? Have I finally snapped? In a week the election will be over. I have no money. Worse; I am around six thousand dollars in debt. I raised ten thousand dollars but I had to spend seven thousand of those dollars just to get on the ballot. That is how much it costs to collect the five thousand signatures required in Pennsylvania this year to appear on the ballot. So I had only three thousand dollars to conduct my campaign compared to the five hundred thousand dollars raised by my Republican opponent.

Raising money is not rocket science. There are only a couple of things you have to do. First of all you have to ask. That is the main reason why people contribute. But you do have to explain to people the value they will derive from their donation. If they don’t believe they will receive any value from such a donation, there will be no contribution.

So after hundreds of telephone calls, hundreds of letters and e-mail messages to thousands of people over nine months I have only raised ten thousand dollars. I know a lot of people. If each one that I asked had contributed just two hundred dollars I would’ve raised four hundred thousand dollars. That would actually be enough for an electoral victory. But out of the thousands of people I contacted only three dozen contributed a total of ten thousand dollars. What value did those three dozen people see that the thousands of others did not?

If someone were to ask me if I would like to have a seven series BMW, I would give them an emphatic ‘yes’. On the other hand, if they then said all I had to do was hand over seventy thousand dollars, I would have to say that I didn’t want one quite that much. Give it to me at no cost and I’d love to have one. I might even come up with twenty thousand dollars. But I would never spend seventy thousand dollars for an automobile. It is simply a luxury that I cannot afford.

Everyday I get e-mail messages and telephone calls telling me what a great job I’m doing and how much we need to have candidates like me. But as soon as I finish thanking the person for their complement and ask for a donation the message becomes very clear. “John, you’re doing a great thing but you can’t really ask me to throw away money on a candidate who cannot win. Maybe I can let you have twenty-five dollars”.

That’s when I go in to my explanation that, although I cannot get elected, there are many things that I can win. I usually explain how I was only permitted to participate in one debate two years ago but this year I have appeared in all three. I explain about all of the radio stations and newspapers which have interviewed me; all the organizations which have invited me to speak this year while none of that happened two years ago. But in the final analysis, I am perceived as a luxury candidate that people cannot afford. Progressives want me in very much the same way I want a seven series BMW. Give it to them with little or no cost and you have a deal. But I am just not worth two hundred dollars let alone two thousand.

JOHNNY I HARDLY KNEW YA

You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg,
Hurroo Hurroo
You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg,
Hurroo Hurroo
You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg
You’ll Have to be put with the bowl to beg
Oh my darling dear you look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ya

– From “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ya”

Last Sunday night I went to the AMVETS to make a little campaign speech with the other candidates. After the presentation a big husky women veteran grabbed me by the arm and said, “Honey, you was the best one up there”. I thanked her very much and asked her if she would tell her friends about me and ask them to vote for me too. She said “oh honey, I ain’t going to vote for you; I hardly know you. I ain’t never seen you before tonight. I ain’t never seen you on the television and I ain’t got none of them postcards from you. None of the other ladies never heard of you neither. I think you ought to get a job on the radio because you sound very good like that Rush Limbaugh”.

Of course she has never seen me on television or received a post card from me and I only appeared in each of the newspapers that serve my congressional district one or two times as part of an article about the incumbent. It costs a lot of money to do those kinds of things. It would cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to send a postcard to each of the voters in my congressional district! The Republican and Democrat Parties send out postcards for their candidates. That way the candidates do not even have to use any of the funds they raised on postcards. They will spend their money on television advertising.

Even at this late date I could flood the local radio stations with advertisements for only about six thousand dollars. I could place an ad in the “Community Courier” for two thousand dollars and get into one hundred and ten thousand households. I could get out powerful progressive message and raise the consciousness of tens of thousands of people but this effort is of such little value that only a very few see it worth a contribution over two hundred dollars.

Buddy Can You Spare a Dime

They used to tell me I was building a dream
and so I followed the mob
when there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was over there
right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream.
With peace and glory ahead –
why should I be
standing in line,
waiting for bread?

– From “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”

The author of that depression era song tells us that the narrator is not bitter; he is bewildered. He is a man who had faith and hope in this country. Then came the crash. Now he can not accept the fact that the bubble has burst. He still believes. He still has faith. He just doesn’t understand what could have happened to make everything go so wrong.

Our nation is now closer to fascism than it has ever been. The two corporate parties have led us into two illegal wars, stripped us of our civil liberties, plunged us into a ten trillion dollar National Debt and have made corporations our masters instead of our servants. We have troops not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in one hundred twenty-seven nations around the world. In the last few weeks we have bombed Pakistan and invaded Syria. For the first time since the Civil War we have a combat brigade on duty in the United States “to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities”. So much for the Posse Comitatus Act.

The two major presidential candidates have both confessed they plan to continue a foreign policy of war and aggression with the concomitant slaughter of potentially another million innocent men, women and children. Both have committed themselves to a failed economic system which sacrifices the well-being of ninety-nine percent of the people on the altar of the superrich ruling elite which finances their political campaigns.

The Republican and Democrat parties lack any clear vision for America. They have no real leadership and they inspire no hope for the future. They have given us a view of the world that is clouded by war, poverty, ignorance, fear and violence. I have a different vision for America. I see an America that leads the world in spreading peace instead of war; hope instead of fear; sustainability instead of disaster; freedom instead of occupation. I see an America in which every person, regardless of their race, creed, color, age, gender or sexual orientation is valued and lives in dignity, and every person is free to reach his or her full potential.

Before the night is over I will get a dozen “at-a-boys” in e-mail messages or from people on the phone and maybe if I’m lucky someone will contribute twenty-five dollars. Yesterday someone contributed five dollars. Running a congressional campaign on thirty dollars a day and a dozen “at-a-boys” pretty much explains why I went “screaming in the rain.” But it no longer makes me feel like I am “building a dream”.

The choice of music and entertainment at these conventions speaks volumes. The Democrats had Kanye West, a significant choice considering this is a party that still seeks to keep rap’s more controversial elements at arms’ length. But West’s own limitations mirror those of the Democratic Party all too well: too star-struck by the system to really do anything about it.

As for the Republican Convention, they were entertained by Styx. That’s right . . . Styx! The power-ballad dinosaurs who have never been afraid to inhabit music’s lowest brow for the sake of making money. For the Republicans, a better choice could not have been made!

Compare these artists to those who played for the unwashed masses outside. While politicians hobnobbed with corporate executives and turned the dreams of the American electorate into so much political chum, students, workers, artists and musicians were raising their voices to bring real immediacy to the issues of war, racism, poverty and inequality.

The sheer diversity and dynamism of these musical acts make the “official” entertainment look like a yawn-fest. Punk, hip-hop, soul, reggae, folk, indie-rock — the multitude of genres was almost too much to keep track of. From the indie reggae-rock of State Radio to the jazz-funk inflected rap of the Flobots, to the ubiquitous presence of Rage Against the Machine.

The large amount of varying acts at these protests shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The past several years have seen an increase in political music from artists both established and up-and-coming; musicians who, like most in this country, think the world is heading down an increasingly unequal and dangerous path. If the protests are any indication, then there may well be many more artists to come who are willing to give new meaning to the term “popular music.”

Recreate ’68?

Convention season opened with the certainty that the Democrats would nominate their first African-American presidential candidate — a historic announcement that has inspired a lot of hope past the mere personality of Obama. And so, protesters were of all different mindsets about a candidate whose rightward shift flies in the face of his slogans for “change.”

Veteran rocker and radical Wayne Kramer, who remembers when his own group the MC5 were caught up in the police riot at the ’68 convention in Chicago, said in an interview that he plans to vote for Obama, but wants to hold his feet to the fire: “I do this [protest] out of a sense of participating in democracy,” Kramer proclaimed. “Democracy requires participation, it’s not just a theory.”

Kramer’s presence wasn’t the only thing reminiscent of those heady days forty years ago. Organizers were aware of the deliberate resonance with the ’68 protests. Indeed, one of the slogans thrown around the most at the protests was “Recreate ’68.”

In that vein, there was an effort to recreate that same spirit of resistance that reached into every aspect of culture during that red-letter year. Throughout the convention activists participated in the “Tent State Music Festival,” which treated attendees to an eclectic lineup: Kramer, State Radio, Son of Nun, radical folk stalwart David Rovics, the genre-bending Michelle Shocked, Jill Sobule, The Coup and Jello Biafra were just a sampling of the artists who participated during Tent State.

Certainly not all these performers were of the same mind about voting Obama, however. One of the most recognized radical hip-hop acts of our time, dead prez, performed in front of the Colorado state capitol in downtown Denver right in the thick of the protests, where both stic.man and M1 made their thoughts on the elections very straightforward in a freestyle later posted on YouTube:

“You expect me to vote for the lesser of two evils? Never!
It’s more the evil of two lessers
That’s like saying to M[1] choose your oppressor
Pick one: Jeffrey Dahmer or Hannibal Lecter
You want crack or coke, Pepsi or Dr. Pepper?
They’re all fucked up and neither one of them better!”

Whether those marching and bobbing their heads were planning to vote Obama or not, the one thing unifying every voice on the streets was the idea that no matter who is in office, they must be held accountable by pressure from below. That was made very clear on the final night of protests as Tent State was given a send-off by Rage Against the Machine.

Thanks to a lot of overblown hype from the mainstream media, it’s feasible that Rage were the most high-profile aspect of the DNC protests. It was a frustrating development considering that their show, which also featured the Flobots and other artists, was intended as merely a prelude to the march lead by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Nonetheless, RATM was willing to put actions behind their words when they brought members of IVAW onstage with them before beginning their set.

By all accounts, the show was electrifying. More importantly, the IVAW march perfectly displayed the kind of strength that veterans can have in this movement. Directly defying orders not to approach the Pepsi Center, the vets and the thousands following them simply walked right through the line of police, who stepped aside rather than risk the embarrassment of having to beat up a former soldier.

Police On My Back

It was in St. Paul, however, that the police showed their true colors. Given the amount of physical repression doled out to activists at the RNC, there’s a certain amount of irony in activists’ application of the “Recreate ‘68” slogan to the Democratic convention.

A doubly sick irony was that the Republicans kicked their soiree off on Labor Day. Given the eight-year onslaught on workers’ living standards overseen by the Bush White House, choosing this date seemed to be rubbing it in the face of those anyone who has worked hard for so little.

Protest organizers saw very little humor in this. That same night the “Take Back Labor Day” concert took place on the south bank of the Mississippi River. Once again, the night brought a varied bunch of highlights. Billy Bragg lead the crowd in “There is Power in a Union.” Tom Morello, in his Nightwatchman alter-ego, brought anti-war vets onstage to sing “This Land is Your Land” (including the much more explicit “lost verses”). Mos Def dedicated “Undeniable” to New Orleans, possibly besieged once again by the specter of Hurricane Gustav. A recently reunited Pharcyde performed all their classics.

Even as attendees departed this relatively calm event, cops were still waiting to hassle them, even shutting off bridges to the mainland until finally and inexplicably letting people pass. This kind of craven intimidation characterized the whole convention. Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman was arrested along with her crew while covering the protests. Innocent bystanders were often brutalized and arrested as cops and protesters clashed. And of course, there were the ridiculous charges of “terrorism” leveled against activists arrested the night before the events even began!

Sure enough, musicians were also caught up in this atmosphere of heavy manners. At the IVAW conference held in the days running up to the RNC, Baltimore political MC Son of Nun was among many activists harassed, and was even singled out by police himself after being tailed by a hotel manager. As it played out, eight officers held him for a half-hour before letting him go, but it was a blatant example of racial profiling and police repression that smacked more of the Jim Crow south. As SON himself put it, “I’ve never been kicked out of a hotel before.”

The crackdowns extended throughout the whole weekend. At a rally/festival that Tuesday, as Anti-Flag finished their set, the rumors that RATM would also be playing at this demonstration were quickly dashed by the police, who fallaciously claimed that the permit for the park had expired. The entire crowd erupted into a defiant chant of “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Not to be deterred, Zack De la Rocha and Tom Morello took the stage nonetheless to perform an a-capella version of “Bulls on Parade” that humorously featured Morello mouthing his iconic guitar part into a megaphone before joining the march to the convention center.

The Sound of Rebellion

When asked by Rolling Stone why he participated in the march, Morello simply stated, “I think it’s important to call out the economic crimes at home and the war crimes abroad while they’re [the Republicans] are here… Not to let them get away with it while the media is focused here. It’s important to get that message out . . . to have that amplified alongside the B.S. messages being spouted from the podium.”

In the days of and directly following the RNC, newspapers were filled with all manner of B.S. Those arrested were written off as “anarchists,” “violent.” Mainstream media treated protesters and musicians with either indifference or contempt. To some, the large amount of radical music acts was simply proof that these activists weren’t “serious,” and were only there to “cause mischief.”

It wasn’t only a slander against the already bruised and battered protesters, but a slight against the role music can play in movements. More than a hundred years ago, Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill famously explained that “a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once. But a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.”

In the thick of protests, with the urgency of injustice passionately felt by all the participants, and the threat of violence and repression looming overhead, the strength and inspiration that can be gleaned from these songs can be almost as important as the ideology and tactics.

By now, it’s obvious to all but the most cynical of commentators that people are fed up with the direction of this country, and growing numbers are willing to put real action behind this frustration and anger.

Where this goes past the election is anyone’s guess, but one can hope that these protests are only the early rumblings of something bigger. If that’s the case, then popular rebellion can’t help but bring large sections of the artist and musician communities with it.

Truly popular music. What a concept.

Nine or ten years ago a friend of mine whom I had not spoken to since 1982 called me. After a minute or two of establishing our current situations vis-a-vis our place of domicile, employment and family situation, my buddy (whom I’ll call C) asked if I still imbibed in the cannabis. Despite my aversion to speaking of such things on the telephone, I answered yes. “Hard to believe,” he responded. “We thought the stuff would be legal by now and look at it. People getting busted for it and seeing time like they did in the 1950s. That utopia we dreamed about and threw rocks at the cops for sure took a nosedive. Instead, we have a Brave New World drug scene where doctors pass out pills whose sole role is to homogenize our emotions and our essential beings.” I listened and agreed. “Besides the weed thing,” I said. “Look at the political spectrum. From authoritarian neoliberalism to authoritarian neoconservatism.” The far left is microscopic and the so-called progressives are unable to move beyond their moneyed sponsors.”

We continued on this track for about half an hour before bidding each other goodbye. Since then, C and I stay in touch via email and occasionally visit each other in person when I am in the DC area for a protest or family visit. His cynicism does not seem greater or lesser than mine and neither of us engage in political organizing as much as we did back in the early 1970s. Like many of our contemporaries who were engaged in left organizing back then, we are following the current US presidential campaign with a special interest in the Obama phenomenon. Being grounded in both leftist analysis and the aforementioned cynicism, Obama’s rapid swerve to the right once it became apparent that he had clinched the votes necessary for the Democratic nomination did not surprise us. It did, however, make voting for him less likely.

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead regrouped before the California primary this year and endorsed Barack Obama’s run for the presidency. In addition, they performed a benefit concert for his organization. The setlist was fantastic and recordings I have heard of the concert prove that the band still has the ability to turn in some good sets even with other guitarists playing in Garcia’s place. However, the endorsement of a candidate by the group was uncharacteristic. Garcia once commented when asked about voting in the US elections: “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” He wanted no part of such a choice, preferring instead to put his money and energies towards grassroots causes. It seems he understood that once one makes an allegiance with evil–even the lesser one–they risk becoming part of that evil themselves. The more active the allegiance, the greater the risk. Just look at the major national antiwar organization United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and their public stance regarding the desire of organizers of the protests at the upcoming Democratic convention to stage a large antiwar march at the convention. According to a recent press release from some organizers of the march, Leslie Cagan of UFPJ told some Denver organizers, “We don’t think it makes sense to plan for a mass march that might not end up being all that mass!” In other words, UFPJ is refusing to help build support for the march.

There can only be one reason for UFPJ’s stance. That reason is UFPJ’s allegiance to the Democratic Party. This allegiance is not an allegiance found among the grassroots of UFPJ but at the top. It involves a political misunderstanding of the Democrats’ role in maintaining the US empire and a fear of losing funding from elements of UFPJ that are tied to the Democratic Party. Ignoring the fact that it is the Democratic Congress that has kept the Empire’s wars going, UFPJ continues to call the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “Bush’s Wars.” Besides the attempts to silence the antiwar voice in the streets, there are also ongoing attempts by Democratic Party manipulators to keep antiwar language out of the Party’s platform. This is in spite of a statement signed by the progressive wing of the party demanding that the language be included. If 2004 is any indication, there will be no antiwar language in the 2008 Democratic Party platform. At least in 2004, there was a candidate (Kucinich) whose supporters struggled to get such language included until Kucinich rolled over and called off his supporters. It is unlikely that the battle to include such language will even make it to the convention this year. On top of that, one can expect some rather bellicose statements in support of Israel and against Iran. Not exactly the antiwar party you might have thought it was, huh?

I know Jerry Garcia was not a politician or even a politically inclined guy. Perhaps that was why he could see the bullshit that passes for representation in this country for what it is.

It strikes me that, in many ways, Carlin had turned himself into a modern Socrates, always questioning our words, thoughts, and actions, and finding himself disappointed in the lack of reflection in the rest of us. Carlin acknowledged this in perhaps his most important routine:

“I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love, as I say, they’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.”

The Seven Words routine was a milestone not just because Carlin managed to highlight the dilemma at the core of the modern condition, but also because it gave us a landmark Supreme Court case on freedom of speech that highlights how dangerous words can be to the guardians of mainstream mores, FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation. Carlin’s monologue, played on Pacifica Radio in NYC, engendered a dispute as to what constituted decent speech on broadcast media — and the Court decided that the population needed to be protected from hearing those “deadly” words spoken by Carlin, who had done so in an effort to help us enlighten ourselves about the power of speech.

Justice William Brennan, writing in a stinging dissent from the majority on that decision, stated that: “because the radio is undeniably a public medium, these actions are more properly viewed as a decision to take part, if only as a listener, in an ongoing public discourse.”

Censorship of language is an attempt to silence this public discourse, to stifle thoughts, actions, and ideas. George Carlin understood this perfectly well.

Carlin was concerned with pointing out how we, as a society, have started using euphemistic language as a way to avoid dealing with tough concepts. This is a corollary — and perhaps more dangerous than the official censorship — to the FCC’s abrogation of speech on TV and radio: self-censorship. In one of his books he noted:

“I mentioned several reasons we seem to employ so much of it [euphemistic language]: the need to avoid unpleasant realities; the need to make things sound more important than they are… but no matter what the purpose, the one thing euphemisms all have in common is that they soften the language. They portray reality as less vivid. And I’ve noticed Americans have a problem with reality; they prefer to avoid the truth and not look it in the eye. I think it’s one of the consequences of being fat and prosperous and too comfortable.”

Of course, the easy political examples are those we’ve been familiar with for a time now: George W. Bush’s “enemy combatants,” the “homicide” bombers, collateral damage. Carlin was adept at pointing these out along with the more common expressions we use between friends and colleagues. Religious, political, and cultural hypocrites were not spared his withering gaze — I once noted how a portion of his audience left during one of his anti-religious diatribes at a concert of his that I attended.

So what, then, is Carlin’s legacy? At the end of another of his famous routines he said that “the planet is fine, the people are fucked.” He was amused with our capacity to, essentially, kill ourselves off as a species. He said that:

“… it amuses me. Because it means the system is beginning to collapse, beginning to break down. I enjoy chaos and disorder. Not just because they help me professionally; they’re also my hobby. I’m an entropy buff.”

We are inundated with food yet prices are rising and people starve; we are awash in oil and prices have never been higher; we are aware of the effects of human-caused global warming and most of us choose to do nothing except complain about the weather; our government openly lies and violates Constitutional rights and all we do is shrug. Carlin’s choice was not to simply laugh at the downward spiral we were all on (by our choice); that is too superficial a reading of his humor. He was deeply concerned by the stupidity and violence we do to each other through laws, morals, and simply not acting.

His legacy, I think, is that our understanding of speech, of words, and our constant questioning of their meaning and use is our only outlet to discovering potential truths, to exposing lies, and perhaps building a world that’s a little nicer to live in, or at least, a little more amusing. It is, perhaps, a call to action, to understand that he was bitterly disappointed in how passive most people are in the face of injustice. In that respect, those of us who are political activists, or even those of us who are just trying to make small changes in our lives, could learn from Carlin to keep thinking and to be the gadfly that won’t let things rest, to tell the truth about the world in which we live.

Carlin, of course, put it best:

“Here’s the Secret News:
All people are afraid.
No one knows what they’re doing.
Everything is getting worse.
Some people deserve to die.
Your money is worthless.
No one is properly dressed.
At least one of your children will disappoint you.
The system is rigged.
Your house will never be completely clean.
All teachers are incompetent.
There are people who really dislike you.
Nothing is as good as it seems.
Things don’t last.
No one is paying attention.
The country is dying.
God doesn’t care.
Shhhhhh.”

– Emily Dickinson

George Carlin’s dead!

He was a funny guy.

He’d take a truth and dance with it.
The truth was like a big rag doll.
It could be bent.
It would fall down.
He’d hold it up and pirouette.

George Carlin was on a rant.
He’d rant about the government.
He’d show the stupid grin behind
Tyranny spying on its drones.
He’d show a people
Stewing in their fear.
It was funny –
The way nightmares are funny.

George Carlin, the murderer, is dead.
He was a dangerous man.
He’d walk around with his machete swinging.
He’d macerate myths and propaganda.
You’d never know where or when he’d strike.

“I have only one life to give for my country.”
Crap!
We keep killing the same fools over and over.
We raise them to kill and be killed.
Whack!
“Government of the people, by the people
And for the people –”
Whack!
“– Shall not perish from the earth.”
Whack! Whack! Whack!
He carved it into a pretty dish.
He served it with a lot of salt.
“This is the war to end all wars!”
Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
He stood it on its big fat head.
All its shiny coins fell out.
Blood skirled over the coins.
“The only thing we have to fear –”
Whack!
“– Is fear itself.”
Whack! Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
There was nothing to fear about fear.
We could figure that out ourselves.
There was everything else to alert ourselves to–
Especially lies from those who said
We had nothing to fear but fear.
“We the People”
Whack!
“–In order to form a more perfect government …”
Whack!
Government’s always imperfect–
It deals with human beings.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
Whack!
Truth is never self-evident.
It wears a thousand transforming masks.

Reverend Carlin’s dead.
He ministered to our wounds.
He applied the balm of love and laughter.
He walked us up to the Kingdom of Light.
He dared we make ourselves free to enter.
He left smiling.