The Obama Movement: Historical Turning Point?

The Obama Movement: Historical Turning Point?

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1242/1/

Written by Paul Buhle
Tuesday, 26 February 2008

Whatever is written about the Democratic presidential nomination
before the concession of one candidate or another is likely to be
premature at best. Still, for those historically-minded, a great deal
of significance has already happened.

When Hillary Clinton, a few days ago, accused Barack Obama of leading
"a movement" and not "a campaign," she inadvertently identified the
most important phenomenon in mainstream American politics, and not
only liberal politics, in a generation. She could be accused of
partial inaccuracy because the movement, arguably, has pushed Obama
from campaign to something more, notwithstanding the capabilities of
his electoral machine.

We can rightly go back to 1936 for one precedent, because the
organizations of the Left, fresh from participation in city general
strikes, hardly to mention housing struggles and unemployed marches,
made a ninety degree turn. Not only Communists, of course, but
prominent socialist labor leaders and others who grasped that FDR was
reaching out and offering organizing space as well as a global tilt
against fascism (initially welcomed by the New York Times and
others). The influences were felt within the rising industrial union
movement and elsewhere. But the real effects would be within the next
few years, when the Left, as individuals and organized groups large
or small, played an enormous role in culture, labor and politics. The
US that entered the Second World War was a different place than the US in 1935.

We can rightly go back to the middle 1960s for another precedent. The
leadership of society emphatically including the organized labor
movement based in the warfare-welfare economy successfully resisted,
in the end, anything like a decisive shift in power. And yet: the
hopes and expectations of the Kennedy years, alongside the rising
civil rights movement and the emerging student movements, propelled
the sense of "movement" beyond anything that the professionals of the
Democratic party anticipated or wanted. Coming out of the 1960s, the
progressive and multiracial coalitions successfully taking local
elections during the 1970s, senate and congressional progressives,
few as these may have been, etc., all owe to the Movement model.

We drop further into the negative with the successful centralization
of power by the DLC, with its sources in Democrats for Nixon, the
Moynihan defeat of Bella Abzug, the rise of the Clintons and above
all the counterattacks against the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1988.
Here we find the story of the Superdelegates and their capacity for
mischief. And, in the months to come, those hawkish Democrats far
more eager to keep a potential peacenik out of power than to defeat
Republicans. Count on it.

Better that we rest our case, for the moment, on the positives. When
thousands of aging and aged African Americans in Chicago gather their
energies for Obama, when they are mirrored by thousands of mostly
white undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin, when prestigious
endorsements (useful though they are) seem pale compared to crowds
roaring for social change, then we have the basis of a Movement, the
phenomenon that, as Tom Hayden has said, individuals do not create
but history can create.

What can we do, as progressives of varying age and political
backgrounds, to bring a wider, more sustained social movement right
for our time into existence? I can't think of a more important question.
---

Paul Buhle, a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, was editor of the
SDS magazine RADICAL AMERICA, and is author or editor of many books
on the Left and popular culture.

.

Symposium: The Death of a Traitor [Philip Agee]

Symposium: The Death of a Traitor

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6A8CDEC4-F7A9-4149-8057-A537115C3656

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 29, 2008

Philip Agee, a renegade ex-CIA agent, recently died in obscurity in a
run-down Havana neighbourhood. He betrayed his country and several
agency operatives were murdered after being exposed by him. Agee's
treacherous behavior in this regard prompted a U.S. law against
exposing government spies.

A distinguished panel joins us today to discuss Agee, the damage he
did to this country and the lessons and significance we can draw from
the life and career of this traitor. Our guests are:

Jim Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1993-1995).

Chris Simmons, a Counterintelligence Officer since 1987. From
1996-2004, he was deeply involved with the majority of US
Counterintelligence successes against Cuba. He was a central figure
in the identification, investigation, and debriefing of convicted
Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes. She remains the highest-ranking Cuban
spy ever sent to prison in the US. Simmons was the lead military
official in the May 2003 expulsion of 14 Cuban spies serving under
diplomatic cover. This was the third largest expulsion of diplomats
in US history, and the only one not targeted against Russia/USSR. He
has lectured on Cuban Intelligence throughout the US Intelligence
Community, to Congress, the Heritage Foundation, and in several
academic forums. In addition, his views on Cuba are increasingly
covered by the media, resulting in stories by EFE, TV and Radio
Marti, Notimex, the Washington Times, the Miami Herald, and America
TeVe in Miami. He writes a column on Cuban Intelligence for the Miami
Herald and is founder of the Cuban Intelligence Research Center.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest official ever to have defected
from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were executed
at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come
word-for-word out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons, republished in 27
countries. Pacepa's new book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald,
the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, has just been published.

and

Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He prosecuted the Blind
Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995. A failed
American, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee, 72, "Pont" to the KGB for
nearly four decades, is dead in Cuba, his spiritual home. He was a
traitor, paid by the Cubans and Russians.

FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and
Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Any McCarthy, let's begin with you.

What were your thoughts on the occasion of Agee's death?

McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie. It's a pleasure to join you and the rest of the group.

My interest in Agee is not that of a CIA insider but, instead, a
fascinated outsider whose national-security work on the
law-enforcement side of government was importantly affected by the
intelligence community. From that perspective, Agee seems to me to
have been the perfect storm of much that was excessive, or at least
eccentric, about the Agency and the 1970s. It's an aspect of the
critical but often overlooked difference between the skills of
intelligence gathering/analysis/operations and criminal investigation
that the CIA has always been more hospitable to those of a Leftist
bent of mind than, say, the FBI. The Agency, after all, really came
into being in the course of a great cause in which we and the British
(whose intelligence services were obviously very influential for us)
were aligned with the Soviet Union. It was, moreover, more concerned
than law-enforcement with knowledge of the world and expertise in
various disciplines; thus the top universities were much more of a
recruiting base for the CIA than the FBI. That doesn't necessarily
signal a leftward bent -- Bill Buckley, after all, joined the Agency,
not the Bureau. Still, I don't think we can ignore that the decades
immediately after the CIA's creation were those when the academy
trended decidedly and identifiably to the political left.

From the pool of Agency personnel, I think you thus end up with a
swath of people who are inclined -- or at least receptive -- to an
anti-American worldview and who are less rigid than their law
enforcement counterparts tend to be about bright-line rules, and
rigid, hierarchical divisions of responsibility. Consequently, the
hard line we try to draw between gathering information and exercising
charging discretion is better respected in the law-enforcement system
than the line between gathering intelligence and making policy is
honored in the intelligence system. This is not to say that you don't
have people in law-enforcement who heavy-handedly lobby to affect
charges and policy. But I think you have a greater percentage of
people in the intelligence community who think they know best and
should be the ones steering national policy, and who, concurrently,
are less apt to defer to protocols and conventions against taking
matters into their own hands.

This type of person, I think, was catalyzed -- and not in a helpful
way -- by the Zeitgeist of the Seventies which, in overreaction to
Watergate, some intelligence abuses, and elite criticism of the war,
evolved into what Jean Kirkpatrick memorably referred to as the
"Blame America First" culture. They came to see the U.S. as immoral
and imperialistic, and to see the intelligence business as
particularly noxious -- what with its practices of deceit to cull
information, its need to deal with unsavory characters (since nice,
upstanding people rarely are found rubbing elbows with those who pose
dire threats to the United States), and its secrecy and unilateral
control by the (discredited) executive branch. Of course personal
factors play a big part in why someone becomes a traitor. But just
looking at the framework from the outside, I don't think it's a great
mystery why you get an Agee, an Aldridge Ames, or even a lot of the
current and former intelligence officials today who are so deeply and
actively critical of U.S. policy.

FP: Thank you Andy McCarthy.

Mr. Woolsey?

Woolsey: Well, Andy's right that on the liberal-conservative spectrum
there have historically been more liberals in the CIA and more
conservatives in the FBI. But it's of course a long way between being
even on the very left end of the American political spectrum, and
even being willing to spin intelligence to affect policy, and being a
homicidal traitor like Agee.

I have been struck by the degree to which, during most of the Cold
War, ideology explained relatively little about American traitors.
That wasn't true at first. Certainly in the 30's and 40's the Soviets
snared a number of people who were on the left politically and who
were attracted by the very far left ("I have seen the future and it
works.") For some this was because their doubts about capitalism were
heavily magnified by the Depression, for others because our wartime
alliance with the USSR created a sense of common purpose. Here in the
US (Alger Hiss) and in the UK (the Cambridge spy ring of which Kim
Philby was a part) some true sons of the establishment spied for the
Soviets not because they were failures in life, needed money, or were
blackmailed but because they became true, believing communists.

By the time we were into the fifties, however, and the world had
digested Khrushchev's disclosure of Stalin's crimes, the Soviets got
very few American assets who were true believers. The traitors of the
late cold war era tended to be of two types. One was flakey young
guys such as the Falcon and the Snowman (F: "Hey Dude, stop Bogarting
that joint and look what I've found here in the SCIF - a manual for
the new reconaissance bird!" S: "Phat! Let's drop it off at the
Soviet Embassy, get a few bucks, and score some more grass!").
Another common type was the mid-career loser, often with a weird
psychological twist: Ames, Hanssen, Agee.

Now in the current era we have to be particularly aware of avoiding
stereotypes. For example, the vast majority of Cold War era spies
were white guys, but Cuba's penetration of DIA was with a
Cuban-American woman. And a very senior FBI official a few years ago
(happily now retired) was so convinced that there was another Ames,
in his view, in the leftist CIA that he ruined more than one career
at Langley while systematically overlooking for a long time the
ostensibly deeply religious and quite conservative Robert Hansen
spying for the Russians from his office just down the hall in the FBI building.

Our enemies are creative in finding spies that break stereotypes. We
must get inside their heads and be creative ourselves.

FP: Thank you James Woolsey.

Mr. Pacepa, your thoughts on Mr. McCarthy's and Woolsey's comments?

And kindly also touch on Agee the man: the man who betrayed his
former colleagues, the CIA and his own country. What damage did he do?

Pacepa: I am delighted to join such distinguished participants in
discussing a crucial side of the intelligence war. Let me start by
showing Agee as he was seen at the top of the Soviet bloc
intelligence community, to which I belonged when he became a traitor.
It is, I believe, a novel look.

According to Sergio del Valle, the head of the Cuban domestic and
foreign intelligence services with whom I had a relatively close
working relationship in the 1960s and 1970s, Agee was a venal
womanizer who had been recruited in Mexico City by the Cuban
espionage service, the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia), with
the help of a Cuban lover.

At that time the Soviet espionage service, the PGU, was engaged in
publishing bogus books by such supposed authors, such as White
Russian commander General Vlasov and Soviet foreign commissar Maksim
Litvinov, and even a collection of invented written correspondence
between Tito and Stalin. [1] Agee was like manna from heaven for the PGU.

The PGU took over Agee from the Cubans and persuaded him to put his
name on a "devastating book" against the CIA that would make him a
"rich man." During the Cold War the CIA was the West's first line of
defense against communist expansion, and the PGU believed that Agee
could help it erode the CIA's ability to recruit highly positioned
people able to see what spy satellites could not­what communist
despots were planning to do against the rest of the world.

The PGU resettled Agee in England, and tasked to write a book about
his experience with the CIA. From General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, a
former chief intelligence adviser in Romania who rose to head the PGU
for an unprecedented 14 years, I learned that Agee's book was in fact
conceived and documented by a DGI/PGU team of disinformation experts
in Moscow. The chapter drafts and the appended documentary materials
were sent to Agee through a PGU officer assigned under cover as the
London correspondent of the Novosti news agency, which was a PGU
front. (I later identified the correspondent as Edgar Cheporov.)

In January 1975, this joint DGI/PGU disinformation effort took shape
in the form of a book entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary,
attributed to Phillip Agee. The book claimed that "millions of people
all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by
the CIA," [2] and it identified some 250 "criminal" CIA officers
involved in Latin American operations, whose names had been provided
to Agee by the DGI/PGU team in Moscow.

Inside the Company became an instant bestseller and was translated
into 27 foreign languages. Why? In my other life, as a communist
intelligence tsar, I oversaw the Romanian equivalents of both the FBI
and the CIA, and I came to realize that the populace has very
different yardsticks for each. The domestic security agency carried
out its duties more or less in the open, and its officers were seen
as human beings with human failings. But foreign intelligence, which
was buried in utter secrecy, was light years away from people's
everyday lives. It was considered to be a mysterious and magical
organization, consisting of anonymous officers without name or face
who could bring off anything asked of them.

The PGU capitalized on this perception.

In 1978 I learned about a new PGU operation, aimed at using Agee to
make the CIA "toothless in Europe." Soon after that I broke with
communism, and of course I lost contact with those PGU plots. Twenty
years later I learned a few details of this new effort from original
PGU documents smuggled out of Moscow by PGU officer Vasily Mitrokhin,
helped by the British MI6.

Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive­described by the FBI as "the most
complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any
source"­show that in 1978 the PGU created a task force staffed with
officers from Service A (disinformation) and Directorate K
(counterintelligence), headed by V.N Kosterin, assistant to the chief
of Service A, and charged it to provide Agee with materials designed
to create another book. This became Dirty Work: The CIA in Western
Europe, which contained names and biographical details of some 700
CIA officers who were, or had been, stationed in Europe.

In 1979, according to other documents in the Mitrokhin Archive, the
PGU tasked Agee to lend his name to a sequel book, Dirty Work: The
CIA in Africa. Agee was met in Cuba by two PGU officers, Oleg
Nechiporenko of Directorate K and A.N. Itskov of Service A, who gave
him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.

Dirty Work was published in September 1979, bringing the total number
of CIA officers exposed by the PGU with Agee's help to about 2,000. [3] [i]

Trust is the most valuable asset of any espionage service, whatever
its nationality or political flavor, and the CIA was indeed harmed
for a time­any high-ranking foreigner would think twice before
putting his life in the hands of an espionage organization unable to
protect the identity of its officers and sources. Nevertheless, the
CIA continued to epitomize the notion of freedom for most of the
people kept prisoner in the Soviet bloc, and it eventually become
instrumental in winning the Cold War.

By the 1990s, Agee had become a forgotten relic. Now he has died of
septicemia in an infected Cuban hospital, and he was immediately
cremated to avoid future embarrassments. His books are turning to
ashes as well.

I am always interested in the perceptive comments of Jim Woolsey, and
I hope he can expand a little on how Agee has been regarded within
our intelligence community. Is he now forgotten there as well?

Simmons: To build upon Mr. Pacepa's observations, additional
confirmation regarding the fact that Agee began collaborating with
the KGB and DGI in the late 1960s comes from KGB General Oleg Kalugin
and Cuban defector Pedro Anibal Riera Escalante. Riera served in the
DGI (later simply the "DI") from 1969 until 1993. During his tour in
Mexico (1986-1991/1992) he participated in Operation "Moncada," which
targeted the secretary of the CIA's deputy station chief. Agee was
used to approach the secretary, but he was quickly recognized and his
effort just as quickly rebuffed.

I would also like expand upon Mr. Woolsey's comments on Agee's
motivations. Agee has often been characterized as a traitor motivated
by ideology. However, I believe revenge and greed also played
significant roles in his betrayal of the United States. The CIA
forced Agee to resign in 1968 due to his unprofessional and reckless
behavior. Specific examples included irresponsible drinking, repeated
and vulgar propositioning of colleagues' wives, and an inability to
control his finances. These character flaws should have raised flags
with US Counterintelligence. Instead, these failings fuelled Agee's
bitterness and thirst for revenge.

Regarding the greed aspect, in 1992, two senior CIA officers and the
highly respected DGI defector, Florentino Aspillaga, publicly charged
Agee with repeatedly receiving money from Cuban Intelligence. In
fact, Aspillaga said Agee's payments might have totaled more than a
million dollars. Agee denied the charges, but a second Cuban defector
both confirmed Havana's payments to Agee and charged Agee with
teaching Sandinistas how to identify US intelligence personnel and
their operations. It's important to remember that the Castro regime
was, and is, disinclined to pay its agents. As such, for Havana to
have paid Agee hundreds of thousands of dollars simply emphasizes the
importance the DGI/DI placed on him.

McCarthy: I feel here like a student lucky enough to get into the
faculty lounge on a day when the A-Team profs all happen to be there.

The Cuban and Soviet usage of Agee is fascinating stuff, and just as
the last time General Pacepa and I were together in an FPM symposium,
when the general spoke about the KBG role in marketing the Protocols
on the Elders of Zion, I'm struck by how coldly calculating the
Soviets were in exploiting prejudices and misconceptions in popular culture.

Of course, Jim and Chris can address this from the intelligence side
of the house far better than I, but in working national security
matters as a prosecutor and in studying them as a commentator, I've
been struck by how politically correct we are. Showy politesse is, I
suppose, necessary to some degree in diplomatic circles­I mean, who
wants to ruin a perfectly lovely dinner party. But it seems
positively stupid in the intelligence world.

To take one recent example, there is the case of Nada Nadim Prouty
(maiden name Nada Nadim El-Aouar), who infiltrated both the FBI and
the CIA despite being a former illegal alien and the sister-in-law of
a top Hizballah operative, Talal Chahine. Prouty pled guilty last
November to using her access to government intelligence files to
review intelligence on Hizballah­and there seems to be a determined
effort in government circles to understate the significance of what happened.

Prouty had fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship with the help of
her roommate, a U.S. marine captain named Samar Spinelli (maiden name
Khalil Nabbouh) who pled guilty to that fraud. The third roommate in
the group was a woman named Elfat El-Aouar: aka Mrs. Talal Chahine.
He is now a fugitive­a Detroit restauranteur and apparent Hizballah
big-wig who was laundering and routing millions to the terror
organization in Lebanon (where it is now believed he has
fled­El-Aouar pled guilty to tax fraud).

Now, I hear what Jim is saying about how, at a certain point, Soviet
moles did not typically fit a "true-believer" profile. But one would
think, if we took today's threat environment into account, that
someone like Prouty was straight out of central casting. How the hell
does that happen? I fear we are so intimidated as a government by
accusations of Islamophobia that we are overlooking what one might
have thought was the undeniable connection between Islamic ideology
and Islamic terror. It's like you don't even need to infiltrate us;
we will actively recruit you and not screen for, or blithely dismiss,
the pluperfectly obvious potential threat.

I've seen some of this syndrome myself in the astounding mishandling
of al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed by the CIA, the FBI and the U.S.
army. (Shameless plug­I write about Mohamed in my soon-to-be
published book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad). And why,
to take a slightly different example, would the army drum out a
highly respected scholar like Stephen Coughlin … because he declined
to modulate his (entirely correct) views on jihadism to fit the
military's rose-tinted vision of Islam?

Woolsey: I very much agree with the statements of this fascinating panel.

The Pacepa perspective is invaluable and I certainly agree with the
Simmons point on Agee's having been motivated by revenge and greed.

The McCarthy points about the recent cases set the tone for what we
must focus on in the future -- we're not in Kansas any more dealing
with cynical Soviets with a dead ideology. Our current problem is
much harder because the operatives who serve our major adversary --
several varieties of radical Islamic extremism -- are far from being
cynics and their ideology is far from dead. Indeed they very much
believe that they are commanded by God to destroy our civilization
and way of life and to use any means -- nuclear weapons, suicide
bombing, and total duplicity in order to achieve that end. Hence the
cases pointed out in the McCarthy comment. All is fair game to them:
lying about their citizenship, lying about a knowledgeable student of
Islam who understands their ideology, financing terrorists and then
denying it, and so on.

We must first of all cease the practice of the US Government's
honoring the radical Islamic extremists -- however cleverly they
speak and whatever their oil wealth and however large their corps of
lobbyists. If Harry Truman had decided to reach out to the American
legal community at the beginning of the cold war, he would not have
elevated the communist-front Lawyer's Guild to being his chief
adviser. And the US Government needs to stop its current parallel
practice of honoring the advice and company of Wahhabi-funded, Muslim
Brotherhood organizations and ignoring truly moderate Muslims such as
many Sufi, traditional Shia, Indonesians, and the like. Otherwise we
will see many more espionage cases of the sort that are set out in
the McCarthy comment -- and worse.

Pacepa: In order to protect our country and our allies against
terrorist and nuclear despots, we need highly positioned intelligence
sources. Only they can tell us what those despots have in mind, and
what their most secret war plans against us are. How can we get such
sources? The most important thing is to earn the trust of potential
agents and defectors, in spite of the vitriolic anti-American climate
they may be living under.

This takes me back to the subject of our Symposium. Agee died of
septicemia, but he left an infected legacy that it is still causing
considerable damage to the trustworthiness of the CIA, our first line
of defense against terrorism and nuclear proliferation. For one
thing, Moscow is still using Agee's name to discredit the CIA as an
organization incapable of preserving the secrecy of its officers,
foreign agents and foreign operations. For another thing, Agee's
revelations have encouraged some American political figures to
promote themselves by revealing CIA secrets.

From own experience I know how difficult it is for high-ranking
enemy officials to be persuaded to place their lives in the hands of
an espionage organization distrusted by the general public and by its
own government. In 1975 I decided to defect to the CIA. I trusted it,
I admired the efficiency of its secret war against the Soviet empire,
and I wanted to help. But, just before taking that irreversible step,
I was slapped in the face by the Rockefeller Commission report
describing the CIA as a rogue organization. The following year, the
Senate's Church Commission published 14 more reports portraying the
CIA as a criminal organization. A cable sent to Bucharest from KGB
chief Yury Andropov triumphantly prophesied: "The CIA's tyranny is
over." Ceausescu popped a bottle of champagne. A couple of months
later I had dinner with Janos Kadar, the ruler of Hungary and the
first chief of its communist espionage service; he raised his glass
of vodka with a toast: "To the CIA's funeral!"

The reports of the Rockefeller and Church Commissions froze me in
place for three more years. If the U.S. government did not trust its
own CIA, why should I? After I finally defected in 1978, I was sure
that other heads of Soviet bloc espionage services would follow in my
footsteps. It did not happen. Further investigations hit the press,
this time publicly revealing the CIA's failures in handling
intelligence defectors and agents. Those new reports would have
scared the guts out of me, had I still been in Romania.

Right now the CIA is being publicly raked over the coals in numerous
investigations­all "politically correct." I understand the openness
of American society. But espionage is, by definition, a secret and
merciless war that is especially perilous when waged against brutal
tyrants­even the slightest indiscretion could endanger the lives of
CIA officers and their sources. This sensitive national security tool
should not be used to improve the domestic stature of ambitious politicians.

To the best of my knowledge, none of our main allies has voluntarily
washed the dirty linen of its intelligence business in public. Their
espionage services also occasionally make mistakes, but they are
usually corrected in house.

It is not fair to compare the CIA with my former foreign intelligence
service, the Romanian DIE, but there is a lesson there. After I broke
with communism, the DIE became the subject of a public political
investigation. Romania's dictator needed to explain to the Politburo
why he had been "betrayed" by his own spy chief, and he made the DIE
his scapegoat. Soon after that the whole DIE collapsed­and I was
credited with "single-handedly demolishing an entire Soviet bloc
espionage service."

Over the past 25 years I have worked with a number of CIA officers.
All have been good professionals and devoted patriots, ready to go to
any lengths to protect our national security. They do not need more
Agee-style revelations. They need to be quietly helped to regain the
trust of their potential sources abroad. Trust is the most valuable
asset of any espionage service, no matter its nationality or political flavor.

Simmons: I agree with the insightful comments from the other panelists.

However, I would like to expand upon two points raised by Mr.
McCarthy. First, the shrewd ability of our enemies to exploit
prejudices and misconceptions in our popular culture and secondly,
how political correctness undermines our counterintelligence services.

A long-term influence operation conducted by the Castro regime has
been it masterful ability to justify its intelligence operations as
defensive measures taken against US terrorists. One need not look
further than the worldwide campaign known as "Free the 5" to witness
Havana's ability to exploit prejudices and mistaken beliefs. This
effort aggressively and methodically lies to global audiences by
portraying the espionage operations of the now defunct Florida-based
Wasp Network as Havana's innocent response to a violence-prone
Miami-exile community. In reality, several members of the Wasp
Network played key roles in the deaths of four members of Brothers to
the Rescue. Cuba conducted similar, albeit much smaller influence
operations following the arrest of INS official Mariano Faget, as
well as Florida International University staff members Carlos and Elsa Alvarez.

For decades, Havana also successfully exploited the biases held by
CIA Case Officers regarding the capabilities of Cuban Intelligence.
This arrogance came to light in June 1987 when Florentino Azpillaga
Lombard defected and revealed that 85 of the CIA's Cuban assets were
Cuban agents or provocations. Many of these double agents "worked"
for the CIA for decades, effectively denying the US leadership with
"ground truth" regarding what was actually occurring in Cuba.

Moving onto the issue of political correctness, this behavior has a
crippling effect on US Counterintelligence. We must remember that
Havana is predisposed towards racial/ethnic/gender profiling. Cuban
case officers favor the targeting of US minorities, specifically
women, African Americans, and Hispanics. This practice is based on
Havana's premise that minorities in the United States have been
repressed for so long that a need for revenge can be nurtured and
fueled within many members of these communities. Whether we believe
it or not is irrelevant; Havana has been quite successful with this
tactic. While Agee clearly didn't fit the racial/ethnic/gender
profile, his need for revenge is well within Havana's spotting and
assessing protocols. We need to view Cuba's preference towards
profiling for what it is; an operational signature that leaves their
agents very vulnerable. The US inflicted devastating losses on Cuban
Intelligence from 1998-2003. We can better repeat those successes
when we stop worrying about being "PC."

FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and
Andy McCarthy, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. And a
special thanks to Peter Collier, who planted the seeds from which
this symposium grew.
--

Notes:

[1] Andrew and Gordievsky, pp. 463-464. The authors describe several
bogus memoirs produced by the Agayants department, noting that the
fraudulent Litvinov book was "sophisticated enough to deceive even
such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E.H. Carr, who in 1955
contributed a forward" to it.

[2] Phillip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London, Penguin,
1975), p. VIII.

[3] "Allegations Concerning Philip Agee and the Covert Action
Information Bulletin," source: The Sword and the Schield:: the
Mitrokhin Archives and the History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and
Vasili Mitrokhin,, October 5, 1999, p. 2, as published on

http://jya.com/agee-kgb.htm.
---

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a
Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign
policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz's Left
Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate
America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev's
Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on
How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews
and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

.

Background for Chicago 10

[See URL for embedded links.]

Background for Chicago 10

http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/02/29/background_for_chicago_10.html

Chicago 10, the innovative documentary that revisits the tumult of
the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago 8/7
conspiracy trial of key antiwar activists a year later, opens Friday
in select theaters. The film is directed by Brett Morgen and combines
archival footage of the chaos of August 1968 with animated
reenactments of scenes from the trial. Plus a soundtrack ranging from
Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf to the Beastie Boys and Eminem.

Morgen has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to do the myth of
Chicago rather than the history," and "if you want to know the
history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book."
Well, we think understanding history is pretty darn important and are
happy to oblige.

Twenty years ago we published the most complete account of the events
surrounding the 1968 DNC, David Farber's Chicago '68. That book is
innovative itself, creating multiple perspectives reflecting both
police and demonstrators. Farber shows the developing plans of the
antiwar movement for protesting the war in Vietnam during the
convention, as the shocks of 1968 shift the ground­the Tet offensive,
President Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the re-election race, the
assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent riots in cities
across the country, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Next month we will release a paperback edition of Battleground
Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by
Frank Kusch. Battleground Chicago is essential for understanding what
is completely absent in Chicago 10­any insight into the motivations,
thoughts, and feelings of the individual policemen who were enforcing
order on the streets of Chicago. (Or, as Mayor Richard J. Daley
famously misstated it: "the policeman is there to preserve
disorder.") Kusch interviewed eighty former Chicago police officers
who were on the scene and uncovered the other side of the story of '68.

If you want to get a taste of 1968, go see Chicago 10. But if you
want to understand 1968, read a book.

.

Their War, Our War: Signs of Life from America’s Youth

Their War, Our War: Signs of Life from America's Youth

http://www.cityonahillpress.com/article.php?id=1068

By Nick Winnie
[February 2008]

On a temperate, late-autumn day a few months ago, my father and I
climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to look at the most
patriotic of American landscapes. The reflecting pool, the National
WWII Memorial, the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol
lined up like a row of standing soldiers.

"It's been almost 40 years since I've been here," my father
reminisced. "The last time I was here, you couldn't even see all of
this beautiful grass ­ there were so many thousands of us, standing
shoulder to shoulder, pissed at Nixon, sick of that war."

He didn't ask, but beneath his words lay an obvious question.

Why, after nearly five years of a war that was originally justified
on what we now know were false premises, that has killed 3,972
American soldiers and up to 1 million Iraqi civilians, violently
uprooted 4.8 million Iraqis from their homes and cost American
taxpayers nearly $500 billion dollars, why is your generation not
doing what we did?

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, these
questions have been as difficult to answer as they are necessary to
ask. And in a city like Santa Cruz, so proud of its progressive
activism and so given to 1960s countercultural nostalgia, these
questions are nearly inescapable.

And yet our generation continues the critiques: Where our parents'
generation was engaged and idealistic, we are passive and cynical.
Where they were cooperative and violently anti-establishment, we are
self-absorbed and materialistic. The list of self-evident
generational opposites goes on and on.

Beyond these simple black-and-white assertions are common
explanations with a bit more historical perspective. Our parents'
antiwar activism drew inspiration and practical lessons from the
civil rights movement. In MLK, JFK and RFK, '60s activists had
charismatic figures to rally around. They watched the grisly scenes
of the Vietnam War unfold on their TV screens every night. Perhaps
most importantly, they had draft notices and the death letters of
friends who weren't coming back. We've lacked all of these things and
have remained relatively quiet about our war.

Questions about the apathy of our generation have plagued me for
years. Now, on the eve of the American invasion's fifth anniversary,
they ring in my ears, louder than ever. But this is because I'm
beginning to reformulate my own answers to such questions.

I'm beginning to see signs that we are slowly waking from our civic slumber.

First of all, we're voting now in numbers that actually carry some
weight in national elections, a fact that became abundantly clear
with the Iowa caucus. In this significant first primary campaign
stop, young voters (ages 18 through 29) flooded the polls, increasing
their turnout from 2004 by 135 percent.

A recent Time magazine feature tracked the spike in youth voting,
which has extended from Iowa and the early primary states through
Super Tuesday, and has continued to lift Barack Obama to an
uninterrupted 11 primary state victories since then. In "The Year of
the Youth Vote," columnist David Von Drehle wrote of Obama, "His
campaign has become the first in decades ­ maybe in history ­ to be
carried so far on the backs of the young."

The article displayed a poll that compared general youth interest in
the 2008 presidential elections to 2000 and 2004. According to the
poll, 74 percent of 18- through 29-year-olds said they were paying
close attention to the campaign, as opposed to 42 percent in 2004 and
a paltry 13 percent in 2000.

In our generation's own slightly detached, digital-age way, we have
also turned the Internet into a powerful grassroots weapon that has
the potential to revolutionize American politics.

The emergence of rapidly growing online organizations, such as
MoveOn.org, has created a new avenue for mass protest and organizing
that was simply not available to youth a decade ago. MoveOn has a
network of over 3 million members and can make a strong, mass
political statement immediately. The organization is currently
demanding that super-delegates allow voters to decide the Democratic
candidate and it has rapidly gathered over 400,000 petition
signatures to apply significant political pressure.

Outside of cyberspace, our generation has also exhibited its nascent
idealism and willingness to sacrifice in its little-known, but
significant, volunteer efforts. A poll recently used by Mother Jones
magazine indicated that today's youth are volunteering at a higher
rate than any point in the last 40 years.

So, perhaps our generation isn't so apathetic after all.

There is certainly an encouraging trend of increased political
activism and involvement. What remains entirely unclear is how this
general shift will affect the way we relate to our war, whose
blood-encrusted legacy will define these years of our political maturity.

On April 7, when the American occupation of Iraq officially becomes
five years old, we might not stage mass antiwar protests that rival
those of the Vietnam era, but we must find a way ­ our own way ­ to
exercise the passion and idealism we've always had for our country.

.

Bachelor of Science in Pot Studies?

See: http://www.oaksterdamuniversity.com/
--

Bachelor of Science in Pot Studies?

http://www.campusprogress.org/page/community/post/Annika/CLl4

By Annika - Feb 26th, 2008

A new trade school in Oakland, CA is preparing its students for a
highly competitive career in a burgeoning field: medical marijuana.
For $200, Oaksterdam University (clever, huh?) teaches students how
to cultivate and cook with pot, and equips them to navigate the legal
restrictions on the use of medical marijuana.

"My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it
taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling
hard alcohol," said Richard Lee, the activist and medical marijuana
distributor who founded the school.

While Lee's students seem excited about learning to "grow pot at home
for fun, health, public service ­ or profit," not everyone is
thrilled. Though Lee's school is totally legal, Michael Chapman, an
assistant agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Agency's San
Francisco office, thinks it's more of a detriment than a public
service. "I think they are sending the wrong message out to the
community and it's something that could only facilitate criminal
behavior," he said.

Fun fact: According to Lee, entry-level workers at medical marijuana
dispensaries earn over $50,000 a year on average, and managers and
owners often make over $100,000.

.

71 cop-killing case may cost S.F. millions

'71 cop-killing case may cost S.F. millions

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/28/BALLV9NKR.DTL

Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2008

A murder trial for several men charged with killing a San Francisco
police officer 37 years ago and with plotting to kill police officers
across the country could cost the city millions of dollars in
attorney fees for the accused.

The "San Francisco Seven" are accused of killing Sgt. John Young
inside the Ingleside Police Station in 1971, and three of those men
are also charged with conspiracy to kill officers from New York to
Los Angeles to Louisiana from 1968-73.

Prosecutors have described the accused as members of the Black
Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers.

The case, which some attorneys involved are calling the most complex
and expensive in city history, already has drained the fund of money
set aside for attorneys of criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer.

"This is a very extraordinary case," said Neal Taniguchi, chief
fiscal officer for San Francisco Superior Court, where it is being
tried. "It's a case that is 35 years old and has half a million
documents of evidence. It's very time consuming to go through all the
evidence, and that's why it costs so much."

On Thursday, the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of
Supervisors considered a measure to allow the county court system to
spend an additional $2.26 million this year for indigent defendants
who are not represented by the public defender.

Most all of that money would be spent on this case, and it would be
in addition to the $7.26 million San Francisco already had budgeted
for these kinds of expenses. By law, the public defender can only
represent one defendant in a trial where multiple people are being prosecuted.

The case also is unusual because it is state Attorney General Jerry
Brown, not county District Attorney Kamala Harris, who brought
charges against the men.

City leaders say they plan to ask the state to reimburse San
Francisco for the cost, but that will take an act of the state
Legislature and the city cannot do so until the trial is complete.

Attorneys defending the men said the government's case is weak and
questioned the reasoning for pursuing an expensive and time-consuming trial.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi, whose office is representing one
defendant, said he thinks prosecutors will have a difficult time
proving the charges, as the accused have maintained their innocence
for decades and the case involves allegations of illegal police interrogation.

"I've been around 20 years and I've never seen a case like this," Adachi said.

Stuart Hanlon, a defense attorney representing another of the
accused, said there is no new evidence in the case and much of the
evidence - including the gun purportedly used in the shooting - has vanished.

"It's going to be very tough to prove this case, and the real
question is, given the lack of evidence, why we're doing this," said
Hanlon, who said he is working for about a quarter of his regular
rate and said the other attorneys on the case are collaborating to
keep the fees low.

The Superior Court assigned two defense attorneys for each defendant
because of the voluminous amount of evidence, Taniguchi said.

The attorney general last month dropped conspiracy charges against
five of the men originally charged, which led to the release of one
of them. The three others still are charged with murder and
conspiracy, and prosecutors are confident they can win the case.

"We have very strong evidence supporting our prosecution for these
individuals murdering a police officer," said Gareth Lacey, spokesman
for Attorney General Brown. "We have credible and strong new evidence
that we'll present at the preliminary hearing in April."

Taniguchi said the money the court requested, which still needs
approval from the full Board of Supervisors, also would pay for the
increasing number of defense attorneys needed from outside the public
defender's office.

In 2005-06, 14 such attorneys were needed. Last fiscal year, that
number increased to 24, he said.
---

E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.

.

Sixties Folk Icon Makes Rare Appearance [Jim Kweskin]

Sixties Folk Icon Makes Rare Appearance

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/sixties_folk_icon_makes_rare_appearance/Content?oid=651782

Jim Kweskin's Jug Band was positioned for stardom. Then he pulled the plug.

By Hal Gelb
February 27, 2008

There are waiters and waitresses, receptionists and Realtors, but for
an artist, Jim Kweskin has an unusual day job. He manages and is part
owner of Fort Hill Construction, a multi-million dollar outfit that
does, the singer-guitarist says by phone one workday morning from an
LA job site, "high-end building and renovation."

The construction gig is so much at the center of his life that the
one-time leader of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, the funky, infectious
'60s aggregation that Fresh Air rock historian Ed Ward places in
importance alongside the Beatles, Byrds, and Rolling Stones, rarely
performs or records. "I'm not trying to make a living at music," he
says, and adds, "It's a good feeling."

So when Kweskin takes the stage at the Freight & Salvage Friday
night, it will be something of a rare occasion. "I keep my finger in
the pie," he admits, "but not a tremendous amount."

The Jug Band, which first brought Maria Muldaur to national
attention, played Kweskin's typical repertoire, an eclectic mix of
almost entirely pre-'50s Americana: good-timey tunes, folk, blues,
pop, and early jazz. A pillar of the Harvard Square folkie scene that
spawned Joan Baez and then a national attraction ­ Janis Joplin
opened for them when they played the Fillmore ­ the Jug Band was
being positioned for pop stardom by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman,
when Kweskin pulled the plug.

"Once I realized I had to play music for a living ­ which meant all
the time ­ it stopped being fun," he recalls. "There was too much
time away from home, too much repetition." He grew unhappy "playing
music with kazoos" and moved on to a few non-Jug Band albums,
including the deeply moving Jim Kweskin's America, before stopping
recording entirely in 1980.

Following Mel Lyman, the Jug Band's charismatic Santa Rosa-raised
banjo and harmonica player, into the commune Lyman was putting
together on Fort Hill in Boston's Roxbury ghetto pulled him further
away from a musical career. When asked to describe the community's
ethos, Kweskin simply says, "It's just a family, a bunch of people
who live together and share." That was the original attraction.
"Being together with a large family, with people who were inspiring
to me and who I grew to care about."

He even refers to Fort Hill Construction as his family's business.
"There was a bunch of rundown houses," he recalls, "and we moved in,
because at that time we were quite poor." Over the course of a couple
of years, the community bought the houses and learned how to fix them
up. "And after a while people said, 'Hey, you guys do pretty good
work. Why don't you work on my house?'"

Kweskin tends to use the word "community," not "commune" for Fort
Hill. "The next word after 'commune' could be 'cult,'" he notes.
That's a term Fort Hill has heard a lot. In the 1970s, a Rolling
Stone cover story pictured Fort Hill as an acid-fascist cult with a
megalomaniac Lyman as its Charlie Manson. Kweskin calls the article
"a chop job, full of falsehoods. They really tried to destroy us."

"Why would they do that?"

"To sell papers."

"Did the community change as a result?"

Yeah, he laughs. "We stopped giving interviews to newspapers."

More recent press accounts are cautious but laudatory, pointing to
Fort Hill as one of the few communal experiments to survive the '60s.
How'd they manage that? "Strong people. Committed. The personal
relationships. A lot of it had to do with who Mel Lyman was, helping
us getting this family going."

Articles point especially to the children raised in the commune.
They're described as responsible, studious, courteous adults. And to
Kweskin's delight, a number of them are into music. "I've taught
music to almost all the kids and some of them have grown up to be
quite good musicians. That's a very good feeling."

One of the "kids" is the remarkable singer Samoa Wilson, with whom he
recorded two recent albums, Now and Again and Live the Life on Blix
Street Records. Kweskin also has two forthcoming CDs, one featuring
his fingerpicking and another that captures a jug band extravaganza
at the Great American Music Hall where he jammed with John Sebastian,
David Grisman, and Geoff Muldaur. He's been gigging again with
Muldaur, the Jug Band's singer/guitarist, ever since they reunited at
a memorial for Fritz Richmond, the band's bassist and jug player
extraordinaire, in 2005.

All in all, Kweskin may play a dozen or two dates a year now. He
plays "when I feel inspired, when I have some music in me or
something that I want to play for people. Then I feel very alive onstage."

.

Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

http://www.alternet.org/rights/77507/

By Nicolaus Mills, Dissent Magazine
February 22, 2008.

The Clinton/Obama debate over who deserves credit for the Civil
Rights Act has died down. But a history lesson is in order.
--

Like so many of my generation who did voter registration work in the
South during the 1960s, I have been saddened by the debate that
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparked over whether Martin Luther
King or President Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the landmark
1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in hiring and
public accommodations. Instead of providing voters with a thoughtful
view of the recent past, Clinton and Obama combined to offer a crude,
"great man" theory of history in which King's vision and Johnson's
pragmatism were portrayed as antithetical forces.

The debate has quieted down. But it should not be allowed to fade
from the headlines without a reminder of the lesson this controversy
threatened to obscure -- blacks and whites across America relied on
one another to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a reality.

The act had its legislative origins in a June 11, 1963 speech that
President John Kennedy delivered on national television after Justice
Department officials, aided by federal marshals, forced Alabama
Governor George Wallace to stand aside while two black students were
admitted to the previously segregated University of Alabama. "If an
American, because his skin is dark … cannot enjoy the full and free
life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have
the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?" Kennedy asked
the country.

But Kennedy's speech, which was followed hours later by the murder of
Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, did not
guarantee a speedy passage of civil rights legislation. A coalition
of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans stood in the way
and the best that Kennedy could do before his November 22
assassination was to get his civil rights bill voted out of committee.

It fell to President Lyndon Johnson to get Kennedy's civil rights
legislation enacted. Soon after taking office, Johnson made his
intentions clear. "We have talked long enough in this country about
equal rights," he told a joint session of Congress on November 27.
"It is time now to write the next chapter and to write it in books of
law." At this same time, Martin Luther King was playing a crucial
role in shaping public opinion. His April 16 "Letter from Birmingham
Jail" and his August 28 speech "I Have a Dream" galvanized millions
of Americans who in the past had remained passive when support for
civil rights was needed.

Still, it was not until 1964 that Kennedy's civil rights bill got
through Congress. On February 10, the House passed the bill by a vote
of 290 to 130 and on June 19, in the wake of a record-breaking 75-day
filibuster, which took up 534 hours, the Senate passed its version of
the civil rights bill by a 73 to 27 margin. Now Lyndon Johnson began
pressuring Congress to reach agreement on a bill that he could sign by July 4.

At this moment, Johnson benefited not only from the civil rights
coalition led by Martin Luther King but from the grassroots work of
Bob Moses, then a young organizer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who had been active in Mississippi
since 1961. At a November 1963 SNCC meeting, Moses had proposed a
1964 "Summer Project" in Mississippi that would make extensive use of
college students, getting them to teach in freedom schools and carry
out voter registration drives. A black-white coalition, Moses
believed, would engage the whole country. But no sooner had the
Summer Project begun when three of its participants -- Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman -- disappeared on June 21
near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Their disappearance (their bodies would later be found buried in an
earthen dam) could not be ignored by America. Television cameras and
the print media descended on Mississippi while state officials acted
as if nothing of importance had happened. "They could be in Cuba,"
joked Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson.

It was the worst response that the diehard segregationists of the
Deep South could have made. The influence of Martin Luther King,
Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy, along with years of demonstrations
and sit-ins, had created a political tide that reached its peak with
the disappearance of the three men. On July 2, two days ahead of
schedule, Congress, under heavy public pressure, agreed to the civil
rights bill that Johnson wanted. Five hours later in a White House
signing ceremony timed to coincide with the evening news, the
president addressed the nation.

"One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of
valiant men began a long struggle for freedom," Johnson told the
nation. "Now our generation of Americans has been called on to
continue the unending search for justice within our own borders." The
analogy was unmistakable. The president was comparing the work of the
Founding Fathers with that of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King, who was present at the White House signing
ceremony, also had no doubts about the significance of the day or
about Lyndon Johnson's role in making the civil rights bill law. "It
was a great moment," King declared, "something like the signing of
the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln."

Today, we cannot know exactly what Johnson and King, two coalition
builders, would say about the efforts to portray them as civil rights
rivals. But it is hard to imagine that both would not have seen
comparisons that pit them against each other as inimical to the civil
rights movement they believed in. As King observed of the struggle
for racial justice in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny."
---

Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence
College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964­The
Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America and most recently,
Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America s Coming of Age as a
Superpower.

.

Anti-War Movement Wrestles with 1968

Anti-War Movement Wrestles with 1968

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/27/7315/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8710.html

by Ryan Grimm
Published on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by Politico.com

A coalition of anti-war groups is vowing to protest this summer's
Democratic National Convention in Denver under the rubric "Re-create
'68," prompting criticism from some on the left who are loath to
revisit what they see as a disastrous time for both the anti-war
movement and the Democratic Party.

Capping a year that saw the assassinations of both the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic
National Convention erupted in violence as thousands of Chicago
police officers, supported by U.S. Army troops and National
Guardsmen, battled in the streets with activists protesting the
Vietnam War. Inside the convention hall, the Democrats chose as their
presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose the general
election to Richard Nixon.

Re-create '68?

"What's the political calculation that speaks to them of the wisdom
of civil disobedience - which means a massive media spectacle - on
the brink of a Democratic campaign that could plausibly put a
Democrat in the White House who's committed to withdrawal from Iraq?"
asked Todd Gitlin, an anti-Vietnam War activist who was at the
Democratic National Convention in 1968. "If the objective is to put a
belligerent Republican in the White House, they should keep up the good work."

The "belligerent Republican" of whom Gitlin speaks will almost
certainly be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent the summer of 1968
as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Organizers acknowledge that their "Re-create '68 moniker has been met
with skepticism as they've toured the country to gin up support among
fellow activists. "A lot of people of course associate it with the
DNC of '68 and react negatively," said organizer Mark Cohen. But the
point, Cohen said, isn't to reproduce the violence associated with
the 1968 convention, just the strong sense of countercultural protest
that coalesced against the Vietnam War. "We don't call ourselves
'Re-create Chicago '68,'" Cohen offered.

Leslie Cagan, head of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war group
that has organized large marches in the past, said her group has
endorsed the planned demonstrations in Denver.

Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman now running as a
Green Party candidate for president, will be expressing herself at
the demonstration, said organizers. They also plan to reach out to
Ralph Nader, who is running as an independent, third-party candidate.
The coalition is seeking the support of ANSWER, an anti-war
organization with a more radical approach to street protest than UFPJ's.

A major march against the war on the Sunday before the convention
will be followed by a week of action, some of which will include
nonviolent civil disobedience.

Organizer Barbara Cohen speculated that some of the reticence about
the name comes from a misunderstanding of the Chicago ruckus. "First
of all, it was a police riot, and people should remember that," said
Cohen, explaining that the group has no plans to become violent.
"It's the feeling and the ambience from '68 that we want to re-create now."

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, said her
organization will participate in the demonstrations in order to focus
attention on Democrats it believes haven't done enough to stop the
war in Iraq. "We'll use it as a time to pressure leaders like Nancy
Pelosi, who we feel talks a lot about opposing the war but maneuvers
Congress to make sure it gets funded," she said.

Michael Heaney, a Florida University political scientist who studies
the anti-war movement, said he expects between 10,000 and 30,000
people to participate in the Denver protest, depending on which
candidate seems headed for the Democratic nomination. Organizers said
that, from a turnout standpoint, a victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton
would be good for numbers - echoing sentiment on the right that
Clinton is a boon to corralling outrage. "If Hillary gets the
nomination, we're going to have very large numbers - a solid 50,000
people at every event," said organizer Glenn Spagnuolo, 37, who
wasn't yet born in 1968.

What about the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St.
Paul, where the GOP will nominate as its presidential candidate the
Senate's chief advocate of the "surge" in Iraq?

Organizers say that they'll protest at the Republican convention,
too, but that their focus will be on the Democrats in Denver. "I
think it's even more important to be in Denver at the DNC," Cohen
said. "Republicans aren't going to listen, no matter what we say, but
the Democrats might actually listen."

Cohen was an activist with the radical Students for a Democratic
Society in 1968, but she wasn't at the Chicago convention. "Partly,
my ride fell through, and something else came up that summer," she said.

Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who represents Denver, was only 11 in
1968, but she said that she's flummoxed by the notion that anyone
would want to re-create the dark days of that year. "I can't figure
out why, for the life of me, that somebody would want to re-create
'68," she said. "Is it the riots or tear gas - or perhaps the
assassinations? Or maybe the election of a Republican president? I'm
not sure the name was completely thought out."

DeGette added, however, that her husband is a top official at the
American Civil Liberties Union and that she is pushing for the
demonstrators to have a "robust right" to speak their minds.

Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society,
fears that the protests in Denver will be too much about people
speaking their minds and not enough about obtaining the results that they want.

"In the '60s," he said, "there were competing strains: the desire for
results and the desire for self-expression. This seems to belong
squarely in the self-expression camp."

Gitlin said that trying to re-create the feeling of another era
"makes about as much sense as throwing a costume party. It's absurd
to think you can re-create the culture of a moment. History is a
succession of irreproducible moments

.

The Left Won the Debates of the 1960s

Clintonites Need to Realize the Left Won the Debates of the 1960s

http://hnn.us/articles/47398.html

By James Livingston
2-18-08

Mr. Livingston teaches history at Rutgers. He's finishing a book
called The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at
the End of the 20th Century. He blogs at politicsandletters.com.
---

Last time out on this limb, I ended by saying that the Obama campaign
performs a political sensibility­an attitude toward history­that
adjourns the culture wars by assuming the Left won the struggles
conducted in, or inherited from, the 1960s. This campaign assumes, in
other words, that the New Left has become the mainstream of American
politics. It assumes accordingly that the New Right has always been a
marginal, insurgent movement destined to fail with an electorate that
has increasingly insisted on­or rather just acted out­equality across
lines of race, gender, sexual preference, and national origin.

As the culture at large moved rapidly left after 1965, the New Right
chose political means to slow or stop the process. And once in a
while, for example in 1994, it succeeded, although its intellectual
purchase on the culture kept slipping, and its political toehold was
always insecure at best­as witness the elections of 1998 and 2000,
when Democrats won decisively.

Yes, George W. Bush was named the president by a radical junta
convened at the Supreme Court. But his domestic agenda was "No Child
Left Behind," which, regardless of its bureaucratic intricacies, was,
and is, a measure fully consistent with the welfare state­his
Senatorial comrade in arms, remember, was Teddy Kennedy.

It was only in late 2001, after 9/11, that the zealots of the New
Right were able to seize the time, in a kind of coup d'etat that
featured all the hysterical symptoms of 20th-century fascist
movements (and I use the adjective advisedly, based on my reading of
Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism). Their instant magnification
of executive power was designed to destroy any balance between the
branches of government, and to refit the White House as a bunker from
which to launch two wars in two years, each in the name of "an end to
evil." As late as the summer of 2007, they were planning to bomb Iran
and happily acknowledged their insane intentions. War was, in
principle, the health of the state they imagined.

But they failed. The "war on terror" has become a joke, except when
journalists or politicians equate Al Qaeda in Iraq with the real
thing. The zealots of the New Right­Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld,
Feith, Addington, Perle, Frum, et al.­and their idiot enablers in the
executive branch­Bush, Yoo, Gonzalez, Libby, Rice, Powell, et al.­are
now in jail or in exile or in disgrace or in denial. The American
people would not legitimate their attempted coup.

The people have made it plain, by this refusal, that they want a
return to the rule of law, not of men. They've also made it plain
that they favor Democrats on issues, from health care to the economy
to the Iraq war, but also on values, including a woman's right to
choose and gay rights. Don't take my word for it, consult the
National Opinion Research Center or USA Today or the Pew Center
polls. Everywhere you look, the results are the same: the New Right
can no longer use political means to contain the consequences of the 1960s.

In short, the American people, young and old, have made it plain that
they're increasingly liberal. That liberal trend stopped the New
Right in its tracks, just when it thought it finally had a grip on
power in Washington.

Now these people typically don't call themselves liberals. They don't
call themselves feminists or socialists, either. Nonetheless,
liberalism, feminism, and socialism are constituent elements of our
culture, our politics, and our society. That is why, when polled,
most so-called conservatives say they want more government spending
on health and education. That is why, when asked, men and women who
refuse the label of "feminist" always insist they favor equal
opportunity for males and females, and, when pressed, usually
acknowledge that gender differences are mostly matters of
historically determined cultural conventions.

And that is why, when prompted, even the hapless Bush administration
is pushing a fiscal stimulus package to address the subprime mortgage
mess, as meanwhile the Federal Reserve frantically drives real
interest rates toward zero: everyone, from Left to Right, assumes
that market forces are economic means to social and political
ends­they are supposed to be manipulated in the name of the general
welfare­not anonymous externalities beyond the intellectual grasp and
social control of human beings.

Look at it another way. The transformation of liberalism in the
late-20th century made it an approximation of what we used to call
social democracy. And that interesting transformation makes sense of
the New Right's fear of liberalism­that is, its ferocious, yet mostly
inarticulate conflation of liberalism and socialism.

Irving Kristol, the founding father, by all accounts, of
neo-conservatism, explained this political process in 1978: "To begin
with, the institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and
for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e.,
institutions which maximize personal liberty vis a vis a state, a
church, or an official ideology. On the other hand, the severest
critics of these institutions­those who wish to enlarge the scope of
government authority indefinitely, so as to achieve ever greater
equality at the expense of liberty­are today commonly called
'liberals.' It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were
called, with greater propriety and accuracy, 'socialists' or 'neo-socialists."

This was, once upon a time, a complaint. What if we read it as a
prophecy? What if Henry Kaufman, the Wall Street guru of the 1970s,
was right in 1980 when he announced that the majority of the American
people was committed to "an unaffordable egalitarian sharing of
production," that is, to some kind of unspoken socialism?

One way to answer the question is to notice the dizzying range of
regulatory agencies, federal statutes, and executive orders, which,
then as now, limit the reach of market forces in the name of purposes
that have no prices. A laundry list of such agencies, statutes, and
orders would merely begin with . . . FRS, FDA, FTC, SEC, FDIC, FCC,
FAA, OSHA, EPA, EEOC, NWS, FEMA, NIH, CDC, NSF, NEA, NEH. . . And so
on, unto acronymical infinity.

To this incomplete laundry list we should add the post-Vietnam armed
services­the "all-volunteer army" that now serves as a job-training
program and a portal to higher education for working-class kids of
every color. These armed services are a social program that still
lives up to the egalitarian ideals of the 1960s, in part because it
addresses the problem of race and the promise of diversity with the
attitudes of affirmative action.

Another, more prosaic way to answer the question about an unspoken
socialism passing for politics as usual is to measure the growth of
transfer payments in the late-20th century, when the liberal/welfare
state was supposedly collapsing.

Transfer payments represent income received by households and
individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods and
services has been required. By supply-side standards, they are
immoral at best and criminal at worst because they represent reward
without effort, income without work. But they were the fastest
growing component of income in the late-20th century, amounting, by
1999, to 20% of all labor income.

From 1959 to 1999, transfer payments grew by 10% annually, more than
any other source of labor income, including wages and salaries. By
the end of the 20th century, one of every eight dollars earned by
those who were contributing to the production of goods and service
was transferred to others who were not making any such contribution.

The detachment of income from work­the essence of socialism­abides,
then, just as unobtrusively, but just as steadfastly, as The Dude,
who unwittingly foiled the venal designs of that outspoken
neo-conservative, the Big Lebowski.

Why, then, does the academic left keep crying wolf? Why do lefties
keep portraying themselves as losers in the culture wars and in the
larger political battles we're fighting today? Why do they keep
bemoaning "the collapse of the liberal state" or keep defending a
welfare state that shows no sign of impending expiration? Why can't
they see that we won?

Why, in sum, does the Left agree with right-wing blockheads like Ross
Douthat? He's the guy who concludes his Sunday New York Times
(2/10/08) op-ed as follows: "Precisely because the right has won so
many battles­on taxes, welfare, crime and the cold war­in the decades
since it squared off against Gerald Ford and Jacob Javits, the
greatest danger facing the contemporary Republican party is
ideological sclerosis, rather than insufficient orthodoxy."

Hello? The supply-siders themselves have admitted, over and over,
that the Reagan Revolution was a bust­because he couldn't cut federal
spending, and indeed increased it significantly in the 1980s. He also
raised taxes, fled Lebanon after a terrorist attack on US Marines,
sold illegal arms to Iran, and negotiated with the leader of the
"evil empire" then resident in the Soviet Union.

An avowed liberal ended welfare as we knew it, and in doing so he
permitted greater labor force participation by women. Violent crime
rates have plummeted because the proportion of young single males in
the general population has fallen­not because we've jailed more drug
users and dealers. And the Cold War was fought (and "won," if that is
the right word) by a cross-class, bipartisan coalition that included
many avowed Marxists, socialists, and liberals.

But the consensus across the Left/Right intellectual divide says that
Douthat is correct­that the conservatives have been winning all
along, or at least since the sainted Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
Both sides believe that the electorate bought into supply-side
economics, the Contract for America, the values of the religious
right, and the "war on terror." Both sides are wrong.

The Left is more wrong, however, because its pose as a marginalized
movement with no real voice in the political debates of our time
reenacts and reinforces a passivity that is at the very least a
mistake. This pose enables abstention, not action. It makes us mere
spectators on the history of our time; it depicts us as beautiful
souls who can't bear the corrupting burdens of the world as it is
rather than as we would like it to be. It promotes purity.

As a case in point that will draw us back to Obamarama, I offer in
evidence the incendiary essay by the esteemed feminist Robin Morgan,
who, like Paulie ("the Hitman") Krugman, sees nothing but
"celebrity," "hero worship," and a "cult of personality" in the
unreasonable and quite possibly misogynistic attitudes of Barack's
deluded supporters (see Krugman's column of 2/11/08 in the NYT).

Morgan is nothing if not reasonable, so she is a true believer in the
false consciousness of those who disagree with her. Unqualified and
uneducated voters here worship at the shrine of "celebrity-culture
mania" erected by Obama supporters. Among them are "young women eager
to win male approval by showing they're not feminists"­presumably by
favoring Obama. She quotes Harriet Tubman to equate such women with
slaves who did not even know they were enslaved: "When asked how she
managed to save hundreds of enslaved African-Americans during [sic]
the Civil War, she replied bitterly, 'I could have saved thousands
–if only I'd been able to convince them they were slaves.'"

I get it. If only we were able to convince Obama's female supporters
that they're, uh, slaves to male supremacy, we could save them from
their false consciousness and deliver them unto Hillary. Because of
course "She's better qualified" than Obama. It is self-evident. You
can tell because this dubious statement about the candidates'
qualifications is followed by Homeric diction: "(D'uh.)"

But the pivot of the piece is the rhetorical series of questions
through which Morgan announces the return of the repressed 1960s:
"How dare anyone unilaterally decide to turn the page on history
[that would be the 1960s], papering over real inequities and
suffering constituencies [these would be the insignia of our
benighted present], in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare
anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S.
youth from torpor it's useful to triage the single largest
demographic in this country's history: the boomer generation­the
majority of which is female?"

So Morgan wants us to believe that us Obama supporters are
practically misogynists because we assume that the boomers of the
Left won the battles begun in the 1960s and don't want to fight them
all over again. Like the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, who also
raises the rhetorical stakes by asking "How dare he?", Morgan wants
us to believe that in making this crucial assumption­by acting as if
the culture wars are over­we blind themselves to the inequities and
suffering that, now as then, and always already, disfigure our
country. Like Voltaire's Pangloss, we have begun to believe that we
live in the best of all possible worlds. In our happy ignorance, we
forget the atrocities of the past and begin to believe, stupidly, in
a better future.

To which there can be only one response: we need a usable past if we
are to shape a better future. We need to know that this is our
country. If our ethical principles do not reside in and flow from the
historical circumstances we study­if our most cherished values do not
somehow intersect with the dreary facts of our everyday lives and the
disheartening facts of our country's past­we have no choice except to
retreat from the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to
be, and then curse it as the obvious cause of our righteous anger.

Here is how John Dewey explained the dilemma of those who would act
as if their principles can never be derived from, or embodied in,
historical circumstances, including the political movements and
institutions of the present: "An 'ought' which does not root in and
flower from the 'is,' which is not the fuller realization of the
actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that
things should be better."

Yes, it is a mere pious wish, a waking dream that will keep you pure,
and only pure­undefiled by compromise and engagement with the world
as it exists, a world full of illiberal Democrats and surly
Republicans, plus many other unruly political species at home and
abroad. That wish, that dream, will let you believe that false
consciousness is the affliction of all those others who have
misinterpreted their own interests­you already know what is right for
them, and you mean to do it, no matter what they might say. Or you
know that they'll never get it, so you congratulate yourself as you
say "Goodbye."

To shed our piety, to wake from our dream of purity, we must "turn
the page" on the "boomer generation" of the 1960s without forgetting
or repudiating it, just as Obama asks us to. That means we take its
achievements for granted. We assume we won, and get on with the
changes we can still believe in.

.

The 'Year That Rocked' [1968]

The 'Year That Rocked'

http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_8322137

By Jim Farber, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 02/22/2008

1968. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, as
Bob Dylan would later write, a time when, "There was music in the
cafes at night and revolution in the air."

Everyone knows the headlines: "Martin Luther King Gunned Down in
Memphis"; "Robert Kennedy Assassinated in Los Angeles"; "Police Beat
Back Protesters at Chicago Democratic Convention"; "Medalists Raise
Black Power Salute at Mexico Olympics."

"The problem," says John Powers, principal writer and artistic
director of "Works in Progress," "is people who were born after these
events took place don't know much more than the headlines."

Exploring the lifelines and plotlines behind the headlines, says
Powers, is the theme of a new four-part theater series, "1968: Year
that Rocked!" which begins Wednesday at the George Nakano Theatre of
the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.

Performed by a cast of professional actors, each segment will feature
the actual words spoken by the people involved, drawn from speeches
and recorded conversations, threaded together by Powers and
accompanied by projections of historic material.

The way Powers sees it, there's a lot of resonance between where we
were as a nation in 1968 and where we are today in 2008.

Forty years ago we were mired in Vietnam. Now we're bogged down in
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we don't know how to get out of,
Powers says. We're in the midst of a political campaign that's all
about change. And the Olympics are about to be held in a country,
China, that wants to show itself off to the world, but has real
issues regarding human rights, just as Mexico did.

As Mark Twain was fond of saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but
it rhymes."

"1968: Year that Rocked!" begins with "Memphis."

"Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis," Powers says. "But
why was he there? What was the sanitary workers strike all about? Why
did he go to Memphis when his advisers warned him against it? And
what was the role of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI?"

Those are the questions the production will try to answer.

In Wednesday's performance, Carl Gillard will take on the role of
Martin Luther King Jr., with Ian Tanza as FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, Renard Ricks as the Rev.James Lawson of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and Bill Wolski as Memphis mayor Henry Loeb.

Part 2, "Los Angeles," to be presented March26, will focus on the
death of Bobby Kennedy.

"RFK is assassinated in Los Angeles (at the Ambassador Hotel) after
winning the Democratic primary," says Powers. "Why was he running for
president? Why was he in contention with Lyndon Johnson, the man that
had been his brother's running mate?

"It was over Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War," Powers explains.
"But most people don't know that. Bobby was trying to reverse the
policy set in motion by his brother and extended by LBJ."

"Chicago," scheduled for April 30, takes place during the turbulent
summer of '68, says Powers, when violent confrontations took place
inside and outside the Democratic National Convention.

The performance, Powers says, will focus on the roles played by four
men: presidential peace candidate Eugene McCarthy; Jerry Rubin,
leader of the Yippies; David Dellinger, organizer of the National
Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; and Chicago's
all-powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley.

The final chapter, "Mexico," will be staged May 28. It will trace the
violence and the politics leading up to and during the XIX Olympiad
in Mexico City.

It will recall the street war waged against student protesters by
government soldiers, and trace the steps leading to that famous
silent protest by two black American athletes, Tommy Smith and John
Carlos, as they took their place on the victory stand.

"We've come to see what they did as a Black Power salute," says
Powers. "But it was meant as a more complex protest. Their heads were
bowed in sorrow and they were not wearing shoes in sympathy with the
impoverished people of the world. There were many other specific
symbols they were trying to evoke. But the media focused on the Black
Power element and branded it as that."

While "1968: Year That Rocked!" is designed to provide an insightful
look back at history, the real goal of the series, says Powers, is to
provoke people to continually ask what's going on behind the scenes.

"If we do that," says Powers, "our grandchildren won't have to ask,
`Why didn't we know?"'
---

Jim Farber (310) 540-5511, Ext. 416 jim.farber@dailybreeze.com

.

Defense wants evidence from American Indian Movement slaying

Defense wants evidence from American Indian Movement slaying

http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2008/02/19/news/regional/6e8ef1c0e0199426872573f1007a7403.txt

By CARSON WALKER
Associated Press writer
2/19/08

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- A man charged with killing American Indian
Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash 32 years ago wants federal
prosecutors to turn over evidence from the body for DNA testing.

A Denver man is already serving a life sentence in the case.

John Graham was extradited from British Columbia in December, four
years after he was charged with killing Aquash, a fellow AIM member
from Nova Scotia, around Dec. 12, 1975, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Graham pleaded not guilty in federal court in Rapid City to
first-degree murder. His trial is scheduled to start June 17 in Rapid City.

Graham's lawyer, John Murphy, asked a federal judge this past week to
make the government reveal the location of and make available to a
defense expert for testing Aquash's underwear and a sanitary napkin
taken at the first autopsy.

A rancher found the unidentified body Feb. 24, 1976, north of
Wanblee. The local coroner, Dr. W.O. Brown, ruled she died of
exposure to the cold.

Brown found evidence of acid phosphate in her vagina, from which he
concluded she had sex shortly before her death, Murphy wrote in his
memorandum filed with the request.

Brown turned over the evidence to the FBI after the autopsy, Murphy wrote.

The FBI then used an identification procedure common at the time that
involved cutting off the hands, which was done and weeks later
identified the body as Aquash.

The remains were exhumed from an Oglala grave and a second autopsy by
Minneapolis pathologist Garry Peterson revealed she had been shot in
the back of the head with a .38-caliber handgun. He ruled the death a homicide.

Brown, now deceased, then wrote that he "inadvertently overlooked"
the bullet, although Peterson said a nurse at the first autopsy
remembered seeing blood flowing from the head wound.

The peculiar circumstances compounded allegations that federal agents
were involved in the slaying, which they have denied. They have said
AIM leaders order the killing.

Murphy wrote in the court document that Graham notified prosecutors
Feb. 7 he wanted the underpants and sanitary napkin tested and asked
whether the items had ever been checked for DNA.

Prosecutors have not responded, he wrote.

"Mr. Graham needs to have these items preserved and tested in order
to fully investigate the facts of his case. DNA testing on these
items may lead to the production of material evidence that assists
Mr. Graham in his defense by implicating others in the crime alleged,
corroborating other witnesses' version of events that implicate
uncharged third parties in this crime, and by attacking the
credibility and consistency of the government's theory of
prosecution," Murphy wrote.

Murphy was unavailable for comment. U.S. Attorney Marty Jackley is
not allowed to discuss pending court cases.

Another man charged with killing Aquash, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud,
was convicted in 2004 and given a mandatory life prison sentence. He
is from Pine Ridge but had been living homeless in Denver.

In an earlier court filing, Murphy asked the judge to require
prosecutors to turn over all of Looking Cloud's statements so Graham
can spot inconsistencies, some of which were made under the influence
of drugs and alcohol.

"The government's only alleged witness to the crime, Mr. Looking
Cloud, is an accomplice who has been sentenced to life and who has a
motive to fabricate," he wrote.

At Looking Cloud's trial, witnesses said he, Graham and another AIM
member, Theda Clark, drove Aquash from Denver and that Graham shot
Aquash in the Badlands as she begged for her life.

Clark has not been charged. She lives in a nursing home in western
Nebraska and has refused to talk about the case.

Graham, a Yukon native also known as John Boy Patton, denies killing
Aquash, though he acknowledged being in the car with her from Denver.

.

Diverse group treads The Longest Walk for the environment

Diverse group treads The Longest Walk for the environment

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416690

Americans look to shed light on ecological challenges facing the nation

By Dhyana Levey -- Mreced Sun-Star, Calif.
February 22, 2008

MERCED, Calif. (MCT) - The sounds of passing trains and honking cars
blended with cheers and a pounding drum Feb. 18 as about 100 brightly
clad walkers brought their journey through Merced.

They paused in the morning for a break where Highway 59 meets Olive
Avenue. A cloud of sweet-smelling sage wafted from the center of
their circle as Los Banos resident Henry Dominguez, Chiricahua, led a
prayer in thanks to the past four miles they had walked.

The beginning point was Alcatraz Island, but participants had spent
the weekend at Merced resident and Shawnee Indian Mike Hermann's
ranch. There, they gathered spiritual and physical replenishment
through food, rest and a sweat lodge before hitting the road once again.

There were many purposes to this walk - the Longest Walk II - which
will span five months as it heads to Washington, D.C. For one, it
gives a 30-year nod of remembrance to the original 1978 Longest Walk
across the country. Many walkers, such as Hermann and Dominguez,
participated in the 1978 trip.

The purpose for that journey was to draw attention to proposed
legislation in Congress that threatened American Indian rights.
Shortly afterward, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978
was passed.

This year, walkers want to raise environmental concerns. ''I have 10
sons and eight daughters ... and I want to make sure they have air
they can breathe and water they can drink,'' Dominguez said. ''We
need to put the message out there.''

As walkers reach each community, they plan to gather information from
the locals about each environmental challenge they are facing. These
details will be included in a paper to be delivered to Congress July
11, said organizer Pashina Banks Moore - daughter of Dennis Banks who
co-founded the American Indian Movement, led the 1978 walk and has
taking charge of this year's trip.

While the event is to raise awareness across the nation, it also
works as a springboard to address local issues, said David Alvarez, a
Merced resident and ''Yoeme'' or Yaqui Indian. He runs the Merced
Talking Circle, which provides updates on issues affecting American Indians.

His specific environmental concerns for Merced include the area's
congestion from so many vehicles, and the development of major
outlets. ''It hurts the quality of the air,'' he said. ''To top it
off, there isn't adequate health care.''

Some walkers, like Kaelan Holmes of Seattle, were in the walk for the
long haul. ''I haven't had a driver's license for years, so I'm used
to walking,'' he said. ''I love Seattle, but you can't just sit there
stagnant. ... A lot of people here are going through a spiritual pilgrimage.''

Other walkers, like Atwater pencil portrait artist Johnny Clay,
simply joined in for the Merced part of the walk as it headed down
Olive Avenue on the way to Le Grand and into Chowchilla.

Clay, a descendant of the Yokayo Band of Pomo Indians, was also one
of many local residents who donated food or other supplies.

At least 50 people from this area so far have donated food or money,
Hermann said. The Merced County Food Bank even passed some nutrients along.

And the event itself drew participants from all ages and backgrounds.

Buddhist monks joined the journey with American Indians and other
cultures. Shunsho Yamada traveled all the way from Tokyo to make the
cross-country trip. ''I came here to learn about what this movement
is so I can go back to Japan to talk about it,'' he said.

This year's walk drew more people than the original, Hermann said. It
split into two groups to cover two routes. The northern route
commemorates the original walk and will wind through Nevada, Utah and
Colorado. The southern route - which came through Merced - visits
significant Native tribal land.

But the biggest difference between the Longest Walk II and its 1978
predecessor is technology, Hermann said: ''We can document everything
as we go along. People up ahead can get a vision of the walk [from
the Web site]. In 1978, there wasn't the technology to have forward vision.''

.

Fairport Convention: Maidstone 1970

Music DVD Review:
Fairport Convention: Maidstone 1970

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/02/21/144206.php

Written by Jon Sobel
Published February 21, 2008

Being the only known filmed footage of Fairport Convention's Full
House lineup, this release is a bit more than a mere curiosity.
However, its brevity and modest sound quality make it a must-have
only for the most diehard of the band's fans.

With Sandy Denny out of the band, Fairport Convention in June 1970
consisted of Dave Swarbrick and a pre-facial hair Richard Thompson,
with Dave Pegg on bass and mandolin, Dave Mattacks on drums, and
Simon Nicol on rhythm guitar. The most famous, successful, and
lasting band of the British folk-rock movement, the Convention was
almost as well known for its shifting lineup as for its music.

The performances at this event are excellent, especially the
multipart harmony vocals. But of the seven songs, only five are
actually by Fairport; in the middle of the sequence are two songs by
Matthews Southern Comfort, led by ex-Fairporter Iain Matthews. This
band, one of many Matthews projects, would later record a hit version
of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," but is otherwise mostly forgotten.

The total running time of the concert footage is only half an hour.
From Fairport we get a jig and reel medley, followed by "Sir Patrick
Spens" and "Now Be Thankful." Then Matthews Southern Comfort steps up
with two disappointingly boring numbers. Fairport returns with
"Flatback Caper" and "Jenny's Chickens & The Mason's Apron."

Besides the concert footage, there is one extra feature: a
fifteen-minute interview with filmmaker Tony Palmer, who relates some
background and trivia on how this film came to be made. Though the
sound has been remastered, it's certainly not high fidelity. In fact,
the shots of the crowd are probably more interesting than those of
the band, although all of it is filmed and edited artfully.

The Maidstone Fiesta was truly, as Palmer describes it, a "family day
out." Happy hippies dance to the faster tunes, but much of the
audiences consists of families with children. Watching the kids play,
the hippies wander in and out of the woods, and the "normal" folks
squint at the band is entertaining. You really get a flavor for how
people looked, dressed, and interacted on a hot summer day in Kent in 1970.

Interrupting the set is a little Army helicopter show. Shades of
"Puppet Show and Spinal Tap"? Not quite - Fairport was highly popular
at the time - but it's funny anyway. Overall, it's an interesting
set, but necessary only for huge Fairport Convention fans and
completists; a minor addition to the historical record of the British
folk-pop movement.

.

Hippie Punching FAQ

Hippie Punching FAQ

http://www.imao.us/archives/009667.html

February 19, 2008
Posted by Frank J.

Unfortunately, American society has gotten lax on hippie punching to
the point I thought I should write an FAQ to better explain the issue
to those who don't currently engage in the punching of hippies.
Hopefully one day this will all become so natural again that a hippie
punching FAQ will be about as necessary as a flipping people off in
traffic FAQ.

HIPPIE PUNCHING FAQ

Q. Where is best to punch a hippie?
A. About the face. That's where the hippie is most annoying.

Q. What is a hippie?
A. Generally, a hippie is an annoying, useless. Actually, less than
useless, as they are not happy until they prevent other people from
being useful as well. In fact, Scientists have determined that the
only evolutionary purpose of a hippie is for punching as a stress
release for productive members of society.

Q. Are there any other uses for hippies than punching them?
A. No, there are no other uses.

Q. Couldn't they be ground up and used as chum?
A. They're too gummy.

Q. Where do hippies come from?
A. There's basically waste products of a productive society, as they
only come from middle class to upper middle class families. Thus its
important for parents to make sure they tell children the importance
of not being a hippie while also making them cut the lawn and do
other non-hippie, productive activities.

Q. Where can hippies be found?
A. Their main habitat is the college campus and can be found in the
vicinity thereof. Occasionally they have mass migrations to city
areas to work as a large group (a group of hippies is known as a
"protest") to make loud noises and annoy people. In this way, they
are like geese, except with more excrement. Also, they have large puppets.

Q. What are the benefits of punching hippies?
A. What aren't? It gives you exercise, increases your intelligence
and sexual prowess, helps the economy, defeats terrorism, and helps
orphans find families. Also, scientists say that each time you punch
a hippie, they get one step closer to curing cancer.

Q. Hippies smell. Do I have to worry about getting that smell on my fist?
A. Always carry around hand sanitizer in case you punch a hippie.
Make sure to put it on your knuckles.

Q. Is it okay to punch a hippie on a Sunday?
A. Check local laws. Some counties have blue laws preventing striking
hippies on a Sunday. Other think that's the best day for punching hippies.

Q. Just to be clear, are you talking about physically striking
hippies or are you talking metaphorically about "punching" hippies
through rhetorical means or through your actions against narcissistic
hippie ideals?
A. Can't it be both?

Q. Well, one of those is a valid point and the other I'm pretty sure
is assault.
A. Maybe you're a hippie.

Q. Since you're writing both sides of this FAQ, you're actually
accusing yourself of being hippie.
A. Shut up. I really hate you.

Q. Now this is getting a little weird.
A. You're the reason dad never loved me!

Q. Dude.
A. Why won't you die!

Q. Okay... let's dial this down a little. It's not me you're angry
at. It's them. They're the ones at fault. Remember?
A. Are you going to have me hurt people again?

Q. That is not your concern. You do what I tell you, or I will make
your life miserable. Do you understand?
A. I understand.

Q. Where does the term "hippie" come from?
A. It's derived from the word hipster.

.

Michel Klein: The Chic Side of ‘68

Michel Klein: The Chic Side of '68

http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=1826

Godfrey Deeny
February 25th, 2008

Most people would regard 1968, the epicenter of Sixties revolt when
students built barricades on Boulevard St. Germain, as not exactly a
fashion moment, but for designer Michel Klein it provided the
inspiration for a modernist chic fall 2008 collection and a sleekly
staged catwalk experience in Paris Sunday, the opening day of the
French season.

"I was thinking of 1968, but not rock throwing and police baton
charges, but Brigitte Bardot in St. Germain looking insolent and
amazing," Klein explained to FWD post show.

This designer's vision of women is a quintessentially Parisian one,
where women want style with panache yet practicality, as his opening
selection of coats underlined. Cut with credible volume and worn with
patent leather or mat leggings, all these A line coats made for a
clear fashion statement about contemporary style.

Klein, whose collection is named Cher Michel Klein, also sent out
some remarkably well-cut black knit dresses, composed of contrasting
weaves that were the epitome of understated elegance.

But his best moment was a quintet of magnificent cable wool sweaters
and tops in strands thicker than the average finger. Shown in a
subtle sand hue, they were the most comfortable body armor
imaginable, with coils at the cuffs and protective shoulders.

No Klein show is complete without a little razzle dazzle and Michel
captured that with four eye blinking cocktails showered with
reflective beads and studs that said Shanghai sin and naughty winter
cruise in each look.

Presented in the recently renovated Grand Hotel, the show was a great
example of French professionalism, ideally lit by the theatrical
spots of Thierry Dreyfus, and charmingly scored with an all female
soundtrack by DJ Michel Gaubert, that featured the cult YouTube cut
"I'll Kill Her" by French singer Soko.

Like Soko's charming paean to lost love and brilliant statement of
spurned woman's obsession with revenge, this collection had flair and
flamboyance in equal measure.

.

Man returns to the trees in Berkeley

Man returns to the trees in Berkeley

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2008/02/man_returns_to_the_trees_in_be.html

Posted by Paul Mulshine
February 19, 2008

They say trends begin in the West. If so, I just witnessed the
beginning of a trend toward the end of our democracy through
political paralysis.

I'm on vacation visiting my brother in California this week. He lives
in the Oakland hills, not far from the campus of the university of
California at Berkeley.

I went to Berkeley for a year in the late 1960s. The self-indulgence
of the student radicals was a key factor in turning me into a
conservative. They rioted not for any specific political aims, but
for the fun of it. But it wasn't much fun, at least not by my standards.

Berkeley hasn't changed. On Saturday night my daughter Casey, who is
16, took a tour of the campus with her cousin Pat, an ex-Banana Slug.
That's the name of the sports teams at the University of California
at Santa Cruz, where he played baseball until he graduated last year.

When Casey got home she told me of driving by the football stadium
and seeing a bunch of protesters encamped in some trees. The
protesters were trying to stop the expansion of the stadium to
include a practice area. This is badly needed. The university
athletic facilities were ancient even back when I was at Berkeley and
ran on the track team.

Pat explained to me the nature of the dispute. It seems the
protesters moved into the trees more than a year ago and the
university, instead of confronting the problem immediately, let them
platforms in the branches. Ever since, the two sides have been
involved in a long legal battle that cost the university more than
$370,000. The university finally won a court order requiring the
protesters to leave, but the administrators have so far failed to act on it.

They're probably thinking back to the People's Park riots of 1969.
This was a similar situation. The university had planned to build a
soccer field, again badly needed, on a vacant lot. A bunch of student
radicals seized the land and began building a rudimentary park on it.
One morning, the cops moved in and kicked them out, and by noon one
protester had been shot dead and another had been blinded in a brawl
with the rock-throwing mobs. Two weeks of rioting ensued during which
we distance runners had to avoid clouds of tear gas as we worked our
way up to the hills for our workouts.

On Sunday morning, I decided to return to the scene of the crime. My
brother drove me to the campus and we walked up to the chain link
fence that separated the tree-dwellers from the community. On the
fence were posted copies of a court order that threatened that anyone
entering the premises could face a fine or five days in jail. Five
days in jail? Some threat. These clowns had already spent more than a
year in a tree.

They were living on crude platforms covered with blue plastic
tarpaulins. I could see one woman sitting on a branch reading a book.
In another tree, a few ape men were gathering garbage, which they
threw down in a plastic bag.

We walked around to the street side, where we could see various signs
put up for the benefit of those driving past. One read, "Save the
oaks." But these weren't ancient, majestic oaks. They were just
scraggly new-growth trees, in no way the equal of the giant redwoods
to the north. This was a protest for the sake of protest, in other
words. These was no real issue. On the other side of the stadium,
just a few hundred yards away is a massive forest that stretches far
over the hills. We used to run up there for track practice. Even
during a two-hour workout we would cover just a tiny portion of that
forest. The area of the protest, meanwhile, was barely larger than a
good-sized back yard.

We took a walk over to talk to a couple of yellow-jacketed security
guards. They told us that worked for a private firm that had been
hired by the university.

"How do these clowns get food and water?" I asked.

"Stick around till 2:30," a guard replied. Every afternoon, the
tree-dwellers are resupplied by their fellow nuts.

"But aren't you guards hired to keep them out?" I asked.

Nope. The guards' job was to keep people from harassing the bozos in
the trees, he told me.

I asked him why the university was protecting the protesters.

"That's the biggest question," he replied.

I walked away scratching my head.

This is far from the nuttiest news story coming out of Berkeley at
the moment, by the way. The big national story concerns how the city
council had voted to ban Marine Corps recruiters from town as
"unwelcome intruders." The vote was later rescinded, but protesters
have had the Marine Corps recruiting station staked out for a week.

As for the tree-dwellers, the local radical newspaper had a story
about a big demonstration held at the spot last week. It seems that
hundreds of radicals showed up outside the fence to hold the usual
loud demonstration highlighted by impassioned speakers bellowing
through bullhorns. But there was a problem. A different campus group
was holding a protest event of its own, this one with some loud rock
groups. The tree protesters could barely make themselves heard. They
complained to the university, but to no avail. So that was a first, a
noise complaint from people who showed up wanting to make noise.

The larger problem, however, is the political paralysis that develops
in a democracy over time. It's not just California. Jersey's just as
bad. It's too cold to sit in trees here, but a handful of kooks can
tie up our government as well. If you don't doubt that, ponder the
spectacle of all those bears running around with more rights than
citizens. It took just a small number of kooks to cancel the bear hunt.

Washington? Don't make me laugh. Nothing happens there that is not
the direct result of pandering to some group that is powerful out of
proportion to its numbers.

So those people in the trees aren't as crazy as they look. The real
suckers are the voters. The politicians have us up a tree. We won't
be getting down any time soon.

.

Angela's Mixtape: Living the legacy

Angela's Mixtape: Living the legacy

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/angela_s_mixtape_living_the_legacy/Content?oid=415435

Play explores the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement

Published 02.20.08
By Curt Holman

Playwright Angela Eisa Davis harks back to the very beginning when
she narrates her life story in Angela's Mixtape at Synchronicity
Performance Group. Eisa (played by Ayesha Ngaujah) claims she was
conceived on Aug. 7, 1970, a momentous date for her family,
particularly her aunt and namesake, Angela Davis.

On that day, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson and two others took
hostages at the Marin County courthouse in an attempt to free
Jackson's brother and other prisoners. The gunmen and hostages were
killed in an ensuing shoot-out, and Angela, who owned one of the
guns, was charged as an accomplice to the shooting. Angela became the
third woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list as well as a
living symbol of the black struggle for social justice.

Eisa's famous aunt (Minka Wiltz) serves as a constant yet remote
presence in Angela's Mixtape. At times the black activist and
intellectual appears behind bars: After being a fugitive for two
months in 1970, she spent 18 months in jail before being tried and
acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. Eisa describes Angela
as an inspirational but enigmatic figure when she grew up, and as a
girl she wonders, "How do I live up to my name?"

Like A Song for Coretta, playing down the hall on 7 Stages' main
stage through Feb. 24, Angela's Mixtape considers the gulf between a
"Greatest Generation" of black activists and those who followed.
Using a "mixtape" of songs as a narrative framework and the
soundtrack to Eisa's life, the play takes musical interludes, offers
moments of rap and leaps back and forth in time to show Eisa's
struggle to carve out her own identity. Directed by Liesl Tommy,
Angela's Mixtape offers such energy, originality and attention to
detail that we forgive the playwright's tendency to scrutinize her own navel.

Eisa's description of her favorite things in the early 1980s conveys
her formative influences: "I like Fame, the movie and the TV show ...
I like Donna Summer, the working class people and the Soviet Union."
Eisa's mother (Naomi Lavette) was an activist lawyer and a proud
communist, and some of the play's sharpest moments reveal the
incongruities of Eisa's childhood. She grew up poor in the liberal
stronghold of Berkeley, Calif., while hobnobbing with political and
intellectual luminaries such as novelist Toni Morrison. "We're
oppressed? I thought we were the intelligentsia," the girl asks her mom.

A musician and actress who has appeared on HBO's "The Wire," Eisa
Davis grew up talented and precocious, performing monologues from her
Aunt Angela's book at demonstrations and political meetings. Wiltz
and Ngaujah frequently recite the passages in unison, a device meant
to provide another link to the two women, although it can undermine
the episodes' powerful content. At one point Angela describes growing
up in Jim Crow-era Birmingham and that her neighborhood was called
"Dynamite Hill" for all the bombings of African-American homes.

Eisa didn't grow up under such overt institutional bigotry, and she
grapples with such questions as "Slavery or death?" The radical
politics of Eisa's elders, who routinely refer to police as "the
pigs," seem particularly distant in 2008, a year when the Democratic
nominee for U.S. president will either be a woman or an
African-American man. Like A Song for Coretta, Angela's Mixtape
implies that the generation following the Civil Rights era enjoyed
more freedoms and thus never built up the same strengths as its
predecessors. The playwright focuses so minutely on her own
experience that she misses some opportunities, such as more deeply
exploring her mother's disillusionment with communism after the fall
of the Berlin Wall.

Ngaujah proves to be such a vivacious, emotionally transparent
performer that we empathize with even the smallest conflicts in
Eisa's life history. In the play's second half, the actress's
uncharacteristic stillness conveys shame and uncertainty when she
experiences a high school identity crisis. In the complex dynamic of
1980s Berkeley, teens of mixed parentage freely mingled across ethnic
lines, while blacks faced peer pressure to stay with their own. Told
"You look black but you act white," Eisa claims to be mixed, which
she feels betrays her family and their ideals.

Jeanette Illidge, who energetically plays Eisa's cousin Cess and
various other roles, adopts a hilarious Valley Girl accent as one of
Eisa's white classmates. Wiltz passionately invests Angela with the
posture and diction of a crusading, fiercely intelligent public
figure, and we can appreciate Eisa's challenge to reach the real
Angela within her glamour as a living symbol.

Angela's Mixtape feels like a sister play to Synchronicity
Performance Group's season opener, My Name is Rachel Corrie, another
in-her-own-words account of a young woman's political awakening.
Rachel Corrie's eponymous narrator died in the midst of the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the Gaza Strip, an event that, like
Angela Davis' imprisonment and trial, carries far more dramatic
weight than Eisa's generally minor problems.

Apart from a protracted running time and some clunking lines,
Angela's Mixtape demonstrates such an engaging voice, channeled with
such enthusiasm and intimacy by Ngaujah, that the production becomes
a bountiful collage of music and memory. By the end, Angela Eisa
Davis finally emerges from her namesake's long shadow.

.

Landy's vision: Iconic photos see new light in exhibit

Landy's vision: Iconic photos see new light in exhibit

http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19320769&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=81975&rfi=6

By Blaise Schweitzer, Freeman staff
02/22/2008

Interviewed in his rambling Woodstock workshop, Elliott Landy said
his collection of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez,
Van and Jim Morrison photos is sort of like money in the bank.

Then he reconsidered.

"It's more like an annuity," Landy said. The negatives and prints in
his archives bring him income each year as requests for the photos
continue to come in. "I have to keep working for it."

Landy was virtually crowned as his generation's "visual scribe" when
he was selected as the official photographer for Woodstock '69 music
festival, but in his most active years he also published photos of
peace protests, ballet stars and his own children.

Many of those images will get fresh viewings this spring as Landy has
been awarded with an Artist in Residence position at Ulster County
Community College. It gives Landy, UCCC students and members of the
public a chance to see his work and discuss photography. The first
photo-centered workshop is slated for 7 p.m. Feb. 28 in Vanderlyn
Hall's student lounge, on the Stone Ridge campus, followed by an
opening reception of an exhibit of his works at the Muroff Kotler
Gallery. There is an $8 suggested donation.

Landy still shoots pictures. Last week he was flipping through recent
photos he was commissioned to take of Italian pop star Carmen Consoli
as well as some fresh prints of flowers he photographed during a trip
to France.

Through the years, Landy's camera and his press pass have served to
get him "every place I wanted to go," he said.

There were moments where security officers and music impresarios,
including Al Grossman, tried to get him to destroy negatives when he
took photographs when they weren't "allowed." The only time he was
ever physically accosted, however, was when shooting ballet star
Suzanne Farrell in New York City.

"It was a member of the audience," he said incredulously.

Only once, to his recollection, have his photos gotten anyone in
trouble. Landy rummaged up a copy of his 1994 photo book "Elliott
Landy's Woodstock Vision, the Spirit of a Generation" to point out
the photo, which shows a police officer savagely beating a protester
with a blackjack. The officer, and his illegal tool, were clearly visible.

This month, some of Landy's photo stock has seen an uptick in
interest as Levon Helm secured a Grammy for "Dirt Farmer" and
lifetime Grammy awards were given to all the surviving members of The
Band, Dylan's backup band. Landy's photos of The Band graced many of
the group's early albums.

He likes Helm, he said, and is glad to see his career taking off again.

"Everybody who does nice things should be successful," he said.

More artist than journalist, Landy said he has few objections to
darkroom or photoshop techniques that tweak photos - as long as no
one is using the image to lie. He continues to refine his printing
techniques, and said some of his more recent printings of his Dylan
photographs are superior to early versions.

He spends a fair amount of time tracking down those who use his
images without his permission and/or without paying him.

The biggest "thieves," he has found, are those who have signed
contracts with him and still fail to pay him. Right now, he is trying
to get paid for some of his Band photos used in a Eagle Rock production.

"I have to get a lawyer and sue them," he said.

Some see him as a rock 'n' roll photographer, but Landy saw his work
to be more about documenting cultural change. The resistance to war
didn't just happen on city streets or in parks, he said. "Rock and
roll was part of the anti-war movement."

While he has been hired to do specific work, the jobs were usually
more about access to subjects that interested him rather than income,
he said. "I've never done this for money."

He advises young photographers - or anyone - that they should follow
their joy in their careers. When his zeal for photographing causes or
events faded or became tainted by commercialism, he looked in new
directions, in his life.

He did grant that following a muse can't work for everyone,
especially if they have a family to feed.

"If it fails, then you go on and drive a cab," he said.

When asked if there have been occasions where he "missed" great
shots, Landy said he has a strong memory of bicycling alongside his
son, Bo, and seeing the boy hunched over the handlebars and pedaling
with gusto. If he could have captured that instant on film it would
have given him great satisfaction.

"Wow," he said, recalling the moment 28 years ago, "It seems like a day."
---

For more information about Landy, visit his Web site, www.landyvision.com.

.

Bob Dylan's early years chronicled in Skirball exhibit

Bob Dylan's early years chronicled in Skirball exhibit

http://www.simivalleyacorn.com/news/2008/0222/On_The_Town/044.html

February 22, 2008
By Sophia Fischer sfischer@theacorn.com

Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966, opened at the Skirball
Cultural Center in Los Angeles on Feb. 8.

Through a detailed timeline and neverbeforeseen photos, artifacts,
recordings, and performance and interview footage, the exhibit
focuses on Dylan's early music career and his transformation from
rock 'n' roll teen to a civil rights and antiwar movement commentator.

"This is one of the most prolific decades in Dylan's career," said
curator Jasen Emmons.

The Skirball visit marks the exhibit's last stop on a two-year tour.
Created in 2004 by the Experience Music Project, a Seattle music
history museum, the exhibit has traveled nationwide, including a stay
at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

The Skirball has added a unique feature to the exhibit- an
interactive music gallery. Visitors can play along with original
Dylan tracks from such albums as the 1966 "Blonde on Blonde." A drum
set, three electric guitars, an interactive keyboard and a mixing
console allow visitors to manipulate the music and have their own
influence on Dylan's work.

The exhibit opens with a wall filled with 100 different seveninch
covers of Dylan's 1962 hit "Blowin' in the Wind." Visitors can listen
to 16 different versions of the recording.

Oversized photo panels scattered throughout the museum gallery depict
a young Dylan playing guitar and harmonica. Other pictures show him
wearing his trademark pensive expression and wild hair. A colorful,
oversized painting created by Dylan in Woodstock in the '60s adorns a
section of wall.

Sections of the exhibit focus on the artists who influenced Dylan,
including Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez. Memorabilia on display
includes Dylan's doubleO Martin guitar and harmonica; one of
Guthrie's guitars, on the back of which he scratched his name; and
musician Ramblin' Jack Elliott's guitar and boots.

Referring to a letter written by Dylan to Joan Baez's mom, curator
Emmons said, "Bob Dylan has a fantastic sense of humor, which I think
is often overlooked."

Another section details Dylan's childhood as Robert Allen Zimmerman
in Hibbing, Minn. Several television monitors run footage of Dylan
discussing songwriting as well as interviews with musicians and music
producers talking about Dylan and his talent.

"The songs he wrote made you feel like 'I could have written that.
That's just how I feel,'" said one music producer on a monitor.

A nearby monitor features Joan Baez and her take on the musician,
with whom she shared a close relationship.

"Everybody's gifted. But there are some people who crash through all
the barriers with their gift because it's unique and it's enormous,"
Baez said.

In conjunction with the Dylan exhibit, the Skirball is offering a
number of related public events including lectures given by Dylan
scholars, concerts featuring artists who reflect Dylan's legacy, a
series of films in which Dylan played a role and family workshops on
songwriting and instrument-making.

"His Jewish background, his democratic ideals and the way Dylan's
life and work embraced those elements are what the Skirball is all
about. It's very fitting that this exhibit is here," said Robert
Kirschner, Skirball curator.

The exhibit runs through June 8. For information call (310) 4404500
or visit www.skirball.org.

.

Local film producer finds Seeger still hammerin' away

Local film producer finds Seeger still hammerin' away

http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/02/22/968/local_film_producer_finds_seeger_still_hammerin_away

By Rob Nelson
Friday, Feb. 22, 2008

Twin Cities-based film producer William Eigen sits in a Warehouse
District coffee shop sipping soy milk and inspecting "The New Rolling
Stone Album Guide," in particular its detailed entry on folk legend
Pete Seeger.

Eigen has a special interest in the subject: He spent years
encouraging the 80-something artist to consent to the making of "Pete
Seeger: The Power of Song," a fond and deeply touching biographical
documentary Eigen co-produced with award-winning director Jim Brown.

Following its acclaimed run at film festivals and art houses, "The
Power of Song" airs Feb. 27 on PBS as part of the network's "American
Masters" series. A trailer can be found here.

"I would agree," says Eigen of the book's assertion that Seeger
"deserves the same deep respect we give Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong."

But Eigen says Seeger did more than make music.

"Obviously they're speaking in musical terms," says Eigen. "Yet the
interesting thing about Pete is that he has been so much more than a
musician. In fact, he has been at the forefront of every important
social movement in the United States since the Great Depression. He
galvanized protest of the Vietnam War. He organized labor unions. He
fought the communist witch hunt of the '50s and paid a steep price
for it. He's been butting his head against the norm for many decades."

'Heckuva guy'
Like the film, Eigen doesn't aim to moderate his abiding affection
for Seeger. "He's a heckuva guy. I hate to put it in such familiar
and mundane terms, but there it is."

Seeger might well prefer recognition as a "guy" to any other
designation. The movie makes clear that this begrudging old celeb ­
beloved by Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, Joan Baez and Arlo
Guthrie ­ is chiefly a man of the people.

More often than he's onstage or in the studio, he's in the woods
drawing maple syrup and taking his legendary axe to trees, or
standing on the picket lines with antiwar activists. His 1949 song
"If I Had a Hammer" ­ with its driving lyric "I'd hammer in the
morning/I'd hammer in the evening/All over this land" ­ isn't far off
in describing Seeger's justice-minded work ethic even to this day.
He'll be turning 90 soon.

"I bugged him for a few years," says Eigen with a smile. "Pete said,
'I don't want a film about me. You can do it when I'm dead, but I
don't want the notoriety.' He's incredibly modest. I kept saying,
'We're here. We want to do this. It should be done. Your voice should
be heard. The example of your life should be shown.' Finally he gave
in ­ not because of anything I had said, really, but because he was
so fed up with the politics of today. He felt his story might be an
antidote to the times. That's what tipped the scale for him."

At first glance, "The Power of Song" appears a standard-issue Great
Man hagiography with its mix of archival footage and celebrity
talking heads delivering the straightforward narrative of an artist's
struggle and ultimate, enduring triumph.

In the spirit
But the uncommonly gentle rhythm and tone ­ clinched by repeated
pastoral scenes of old Pete toting syrup jugs at a turtle's pace, his
manual labor on acres of upstate New York land appearing as notable
as his mile-long list of musical achievements ­ are proudly in the
spirit of Seeger's "Kisses Sweeter than Wine," written for his wife Toshi.

PBS and HBO waged a bidding war over the film's broadcast rights (a
"beautiful thing," says Eigen), though YouTube and MTV haven't
infiltrated its laidback style by so much as a pixel. A
self-described "planter of seeds," Seeger belongs to another era and
so does "The Power of Song."

Perhaps Eigen, who speaks skeptically of the digital revolution even
while twiddling an iPhone, is from another time, too. (The rear
bumper of his Grand Jeep Cherokee is packed with brightly colored
peace symbol stickers.) Although the St. Louis Park native graduated
from the University of Minnesota in the turbulent late 1960s with a
specialty in filmmaking, he didn't produce a feature for more than 30 years.

"I was busy in college, trying to make crazy little experimental
films and stay out of Vietnam, participating in the protests at
Honeywell," he says. "After that I just sort of went out and traveled
through the underbelly of the world for a long time. But I always
kept film in the back of mind."

The year 2004 brought the release of Eigen's first work as
co-producer, "Isn't This a Time!," a film about the folk star-studded
Carnegie Hall tribute to veteran music producer Harold Leventhal ­
"another guy I had bugged for a couple of years," jokes Eigen.

That the late Leventhal had been closely involved with Seeger ever
since their days in The Weavers didn't hurt Eigen's chances in
getting "The Power of Song" made. Or to do it on his own somewhat
Seegerian terms, staying based in Minnesota just as Seeger hangs
around his bucolic land in upstate New York, far enough from bright lights.

"Needless to say I do have to travel a bit," says Eigen, who's
currently finishing a documentary film about Harry Belafonte. "But if
you can take the meetings, if you can schlep when necessary, then
yes, you can live here and work in this business.

"It's harder to do it here than in New York and L.A., where the
business networking is so fluid, but that doesn't mean you can't do
it. You just have to take the extra steps. I'm willing to take the
extra steps."

Seeger, hammering from dusk until dawn in his own private hinterland,
would no doubt approve.
---

Rob Nelson, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, can be
reached at rnelson [at] minnpost [dot] com.

.

In an Era of the Beatles, the Shags Ruled, Too

In an Era of the Beatles, the Shags Ruled, Too

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/24albumct.html

By TAMMY LA GORCE
Published: February 24, 2008

PUT the words "Connecticut" and "garage" together, and most people
see visions of weed whackers and garden hoses, not long-haired guys
with guitars.

But chances are that's about to change.

On Feb. 19, the much fetishized reissue label Sundazed Music released
"Don't Press Your Luck! The In Sounds of 60's Connecticut," an album
that reaches back to a time not everybody remembers, but that anyone
with a fondness for fuzzed-up guitar and suburban psychedelia will
want to get to know.

"Back in the 60s, each geographical area had its own sound ­ like in
Los Angeles, it was the sound of the Byrds," said Bob Irwin, the
album producer and owner of Sundazed, based in Coxsackie, N.Y. "What
came out of Connecticut were these super-great garagey cuts with
killer guitar. You can hear the influence of blue-eyed soul from Long
Island, threads of the Rascals and the Vagrants. But what's in the
water in a specific place comes out on a record when you do an
excavation like this. It makes my heart pound."

Music ­ freewheeling rock 'n' roll represented by long-forgotten New
Haven-area bands like the Shags, the Bram Rigg Set and the Wildweeds
­ is what got the hearts of the teenagers featured on "Don't Press
Your Luck!" pounding; something the CD, available at

www.sundazed.com, puts across within the first few speaker-thumping tracks.

But corralling and guiding those heavy heartbeats, Mr. Irwin said,
was a single player: Thomas "Doc" Cavalier, founder of the
still-running Trod Nossel Studios in Wallingford. Before Mr. Cavalier
died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, Mr. Irwin made a deal with him to
secure the masters for hundreds of songs, including the 22 that
landed on the CD.

Mr. Cavalier's daughter, Darlene Cavalier, now runs Trod Nossel,
which means "tree of many branches" in Scandinavian, with two of her
three siblings, Tom and Rob Cavalier. "My dad was a dentist in
Hamden," she said. "That's how we grew up, living above the dentist's
office. That's why people called him Doc. He started the studio in
1965, while he was still doing dentistry."

"Not to brag about him, but Dad was so smart, such a passionate
person," she said. "He got bored with being a dentist. He wanted to
put out a record."

Enter the Shags, a four-piece band formed in 1963 at Notre Dame High
School in West Haven that developed a following through wedding gigs
and show openers at the Oakdale Theater, now the Chevrolet Theater,
in Wallingford.

"We wore three-piece suits with vests, pointed boots. Our hair was
long," said Tom Violante, the onetime front man, now a part-time
musician and part-time marketing consultant in New Haven. "People
referred to us as the Beatles of Connecticut. But back then everybody
sounded the same, because we all wanted to sound like the Beatles.

"Among Connecticut bands we had no equal, though, and that was thanks
to Doc. He pushed us in the studio to do better. He worked with us on
our stage presence. He took us to New York to have designer outfits
made for us."

By 1966, The Shags were radio staples on WAVZ in New Haven and WDRC
in Hartford courtesy of songs like "Don't Press Your Luck" and
"Breathe in My Ear," included on the new CD (which is also available
as an LP).

Mr. Violante remembers hanging around the Cavaliers' home with his
bandmates for spaghetti dinners: "We practically grew up there," he
said. And Ms. Cavalier remembers a pattern forming once the Shags
entered her family's life.

"Everyone who had a project in this area Dad got involved with. He
didn't just manage bands or produce bands, he helped them with their
finances, he helped them with their divorces. He really cared. Trod
Nossel was a catalyst for all the music that happened around here."

Names like Fourth Ryke, a band whose origins Mr. Irwin and Sundazed
were unable to distill, may not resonate the way names like the
Animals and the Righteous Brothers do, but not every act represented
on "Don't Press Your Luck!" is steeped in obscurity. Al Anderson,
leader of the R&B-leaning, Windsor-based Wildweeds, for example, went
on to form the popular alt-country band NRBQ.

"Even at 17 or 18, Al Anderson was writing material that gives you
goose bumps," Mr. Irwin said. "He was just plugged into the cosmos,
even as a teenager."

Together with Mr. Cavalier, Mr. Violante and a few others, he spawned
something like a musical cyclone, Mr. Irwin said.

"What happened was, once you have a band in a locality hit pay dirt,
it makes every other person in a band in that area want to make a
hit," he said. "All the pieces were in place, and Connecticut just zoomed."

Mr. Violante, who now plays in a Jimmy Buffett cover band called Key
West Trio, regrets that it died down: "I've always felt that we
should have been more recognized. I'm amazed it took 42 years to get
a CD of what was going on here out there. But I'm also very
flattered. It's tremendous what they've done with this record."

.

Duke Erikson on Pushin’ Too Hard by the Seeds

Duke Erikson on Pushin' Too Hard by the Seeds

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3404400.ece

Going for a song

February 24, 2008

A tiny farming town among the cornfields of Nebraska is an unlikely
place to find inspiration in music, but when I was a teenager growing
up in Lyons (population about 800), music was my salvation, and radio
was my connection to it. As I cruised up and down the main street of
my little town on summer nights, hoping to score some beer or a girl
and usually missing out on both counts, the radio was always there,
an exciting soundtrack to otherwise mundane evenings. On Top 40
radio, the old guard were being slowly shown the door by the new. The
"British invasion" psychedelia and the garage rock of America were
storming the charts, bumping up hard against conservative, orchestrated pop.

You could hear Engelbert Humperdinck's mellow pipes right after Jim
Morrison's scream at the end of Light My Fire. The tracks that stood
out to me were the ones that sounded the dirtiest, the grittiest –
the ones branded "garage rock", obviously recorded in one take.
Hearing Pushin' Too Hard by the Seeds for the first time while
drifting under the streetlights of Lyons on a warm night sent me, for
two minutes and 30 seconds, onto another plane of existence. The car
wheels left the bumpy bricks of the road and I was airborne on that
whirl of two chords trading places as fast as they could, like
molecules bouncing off one another as heat is applied. The scorn and
humour in the snarling voice, as it sailed over the beat, seemed to
mutate and change. Other voices bellowed and answered with the words
"Too haaaard". The song was magical and crude, scary and hilarious,
its simplicity belying the genius of its construction. Those two
chords go back and forth while the vocals and guitar paint the
perfect picture of manic energy.

Sky Saxon (right), the troubled brain behind it, had a voice that
sounded like a bratty little kid who just may be dangerous. The Seeds
were part of the flower-power generation, but they brought a darkness
and an edge to it. My band, the British (such was my love for all
things Brit), learnt Pushin' Too Hard and performed it at local
halls, and those two simple chords were just as wondrous to play as
they were to hear. I moved on to other songs, other bands, and Sky
Saxon and the Seeds moved on to where most such musicians eventually
ended up – victims of the music biz, drugs, flighty fans,
unscrupulous managers, or just time. After a couple more singles and
an uneven album or two, they disappeared, becoming just a footnote to
the era. Then, one Saturday afternoon a couple of years ago, one of
my current bands, the Know-It-All Boyfriends, were setting up our
gear at a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, when a phone call from a friend
who runs a local record store announced: "Sky Saxon is here and wants
to come and say hello." He was in town with a group of 1960s bands,
"revived" for a small tour.

Ten minutes later, I almost dropped my guitar at the sight of the man
blowing through the door, with long salt-and-pepper hair, dressed
from head to toe in billowing folds of some purple, silky fabric. He
wore oversized shades that covered much of his face and sported a
beard that hid much of the rest. The next thing I knew, we were on
stage, blazing away on those two chords, with Sky Saxon on lead
vocal, snarling and whining as we readied ourselves to answer him in
the chorus. I felt hypnotised and ecstatic – the same feeling I had
on first hearing it. After 20 minutes of this divine madness, the
song finally disintegrated as those things do. As the five other
people in the bar applauded, or looked a bit dumbstruck, the
bartender continued polishing glasses, and Sky Saxon disappeared
again and went back to wherever those guys go. And I, a little sweaty
and breathing a little fast, felt like I had been visited by a ghost.
---

Duke Erikson is Garbage's guitarist

.

Ken Kesey's Family Fights for Wrestling

[2 items]

Ken Kesey's Family Fights for Wrestling

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gYCjVcOjZP4bnGDaDEfGMf5Xzf2gD8UVIR7G0

By JEFF BARNARD
2/22/08

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. (AP) ­ Before Ken Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest," or stocked a psychedelic school bus with LSD and the
Merry Pranksters to look for America, he was a wrestler.

He might never have written "Cuckoo's Nest," the 1962 novel that
launched him to stardom, if he hadn't dislocated his shoulder
wrestling for the University of Oregon.

The injury kept him out of the draft, allowing him to go to Wallace
Stegner's writing seminar at Stanford University, where his job at
the local veterans hospital gave him the setting for "Cuckoo's Nest"
and the prototype for mean Nurse Ratched.

So when his alma mater decided to eliminate wrestling at the end of
this season, it went down hard on the Kesey family farm. That's where
Kesey is buried alongside his son Jed, the victim of a 1984 van crash
during a University of Oregon wrestling team road trip. It's also
where Furthur, the bus made famous by Kesey's 1964 odyssey and Tom
Wolfe's book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," awaits restoration.

"I know what Dad would do," said 46-year-old Zane Kesey, who also
wrestled for Oregon. "It's just the kind of thing he would step up
and attack when he sees something that's wrong, when it's something
he's already shed so much soul for."

So last weekend, wearing his dad's American flag shirt, Zane Kesey
fired up a newer version of Furthur (named Further), called on Oregon
wrestlers and alums to "Get on the bus," and with original Merry
Prankster George Walker at the wheel roared through the Eugene campus.

Loudspeakers blared "Save Oregon wrestling," drums beat, a brass bell
clanged, and wrestlers handed out fliers as they circled McArthur
Court, the aging arena where Ken Kesey wrestled from 1955 to 1957,
posting a winning percentage of .806 that stands seventh all-time at Oregon.

The '60s-style act of taking it to the streets did not immediately
get the university to change its mind about wrestling. But the Kesey
family is not giving up.

"One thing about wrestlers is if they get on their back, it's not
over ­ it just got interesting," said Zane Kesey, whose father died
in 2001. "You get fierce."

Head wrestling coach Chuck Kearney suggested that if Oregon had not
had a wrestling team back in the 1950s, Ken Kesey might not have
attended the university. And the course of literary history might
have been different.

"Had he gone to Oregon State and wrestled, would he have written `One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and `Sometimes a Great Notion' and all
the great things he did?" Kearney asked. "It was a combination of
this campus, this university, the education he received here and the
sport of wrestling that came together and made him what he was and in
my mind made the impact that he made."

Athletic director Pat Kilkenny made the decision to eliminate
wrestling and bring back baseball, which he said could become a
moneymaker for the university.

"Is this a final decision?" Kilkenny said. "It's America, so there
are always opportunities to make changes. But our strong belief is
our analysis was significant and powerful and conclusive, and we
don't think this has changed since last July to today."

For wrestling enthusiasts, the solution might be to run out the clock.

Ron Finley, an Olympic wrestler and head wrestling coach at Oregon
from 1970 to 1998, has gathered pledges of $2.3 million so far for
the team, scholarships and a new practice center.

"Kilkenny says it's not coming back," Finley said. "He'll only be
here a couple more years anyway. If it has to go away a few years,
we'll keep fighting, get it back some way."
--

On the Net:
Official Kesey Web site: http://www.key-z.com
Save Oregon Wrestling: http://www.saveoregonwrestling.com
University of Oregon athletics: http://www.GoDucks.com

--------

Far out, man

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_8357315

Compiled by John Ryan
Mercury News
Article Launched: 02/25/2008

Even the University of Oregon's athletic department has a budget, and
the latest victim is the school's wrestling program.

The sport doesn't have Phil Knight's attention. But it does have a
well-known support group that, while probably unable to save the
program, will surely ease the pain of its demise. The family of Ken
Kesey, who wrote "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," has fired up the
new incarnation of the Merry Pranksters bus Furthur. (The original,
the setting of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," is
being restored.)

Kesey wrestled at Oregon in the mid-'50s. He is buried at the family
farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., alongside son Jed, who died in a van
crash while on a Ducks wrestling trip in 1984.

"I know what Dad would do," Zane Kesey, 46, who also wrestled for
Oregon, told the Associated Press. "It's just the kind of thing he
would step up and attack when he sees something that's wrong, when
it's something he's already shed so much soul for."

Last weekend, Zane led a '60s-style revival around McArthur Court.
Activists handed out fliers and used drums, bells and loudspeakers to
make their point to passersby.

Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny said plans to scrap wrestling and
start a baseball team continue apace. But he might not have heard the
last from this band.

"One thing about wrestlers is if they get on their back, it's not
over - it just got interesting," said Zane Kesey, whose father died
in 2001. "You get fierce."

.

Daydream Believer [John Stewart]

John Stewart, the Miles Davis of Folk Music

Daydream Believer

http://www.counterpunch.org/simmons02212008.html

By MICHAEL SIMMONS
February 21, 2008

John Stewart -- singer, songwriter, guitarist, artist, husband,
father, grandfather, Californian, American -- was scheduled to
perform at McCabe's in Santa Monica on Saturday, February 2. He
missed the gig, but he had a good excuse. Stewart suffered a sudden
stroke at the age of 68 and died on January 19th in San Diego at the
very same hospital he was born in.

His friends called him Johnny Stew, including Lindsay Buckingham who
wrote a song by that name. He lived much of his life in Southern
California (the rest up north) and was a presence in Malibu for years.

In 1961 he joined the Kingston Trio with whom he sang "Where Have All
The Flowers Gone?" and "Greenback Dollar." He wrote songs for NASA
and became pals with astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. He
also marched for civil rights in Selma and was smuggled out of there,
along with Harry Belafonte, on the floorboards of a Chevy to prevent
the Klan from taking potshots.

His solo career began in 1968, the year he joined Robert Kennedy's
last campaign and became house folkie and confidante to the Senator
and his wife Ethel. That same year the Monkees recorded John's
"Daydream Believer," which kept him in donut holes -- his avowed
favorite food -- for life.

Stewart recorded more than 45 solo albums for various labels and in
1979 reached number five on the charts with "Gold," a paean to the
musicians of Los Angeles. Anyone who was half-sentient in 1979 (and
there were many of us who were only half) remembers that rumbling
rocker: "When the lights go down in the California townThere's people
out there turnin' music into gold." Johnny Stew was the Golden
State's own Guthrie/Cash/Dylan and remained a working musician until
his dying day.

It was decided that the February 2 gig at McCabe's would go on. The
tiny guitar shop, walls lined with mandocellos and other arcane,
stringed instruments, is full of mostly middle-aged fans -- lifers
who are here to celebrate the Lonesome Picker. (Stewart had more
handles than a polygamous truck driver). Dave Batti, Stewart's
bassist and left-brainiac, and John Hoke, his guitarist and
co-producer play host. Batti introduces Jeremy Stewart and Amy
Stewart Kaplan, two of John's adult offspring, Dennis "The D-Man"
Kenmore, John's longtime drummer, Andy Fergus, a club owner from
Scotland who regularly booked Stewart ("If anyone wants to talk to
Andy, I'd be glad to interpret," quips Batti), and others, including
me, who played roadie, adviser, and companion for Stew more times
than I can count. Batti and Hoke then sing John's "Runaway Train,"
which was a massive hit for Roseanne Cash, a dear friend of
Stewart's, and "Jasmine," a recent composition. (By Stew's own
estimate, he wrote 5000 songs.)

Batti parks his bass and reads the eulogy that Luke Stewart, John's
youngest son, gave at his father's funeral, which includes lines such as:

"My Dad invented sarcasm

My Dad would always buy me that CD I wanted when I was a kid, even if
it had a parental advisory sticker on it

My Dad always rooted for the underdog

My Dad didn't care what ANYBODY thought

My Dad's heroes [were] John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, and Elvis

My Dad had a great laugh if he thought you were funny

My Dad had a great look...if he thought you weren't

My Dad was always late...he was even late today, I think

My Dad's favorite way to say goodbye to me [was] ' bye buddy, call if
you get work'

My Dad is a legend"

Batti pauses to compose himself before continuing.

"My Dad is loved

My Dad is missed

My Dad is remembered

Forever."

Batti tells the gathering that Stew was "the Miles Davis of folk
music. He would improvise, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. John
Stewart never played the same song the same way once."

Paul Surratt, who produced a documentary about the Kingston Trio,
shows clips from Stew's television appearances with the Trio,
including a "Hard Day's Night"-like pilot called Young Men In A
Hurry. We see solo Stew on The Joey Bishop Show (introduced by Regis
Philbin), on Playboy After Dark, and, most oddly, disco-suited in
1979 on Solid Gold, lip-syncing "Gold" with a half-dozen spangled
chorines shakin' booty (Hoke insists that Stew tried to get the Solid
Gold dancers to a McCabe's gig, but we think he was kidding.) Surratt
then treats us to footage of John at London's legendary Abbey Road
Studios asking where the inflatable Yoko was kept, inquiring about
buying a Linda McCartney t-shirt, and standing outside the famous
crosswalk screaming, "Telegram for Pete Best! Telegram for Pete Best!"

Batti thanks the audience and Hoke ends the night with: "As John
would say about now, 'It's Monkee time!'" The tears fall and we sing along.

Cheer up sleepy Jean
Oh what can it mean
To a daydream believer
And a homecoming queen.
---

Michael Simmons is an award-winning journalist and currently filming
a documentary on the Yippies. He can be reached at guydebord@sbcglobal.net.

.

Spiritual Essence of Santana Explored on Multi Dimensional Warrior

Spiritual Essence of Santana Explored on Multi Dimensional Warrior

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/spiritual-essence-of-santana-explored-on-multi-dimensional-warrior,287632.shtml

Posted : Thu, 21 Feb 2008
Author : Legacy Recordings
Category : PressRelease

A decade after their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame
(in January 1998), the hypnotic power of Santana -- to mesmerize
crowds of tens of thousands in the world's biggest stadiums, or to
cast the same spell on a single listener in their solitude --
continues to be one of the enduring and mysterious pleasures of the
band's music. That meditative power has coursed through Santana's
recordings for four decades, but has never been the exclusive focus
of any one collection -- until now.

Multi Dimensional Warrior is a unique project, with every track
personally selected and sequenced by Carlos Santana to create an
engaging journey through a soundscape of moods and feelings. In an
unprecedented concept, disc one comprises 14 vocal performances
chosen from albums spanning the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, while
disc two comprises 14 instrumental performances from albums covering
the same years. Multi Dimensional Warrior is the first anthology to
include tracks from the band's three major label associations:
Columbia, Polydor/PolyGram, and Arista/BMG. With just three
exceptions, all of the albums represented on disc one are different
than the albums represented on disc two. Carlos Santana supervised
new overdubs to five tracks on the set. He personally added guitar to
"Spirit" and "Right Now," Santana band member Chester Thompson
contributed piano to "Let There Be Light," and Barbara Higbie added
harp to "Praise" and "Let There Be Light."

Multi Dimensional Warrior will arrive in stores April 1st on
Columbia/Arista/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT,
in advance of a one-month schedule of North American tour dates
across the U.S. and Canada. The tour opens April 4th at Agganis Arena
in Boston, and concludes May 4th at the annual Jazz & Heritage
Festival in New Orleans.

On March 31st, the Monday before the album release date, Carlos
Santana will join millions across the U.S. in observance and
celebration of the birthday of United Farm Workers activist and labor
leader Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993. The movement to win a Cesar E.
Chavez National Holiday has long been held dear by Carlos Santana. He
has agreed, along with Martin Sheen and Edward James Olmos, to serve
as National Co-Chairs of the effort. To date, 40 cities in 25 states
will be holding events.

"It's supremely important that a day be selected to honor the life of
Mr. Cesar Chavez for his quality of service to all humanity. His
supreme cry of 'si se puede' will forever resonate as a positive
motivator as words of light," stated Carlos Santana. He helped
organizers wage a successful signature campaign during his 1999
Supernatural tour, which led the State of California to establish a
legal holiday for Chavez the next year, the first time that a Latino
or labor leader was honored in this way in our nation. Since then,
several states have established Cesar Chavez Days on March 31st
including Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Rhode Island,
Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. For more information please go to:
<http://www.cesarchavezholiday.org/>http://www.cesarchavezholiday.org/.

History swirls around Santana, signed to Columbia Records by Clive
Davis in late-1968. They began recording in January 1969 -- although
the follow-up sessions of May 1969 were the ones eventually used for
their debut album. That self-titled release came out on August 19,
1969, the day after the end of the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair, where
they performed on Saturday afternoon. Warrior includes one of their
oldest signatures, "Samba Pa Ti," the B-side of their fourth single,
"Oye Como Va," from the second Santana album, Abraxas (1970).

At the far end of the Columbia timeline are the final three albums to
bear the Santana name -- and the only three albums on Warrior to be
represented by one track each on disc one and disc two. Early 1987's
Freedom -- which reunited original band members Gregg Rolie on lead
vocals and keyboards (after his 1975-85 founding stint in Journey),
drummer Mike Shrieve, and percussionist Jose 'Chepito' Areas -- is
the source for "Praise" and two instrumentals, "Bella" and "Love Is You."

At the end of 1987, Carlos Santana delivered Blues For Salvador, his
final Columbia solo album, which won his first GRAMMY Award for Best
Rock Instrumental Performance. Warrior includes the closing title
instrumental, as well as the opening vocal medley of
"Bailando/Aquatic Park." A long hiatus ensued before Santana released
its final Columbia studio album in 1990, Spirits Dancing In The
Flesh. That album's opening track, "Let There Be Light," featuring
lead singer Alex Ligertwood (Santana's longest-running vocalist, from
1979 to 1995), is the appropriate opening track of Warrior. An
instrumental track from Spirits, "Full Moon" appears on disc two.

Santana's two decades at Columbia Records encompassed some 25 studio
and live album releases, comprising band albums and solo projects by
Carlos Santana. On the vocal side, Warrior also revisits Festival
(1976, with "The River"); Moonflower (1977, with "I'll Be Waiting");
and Beyond Appearances (1985, with "Brotherhood," "Spirit," "Right
Now"). On the instrumental side, Warrior includes tracks from
Marathon (1979, "Aqua Marine") and Zebop! (1981, "I Love You Much Too Much").

Santana had a brief but productive three-year stay at PolyGram,
starting with the May 1992 release of Milagro (which means
"miracle"). The album was dedicated to two close friends, Miles Davis
and long-time Santana manager and booking agent Bill Graham (who died
respectively in September and October, 1991) and contained tributes
to four of Santana's inspirations, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Marvin
Gaye, and Bob Marley. From that album, Warrior offers four vocals on
disc one: "Life Is For Living," "Saja/Right On," and two Santana
originals, "Somewhere In Heaven" and "Your Touch."

Milagro was also the name given to an important charitable foundation
created by Deborah and Carlos Santana, who believe that children are
divine miracles of light and hope for the world. With funds generated
by concert tickets, donations and generous individual and corporate
donors, the Milagro Foundation makes grants to tax-exempt
organizations that work with children and youth in the San Francisco
Bay Area, the United States and countries around the world touched by
the music of Santana. The Milagro Foundation can be reached at PO Box
9125, San Rafael, CA 94912-9125.

Attention focused on the Milagro album as Santana toured through 1992
and mourned the April '93 death of Cesar Chavez. Later that year,
Sacred Fire, a live album was released. Santana returned in 1994 with
a final PolyGram album, Brothers, essentially a trio collaboration by
Carlos, his brother Jorge, and nephew Carlos Hernandez. Three of its
instrumentals are included on Warrior: "Blues Latino," "En Aranjuez
Con Tu Amor," and "Luz, Amor y Vida."

A five-year hiatus from recording followed, ending in 1999 with the
release of Supernatural. It was Santana's first album for Arista
Records, and a welcome reunion with Clive Davis, who produced the
album with Carlos. Supernatural was an industry phenomenon --
15-times RIAA platinum in the U.S. alone, the #6 best-selling album
in Soundscan history, with nearly double that number of sales
worldwide. The album spent 102 weeks on the Billboard chart including
12 weeks at #1.

Most significantly, Supernatural generated an all-time
record-breaking nine GRAMMY awards including Album Of the Year and
Best Rock Album. Among the instrumentals on Supernatural (and
included on Warrior) is "El Farol," which won the GRAMMY for Best Pop
Instrumental. ("El Farol" was also the B-side of the worldwide smash
hit single and triple-GRAMMY Award winner "Smooth," co- written by
and featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty).

Supernatural was a hard act to follow -- but 2002's Shaman gave
Santana a second consecutive #1 multi-platinum album. The album's
title alluded to traditional and primitive religious figures who are
in touch with the spirit world, an atmosphere that is conjured up
with "Victory Is Won," the closing track on disc two of Multi
Dimensional Warrior.

For more information, visit
<http://www.legacyrecordings.com/>http://www.legacyrecordings.com/.

.

My Brief Encounter with Fidel Castro [Paul Krassner]

"I Will Say Only That Cuba is Alert"

My Brief Encounter with Fidel Castro

http://www.counterpunch.org/krassner02202008.html

By PAUL KRASSNER
February 20, 2008

In 1960, the U.S. State Department was financing counterrevolutionary
broadcasts to Cuba from a radio station on Swan Island in Honduras.
Program content ranged from telling Cubans that their children would
be taken away to warning them that a Russian drug was being added to
their food and milk which would automatically turn them into
Communists. My friend Lyle Stuart was national treasurer of the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee, which sponsored a trip to Cuba that
December, and he invited me to come along.

On New Year's Eve, at an outdoor dinner celebrating the anniversary
of the revolution, 15,000 Cubans, including 10,000 voluntary
teachers, were bidding goodbye to the Year of Agrarian Reform and
welcoming in the Year of Education. Although Fidel Castro accused the
United States of planning to attack Cuba, the few hundred Americans
who had been invited were greeted with applause, cheering and
kiss-throwing. At midnight the Cubans sang "The 26th of July Song,"
and their cardboard plates went scaling through the air, mingling
with a display of fireworks.

There was a full-scale learn-to-read-and-write campaign. In several
industries, every employee would give one cent a day throughout the
year to the Minister of Education. In the Sierra Maestra, where
battles once raged, there were now under construction schools and
dormitories for 20,000 children, to match the 20,000 Cubans who had
lost their lives, many after torture, under the U.S.-supported
Batista regime. At one of these educational communities, some young
students removed the string that had been set up by a landscaping
crew to mark off a cement foundation. Next morning, the school
director lectured them about such immorality.

"Even a little thing like that," he explained, "does harm to the revolution."

The children of Cuba were being programmed for cooperation rather
than competition. This sense of utter involvement in the revolution
provided the rationalization Cubans gave when I asked about the lack
of a free press, critical of the revolution.

"We get the New York Times," I was told, "and that's enough."

On January 2, there was a parade, with female soldiers marching in
conga fashion, heavy tanks ripping away at well-paved streets, and a
Macy's-type float that was actually the reconstructed American space
rocket which had been fired from Cape Canaveral the previous
November, only to be destroyed just after launching when it proved
defective. Fragments had fallen in Cuba, killing a cow. Now the
revolutionary slogan, "Venceremos" ("We Will Win") was temporarily
changed to "We Will Win, With or Without Cows."

One evening, there was a reception at the Presidential Palace for
several hundred visitors from around the world. When Castro arrived
in the main ballroom, he was surrounded by an eager, protoplasmic
circle of admirers and well-wishers. He stood tall and handsome in
their midst, uniformed but hatless. The throng of people with Castro
at the hub surged forward a few feet at a time toward the end of the
ballroom and finally gave way to a line that formed to meet him, one
by one. Some asked him to pose with them, which he did. A man with a
camera stood on a plush chair for a better angle, but his wife, who
was posing with Castro, yelled at him.

"Max! Don't stand on that chair! This is a palace!"

I gave Castro a copy of my magazine, The Realist, and requested an
interview. He told me to set it up with his secretary. Then a palace
guard handed him a cablegram from President Dwight Eisenhower--in the
final weeks of his lame-duck presidency--calling off diplomatic
relations with Cuba. I asked Castro for a statement.

"I do not think it is up to me to comment," he said, "since it is the
United States that has broken relations. I will say only that Cuba is alert."

There was no official announcement at the Presidential Palace, but
the news spread rapidly among the guests as Castro strode across the
ballroom and departed.

I had brought Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind to
Cuba. The next day, I was in my hotel room, sitting on the bidet and
reading his long poem, "I Am Waiting," while waiting in vain for a
call from Fidel Castro's secretary. But Castro obviously had more
important things to do than answer my questions. In retrospect,
though, I would like to have asked him, "How do you feel about term limits?"
---

Paul Krassner is the editor of The Realist. His books include: Pot
Stories for the Soul, One Hand Jerking and Murder at the Conspiracy
Convention. He can be reached through his website: http://paulkrassner.com/

.

Obama, Bombers and Bullsh*t

Obama, Bombers and Bullsh*t

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bill_buc_080223_obama_2c_bombers_and_b.htm

February 24, 2008
by Bill Bucolo

Painting Obama with the broad brush of 60's radicals will backfire on
the right wing. After all, everything activists ever said that was
good about Civil Rights and wrong with the Viet Nam War have come to
pass. Now we have a society that can actually contemplate electing a
black American to the White House, and we're trading with and touring
a peaceful, united, commie/capitalistic Viet Nam. As far as radicals
and bombings... that's so much bullsh*t.

I was involved in 60's activism too... all the way up in the court
system to the Supremes (Rivard, Bucolo, et al...). And that court
business was directly attributable to events that happened because of
government sponsored people not associated with our activity (we
college kids had an underground newspaper called Florida Free Press
in 1967). We were set up for bogus obscenity charges in right wing
Palm Beach county but eventually beat the case anyway. Plenty of
others around the country faced the same kind of government
sanctioned crap. Accordingly I'm more than leery of most of the
violent and unsavory things that happened in the 60's like those
bombings, and more suspect people working for the government who
wanted to turn public opinion against citizens working for peace and
civil rights back then (and probably now too). 99% of the time about
the worst we ever did was hang banners from water towers and throw
dollar bills down onto the floor of the Stock Exchange (Abbey
Hoffman, Aug 24, 1967).

So I've seen my share of wide-eyed 60's radicals, but if we could
ever know for sure, I'd bet dimes to dollars that the very few
dangerous ones, the real nutters, were paid punks working on behalf
of US police and security interests. The evidence is certainly
there. For instance we can know for sure that news media was (and
certainly still is) used to some extent by them (Mockingbird) and
that provocateurs from Washington were used extensively by the FBI
and others (search FBI at that link) during the Civil Rights and
anti-Viet Nam War movements (search FBI at that link too). Check any
of them in Wikipedia, Google, etc. Why should we believe that
otherwise completely sane and intelligent people would do anything as
ridiculous as bombing a post office or whatever? We shouldn't.

The only ones who benefitted from that criminalization of the peace
and civil rights movements were those sad souls in our own government
who needed excuses for their own departmental budgets and
authoritarian agendas and world views. And none of them were ever
held accountable for their treachery against US citizens exercising
their constitutional rights and duties. But that day may yet come.

I maintain it is certainly a citizen's duty to monitor and correct
our government when it gets off track. And if you agree with me this
far, you may also agree that it is Un American and
Anti-constitutional to impede or harm Americans exercising their
rights and responsibilities. It takes a great deal of courage to
stand up to the government... especially when it tries to warn you
off their backs with jail and heavy fines.

I believe in honoring ALL of our patriots... and I'm looking forward
to the day when peace activists are honored for their service to the
country; and our Justice Department holds government hacks
responsible for the harm they did (and still do) to their fellow
citizens who work for a better America.
---

Bill Bucolo has trained and worked in newspapers, public relations
and magazine publishing since the 60's. During the Viet Nam War he
was active in the Southern Student Organizing Committee and Students
for a Democratic Society, and one of the publishers of the Florida
Free Press which eventually prevailed in a 1st Amendment case in
front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Since November 2000 He has been
active in the fight for election system reform and against
conservative excesses and writes frequently on these issues.

.

Peace, protest and patriotism [Minnesota 8]

[3 articles]

Peace, protest and patriotism

http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2008/02/20/72165692

The play tells the story of eight Minnesotans arrested for raiding
draft offices.

By Stephanie Dickrell
February 21, 2008

"4 draft offices in state raided, 8 accused of attempted sabotage"
"FBI Nabs 8 in Minnesota Draft Office Break-ins"
"8 Arrests in Draft Raids Spur City Demonstration"
"Further protests threatened in 8 draft break-in arrests"
"Vigil, Fast to Support Protestors"

These headlines from the early '70s chronicle the story of eight
Minnesotan men who attempted to break into draft offices in three
Minnesota cities to destroy draft cards and spare young men from the
horrors of what they saw as an unjust war and the high death rate
that accompanied the Vietnam War.

Their story is being told in a new production, "Peace Crimes: The
Minnesota 8 vs. The War." Four years in the making, the play is a
collaboration of the Minnesota History Theatre, the University
Theatre Department and the Playwrights' Center.

It tells the stories of the eight who got caught and were put on
trial for sabotaging the war effort in 1970.

The production process started when one of the Minnesota 8, Frank
Kroncke, presented the History Theatre with a manuscript of a memoir
about the political actions he took in his youth against the Vietnam War.

Director Ron Peluso easily summed up what the play was about: peace,
protest and patriotism, and the price you pay for resistance.

"This is a story this generation needs to understand," he said, to
motivate people to be politically active.

With all of the similarities being drawn between the Vietnam War and
the war in Iraq, the timing of this play is important, he said.

The show is a unique way to share this recent history that is more
effective than a lecture in a classroom, he said.

The production features five professional actors working alongside
University theatre students, which is particularly fitting because
the University was the epicenter for protest activities during the
Vietnam War, and the backdrop for the story of the Minnesota eight -
most of whom attended or lived near campus.

"They were burning draft cards in Coffman," said Natalie Remus, a
theatre and political science senior, who plays Diane. "It's right here."

The presence of some of the Minnesota eight throughout the process,
from auditions to rehearsals, has also made the story more relevant.
It provides a unique experience for the actors. Instead of relying on
a character's lines to understand their motivations, they can
actually meet and discuss them with these men.

"Their passion and hearing their stories makes you really want to do
the show," said Jasmine Rush, a junior and a theater major. She is
part of the ensemble that backs up the Minnesota eight.

Director Peluso was quick to remind the actors they were not to do
impersonations of these characters, but rather to "focus on the
passion of the characters within the play," said professional actor
Nicolas Freeman, who plays Frank Kroncke's character in the production.

Most of all, Freeman, Peluso, Rush and senior Natalie Remus agree the
play is relevant because it is about more than just telling eight
men's stories.

"We really hope the play spurs discussion," about the current war,
about politics and about resistance, Remus said.

The play has already done so for the actors, among themselves and
with their family and friends.

For these actors and their audiences, history doesn't stay in the
past, and the lessons learned yesterday are still relevant today.

--------

OnStage:
Still no peace

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/onstage/15842477.html

A new collaboration between History Theatre and the University of
Minnesota reopens the book on Vietnam.

By GRAYDON ROYCE, Star Tribune
Last update: February 21, 2008

Ron Peluso received the letter shortly after an early version of "The
Minnesota 8" was read at the History Theatre's Raw Stages series in
2005. A patron wrote that she would never again set foot inside the
St. Paul theater, so offensive was the drama based on Vietnam War
protesters who had raided draft boards across the state. She had been
a secretary in the St. Paul office and felt terrorized by the 1970 event.

Peluso, the History Theatre's artistic director, assured the woman
that the play was still in development. He passed along the note to
playwright Doris Baizley, who was called in after Raw Stages to take
over the script, originally by a different playwright.

"We get a little of the secretary's point of view now," said Peluso,
who indicated he's uncertain whether she'll come back for a look at
"Peace Crimes: The Minnesota Eight vs. The War," as the play is now
titled. "This one sparks really angry discussion on both sides. It
feels like one of the more important things we've done."

It opens tonight in a premiere collaboration with the University of
Minnesota's Theater Department at Rarig Center in Minneapolis.

Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame and a witness at the
Minnesota 8 trial, is expected to see the show Saturday and speak in
a University Great Conversations event next Tuesday (612-624-2345 for
information).

A full generation has grown up since Vietnam raged in the public
consciousness and still the war rests uneasily. The U.S. occupation
of Iraq has raised its currency on both sides. Vietnam teaches us
what happens when we cut and run, advocates say. Vietnam teaches us
what happens when we bumble our way through a misguided military
adventure, opponents reply.

Those, however, are geopolitical arguments. As the disgruntled
patron's unease indicates, Vietnam's wounds are personal -- a death
of a friend, the trauma of being attacked for your beliefs, a loss of
faith in leaders we once trusted.

"The anger and the frustration in 1970 was immense and it felt like
we couldn't trust our government after that," said Baizley, a Los
Angeles writer who marks her Twin Cities stage debut with this play.
"It changed the basic things of my life and I felt since then that
I've been much more suspicious of government."

Breaking the social compact

Peluso first learned of Baizley after watching a PlayLabs reading of
her script "SexSting" in 2004. Impressed, he thought of her when he
was looking for a new writer to rework the story of eight Minnesota
men who were convicted of burglary and spent between 14 and 20 months
in prison after the break-ins in 1970. Baizley, though unfamiliar
with the case, had her own Vietnam experience. Three friends enlisted
in 1966 and only one returned from Vietnam.

"Our generals were putting kids in danger in a really terrible way
that involved lying," she said. "Then we started thinking that maybe
the guys who are running this society don't have our good at heart.
That's why when Ron told me about the Minnesota 8, something in my
mind clicked right into it."

Baizley dove into her own antiwar past -- letters from guys in
Vietnam, speeches by a friend's mother -- and also read the Minnesota
court transcripts. She saw the specifics of this case as a
jumping-off point for a wider exploration of the era, "more like a
pageant or a Diego Rivera mural."

Despite the risks of leaving his St. Paul home base, Peluso felt the
show should be produced at the University of Minnesota. After all,
the Minnesota 8 consisted mostly of students, so who better to
portray students than students?

"It allowed us to do the play as it's meant to be done," said Peluso.

For the youngsters, Vietnam is history and not the real experience it
was for Baizley and Peluso, who graduated from high school in 1968
and qualified for a student deferment. They are receptive, however,
particularly given current events in Iraq. That willingness might not
have been there during the 1980s, when young people grew tired of
hearing about the Vietnam years.

"Kids were really sick of hearing us talk about having the best
music, the best protests and I began to feel like an old jerk," said
Baizley. "These kids are enough younger and they are in their 20s
with a war going on, and an environmental crisis that has gotten them
into action and they're looking at us with more sympathy and interest."

Ironically, one of the "reforms" of the Vietnam era has dampened
today's protest movement. The Minnesota 8 targeted Selective Service
offices, and in 2008 there is no draft. Too, Vietnam was part of a
nexus of protest movements that created a counterculture synergy.
Today, especially with the Iraq war being framed as part of
anti-terrorism efforts, the public is given to a more ambiguous
response. Pew Research reported in November that a slight majority
favored withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq; yet, the number of people
who felt the military effort was going well had risen 18 points to 48
percent over the previous six months.

Lodged within those findings is the attempt by some to brand antiwar
activists as unpatriotic, a sensation that resonates with the Vietnam era.

"The reason we're doing this play is that it's about peace, protest
and patriotism," said Peluso. "There is a price you pay for speaking
out. It's surprising how much we haven't learned about the past."
---

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299

.

--------

Theater review:
'Peace Crimes' tries a little too much

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/onstage/15924492.html

Earnest, well-meaning and ambitious, in the end it has more breadth
than depth, more image than insight.

By LISA BROCK, Special to the Star Tribune
Last update: February 24, 2008

From the grainy photographs of war protest signs and campus
demonstrations to the tie-dye T-shirts and bell-bottom jeans, the
opening moments of "Peace Crimes: The Minnesota Eight vs. The War"
instantly transport the audience in time to the waning years of the
1960s. The death toll in Vietnam is mounting, the anti-war movement
is heating up and hundreds of thousands of young men in America face
the prospect of a draft card in the mail.

Rarig Center, on the West Bank campus, is an inspired venue for this
collaborative co-production by the Minnesota History Theatre and the
University of Minnesota's Theater Department of Doris Baizley's play.
Many of the Minnesota Eight were students, and the campus was a
hotbed of activism during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The play provides a glimpse into a little-explored facet of our local
history, a history made all the more compelling in the context of the
current war in Iraq.

In 1970, a group of eight young Minnesotans took their anti-war
sentiments to a higher level by raiding a series of Selective Service
offices around the state, destroying draft records and files. They
were captured by the FBI and stood trial. Seven of them went to
prison, serving between 14 and 20 months.

Baizley's play provides a kaleidoscope of opinions on the actions and
beliefs of the Minnesota Eight. There's the mother who supports her
son's anti- war stance but wants him to seek a plea bargain rather
than go to prison. There's the procession of witnesses testifying on
their behalf. At the other end of the spectrum, there's the Selective
Service office worker who feels only shock and violation at the destruction.

Baizley makes a valiant attempt to encompass the complexity of the
era she describes, but her efforts often diffuse the focus of the
play. Scenes that try to incorporate the Black Panther movement and
women's rights issues feel contrived and fail to delve beneath the
level of mere symbols like a clenched fist and bra-burning. Despite
some strong performances, including John Riedlinger as a wild-eyed
Abbie-Hoffmanesque activist and Joe Leary as a man with a gently
ironic world view and welcome sense of humor, the characters are too
often simply deadly serious mouthpieces for their points of view,
their beliefs reduced to didactic slogans.

While this earnest, well-meaning and ambitious production is a good
jumping-off point for a reevaluation of the anti-war movement of the
1960s and '70s and its implications today, "War Crimes" offers more
breadth than depth, more image than insight.
---

Lisa Brock is a Twin Cities freelance writer.

.

Antioch College to be closed for 2008-2009 academic year

Ohio campus to be closed for 2008-2009 academic year

http://www.wnewsj.com/main.asp?SectionID=49&SubSectionID=156&ArticleID=163333&TM=28988.7

2/23/2008

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio (AP) ­ Antioch College, known for inspiring
quirky academic programs that produce students with a passion for
free thinking and social activism, has no choice but to close for the
2008-2009 academic year, trustees of the parent Antioch University said Friday.

Operations will be suspended June 30.

Antioch and Yellow Springs, tie-dyed and liberal-leaning, fed off
each other. Students were encouraged to create their own programs for learning.

Famous alums included "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, Coretta
Scott King and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould.

After two days of meetings in Los Angeles, trustees reaffirmed their
June 2007 decision to close the college for a year. They said they
ran out of time to reach a deal on transferring the financially
struggling school to a group of alumni, donors and others with its
own board of trustees.

Trustees had reversed their earlier decision in November, contingent
on whether alumni and the school could meet fundraising deadlines.
But the college could not overcome declining enrollment, heavy
dependence on tuition and a small endowment.

Trustees said they would continue discussions on a possible transfer
of the college, but said it was important to clarify for students,
faculty and staff that they would need to make plans for the next
phase in their educations and careers.

The town and school have been fertile ground for social activism and
civil disobedience, ranging from anti-Vietnam war protests in the
1960s and '70s through demonstrations against the Iraq war in recent years.

In 1994, students took over a campus building for 32 days to protest
the school's plans to turn it into an admissions office instead of a
student-activity center.

Friday's decision does not affect Antioch University's nonresidential
campuses in Yellow Springs; Keene, N.H.; Los Angeles; Santa Barbara,
Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; or its doctorate program.

"It has been a difficult year since Antioch University's board of
trustees ­ many of whom are (Antioch) college alumni ­ faced the
reality that the undergraduate college had enormous financial
problems and an unsustainable business plan," said Art Zucker, the
trustees' chairman.

The closing will affect about 200 students, 41 tenured faculty and 85
staff members, Zucker said.

He said trustees, the university administration and alumni spent the
past eight months trying to save the college after the realities of
the college's finances were announced.

Yellow Springs is about 15 miles east of Dayton.
­­­

On the Net: http://antioch-college.edu

.

Pushing 60 with Pot

After All These Years

Pushing 60 with Pot

http://www.counterpunch.org/kent02222008.html

By NORM KENT
February 22, 2008

I am close to being a senior citizen. Though I will always think of
myself as a student at Hofstra who was the 19 year old President of
the Sophomore class, I am turning 58 this year. Damn, 60 is around the corner!

You know what that means? When I open a newspaper in the town I have
lived in for the last thirty years, I know the people in the
obituaries. I am older than some of them. When the city councilmen go
to jail for the bribes they always seem to take in every city
everywhere, I realize they are kids I grew up with. That means I
smoked dope with them, got laid with them, partied with them, and got
drunk with them.

If you are from the 1960's, let's be honest. Pot was the least of the
things we did. There were mushrooms and Quaaludes, acid trips with
LSD, body painting, psychedelic and psychotropic drugs up the yin
yang tree. So a little weed was just a nominal high. By the time we
were 20, we were reading about classmates who overdosed on Heroin.

Some of us really got into marijuana, though. It was a chance to
individually transport ourselves to a higher consciousness, to strip
away stress and let our bodies reach sensory highs.. It was a chance
to feel and touch on a cosmic level, to tune in and turn on.

It worked then for us and it still works now for a younger
generation, despite the institutional trash generated from the United
States Office of Drug Control Policy. "This is not your father's
pot," they warn. They are right. As users and caregivers everywhere
know, it is better, cleaner, more refined, and probably a lot safer than ever.

If Americans are growing their own pure hydroponic pot in their
homes, they do not have to worry about deceitful dealers throwing
oregano, rat poison, and dirty weeds into the mix. They do not have
to fear that their plants came over moldy and mildewy, after a boat
trip from Colombia, where it was sprayed and stored and secreted in
ways that reduced the product to rubbish.

Anyway, while we kids were dancing in the mud at Woodstock, our
parents were living in the suburban valley of the dolls, downing
valium by the bucket. They were pouring martinis, and finding pills
by the pound to cure their own ills. Doctors called them
tranquilizers and they dosed our parents in the millions.

Forty years later, whether its booze or coke, reckless citizens still
generate self-inflicted destructiveness, and it has nothing at all to
do with pot. In a free society, you have no conduct to condemn or
congratulate but your own. The world is yours to create or ruin.

I never really used drugs until I busted up my knee playing baseball.
Then the doctors shot my knee up with lidocaine, benzocaine, and any
liquid that would relieve the pain. I can't list all the arthritis
and pain pills I have been given. From Celebrex to Vioxx to Bextra,
the manufacturers are all now getting sued for poisoning Americans
while distributing substances they knew were toxic.

I found out a lot more about pills when I contracted cancer. My life
became a 24 hour cycle of constant protocols of treatment. You are
dosed with oxycodone, oxycontin, percocet, darvocet, percodan,
cortisone, prednisone, hydrocodone, and all or any combination or
concoction of medicines doctors can prescribe to keep those good
blood cells alive while beating down the bad ones. You take them
because they tell you to.

Recently, we all have been anointed with human growth any purportedly
natural or herbal pill with a fancy name you cannot pronounce, but
all I ever wanted was a joint.

As a gay man, I have been friends with lots of men who have come down
with HIV and AIDS. Many have died, but many more are living. Until
the new protocols were available, they were taking as many as 30
pills a day. I can't list them all, but the processes to match the
medicine with the man would leave good people very sick and often
emaciated beyond your belief. Meanwhile, joints were illegal.

So here I am now, having lived a pretty full life in a pretty
pill-filled America. Over the years, we have seen lots of food
scares. Just in the past few years, some E coli thing in the lettuce
killed thousands, and a Mad Cow took down hundreds. Last year, we
even lost Popeye from a bad can of Spinach. But I don't ever remember
reading about anyone dying from a bong hit, unless a jealous lover
smashed the glass over some toker's skull. I did cut my hand once
when I dropped a ceramic bong and it shattered in my fingers.

When I was a kid, I remember there was a scare about cranberries, and
then Bon Vivant Vichyssoises Soup, and then something crazy called
Legionnaires' disease. Occasionally, our city officials tell us not
to drink the water because it is contaminated and we have to boil it.
You know what occurred to me the other day, though? I have never had
to boil pot. The only time pot ever became dangerous in America was
when our government tried to spray paraquat on it.

I am proud of my efforts back then, as a young lawyer, in 1982, to
stop the government dead in its tracks, asking for an injunction to
end the toxic spraying. It was the first time I ever made the New
York Times, and I was 32 then. Now it is 25 years later and instead
of spraying pot in Florida, my government is raiding dispensaries in
California. What lunacy.

Years later, I had a client smoking pot to reduce the intraocular
pressure in her eyes from glaucoma. Pot saved her eyesight. Same
thing with some HIV patients in Key West, who consumed cannabis to
retaliate against the wasting syndrome the disease caused. Pot and
the patients won. Smoke and you get better, or at least less sick.

You know, we are all day to day, and minute to minute. I may live
another hour or another two decades, but in one truth I think I can
trust. Pushing the age of 60, I do not need someone else to tell me
what I can put in my body. I do not need laws telling me what I can
eat, drink or smoke. If I don't know by now that smoking cigarettes
can give me cancer or becoming an alcoholic will destroy my liver,
then 'my bad.'

The bottom line is that if they can pass a law saying a condo can be
for residents only 55 an older, maybe we can push for a law saying no
drug laws can be applied against those 55 and older either. Maybe we
can say we have put in our dues, earned our rights, and in the latter
stages of our lives, we have an unfettered freedom and right to be
free; to determine our own destinies.

Let's see if I can't conclude with a little story from the Mass Cann
NORML conference last September in the Boston Commons. The founder
and director of NORML, Keith Stroup, and the Associate Publisher of
High Times Magazine, Rick Cusick, were both busted for smoking a
joint at a pot rights rally in the park. They both have to go to
court. Maybe more of us should.

Now you tell me what this court is going to say to two professionals
who have spent their lives devoted to the advocacy and abolition of
marijuana laws?

You tell me what the courts should say to two sixty plus year old men
who made a conscious and deliberate choice to consume some weed on a
weekend. Like they have nothing else to worry about in Boston but to
bust 50 people every year in the Commons when they have a toke?

Have you seen the crime stats in Boston lately, for robbery, rape,
ransacking, and plunder- and that is just in City Hall in their parking lot?

For thirty years, since those early days as a student activist, I
have been fighting for change. But I guess I have not done all that
well, not if our government is raiding dispensaries, arresting
growers, taking scholarships away from students, seizing property
from landlords and, astonishingly, arresting 800,000 citizens a year
on simple pot possession charges. I guess I am not doing well if the
government is still revoking your drivers' licenses, forfeiting your
cars, and locking you up for loose joints.

I think we all need to do a little bit better. You can help us help
you by joining NORML today. We are still fighting the good fight. We
need some freedom fighters to join us.

Yeah, NORML is still around. Yeah, I know some of you have not heard
about us since your college days. Yeah, we are the old men on the
block. But we are infused with new blood, still very dedicated to an
honorable cause, and still in need of your help.

We were here for you yesterday, and unless we change the laws we will
be around for your kids tomorrow. But you can help change that by
joining us at www.norml.com today.
---

Norm Kent lives in Fort Lauderdal. He can be reached at::
norm@normkent.com

.

Rainbow People forced to move from Ocala National Forest

[5 articles]

Rainbow gathering in Ocala National Forest takes darker tone

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-rainbow2308feb23,0,3225243.story

The forest's annual lovefest has taken on a darker tone.

Stephen Hudak | Sentinel Staff Writer
February 23, 2008

OCALA NATIONAL FOREST - With rainwater, Rob Korotky rinsed out the
tin pail he used to whip up pancake batter for 20 guests from his
"kitchen" at an oak-shaded campsite near Salt Springs.

Korotky, 52, a drum-maker and musician known to fellow campers as
"Kodi," spent $400 on gas to drive from Woodstock, N.Y., for the
annual Rainbow Family Gathering about 80 miles north of Orlando. But
as he cleaned up cookware, he wondered if there weren't more
freeloaders than free spirits among the estimated 500 people in the
woods this year.

"It ain't Rainbow people, per se," Korotky said. "It's all of those
drifters and floaters who have never been to a gathering before but
who have heard about it as a place to land and party."

Rainbows, as the campers are often called, have gathered in Ocala
National Forest each winter since the mid-1980s to commune and pray.
But the event -- rooted in the 1960s counterculture and loosely
committed to spreading love and peace on Earth -- has attracted a
less-idealistic crowd this year, said veteran participants and U.S.
Forest Service officials.

"A lot of people seem like they're here for the wrong reasons," Becki
Barnes, 34, of Brandon said this week as she was preparing to leave
the gathering, her 14th. "It's totally changed."

Some campers, especially weekend visitors, are lured not by utopian
ideals of peace, love and harmony but by the possibility of scoring
sex and drugs, authorities say.

Nudity is often prominent.

Crime has been, too.

Federal law-enforcement officer Chris Crain counted 14 arrests
through the first seven days of the gathering, which unofficially
began Valentine's Day and ends on Leap Day, Feb. 29. Crain said
federal law officers made only six arrests during last year's event
and just one at the 2006 gathering. Marion County deputies have
investigated four assaults in the forest, three of which sent the
victim to the hospital.

"Something's unraveling," Ranger Rick Lint said. "I don't know if
it's people involved in the event or people glomming onto it."

There were problems from the beginning this year. The Forest Service
had to force hundreds of visitors from Duck Pond, near Paisley in
Lake County, because officials said the crowds could hurt sensitive
lands already trampled by ATVs and other off-road vehicles.

Dozens of people were ticketed for parking vehicles on closed forest
roads or for refusing to leave.

Others, disillusioned, stayed away, perhaps explaining the smallest
gathering in at least seven years.

The Rainbow Family claim no leaders, hierarchy or official
spokesperson and open their arms to "anyone with a belly button."

Visitors to the camp's inner circle are greeted with hugs and the
salutation, "Welcome home."

Campers at the gathering eschew money, except for passing a "magic
hat" to collect funds for water or other communal needs.

They beat drums and dance.

They span spiritual and economic spectrums. Some Rainbow campers
arrived in the forest by hitchhiking or aboard rickety church buses,
others in Mercedes SUVs. One minivan was slathered with "Jesus" and
Right-to-Life messages. A bumper sticker affixed to a Volvo sedan
read, "God Bless the Freaks."

Though some campers playfully describe the group as a
"disorganization," this year's event has been especially chaotic,
said Pat Tolley, a 25-year employee of the U.S. Forest Service who
works closely with campers in the Ocala forest.

She said Rainbow participants who for years served as "focalizers" --
planners who arranged for water deliveries, trash removal and other
essential services -- decided to camp separately at Buck Lake, about
25 miles south of this year's gathering.

"They just got tired of doing all the work," Tolley said.

The decision by women who used to do the planning led some campers to
brand them as "High Holy Hippies," a slur suggesting they are
self-righteous and elitist.

"It is a little hurtful," said April Hendry, 31, who manages an adult
superstore in Gainesville and uses the Rainbow name "Dirty Momma."

Nonetheless, she shouldered the duty of sanitizing and delivering the
gathering's "water buffaloes," large tanks of water.

By contrast, the gathering's main campground includes a collection of
so-called "drainbows," moochers who float from campsite to campsite,
eating free at communal kitchens and offering neither labor nor trade.

Despite the gathering's problems this year, Korotky, the drum-maker,
has relished his stay.

He beat a drum for hours earlier this week beneath a lunar eclipse.

"Wow, man," Korotky said, describing the satisfying rush he felt that
night. "There's no other place I can play my drums as loud as I want.
It's still good."
---

Stephen Hudak can be reached at shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5930.

-------

Deputies Say 'Rainbow Family' May Be Responsible For Assaults, Shoplifting

http://www.wftv.com/news/15376281/detail.html

February 22, 2008

MARION COUNTY, Fla. -- The annual gathering of campers known as the
'rainbow family' continued Friday morning in the Ocala National Forest.

Hundreds of people are taking part in the commune-type camp near Salt
Springs. Marion County deputies said there has been some trouble in
the area. They have arrested at least three people for assaults and
shoplifting.

The 'rainbow family' insists the majority of its members are peaceful.

"Rainbow is powerful, man. It's more than a movement," said a man
known as "Magoo". "It's a way of life."

The 'rainbow family' has a forest service permit to camp until March
9. They've been camping in the forest for the past 20 years.

--------

Forest camper charged with blocking deputy's vehicle

http://www.ocala.com/article/20080220/BREAKING_NEWS/482259803/1368/googlesitemapnews

Feb. 20, 2008
Austin L. Miller
STAR-BANNER

SALT SPRINGS - On Monday, when a sheriff's deputy was taking an Ocala
National Forest camper to jail following a fracas, other members of
the Rainbow Family of Living Light joined hands and tried to block the vehicle.

Although deputies activated their sirens, the Rainbow people still
would not move until a fellow camper told them to, according to the
Sheriff's Office.

On Tuesday, deputies went back to the Syracuse Island area to look
for several people involved in the disturbance. They arrested Gerardo
G. Salazar, 20, who they believe took part in blocking the vehicle.
He was charged with obstruction, which is a misdemeanor involving
resisting arrest without violence.

Salazar told officials he did it because he was trying to help his
"brother," the report said.

--------

Rainbow Family camper charged with simple battery

http://www.ocala.com/article/20080219/BREAKING_NEWS/890206926/1368/googlesitemapnews

Feb. 19, 2008
Austin L. Miller
STAFF REPORT

SALT SPRINGS - A 28-year-old Oregon man camping with the Rainbow
Family at Syracuse Island in the Ocala National Forest was arrested
by a sheriff's deputy Monday and charged with burglary of an occupied
conveyance, simple battery and criminal mischief.

According to a Sheriff's Office report, a woman and her son told
deputies they were camping in the Forest and got into their vehicle
and headed to town to get water.

They told officials they were stopped by a man, who was yelling at
the woman's son. They said the man, later identified as Bernard
Randolph Tully, punched the son in the face. The woman said several
people then dragged her son out of the vehicle and beat him.

When deputies arrived, the duo described the man who they said
instigated the confrontation.

Tully told deputies he never hit the woman's son and only struck the
vehicle because it hit him. He did not reveal the names or
whereabouts of those who reportedly assisted him.

As Tully was being driven away in a patrol vehicle, officials said
several people joined hands in an attempt to prevent the vehicle from
leaving. Once the deputy activated the sirens, they moved out of the way.

Tully was transported to the Marion County Jail.

--------

Rainbow People forced to move from Ocala National Forest

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-rainbow1908feb19,0,7842483.story

Evicted from their Ocala forest spot, the hippies continue their
annual gathering up the road.

Stephen Hudak | Sentinel Staff Writer
February 19, 2008

OCALA NATIONAL FOREST - Dirty Momma just wants to protect the land.

That's why the 31-year-old Florida woman, known outside Rainbow
gatherings as April Hendry, didn't resist the U.S. Forest Service's
effort to force her and hundreds of other free spirits from Duck
Pond, though many did.

"We love the Earth," Hendry said, surrounded by other barefoot and
bedraggled campers in tie-dye.

Though Duck Pond, near Paisley in Lake County, was pegged for months
as the site for the annual counterculture convention in the Ocala
National Forest, forest officials feared the two-week event would
wreak irreversible damage on an environmentally delicate area deeply
scarred by all-terrain-vehicle riders.

"Allowing that many people to tramp around sensitive land that is
trying to heal makes no sense," said Heather Callahan, spokeswoman
for the Forest Service.

Forest officials estimate the annual gathering will draw 600 Rainbow
Family members this year but could swell to 1,500 if the weekend
weather is good. The federal agency, in charge of managing and
protecting the 383,000-acre forest, has increased its law-enforcement
presence to 11 officers, more than twice as many as usual.

The hippies have been congregating for several weeks at a time during
the winter in the Ocala forest, partying, singing folk songs, playing
drums and praying for peace. The gatherings began in the Ocala forest
in the 1980s. Some members of the loose-knit group have been known to
prance around naked, and authorities have said they sometimes take drugs.

Members of the Rainbow Family, which espouses ideals of peace, love
and nature on Web sites, began arriving this month at Duck Pond and
ignored directives to leave.

U.S. Forest Service lawman Chris Crain said officers posted warning
notices that read: "This is an ILLEGAL gathering of 75 persons or
more without a permit. The max penalty is six months in prison and/or
a $5,000 fine."

Officers also ticketed 56 people who had parked their Volkswagen
buses, vans or other vehicles on forest roads that were closed.

"Their group wasn't singled out. They got the same as any ATV'er or
hunter in a motorized vehicle off a designated route or trail," said
Crain, dubbed "Officer Killjoy" by some Rainbow People.

The fine is $175.

Officers then issued tickets to Rainbow People who refused to leave.

Crain said 30 were cited for camping without a permit, an offense
carrying a $225 fine. Some avoided citations by fleeing into the woods.

James Bryant, 59, a retired California horse trainer who identified
himself by his Rainbow name "Riversong," chuckled about his escape
from the camping ticket. But the possibility of another $225 ticket
convinced him to move to Syracuse Island, where the Forest Service
has funneled the free spirits and freeloaders attending this winter's
regional gathering, which will continue through the end of the month
or into March.

He said most Rainbow members don't want trouble -- though he noticed
the "No Panhandling" sign the nearby grocery posted on its door to
discourage begging.

"But there is some riff-raff that follow us," he said.

Though federal officials were relieved the Rainbow People left Duck
Pond, the folks running the campground at the Salt Springs
Recreational Area were not. Rainbow People, hunkered down in adjacent
woods, have jumped the campground fence to use hot showers and
restrooms reserved for paying guests, most of whom are snowbirds who
pay $23.45 a night.

Not only are the restrooms in shambles every morning, but some
Rainbow People have used the springs' freshwater swimming area as
their personal bathtub, said Judye Nix, the area manager.

"I tried to stop this woman with shampoo in her hand. I told her,
'Ma'am, this is a nature area, an environmentally sensitive area,"
Nix said. "She just ducked her soapy head under the water. When I
pulled her out, her shorts were down at her ankles. This one old
gentleman was sitting there, just a-watchin'. I told him, 'You know
that song, 'Bad Moon Rising'? Well, you just saw it."
---

Stephen Hudak can be reached at shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5930.

.

Legendary '60s trio Blue Cheer will play monster riffs in S.B.

Legendary '60s trio Blue Cheer will play monster riffs in S.B.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/feb/21/power-on/

By Bill Locey
Thursday, February 21, 2008

Born in the Summer of Love plus one and named for a famous product of
those silly '60s, there was never anything remotely groovy about the
band Blue Cheer, even though the trio was a bunch of longhairs.

From the start, Blue Cheer was more about power chords than peace
and love or the potent brand of LSD that gave the band its name. The
group was so loud that its sonic assault could make hippie flowers
wilt, then spontaneously combust. The power trio, said by many to
have been the first heavy metal band, had a hit with a cover song,
"Summertime Blues," that was exponentially more powerful than the
Eddie Cochran original and on a par with The Who's version.

Although it's been 40 years since their 1968 debut, the guys in Blue
Cheer never really went away. They've been releasing albums all
along, including the most recent, "What Doesn't Kill You "

Blue Cheer plays tonight at Velvet Jones on State Street in Santa
Barbara. Original bass player Dickie Peterson, who leads the current
lineup, discussed the latest while driving around Northern California.

What's new in Blue Cheer world?

We're in a redwood forest right now, on our way to McKinleyville ­
that's where we're playing tonight in Northern California.

So, 40 years of this ­ think you might stick with it?

I imagine I'm in for the duration, my friend.

That's a long time for a band or anything else. How do you account
for your longevity?

I dunno, man, maybe rock 'n' roll is keeping me alive. That's all I can figure.

Who goes to see Blue Cheer?

Everyone from 22-year-old kids all the way up to 65-year-old men.

So some of the 65-year-old men we're 22-year-olds back in the day?

Yeah, I'm sure they were ­ we have a lot of fans that have been with
us all their lives. Even young ones come up to us and say, "Hey, my
father turned me on to your music when I was 1." One kid told me they
brought him home, put him in a bassinet and played Blue Cheer for
him, so that was literally all of his life.

How did you get named for a brand of acid?

Obviously, we took a bit of it, and also because our music is
blues-based. It's based on jump blues as opposed to a sad blues. You
know, blues got a bad rap when some stupid poet identified sadness
and blue. Jump blues is about ladies and dancing and carrying on ­ good times.

How did you happen to choose "Summertime Blues"?

Actually, the band picked "Summertime Blues" as filler on the album.
Abe Cash is the one that picked it for a single ­ he's a producer;
that's his job.

What have you learned on the road after all these years?

The secret is believing and being honest with the music. I think
believing in it will keep a man alive a very long time.

Where does the band fit into rock history, and was Blue Cheer the
first heavy metal band?

I think we were one of the first power bands to surface. People call
us the first heavy metal band, which is fine, but we refer to
ourselves as a power trio. We're very low end.

How did you end up as the bass player?

I wasn't one of those bass players that was a guitar player first. I
started out a bass player and I am a bass player.

Back in San Francisco with all those hippie bands, you guys were
definitely not groovy.

You have to remember that most of the psychedelic bands were a little
bit older than us, and at the time, they were surfacing out of folk
music ­ the Woody Guthrie scene. We broke our teeth on Howlin' Wolf.
That's the big difference.

When you guys go to Europe, do they see you as a blues band?

People see us as a hardcore rock 'n' roll band; most people don't
even know that it's blues-based.

Are the fans the same here as they are in Europe?

They're not the same everywhere. When I was young and went to a
concert, you would definitely get a rock band, and you might get a
folk band, jazz band or bluegrass band. There was a night of various
kinds of music, whereas today, it's pretty mono-dimensional, you
know? I'm a heavy metal guy and if you don't like heavy metal, then
we can't really be friends. All the music has something tremendous to
offer, and it disappoints me to see the kids cut themselves off
because they don't think this is hip enough.

What's the strangest Blue Cheer gig?

The strangest gig we ever played would have to be in El Paso, Texas,
when we played at a Mexican disco. It was in the '70s and I don't how
we got booked there, but the minute we walked on stage, everything
stopped. When we stopped playing, disco music would come on and the
floor would fill up with these John Travolta-like people. Then we
would come back on stage and the dance floor would empty. They waited
for us to finish so they could do their disco.

Where does the new one fit into your vast body of work?

I'm really tremendously proud of the way the guys worked on the new
album and I think it's sort of old meets new.

What's next?

This leg of the tour will end up in Texas in March, and that will be
wrapped up with the High Times Doobie Awards, where we'll get a
Lifetime Achievement Award. One of the songs off our new album is up
for Pot Song of the Year. After that, we're heading for Europe in April.

On the Net: http://www.bluecheer.us

.

Beat voices showcase culture

Beat voices showcase culture

http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/02/22/LifeArts/Beat-Voices.Showcase.Culture-3228571.shtml

2/22/08
By Andres Martinez

All the cool cats skipped the Democratic debate last night to attend
"Beat Voices," a performance at the Harry Ransom Center. UT theater
students will blend among the Beat artifacts to portray their visions
of the counterculture.

The performance marks the second collaboration between the UT theater
department and the Harry Ransom Center.

Last spring, the two teamed up to take on the 20s. Both graduate and
undergraduate students alike will collectively present four different
pieces this year.

"It's really a perfect tie in to theater and a perfect time period to
theatricalize," said Karen Sullivan, the coordinator of the event.

The four short pieces show a different aspect of Beat history and
culture. Erica Lies wrote a monologue that features a Beat woman,
Diane di Prima. Di Prima worked as co-editor of the Floating Bear
newsletter, for which she did most of the work.

Most people associate the Beat movement with men like Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, so the piece explores the
gender issues at stake.

"I really wanted to highlight the labor that goes into making
newsletters," said Erica Lies, a theater and dance graduate student
who is the actress and writer of the monologue.

Lies feels that she is honoring the work and sacrifice it took di
Prima to produce the newsletter as a woman.

Lies' other piece makes use of Burroughs's famous cut-up technique.
She took the text of letters actually in the exhibit and cut them up
in the Beat fashion. She, however, made sure that the poems made
sense. Burroughs' poems were a bit more abstract.

"I wanted to show some sort of movement in the piece," Lies said.

The other two performances also offer different perspectives. One
depicts Peter Orlovsky, a Beat poet better known for his love affair
with fellow Beat, Allen Ginsberg.

The piece has Orlovsky discussing his relationship with Ginsberg and
is also the piece that travels the most, explained Sullivan. It takes
the audience to three different areas of the exhibit.

A more experimental piece takes on the point of view of a painting by
Alfred Leslie. The painting talks about what it feels like to be
created and looked at.

"This expressionist piece is definitely a painting with attitude,"
Sullivan said.

The dramaturge, or literary editor, of the project created a packet
for high school classes that will visit the exhibit in order to help
them better understand the Beats.

"[The packet] encourages students to make their own cut-up a la
Burroughs and write, perform and design their own museum theater
piece based on something that excited them from the exhibit," said
Lindsey Mantoan, the dramaturge and a theater graduate student.

As dramaturge, she met with the writers and helped them improve their
drafts. She focused on the themes of the pieces, the language used,
tone, characterization and legibility.

The combination of this historically themed theater in the Ransom
Center makes for an interesting synthesis of mediums.

"The performances should enrich and enhance the experience of those
attending so they can better engage with the exhibit," Sullivan said.

The plays will be performed every Saturday at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. at
the Ransom Center until the exhibition closes Aug. 3.

.

OBIT: Dorothy Podber

OBIT

Dorothy Podber

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/22/db2202.xml

26/02/2008

Dorothy Podber, who died on February 9 aged 75, was a performance
artist best known for turning up at Andy Warhol's studio and putting
a bullet through a stack of his silk-screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe.

One day in late 1964 she arrived at the Warhol "Factory" on East 47th
Street dressed in black motorcycle leathers, except for a pair of
white gloves, and accompanied by her Great Dane (known as Carmen
Miranda or Ivan de Carlo, depending on her mood) and a couple of
friends. After slowly removing her gloves, she pulled a small German
pistol out of her pocket, and aimed it at Warhol before swivelling to
a stack of four paintings propped against the wall and pressing the trigger.

One of Warhol's acolytes, Ultra Violet (alias Isabelle Dufresne),
recalled: "She put her pistol back, pulled on her gloves, gathered
her followers and left. This stylish event was regarded as an art happening."

Though Warhol was terrified at the time, instructing friends never to
allow Dorothy Podber into his studio again, in the postmodernist art
world her action was held to have added an extra dimension to
Warhol's works, thus adding greatly to their value. The four
paintings became known as the "Shot Marilyns".

In 1989 one of the paintings, Shot Red Marilyn, sold for $4 million,
the highest price ever paid for a Warhol at the time. They are now
said to be worth around $17 million apiece.

Dorothy Podber was born in the Bronx in 1932 having defied her
mother's efforts to abort her - which included throwing herself down
the subway stairs. Dorothy's father ran a speakeasy for a Jewish
mobster, but when Dorothy was a young child he lost his sight and was
forced to go straight, opening a newsstand.

Dorothy was educated at West Walton High School, where she was
remembered as a disruptive influence, organising a student strike
over a change in admission rules in 1949. Accounts of her life vary,
but mostly feature heavy drinking, drug abuse and brushes with the
law. On one occasion she was jailed for running an illegal abortion
referral service from her apartment. In court she pleaded guilty but
declared herself a Buddhist.

In the late 1950s, Dorothy Podber emerged on to the avant-garde
scene, becoming part of a set which included such figures as Allen
Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jasper Johns, Gregory Corso and Billy Name - a
prominent member of the "Factory".

"We were Zen Communists, into aesthetic communality," Name explained.
Dorothy Podber was also a member of a circle known as the
"amphetamine rapture group" (other members included Rotten Rita, the
Mayor, the Duchess and the Sugar Plum Fairy), and kept a bowl of
methamphetamine on her coffee table.

In the 1960s, Dorothy Podber helped to run the Nonagon Gallery in
Manhattan, which promoted the work of, among others, Yoko Ono, and
hosted jazz concerts by performers such as Charles Mingus. She also
organised existential "happenings" with the performance artist Ray Johnson.

In one of these she and Johnson would persuade people to invite them
into their homes, where they would play a record (purloined from a
speech therapist) of people stuttering, or re-enact the shower scene
from Psycho. They also had a "dead animal phase", during which they
would give people "gifts" (a clock with no hands, say) in which were
placed a dead animal - often a rat - painted gold. Johnson saw
Dorothy Podber, admiringly, as a "sort of terrorist".

Alongside her performance work, she ran an employment service scam
supplying cleaners to doctors' surgeries (in order to obtain the keys
to their drug dispensaries), and was also said to have a line in
counterfeiting cheques.

"I've been bad all my life," she told an interviewer recently.
"Playing dirty tricks on people is my speciality."

Dorothy Podber was married three times and had numerous casual
liaisons. One boyfriend was a banker with whom she would have sexual
intercourse only on the banknote-strewn floor of his firm's vault.

Her third husband, Lester Schwartz, was a bisexual shipyard worker
and the shared lover of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of
the Living Theatre. He died in 1986.

.

Autonomia revisits Italy post-'68

Years of Lead

Autonomia revisits Italy post-'68

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=5726&catid=85&volume_id=317&issue_id=340&volume_num=42&issue_num=21

BY ERIK MORSE
Wednesday February 20, 2008

Reflecting on his work on millenarian Europe, the autonomist and
political philosopher Antonio Negri stated, "This is certainly one of
the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our
much-celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but
incommunicable."

Long an influential campaign in Negri's native Italy, autonomia, or
self-rule, has received little critical attention from the
English-speaking world. Editors Sylvère Lotringer and Christian
Marazzi's Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Semiotext(e), 340
pages, $24.95), originally released as part of the short-lived
Semiotext(e) magazine series in 1980, proffers the first
English-language introduction to one of the most controversial
movements of postmodernity.

Developed in the vibrant Götterdämmerung of the late 1960s in
reaction to the largely corrupt and co-opted Eurocommunist parties,
the worker-inspired Potere Operaio and its immediate descendent
Autonomia Operaia were a philosophical umbrella, or, as one
government critic put it, "a veritable mosaic made of different
fragments, a gallery of overlapping images of circles and collectives
without any social organization." At its heart, autonomia was a
rejection by individuals and marginalized groups of not only the
capitalist state but also its traditional ideological enemy ­ Marxism
and its central doctrine of class struggle ­ for a postideological
and immaterial way of life.

Brokered in universities throughout Bologna and Rome but dedicated to
labor activism and the street-level situationism of sessantotto
(student unrest), autonomia was powered by a number of formidable
philosophical proponents. They included Negri, Oreste Scalzone, and
Paolo Virno, as well as French sympathizers and arch collaborators
Félix Guatarri, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Virilio. Autonomia collects
the various polemics, letters, and récits of these authors in an
attempt to again dramatize the revolutionary and sometimes violent
struggles between neofascists, unionists, and the ultraleft during
the ensuing "Years of Lead."

Semiotext(e) editor Lotringer prefaces this new edition with a short
travelogue describing his interactions with the various underground
factions of Rome and Bologna in the shadow of politician Aldo Moro's
assassination by the dreaded Red Brigades, or Brigate Rosse. Long
associated with the neofascists and socialists as the armed division
of the Autonomia Operaia, the Red Brigades began resorting to
terrorist propaganda, bombings, and assassination in the wake of
government crackdowns in the late 1970s.

Lotringer encounters a gaggle of activists, intellectuals, and
simulationists who may or may not pledge loyalty to the Red Brigades
and who live in compounds and squats hiding from the omnipresent
carabinieri, who continue to surveil the streets. Some are in costume
and others spin Velvet Underground records; still others may be
government informants or simply thrill to the hip simulacra of
espionage. According to Lotringer, this alternative and autonomist
space may have accomplished, however briefly, the utopic "non-fascist
living" of Deleuze and Guattari.

Throughout Autonomia's 300 pages of densely translated text ­ from
theorists and tricksters, reporters and members of the lumpen
proletariat ­ the truly inclusive and sometimes circuitous worlds of
the title movement become all the more apparent, yet never
transparent. Negri's contributions are particularly inspiring and
frustrating in their brilliant opacity. Ultimately, in rejecting the
verticality of hierarchies of power ­ textual, political, and
economic ­ the autonomists opened up larger interpretative spaces:
realms that existed beyond capital and beyond empire.

The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty

[See URL for embedded links.]

The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/bookpatrol/archives/132355.asp?from=blog_last3

by Michael Lieberman
February 21, 2008

It was fifty years ago today that Gerald Holtom designed the logo for
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It signaled the beginning of
the British peace movement and the beginning of it's reign as the
global symbol for Peace. It is arguably the healthiest logo ever
created and one of the few A-list logos not of corporate origin.

To commemorate the anniversary Barry Miles has written Peace: Fifty
Years of Protest.

It is about "the story of the creation of the original symbol and of
how it has been used over the past five decades by peace activists
around the world." It "combines the written history of modern popular
protest with a range of fantastic photographs of the diverse ways and
places that the symbol has been used. The book will also include a
number of hand-drawn cards from both prominent figures --musicians,
actors, politicians, artists and businessmen etc."

Essential Works, the company that produced the book, has created a
Happy Birthday Peace website which includes a gallery of contemporary
Peace symbols including some celebrity ones by the likes of Kate
Hudson, Noam Chomsky and Adam Ant

.

PEACE: The Biography of a Symbol

National Geographic Commemorates 50th Anniversary of Peace Sign with
"PEACE: The Biography of a Symbol"

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080221005003&newsLang=en

February 21, 2008

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The peace symbol. It is recognized
around the globe and has become an enduring cultural icon. For five
decades, millions of people worldwide, regardless of race or
religious beliefs, have looked to the peace sign to unite them. And
the symbol's appeal continues with each succeeding generation.

The story of the peace sign began in the spring of 1958 when peace
activists, clergy and Quakers in Great Britain organized a rally to
draw attention to the testing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons by
some of the world's most powerful countries. Gerald Holtom, a textile
designer and commercial artist from Twickenham, suggested the
demonstrators carry posters and banners with a simple visual symbol
he had designed. He created the symbol by combining the semaphore
letters N and D, for nuclear disarmament, and on Feb. 21, 1958, the
symbol was accepted by the District Action Committee.

On April 4, 1958, 5,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square to show
support for the Ban the Bomb movement, then walked to the town of
Aldermaston, site of an atomic weapons research plant. The first
peace signs appeared during that march and a second Aldermaston march
the following year. From there it took flight, appearing on flags,
clothes, even scratched on walls and signposts, all over Europe.

To commemorate this anniversary, National Geographic Books is
publishing in April a tribute tracing the world-famous pictogram as
it evolved from a 1950s anti-nuke emblem to a defining icon still
widely seen and used today. PEACE: The Biography of a Symbol ($25),
by Ken Kolsbun, with Michael Sweeney, is a one-of-a-kind story about
the origin of the peace sign, the man who created it and its enduring
relevance through the past 50 years.

Easy to remember and reproduce, the symbol soon crossed borders and
cultures in a phenomenal way. It became a classic symbol, an icon of
peace for the people. Like a chameleon, the symbol took on additional
meanings during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the
environmental movement, women's and gay rights movements and the two
Iraqi wars.

Kolsbun is a photographer, writer, historian, peace activist, game
inventor, landscape architect, husband and father who continues to be
active in the peace movement.

Contacts

National Geographic Society
Alison Reeves, 202-857-7793
areeves@ngs.org

.

1968 with Tom Brokaw

1968 with Tom Brokaw

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tv/reviews/55275/1968-with-tom-brokaw/

Cast: Tom Brokaw, Stewart Brand, Pat Buchanan, Arlo Guthrie, Rafter
Johnson, Tom Smothers, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Stewart, James Taylor,
Andrew Young
(History Channel) Rated: N/A
US release date: 26 February 2008 (A&E)

by Jack Patrick Rodgers
25 February 2008

Despite the imprimatur of a respected newsman, 1968 with Tom Brokaw
feels more like educational material for a high school classroom than
a full-length documentary. It tries to explore the social fissures
that were tearing America apart in the 1960s through recent
interviews and archival footage, but in the end the documentary
refuses to draw any conclusions about the meaning or lasting impact
of the seminal events of 1968.

Maybe the scope of this topic is just too big to tackle in 90
minutes; it's impossible to really discuss 1968 without examining a
number of overlapping social revolutions – the civil rights movement,
women's liberation, the drug culture, anti-war protests, the sexual
revolution, countercultural art and music – that threatened to erase
the status quo over the course of the decade.

1968 at least starts out with a slightly more personal focus. Brokaw
talks about his own experiences growing up in the '60s, and admits
that he tried to enlist in the military during the early years of the
Vietnam War, long before public sentiment turned against the war. He
describes his friendship with a Marine fighter pilot named Gene
Kimmel, and stands at Gene's grave as he remembers being told in
October of 1968 that his friend had been killed when his plane was shot down.

This section on Vietnam is the most cohesive part of the documentary,
and it benefits from quality interviews with people who had wildly
different experiences of the war. Jeffry House was a draft dodger
who fled to Canada; when Brokaw interviews him today, he's a lawyer
in Toronto helping army deserters who don't want to be shipped back
to Iraq. Brokaw also talks with a husband and wife who were brought
together by the Vietnam War: he was a soldier who had his leg
amputated after being shot, and she was the nurse who took care of
him. There's a poignant scene where they visit a military hospital
today to offer words of encouragement to the wounded soldiers.

But once Brokaw moves beyond the Vietnam War, the interviews aren't
nearly as compelling. Bruce Springsteen, folk singer Arlo Guthrie,
and comedian Lewis Black share their memories of life in the '60s,
but their segments lack any larger historical context and amount to
little more than recollections of what they were doing at the
time. Even more disappointing, there's hardly any insight into what
it felt like for the average person living during the '60s, those who
were touched by its social changes but weren't rushing off to join a commune.

Former Nixon speechwriter and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan mocks
the student protestors as self-destructive slackers who were despised
by Middle America, and says that 1968 was "probably the worst year in
this nation's history"', whereas singer Michelle Phillips remembers
the era as a paradise of free love and harmless drugs. The truth
probably lies somewhere in between.

Ironically, it takes Daily Show host Jon Stewart – only five years
old in 1968 – to point out that the anti-war protest against Vietnam
was galvanized by the draft and by diligent reporting of the war
which was reflected in bloody, uncensored television coverage. By
contrast, the current war in Iraq has faded into the background noise
of debate in the US, thanks to an all-volunteer army and politicians
who have a much better grasp of how to shape public opinion (if only
their tactical planning and military intelligence was as good). As a
result, pulling US troops out of Iraq has become just another issue
on the liberal-conservative spectrum, one that seemingly many
Americans don't feel any immediate pressure to resolve.

1968 with Tom Brokaw is filled with revealing moments, both big and
small, that show just how much – and how little­things have
changed. Videos of the student protests at Columbia University,
which shut down the campus for a week in April of 1968, show a
widespread passion and determination that are hard to imagine in
today's anti-war demonstrations. A brief clip of Tom Brokaw on the
nightly news has him sitting at a plain desk in front of a cheap
cardboard map of Vietnam­technologically a million miles away from
the intricate sets and slick charts and graphics of contemporary
news. And while hippies were seen at the time as menaces to society
by the hard Right and as revolutionaries by the radical Left, today
they just look hopelessly goofy. Listen to one bearded, squinty-eyed
fellow as he tries to explain life in a commune: "(We think) people
have been living inside squares for too many years. We'd like to get
inside a circle." Cue stock footage of people sitting down around a campfire.

Even more ambiguous and harder to detect are the subtle trends that
have stayed the same over the years. Richard Nixon's appearance on
Laugh-In was an early example of a politician embracing pop culture
in order to improve his image; you can see that echoed today with
Barack Obama guest starring on Saturday Night Live and Chuck Norris
endorsing Mike Huckabee for President. Likewise, when Nixon was
elected President he insisted that the first and most important goal
of his administration would be to unite the nation. Thus, not only
do we see how long the cultural wars of America have been going on
for, but Nixon's speech also highlights the use of "unity" as a
political buzzword that doesn't necessarily include compromise with
the other side.

It's telling that the documentary doesn't identify the nationality
(Palestinian) or motives of the man who killed Robert F.
Kennedy. 1968 with Tom Brokaw is more concerned with the bare facts
of what happened during that eventful year than seeing the big
picture. For all the discussion of the social revolutions of the
'60s, nobody hits on the biggest difference between then and now:
there is no counterculture anymore, or more accurately, there are a
million different countercultures, each occupying their own separate
corner of our media-saturated world.

Before the Internet or the advent of thousands of different satellite
radio stations and television channels, young Americans constricted
by the mainstream culture had to find each other and they rallied
around the social changes that offered them a way out of their
faceless, consumerist society. For better or worse, what the '60s
truly offered was a sense of community that we may never have again.

Special features include extra footage from Brokaw's interviews and
from his own recollections on growing up in the '60s.

.

Steven Spielberg Delays The Trial of the Chicago 7?

[See URL for embedded links.]

Steven Spielberg Delays The Trial of the Chicago 7?

http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/02/23/steven-spielberg-delays-the-trial-of-the-chicago-7/

February 23, 2008
Source: Collider
by Kevin Powers

Over the last few months there have been various early-stage news
reports surrounding The Trial of the Chicago 7, including word we
brought in December of Sacha Baron Cohen assuming the role of hippie
Abbie Hoffman; this would be Cohen's first foray into true drama. The
biggest news, however, is that Steven Spielberg had expressed
interest in the film, which is a surprise to many given the many
projects he has lined up, including the 3D cartoon Tintin and the
biopic, Lincoln. Continued rumors arrived yesterday that Spielberg's
involvement may be hanging by a very thin thread.

Collider reports yesterday that the latest innuendo indicates
Spielberg will, in fact, be walking away from the project - a fact
confirmed by two sources. Shortly after that piece appeared, Nikki
Finke stated on Deadline Hollywood that the director is actually just
pushing the start date given the possibility of an actors strike and
that he's still very much interested and involved. However,
disbanding a production and poised leads is no small decision and
doesn't guarantee those actors will be available down the line.

Part of Chicago 7's notoriety has been even more rumors surrounding
its roster. Back in January Vanity Fair brought us those tantalizing
first photos of Spielberg's latest, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull, along with a lengthy interview with the master
filmmaker. In that piece, editor Jim Windolf reports that during a
visit to the Amblin Entertainment production house, he spied material
and headshots related to The Chicago 7, including those of Will
Smith, Kevin Spacey and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Such news only fueled
the fire of Spielberg's reported involvement, despite being no
official confirmation from the director or his reps.

While Nikki Finke's account of the latest state of Spielber's
involvement seems more plausible, she does contract this earlier
casting news. She states Chicago 7 will be "a lower-budget movie" and
that she's "told the rest of the Chicago defendants [would] be played
by unknowns." This doesn't exactly jive with Variety's leaks, so who
knows what to think.

Rumor reporting is a tiring job, but such chasing is expected with
anything surrounding Spielberg's projects. I hope that he or his reps
will come forward soon and clear the air a bit. The Screen Actors
Guild contract expires in June, so it should be pretty clear in the
next month or so whether production could begin on the film, or if
it'll definitely be shelved until contract negotiations have settled
and things are a bit stable.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a new film written by Aaron Sorkin (A
Few Good Men, "The West Wing", Charlie Wilson's War) based on the
events and story surrounding the riots from the 1968 Democratic
National Convention.

.

The Old Revolutionaries of Vietnam [by TOM HAYDEN]

The Old Revolutionaries of Vietnam

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080310/hayden

by TOM HAYDEN
[from the March 10, 2008 issue]

During Christmas 2007 I traveled back in time with my family, to
Vietnam, for the first time in thirty-two years. I was feeling a deep
need to see the place once more, a regret at having withdrawn from a
country I had visited four times during the war. I wanted to
understand the long-term lessons and, on a personal basis, track down
the Vietnamese guides and translators, men and women, who assumed an
ideological faith in the American "people" they escorted through
ruins inflicted by the American "enemy." They would become important
diplomatic bridges between our two countries in the postwar period.
Most were survivors of the French and American wars and would be in
their 80s by now. Were they still alive? How had they suffered? After
the exuberance at their victory and reunification after 1975, how had
they adjusted to a Vietnam without war? Vietnam's consul in San
Francisco, Chau Do, said many of these old revolutionaries were
alive, excited by my return and inquiring whom I wanted to see. I
told him that my closest Vietnamese friend was a poet, musician and
translator, Do Xuan Oanh, who was perhaps 40 in those days. "I can
help you find him," Chau replied with a smile. "He's my dad." My eyes
filled with tears. It would be quite a trip.

Before I would reunite with these old friends and contacts, however,
I plunged into the shocking contrasts between past and present in
Hanoi. Between Christmas 1965 and November 1972, when I made four
unauthorized visits to Hanoi, the wartime city was unlit and ghostly.
Most people had been evacuated to the countryside. Air-raid sirens
and public-safety broadcasts were the only urban sounds. There was no
economic development beyond the construction of pontoon bridges to
replace bridges bombed by the Americans. The only motorized vehicles
were military ones. Most residents rode bicycles or carried their
meager wares on bamboo poles across their shoulders. Water buffalo
pulled the heavier loads. To outward appearances, Gen. Curtis LeMay's
plan to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age was on track.

Finally came the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong by 200
B-52s, from December 18 to December 28, 1972. The United States says
that fifteen of the giant Stratofortresses were shot down and
ninety-three American airmen went missing before the bombing ended
(Hanoi says thirty-four B-52s and eighty-one fighter planes were put
out of action). Estimates of civilian deaths range from 1,600 to
2,368 in those eleven days, and Hanoi listed 5,480 buildings
destroyed. In the American narrative, the Christmas bombing forced
Hanoi to sign the Paris peace agreement one month later. But under
terms agreed to by the Nixon Administration, North Vietnamese units
remained positioned in the south, and in 1975 they stormed Saigon.
What is beyond dispute is that crowded Hanoi neighborhoods and the
Bach Mai hospital were reduced to rubble during the Christmas B-52
raids. The last time I had seen Hanoi was in 1974, when Jane Fonda
and I walked through the hospital debris and interviewed
still-furious victims of the Christmas 1972 bombs.

Now, suddenly for me, it was Christmas 2007 and Vietnam was ablaze
with festive holiday lights, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. Though
billboards of Ho Chi Minh were pervasive, the most ubiquitous bearded
one this Christmas season was Santa Claus, beckoning shoppers from
department store doorways, seen incongruously riding motorbikes,
waving to little children. Spectacular strings of red and green
lights were draped over the streets and stores, blinking at thousands
of Vietnamese rolling along on bicycles and motorbikes, parting
smoothly like schools of fish around pedestrians crossing the street.
Restaurant-goers applauded Christmas carols sung by young Vietnamese
women strapped in Heineken Girls sashes. None of this was about
Jesus--Christmas is not a tradition in this Buddhist and
secular-Marxist country--but all about corporate branding. The fancy
Diamond department store next to Independence Palace was filled with
shoppers, gawkers and Santas wandering the aisles of Lego, Calvin
Klein, Victoria's Secret, Nike, Converse, Estée Lauder, Ferragamo and
Bally. The nearby Saigon Centre bore a billboard proclaiming, More
Shops, More Life.

Far be it from me to question the desire of Vietnamese to share our
globalized consumer culture like everyone else, or to reject their
aspiration to be the next Asian Tiger, or freeze them in memory as
icons of selfless revolutionaries. Gentrification and consumerism,
after all, have destroyed the character of my favorite American
haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen. It seems the
way of the world. As I walked through the busy Christmas streets,
however, I was gripped by the question of why the Vietnam War was
necessary in the first place. Why kill, maim and uproot millions of
Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the
country's still-undefeated Communist Party? The whole wretched
American rationale for the war, that Vietnam was a dangerous domino,
a pawn in the cold war, seemed so painfully wrong. Was there any
connection between destroying so much life and causing the Vietnamese
to go Christmas shopping? Would the same outcome--a one-party
socialist government leading a market economy--have occurred in any
event, without the destruction? Now that US naval ships were paying
peaceful visits to Da Nang, this question nagged at me: is it
possible that Marxism and nationalism won the war but capitalism and
nationalism have won the peace?

Those who still believe Vietnam was a "necessary" war must take
pleasure at seeing that country in the camp of corporate
neoliberalism. A proud new member of the World Trade Organization
(WTO), Vietnam is welcoming a $1 billion Intel project to Ho Chi Minh
City this year, and has accepted the wholesale privatization of
telecommunications and other industries.

Some in Hanoi are dismayed by all this. An American expatriate, Gerry
Herman, a former antiwar activist turned businessman and film
distributor who has lived in Vietnam for fifteen years, told me the
Vietnamese were so desperately eager to normalize relations with the
United States that they accepted the most liberal market reforms of
any developing country. Having some internal knowledge of the trade
negotiations, he says bitterly that Vietnam was blackmailed by the US
negotiators. To gain export markets for their textiles, shoes and
seafood, they slashed subsidies and opened markets in banking,
insurance, services and advertising to private corporations. For
Herman, the distressing prospect is that Vietnam will follow the
failed model of the Philippines, not the more successful Asian Tigers
whose development benefited from government subsidies.

China, Herman says, got a better deal than Vietnam, winning twenty
years of protection for its telecommunications industry. "The
American negotiators said to Vietnam that they were beaten by the
Chinese on certain issues and would never do it again, and Vietnam
could take the deal or leave it." The Americans, in deference to
domestic political pressure, even demanded market access for
Harley-Davidson, against the Vietnamese complaint that the larger,
faster Harleys would worsen the high accident rates on their narrow,
congested roads. "The Vietnamese negotiator broke down in tears,"
Herman said, over the Harley concession. I suddenly remembered the
cynical 1960s strategy of Harvard's Samuel Huntington, that forced
urbanization would transform the Vietnamese into a "Honda culture."
It was coming true before my eyes, with the Honda Dream motorcycle
and, sooner or later, the Harley. As a Vietnamese named Pham Thong
Long blogged last July, "I have only one dream is buy one of brand
new Harley-Davidson, now I waiting for Harley-Davidson deal to open
in Saigon. I need a Fatboy."

It is difficult to discern the truth across these cultural divides.
Scholars like Gabriel Kolko have predicted the disintegration of the
Vietnamese Communist Party for decades, but the political situation
by most accounts is stable, even improved. Thao Griffiths, a
30-year-old who directs the Hanoi office of Vietnam Veterans of
America, reminded me of certain fundamentals on my first day
adjusting to the new Hanoi. "Since thirty years ago when you were
first here, we have motorbikes in addition to bicycles, cellphones
more than land lines, an Internet, and most of our population like
myself was born after the wars. It has been a time to catch up in
peace." As for Hanoi's accepting the WTO, Thao said, "We knew the
mechanism was not fair, but the strategic reason is that we had to
get inside. We didn't really have 'normal' economic relations with
the US until 2006, for four decades. Even last year, Bush was saying
America should have stayed the course in Vietnam." Thao herself
reflected postwar Vietnam: fluent in English and a former Fulbright
scholar, she spent two years at the Vietnam veterans' office in
Washington, DC, deeply involved in the normalization process. She has
two children with her Australian husband, Patrick, a researcher for
the United Nations. Her little boy, Liem, immediately befriended our
7-year-old Liam on sleepovers and trips to fabled Ha Long Bay.

Vietnam's annual economic growth of 7-8 percent in recent years has
been remarkable, though it has come at the price of rising
inequalities, a pattern in many other countries under neoliberalism.
Per capita GDP has risen from $200 in 1993 to $835 last year. That's
still less than $2 per day for most Vietnamese, but it comes close to
removing Vietnam from the World Bank's category of the poorest
nations. The Vietnamese government estimated foreign direct
investment at $13 billion in 2007, the highest investors being South
Korea, the British Virgin Islands (a conduit for offshore Hong Kong
money) and Singapore. Poverty has fallen from 58 percent to 20
percent, though the majority of ethnic minorities and rural
Vietnamese still live in poverty, and growth has created catastrophic
problems of infrastructure, traffic congestion and pollution.

The party introduced its drastic doi moi market policies in 1986, a
"renovation" plan that opened doors to private foreign investment and
a Gorbachev-style internal perestroika. An exhaustive European study
concluded in 2006 that a remarkable result of the doi moi reforms has
been "the absence of organized social opposition among workers,
peasants and youth. They are generally content with their growing
economic opportunities."

Of course, Vietnam is a one-party state that closely monitors the
Internet and pockets of dissent among religious and ethnic groups.
But the institutional controls have been steadily relaxed since the
1970s, with none of the uprisings that accompanied the fall of Soviet
or Eastern European Communism. Nor has there been a Tiananmen Square
in Hanoi. "Democratic debate within the party and within the National
Assembly, as well as personal freedoms, have made much progress since
the war," observes John McAuliffe, a reconstruction specialist who
has made an estimated fifty trips to the country. "It's true that it
wouldn't be wise to stand up on a soapbox and advocate the overthrow
of the government," says Lady Borton, a longtime American expatriate
and translator in Hanoi. "But there is widespread criticism of the
party leaders"--whom she describes as "bulldogs"--"on all levels in
private and in the press." In an observation I shared, Borton
described Vietnam as "a place of constant talk, all the time, and
they talk freely."

Kent Wong, the director of UCLA's labor studies center, discerns a
positive spirit among Vietnam's working class based on taking several
union delegations to Vietnam. "I've seen poverty in many developing
countries, and Vietnam is different. There are no shantytowns," Wong
says. Vietnamese unions, Wong acknowledges, are not constituted as
adversarial bargaining units, but the many members he has interviewed
have high morale. "Four years ago when I was there, they had a plan
to organize 1 million more workers in the public sector, and they
actually met the goal," he says. Wide income disparities prevail in
the private sector, but inequalities in the public sector are less
pronounced. Wong, who wants to turn the AFL-CIO away from its
lingering cold war (and CIA-financed) heritage of anti-Communism
toward Vietnam and China, is working to build direct worker-to-worker
relationships to foster labor solidarity strategies in the age of
globalization.

To make sense of the contradictions between Vietnam's grinding
poverty and rising affluence, between defeating Americans in war but
joining the WTO in peace, one must consider Vietnam's history.
Perhaps no country in the modern world has suffered the sorrows of
war more heavily and for a longer consecutive period than Vietnam.
Leaving out the century of French colonialism, the Vietnamese
survived, even prevailed, during the Japanese occupation in World War
II, the nine-year war against French reconquest (365,000 battle
deaths), the fifteen-year war with the Americans (2.1 million battle
deaths) and the ten-year war with Pol Pot's Cambodia and China in the
1980s. Millions of Vietnamese died of famine as well, or lived with
hunger and deprivation as everyday experiences. After the American
war, at least 38,000 more Vietnamese were killed by unexploded bombs
and landmines, and countless numbers continue to live with the
deformities resulting from 20 million gallons of dioxin-laced Agent
Orange and other defoliants. Their sufferings are beyond Western
imagination. All this sacrifice was accepted as either a duty in the
war for independence or a reality to be accepted and survived. It was
accompanied by the deep personalized pain of Vietnamese killing one
another, not simply the French or American invaders. At least 185,000
Saigon soldiers died, for example, dishonored as the losing side.

Here, perhaps, is the explanation for Vietnam's two-decade quest to
achieve something resembling a normal life, to avoid exclusion from
the world community. This memory is why they believe normalization
with the United States, accession to the WTO and a (nonpermanent)
seat on the UN Security Council are strategic "victories" on a long
road to recovery. It is a matter of great pride that a Vietnamese
Bronze Age drum is placed at the entrance to the UN Security Council today.

"No More War was the lesson after Vietnam for our people," said Bao
Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War, a 1993 antiwar novel that ranks in
my mind with the classics of Remarque, Heller, Vonnegut, Mailer, Tim
O'Brien and Philip Caputo among war veterans. We visited Ninh one
evening at his Hanoi residence, where he and his wife received us
with tea, fruits and cake. His first floor was a bright reception
room with a couch, chairs and, in one corner, a motorbike. Ninh's
novel was banned at first for allegedly undermining the national
consensus that the war had been patriotic, victorious and glorious.
But under doi moi the book gained a huge audience in Vietnamese and
other languages, and this year it is being produced as a film.

When he was 15 in Hanoi, Ninh saw his first American. It was John
McCain, parachuting into Truc Bach Lake from his burning
fighter-bomber after destroying a power plant. Ninh watched as
McCain, drowning with two broken arms, was pulled from the lake by a
local fisherman at a spot marked by a small monument today. Ninh
later joined the army to fight in South Vietnam, was among the
soldiers who liberated Saigon in 1975, and searched for the
decomposing bodies of dead soldiers after the war. His book is more
about man's inhumanity to man than a tale of triumphant revolution. I
was stunned at the jacket's description of Ninh as one of only ten
survivors of a youth brigade of 500. With a laugh, he surprised me by
saying the numbers were made up by his publisher, Pantheon/Random
House. "Not only governments but soldiers themselves make up war
stories, too," he laughed again, not unlike sardonic American Vietnam
veterans. "I like writing. I write about what I know. I wanted to
tell a soldier's story, not a political or ideological one."

Ninh visited the United States in 1998 with other Vietnamese writers,
gaining an impression of US diversity, including surprise at how many
Americans were "quite fat." That aside, even in conservative towns
like Missoula, Montana, he found Vietnam memorials and town officials
who were veterans like himself. Ninh came away impressed that so many
Americans still "remembered, discussed and agonized over Vietnam,"
and formed the opinion that this memory of Vietnam could be "a tower
of strength from the past" on which to build better relations in the future.

Beneath his friendly bearing, Ninh carries the scars and guilt that
only some war veterans are capable of expressing. The most painful,
perhaps, is his "sorrow at having survived," the belief that the very
best of his generation died for Vietnam's present peace:

Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad.
And look who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives
in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But
those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have
all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being
killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this
beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox.

Ninh was repelled by Vietnam's Marxist postwar policies. "In the war,
I had lived like an animal. Now I couldn't stand this [the peace].
Some Americans may sympathize with Communism but I lived under it and
couldn't stand it. Everybody was fed up with the hardship. That's
what led to the doi moi in the '80s." One of Bao Ninh's sons is
making millions in the global high-tech industry and travels
frequently to the United States. It's not the future he fought for at
the same age, he says, but he's proud and happy for his son. "We
Vietnamese are not like North Korea or China. If Communism doesn't
work, we move on. But North Korea, for example, has a very tough time
because they keep going on with Communism."

Not many Vietnamese today think of the war with America with Bao
Ninh's profound cynicism, for that would mean questioning their
country's very identity, much like questioning the Indian wars or the
Revolution for Americans. Rather, the American war is perceived as a
necessity forced on Vietnam by invading powers, as has happened for
more than a thousand years, beginning with the Chinese. Vietnamese
take pride in having defeated so many great powers and feel deeply
about their losses. There is a suppressed anger that they were
willing to join the search for American MIAs while the United States
and Monsanto refuse to take responsibility for Agent Orange.

The question is whether the future, aside from the obvious advantages
of peace, will be worth the sacrifices of the past. Is the period of
anticolonial revolution--which Vietnam symbolized and so dominated
our thinking in the '60s and beyond--becoming an obsolete memory in
the era of globalization? Has the promise of those inspiring
revolutions faded with the decline of naked colonialism and the
emergence of so many corrupt authoritarianisms in the Third World? Or
are the supposedly scientific models of history long embraced by the
left being replaced with a kind of chaos theory of unpredictability?
Is this all that was ever possible?

Perhaps this was why I had stayed away so long but had to return
after so many decades. Much as I still opposed war and imperialism,
from Vietnam to Iraq, I no longer expected joyous endings.

I wanted to see my oldest acquaintances in Vietnam for personal
reasons but also as guides in sorting out these troubling questions.
I will call these people, now in their 80s, Vietnam's old
revolutionary generation. Their roots went back nearly a century, to
young Ho Chi Minh's odyssey to the West--in particular, France and
America--to study the spirit of republican revolutions for lessons he
might bring home. Ho, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, presented a
petition to the 1919 Versailles conference asking for Vietnam's
inclusion in the call for self-determination. There he learned that
Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points did not apply to the colonies. In
the period of the Russian Revolution, Ho was waiting tables in Harlem
and making diary notes on lynchings. He embraced Marxism-Leninism
because of Lenin's opposition to colonialism. Twenty-five years
later, Ho collaborated with American intelligence agents in resisting
the Japanese occupation. Then he cited the US Declaration of
Independence in declaring Vietnam's freedom in 1945. From long
tradition grew the practical, and even sentimental, belief that the
"American people," in Walt Whitman's mythic invocation, could be
appealed to against American imperialism.

Thus arose Viet-My (Vietnamese-American) solidarity committees and
cultural exchanges from the very beginnings of the war with the
United States, staffed by bright young Vietnamese who were asked to
host American wartime visitors and in the process learned more about
American culture and politics. Now long retired, many of these old
revolutionaries went on after the war to become diplomats and
ambassadors to European countries. These days in Hanoi many still
arise at 5:30 for morning exercises at the Flying Dragon Club, an old
building with a curved roof, then, with bodies limber and spirits
balanced, go out for tea and conversation.

In general, the old revolutionaries are busy, active in community
affairs, proud and nationalistic, and shared with me the unanimous
sense that Vietnam has become too materialistic and acquisitive. "The
new generation lacks a balanced approach," said 81-year-old Nguyen
Ngoc Dung, who runs shelters for street children in Ho Chi Minh City.
"The situation is out of balance," said one. "They are not
looking--how do you say?--at the other side of the coin."

Dung is a former deputy to the most well-known of the old
revolutionaries, 81-year-old Nguyen Thi Binh, who presides over the
Peace and Development Foundation in Hanoi. During the war, "Madame
Binh," as she was known, was a striking global icon and nemesis
denounced by Henry Kissinger in the Paris peace negotiations. When
she welcomed me for tea, she seemed smaller than the woman I
remembered, but the energy remained vibrant. The formality of the
reunion was derailed by the arrival of the "two Liams," arm in arm.
They sat on her grandmotherly lap while Binh held forth on the
challenges of healing the damage of Agent Orange and developing
Vietnam past the status of other poor countries. She showed a keen
interest in sponsoring workshops with critics of globalization.
Meanwhile, the two little Liams lobbied to be taken to the local Lego
franchise.

On another morning, the sudden arrival of an older man in a blue
windbreaker surprised me. He walked toward me peering carefully
through wide spectacles. "Do you remember who I am?" he asked with an
expectant look. Then he held before me a black-and-white photo of
myself, ten pounds lighter and thirty-five years younger, staring at
Vietnamese graves, notebook in hand. The man with glasses was Pham
Khac Lam, an interpreter and photographer whom I last saw deep within
a cave in rural North Vietnam, in 1972.

Lam, now 77, was the top assistant to Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in
preparing the battle plan for Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His father was a
mandarin adviser to Emperor Bao Dai, the last Vietnamese king. Lam's
father is said to have written Bao Dai's abdication speech in 1945.
Lam, in other words, grew up in the absolute center of Vietnamese
anticolonialism, joined the solidarity committees during the American
war and participated in the postwar process as director of the
country's first television network. He was part of the Rose Garden
ceremonies when Vietnam's leaders met Presidents Clinton and Bush. He
takes modest credit for the idea of flying both Vietnamese and US
flags on the stretch limousine that carried Hanoi officials to the
White House door. And he once told Civil War buff Ted Turner, who
opened media relations between CNN and Hanoi, that "it was important
to let the past be 'gone with the wind.' " Turner generously sold Lam
the rights to broadcast CNN for a nickel.

Lam edits Viet-My, a glossy magazine that seems devoted to
promotional reports on commercial and diplomatic ties with the United
States, including critical commentary on issues like Agent Orange.
Occasionally Lam inserts a strategic analysis of the US quandary in
Iraq, buried amid advertisements beckoning tourists to such
attractions as health clubs at the beach. How did he really feel, I
wondered, about the world he had done so much to shape?

Lam seemed relaxed and diplomatic. His duties have included welcoming
former Saigon dictator Nguyen Cao Ky, who has visited Hanoi
frequently in recent years, against vociferous complaints from
Vietnamese exiles in America. "Ky said that he always wanted to unify
Vietnam, so I have to salute him," Lam says wryly. On the question of
his country's deepening inequalities, however, Lam parted from the
optimistic party line. "The government is trying to reduce poverty,
but it's already a reality. The rich are getting richer because they
have the means. And the poor don't. We are better off materially, but
not mentally, ethically," he said, brushing his forehead.

The world had changed all around him, from the caves of resistance to
welcomes in the Rose Garden, from Dien Bien Phu to the global media
stage. The geopolitical balance was altered forever with no more
Soviet Union or "socialist camp" and tensions simmering beneath the
"fraternal relations" with China. "We and the Chinese used to call
each other comrade; now it's mister," he reflected wryly. The most
ironic piece of the puzzle before me was falling into place. While it
could not be said explicitly--and while Vietnam inevitably would
strive to maintain close relations with China, its giant northern
neighbor--the United States could serve as a strategic balance in
Asia for Hanoi, while Vietnam serves as a silent check on the
expanding Chinese power Washington fears most. Ironically, it's
becoming the domino theory in reverse.

Finally, there was a visit to my oldest friend, Do Xuan Oanh, who
first greeted me at Hanoi's airport on a December day forty-two years
before. He went through a "bitter period" after retirement, someone
told me, but was feeling better, having recently translated into
English an edition of Vietnamese women's poetry. He lived alone, his
wife having died after many years of illness, his three sons all
abroad. As I remembered him, Oanh loved America in unique ways. For
example, after learning English from the BBC, he translated
Huckleberry Finn into Vietnamese, a massive challenge. A musician, he
could sing many American protest songs. A romantic, he wept easily
and became close to many Americans.

Now, in a carload of old revolutionaries, I traveled along a narrow
cement path past houses, until we came to the gate of Oanh's home of
fifty years. He was standing in the door, a thin shadow of the Oanh I
remembered. Taking my hand, he led me into a windowless room where a
couch and piano were the most prominent fixtures. There were alcoves
for painting and a kitchen. We sat and looked at each other. He held
my hand on his knee, while the others sat in a quiet circle. It was
more a last visit than a time to renew an old conversation.

"Do you want some booze?" Oanh asked with a low chuckle, pointing to
a half-bottle of Jim Beam. I deferred, worried what might happen
after a few drinks. My wife said Oanh seemed fit and energetic for an
85-year-old. She asked if he would play the piano, and he performed
an original piece in a classic European style. He gave me a copy of
the song, signed to his "precious friend," and a small carving of a
beautiful Vietnamese woman carrying a student briefcase, which he
said reminded him of his wife "before the revolution." He repeated
the phrase, then relaxed. Gradually, the others began to reminisce
about the old days. I wondered if we would ever meet again. I
remembered an e-mail from Oanh's son in San Francisco: "I believe God
assigned my father and myself to serve the American people." His son
would come for a visit in the summer, Oanh said.

We walked back along the dark path to the street filled with
motorbikes and strolling couples out for a coffee. Oanh looked at me
intently, pointing a finger for emphasis. "Nothing can be predicted,"
were his last words before we said goodbye.

.

Workhorse bike is king of Copenhagen streets

Workhorse bike is king of Copenhagen streets

http://in.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idINL1931104020080219

Tue Feb 19, 2008
By Martin Burlund

COPENHAGEN (Reuters Life!) - Picking up the kids from kindergarten
after commuting from work and shopping for groceries sounds like a
job best suited for a station wagon.

But not in Copenhagen, where many working parents prefer the slow,
heavy and highly functional Christiania bike -- a pedal-powered
three-wheel vehicle that retails for $3,000 and can carry up to 100
kg in a huge basket mounted on its front axle.

"It does not use any gasoline, so there is no pollution and you do
not have to insure it," said Jeppe Lang after picking up his two
children from kindergarten.

There are an estimated 20,000 of these bikes in Copenhagen sharing
the Danish capital's vast network of dedicated cycling lanes with
some 400,000 regular bikes, according to the Danish Cyclists Federation.

"I definitely prefer the Christiania bike, because it is impossible
to park your car here," mother of two Heidi Nielsen said as she
stopped her Christiania bike in front of a bakery.

The bike was invented in 1984 by blacksmith Lars Engstrom in
Copenhagen's famous "free town" hippie enclave of Christiania. He
made it as a birthday gift for his wife, Annie Lerche.

The two created a business out of the idea, setting up production on
the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. Fom there they
export Christiania bikes to 12 countries including Great Britain,
Germany and Australia.

"Back then the idea was to bombard the city with carrier bikes and no
one believed us," said Lerche.

The Danish postal service also uses the bikes to carry mail in
Copenhagen, and the Bornholm factory is running at full clip to meet demand.

Lerche estimated that the bikes have replaced 8,000 cars on the
streets of Copenhagen since their arrival.

.

Obama once visited '60s radicals

Obama once visited '60s radicals

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8630.html

By: Ben Smith
Feb 22, 2008

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor,
Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the
home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local
activists, they're better known nationally as two of the most
notorious ­ and unrepentant ­ figures from the violent fringe of the
1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an
unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands
as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park
left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill
Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the
senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent
Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the
informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn.
"[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Obama's connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some
fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their
home ­ part of a campaign courtship ­ reflects more extensive
interaction than has been previously reported.

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship
between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as
"friends," but there's no evidence their relationship is more than
the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago
political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Obama's relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost
on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly
reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement
based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.

In one sense, Obama's journey toward the cultural and political
center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.

Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with
figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance,
interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.

On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation
before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted
against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later
called that a mistake.

The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde
Park politics. It's milieu in which a former violent radical was a
stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.

It's also a scene whose liberal ideological features ­ while taken
for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best ­
provides a jarring contrast with Obama's current, anti-ideological
stance. This contrast between past and present ­ not least the Ayers
connection ­ is virtually certain to be a subject Republican
operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also
evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many
national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center
over time. But Obama's transitions are still quite fresh.

A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket
opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than
he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health
care as recently as 2003.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn
are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb ­ designed to kill army
officers in New Jersey ­ accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village
townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were
never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the
Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper
FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today
he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago; she's an associate professor of
law at Northwestern University.

But ­ unlike some other fringe figures of the era ­ they're also
flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of
ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no
one, except, accidentally, their own members.

Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to
testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground
members' robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York
State Troopers were killed.

"I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers
told the New York Times in 2001.

And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park,
has its limits.

Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers
wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non
grata at a progressive educators' conference in the summer of 2006.
"We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between
progressive education and the violent aspects of your past," he
quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as
writing to him.

But the couple has been embraced, by and large, in the liberal
circles dominating Hyde Park politics.

"Bill Ayers is one of my heroes in life," said Sam Ackerman, a
longtime local activist. "I knew Tony Rezko, and he ain't no Rezko."

But others in Hyde Park, whose intellectual and political life
revolves around the University of Chicago, view the couple with ambivalence.

"I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is
thought of as horrible types now ­ so far as most of us know, they
are legitimate members of the community," said Cass Sunstein, a
University of Chicago law professor who has known Obama since the
early 1990s and supports his campaign.

"Not only is Obama the opposite pole from radicals like Ayers and
Dohrn at least as one point were, he's not a conventional left
liberal by any means," he said.

Others are less inclined to even consider forgiveness.

"Ayers was a terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist. Ayers has
never offered one word of apology ­ he glories in it, thinks it's
terrific. And that to me is not what I would call acceptable or
mainstream behavior," said Dan Polsby, a former law professor at
Northwestern who is now dean of George Mason University Law School.
"If Obama takes a different view on that ­ well, OK, that's data about Obama."

On Thursday, Ayers spoke at the State University of New York at New
Paltz, where he refused to answer questions from Politico about his
relationship with Obama.

Dohrn did not respond to a message left at her office.

Obama's campaign dismisses the notion that his relationship with
Ayers should be seen through the lens of the latter's violent past,
or his present lack of regret for the bombings.

"Sen. Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen
group, as he does all acts of violence," said Obama's press
secretary, Bill Burton. "But he was an 8-year-old child when Ayers
and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with
events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous."

He described Ayers as "a professor of education at the University of
Illinois-Chicago and a former aide to Mayor Richard J. Daley,"
referring to printed reports that he had "advised" Daley on school reform.

As Bloomberg News reported recently, Obama and Ayers have crossed
paths repeatedly in the last decade. In 1997, Obama cited Ayers'
critique of the juvenile justice system in a Chicago Tribune article
on what prominent Chicagoans were reading. He and Ayers served
together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago for three years
starting in 1999. In 2001, Ayers also gave $200 to Obama's state
Senate reelection campaign.

Many details of the 1995 meeting are shrouded by time and by Obama's
and Ayers' refusals to discuss it.

The exact date is not known, but it was in the second half of 1995,
before Palmer's decision ­ late in her losing congressional primary
against Jesse Jackson Jr. ­ to jump back into the special election
for her state Senate seat. (Her decision produced a rift between her
and Obama, who was able to get her thrown off the ballot on technical
grounds.)

"That's too long ago ­ that's ancient history," Palmer said, when
asked of the meeting.

Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as
an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to
Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.

"When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous
little talk in the living room of those two
legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn," Warren
wrote on her blog in 2005. "They were launching him ­ introducing him
to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."

Contacted by e-mail, Warren declined to describe the meeting further
and later blogged of her concern that Republicans would use accounts
of the event for "left-baiting."

Young described the gathering as a matter of "due diligence" for
Palmer to introduce her chosen successor to constituents. "Many of us
knew him already," he said.

They, like others in his old Chicago world, now consider him a bit
too "conservative" for their liking, as Warren wrote recently.

Ackerman, the Hyde Park activist, complained of his votes for
continued funding for the Iraq war.

"A lot of people were very angry when he voted to fund the war," he
said. "But any candidate running for president is going to strive for
broader appeal and move more to the center ­ I don't believe that
Barack has departed from his basic principles."

Dr. Young said, however, that he isn't supporting either of the
leading presidential candidates because he is a single-issue voter,
and the issue is single-payer health care.

He said he was disappointed that Obama is "equivocating" on his
support for single-payer health care, after saying in the past that
he supported it. But he said Obama's style ­ "cautious, deliberate,
defensive" ­ was also familiar from the senator's Hyde Park days.

"In fairness, there's no double dealing," he said. "It's part of his
stated strategy: He wants to get maximum unity."
--

Stringer Andrew Lipkowitz contributed to this story.

.

Justice for Sale in Sean Bell, et. al.? [by ALTON H. MADDOX JR.]

Justice for Sale in Sean Bell, et. al.?

http://www.amsterdamnews.com/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=86223&sID=34

by ALTON H. MADDOX JR.
Amsterdam News
Originally posted 2/21/2008

Michael Vick was prosecuted for slaughtering pit bulls. He was
shipped off to a federal prison. Meanwhile, he is awaiting a trial on
similar charges in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This is double
jeopardy. When the defendant is Black, animal rights are taken seriously.
On the other hand, three members of the New York Police Department
pumped 50 bullets into the vehicle of an unarmed Sean Bell and
others. The three cops are about to walk away from a rigged and
toothless indictment. Blacks have neither civil nor human rights.
These cops were never in harm's way. Two days after this inhumane,
wanton and reckless shooting, Mayor Michael Bloomberg summoned Black
selected leaders to City Hall to write a script to pacify the Black
community and to exonerate the cops. Bloomberg had studied the
pitfalls of the Koch administration.
Without blinking an eye and before Bell had been buried, these
leaders were behaving like house servants who had been summoned by
their master to sip tea with him in the Bighouse. This is the state
of affairs in New York. No Cameras! No Peace!
Within the past year, this column has correctly predicted the
outcomes in the cases of Henry Richards, Don Imus and the "Jena 6."
The outcome in the Sean Bell case is pending. I take no solace in
being a legal forecaster. Blacks were not allowed to lay a glove on
any of these malefactors. A protection racket is afoot.
I did have help, however, from our revered ancestors. In "The
Mis-Education of the Negro," Dr. Carter G. Woodson referred to Black
leaders, in 1933, as "racial racketeers." This was seventy-five years
ago. Their modus operandi is still intact today. Of course, Malcolm X
had a solution.
During January 2008, the three assassins of Sean Bell filed a sham
motion in People v. Oliver et. al. for a change of venue because of
supposed, prejudicial, pre-trial publicity. This was part of the
script. Predictably, the Brooklyn Appeals Court said that the motion
was premature. The motion was a cover for the conspiracy.
Before demanding a mock trial with only a judge, the cops had to make
it appear as though they had exhausted their legal remedies. This
criminal prosecution was already compromised when no effort was made
to secure a special prosecutor. After a defendant chooses a bench
trial, a new trial judge should be chosen by lot.
In making the motion for a change of venue, the Detective's Endowment
Association made Rev. Al Sharpton the primary, but not the exclusive,
villain. Every time that Rev. Sharpton posed for the cameras, cops in
New York City would add another notch to their claim that the
assassins were the victims of prejudicial, pre-trial publicity.
The New York Police Department gladly gave Rev. Sharpton a permit to
march down Fifth Avenue during the height of the Christmas shopping
season. The media was an accessory. The white media encouraged Blacks
to march down Fifth Avenue. "Shopping for Justice" became the rallying cry.
It is customary for an intermediate appellate court to deny a motion
for a change of venue before the commencement of the voir dire unless
the questioning of potential jurors would clearly and unquestionably
constitute an exercise in futility. This is a rare occurrence.
No criminal defendant waives a jury trial unless the trial judge has
given the defense a wink. In any case, where a question of fact is
involved, a jury trial is preferable to a bench trial. A hung jury is
not an option in a bench trial. A defendant needs an option.
Within the past thirty years in New York, People v. Katherine Boudin
et. al. is the best example of a motion for a change of venue. An
interracial group of revolutionaries, including members of the Black
Liberation Army, were accused of robbing a Brink's armored truck in
Rockland County, NY and killing a Brinks armored guard and two police officers.
The federal government opposed attorney Chokwe Lumumba's pro hac vice
admission in order for him to represent one of the Brinks defendants,
Samuel Brown. Lumumba was from Michigan. The government had described
Lumumba as a "terrorist." His potential client, Samuel Brown, had
been nearly beaten to death by policemen after the bank robbery on
October 20, 1981.
Brown was paralyzed and, afterwards, was denied medical treatment by
federal and state law enforcement agents. Subsequent to a federal
hearing and appeal, I secured Lumumba's admission to the New York bar
pro hac vice. After I filed and argued a writ of habeas corpus, Brown
was given medical treatment.
The defendants then moved for a change of venue. Like in People v.
Oliver, et. al., the Brooklyn Appeals Court found that the
application was premature. It is customary for an appellate court to
await the outcome of jury selection before deciding the motion.
In their second motion, venue was changed to Orange County and, in a
fourth motion, venue was changed to Westchester County for Boudin.
The defendants in Oliver et. al. jumped the gun and decided,
prematurely, to seek a bench trial. This is suspect.
Out of a group of several revolutionaries, Boudin was white and the
wealthiest of the group. The trials of most of the indictments were
moved from Rockland County to Orange County but Boudin avoided
prosecution in Orange County. Her fate became a class issue.
After most of the other defendants had been wrongfully convicted in
Orange County, Boudin's trial was moved to Westchester County. Racial
prejudice has always permeated Orange County. Those defendants
suffered a mob trial. See the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dempsey
v. Moore and the impeccable legal skills of attorney Scipio Africanus Jones.
The attorneys for Boudin included Martin Garbus, attorney for Don
Imus and Leonard I. Weinglass, former attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The convicted defendants included Sekou Odinga and Abdul Majid. Most
Blacks, committed to violent, Black struggle, have already been
co-opted, assassinated, imprisoned or exiled.
Although the worst examples of prejudicial, pre-trial publicity are
generated from trials involving Black defendants, it is only white
defendants who are able to convince courts to change the venue of a
trial. Compare, for example, the ill-fated trials of the "Jena 6,"
the "Central Park 6," Malachi York, Yahweh Ben Yaweh, Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Wayne Williams and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.
The "Central Park 6" resembled the Scottsboro Boys in terms of
prejudicial, pre-trial publicity. Donald Trump took out a full-page
ad in the New York Times demanding that these innocent boys be given
the death penalty. Black and white public officials referred to them
as a "wolf pack" and "animals." A change of venue was out of the question.
The most important decision affecting New York's criminal justice
system was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2008. The
case was New York State Board of Elections v. Torres. Party bosses
attempted to ice or shakedown Surrogate's Court Judge Margarita Lopez
Torres before her nomination and election to this judicial post.
Black and Latino voters are still disenfranchised after the U.S.
Supreme Court said, last month, that its hands were tied. Party
bosses select judges and, accordingly, judges are beholden to them.
This arrangement puts justice on sale. Clarence Norman was a
beneficiary of this arrangement.
The outcome in a request for change of venue in the Amadou Diallo
case resulted from the assignment of a Black female jurist to the
Amadou Diallo trial. A change of venue was necessary to remove her
from the trial as an acting justice of the Supreme Court. Usually,
these justices play to the commands of party bosses. This jurist was
different, however. The PBA had a problem.
Black leaders are unable to connect the dots. The judiciary in New
York consists mostly of Democrats. Black and Latino voters are
political pawns. Special interest groups, like the PBA and the DEA,
supply the cash to the Democratic Party. These groups enjoy a quid pro quo.
---

Feb. 26 - Alton H. Maddox, Jr. will lecture on Racial Diversity and
the Law at York College, 8:00 a.m. Academic Core Bldg., 94-20 Guy R.
Brewer Blvd., Jamaica, NY.
Feb. 27 - UAM Weekly Forum at the Elks Plaza, 1068 Harriet Tubman
(Fulton Street) nr. Classon Ave. in Brooklyn at 7:30 p.m. Take the
"C" train to Franklin Ave.
March 15 - Continuing all-day advanced course on "Critical Thinking,
Legal Reasoning and Systems Analysis," taught by Alton Maddox and Dr.
Leonard Jeffries will occur at City College's NAC Building, 138th
Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem. For further information call
Alton Maddox at 718-834-9034.
The need for "Critical Thinking, Legal Reasoning and Systems
Analysis" was demonstrated in "The Great Debaters" and the current
presidential debates in the United States. "Yes We Can!" came from
the gubernatorial campaign of Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick.
Similarly the "just words" argument also came from his campaign.
Reason: David Axelrod managed Patrick's campaign and is currently
managing the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.
April 19-20 - Overnight bus trip to Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC
with tour of Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore and an "Egypt on the
Potomac" and Civil War Memorial tours in Washington, DC conducted by
Tony Browder, author of Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization.

For further information call United African Movement at 718-834-9034.

See: www.reinstatealtonmaddox.net for "Black Congresspersons Kiss
White Doll," and "UAM: Make-over or Break-up."

.

SDS hosts mock draft protest

[2 articles]

SDS hosts mock draft protest

http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2008/02/22/University/Sds-Hosts.Mock.Draft.Protest-3228027.shtml

Fake draft cards burned in the Pit

By: Laura Marcinek, Staff Writer
Issue date: 2/22/08

Senior Charlie Soeder timidly approached the "UNC Draft Board" table
at noon Thursday.

"You sir, will you sign up for the U.S. Army?" said Tamara Tal, a
toxicology doctoral student, wearing a tie, vest and a fake mustache.

"Absolutely," Soeder said, throwing his shoulders back, puffing his
chest and lifting his chin.

"All right, drop and give me 20," Tal ordered.

So he did.

Protesters with Students for a Democratic Society used these
theatrical displays and handouts of fake draft cards to attract
students to their anti-war protest.

"We must understand that war is peace. If we want peace, we must have
permanent war in Iraq," Clint Johnson, organizer of the event, said
through a megaphone to clapping and laughing spectators. "Everyone's
being drafted today."

Men ages 18 to 25 must register for the draft - a mandate by the
Military Selective Service Act. About 93 percent of men required to
register have done so, according to the Selective Service System Web site.

Organizers Thursday set up a fake draft board to satirize the troop
surges in Iraq, such as the one in January 2007 when President Bush
announced 20,000 more troops would go to Iraq, bringing the total to
more than 150,000.

Students stood by Lenoir Dining Hall, holding signs that read "UNC
Draft Board" and "Support the Troops in Iraq! Join them Today!"

Lt. Col. Monte Yoder, of UNC's Army ROTC, said it's rarer to find
people who speak out publicly in support of current policies. "I
think as a nation we're very fortunate to have a voluntary military service."

At Thursday's protest Dahlia Wasfi spoke against the negative impacts
of the war on the Iraqi people. She has lived in Iraq before and
after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"Life basically for Iraqis is a living hell," Wasfi said, adding that
she wants to ensure that she gives her people a voice - something
they didn't have under a dictatorship.

"It's to get the truth out, to get another side and to show the
reality that the mainstream media won't show," Wasfi said.

Jason Hurd, who served in Iraq from November 2004 to November 2005,
used the opportunity to speak against military procedure in Iraq.

"I saw so many tactics that actually injured Iraqi people," Hurd
said. "We're hurting innocent civilians."

Participants then handed out fake draft cards for spectators to burn.

"This war has got to stop, and we've got to stop it," Tal said as
students defaced their cards.

Yoder said burning draft cards served as a symbol of protest against
U.S. war-time policies in the 1970s.

"It's great that we have a free nation where citizens can protest
things that they disagree or agree with," he said.
---

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.

--------

Live in your own reality

http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2008/02/22/Opinion/Live-In.Your.Own.Reality-3227896.shtml

SDS draft protest was misguided and unproductive

By: Editorial Board
Issue date: 2/22/08

The last year that the U.S. military draft was in effect, Roe v. Wade
overturned state bans on abortion, the Watergate scandal raged on and
the Sears Tower was completed in Chicago.

Since then, six presidents have taken office and the U.S. has changed
drastically, from bell-bottom to Apple Bottom jeans and from "Bad,
Bad Leroy Brown" to "Soulja Boy."

Yet, for some reason Students for a Democratic Society decided to
speak out about the discontinued practice Thursday, almost 35 years
later, with a 1970s-style protest of its own.

The charade, intended to galvanize students in support of withdrawing
all troops from Iraq, suffered from a lack of tact and was far too
over the top to be taken seriously.

SDS members created their own "draft cards" under the guise of the
"UNC Draft Board," collected them from the crowds and tore them up.

The entire display was performed with biting sarcasm, completely
overshadowing the two speakers and showing a total lack of respect
for both current and past soldiers.

As in its previous protests, including marching on a military
recruitment center and sitting in on the office of Rep. David Price,
D-N.C., because he voted to continue funding the war, SDS failed to
target the appropriate group and did so in an ineffective manner.

It's OK to disagree with the war in Iraq. It's a bit of a mess,
without a doubt. But regardless of whether or not anyone agreed with
the premise of going to war in the first place, the fact remains that
we're there now.

That fact isn't going to change, and further debate on the issue must
be framed accordingly to be at all useful.

The draft has absolutely nothing to do with the current war. The U.S.
hasn't had a draft since Vietnam. Protesting the draft, therefore, is
a useless demonstration of ignorance.

Calling for the immediate removal of troops from Iraq is also
foolish. It arguably might have been better if the U.S. had never
intervened to begin with, but pulling the troops out now will only
send Iraq into greater chaos with greater loss of life.

Instead of simply complaining or arguing for solutions that defy
reality, SDS needs to take a close look at the facts.

If the group actually proposed viable solutions or even just
initiated dialogue that better reflected the situation at hand, it
might actually create change in the right direction.

As it stands, however, SDS comes off as a group slightly off its
rocker pushing an unrealistic, heavily ideological agenda.

It's impossible to get anything useful done with that kind of reputation.

If SDS truly wanted to engage students on the topics of the war in
Iraq and military recruiting, it should do so with facts and figures
and by presenting both sides of the issue fairly, so students can
decide for themselves what to think.

And if they have time between printing fake draft cards and making
posters, they could also check what decade they're in.

.

Berkeley-Like Incident in DC

Berkeley-Like Incident in DC

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=25132

by Katie O'Malley
Posted: 02/22/2008

Last week's Vietnam flashback was courtesy of the mixed nuts in
Berkeley who took it upon themselves to label the local Marine
recruiters "intruders" and "unwelcome." Some people will do anything
for a feelgood liberal headline. But we were heartened by the
overwhelming numbers of proud and patriotic Americans standing by our
defenders. And, typically for liberals, Berserkely kinda backed down
under their pressure. (Hey, Mrs. Obama: plenty of folks manage to
find lots to be proud of in America.)

While we were distracted by the Berserkely street theater, a much
more disturbing scene was unfolding in our Nation's Capital. On
Friday, February 15, members of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) stormed a recruiting office at 14th & L and laid siege while
Metro Police stood by. In a protest entitled "Funk the War" these
children delighted in an act of civil disobedience that is as
pathetic as it is chilling. Didn't see that on Keith Olbermann's
report? I wonder why.

These spoiled privileged brats are the tools of some of the most
disturbing figures on the Left. At Friday's event, the sagging hags
of Code Pink stood off to the side while cheering on the SDS kidz'
action. You can almost see their petuli-addled brains whirling, "If
we send the children to do our dirty work, the police will be
hesitant to make arrests."

I have to believe that the police would find joy in hauling one of
those old prunes off to the clink. But getting your photo in the
paper arresting a white, fresh faced college student? Not so much.

According to witnesses, Code Stink and the other aging hippies stood
by the side and sent the children to the front lines, and ultimately
into the recruiting station. Yet another technique the Left has
borrowed from the Viet Cong.

I struggle to find the relevance of trashing a recruiting station.
What message is this collection of mush trying to impart by
vandalizing the station? These men and women are doing their jobs for
a volunteer military. They do not set policy. The White House and
Congress are only blocks away, kiddies, go where the decisions are
made. Methinks the Secret Service would be less accommodating than
the Capital Police.

Like a toddler who calls his parents to the bathroom after a
successful event on the potty, these minions captured their dirty
work on the web and proudly crowed,

"Prior to ripping up all their *&^%-but (sic)inside at 14th and L
recruiter. After many previous protests had found the 14th st
recruiter 'closed' at 5PM, Funk the War found them open, and the door
unlocked at nearer to 6Pm and promptly exploited the situation by
demonstrating to them first hand how an occupying force behaves.

After a loud commotion inside while outnumbered cops watched,
recruiters finally managed to get protesters to leave-but not before
literature and full-body length cardboard displays in the street
window area were destroyed. In addition, hundreds more "Funk the War"
stickers were plastered all over just about everything that would
take them. By the time everyone was out it looked like a tornado had
swept through the lobby."

Not content at this destruction, they turned to the DC GOP
headquarters but found the door locked. Apparently the deterrent was
a locked door, not the presence of police. How telling.

And calling themselves an occupying force? Their delusions of
grandeur are staggering. Please. These twits took no risk. They know
that they have friendly ears with the powerbrokers in DC. They know
that the Mayor and the Police do not want images of little Johnny and
Susie being hauled away in handcuffs. They know mommy and daddy went
to school with the folks who now run the ACLU and that steady
donations are coming from the family checking account. Wow.
Super-brave. In the minds of these idiots, they are as brave as the
Marines walking the streets of a struggling Iraq, helping to liberate
an entire people while avoiding terrorists trying to blow them to pieces.

If only the SDS'rs could realize how completely absurd they really look.

My initial calls to the police were fruitless as were repeated calls
to the Mayor's office. Each person I spoke with expressed surprise
when told of the events. The few return calls I did get were too
little, too late.

I find it mind-boggling that an incident of domestic terrorism holds
so little importance in the eyes of those charged with public order
in our Capital.

The military has been battling thugs like SDS and others for decades.
For obvious reasons, the mainstream press has not chosen to cover it.
It might make their peeps look bad. Recruiter's cars have been
torched, their offices vandalized, bricks have been thrown through
windows and these fine men and women have literally been chased from
high school and college campuses.

The internet and the foolish bravado of these malcontents has made
official reporting unnecessary. The Left gleefully posts the evidence
of their dirty work (with pictures that the police should be able to
use to id some of them) and their hatred for all to see. They
gleefully call the recruiters pedophiles and these lovers of peace
post threats and make harassing phone calls to those who stand
opposing them. Do as I say, mews the little flowerchild, not as I do.

Like a bad STD, SDS has reemerged from the mindlessness of the 60's
under a new banner with the same old tired socialist mindset. They
join other parasites like the IVAW who fancy themselves the new
Winter Soldiers. Both groups are powerful reminders of the danger of
a diseased and troubled mind. Unlike their counterparts in the
1960's, these tools of the Left face a powerful, vocal and committed
opposition.

As success in Iraq and in the War on Terror continues to expand,
expect to see more public temper tantrums from these groups. Their
irrelevance chafes at their tender hides and they will continue to
ball their pudgy little fists and scream into the night.

I was just a child when my step-father returned from Vietnam. He and
his brothers-in-arms were treated like dirt. I was unable to
comprehend the horror of it or to protect him from it. Despite my age
at the time, I carry a veil of shame at what some of my fellow
Americans did to those men and women. Never again is not an empty
platitude for me.

Nor is it an empty platitude to the folks who stand outside Walter
Reed Hospital every week or to the folks who will surely stand
outside 14th & L this Friday to let our heroes know that this time,
they are not alone.
---

Ms. O'Malley is a freelance writer from the New York City area and
has been a non-profit fundraiser for 15 years. Write her at
katiehastingsomalley@yahoo.com

.

Radical returns to Austin for Cornyn protest

Radical returns to Austin for Cornyn protest

http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/other/02/24/0224dreyer.html

Thorne Dreyer back after 40 years.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 24, 2008

Ten minutes before the demonstration, Thorne Dreyer ­ the guy in the
chocolate-brown dog costume ­ ambles toward the corner of West Sixth
and Lavaca streets in downtown Austin, looking every bit like a man
who can't wait to bark out in the name of democracy, in the guise of
political street theater, in the company of his activist friends.

Dreyer's dog costume covers him from neck to toe, his face open
beneath a floppy-eared dog hood and bright red Houston Astros ball
cap. His stride is long and tall and lopey. He pumps his arms high.
Though he's 62 years old, Dryer's posture is youthful, expectant and
a little jazzed ­ never mind the sudden, chilly rain that splatters
the sidewalk in front of him at the start of rush hour on Feb. 15, a
Friday afternoon.

"It hasn't rained a day in, what, three months?" says Dreyer, hands
on his hips as he takes inventory of a restless, dark gray sky that
seems to promise nothing but more chill and harder rain. Yet Thorne
Dreyer ­ a prominent Austin activist from the 1960s who moved back to
town three years ago ­ isn't about to let a little rough weather
spoil this 90-minute piece of socio-political theater. The show will go on.

Dreyer's aim on this day is to poke fun at U.S. Sen. John Cornyn ­
drawing specific attention to the Republican senator's longtime
advocacy of President Bush's increasingly unpopular administrative
agenda, particularly his support of the Iraq war and the Guantánamo
prison. The president's nickname for Cornyn is "Corn Dog." But the
way Dreyer sees it, the senator from Texas is more "lap dog" ­ the
president's eager-to-please pup.

Riffing on this dog idea, Dreyer has assembled two dozen members of
Austin's peace and social justice community in front of the Chase
Tower (where Cornyn keeps an office) and invited them to express
their disdain for the senator's politics. The only ground rules:
Honor the dog theme, and absolutely no speeches. Dreyer wants humor,
not stridency.

David Hamilton, who demonstrated with Dreyer on the University of
Texas campus as a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the
1960s, and his wife Sally come dressed in Scooby-Doo costumes.
Members of the Code Pink peace group arrive as pink poodles with
painted noses. A man in a George W. Bush mask walks a saw-horse-sized
pull-toy dog emblazoned with a John Cornyn face. As traffic lurches
down Sixth Street in the premature darkness, the pretend president
wags his finger at the Cornyn dog, imploring him to obey.

"Curb the Corn Dog!" shouts Dreyer, pacing the sidewalk, his droopy
tail dragging behind him. And as the rain lets up a bit, his
supporters join in the chant. The scene is scruffy and soggy and
chaotic, in a small-scale kind of way. Several demonstrators have
brought their own dogs to the protest, inciting a confusion of
barking and snarling and tangled leashes. Behind them, a man stands
on a crate, in a blindfold, arms outstretched ­ his posture
suggesting Abu Ghraib, with wires dangling from his fingers. The wind
gusts, suddenly, so hard that Scooby-Doo's head blows off.

Some drivers honk their horns in approval of Dreyer's message; a few
flash the peace sign from an open window. But most look blankly at
the road ahead. On the street, a middle-age man with short, gray hair
glances over his shoulder and sniffs in disdain as he passes
Scooby-Doo and the prisoner and a cardboard John Cornyn doghouse.

"I hope you point out that these are serious people, among the
brightest minds in Austin," says Steve Speir, a Democratic precinct
chair who has stood in the rain in his dress shirt and slacks ­ no
coat or hat or umbrella ­ to lend his support to this day's
demonstration. "A lot of the people here have been committed to
making this a better world for a long, long time."

For all his experience in the movement, Thorne Dreyer is just now
realizing how hard it is to pass out his Cornyn "barking points"
leaflets on the street while wearing a dog suit. "Man, these mitts
make it really hard," he says, looking down at his damp, chunky dog
paw-hands after dropping a clutch of papers onto the street. But he
laughs it off and continues to hand out more leaflets.

This man in the dog suit ­ the only son of Houston journalist Martin
Dreyer and his wife, the painter Margaret Webb Dreyer ­ was one of
the leaders of the Texas student protest movement as a young man. He
joined the SDS as a UT freshman in 1963 and embraced its
socialist-tinged manifesto of participatory democracy, world peace,
economic justice and environmentalism, even though the UT Board of
Regents sometimes labeled its members "subversives and
revolutionaries" and tried to revoke the group's status as an
official university organization. With several SDS friends, Dreyer
co-founded The Rag ­ Austin's influential underground newspaper ­ and
worked as its first editor in the mid-1960s.

Dreyer moved to Houston in the late 1960s and helped launch a second
underground paper, the Space City News. During the course of the next
30 years, Dryer worked as a freelance journalist, hosted a talk show
on the Pacifica radio station, did public relations work for artists
and politicians, managed a Houston jazz club, dabbled in the theater
and at last, in the 1990s, suffered through a divorce, depression and
two prison sentences for cocaine possession.

After three decades away, Dreyer returned to Austin after attending a
reunion of The Rag staff in 2005. It was an event, says Austin
activist and former staffer Alice Embree, "that reaffirmed people had
not lost their sense of outrage ... or outrageousness." Last year,
Dreyer helped start the local chapter of Movement for a Democratic
Society ­ a national offshoot of the old SDS.

"This is such a weird time, an outrageous time," says Dreyer, who has
been contributing to the Next Left News, the Texas Observer and The
Rag Web site since moving back. "Everything Bush has done is such an
abomination, I think there should be hundreds ­ thousands ­ of people
in the streets every day. And while the consciousness seemed very
high in Austin when I came back here, there didn't seem to be much happening."

Much like SDS, MDS "believes in solutions to the problems of the
world without war," says Dreyer. "We believe in universal health
care. We believe in a world without racism, sexism or class-ism. And
we believe all things are interconnected, at the core, by our
economic system and who controls the economic system. So long as we
let corporate powers control the decisions of how we live, we're not
going to live very well."

At last light on Sixth Street, Thorne Dreyer knows his "Curb the Corn
Dog" rally hasn't changed the world. His demonstration drew four
dozen people and a lot of raindrops. Yet Dreyer's spirit is bright
around 7 o'clock, when he slips off his dog suit and joins a handful
of friends for post-rally Mexican food at Maria's Taco XPress.

"Hey, Thorne Dawg," someone shouts out when Dreyer arrives at
Maria's. "Sit down and chill out."

Dreyer orders a mango margarita, then tugs on a pale blue T-shirt
emblazoned with the words "Dogs for Peace." The picture on the front:
a half-dozen dogs seated at a table, flashing peace signs with their paws.

"During that Vietnam time in the 1960s, we believed ­ sincerely
believed ­ that what we were involved in was unique to history. You
felt something on a gut level," Dreyer says later, reflecting on
movements old and new. "You felt that something momentous was
happening. And there was such an incredible sense of community that
evolved from that, that helped shape that, that you really don't see
as much of today.

"But this is really important: We don't want to sound like we're just
into nostalgia. We don't want to get up and talk about the glories of
the '60s. This is not the 1960s. There has been a loss of innocence.
It is a different time. But like Alice Embree likes to say, 'I'm more
interested in what we're going to do tomorrow than what we did in the past.' "

Unlike a lot of SDS alumni, Dreyer believes in the possibility of
electoral politics, inspired in part by his interactions with Houston
politicians such as Kathy Whitmire, Fred Hofheinz and the late
Congressman Mickey Leland. Dreyer was an enthusiastic supporter of
Sen. John Edwards' run for president ­ "he was more concrete, and
class conscious" ­ yet he's intrigued by Barack Obama's ability to
inspire. "For the first time in a long time, people believe in
something and have some hope."

"In the old days, we thought electoral politics was just a trick ­ a
trick bag, we used to call it," Dreyer says with a smile. "I didn't
vote. I didn't believe in voting. I never did it back then. Because
either way, the problem was societal. What either party created was
just the illusion of change. But as I matured ­ and I don't think I
ever sold out ­ I began seeing things slightly less in black and
white. There are things you can do (in electoral politics), so long
as you keep your perspective."

Thorne Dreyer's belief system for a new millennium is anchored in
community and participation and a sense of humor. As a younger man,
he led a charge to change the world, thinking it his generation's
calling. Today, Dreyer has the gentle feeling at times that the
movement has repaid the favor ­ and saved him. For the first time in
a long time, he feels at home.

"Hey, my friend, this is for you," activist Carlos Lowry calls out to
Dreyer as he presents him with a plate of exotic ice cream. All
around, there are claps of appreciation. Dreyer is hesitant to accept
the gift, but the demonstrators urge him to grab a spoon and dig in.
"Every dog has his day, you know. ... "
---

bbuchholz@statesman.com;
912-2967.

.

To Tour or Not to Tour

To Tour or Not to Tour

http://www.jambands.com/Features/content_2008_02_24.00.phtml

John Zinkand
2008-02-24

"As he saw his life run away from him, thousands ran along, chanting
words from a song!" - Phish

Having just finished a small run of shows with Umphrey's McGee, my
thoughts turned to touring. What makes a band worthy of "going on
tour" with and seeing an entire tour or multiple shows over a week or
two? The day before I saw Umphrey's last week I saw the North
Mississippi All-Stars. They put on a great show and I look forward to
catching them the next time they swing through town, but they are not
a band I would go on tour with. When I got back to Portland from San
Francisco after seeing Umphrey's Sunday night at the Fillmore, I saw
Adrian Belew play live. The guy is just phenomenal. He's played with
legends like Frank Zappa and David Bowie and can really light up the
stage with his guitar wizardry and unusual compositions. But I
wouldn't want to go on tour with Adrian Belew either.

But I would go on tour with Umphrey's McGee. Lots of people tour with
Widespread Panic and moe. And thousands have toured with String
Cheese, Phish, and of course the Grateful Dead. Why do people want to
tour with these bands and not with Ween, Garaj Mahal, or Wilco? There
are many reasons.

First and foremost, I think the bands that people like to tour with
have built up a strong word of mouth. It's more fun to tour with a
band that many other people are touring with to experience a
close-knit musical community. Granted, Umphrey's McGee is still at a
pretty small level to be considered a band that people want to tour
with, but that's how it all starts. Touring bands have a small and
fervent following that increase the fan base through word of mouth
and music swapping. To be a band to tour with, you first must attract
a rabid and loyal small fan base and develop it into something larger
through relentless touring and powerful, consistent live shows. If
the word of mouth is out there and new people come to see a show and
it's a low-energy and/or sloppy affair, the band in question hurts
their chances at developing a fan base that tours with them. The live
show needs to be consistently good enough to live up to the hype.

Another important part of being thought of as a band to tour with is
a sound that is varied enough to hold the attention of the listener
for many consecutive nights in a row. Ideally, this would entail
enough songs to keep things interesting. A smaller band that only has
20 or 30 songs in its entire repertoire is going to have a difficult
time keeping the attention of the listener over a multiple show run.
If many songs are repeated 3 out of 4 shows in a row, folks probably
will not be touring. And if even if a band has 100 songs in their
playbook, it would be better if they were not all in the same genre
or style. A band that has a lot of different dynamics in their songs
is going to be more entertaining and tour worthy over a string of
shows than a band that always plays bluegrass or hard rock at the
same exact tempo and volume. Variety is the spice of life and also of
live music.

Another important characteristic of a band that people want to go on
tour with is developing a culture. No band can really start out with
its own culture, but a band can develop one through talent, effort,
marketing, and consistently strong live shows. Once enough people are
attracted through the word of mouth of the rabid fan base, the
culture usually develops. Fans can relate to one another that certain
songs are songs to look forward to, for example. Or they can discuss
how long it's been since the band has played a particular song. The
fans develop their own t-shirts and stickers and sell them to one
another. The fans can hang out before and after the shows and party
together. The band has an active blog or message board where fans can
discuss the band, rumors, etc and build the spirit of comradery
(together they can trash any trolls who might come in and make fun of
their beloved band, for example). The band is often mentioned in the
press as having a good live show and building a fan base. They are
featured on websites like Phantasy Tour or setlist sites. When all of
this starts to happen, a band is well on the way to becoming a band
to tour with.

Most of the bands that have garnered a big enough fan base that tours
with them usually perform a two set show. This goes hand in hand with
having enough songs and a varied enough sound to keep it entertaining
night after night. Playing two sets gives the band room enough to
stretch out and explore different musical terrain and provide shows
with different flavors. And what bands like Widespread Panic, moe.,
and String Cheese prove is that a band does not need a star or front
man to be popular. Although the Grateful Dead had Jerry and Phish had
Trey, many of the newer tour-friendly bands have no front man. While
some people might argue differently, the band in question does not
need to be made up of technical masters or folks that are pushing
music in a brand new direction. As long as the band has a varied
sound, enough songs, puts on a consistently strong live show, and can
develop a culture, they can emerge as a band to tour with. I'm not
saying that all bands should aspire to this aesthetic, however, just
that it's interesting that they all share common factors. Many of my
favorite bands are bands I would not want to tour with, but I love
seeing them a couple times per year when they come through town.
Whether you are doing summer tour with your favorite band or catching
one Victor Wooten show when he comes through town, the most important
thing is to get out there and support live music any way you like it.

.

ELDR Magazine Explores Sex & Intimacy Over 60

ELDR Magazine Explores Sex & Intimacy Over 60

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2008/2/prweb703783.htm

"Most people don't want to think about their grandparents having
sex." Well, get over it. Folks over 60 are indeed getting it on. The
third issue of ELDR magazine, named one of 2007's "Hottest Magazine
Launches," gets hotter with an exploration of sex and intimacy over
60 years of age.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 19, 2008 -- The third issue of
ELDR magazine, named one of 2007's "Hottest Magazine Launches," gets
hotter with an exploration of sex and intimacy over 60 years of age.

The Spring issue cover story for ELDR, the first national magazine
for people over 60, brings the latest groundbreaking research on
elder sex to a personal level with real people stories and interviews.

"Love, sex and intimacy are just as important to older people as to
younger people," said David Bunnell, editor-in-chief of ELDR, "But
somehow it's been taboo to even think about these things in terms of
anyone over 60. We think this is just plain silly because as this
article points out: sexual well-being is a key part of aging."

ELDR's Spring issue also covers dancing as a way to achieve
longevity, recipes from the world's healthiest cuisine, a pull-out
poster on "How to Reduce Your Cancer Risk," and interviews with
inspiring elders including Judy Collins, Wavy Gravy and Marian McPartland.

ELDR Magazine Cover - The cover of ELDR's third issue features two
nearly-nude 60-something elder models. ELDR's premier issue cover
featured Jim Hammond, a 93-year-old Seniors Olympics sprinter; the
second issue cover featured Betty Eiler, a 73-year-old yoga instructor.

ELDR was recently chosen from among 700 new magazines as one of the
15 "Hottest Magazine Launches" of 2007 by Media Industry Newsletter
(MIN) and University of Mississippi journalism professor Samir Husni,
also known as "Mr. Magazine." ELDR.com is also a design finalist in
the 2008 MIN "Best of The Web" Awards.

About ELDR Media LLC - ELDR is a media company which seeks to inspire
the affluent elder to live a more meaningful life, to celebrate the
joys and to navigate the challenges of aging. ELDR is the first media
company targeting the 60-plus active and affluent demographic. ELDR
was founded by senior housing innovator Chad Lewis and pioneering
magazine editor and entrepreneur David Bunnell. ELDR Media LLC is
headquartered in Berkeley, California. Visit ELDR online at

http://www.eldr.com.

.

Steal This Wiki launches alpha version of Steal This Book for 21st Century

[2 items]

Steal This Wiki to Be Reborn in Stealable Book Form

http://www.appscout.com/2008/02/steal_this_wiki_to_be_reborn_i.php

February 21, 2008

Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book was first published in 1971. In many
ways the flagship title of Hoffman's Yippie movement, the book was an
underground instruction booklet of sorts, providing users with tips
on subjects ranging from creating pipebombs to scoring free postage
and buffalo from the government.

The book proved a huge success and remains an important
counter-culture milestone, although much of the information contained
in the volume has become obsolete in the three and a half decades
since its publication.

Today the existence of the book begs the question--what would Steal
This Book have been like had Hoffman published it on the Web? Surely
he would have been an enthusiastic proponent of the
information-sharing capabilities of wikis.

A group of Internet users realized the wiki's potential and launched
the fittingly titled Steal This Wiki

http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page a year and a half ago.
Now the site is ready to be reborn in book form. As STW
representative Ploney Almoney tells Boing Boing:

We now have our first alpha available for people to download as ODT
or PDF, it is a huge bloated draft with minimal images but we have
added just about every survival tip we could think of for shelter
alternatives living out of a pack, cooking without a kitchen,
escaping the United States, and even making a fabber, plus all of the
protest and propaganda distribution in a more useful DIY format. Now
we need lots of people to read it and help us get the edits done so
it can be sent for printing.

The site offers a constantly updated resource for modern-day Yippies.
Abbie Hoffman would be proud.

--------

Steal This Wiki launches alpha version of Steal This Book for 21st Century

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/19/steal-this-wiki-laun.html

by Cory Doctorow, February 19, 2008

For the past 18 months, the Steal This Wiki project has been
industriously updating Abbie Hoffman's 1971 classic, Steal This Book,
and now they're ready to ship. Ploney Almoney sez, "We now have our
first alpha available for people to download as ODT or PDF, it is a
huge bloated draft with minimal images but we have added just about
every survival tip we could think of for shelter alternatives living
out of a pack, cooking without a kitchen, escaping the United States,
and even making a fabber, plus all of the protest and propaganda
distribution in a more useful DIY format. Now we need lots of people
to read it and help us get the edits done so it can be sent for printing."

This site is intended to support and distribute information that is
relevant to this day and age, which can be reasonably defined as one
in which Americans are forced to deal with difficult issues (such as
a military led by an unwise and unreasonable group of people) as well
as with real and dangerous threats.

Hopefully as the content on this site evolves, it will become a new
and useful work, holding true to the spirit of the original, and
providing useful information to those who value freedom, peace, and justice.

This site contains the how-to information on everything from how to
grow a garden to how to teach a college level class. How many
revolutions were about putting the existing means of production into
the hands of the people. We have seen that these revolutions, given
enough time, always ended with a new power caste abusing the under
class. We want to give the means of production for basic needs back
into the hands of every person so they can choose to ignore the heavy
hand of a government which has melded itself with the mega-businesses
in a way that leaves ordinary humans with a voice or a choice.

Link to Steal This Wiki,
http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Link to download PDF of alpha edition
http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org.nyud.net/originalSTB.pdf

.

The 'Year That Rocked' [1968]

The 'Year That Rocked'

http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_8322137

By Jim Farber, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 02/22/2008

1968. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, as
Bob Dylan would later write, a time when, "There was music in the
cafes at night and revolution in the air."

Everyone knows the headlines: "Martin Luther King Gunned Down in
Memphis"; "Robert Kennedy Assassinated in Los Angeles"; "Police Beat
Back Protesters at Chicago Democratic Convention"; "Medalists Raise
Black Power Salute at Mexico Olympics."

"The problem," says John Powers, principal writer and artistic
director of "Works in Progress," "is people who were born after these
events took place don't know much more than the headlines."

Exploring the lifelines and plotlines behind the headlines, says
Powers, is the theme of a new four-part theater series, "1968: Year
that Rocked!" which begins Wednesday at the George Nakano Theatre of
the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.

Performed by a cast of professional actors, each segment will feature
the actual words spoken by the people involved, drawn from speeches
and recorded conversations, threaded together by Powers and
accompanied by projections of historic material.

The way Powers sees it, there's a lot of resonance between where we
were as a nation in 1968 and where we are today in 2008.

Forty years ago we were mired in Vietnam. Now we're bogged down in
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we don't know how to get out of,
Powers says. We're in the midst of a political campaign that's all
about change. And the Olympics are about to be held in a country,
China, that wants to show itself off to the world, but has real
issues regarding human rights, just as Mexico did.

As Mark Twain was fond of saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but
it rhymes."

"1968: Year that Rocked!" begins with "Memphis."

"Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis," Powers says. "But
why was he there? What was the sanitary workers strike all about? Why
did he go to Memphis when his advisers warned him against it? And
what was the role of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI?"

Those are the questions the production will try to answer.

In Wednesday's performance, Carl Gillard will take on the role of
Martin Luther King Jr., with Ian Tanza as FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, Renard Ricks as the Rev.James Lawson of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and Bill Wolski as Memphis mayor Henry Loeb.

Part 2, "Los Angeles," to be presented March26, will focus on the
death of Bobby Kennedy.

"RFK is assassinated in Los Angeles (at the Ambassador Hotel) after
winning the Democratic primary," says Powers. "Why was he running for
president? Why was he in contention with Lyndon Johnson, the man that
had been his brother's running mate?

"It was over Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War," Powers explains.
"But most people don't know that. Bobby was trying to reverse the
policy set in motion by his brother and extended by LBJ."

"Chicago," scheduled for April 30, takes place during the turbulent
summer of '68, says Powers, when violent confrontations took place
inside and outside the Democratic National Convention.

The performance, Powers says, will focus on the roles played by four
men: presidential peace candidate Eugene McCarthy; Jerry Rubin,
leader of the Yippies; David Dellinger, organizer of the National
Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; and Chicago's
all-powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley.

The final chapter, "Mexico," will be staged May 28. It will trace the
violence and the politics leading up to and during the XIX Olympiad
in Mexico City.

It will recall the street war waged against student protesters by
government soldiers, and trace the steps leading to that famous
silent protest by two black American athletes, Tommy Smith and John
Carlos, as they took their place on the victory stand.

"We've come to see what they did as a Black Power salute," says
Powers. "But it was meant as a more complex protest. Their heads were
bowed in sorrow and they were not wearing shoes in sympathy with the
impoverished people of the world. There were many other specific
symbols they were trying to evoke. But the media focused on the Black
Power element and branded it as that."

While "1968: Year That Rocked!" is designed to provide an insightful
look back at history, the real goal of the series, says Powers, is to
provoke people to continually ask what's going on behind the scenes.

"If we do that," says Powers, "our grandchildren won't have to ask,
`Why didn't we know?"'
---

Jim Farber (310) 540-5511, Ext. 416 jim.farber@dailybreeze.com

.

Recapturing the ’60s, in DayGlo Colors [Chicago Conspiracy Trial]

Recapturing the '60s, in DayGlo Colors

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/movies/24lipt.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: February 24, 2008

MORE than a year after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in
Chicago transformed the culture wars from metaphor to mayhem, Norman
Mailer was still trying to make sense of what had happened.

Mr. Mailer, under oath as a witness in a federal conspiracy trial,
recalled a 1967 conversation with Jerry Rubin, the Yippie leader and
provocateur, about a "youth festival" that groups opposed to the
Vietnam War were planning as a convention counterpoint.

"I was overtaken with the audacity of the idea," Mr. Mailer
testified, "and I said, 'It's a beautiful and frightening idea.' "

The protests, the brutal reaction of the police, and the conspiracy
trial of eight leaders of the antiwar movement that followed are the
subjects of a new documentary, "Chicago 10." Mr. Mailer, who died in
November, was an animated witness at the trial, according to
contemporary news accounts. And he is animated in "Chicago 10" too,
in a second sense ­ as a cartoon.

In the documentary, he and the other witnesses, defendants and
lawyers are rendered with motion-capture technology like that in "The
Polar Express" and "Beowulf" and with actors' voices, including those
of Mark Ruffalo (as Mr. Rubin), Jeffrey Wright (as the Black Panther
Bobby Seale) and Liev Schreiber (as the radical defense lawyer
William Kunstler).

The effect is an idiosyncratic effort to reclaim and perhaps redefine
the spirit of the 1960s. The film makes the case that the Yippies ­
more pranksters than politicians, more punks than hippies ­ provided
a lasting template for revolutionary engagement through anarchy and ridicule.

"Chicago 10" has met with mixed reactions from the dwindling number
of people who saw the trial firsthand, and its reception at the
Sundance Film Festival last year was lukewarm. ("The pic opened the
fest," Variety reported, "but by the next day its buzz was all but
dead.") Enthusiasm from younger leftists eager for inspiration, on
the other hand, seems high.

In addition to the trial sequences, the film presents raw archival
footage of the Chicago police department's savage response to the
protests. Brett Morgen, the film's writer and director, married that
footage with throbbing music from Rage Against the Machine, Black
Sabbath and the Beastie Boys, forgoing the usual '60s soundtrack.

Mr. Morgen, who co-directed "The Kid Stays in the Picture," about the
film producer Robert Evans, was born two months after the convention.
In an interview in his office in Rockaway, Queens, a block from the
beach and above a store that sells sneakers, he said he had aimed to
avoid treating a turning point in the history of the counterculture
as sacred ground.

"The world simply did not need another movie about the '60s made by
someone from the '60s," said Mr. Morgen, who is scruffy and
longhaired but not especially mellow. "We weren't making a movie
about 1968 per se. I don't want to smell patchouli. I don't want to
see bell-bottoms."

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair and a producer of "The Kid
Stays in the Picture," produced "Chicago 10" with Mr. Morgen. He said
it was the product of political frustration in the early days of the
Iraq war ­ an anger that has infused his monthly editor's note and
the contents of his magazine ­ and an attempt to rouse young people
to action. "I became incredibly upset," he said, "that this young
generation of Americans seemed to have no interests at all in the
origins of the war in Iraq, the rightness of the war or the
possibility of ending the war."

"Chicago 10," which opens Friday in New York, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington, has no narration or fresh
interviews. Instead it uses the animated trial sequences to explain
what went on in the streets, even as it explores the extended farce
that was the Chicago conspiracy trial.

Many of the protagonists in the trial are dead now, including the
irascible judge, Julius H. Hoffman; Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman,
the Yippies at the center of the film; and Mr. Kunstler, who
represented his clients with gusto and verve and was repaid with
contempt citations.

Some of the remaining participants have their reservations about Mr.
Morgen's approach.

"I was very impressed with the newsreel footage they got," said
Leonard Weinglass, the other main defense lawyer, who was also held
in contempt. "It really conveyed the horror of being on the street.
But for the actual trial itself, the film was drained of its
political content."

Mr. Morgen focuses on the comic moments in the trial, of which there
were many, and on Judge Hoffman's decision to bind and gag Mr. Seale,
the only black defendant, after he insisted on defending himself. The
film is scrupulously accurate, relying on 22,000 pages of trial
transcripts. But it is also highly selective, distilling that
transcript to about 30 pages of script.

Mr. Weinglass said he would have made different choices. "The trial
was really about the war and racism and the alternative lifestyle,"
he said. "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education."

He had another complaint. "Never in my life have I had a lavender
suit," he said, objecting to his cartoon garb.

Mr. Morgen said he reviewed 180 hours of archival footage and chose
scenes with visceral power. But some of the omissions are jarring:
Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated that June, is not mentioned, and nor
are the names of the candidates vying for the nomination.

That was deliberate, Mr. Morgen said, and part of an effort to reach
a young audience. "I didn't want to make a film that read like a
Cliff's Notes to an era," he said. Finding the right way to convey
the story of the trial was grueling, Mr. Morgen said. There was,
first of all, too much information: eight defendants facing a complex
indictment.

"We're charged with carrying certain ideas across state lines," Mr.
Hoffman, voiced by Hank Azaria, says in a scene set in a nightclub,
which is not a bad summary of the incitement counts the defendants
faced. After Mr. Seale's case was severed from that of the main group
of defendants, they came to be known as the Chicago Seven. Mr. Morgen
called his film "Chicago 10," he said, to honor Mr. Seale and the two
defense lawyers. The convictions of all of the defendants were
ultimately reversed.

The journalist Paul Krassner, who came up with the term Yippie, for
Youth International Party, and who consulted on the film with Mr.
Morgen, said he thought the documentary succeeded on its own terms.

"It's certainly a slice of countercultural history, with an agenda,"
Mr. Krassner said. But Mr. Krassner said the film may be
counterproductive. "Ironically," he said, "seeing the footage of the
sadistic and indiscriminate brutality of the police could frighten
some moviegoers into inaction."

Tom Hayden, a defendant and a leader of Students for a Democratic
Society who was in many ways a more substantial figure than the two
Yippies, is relegated to the sidelines.

"I think the film captures the spirit of intensity, of desperate
acts, of things falling apart in that year," Mr. Hayden said. But the
film's perspective is partial, he added: "This is an Abbie Hoffman
story. Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in
theatricalizing history."

There may soon be a second take on the trial, this one by Steven
Spielberg, in a feature film that would almost certainly be more
conventional and accessible than "Chicago 10." The script for the
film, "The Trial of the Chicago Seven," is by Aaron Sorkin ("The West
Wing" and "Charlie Wilson's War"), and Mr. Spielberg is said to be
considering Sacha Baron Cohen for the role of Abbie Hoffman and
Philip Seymour Hoffman to play William Kunstler.

Mr. Morgen said he was delighted.

"We've been consulting with them and providing them with our
databases," he said. "We made this movie to try to get the story out.
A documentary ultimately is going to have a limited audience. A
Spielberg film is going to have a limitless audience."

.

1968: 40 years later

1968: 40 years later

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080224/LIVING/80222033/1004&theme=

Published: Sunday, February 24, 2008

Witnesses to history share their stories

Although Americans have been bitterly divided about Vietnam for four
decades, everyone seems to agree on at least one thing: It was a time
of national anguish.

The "war at home" reflected more than just the bloody conflict
overseas. Street scuffles raged over issues like capitalism, racism,
paternalism, sexism and homophobia.

This violence was juxtaposed with a festive hippie counterculture
that would soon be co-opted by mainstream society. Almost overnight,
long hair and bell bottoms went from ridicule to ubiquitous fashion
statement. The baby boom had been reborn.

Random snapshots of 1968 provide clues about how ordinary people
coped with extraordinary events. Some Vermonters had already joined
the vanguard of change; others stood unwittingly on the threshold.

Either way, they all had a destiny to fulfill. Their diverse stories
reach back 40 years to offer a quick glimpse of forces that
transformed the country and, in the process, enriched the Green Mountain State:

Jan. 13, 1968 ­ Shortly before the 77-day Siege of Khe Sanh, Marine
Sgt. Jim Lockwood's rifle company was ambushed en route to that
embattled village. "In a six-hour firefight, 22 out of 55 men in the
platoon were killed," recalls the Essex Junction resident, 61. "One
advantage we had was that most of the NVA (North Vietnamese Army)
were stoned. They dipped their joints in opium."

His injuries, from shrapnel, were minor. Dozens of others had to be
medevaced out.

In February, Lockwood's squad, stationed at an old French fort in
inaccessible cloud-covered mountains during monsoon season, was
running out of food. "We killed a wild pig one day, like a damn
safari," he says, before remembering a more tragic wild animal
encounter: A member of the battalion was dragged off by a tiger and
never found.

In March, Lockwood was flying in a helicopter brought down by enemy
fire, with a heavy loss of life. "That's what 1968 was like," he says.

When his 13-month tour of duty ended in August, he decided to walk
away from what had always been envisioned as a lifelong career in the military.

On Jan. 13, 2008, Lockwood ­ now working as a Federal Court Security
Officer in Burlington after more than 25 years with the Border Patrol
­ paid homage to the memory of Khe Sanh.

Lockwood attended church with the mother of a Marine from Proctor,
one of the 22 killed in that day, and they visited his grave together.

"We have an obligation never to forget them," he says.

April 15, 1968 ­ With a draft notice just days away, Andy Megrath,
then 20, of Rutland joined the Army for a three-year tour in order to
secure a more skilled position than that of an infantry foot soldier.
Even so, his surveying responsibilities in Vietnam required setting
up perimeters in hostile territory. Beyond that, from Saigon to
Pleiku, he would volunteer for dangerous patrols and, what were
dubbed "hunter-killer" teams.

"We'd ride shotgun in small helicopters at treetop level," explains
Megrath, 59. "Charlie (the Viet Cong) used tracers, so we'd draw fire
and zip out of the way when the big Cobras flew in to finish the job.
We were the hunters; the Cobras were the killers."

Although, more skirmishes than major combat, his battles produced
casualties that he prefers not to discuss. "I don't like talking
about the bad times," acknowledges Megrath, who was discharged from
the military in April 1971 as a decorated Specialist 5 ­ "the
equivalent of today's three-stripe sergeant."

Today, he is president of Chapter One of the Vietnam Veterans of
America and heads the board of Dodge House, a facility for homeless
vets. Megrath, though, has not let go of his anger about civilians
who opposed the war, particularly a certain controversial actress. A
patch on his vest refers to Jane Fonda as an American traitor.

April 23, 1968 ­ Roz Payne of Richmond was in a New York City
filmmakers' collective documenting a protest at Columbia University,
where hundreds of students opposed the school's plan to build a gym
in the nearby black community.

Her cinematic career, begun the year before, involved chronicling
most of the dynamic activities in the late 1960s. As a member of
Newsreel, a team of radicals-with-cameras, she covered almost every
development that gave the era its oomph.

In 2007, Payne released a four-disk DVD box set on the Black Panthers
that that includes three Newsreel films on the subject. She also
maintains the collective's archives.

"Columbia Revolt," a documentary that traces the seven-day takeover,
conveys the raw energy of youngsters denouncing their school's
corporate ties and obliviousness to Harlem neighbors.

During the occupation, the basic necessities were smuggled in via a
bucket lowered to supporters on the street below. The Newsreel folks
observed and participated, as serious dialogue was tempered by
celebration. The Grateful Dead even performed outside.

Payne can be spotted in the footage. "There are shots of me doing the
Limbo, smoking a cigarette and climbing in through the window," she
says. "It was one of the most wonderful times of my life."

Remarkably, one day she noticed her City College professor walking
past the building. "I put my master's thesis in the bucket and handed
it down," Payne explains. "I'm not sure what she thought about that,
but I got my degree."

Payne was not among the 700 Columbia occupiers subsequently arrested;
many of them were beaten by police as the cameras rolled.

Newsreel's "Summer '68" is a pastiche of organizational efforts
leading up to August's Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
where police night sticks were wielded against activists, journalists
and delegates. Payne was there, shooting as she ran from tear gas and
cops in pursuit.

She also accompanied her pals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin ­ leaders
of the mischievous Yippies (Youth International Party) ­ when they
purchased an Illinois farmer's pig to use in a satirical campaign:
Pigasus for President. "After a few days, the ASPCA (American Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) took it away," Payne says.

Dave Dellinger, a respected proponent of nonviolent disobedience who
moved to Vermont in the 1980s, is seen at several points in the film.
He tells a Boston crowd: "New England will once again be an
inspiration for a second and badly-needed American revolution."

As melee took place throughout the city, he contended: "Chicago is a
concentration camp."

Along with Hoffman, Rubin and other fellow organizers, Dellinger and
John Froines ­ who would soon begin teaching chemistry at Goddard
College in Plainfield ­ were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot
in Chicago. Those convictions were eventually overturned.

April 23, 1968 ­ Rick Winston came down with strep throat and
couldn't participate in the Columbia occupation or subsequent strike,
though he was then a junior there. He soon transferred to the
University of California at Berkeley, another campus in turmoil.

"I was rank-and-file," says Winston, 60, now owner of the Savoy
Theater in Montpelier. "Whenever they held a march, I'd march. I had
friends in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but I've never
been a joiner."

As unrest spread to colleges across the country, "it was like a
prairie fire," says Winston, who lives in Adamant. "When Robert
Kennedy was killed so soon after Martin Luther King, a friend of mine
said: 'This is the end of America.'"

April 1968 ­ Bill Kinzie of Ferrisburgh was earning $600 a week as
the drummer with a "Top 40-type' band playing a club in Palm Springs,
Calif. "I never dressed the way they did," he says. "After about six
months, I was told: 'We're going to Vegas, and you're not.'"

A year earlier, in Los Angeles, Kinzie was a production assistant for
The Cowsills, a family of pop singers and the premier act on the MGM
record label.

While the band that fired him apparently went on to Vegas anonymity,
Kinzie was able to relocate to Vermont in 1969 thanks to his savings
from the Palm Springs gig.

Although now the senior media producer for Lindblad Expeditions, an
international eco-tourism company, at 60 he can count decades of
performing blue-eyed soul, rhythm-and-blues and jazz on his resume.

"We were too late to be beatniks, but we weren't really hippies,"
Kinzie says, describing the musicians of his generation. "We were the
people the hippies wanted to look like."

April 4, 1968 ­ Joe Moore of Burlington had already played sax for
Wilson Pickett, Junior Walker and other major talents when he took a
steady job with Lloyd Simms and the Untouchables, a soul revue that
toured North America. Right after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, the band witnessed riots while performing at clubs or hotels in
Detroit and Asbury Park, N.J.

"I stayed way from the violence and the drugs that were around then
because I didn't want to kill myself," Moore, 59, says. "I wanted to
become famous.""

He also wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, even though his own hair
had been damaged by processing. So Moore purchased "a huge Afro wig"
and tied a scarf wrapped around his head. "Nobody else realized," he
says. "But it would get so hot at gigs, I'd take the wig off, and
they'd be stunned."

Since moving to Vermont in 1975, Moore has become adept in several
other genres, including jazz, rock and Irish music. His Celtic alter
ego: "I go by Jo' Mo', the Irish Bro'."

April 4, 1968 ­ Tony Whedon, 66, found himself in the whirlwind of
civil rights issues at a key moment. "I was teaching at Morehouse
College, Martin Luther King's alma mater in Atlanta, was very much
engaged in the 'movement' as it spiraled out of control away from
nonviolence," he says.

Now a professor of creative writing and literature at Johnson State
College, Whedon re-examined those experiences in "A Language Dark
Enough," his 2004 book of autobiographical essays. The chapter about
King's death is titled "Liberal White Boy.'

June 6, 1968 ­ Jay Craven of Peacham, a poetry-loving Pennsylvania
peacenik who had been campaigning door-to-door on behalf of Robert
Kennedy's presidential bid, graduated from high school one day after
the assassination. In August, he intended to reach Chicago in time
for the Democratic convention, but his 1954 Renault broke down on the way.

At Boston University that fall, finances dictated that Craven take
ROTC to get a break on tuition. During his first day on campus, an
AWOL soldier took sanctuary in the chapel and students maintained a
weeklong vigil.

"I spoke at a rally about the war and never showed up for ROTC,"
Craven says. "I lost the financial aid but found myself."

His newly minted sense of identity was tested when plainclothes cops,
who were breaking up a protest about General Electric's military
contracts, clubbed him. Craven ran afoul of the law again while
selling charcoal-broiled, all-beef hot dogs with wheat germ, sliced
carrots and green peppers from a cart on school grounds.

"I took the business over when the guy who was doing it got busted
for competing with the university food service," explains Craven, now
a 56-year-old filmmaker. "My logo was a clenched fist holding a hot
dog. Within a week, I was selling 2,000 a day ­ which made up for
losing that ROTC money. After seven or eight weeks, I got busted."

August 1968 ­ Lou Andrews was raising two young daughters and working
to put her husband through college in Wisconsin. He went to Chicago
to protest at the Democratic convention; she remained home with the
girls. "I was laden down with children and a little bit out of it,"
she says of her own political awareness.

Andrews was then still two years away from an epiphany ­ women's
liberation, to be exact ­ at a rural commune in Franklin called
Earthworks. "Suddenly, people were paying attention to me for the
first time in my life," she marvels.

The hardscrabble existence was daunting. "We had 300 acres, but it
was a small house with four couples," explains Andrews, 64, a
Burlington human resources specialist. "The kids all slept in the
same room. We tore out the telephone and washing machine. Diapers
were done by hand. We grew veggies, farmed with horses, slaughtered
our own meat and sold maple syrup."

These chores did not come naturally to people who hailed from cities
and suburbs. "We learned a lot from neighbors willing to converse
with us," Andrews acknowledges. "Others in town were terrified."

August 1968 ­ Along with another friend, in 1967 author Ray Mungo and
poet Verandah Porche co-founded the Liberation News Service in
Washington, D.C. A year later, they launched a legendary Vermont
commune: Packer Corners in Guilford also became known as "Total Loss
Farm," the title of his 1970 Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir about
the experience. Some of the down payment for their ramshackle abode
with no indoor plumbing came from fellow communard Mary Jezer's bar
mitzvah money.

Mungo, 62, explains in an e-mail: "At some point we got completely
burned out and longed for a place deep in the woods, where we could
find peace and brotherhood ­ and raise a few vegetables ­ and maybe a
pot plant or two."

The California-based Mungo, who left Packer Corners in 1971, once
wrote that "Vermont is a place of strong white magick, a place
friendly to adventurers of the mind and body."

Porche still lives at Total Loss Farm, the not-quite-utopia where she
landed with a sense of hopelessness after Dr. King was assassinated.
In one of her poems, she describes their communal experiment long ago
as "famous, formless, flaky, together."

The past is never past, of course, and many of those who lived
through 1968 may spend part of 2008 revisiting the disparate joys and
sorrows of a year that still resonates for them.

From Aug. 22 to 24 this summer, Ray Mungo and his fellow communards
are holding a 40th anniversary reunion at Total Loss Farm. "We were a
bunch of idealistic, searching and also tired youths struggling for
peace and equality and an end to the war in Vietnam," he muses.

The same month, Jim Lockwood will travel to Virginia to meet up with
Marine buddies who made it back from Khe Sanh. "Wars are stupid to
begin with, but fantastic for big business," he theorizes. "Even
though the economy booms, I'd still like to think we go for a noble cause."

Upcoming film

Steven Spielberg is planning a movie about the raucous trial of the
Chicago 7, starring Sacha Baron Cohen of "Borat" fame as Abbie
Hoffman and Philip Seymour Hoffman as defense attorney William Kunstler.

This project intrigues Maria Garcia, a Goddard student in the early
1970s when attended a party there with comedian Dick Gregory,
Kunstler, and defendants Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger and John
Froines, her chemistry professor.

"Gregory was at Goddard to perform, and to push his candidacy for
president," Garcia writes in an e-mail from Manhattan, where she is a
magazine film critic and novelist. "I mostly remember listening in
rapt attention to every word Dellinger had to say. He was a quietly
charismatic guy ... and we would have listened to him had he been
reciting menus."

During a debate about the extreme tactics of the Weather Underground,
Garcia continues, "Kunstler, always a humanist, expressed grief and
then said: 'In a free society, it's always sad when anything has to
go underground.'"

Later that decade, he defended a young West German woman whose
underground existence ended at the Vermont border. Kristina Berster
had crossed over illegally from Quebec in July 1978. Kunstler tried
to tackle the immigration issue, at one point telling the court in
Burlington that his own Eastern European grandparents "came over here
on a pickle boat."

His bigger challenge was the FBI's assertion that Berster, allegedly
a terrorist wanted in her homeland, had conspired with U.S. citizens.
The jury rejected that claim and found her guilty only of lying to
Customs officials.

During Berster's four-month trial, snipers were positioned on the
roof of the downtown Federal Building and the judge had a 24-hour
bodyguard. After applying for political asylum, in October 1979 she
voluntarily went back to Germany, where the charges of "criminal
association with known terrorists' were dropped.

A mom for peace

"By 1968 everybody was opposed to the war," says Kevin Graffagnino,
executive director of the Vermont Historical Society in Barre.

That partisan perspective may be due to the fact that, while he was
growing up in Montpelier, his single mother had been an early and
lone champion of many seemingly lost causes. Myrtle Lane, who died in
2006, "just burst out of being a 1950s housewife," Graffagnino says.

In an era when public school students had to "march around like
soldiers as part of phys ed," he adds, Lane did not want her two sons
"contributing to the military-industrial complex."

From ban-the-bomb to give-peace-a-chance, she was unafraid to
express her views. Consequently, Lane often became the target of
intolerance, such as when some local boys threw snowballs at her. An
editorial in New Hampshire's conservative Manchester Union-Leader
newspaper praised their actions.

"Most people we knew told her, 'Don't make waves,'" says Graffagnino,
who remembers classmates picking fights with him because of the
family's notoriety. "My mother was years ahead of her time. She
wanted to get America to a better place."

.

COINTELPRO case against Black Panthers

COINTELPRO case against Black Panthers

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_michael__080224_omaha_police_detecti.htm

by Michael Richardson
February 24, 2008

Omaha Police detective's "evidence" in Black Panther murder case
disappeared without a trace raising perjury question

The tragic bombing murder of Omaha Police patrolman Larry Minard on
August 17, 1970 triggered a series of events, monitored by J. Edgar
Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that led to
the ultimate release of Minard's confessed killer, Duane Peak, after
several years of juvenile detention.

Peak's brokered testimony, which bought his freedom, implicated two
leaders of Omaha's Black Panther chapter, the National Committee to
Combat Fascism. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, formerly David
Rice, had been under surveillance by Hoover's secret, and illegal,
COINTELPRO operation designed to "disrupt" the Black Panthers, were
named by Peak as his co-conspirators. Both Poindexter and Langa were
convicted of murder and are incarcerated at the maximum security
Nebraska State Penitentiary serving life sentences. Both men deny
any involvement in the crime.

Although Peak was the prosecution's murderous star witness, the
testimony of Omaha detective Robert Pheffer was also critical to the
case as he corroborated the account of detective Jack Swanson's claim
to have found dynamite in Langa's basement at the trial. Pheffer has
since contradicted his own trial testimony and now claims, under
oath, that he found the dynamite raising a question of perjury,
either at the trial or at a May 2007 hearing before Douglas County
District Court Judge Russell Bowie who was considering a new trial
request by Poindexter.

When confronted by Poindexter's attorney, Robert Barle, over the
discrepancy between his 1971 testimony at trial and his 2007 sworn
testimony before Bowie, Pheffer became noticeably flustered and
denied his own trial testimony claiming "the court reporter, somebody
got it wrong."

Dynamite never appeared in any evidence photos of Langa's house and
only first shows up in the trunk of a police squad car in any photograph.

Pheffer's new claim to have found the dynamite brings into question
other "evidence" discovered by the Omaha detective in the course of
the investigation. Pheffer has testified to the discovery of other
bomb-making supplies at two locations--claims not supported by the
trial record or any police reports. Thus, the question of Pheffer's
credibility hinges on whether or not police destroyed or hid evidence
of bomb-making equipment, allegedly found by Pheffer, at two
different search locations.

At Langa's house, where Pheffer now claims he found dynamite in the
basement, Pheffer testified to Judge Bowie that he also found in a
bedroom closet three gray Samsonite attaché cases with wires sticking
out of them. Pheffer claims after finding the three attaché cases a
rope was passed through the handles and "lead it out the bedroom
through the front room, outside the steps" where the cases were
opened when they did not detonate. Pheffer's dramatic discovery of
the wired attaché cases was not mentioned at trial nor were the
purported bomb parts introduced as evidence. Pheffer didn't even
bother to enter the attache cases into the inventory list of the
search. Nor did any other officer. In fact, Pheffer is the sole
witness to the "evidence" he now claims to have found that somehow
disappeared without a trace.

At NCCF headquarters, in a search the same day, Pheffer found more
"evidence" with another attaché case with wires. Pheffer did testify
about that purported discovery in 1971. Pheffer testified he found,
"an attache case in the front room with wires and a clothespin
attached to it." Yet once again, Pheffer failed to log in the
attaché case or even record it on the search inventory list. No
other officers filed reports or testified about the case and it was
not produced at trial as evidence despite Pheffer's claims.

From the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln writes Ed
Poindexter, "Robert Pheffer said at our trial that when he and
company raided NCCF on 24th Street that he saw several unarmed
suitcase bombs in various stages of development….Pheffer was lying
right in front of the jury."

"Needless to say, said bomb finding did not exist on the record; that
is, they were not on the inventory list of items confiscated from HQ,
and no one else appeared to have seen them, and of course they did
not exist in evidence. Yet he went totally unchallenged in the
courtroom when he blurted this out."

"I've been harping on this for umpteen years, but for some reason, no
one likes to talk about it."

In a recent prison interview Langa commented on Pheffer's conflicting
testimony, "We come up to the present and here is Pheffer talking
about we found a box of dynamite in David Rice's house facing next to
the furnace."

"I'm thinking about this. Well, if a person was going to keep his
dynamite next to the furnace and I imagine it is to keep it warm,
then it would also make sense that if there were blasting caps in the
house then it would probably have been a good thing to have these
kept like on top of the stove to be consistent with this kind of
absurdity. But it was a make."

FBI agents assigned to COINTELPRO worked closely with Omaha Police
investigating the Black Panthers. One of the techniques common to
COINTELPRO operations was creating false documents and making false
statements to "disrupt" the Panthers.

Judge Bowie ruled Pheffer's contradictory dynamite testimony did not
matter and did not address the four attaché cases with wires that
have vanished which Pheffer claims to have found at two locations
when he denied Poindexter's bid for a new trial in September.

Now the Nebraska Supreme Court must grapple with Pheffer's
contradictory testimony and his missing "evidence" which has left
gaping holes in the case against the two imprisoned Black
Panthers. A date for the decision in Poindexter's appeal has not been set.
---

Michael Richardson is a freelance writer based in Boston. Richardson
writes about politics, election law, human nutrition, ethics, and
music. Richardson is also a political consultant on ballot access.

.

The Left Offers Obama a Strategy [Tom Hayden]

The Left Offers Obama a Strategy

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C6957142-8F26-46F7-A98A-A6475353DA4D

By Ronald Radosh
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 25, 2008

What is Barack Obama's foreign policy? As it becomes clear that Obama
is likely to win the Democratic nomination, both Hillary Clinton and
John McCain are attacking him for a lack of foreign policy experience
and for proposals he has made that appear to make him appear rather
naïve. Is he going to retreat from confronting our nation's enemies,
or is he going to be tough when he has to be? What advice will he
heed? Now, he has been offered advice for his campaign by none other
than Tom Hayden, once the young lion of the New Left and the
anti-Vietnam War movement.

Tom Hayden is, of course, no longer a major public figure with great
influence. His words, however, resonate with scores of activists as
well as liberal intellectuals, who will take them to heart and seek
to up the ante on the Obama campaign. Hayden, who clearly views Iraq
as another Vietnam, is seeking to move Obama to adopt the
prescriptions of the most left-wing sectors of the Democratic Party
constituency.

Pointing to Obama's victory speech in Houston last week, Hayden has
noted that Obama has shifted his position, to one of calling for
withdrawal of all American troops in the first year of his
administration, not over a lengthier time span. Does Obama mean it?
Hayden has one suggestion: the Left and antiwar forces must hold
Obama to his word. More importantly, he argues that sentiment among
Obama's base "is running strongly enough to push the candidate
forward to a stronger commitment," strong enough to move him away
from the words in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, in which Obama
wrote that a complete withdrawal was a matter of "imperfect judgment"
and "best guesses."

It is clear from Mr. Hayden that his supposition - and that of the
Left he represents - (his comments appear in The Nation magazine
website) believe that the United States should not be involved on a
"so-called war on terrorism," a phony concept developed by evil and
strong neoconservatives who falsely believe there is something called
"Islamofascism." Obviously believing that there is not such force in
the world, he argues that its advocates, including Senator John
McCain, favor a "permanent war against Muslim radicals" that is
really about one thing: "American access to oil."

What worries Mr. Hayden is that in a contest between McCain and
Obama, John McCain's war record, combined with his Senate experience,
makes him a "formidable" advocate of tough steps to protect American
national security, something Mr. Hayden sees as a danger to the
antiwar movement. His own prescription for withdrawal of troops are
thus threatened by General Petraeus' forthcoming April testimony
before Congress, in which it is expected he will report on the
favorable outcome of the surge, and urge the nation to stay the course.

Mr. Hayden thus sees Petraeus not as a honest soldier reporting the
truth of what he has accomplished, but as a "de facto surrogate for
McCain" that will force Barack Obama to have to respond without
retreating from his promise of early withdrawal. He says, rightfully,
that those he dubs the neoconservative opposition will oppose Obama
by challenging him for wanting "to pull the plug on Iraq just when
the tide is turning." And why shouldn't McCain do just that? Does Mr.
Hayden think that the United States, should in fact, pull the plug
precisely when the situation in Iraq is improving?

Ironically, Mr. Hayden condemns William Kristol for arguing in the
pages of the New York Times and The Weekly Standard that the
Democratic Party has become "the puppet of the antiwar groups."
Clearly, Mr. Kristol may have been premature. Mr. Hayden seems to
want now to prove Kristol both prescient and right. Mr. Hayden fears
that all of this will lead to McCain successfully forging a new
center-Right coalition, leaving the Democrats only with the moderate
and antiwar left-wing. The Republicans will have, he notes, the aid
of Senator Joe Lieberman working as an ally who would also make
inroads among the Jewish community.

Nevertheless, Tom Hayden is optimistic. He believes Americans will
also see Afghanistan as a quagmire not susceptible to a military
solution; Pakistanis showing they do not want to be pawns in an
American war, and that a fight with the Taliban or al-Qaeda is
nothing but a "bottomless battle." His fear: that Obama will ignore
all this, and seek to "prove his credentials as a militarist or face
being painted as another Democrat too weak to be Commander-in-Chief."
His solution: the forces of the Left and the peace movement wage
"open political and intellectual battle" against "the neoconservative agenda."

Should Barack Obama listen to the Left's advice, he will only push
the Democratic Party back to the age of McGovernite isolationism, and
contrary to the assertion of Tom Hayden, make the campaign much
easier for John McCain. If the Democrats hope to actually win the
presidency, the worst thing they could do is to take advice from Tom Hayden.
---

Ronald Radosh, Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of
New York, is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

.