James Brown's Gate

James Brown's Gate

http://www.counterpunch.org/scaramella03082008.html

March 8-9, 2008
By MARK SCARAMELLA

"On April 5, 1968, less than 24 hours after Martin Luther King's
assassination, the city of Boston was in a state of turmoil. When
James Brown arrived at the airport to play his already scheduled show
he waswarned that the mayor, fearing further unrest among the African
American community, planned to cancel the show. Brown assured the
mayor that the consequences would be much worse if the concert was
called off. Not only did the show go on as planned, public television
station WGBH broadcast the whole thing. It's an incredible historical
document and a fantastic performance by James Brown, who dedicated
the show to Dr. King's memory and brought the raw emotions within
himself and his community to a searing head. At one point the
restless crowd swarms the stage and amidst the mayhem James Brown
tells the cops to stay back and calmly talks the crowd back into
their seats. 'This isn't how black people should act.' Riveting viewing."

CounterPuncher Kevin Alexander Gray made a reference to this very
brief version of Brown's Boston Garden concert in a recent
contribution to the newsletter. Such brief references are common:
James Brown, fearlessly going on with a great show, calming the
restless crowd, saving the City of Boston. (A DVD of the high-energy
performance is for sale.) There's no disputing that Brown's
appearance calmed the crowd in theterrible hours following the tragic
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There's also no disputing
that the mayor feared "further unrest," to put it mildly. Nor is
there any dispute that Brown's performance, as usual, was riveting.

But the backstory is much more interesting and amazing. It's
chronicled in detail in J. Anthony Lucas's great 1986 book "Common
Ground,"the classic story of liberal Boston's doomed attempt to
desegregate its public schools by forced busing. Common Ground weaves
the stories of three prototypical Boston families -- Yankee, Black
and Irish -- with fascinating profiles of Boston's leading citizens
at the time and their roles in the busing fiasco sprinkled throughout.

Early in Common Ground Lukas describes newly-elected Mayor Kevin
White'sinitial handling of the aftermath of the King assassination in
Boston. On the advice by his young top aide Barney Frank, White
restrainedBoston's official response to loud crowds of blacks in the
streets in those post-assassination days on grounds that sending in
cops might well makethings worse. To avoid property damage and
potential violence, Mayor Whiteencouraged black leaders and ministers
to do what they could to keep the raw emotions from exploding.

White, a reformist liberal who had narrowly defeated populist
anti-busing Irishwoman Louise Day Hicks for mayor, was trying hard to
liveup to his campaign promises about "profound and massive change"
in public attitudes toward race in Boston. He appointed several
blacks to top cityposts, but had not yet made many inroads in
Boston's black population, centered, predominantly, in Roxbury.

When the city announced that James Brown's previously scheduled
concertwould have to be canceled, disk jockey James "Early" Byrd,
warned the mayorthat if Brown's concert was canceled thousands of
young blacks would be"pretty pissed off," and the potential for riots
in the heart of downtownBoston would increase. Black city councilman
(and, later, NAACP GeneralCounsel) Tom Atkins suggested that the
concert be reinstated and that it becarried on the local PBS station,
along with an appeal for (black) kids tostay home and watch it on TV for free.

Neither Mayor White nor Barney Frank had ever heard of James
Brown.White kept referring to Brown as "James Washington." Frank
thought Brown was a football player.

When PBS agreed to air Brown's concert, Byrd, who was also Brown's
Boston area representative, strenuously objected: "You can't do that.
Jamesis in New York to tape a show. They're giving him a pile of
money, but onthe condition he doesn't do any other television on the
East Coast until after it airs. You put this thing on TV here and
you'll violate James'scontract. He isn't going to go for that."
Besides the contract problems, Byrd pointed out that if the concert
wasbroadcast on PBS, "...it's going to kill our gate. We're going to
take abath on this thing. Who's going to take care of James?"Atkins
told White that the City of Boston would have to guarantee Brown's
gate. After some heated disputes, White agreed on the condition that
the deal remain secret. "If word ever gets out we underwrote a
goddamn rock star with city money, we'll both [White and Atkins] be
dead politically."

But Brown himself nixed the deal: "No way. They'll sue me in New
York."Atkins pleaded with Brown, arguing that it was the only way to
"save this city." By this time, people had heard the concert was
cancelled and had already begun demanding ticket refunds.

Brown and his staff did some financial calculations and concluded tha
tto put on the show under these conditions the city would have to
pony up $60k (Several hundred thousand in today's dollars) to cover
Brown's gate. Lucas describes Mayor White's predictable reaction:
"'Sixty thousand!' the Mayor exclaimed. Martin Luther King Jr. had
just been killed and here were two black guys putting the squeeze on
him for $60,000. One of them, he'd been told, was the highest paid
black performer in America who made $2 million a year, had a
Victorian mansion, a Rolls Royce, two Cadillacs, two radio stations,
a record company, a production staff of forty-two [and his own Lear
Jet], and now he was worrying about the gate from one measly concert!"

But time was short and White didn't have many options, so he
reluctantly agreed, and the concert went on. As expected, the
audience was fairly small, about 2,000. Introducing Brown, Atkins
told the crowd that Brown was donating a record and $2,500 to Mayor
White's Martin Luther King Trust Fund.

After introducing an amusingly uncomfortable Mayor White to the
mostly black audience as "a swingin' cat," and "together," Mr.
Dynamite did his incomparable thing.

No serious riots materialized. Most of Roxbury's residents stayed
home and watched Brown for free on TV. Some say Brown's amazing
Boston Garden performance catapulted him into the musical big-leagues.

Three days later it came time to pay Brown's gate.Boston City
Attorney Herb Gleason argued, "We [the City] never really gave the
guarantee." Besides, the City of Boston's treasury didn't have
$60,000 sitting around uncommitted.

But Atkins insisted that a deal is a deal. If Brown didn't get
hismoney, Atkins warned, he'd go public with the whole affair and
everybodywould look bad. (If we had public servants like this
nowadays, more would get done. Not only can reformers in official
positions get lots ofconcessions from their mainstream counterparts
by threatening exposure, they can, but seldom do, actually expose and
blow the proverbial lid off of the corruption.)

Mayor White was again forced to get creative and go to the only
sourceof money available to him: The Vault, an unofficial but highly
influentialgroup of Boston's wealthiest Brahmen.

Originally formed to deal with Boston's civic bankruptcy in the 50s,
themembers of The Vault met regularly at the top floor of the Boston
Safe Deposit and Trust Company and included most of Boston's biggest
corporatechieftains, including its erstwhile head Ralph Lowell, scion
of the textile magnate the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named after.

White boldly asked The Vault for a million dollars. Lowell said
thatsounded a tad high. White then added, "the city is at stake here,
sowhatever you think you can do..." The Vault soon contacted the
Mayor's office and said $100,000 was on account.

Vault member Gilbert 'Eph' Catlin later explained that the
Mayor"persuaded us that if we didn't come up with the money, the
blacks weregoing to burn the city down. So we thought we better do
something."The pragmatic members of The Vault obviously saw the $100k
as an insurance policy of sorts.

The $100k became the seed money for Mayor White's "Special
Fund,"controlled by Barney Frank. Brown got $15k from the city, not
the original$60k, because the city put pressure on the Boston Garden
to waive its shareof the receipts. The rest of the insurance money
went to various local liberal outreach and community aid projects.

But, as Lucas points out, the Special Fund also "secretly paid a
smallcadre of black informants and operatives who, had they been on
the official payroll, might have been accused of 'selling out' to the
establishment."The Godfather of Soul certainly deserves credit for
helping keep Boston from going up in flames. But Lucas's more
complete version of the storymakes Brown come off more as a sharp
businessman than a public-spirited citizen who wanted to help his people.

Lucas's fascinating, well-researched story has broader significance,
too. How many other liberal outfits which on the surface appear to
behelping philanthropies or public benefits, are secretly funded and
used bythe wealthy and the political establishment, sometimes even
unknowingly, tokeep an eye out for­and control, if necessary­ rabble
rousers? Or have such subtle forms of intelligence gathering gone
into the dustbin of history now that corporations and government
agencies have easy access to everybody's communications?
---

Mark Scaramella is the managing editor of the Anderson Valley
Advertiser and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. He can be
reached at: themaj@pacific.net

.

Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context

What Was Forbidden Then is Promoted Now

Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context

http://www.counterpunch.org/valdes03292008.html

By NELSON P. VALDÉS
March 29 / 30, 2008

"Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be ours."
-- José Martí, Our America

Tom Miller recently published in the Washington Post (02/17/08) an
opinion piece entitled "As Fidel Fades From the Scene." [1] It is not
the intention of this commentary to address the different issues the
author raises. However, at one point the articles refers to an
unidentified Cuban who states, "I used to listen to the Beatles on a
cassette player in the bushes down by the Almendares." Why were the
Beatles forbidden? Was it prudishness? Was it an expression of
cultural and historical context? Yet, Cubans learned the songs of
other foreigners such as Daniel Vigglieti [Uruguay], Mercedes Sosa
[Argentina] , Violeta Parra [Chile], and many Latin American and
African groups.

In all fairness, Tom Miller's article mentioned the Beatles just in
passing, but superficial impressions can be long lasting. Moreover,
it is true that the Cuban authorities did not permit the Beatles to
be known. A similar situation was also confronted by the very Cuban
"canción protesta" movement initiated by Silvio Rodríguez at about
the same time. [2]

Obviously I cannot write a parallel history of the Beatles and Cuba.
But below are at least some moments that should be taken into
consideration. The intention is not to rationalize nor justify a
banning policy, but to attempt to put things in some historical frame
in order to understand. Then we can discuss matters in a more
discerning fashion.

While the US experienced "British Invasion" with the Beatles' music,
Cuba had experienced a real military invasion. While teenage American
girls experienced metaphorical orgasm by watching Ringo, Cuban
teenagers were engaging in the literacy campaign [1961] or getting
ready for a possible invasion as a result of the Missile Crisis
[1962]. In August 1963 while Swan Records released "She Loves You," -
Operation Mongoose and AM/Lash were preparing the assassination of
Fidel Castro and a wave of sabotage.

In 1963 American Bandstand's Dick Clark made snide remarks about the
Beatles' long hair, while longhaired and unshaven Latin American
guerrillas were setting up camp in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru,
Guatemala and Mexico. The Cubans, of course, were involved. These
were confrontational moments.

The 1964 presidential campaign in the United States saw the emergence
of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater who promised to forcefully
liberate the island. While American teenagers were singing and
dancing to "I want to hold your hand" while the CIA sought to cut
Fidel Castro's throat.

From 1964 to 1966 Cubans were learning about the national liberation
struggles in Africa, the revolution in Algeria, and the Turcios Lima
guerrillas in Guatemala or Peruvian peasants in arms. The 1 million
Indonesian communists massacred in 1964 outraged political leaders in
Havana and left them with no patience while the revolutionary regime
battled the growing internal bureaucracy..

The escalation of the war in Vietnam (1965), the rift between the
Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (1963-1966) did not
leave much room for music appreciation with help from Liverpool.
Moreover, American teenagers were becoming a mass market for "I Saw
Her Standing There" while in Havana people discussed how to take a
country out of underdevelopment. Then there was also the problem of
defeating 600 guerrilla groups armed by the Central Intelligence
Agency and operating in the Escambray Mountains. In New York DJs
spoke of "Golden Hits" but in the Dominican Republic US Marines were
landing and hitting towns with their overwhelming fire power. And the
US air force had just begun bombing North Vietnam.

Cubans were baffled when the Queen of England appointed the Beatles
"Members of the Order of the British Empire" circa June 1965; by then
Che had begun the efforts to spark continental revolutions in Africa
and Latin America began to confront a wave of military coup d'etats.

In those days, the Americans certainly could not lecture the Cubans
about matters of music appreciation. When the Beatles finally began
to address the necessity of giving "peace a chance" [a Plastic One
Band project] and even criticized US policy in Southeast Asia,
criticism of them began in the United States. When Lennon made the
passing remark that they were more popular than Jesus, the Bible belt
reacted. Radio stations classified the Beatles as anti-American and a
boycott ensued. The Beatles had to choose between sales and political
convictions. They ended up apologizing for their views on politics
and religion to the American rightwing. The Cubans found the whole
matter disconcerting.

Granted, by 1966, the Beatles had turned against US interventionism.
The Beatles were not a phenomenon that had a popular impact on Cuba,
then. Yet, Silvio Rodríguez in the late 1960s had a TV program called
'Mientras Tanto' where he actually defended the Beatles' music and
songs. Silvio was criticized and lost his TV spot. [3]

The Beatles' transcendentalism and Eastern mysticism (circa 1968)
alienated Cuban radicals and revolutionaries as well. However, Cuban
musicians were impressed by their freedom of composition. But in
those days, Cubans had more serious concerns than imagining a yellow
submarine when the real ones were just 12 miles away, and the only
"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" they knew were the U-2s and
Blackbirds that entered their air space in order to clock the Cuban
Air command and control structures.

Granted, the Beatles musical contributions, then, ought to have been
judged by the Cuban public, without any political litmus test
attached. Moreover, there was a lack of sophistication in the making
of cultural policy and a facile identification of North American and
British pop culture with ideological diversionism. The political and
ideological shortcomings were exacerbated by a surrounded fortress
mentality. But, cultural and political nationalism also shapes the
history of countries. The student revolts in 1968 in Mexico and Paris
were not identified with the music of the times, but with the death of Che.

At play, during those years, was the concerted effort to construct a
revolutionary ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The Cuban political,
economic and cultural leaderships assumed that in order to overcome
underdevelopment it was imperative to foster an ideology that would
be the revolutionary equivalent of the Protestant ethic. Work hard,
consume little, defer gratification, invest in further development.
The early stages of mass consumerism was considered an external
threat. The Beatles were perceived as the vanguard of selfish
consumerism and not as revolutionaries who were musicians. Or as Ned
Sublette has noted in a comment about this article, "while
anglo-americans were pretending that singers were revolutionaries,
real revolutionaries were facing challenges of basic survival." [4]

Despite the imposed restrictions, the Beatles had an impact on Cuban
music then. (Juan Formell , Silvio Rodríguez and others have
acknowledged as much). [5] Today, the Beatles' influence is found
everywhere in Cuba. Havana has a park remembering John Lennon, there
is also La Caverna de los Beatles in the city of Holguin where old
timers reminisce about the group, listen and sing. Abel Prieto,
Minister of Culture, has written a novel "El vuelo del gato" where
the presence of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis
Joplin and Simon and Garfunkel appear in numerous pages. Prieto has
done, as well, a drawing of John Lennon.

What was forbidden then is now promoted. [6] Videos of Beatles'
concerts are presently shown on prime time Cuban television. In June
2006, a Cuban musical group performed "Hey Jude" in London to the
sound of Conga percussion. There is an extraordinary album made with
all Cuban artists singing Beatle's songs but with Cuban rhythms. [7]

On December 8, 2000, Fidel Castro unveiled a bronze statue of John
Lennon sitting on a bench at a Havana park while the background music
played Lennon's rendition of "All You Need Is Love."

In fact, the Beatles have been thoroughly appropriated and Cubanized
even by children. Last August at the Karl Marx Theater the children's
company La Colmenita performed Sleeping Beauty to the music of the
Beatles. The same group will perform at the 10th Festival of
Children's Theater in Moscow. The festival has been organized by
UNICEF. Children from five continents will participate. The Cuban
children will perform in Spanish, English and Russian a work
entitled: "Cinderella ... according to the Beatles. " [8]
---
Nelson P. Valdés is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
---
This essay originally appear in Cuba-L Analysis.
---
Notes

[1] 02/17/08 - Washington Post - As Fidel Fades From the Scene [by Tom Miller]

[2] The Beatles were not the only ones not allowed in Cuba then. One
could add other groups as well such as the Rolling Stones, or Cuban
musicians who left Cuba.

[3] The banning of the Beatles has been attributed to Papito Serguera
who headed the Instituto Cubano de Radio Television. However, there
were others in positions of authority and power who considered
English language music a form of ideological diversionism. See:
Ernesto Juan Castellanos, John Lennon en La Habana with a little help
from my friends.Ediciones Unión, 2005 [See the section Papito
Serguera - "Los Beatles no estuvieron prohibidos en Cuba"]. A portion
of the chapter can be found at: http://puntocubano.wordpress.com/

[4] Email from Ned Sublette to Nelson Valdés, February 19, 2008 8:57 AM

[5] Domingo Amuchastegui has written a balanced assessment of those
days. See: 08/26/07 - Cuba-L Analysis (Albuquerque) - NI QUINQUENIO
GRIS NI DECENIO NEGRO, SINO INTERMINABLE LUCHA DE IDEAS Y DIVERSIDAD
EN LA CUBA REVOLUCIONARIA

[6] 01/25/08 - Juventud Rebelde (Habana) - Los Van Van's Juan Formell
Still Has the Last Word; 03/12/05 - La Jiribilla - Conversando con
Silvio Rodríguez [by Marta Valdés]

[7] See: "Here Comes ... el Son: Songs of the Beatles with a Cuban
Twist," reviewed by Jacira Castro.

[8] 03/27/08 - Juventud Rebelde (Habana) - La Colmenita to
Participate in World Festival of Children's Theatre

I would like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions provided by
Jacira Castro, Louis Head, Robert Sandels, John Kirk, Domingo
Amuchastegui and Ned Sublette. Of course, any errors are my own.

.

The American Bard in New Orleans [Ed Sanders]

Ed Sanders' Katrina Epic

The American Bard in New Orleans

http://www.counterpunch.org/simmons03312008.html

By MICHAEL SIMMONS
March 31, 2008

Ed Sanders' language
advances
in a direction of production
which probably isn't even guessed at
That is, it takes the earth
to make a feather fall.
-- Charles Olson, 1964

They'd privatize your assholes
if they could get away with it!
-- Ed Sanders, 2007

There is a giant in our midst and his name is Edward Sanders.

Ed was born in 1939 in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved to New York
City in 1958 to attend NYU, from which he holds a degree in classics.
A lifelong activist and peacenik, he was arrested in 1961 attempting
to nonviolently body block a nuclear submarine. He survived to open a
bookstore/community center/underground film studio/crash pad called
the Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side. He published his own
poetry as well as international lit-wigs Allen Ginsberg, Norman
Mailer, Gregory Corso and East Village luminaries like Ted Berrigan
in a zine called Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts.

In late 1964, he and brother poet Tuli Kupferberg co-founded the
Fugs, the name borrowed from Mailer's fornicatory euphemism. Along
with drummer/comedian Ken Weaver and a rotating band of ace axemen,
the Fugs released sixteen or so albums of satirical, left-wing,
smutty, dope-addled rock and roll and mixed poetry and rock before
the Doors. The Fugs went on hiatus in 1969 until 1984 when he and
Tuli resuscitated the band with a stable and kick-ass line-up that
continues to record and perform.

Ed also wrote a harrowing reportage of the clan Manson (The Family),
novels (Tales of Beatnik Glory, the single greatest roman a clef
about the 1960s), poems, chapbooks, liner notes, etc. He and his wife
Miriam Sanders publish and edit the Woodstock Journal, currently
online, in which they serve as the nattering nabobs of their hometown
of Woodstock, NY. No avaricious real estate developer or profiteering
polluter goes unexamined in Woodstock thanks to the Sanders' efforts.
Obeying his own urgings to develop a school of Investigative Poetry,
he's working on a nine-volume America: A History in Verse, three of
which have been bound and pubbed and of which Volumes 1-5, the 20th
Century will soon be available on CD as well.

In his youth, Sanders had the vision of the social movement that both
cheerleaders and detractors refer to when they conjure the 1960s.
While most people may be unaware of the bigness of Ed Sanders' work,
they've not missed his colorful feathers that have graced our
landscape for decades. "Ed Sanders invented everything," our mutual
friend John Sinclair once told me. He's a Renaissance hyphenate and
one of the first public figures of his generation to live seamlessly
within the realms of politics, art and fun. In the process of
self-reinvention, he became the first cousin to Che Guevara's
paradigmatic New Man -- albeit thoroughly American and
anti-authoritarian. To list all of Ed's prodigious accomplishments,
we'd need more space than is available to us, given the reason I
write these words: to praise the man's contemporary recordings.

In particular, his latest: the masterful Poems For New Orleans . He
read and recorded his history of the Crescent City and Hurricane
Katrina with musical accompaniment over four months in 2007 and has
released it on Paris Records, a label on which proprietor Michael
Minzer has also released spoken word by Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Robert
Creeley and a collab twixt Corso and Marianne Faithfull. (It's also
available from Amazon.) Ed creates a people's history in the Zinn
tradition and his own American verse histories by tracing the story
of New Orleans through the eyes of the fictitious Lebage family, from
Lemoine to his great great great great granddaughter Grace.

The poet begins during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and we meet
a renegade Haitian revolutionary named Lemoine Lebage, a free man who
joins up with Andrew Jackson's ragtag army to kick the Brits out,
despite Old Hickory's slave-trading and mass Indian-murder.
Critically wounded on the battlefield, Lemoine is nursed back to life
by Marie Laveau (performed by Monique Moss), the legendary voodoo
queen. After victory, Lemoine remains and builds a home in 1830 on
"the edge of the French Quarter."

Sanders' describes the conditions of N.O. life in the first half of
the 19th Century, including the abundance of goods, which he notes
required cheap labor to acquire and distribute, enabling slavery.
"Stuff is the parcel of never-enough," he notes, referencing both
greed and all that's stampeded in its path, but also the productivity
that resulted from the thriving manufacturing and farming that built
America and is now gone with the search for even cheaper labor. With
New Orleans' emergence as a healthy, if woefully unequal, basin of
wealth, the citizens looked for ways to have fun, resulting in krewes
and parades and floats and balls and, most importantly, music. These
celebratory manifestations are what tourists pay to witness.

One of Ed's many fascinating practices is "speculative poetry." He
imagines William Blake visiting N.O. and muses that Mark Twain, who
did indeed go to Mardi Gras around 1860, meets up with the
extra-sensory Marie Laveau, who warns him of the impending bloodbath
that will be the Civil War. Time passes and we meet Lemoine's great
granddaughter Marie Lebage, who works on populist Louisiana governor
Huey Long's campaign. Ed threads greed from ancient Rome through Bush
II and notes that Long's mottos were SHARE OUR WEALTH and EVERY MAN A
KING and that he distributed free textbooks and instituted salaries
for black teachers equal to those of whites before he was assassinated.

A most powerful poem on this set is "Unearned Suffering," a spoken
word duet with Susan Cowsill. It's a chilling, stark paean to those
"born with anvils on their souls," the collaterally damaged of child
labor, dangerous work, and those who make "the calm life glow for a
few." The piece ends with a comparison of Hurricane Katrina to
"unearned suffering worthy of the days of Poseidon." He then invokes
the spirits of composer Charles Ives and poet Wallace Stevens, both
of whom had been in the insurance racket (who knew?), and begs them
to use their heavenly power to intercede on behalf of the storm's
swindled victims.

No Edward Sanders work would be wholly his without a dose of the
poet's unparalleled comic relief. Yeats wrote that "Gaiety
transfigured all that dread" and so it is with Sanders. He's the
expert at finding mirth amidst tragedy, a survival technique that
helps us retain our humanity under the worst circumstances. In Poems
For N.O., he resurrects Johnny Pissoff, a charming redneck goofball
who's appeared in Ed's oeuvre since 1968. Here, Pissoff and pals
liberate FEMA trailers in Hope, Arkansas (of all places) and hijack
them to New Orleans for the hurricane's homeless.

After a poem about the disappearance and reappearance of wildlife
during/after the deluge, comes "The Experience," so dire that "Help!
won't help." Speaking in the voice of a survivor who's lost
everything, Ed mournfully intones:

I am the guy whose legs tremble
on the edge of the ward

I'm Gone.

Yikes.

The poet evokes civil rights history through the deceptively simple
losses of Katrina:

I miss my ironing board

and the letters you used to send me
after we were beaten in Selma

Like Obama's recent speech, these thoughts in connection with Katrina
remind that we've come a ways, but we have many a ways to go.

Before the flood, Lemoine's descendant Grace Lebage (read/sung by
Troi Bechet) still lived in the home he'd built in 1830. It is washed
away and while her husband is arrested after shoplifting "a six pack
of Yoo Hoos and a loaf of nothing good" for sustenance, Grace is raped.

Ajax who raped Cassandra
in a burning Trojan temple
came to New Orleans
It was early September

This horrid tale is followed by "Ash Wednesday and Lent," a paean to
hope and atonement.

Grace Lebage, the symbol of post-Katrina resurrection, organizes a
house raising, then speaks the poet's words:

"I'm a survivor, better than Bush!
I have more healing zeal than he ever could
and there's a steel keychain around my anger!
I'm pregnant! I'm an American!
I dreamed a Better Dream!
Equity! Come on, Mr. And Ms. Moneybag Sam!
Let me see some breaches in your Money Dam!

Give me a house, America"

And she issues a warning: "Call it a down payment to ward off a Revolution!"

Ed ends with "Then Came The Storm: A Prayer For The Victims Of
Katrina," a combo of meticulously detailed, chronological, and
dramatic reportage, meteorology, and statistics (Stat-Po, perhaps)
and compelling lyric that traces the storm's birth, onslaught, and
wake. He pays loving trib to the "Crescent Flowerwhere jazz was the
art," lists the gaping disparity between those in power and those
"beneath the pov line," describes the supreme callousness that
preceded Katrina despite warnings, and the tourist industry

which brought in five billion dollar-bones a year

to the anarcho-bohemian-freedomistic Polis
where everyone tried their fastest licks
on the Carpe Diem guitar

"You recall how it was," Sanders reminds us and we do. Mayor Nagin's
(Ed calls him "The Nagster") refusal to authorize more than twelve
buses for evacuation, the mass of humanity trapped in the Superdome,
the bodies of humans and animals floating everywhere. The poet
compares this holocaust to "the dispersals of slavery." In closing,
he again inhabits the victims, asking:

Where's my wife? Where's my mother?
Where's my child? Where's my daddy?

and always the question, where is the path
that leads from the Gates of Wrath?

"No one yet has sung the way and even atheists pray for light of
day," the poet adds.

Edward Sanders' Poems For New Orleans is one of the great American
epic poems, on par with Whitman and Ginsberg. The New York Times'
about.com website named the recording The Best Poetry CD Of 2007,
saying: "Sandersutilizes his Investigative Poetry techniques and
aesthetic to give the full backstory to the unbearable tragedy still
in progress (!) in New Orleans." Good point. The ethnic cleansing
that Ed appropriately places in historical context is unfolding in
real time. We continue to pray for light of day.

Extra special note must be made of Co-Producer (with Minzer) and
composer Mark Bingham. His score is as masterful as the words, and as
all-encompassing: folk, ragtime, Dixieland, jazz, funk, stark
percussion, you name it. The music for "Ash Wednesday and Lent" is
particularly stunning: a bluesy, Mingusesque horn moan.

The totality of Poems For New Orleans speaks to the depth of Ed
Sanders' life, his art, his innovation. His no-limits empathy
throughout his lifetime and in this sorriest of epochs. His
insistence that we must all speak out and act. What happened to
compassion? is the question Ed demands an answer for. He's been on
the frontlines for almost half a century and his current work proves
that he's showing no signs of compromise. In the process of making
this demand, he magically transfigures the quest to end human
suffering into art.

The album contains 15 poems and all 52 from the Poems For N.O. cycle
will also be published in book form this coming August 19th by North
Atlantic Books. Sanders, who evidently does not sleep, also has
several other recent CDs available.

Thirsting For Peace - A brilliant solo home recording that features
Ed playing instruments of his own invention (he's the freaky Ben
Franklin), including the microtonal Microlyre, under sung tributes to
Goethe, Ginsberg, Satie, a section of Corso's "Bomb," and sections of
his books Tales of Beatnik Glory and Thirsting For Peace In A Raging
Century. The man has a beautiful tenor!

The Fugs Greatest Hits 1984-2004- Ed, Tuli, Steven Taylor, Scott
Petito, and Coby Batty continue to make sometimes comedic, sometimes
poignant agit-rock. Highlights include the anthem of indomitability
"Refuse To Be Burnt Out" and AIDS mini-opera "Dreams Of Sexual Perfection."

Sanders' Truckstop and Beer Cans On The Moon, Ed's first two solo
albums reissued, originally on Reprise. From 1969 and 1972
respectively, these are Sanders at his most satirical and most
country. The cat is from Missouri, after all.
---

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

.

Impression of world psychedelic forum in Basel

Impression of world psychedelic forum in Basel

http://www.net.info.nl/wpfreport.htm

World Psychedelic Forum
Basel March 21-24 2008

By Luc Sala of Amsterdam - sala@dealerinfo.nl

Dear Friends,

The tribe has met again, the tribe of those who know that our normal
view of reality isn't all there is, and that there are ways and means
to get in touch with the otherworlds without and within. As I have
done before I will give my personal and sometimes critical comments
here, based on what I experienced and the obviously limited number of
sessions I attended. Please understand this is not meant to be an
attack on the organisation, I think they did a great job and with
1500 participants they can be proud of establishing the WPF as a real
global and important forum. But leaving it at that, they and we would
not really learn anything to improve the WPF, stimulate the wider
psychedelic community or those involved in similar events.
It was, for me and I believe for many, another meeting of great minds
and of hearts, this Psychedelic World Forum. Ambitious name, as a
moniker more future-proof than the LSD conference two years ago, but
then that was Albert's event. He wasn't there, in Basel, to my
disappointment, as he was and is such an inspiration. In fact it was
a little inconsiderate of those speakers and luminaries to rush off
to Rittimatte in Burg in the days before the conference, it was too
much for him. He is 102 years old now and his wife passed away
recently. I hope the group energy that Nana Nauwald and Alex Grey
focussed on his behalf helped him, to do whatever. He is, for me, an
example of where humans can go, if they accept, embrace and integrate
their inner child. I don't know if it was the LSD that helped him, or
that it came to him because he was already there, but the man is a
role model, a signpost of what humans can be; more than that, he
appears in my dreams with great lessons.

The conference, organisationally, was Swiss and "gründlich", a bit
stiff and efficient, clear, but I admit I kept my badgeholder, it's
probably very ecological and penny-wise to ask those back, but what
about a little memento? Dieter looked tired, Lucius a bit stressed,
but they did a good job. May they take what follows as positive
feedback. I like the setup with panorama sessions, this allows an
overview of what the various speakers are going to present, it's an
efficient way to help attendees to pick and choose from among the
parallel sessions.
More research
One of the positive developments in the psychedelic world is that
there is, here and there, a little bit more room for research, a
little bit more academic freedom. It's too early to talk about a
revival of academic respectability, but the signs are positive with
projects underway in Europe (Beckley Foundation, Swiss research) and
overseas. One could speculate why this (long overdue) legitimation is
happening, was the LSD conference in 2006 a watershed event, has the
energetic work of MAPS made a difference or is this freedom related
to the increasing number of traumatized ex-soldiers (PTSD)
(Vietnam/Iraq). Whatever the reason, it's a good development and as
the organisation stressed the important point that we need "new"
research by inviting a host of "rising" researcher, let's hope for
more and elucidating research. Although it's nice to hear they redid
the Pahnke Good Friday experiment of 1962 at John Hopkins, and no
doubt with modern technology and more scientific rigidity, for me
there is nothing new there, the stuff works! And it's also good and
legally smart that the scholars and scientists at the conference
fairly consistently refer to "the substances" as medicine, but at the
same time that's limiting. Albert, in 2006, spoke of "Sakrale
Drogen". I personally appreciate the sacred, the magical, the miracle
potion aspect. On the second day this was the central theme, with
shamanic use as the focus, and people like Dale Pendell, Kate
Harrison and Nana Nauwald made that point, with Baba Rampuri as a
colourful aside, but it could have been a little wider, for my taste.
Let's call this the magic side of things, the mind over matter issue,
now it sounds too much like the Shamans are a kind of
proto-psychotherapists and non-western doctors. They are also
sorcerers and magii, and although we all know the work of Albert and
Wasson about the Eleusis Mysteries, I would like to know more about
the use, the rituals, the inspiration in the Western traditions.
Psychedelics as a factor in the Human Evolution, people like Peter
Webster and of course Terence McKenna have made that point. And why
use the term religion only as a kind of legal path to obtain
permission for using substances? In my view most of the shamanic work
is utterly religious, in that it follows strict rules and practices.
We like to call it spiritual, but a young Indian kid might feel it as
very dogmatic.
There are now too many anecdotal and personal stories, documentaries,
books, usually about how someone worked through "Western" trauma and
blockages with the help of "non-western" sacred plants and rituals.
Of course there are people like Stan Grof, who have charted and
expanded our Western mind map; his work around the birth matrix and
holotropic breath-work I missed at the LSD-conference two years ago,
is an essential piece of the puzzle.
Copyrights
One of the undercurrents at this conference was the issue of
copyrights, and I think that is important. Too many camera-teams, too
many videos with unacknowledged material, too many claims and limited
understanding of what the law (the Berner Convention) requires. In
short, and apart from personality, musical, portrait and other
rights, the copyright of events like this belongs to the producers,
the organisers - here the Gaia Foundation. For news purposes one can
use limited clips, quotes etc. for 29 days (the concept of free news
gathering) but then the rights of all events go back to the producer.
They might give that away, making it public domain, or sell it, farm
it out any way they want, etc. If the speakers or presenters have
made prior arrangements about the rights with the producer, the whole
thing gets even more complicated. People registering the event, as
far as the programmed speeches etc. go, have in fact no rights at all
(after that 29 days, but how many real press people were there?). Now
this is not new, so all those people claiming copyrights because it
was their camera, their crew that recorded this or that conference or
event in the past, they actually have NO or very limited artistic
rights. And to sharpen the point, videoing or recording a ritual in
an obscure jungle location is therefore illegal, if no deal is made
with those who produce the ritual or event. Bad news for all those
camera crews out there, but something that obviously also isn't
recognized by all those folks with cameras in the audience at events
like these.
It's another thing to do private interviews with the speakers, and
there were quite a few crews around doing that. Some of them made my
toes curl because of the shots they made, out-of-focus, backlit, with
strange angles and framing, I hope they all will become great
cineasts one day or have editing talents and tools beyond my dreams.
Most were not press, but making more or less commercial
documentaries, in fact using the presence of all those speakers, the
public etc. in a commercial production. The organisation allowed that
and I admit, I did film too. But then I handed out more than 250
DVD's of my "Homage to Albert" video for free. It was something I
made two years ago as a present for our hero, and I made sure that
all those who were in that video received a copy too.
It made me wonder, how many more video/documentaries can we stomach
about the psychedelic (r)evolution, all with interviews with Grof,
Grey, Harrison, MG Garcia, Narby, Pinchbeck, Horowitz, Metzner etc.
Yes, the documentaries that were shown at the conference were
interesting, but how many more egodocuments spiced up with these clip
will find a market out there? Yeah, some are impressive, I had to
throw up seeing the ayahuasca film by Jan Kounen, the memories of the
terrible taste of that sacred brew are very physical for me, but was
there much news, anything I could not have learned from the Yahe
Letters or Terence's books? OK, the visual age is here, the internet
can handle some more terabytes of psychedelic information, have a
look at my archive material
(<http://www.mindlift.tv/>www.mindlift.tv) but how much is enough?
Which brings me to what I think the real purpose of the WPF is and
that is to elevate psychedelics beyond the cult level, make it
respectable. Now they tried, but at the same time accommodating the
scientists (who do need a respectable platform, I agree), the
alternative (freak/cult/culture/tribe) and all those who have a
vested (often financial) interest in the whole circus is not an easy
thing. Maybe the span of the WPF is a bit too wide, maybe more focus
and a smaller scale would work better. But I can also understand the
reply: what about the money, the media attention, the scale?
New wave
There were many younger attendees and that is great, we need the new
generation. Usually they were experienced trippers, I had great
conversations with them, some had very good insight in recognising
whom of the speakers was "real" and who not. Encouraging, and one
could feel that a new wave might be at hand. I was particularly
touched by Rick Doblin kind of vocalising a Boom Festival presence in
the hotel lobby with an young crowd around him. But there was much
more, mothers talking about their young kids tasting (by accident but
obviously some kids get attracted to the substances) LSD or
mushrooms. I had fun talking to the young kids, hearing their
stories, how they dealt with the legality, the dangers, etc.
I hope the new generation will use all this wisely, the warnings by
some shamans about inappropriate use of Ayahuasca were clear, the use
of recorded songs is inappropriate because those songs are unique,
channelled, time-bound. I totally agree with that warning, many of
the self appointed and often self-initiated "western shamans" are
dangerously unaware of what is at stake, the spirit world has its
dangers and I see that recreational use of cannabis etc. does carry risks.
I actually doubt if western shamans can safely guide such rituals at
all, my experience with many many sessions at the Myster center in
Amsterdam are not positive. They usually ignore or are unaware of the
dark and magical side of it, only recognising the healing part, the
mystical state, but don't deal with the more voodoo part. If we
accept that those rituals do help our inner balance, can heal and
help, one also has to accept the other side, the danger, the spells,
the manifestations of hatred, racism etc. Most of us touch that
sphere in our trips, but few are willing to engage that shadow part
head on. We might go on a vision quest, but few of us are willing to
really face death and pain in a real sense.
It sounds great if Kat Harrison tells the attendees we are, because
we were there, all healers, that we can access the band of magic over
our head, that we can touch the unseen, but what does that mean? Too
many believe that after a few sessions or rituals they can do it
themselves, that their glimpse of the other realities made them gurus
or at least holy, and they set up a little business. But how does one
measure up against the really initiated? There was a demonstration of
how modern brain scan techniques can differentiate between mind
states, how about a quality-test for aspiring shamans? We know that
the legislators are looking for the accidents, the crisis situations,
the suicides as an excuse to limit psychedelic use and research, as
is now happening in the Netherlands with psilocybin.
The mix
I thought it was great to see that there actually was a nun attending
the conference (and a few less recognizable pastors etc.), seeing her
talk with the shamans, the hindu folks in orange, the hippie kids. We
need to honour that tradition too, monasteries, mass, the sacraments,
they are the western way of dealing with the unseen. Of course there
was inquisition, holy wars, etc, but do we really think that those
Amazonian Indians lived only the holy life? Holy Mass is celebrating
a mystery, and even if Jesus wasn't using Ergot, consecration does
mean charging material stuff with unmaterial energy. Priests are
shamans, just by another name, and usually well trained. Should
freemasons, exorcists, rosicrusians and the craft and druids be part
of a forum about entering the otherworld?
The speakers
What makes you eligible to get a gig at the WPF? It looks like
writing a popular book, making a documentary, having been there
"always" or being "in" with the crowd is important, but most of the
recent books contain little new insight, they are professionally
crafted and often very commercial productions, rehashing what is
already known; in other words, we have a lot of me-too stuff. Yes,
Benny Shanon in recent years did some good work with his Ayahuasca
study and Narby's snake/LSD connection is interesting, but is
speculating that Mozes, Jesus, or whomever was psychedelically
inspired really more than ego-promoting hype? Ok, let's throw in some
2012, a bit more Iboga, some conspiracy, but it's all so boring. The
Good Friday experiment has been redone, but she/he who has met and
connected with Huston Smith (who was one of the participants then)
has "felt" how that worked out.
What was missing, although I appreciate the attempts to bring it into
the program, was the magic. It is of course important to see what
those substances do, what they meant for individual artists, writers,
researchers, but how have they influenced our reality? The mystical
is ok, that LSD opened inner worlds granted, but can we use this
"technology" to solve real problems? Who talks about how Ayahuasca
was used in warfare, kept the white invaders away, about the real
dark use of substances? Narby does interesting work, trying to help
find cures for tuberculosis, but there could be much more. What about
climate change, what about deep physics, what about cancer, radiation
or dealing with internet-addiction. And sex, too obvious absent at
this WPF, like humour, psychedelic can be very funny. I appreciated
the fact that "natural" or non-induced altered states were taken
seriously in many sessions, and that many spoke of the inner child
being an altered state, maybe even the original state. Manuel Schoch
quoted the Bible there; "If we do not become like children, we will
not enter the kingdom of heaven".
Art is great, pychedelic art is better, psychedelic music a great
inspiration, but I am very happy to see the Grey's going beyond the 2
dimensional (paintings) into threedimensional (their Chapel and the
new place upstate) and fourdimensional work; Alex referred to Jospeh
Beuys "social sculpture" ideas. They take the inspiration into the
world, actively and in ever wider circles, making the psychedelic
experience real, in meeting, connecting and changing our world. We
are in a crisis, financially, emotionally, ethically; trying to prove
(again) that this or that substance is an effective way to kick this
or that habit is old hat, scientifically interesting but not enough.
We need new ways of dealing with what's out there, with climate
change, terror, fascism, big brother. Get out there, like in the
sixties and make waves, shake them up, go for the magic, even if it
makes no sense. Mountain Girl Garcia, one of Kesey's Merry
Pranksters, was one of the most enthousiastic speakers at the Forum,
bringing fresh energy, vigor, life to it. And Manuel Schoch was
another great and energetic speaker.
I was lucky (or was it synchronicity?) to meet a Heilpraktiker, with
little or no experience with the subject, who told me she tried to
charge water with LSD information in her hotel. For her that was
quite logical, she uses charged water a lot in her healing work. The
charging of water (there is even a scale for it called Bovis) is
similar to homeopathy, but without dilution, no material exchange
happens. Now this is what I have been doing for some time, and it
works, but nobody at the WPF believes such "magic". Stan Grof comes
closest as he indicated it might be strong hypnotic induction or
placebo effect. But if it works, who cares?
Suggestions
Now criticising the choice of speakers etc. is easy, but may I make
some suggestions? Get more eloquent and authorative speakers to
keynote. Stan Grof is a lovable man with deep insight, Metzner a
sensitive and engaging hero, but I miss the (sometimes demagogic)
rants of Leary, of Terence? What about people like John Perry Barlow,
Biosphere2 John Allen or Brother David Steindl-Rast? Outsiders, in a
way, but they would broaden the scope and they have been around the
block too! In fact, there were many people at the conference I would
have loved to see on stage, John Gilmore of the EFF among them, and
young Finn McKenna, so much his father, let's encourage him to finish
some of Terence's projects.
When I am honest, I have been to too many of these conferences
already, I know the people, I know their "rap", it's old hat. So in
some lectures I followed I nearly fell asleep, going there because
the speakers were famous or my friends, but I have heard it before,
the stories, the discourses, I know them. For me it's meeting old
friends, the tribal energy, the openness, the one-on-one contacts,
talking about yesteryear and how great it was, the new friends I made.
But obviously there were, beside the insiders, also newcomers,
youngsters, people who have not had this opportunity. So there was a
kind of a split, a dichotomy. If this were called the World
Psychedelic University, geared towards newcomers, new initiates, then
having all these old sages telling their stories would have been more
appropriate. Then the Daniel Pinchbeck's journalistic but slightly
uninspired approach would have been informative for them, the
enthousiastic MAPS activist/historian/organiser Rick Doblin could
have even better spread the word as an evangelist, they could have
had their rave (not at Das Schiff, bitte) and I would have stayed home.
I myself was looking for the inspired, the initiated, the holy and of
course there were those inspiring young researchers, writers,
psychedelicious spirits of all ages, but why not have a comedian, a
live musician, for my part a slight of hand magician with a
psychedelic inclination like Jeff McBride make us "feel" what is at
stake. The "sacred" moment when the attendees energy was asked to
support Albert at the closing ceremony was the highpoint of the WPF
for many, is this a lesson?
One last remark, I was glad that the people in prison because of the
war on drugs were mentioned in connection with John Beresford, their
champion, and that this issue of illegality therefore was part of this event.

Luc Sala, Amsterdam, March 26, 2008

You can find my report about the 2006 LSD conference at
<http://www.net.info.nl/hofmann.htm> and my pre-event email at
<http://www.net.info.nl/wpfpre.htm>.

.

Ex-SLA member Sara Jane Olson returned to prison

Ex-SLA member Sara Jane Olson returned to prison

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/olso-m26.shtml

By Hiram Lee
26 March 2008

Former Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) member Sara Jane Olson was
arrested March 22, just five days after her release from a California
prison. Paroled after serving six years of a 12-year prison sentence,
Olson's release was met with protests from right-wing media and
police groups. Responding to pressures from these groups, authorities
in the California Department of Corrections declared there had been
an error in the calculation of Olson's sentence, and that the former
radical had not yet served enough time to qualify for parole.

Released on March 17, Olson had been at the Los Angeles International
Airport on Friday preparing to fly home to Minnesota when she was
suddenly informed that her right to travel had been rescinded. She
then returned to her mother's home in Palmdale where she was kept
under surveillance while authorities reviewed the sentencing process
that followed her convictions. With the supposed error revealed, a
new arrest warrant was issued and Olson was taken back into custody
"without incident." She will spend the next year at the Central
California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California.

Olson's lawyer, Shawn Chapman Holley, strongly condemned the decision
to rearrest and imprison her client, saying authorities "were bowing
to political pressure. It's like they make up all new rules when it
comes to her. It's like we are in some kind of fascist state." She
also criticized suggestions that there had been an undiscovered error
in the calculation of sentencing time for her client saying, "We
received an order from the state parole board more than a month ago
informing us that she would be released on March 17."

Also questioning authorities' claims of a sentencing error was Gerald
Uelmen, a law professor at Santa Clara University who also serves as
the executive director of the California Commission on the Fair
Administration of Justice. In a quote carried by the San Francisco
Chronicle, Uelmen reacted to Olson's rearrest saying, "I can't
imagine how they could have blown that one, in such a high-profile case."

Sara Jane Olson was initially arrested by the FBI in 1999 when her
story was broadcast as part of the "America's Most Wanted" television
show. In 2001, she was convicted for taking part in two incidents
from 1975 stemming from her involvement with the SLA, the politically
disoriented middle-class radical group best known for its 1974
kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The incidents involved in Olson's case
included the attempted bombing of two police cars in Los Angeles and
the death of a bank customer shot by a fellow SLA member during a
robbery. Prior to her arrest and six-year imprisonment, Olson had
lived in Minnesota for more than two decades. Described as a
"housewife," Olson had married a doctor and raised three daughters.

The active role played by vindictive police and right-wing elements
became apparent early on in her several court proceedings. After
pleading guilty in 2001, Olson was first sentenced to five years and
four months in prison. Unsatisfied with these results, California's
Board of Prison Terms quickly reclassified her as a serious offender,
resetting her sentence to a period of 13 years. One year was later
removed from that sentence in a different court proceeding.

The decision to classify Olson at that time as a serious offender was
remarkably harsh and unnecessary. Described in most newspapers as a
"Minnesota housewife" and a "soccer mom," Olson's most radical
activity at the time of her arrest was performing on stage with a
local community theater group. She was clearly a threat to no one.

When she was paroled last week, having served half of the 12-year
sentence she received for her convictions, the Los Angeles Police
Protective League (LAPPL) took its place at the forefront of the
latest vindictive protests against Olson. Reacting to her release and
demanding her return to prison, LAPPL president Tim Sands declared,
"She needs to serve her full time in prison for these crimes and does
not deserve time off for working in prison." Sands added that "After
participating in one killing and attempting two more, she managed to
elude authorities and live a guilt-free middle class life for
decades. Criminals who attempt to murder police officers should not
be able to escape justice simply because they have good lawyers."
Sands continues to refer to Olson as a "terrorist," a politically
loaded word in the present climate.

It was, more than anything, the pressure placed on authorities by the
LAPPL that drove the decision to reconsider Olson's sentencing and
recent release. In a press conference following Olson's arrest and
return to prison, Scott Kernan, speaking on behalf of the California
Department of Corrections, told reporters there had been an
"administrative error" in the calculation of Olson's sentence.
Authorities had failed to properly take into account, he said, the
conviction for the bank robbery death at the time of her sentencing.
This meant Olson should have received a 14-year sentence rather than
a 12-year sentence. As a consequence of the newly calculated
sentence, Olson will now not be eligible for parole until March 17, 2009.

The rearrest and imprisonment of Sara Jane Olson represents an
unprecedented action by corrections authorities in California. It can
only be understood in the context of the generalized assault on
democratic rights and civil liberties in the US that has accompanied
the so-called "war on terror." The campaign to have her thrown back
into prison was orchestrated not out of the purported concern over
acts she was alleged to have committed more than three decades ago,
but rather as a means of furthering present-day political intimidation.

.

The Lawyer Who Won Roe v. Wade

The Lawyer Who Won Roe v. Wade

http://www.independent.com/news/2008/mar/25/lawyer-who-won-roe-v-wade/

Sarah Weddington Talks to Barney

Tuesday, March 25, 2008
By Barney Brantingham

She Won Roe v. Wade: Sarah Weddington was just 27, and the youngest
person ever to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, when she
faced the nine male justices in the case of Roe v. Wade. Their 7-2
vote, announced January 22, 1973, invalidated all laws anywhere in
the nation that made abortion illegal.

(Abortion was already legal in California due to a law signed in 1967
by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who later, while president, opposed Roe v. Wade.)

"If anybody had said to me, 'You will still be talking about this in
35 years,' I would never have believed that," Weddington told me on
Betty Stephens' sunny Hope Ranch patio the other day.

Yet it's still being argued far and wide and Weddington predicts that
it will be one of the key 2008 presidential campaign issues, along
with the war and the economy. The question hovers: Will Roe v. Wade
be overturned now that the court seems to have a majority, or near
majority to do so? But she said Roe v. Wade is not in jeopardy this
year, because no case challenging it is poised to come before the
Supreme Court in 2008.

Weddington, who still lives in Austin, Texas, where she was living
back then, believes that at least one justice is likely to retire in
the next four years, giving whomever is president a key appointment
to the court.

The Republican presidential nominee-apparent, Sen. John McCain, is
anti-choice, while Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama are pro-choice.

Was this beautiful young lawyer frightened when she faced the
justices? "Scared? Of course. If you're not scared you're not sensible."

The anonymous "Roe" in the case, who claimed she had been raped,
never had an abortion and gave birth to a child before the case was
decided. Opponents of Roe v. Wade have objected that the decision
lacked a solid Constitutional basis. In recent years, "Roe," Norma
McCorvey, has joined the anti-abortion movement and barnstormed the
nation speaking against the decision. She moved to reopen the case
but a court refused, saying that it was moot.

Weddington, a University of Texas law school graduate, was elected to
the Texas legislature in late 1972 and was sitting in her office a
few weeks later when the New York Times called with the astonishing
news. She'd won. Women had won.

Weddington was re-elected three times before leaving to become the
first woman general counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture
under President Jimmy Carter. "I did a lot of work trying to save
wild and scenic rivers." Then she went to the White House as an
assistant to the president. "Then Carter lost and we left."

Looking back, the soft-spoken Weddington said, "It was a time when
women were challenging restrictions and opening opportunities. I was
part of that generation. Women couldn't even get a credit card in
their own names. At the University of Texas (in the mid-1960s) the
policy was that no woman could be given birth control unless it was
within six weeks of a wedding date."

She started out as a primary school teacher but soon saw her future
as an attorney. She wrote a 1992 book about the case: A Question of
Choice: The Lawyer Who Won Roe v. Wade, and spends her time lecturing
and teaching at the U of Texas.
---

Barney Brantingham can be reached at barney@independent.com or (805) 965-5205.

.

What made Wolfman Jack great?

What made Wolfman Jack great?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7307738.stm

21 March 2008
By Sarah Cuddon
[]

The pirate radio stations of the 1960s are part of British pop
folklore, but America had its equivalents broadcasting from the
border with Mexico. And its most celebrated star DJ was the
near-mythical Wolfman Jack.
--

Every DJ has their "radio persona" - a larger than life personality
created to reach across the ether and plant itself in the imagination
of the listening faithful.

The most outrageous - from America's Howard Stern to Britain's Chris
Moyles - have come to be known as shock jocks.

The daddy of them all is Wolfman Jack, the most outlandish, most
thrilling and most elliptical disc jockey of the American 1960s.

Immortalised in George Lucas' breakthrough movie American Graffiti,
the Wolfman derived from an era when radio's disembodied voice could
be almost mesmeric.

His influence on radio today can still be heard... you just need to
know what to listen for.

THE DJ PERSONA

Of course, Wolfman Jack wasn't born with that name. He was born Bob
Smith and he grew up in the tough New York neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
Neglected by his parents he sought succour and inspiration from the
voices he heard on the radio at night beaming up from the Mexican border.

In his 20s he landed a number of DJ jobs on local radio stations
where he experimented with a variety of bizarre and eccentric DJ personas.

Finally in the late 1950s, determined to take on border radio - the
American-equivalent of Britain's off-shore pirate radio stations - he
made his way down to Mexico to the great "border station" XERF and
bought himself a show.

Amongst Bob Smith's heros were disc jockey Alan Freed, aka Moondog,
and blues singer Howlin' Wolf, whose names formed the inspiration for
his own alias, Wolfman, a name which debuted as early as the first show.

"There was nothing as exotic, as mysterious and as forbidden as when
I first stumbled across Wolfman Jack broadcasting from the border,"
says Nic Patowski, a teenager when he first tuned into station XERF.
"He was unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

"You had no idea who he was or what he was but you knew whatever he
was doing it was probably wrong. When you heard him you knew you'd
unlocked the door to a really secret world."

Canadian-born DJ David Jensen, an early fan, compares Wolfman's
character to something out of a Stephen King film.

"When I first heard him... I was thinking of old recordings of the
blues singer Howlin' Wolf. He had this incredible confidence."

THE VOICE

Much of Wolfman Jack's power and enigma lay in his voice. In the
early 1960s most DJs both in America and in the UK presented their
programmes in a straight, deadpan style.

But Wolfman Jack's rich, gravelly baritone was indefinable and
otherworldly. He was hell-fire preacher, animal, beat poet,
philosopher. He purred, he growled and he howled.

"The voice was almost scary," says Bill Crawford, author of Border
Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing
Broadcasters of the American Airwaves.

"It was really scratchy and nasty and dirty and it was delicious. If
you ran into someone on the street who spoke like that you'd assume
they were a hobo or some kind of derelict. "He was more forbidden
than listening to African-American DJs on the rhythm and blues stations."

Wolfman was the precursor to the "shock jock" phenomenon, those
irreverent, taboo-breaking DJs of the 1970s like Howard Stern and Steve Dahl.

But while Wolfman was edgy and his shtick was often kinky and
provocative, he drew a strict line at being wilfully offensive. He
believed passionately in preaching "more soul" to the world and he
maintained a code of decency.

BLURRING BOUNDARIES

Broadcasting from the strange world of the Mexican border offered
Wolfman Jack enormous power.

"The border is the part of America where the lines are blurred. Right
and wrong, Mexico and the US, Spanish and English," says Crawford.
This blurring of boundaries enabled Wolfman Jack to expose his
audience to the sounds of African-American music which was not widely
broadcast on US stations at that time.

His manager for over 20 years, Lonnie Napier, says: "Wolf loved
rhythm and blues".

"Aretha Franklin, James Brown... They weren't getting much airplay in
the US at that time but over on the border Wolf was allowed to play
what he wanted."

Ray Bensen, lead singer of Asleep at the Wheel, recalled being on
tour, getting into a car at 2am and turning on XERF. "You'd hear
Louis Armstrong followed by the Robbins followed by Jimmy McGriff.
He'd play it."

In an era free of the DJ mug shots we are so familiar with now,
Wolfman Jack's listeners had no idea of the face behind the
microphone. Many, like David Jensen, believed he was black.

"He could talk the soul language of a black man with the dialect,"
says Border Radio historian, Durell Roth. "I thought he was black for
many years and that's the beautiful thing about radio, it's totally
colour-blind."

THE MAGIC OF NIGHT

As the name suggests, Wolfman was a creature of the night. He loved
the midnight hour, "the bewitching time" as he called it and the time
when a hungering young audience could feed on his titbits.

Young people hanging out late in their cars would tune into his
broadcasts and feed off his reckless, free spirit. And as his young
fan base grew, Wolfman became the leader of a generational movement.

"The idea of teenagers having power was a new concept... and I think
radio and Wolfman Jack had the power to bring us all together because
we were all listening," says Nic Patowski.

Napier recalls the subtle spread of Wolfman's reputation while at a
diner one night

"I saw this group of guys and they all had these T-shirts on and it
had what looked like a huge target circle on it and this
weird-looking character in the middle that kinda looked like a wolf
and it said 'Have mercy baby'."

Among those teenagers hanging out at late-night diners and listening
to the Wolfman's broadcasts was a young George Lucas, who went on to
direct Star Wars.

Lucas responded to his call with one of the great American movies,
the coming of age film American Graffiti, in which Wolfman Jack is a
constant but mystical character.

THE 'X' FACTOR

Wolfman Jack's genius was his determination to maintain the enigma
for so long. Invitations to appear in public flooded in soon after
his unique sound hit the airwaves in the late 1960s, but Wolfman
would invariably refuse. He insisted on keeping the magic of the
radio persona he'd created. He didn't want to give people a concrete
image of who he was.

Lonnie Napier recalls the thrill of seeing Wolfman for the first
time, having only ever known his voice.

"I knew he'd come in because I could smell his cologne all the way up
the stairs. And then when I saw him I was just blown away. He was
just bigger than life with his Beatle boots and his jet black hair
and the goatee. He was better looking than Elvis."

Following his appearance in American Graffiti, however, Wolfman did
start to let the mask slip. His credibility amongst teenagers led him
to be the face for Clearasil acne medication advertising and he
started to host television programmes like The Wolfman Jack Show and
The Midnight Special.

But where he had been in control of his own destiny, on the border,
he was now bowing to increasing pressure from the media to appear in
public. For many of his fans, Wolfman's "outing" from the hidden
world of the radio meant he had lost his edge. His own belief in
maintaining the mystery and enigma of the voice in the radio-ether
had been proven correct.

"Somehow it was a disappointment to see the man in the flesh," says
David Jensen, "I wanted to carry on believing that he was a kind of
half-human, half-animal creature. But I like to think that those
radio waves he inhabited are still transmitting out there somewhere
still today. He was a true icon."
--

Border Blaster: In Search of the Wolf is on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday
22 March at 1030 GMT, concluding the following week.

.

Most anti-war protesters peaceful, prof says

Most anti-war protesters peaceful, prof says

http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_8672885

He doubts controversy over Civic Center use will spark violence at
the convention.

By Chuck Plunkett
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 03/24/2008

Despite threatening words from one of the groups planning to protest
during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, most of the anti-war
protesters eyeing Denver this summer are peaceful and creative, an
expert says.

Glenn Spagnuolo of Re-create 68 said Thursday that city officials
were "creating a very dangerous situation" after the convention host
committee was selected by lottery for a Civic Center park permit for
the eve of the convention. He said his group would not "give up" the
park for its demonstrations, which he hopes draw 50,000.

R-68 has been meeting with groups such as United for Peace and
Justice, which organized 500,000 protesters for the 2004 Republican
National Convention in New York City, and CodePink, a women's
movement against the war that is another top-tier organizer.

"None of the mainstream organizations have any agenda like property
damage," said Michael Heaney, a political science professor who has
studied the anti-war movement since 2002 and who was in Washington,
D.C., last week observing the many protests marking the fifth
anniversary of the war.

"What they are planning on doing is peaceful protests," Heaney said.
"Basically their objective is to get media attention for their
issues. They want to demonstrate to the Democratic Party that they
have support for their positions."

R-68 organizers were furious Thursday when a party planner for the
Denver committee hosting the convention won ­ in a random lottery ­
the right to a permit for Civic Center on Aug. 24, the Sunday before
the convention starts. The convention runs Aug. 25-28.

The organizers want to start an anti-war march at the park and
continue to the Pepsi Center, which is to serve as the convention hall.

Heaney met Spagnuolo and R-68 organizers Mark and Barbara Cohen in
Atlanta this summer during a convention of progressives, and found
them serious and well-organized. He said he thinks that, depending on
the nominee and whether the convention will be brokered, Denver could
expect between 10,000 and 50,000 anti-war activists.

Anti-war organizers say that if Sen. Barack Obama is the nominee,
they expect much lower protester turnout at the Democratic
convention. Heaney, who has surveyed the movement, says four of five
anti-war activists support Obama.

CodePink's co-founder, Medea Benjamin, greatly doubts the 50,000
figure and says an Obama nomination could reduce interest to but a
couple of thousand. Then again, Benjamin said: "We don't feel that
either of the candidates will get us out of Iraq without strong pressure."

"(House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi will be the queen bee at the
convention, and she has really disappointed us," Benjamin said.

Benjamin met with Spagnuolo in Denver several weeks ago and toured
Civic Center and other sites. She said Denver's host committee
shouldn't get the park and agreed with R-68's plan to occupy the
grounds, but stressed CodePink would do so without violence.
--

Denver Post researchers Barry Osborn and Barbara Hudson assisted with
this report. Chuck Plunkett: 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com

.

Ex-Black Panther leader: History empowers people for the future

Ex-Black Panther leader: History empowers people for the future

http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/03/22/news/doc47e5b227b79af142804444.txt

March 22, 2008
By Edith Brady-Lunny
eblunny@pantagraph.com

NORMAL ­ Black Americans have come a long way in their struggle for
equality but challenges remain, according to the leader of Illinois
State University's black student awareness group.

Black Students through Awareness Resurrecting a Revolution hosted the
first Black Awareness Conference Saturday at the university. About 30
students were on hand for the opening of the conference, titled
"Paint a New Perspective."

Race issues are a concern for many students at ISU, said Johari
Huggins, president of the student group. Raising awareness about the
issues that separate people was the main goal of the day-long event, she said.

"Of all the -isms, the most concerning to me is class-ism. Our
society revolves around money. When people don't have it, they become
underprivileged," said Huggins, and poverty sets people apart and
limits their opportunities.

Telling of black history

Among speakers at the conference was former Black Panther Party
member Ericka Huggins, who is not related to the student group leader.

"My message to the students is about history and how history empowers
us for the future," said the Panthers' longest-serving female leader.

Many people are reluctant to talk about the bleak chapters of black
history, said Ericka Huggins.

"People don't want to talk about the history of slavery because of
fear, guilt and shame. I think they do a disservice to people of all
kinds by not being accurate about the history of the United States,"
Huggins told The Pantagraph.

Praise for Obama's speech

The recent speech by presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama was an
encouraging move toward a national dialogue on race, said the former
Black Panther.

"I thought it was so wonderful and compassionate of him," said Huggins.

Where the dialogue goes next is not, however, up to the candidate.

"It depends upon all of us to determine where it goes," she said.

Progress by blacks

In opening remarks for the conference, ISU President Al Bowman told
students that blacks have made remarkable progress over the past
century. In 1920, about 10,000 black citizens completed college in
the U.S., said Bowman. Currently, more than 3.7 million blacks hold a
minimum of a four-year college degree, he said.

ISU freshman O'Cephus Starks signed up for the conference to learn
more about the issues facing other blacks.

"If you don't know much, you can't really say much," said Starks.

The conference included a photo exhibit of the history of the Black
Panthers, a group Johari Huggins noted was responsible for feeding
children and other community programs. Participants also played an
interactive board game designed to teach them the complexities of
living in a multicultural society.

.

Anniversary of a rebellion

Anniversary of a rebellion

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2008/03/19_paris68.shtml

What veteran of '60s protests can view Serge Hambourg's photos and
not murmur, 'We'll always have Paris'?

By Jonathan King, Public Affairs
19 March 2008

Most Americans look back on 1968 with characteristic parochialism, as
a year of largely domestic tribulations and (occasional) triumphs:
the assassinations, two months apart, of RFK and MLK; the political
theater and police violence surrounding the Democratic convention in
Chicago; the hard-fought race for the presidency that brought Richard
Nixon the prize he had so long sought. Even the year-end excursion
into lunar orbit by the crew of Apollo 8, which yielded an epochal
photo of our borderless One World brightening the darkest gloom of
space, is viewed as a quintessentially American achievement.

But 1968 was also a meaningful year far beyond our borders, for
reasons that had little to do with America's multiple strains and
stresses. There were popular revolts around the globe: in Mexico and
Czechoslovakia, Senegal and India, Poland and Argentina. None,
however, appeared to develop as rapidly, and to threaten the
underpinnings of a major industrial economy so directly, as did the
student protests in Paris that May, which in a matter of days engaged
millions of French citizens, including a great many industrial
workers, in mutual rebellion against the established order,
threatening ­ for a brief but heady few weeks ­ to revolutionize the nation.

A number of the pictures taken by Serge Hambourg, a press
photographer for the weekly magazine La nouvel observateur, during
those eventful days make up "Protest in Paris 1968," an exhibit on
display through June 1 at the Berkeley Art Museum. The majority of
the images, taken between May 9 and 13, capture the days of action
and debate that followed the May 3 police attack on student
demonstrators at the Sorbonne, which resulted in hundreds of injuries
and arrests. Two nights of pitched battles between students and
police across the Left Bank were followed by the declaration of a
general strike across all of France; it began to seem likely that the
government of President Charles de Gaulle would collapse as the
nation's economy, in essence, shut down.

Paris was no Berkeley

Viewing Hambourg's images of marchers, onlookers, and police, exhibit
visitors d'un certain age will notice dissimilarities between Paris
'68 and, say, Berkeley or Columbia in the same era. The protesters
occupying Hambourg's frame are, in the main, neat of dress and short
of hair, resembling the best-and-brightest participants in Berkeley's
Free Speech Movement of four years earlier far more than the hippies
and yippies who stood out on the campuses of "Amerika" '68. Their
banners, posters, and placards call for change not in their country's
foreign policy but in the hierarchical conditions under which French
students studied and French labor labored. Indeed, it's the
partnership that developed between students and labor in France that
May that seems most foreign to an American viewer accustomed to
regarding campus protests, then as now, as the exclusive province of
students, with passivity, if not outright hostility, the dominant
response of working-class citizens.

Which is not to say that French workers and students were unified in
thought before the events of May 1968 brought them out on the streets
to pass before Hambourg's lens. The labor movement was the redoubt of
Stalinist apparatchiks, as ossified in their own approach to dealing
with the nation's rulers as de Gaulle's most loyal legislative
deputies were in theirs. Indeed, the leaders of the French Communist
Party opposed the student-protest movement from the start, urging its
members to steer clear of such "adventurers" in favor of acquiescence
in the continued efforts of union leaders to improve the lot of labor
incrementally, through negotiation with industry and government.

The millions of factory workers who chose to ignore their titular
leaders, joining forces with the protesting students of France as
together they were caught up in the tide of events, were encouraged
by the notion that radical reform of working conditions might be
achieved by popular revolt. In the same manner, the mass of largely
bourgeois students came to believe that by their own actions they
could affect the structure and fundamental philosophy of higher
education, which was characterized by one of their leaders, Alain
Geismar, as "completely inadequate to an advanced country, with its
compartmentalization of the various disciplines [and] its retention
of a grading system dating from August Comte and of faculty
structures inherited from the Empire."

It's the knowledge ­ and, for some viewers, the memory ­ of this
attempt at unified political action on behalf of the nation's
exécutants (order-followers) against its dirigeants (order-givers)
that infuses some of Hambourg's photos with a certain wistfulness,
even as they capture a nascent political movement in its dynamic,
albeit brief, public flowering. One such image is reproduced on this
page: It depicts the leading edge of a march passing before the
building housing Socialist Party headquarters, to the façade of which
is fastened a banner celebrating solidarity between students and
workers ­ an alignment envisioned by only the most ideological among
the U.S. students who marched for peace and social justice throughout
the late '60s and early '70s.

Ultimately, the French rebellion of 1968 was short-lived, brought to
an end by a confluence of events: negotiations between unions and the
government, counter-demonstrations by Gaullists and other right-wing
sympathizers, and the removal by police of protesters from the last
contested sites in Paris. All of the government's modest reforms and
efforts at co-optation were achieved by mid-June, just a month after
the height of the Paris protests.

Was it all for naught, then? Hambourg's photos foreshadow little,
except insofar as they conclude in this exhibit just at the point of
Gaullist counter-revolt. Perhaps it is enough to suggest that
something of the flavor and fervor of 1968, as it was experienced not
just in Paris and Berkeley but around the world, still determines our
collective memory of that year ­ a recollection that for many goes
beyond sad memories of martyred leaders and blood-red streets,
dwelling for as long on the hopes and dreams of those who were alive
then, engaged in the work of conceiving and building a better world.

.

What the Sixties Brought

What the Sixties Brought

http://www.weltwoche.ch/artikel/default.asp?AssetID=18189&CategoryID=91

Von Roger Kimball
Aus Ausgabe 04/08

Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion
(www.newcriterion.com) and Publisher of Encounter Books
(www.encounterbooks.com).
--

The fortieth anniversary of 1968 is upon us. What, with the wisdom of
hindsight, should we think of that convulsive moment? Everywhere
there are nostalgic backward glances: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not
the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise
of emancipation from­well, from everything? Some think so. "Only a
few periods in American history," The New York Times intoned in an
editorial, have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals
of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the
American intellectual tradition. . . . The 60's spawned a new
morality-based politics that emphasized the individual's
responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption.

It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful
recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, Thomas Mann was
right: "The past isn't dead," he wrote, "it isn't event past."
Indeed, paroxysms of the 1960s, which trembled with gathering force
through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through
the early 1970s, continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The
Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was
unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our
tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our
educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop
culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.
Even now it is difficult to gauge the extent of that transformation.
Looking back over his long and distinguished career in an essay
called "A Life of Learning," the philosopher Paul Oskar Kristeller
sounded a melancholy note. "We have witnessed," he wrote, "what
amounts to a cultural revolution, comparable to the one in China if
not worse, and whereas the Chinese have to some extent overcome their
cultural revolution, I see many signs that ours is getting worse all
the time, and no indication that it will be overcome in the
foreseeable future."

In democratic societies, where free elections are guaranteed,
political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms.
Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been
channeled into cultural and moral life. In America and Western
Europe, scattered if much-publicized episodes of violence have
wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that
do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls.
Consequently, the success of the cultural revolution of the 1960s can
be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we
often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake,
that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no
longer perceive the extent of our transformation.

In his reflections on the life of learning, Kristeller was concerned
primarily with the degradation of intellectual standards that this
cultural revolution brought about. "One sign of our situation," he
noted, "is the low level of our public and even of our academic
discussion. The frequent disregard for facts or evidence, or rational
discourse and arguments, and even of consistency, is appalling." Who
can disagree?

As Kristeller suggests, however, the intellectual wreckage visited
upon our educational institutions and traditions of scholarship is
only part of the story. There are also social, political, and moral
dimensions to the cultural revolution of the Sixities­or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that the spiritual deformations we have
witnessed are global, and affect every aspect of life. Writing in The
Totalitarian Temptation, Jean-François Revel noted that "a revolution
is not simply a new political orientation. It works through the
depths of society. It writes the play in which political leaders will
act much later."

The movement for sexual "liberation" (not to say outright debauchery)
occupies a prominent place in the etiology of this revolution, as
does the mainstreaming of the drug culture and its attendant
pathologies. Indeed, the two are related. Both are expressions of the
narcissistic hedonism that was an important ingredient of the
counterculture from its development in the 1950s. The Marxist
philosopher Herbert Marcuse was not joking when, in Eros and
Civilization­one of many inspirational tracts for the movement­he
extolled the salvational properties of "primary narcissism" as an
effective protest against the "repressive order of procreative
sexuality." "The images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and
Thanatos," Marcuse wrote. "They recall the experience of a world that
is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated: . . . the
redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death;
silence, sleep, night, paradise­the Nirvana principle not as death
but as life."

The succeeding decades showed beyond cavil that the pursuit of "the
redemption of pleasure, the halt of time" was narcissistic in a far
more common sense than Marcuse suggested. It turned out to be a form
of death-in-life, not "paradise."

One of the most conspicuous, and conspicuously jejune, features of
the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been the union of such
hedonism with a species of radical (or radical-chic) politics. This
union fostered a situation in which, as the famous slogan put it,
"the personal is the political." The politics in question was seldom
more than a congeries of radical clich‚s, serious only in that it
helped to disrupt society and blight a good many lives. In that
sense, to be sure, it proved to be very serious indeed. Apocalyptic
rhetoric notwithstanding, the behavior of the "revolutionaries" of
the counterculture consistently exhibited that most common of
bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animus­expressed, as always,
safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security. As Allan
Bloom, recalling Nietzsche, put it in The Closing of the American
Mind, the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college
campuses partly because of "the bourgeois' need to feel that he is
not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited. . .
. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man." It almost goes
without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of anti-bourgeois
ire was both addictive and debilitating.

Like Falstaff's dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these
developments was "gross as a mountain, open, palpable." If America's
cultural revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more,
it was a glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader
Jerry Rubin put it, "We're permanent adolescents." The real victory
of the "youth culture" of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its
demands were met but in the fact that its values and attitudes were
adopted by the culture at large. Rubin again: "Satisfy our demands,
and we've got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we
got." Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth­that is to
say, of immaturity­over experience. It may seem like a small thing
that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but
the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture
speaks volumes. At the end of The Revolt of the Masses, his prescient
1930 essay on the direction of culture, José Ortega y Gasset noted
that "Though it may appear incredible, 'youth' has become a chantage
[blackmail]; we are in truth living in a time when this adopts two
complementary attitudes, violence and caricature."

The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of
adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of
adult virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint.
Writing about the cultural revolution in his book The Undoing of
Thought, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut described this
eclipse as "the triumph of babydom over thought."

Today youth is the categorical imperative of all the generations. . .
. People in their forties are teenagers who have not grown up. . . .
It is no longer the case that adolescents take refuge in their
collective identity, in order to get away from the world; rather it
is an infatuated world which pursues adolescence. . . . The long
process of the conversion to hedonism and consumerism of Western
societies has culminated today in the worship of juvenile values. The
bourgeois is dead, long live the adolescent.

The effect of these developments on cultural life in the West has
been immense. One of the most far-reaching and destructive effects
has been the simultaneous glorification and degradation of popular
culture. Even as the most ephemeral and intellectually vacuous
products of pop culture­rock videos, comic books, television
sit-coms­are enlisted as fit subjects for the college curriculum, so,
too, has the character of popular culture itself become ever more
vulgar, vicious, and degrading.

A watershed moment came with the apotheosis of The Beatles in the
mid-1960s. There is no denying that John Lennon and Paul McCartney
were talented song writers, or that The Beatles (and their
technicians) brought a new sophistication and inventiveness to rock
music. It is also worth noting that in their proclamations of peace
and love (blissed-out on drugs, but still) The Beatles stood in stark
contrast to the more diabolical pronouncements of many other rock
stars preaching a nihilistic gospel of (as the The Rolling Stones put
it) "Let it Bleed" or "Sympathy for the Devil." Nevertheless, The
Beatles, like other rock musicians, were unmistakably prophets of
Dionysian excess; and they were all the more effective on account of
their occasional tunefulness and their cuddly image. The dangerous
Dionysianism, however, was overlooked in the rush to acclaim them
geniuses. Even today, some of the claims made for The Beatles are
breathtaking. The literary critic Richard Poirier was hardly the only
academic to make a fool of himself slobbering over the Fab Four. But
his observation that "sometimes they are like Monteverdi and
sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann's" in Partisan
Review in 1967 did establish a standard of fatuity that has rarely
been surpassed.

Unfortunately, the more popular culture has been raised up­the more
vigorously it has been championed by the cultural elite­the lower
popular culture has sunk. At the same time, though­and this is one of
the most insidious effects of the whole process­the integrity of high
culture itself has been severely compromised by the mindless
elevation of pop culture. The academic enfranchisement of popular
culture has meant not only that trash has been mistaken for great
art, but also that great art has been treated as if it were trash.
When Allen Ginsberg (for example) is upheld in the classroom as a
"great poet" comparable to Shakespeare, the very idea of greatness is
rendered unintelligible and high art ceases to function as an ideal.
To quote Alain Finkielkraut again: It is not just that high culture
must be demystified, brought remorselessly down to the level of the
sort of everyday gestures which ordinary people perform in obscurity;
sport, fashion, and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status. .
. . [I]f you cannot accept that the author of the Essais [i.e.,
Montaigne] and a television personality, or a meditation designed to
uplift the spirit and a spectacle calculated to brutalize, belong in
the same cultural bracket; if you refuse, even though one is white
and the other black, to equate Beethoven and Bob Marley­then you
belong, quite irredeemably, to the party of the bastards (salauds)
and the kill-joys.

In addition to its general coarsening effect on cultural life, this
triumph of vulgarity has helped to pave the way for the success of
the twin banes of political correctness and radical multiculturalism.
The abandonment of intrinsic standards of achievement creates (in
Hermann Broch's phrase) a "value vacuum" in which everything is
sucked through the sieve of politics and the ideology of victimhood.
Thus it is that vanguard opinion champions the idea of "art" as a
realm of morally unassailable privilege even as it undermines the
realities that make artistic achievement possible: technique, a
commitment to beauty, a grounding in tradition. Art retains its
status as a source of spiritual uplift, however dubious, yet it also
functions as an exercise of politics by other means.

Most of today's college students were barely born when the Berlin
Wall was dismantled; they had not yet been born when Saigon fell. To
the present generation, the Sixties and all it represented seem like
nostalgic snapshots from a bygone era. Yet despite the placidity of
our own prosperous times, the radical, emancipationist assaults of
the Sixties are not confined to the past. Robert Bork's description
of our situation as a "slouching towards Gomorrah" is melodramatic
but not, I think, inaccurate. "The Sixties," Judge Bork wrote, may be
seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to
fail but did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or
traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the
universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and
their ideology are all around us now.

That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula
of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture
of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the
authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has
undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national
self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment
industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and
other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high
culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and
innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has
perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.

By the late 1970s, after fantasies of overt political revolution
faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake the
"long march through the institutions." The phrase, popularized by the
German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke, is often attributed to the Italian
Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci­an unimpeachable authority for
countercultural standard-bearers. But of course the phrase also
carries the aura of an even higher authority: that of Mao Tse-tung
and his long march and cultural revolution.

In the context of Western societies, "the long march through the
institutions" signified­in the words of Herbert Marcuse­"working
against the established institutions while working in them." It was
primarily by this means­by insinuation and infiltration rather than
confrontation­that the countercultural dreams of radicals like
Marcuse have triumphed. Bellbottoms, long hair, and incense were
dispensable props; crucial was the hedonistic antinomianism they
symbolized. In this sense, countercultural radicalism has come more
and more to define the dominant culture even as the memory of student
strikes and demonstrations fades under the distorting glaze of
nostalgia. For examples, you need look no further than the curriculum
of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest
museum or radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your
workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to
see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the
counterculture. The radical ethos of the Sixties can be felt
throughout public and private life, from the most ordinary domestic
situations all the way up the political ladder: consider, for
example, the career of Joschka Fischer Sixties radical turned German
Foreign Minister.
The grisly political history of the recent past also reminds us of
the extent to which the totalitarian impulse appeals to liberation in
its effort to expunge genuine liberty. Again and again we have seen
the promise of liberation dissolve into outright tyranny. The
totalitarian impulse occupies a prominent place in most revolutionary
movements, cultural as well as political. Think, for example, of the
Marxist-inspired tyranny visited upon Russia in 1917 or the
megalomaniacal Rousseauvian variety that tore France apart in 1789.
Indeed, the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great
deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian
rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of
pursuing conformity while praising freedom.

It is a neat trick. Words like "freedom" and "virtue" were ever on
Rousseau's lips. But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it
applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. "I think I know
man," Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, "but as for
men, I know them not." In the Confessions, he claimed to be "drunk on
virtue." And indeed, it turned out that "virtue" for Rousseau had
nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others.
On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling
of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who
followed him, "feeling good about yourself" was synonymous with moral
rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a
sign of "inauthenticity" because it suggested a concern for
conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely
distinguishable from moral intoxication.
Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau's avid
disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those
"particular wills"­i.e., individual men and women with their diverse
aims and desires­are so recalcitrant and so ungrateful for one's
efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to
convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great
expedient. Robespierre was no political philosopher. But he
understood the nature of Rousseau's idea of virtue with startling
clarity, as he showed when he spoke of "virtue and its emanation,
terror." It is a remark worthy of Lenin, and a grim foreshadowing of
the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of Sixties radicalism.

I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an
important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much that happened
in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. (Important "fathers" include
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.) Rousseau's narcissism and megalomania,
his paranoia, his fantastic political ideas and sense of absolute
entitlement, his sentimentalizing nature-worship, even his twisted,
hypertrophied eroticism: all reappeared updated in the tumult of the
1960s. And so did the underlying totalitarian impulse that informs
Rousseau's notion of freedom.

The glorification of such spurious freedom is closely connected with
another misuse of language­one of the most destructive: the
description of irresponsible political na&lsqauo;vet‚ as a form of
"idealism." Nor is it only naïveté that gets the extenuating
absolution of "idealism." So do all manner of crimes, blunders, and
instances of brutality: all can be morally sanitized by the simple
expedient of being rebaptized as examples of (perhaps misguided)
"idealism." The one essential qualification is that the perpetrator
be identified with the political Left. In On Revolution, Hannah
Arendt­who was certainly no enemy of the Left herself­cannily
observed that one has often been struck by the peculiar selflessness
of the revolutionists, which should not be confused with "idealism"
or heroism. Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever
since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau,
and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp
upon the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the
value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will
contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may
be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and
against his own will.

In fact, the "peculiar selflessness" that Arendt describes often
turns out to be little more than an abdication of individual
responsibility abetted by utter self-absorption. It is a phenomenon
that, among other things, helps to explain the queasy-making
spectacle of left-wing Western intellectuals falling over themselves
in a vain effort to excuse, mitigate, or sometimes simply deny the
crimes of the Soviet Union and other murderous left-wing regimes
throughout the Cold War and beyond. Perhaps we can admit that Stalin
(or Mao or Pol Pot or Fidel or whoever) was repressive (or maybe that
is just an ugly rumor propagated by the United States); perhaps he
"went too far"; maybe some measures were "extreme"; this or that
policy was "misjudged"; . . . but omelettes require breaking a few
eggs, . . . and besides what glorious ideas are equality, community,
the brotherhood of man . . . going beyond capitalistic greed, mere
selfish individualism, repressive patriarchal society based on
inequitable division of labor, etc., etc. The odor of piety that
attends these rituals of exculpation is almost as disagreeable as the
aura of grotesque unreality that emanates from them.

One sees the same thing in another key in the left-liberal response
to cultural revolution of the 1960s. Whatever criticisms might be
made of the counterculture, they are quickly neutralized by invoking
the totem of "idealism." For example, one is regularly told that
youth in the 1960s and 1970s, whatever its extravagances and
sillinesses, had a "passionate belief" (the beliefs of radicals are
never less than "passionate") in a "better world," in a "more humane
society," in "equality." The guiding assumption is that "passion"
redeems moral vacuity, rendering it noble or at least exempting it
from censure. This assumption, which is part of the Romantic
background of the counterculture, is profoundly mistaken and
destructive. As T. S. Eliot observed , the belief that there is
"something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, whatever
the emotion or whatever the object," is "a cardinal point of faith in
a romantic age." It is also, he noted, "a symptom of decadence." For
it is "by no means self-evident," Eliot wrote, that human beings are
most real when they are most violently excited; violent physical
passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but
rather tend to reduce them to the same state; and the passion has
significance only in relation to the character and behavior of the
man at other moments of his life and in other contexts. Furthermore,
strong passion is only interesting or significant in strong men,
those who abandon themselves without resistance to excitements which
tend to deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of feeling
and lose their humanity; and unless there is moral resistance and
conflict there is no meaning.

"Passion," like "idealism," is a nostrum that the Left prescribes in
order to relieve itself from the burdens of moral accountability.

In a subtle essay called "Countercultures," the political commentator
Irving Kristol noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was in part
a reaction against a society that had become increasingly secular,
routinized, and crassly materialistic. In this respect, too, the
counterculture can be understood as part of our Romantic inheritance,
a plea for freedom and transcendence in a society increasingly
dominated by the secular forces of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed,
revolts of this tenor have been a staple of Romanticism since the
nineteenth century: Dostoevski's "underground man," who seeks refuge
from the imperatives of reason in willful arbitrariness, is only one
example (a rather grim one) among countless others.

The danger, Kristol notes, is that the counterculture, in its attack
on secular materialism, "will bring down­will discredit­human things
that are of permanent importance. A spiritual rebellion against the
constrictions of secular humanism could end up . . . in a celebration
of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself." At a time when
the radical tenets of the counterculture have become so thoroughly
established and institutionalized in cultural life­when they have, in
fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes
of the dominant culture­unmasking illegitimate claims to "liberation"
and bogus feats of idealism emerges as a prime critical task.

To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in
that "moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties." The long
march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond
the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The
great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a
significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The
startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative
victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the
dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our
culture. On the contrary, in the so-called "culture wars,"
conservatives have been conspicuous losers.

One sign of that defeat has been the fate of the culture wars
themselves. One hears considerably less about those battles today
than a decade ago. That is partly because, as Robert Novak notes in
his book Completing the Revolution, "moral issues tend to exhaust
people over time." Controversies that only yesterday sparked urgent
debate today seem, for many, strangely beside the point. There is
also the issue of material abundance. For if the Sixties were an
assault on the moral substance of traditional culture, they
nonetheless abetted the capitalist culture of accumulation. Yes,
there are exceptions, but they are unimportant to the overall
picture. Indeed, it happened that the cultural revolution was most
damaging precisely where, in material terms, it was most successful.
This put many conservatives in an awkward position. For conservatives
have long understood that free markets and political liberty go
together. What if it turned out that free markets plus the cultural
revolution of the Sixties added up to moral and intellectual poverty?

It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the
counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among
its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among
those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish
between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may
be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread
spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have
lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between
civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely
unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long
march of the cultural revolution has been.

.

Oaksterdam University Teaches Pot-Friendly Lessons

Oaksterdam University Teaches Pot-Friendly Lessons on Cannabusiness
and Weed Culture

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/251954/Oaksterdam_University_Teaches_Pot_Friendly_Lessons_on_Cannabusiness_and_Weed_Culture

Mar 21, 2008
by David Silverberg

Want to learn how to grow pot? How to bake marijuana cheesecake? What
to say to police if you're caught with a dime bag? A new trade school
in California is offering certification for students interested in
jobs in cannabis culture.

Digital Journal ­ Marijuana activists and curious cannabis lovers can
now achieve "higher" learning at a groundbreaking college to prepare
people for the medicinal marijuana industry. California's Oaksterdam
University is a new trade school teaching students the legal issues
behind pot policy, how to cultivate and cook cannabis, and how to
effectively "budtend" at one of the many dispensaries dotting the
progressive state.

So far, 500 people have enrolled at Oaksterdam University, located in
a 15th Street building in Oakland. The two-day weekend course costs
$200, and the curriculum is filled with topics familiar to any High
Times reader: Horticulture 101 explains how to produce cannabis from
start to harvest, covering processes such as watering, lighting,
ventilation and pest control. Cannabusiness 102 discusses how to
break into the med-pot industry, from starting a commercial grow to
putting the finishing touches on a cannabis edibles company.

Danielle Schumacher, chancellor of Oaksterdam University, told
DigitalJournal.com in an interview, "Our school shows how the pot
industry is growing up fast and it's not going away anytime soon. It
can be professionalized and possibly standardized."

She says the school, which began in November 2007, isn't a concern
for local police because "cannabis arrests are a low enforcement
priority in California right now." Students don't need to worry about
cops cracking down on them, she adds, especially in a state filled
with more than 400 dispensaries (also called "compassion clubs")
selling medicinal marijuana to sick patients.

"The culture is ahead of the laws," Schumacher says. "We're not
involved in activities like federal distribution or trafficking, and
we just have a few plants to show students."

When asked how many plants OaksterdamU has, Schumacher declined to comment.

So what are the benefits of a certification from the med-pot trade
school? Schumacher says many students want to learn "personal growing
techniques" while others graduate feeling closer to the activist side
of the marijuana community. "We're a political hub here in Oakland,
so we like to keep students in the loop about area non-profits and
meetings at City Hall."

A glance at the faculty list is a good indicator of the political
layers behind the school: Cannabusiness instructor Richard Raich
practiced law with the Federal Election Commission; Politics
professor Dennis Peron is known as a pioneer in cannabis legal issues
during the 1990s; and guest speaker Ed Rosenthal has been offering
growing advice to pot fans for decades, authoring several books on
the subject.

OaksterdamU's reputation is gaining attention so quickly the school
was forced to open another facility in Los Angeles. Schumacher says
the first-come-first serve school is completely booked until August
due to the "overwhelming demand."

Schumacher has noticed how even the most advanced cannabis culture
vulture has learned from the school's lessons. "Some students come to
class with lots of attitude, claiming the money they spent won't
teach them anything new. But within 15 minutes they're blown away by
the high standards of each course and the amount of info we're dishing out."

For more information on Oaksterdam University, visit their website.
http://oaksterdamuniversity.com/

.

Sex: The Revolution

VH1 and Sundance Channel to Air Original Four-Part Documentary Series
From Perry Films, 'Sex: The Revolution' Premiering on VH1, Monday,
May 12 - Thursday, May 15 at 10pm* Each Night

Newest VH1 Rock Doc Charts Seismic Changes In American Sexual
Attitudes, Laws And Practices From 1950s-1980s With Rarely Seen
Footage And New Interviews

Film Airs On Sundance Channel May 19th and May 20th at 12:00am and 1:00am

http://sev.prnewswire.com/television/20080324/NYM09824032008-1.html

NEW YORK, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- VH1 and Perry Films in association
with Sundance Channel have produced "Sex: The Revolution," an
original 4 - part documentary series that tells the story of the
sexual revolution and how it changed America. "Sex: The Revolution"
premieres on VH1 on Monday, May 12 - Thursday, May 15 at 10:00pm with
encore showings on Sundance Channel Monday, May 19th and Tuesday, May
20th at 12:00am.

"Sex: The Revolution" frankly examines a colorful and controversial
chapter of modern American history, when individuals and events
coalesced to challenge the moral orthodoxy surrounding sex and sexual
behavior. Eros moved from the shadows into the sphere of public
discussion, as people sought to eradicate sexual ignorance, fear and
loathing. Activism took root and laws were changed; traditional
institutions and gender roles were questioned; pleasure was had, and
so was profit. And as with any revolution, there were counter-forces
seeking a return to the status quo.

"Sex: The Revolution" begins its narrative in the famously frigid
America of the 1950s, with the first stirrings of a new sexual candor
that would challenge the country's rigid "save-it-for-marriage"
mandate. It continues through the political activism and sexual
experimentation of the 60s and 70s, and concludes with the AIDS
epidemic and the culture wars of the 80s. Along the way are Alfred
Kinsey; Hugh Hefner; Elvis Presley; Citizens for Decent Literature;
the Pill; Sex and the Single Girl; Masters and Johnson; Stonewall;
Sandstone; Billy Graham; Deep Throat; Fear of Flying; the Castro;
Studio 54; Jerry Falwell; Harvey Milk; Ronald Reagan and much, much more.

The series tells its story through rare footage that hasn't been seen
in decades, classic clips, iconic music and interviews with a broad
and eclectic spectrum of people. The storytellers featured in "Sex:
The Revolution" are those who created that revolution, lived it,
wrote the books and music and made the films about it, and were
shaped by it. Among them: musicians Nile Rodgers and David Crosby;
actors Cybill Shepherd, Danny Glover and Dyan Cannon; writers Erica
Jong, Armistead Maupin, John Rechy and Gay Talese; publishers Hugh
Hefner, Helen Gurley Brown, Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt;
filmmakers John Waters and Paul Mazursky; television host Phil
Donahue; writer/publisher Paul Krassner (The Realist); birth control
activist William Baird; and Marilyn Chambers, star of the landmark
porn film Behind the Green Door. Also contributing are the authors of
several recent historical studies: David Allyn (Make Love, Not War),
Legs McNeil (The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the
Porn Film Industry) and Martin Torgoff (Can't Find My Way Home).

The schedule for "Sex: The Revolution" is as follows:

Episode 1: Save it for Marriage -- A look at the many faces of sexual
repression in the 1950s, manifested in popular culture, schools and
in the average American home. Virtually everything outside of marital
procreative sex is outlawed, and for those who transgress the
consequences can be life- shattering. But America has its bawdy
underside, and its share of visionaries in the sciences and arts.
1953 brings a one-two punch to America's sexual ignorance and
prudery: Dr. Alfred Kinsey documents women's sexual practices in the
second of his groundbreaking Kinsey Reports; and Hugh Hefner launches
Playboy magazine, trumpeting sex as a fundamental element the modern
bachelor lifestyle. By the late 1950s, even more cultural forces are
at work, piquing the libidos of the young and adventurous across the
land. In 1960, the FDA approves the Pill, the first oral
contraceptive for use by women. Suddenly women are free to have sex
without worrying about pregnancy, and Helen Gurley Brown is there to
offer them advice. As the 60s take flight, the Civil Rights movement
provides inspiration for activism on numerous fronts. On college
campuses, students boldly claim their rights to free speech,
including the dirty words of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. As
hippies take to the streets of San Francisco's Haight Asbury
district, the repression of the 1950s seem like a distant memory.
"Free love" is in the air, and as a new generation embraces utopian
idealism, anything and everything seems possible. Premieres Monday,
May 12 at 10:00pm on VH1 and Monday, May 19th at 12:00am on Sundance Channel.

Episode 2: The Big Bang -- In the late-60s, liberated sexuality
spreads like wildfire within the burgeoning youth counterculture,
which has united against the Vietnam War. A generation succinctly
states its consciousness in the slogan "Make Love, Not War," and the
Yippies (Youth International Party) add fake erotic potions to their
arsenal of political provocations. At the same time, the sexual
revolution is going middle class and mainstream - not to mention
capitalist. Madison Avenue weaves innuendo into advertising and
Hollywood studios begin to take some cues from sultry foreign films.
Canny entrepreneurs inject a jolt of nudity into cocktail bars,
swinging sweeps the suburbs, and Russ Myer takes sexploitation films
to a new and astoundingly busty level. Sex researchers Masters and
Johnson sell millions of books and spark a national conversation
about good sex, female orgasm and other once- verboten subjects. The
nation's final remaining law against miscegenation is overturned, and
a student at all-female Barnard College challenges the double
standard in university housing rules. The women's movement takes
root, and takes aim at one of America's bastions of female
objectification. But not everyone is thrilled to see taboos crumble,
and in 1968 president-elect Richard Nixon vows to press the national
effort to "control and eliminate smut." Premieres Tuesday, May 13 at
10:00pm on VH1 and Monday, May 19th at 1:00am on Sundance Channel.

Episode 3: Do Your Thing -- The 70s are the halcyon days of the
sexual revolution. Androgyny is in and anything goes. The queers who
resisted arrest at the Stonewell Inn have kicked open the closet door
once and for all; gay culture is out, loud and proud in the Meccas of
San Francisco and Manhattan. In New York, Steve Ostrow opens the
Continental Baths and Bette Midler steps in as the Chosen Chanteuse,
kicking off the golden age of bathhouse and cruising culture. In
Southern California, the Sandstone retreat gained national notoriety
as it took suburban swinging to a new level with its clothing
optional, sexually open community. The 70s is also the age of
feminism, a decade of passionate activism, debate, advocacy and
factionalism. Mainstream feminism is represented by Gloria Steinem,
editor of Ms Magazine, while in the popular culture, Erica Jong
creates a sensation with her novel Fear of Flying and Helen Gurley
Brown turns Cosmopolitan into a national phenomenon. And all of it
takes place against the drama of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court
decision that legalizes abortion and seals the sexual revolution in
place. The era of porno chic dawns with Deep Throat, which is
followed by Behind the Green Door, starring a wholesome blonde model
named Marilyn Chambers. In 1977, San Francisco becomes the first
major U.S. city to elect an openly gay public official, Harvey Milk.
Meanwhile, a growing segment of society is voicing outrage about
pornography, permissiveness and homosexuality. A new crop of moral
crusaders enters the national fray, including former beauty queen
Anita Bryant and California State Senator John Briggs, who seek to
reverse the tide of gay anti-discrimination laws. Premieres
Wednesday, May 14 at 10:00pm on VH1 and Tuesday, May 20th at 12:00am
on Sundance Channel.

Episode 4: Tainted Love -- The pleasure principle triumphs in the
non-stop erotic disco culture of the late 1970s. Sex is out of the
bedroom and out in public -- in glamour spots like Studio 54 and at
private clubs like Plato's Retreat. Hardcore porn magazines multiply,
making Playboy seem almost quaint in comparison; 42nd Street is a XXX
playground; and VCR's bring blue movies into households nationwide.
Many feminists take angry exception to the graphic raunch of Hustler
and company, leading to the formation of the activist group Women
Against Pornography. But the biggest backlash comes from conservative
America, the religious right, and the new President of the United
States, Ronald Reagan. As the 80s begin, an undercurrent of sexual
fatigue and suspicion appears in popular entertainment, mirroring
public unease about rising rates of both divorce and STDs (sexually
transmitted diseases). In 1981 and 1982, newspapers and magazines
publish the first reports of a mysterious outbreak of two rare
diseases in homosexual men. With frightening speed, AIDS slams into
gay communities all over the country, snuffing out thousands of lives
and becoming the new crucible of the culture wars. For several years,
the epidemic is shrouded in misinformation and prejudice, with
victims treated as pariahs. By the end of the decade, the Meese
Commission will have issued a 1,900 page report calling for a war on
porn. The AIDS Memorial Quilt will have been rolled out on the
Washington Mall, and the slow march to AIDS education and awareness
will be underway. In the years to come, the story of the sexual
revolution and its legacy will become ever more charged with moral
controversy. But one thing is clear: America was changed, profoundly
and forever. Premieres Thursday, May 15 at 10:00pm on VH1 and
Tuesday, May 20th at 1:00am on Sundance Channel.

"Sex: The Revolution" is produced by Perry Films, Inc. with Hart
Perry and Richard Lowe directing, Dana Heinz Perry serving as
Executive Producer and Martin Torgoff serving as writer and
Consulting Producer. Stephen Mintz, Brad Abramson, Shelly Tatro and
Jeff Olde are Executive Producers for VH1. Ann Rose is the
Supervising Producer for Sundance Channel and Lynne Kirby is the
Executive Producer for Sundance Channel.

Hart Perry and Dana Heinz Perry are leading creators of documentary
films and series related to music and popular culture. Their company
Perry Films Inc., founded in 1989, pioneered music videos, music
documentaries and music long form, and has produced over 50 films to
date, including the recent "Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century
Art" and the Peabody Award-winning "John Hammond: From Bessie Smith
to Bruce Springsteen." Hart Perry's credits also include
cinematography for Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-wining
documentaries Harlan County U.S.A. and American Dream, and he was the
youngest cameraman on the Academy Award-winning Woodstock. This
award-winning husband-and-wife team also produced The Drug Years,
which aired on both VH1 and Sundance Channel in 2006.

Richard Lowe is a longtime collaborator with Perry Films, having co-
produced and edited Valley of Tears; edited Imagining America; edited
and directed (with Dana Heinz Perry) And You Don't Stop: 30 Years of
Hip Hop, and edited The Drug Years. Other credits as editor include
Goal Dreams which aired on Sundance Channel in 2006.

"Sex: The Revolution" is the newest film in the Emmy Award winning
VH1 Rock Doc franchise. VH1 Rock Docs are television's premier
collection of music documentaries. Each high-end feature-length
documentary reveals an untold story in the history of rock and
hip-hop music, combining never-before- seen footage with a unique and
unconventional narrative approach. The documentaries tell some of the
most unique stories of artists and music from a wide range of genres,
styles, and musical perspectives.

VH1 connects viewers to the music, artists and pop culture that
matter to them most with TV series, specials, live events, exclusive
online content and public affairs initiatives. VH1 is available in 90
million households in the U.S. VH1 also has an array of digital
channels and services including VH1Classic, VH1 Soul, VH1 Mobile, VH1
Games and extensive broadband video on VH1.com. Connect with VH1 at VH1.com.

Sundance Channel

Under the creative direction of Robert Redford, Sundance Channel is
the television destination for independent-minded viewers seeking
something different. Bold, uncompromising and irreverent, Sundance
Channel offers audiences a diverse and engaging selection of films,
documentaries, and original programs, all unedited and commercial
free. Launched in 1996, Sundance Channel is a venture of NBC
Universal, Showtime Networks Inc. and Robert Redford. Sundance
Channel operates independently of the non-profit Sundance Institute
and the Sundance Film Festival, but shares the overall Sundance
mission of encouraging artistic freedom of expression. Sundance
Channel's website address is www.sundancechannel.com.

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The cultural climacteric that was 1968

The cultural climacteric that was 1968

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/22/do2202.xml

By Charles Moore
22/03/2008

Whoopee! Friends have kindly sent us an invitation to a Summer of
Love party, enticingly decorated with a photo of a woman wearing a
hippy headband and not much else.

I wonder how many people make the same mistake as I did, and think
that the Summer of Love took place in 1968. (It was actually in
1967.) The word "1968" conjures up love, peace, drugs, Jimi Hendrix
and so on. The musical Hair began in the West End that autumn ("?'The
nudity is stunning'. Daily Sketch", said the publicity poster.)

Forty years on, the BBC is marking the cultural climacteric that was
1968 by running something on the subject every day on Radio 4.
Perhaps it shows the age of the people in charge of the corporation
that they hark back to such a distant date, but I think it is a good
idea. I was alive at the time - 11 years old - but, not being much of
a Voodoo Chile (©Hendrix), I missed most of it.

It is good to catch up. The study of 1968 reveals a great deal about
the way we live now.

Not quite as you might expect, though. Who won the US presidential
election that year? The not notably funky Richard Nixon, who coined
the phrase "the silent majority". Who attracted by far the biggest
street demonstration of support in the Paris disturbances? Charles De Gaulle.

And 1968 was remarkable for two of the most explosive statements of
conservative ideas made in the modern world, one by Pope Paul VI and
the other by Enoch Powell. So anyone wanting to give a 1968 themed
party could appropriately call it Humanae Vitae or Rivers of Blood.
Be there and be square!

Humanae Vitae was the title of the Pope's encyclical of July 25,
which condemned artificial contraception. Rivers of Blood was the
name given to Powell's speech on April 20, in which he warned that
Britain was "heaping its own funeral pyre" by permitting mass
Commonwealth immigration.

The two texts are very different. The encyclical, like all Vatican
documents, is careful, almost dry. Powell's speech is highly
emotional and incendiary. What they have in common, though, is that
they are conservative protests about what is happening, and
predictions about where it will lead.

Both men understood that they would be bitterly assailed. There will
be a "clamorous outcry", said the Pope. "I can already hear the
chorus of execration", said Enoch. But both thought it was their duty
to speak out. They were much braver than Vietnam protesters in
Grosvenor Square or revolting students in France: they were
confronting the spirit of the age.

The Pope took his stand on the teaching that all married sexual
intercourse - the Church does not countenance any unmarried sexual
intercourse - must have "an intrinsic relationship" to procreation.
If this relationship were broken, various things would follow. There
would be more promiscuity, he said, and lower moral standards. Men,
in particular, "may forget the reverence due to a woman, disregarding
her physical and emotional equilibrium", and reducing their sexual
behaviour to "mere instinct". This would be accompanied by much
greater public obscenity and the advancement of "depravity in the name of art".

Governments, said Paul VI, would use population control as a
substitute for pursuing just economic and social policies. They would
coerce people into limiting the size of their families, forgetting
that "The family is the primary unit in the state". They would
succumb to "an utterly materialistic conception of man". And science
and technology would be abused. "The power of man over his own body"
would become so absolute that he would neglect his duty to the
sacredness of life.

Enoch Powell warned that the then-current rate of immigration would
produce between five and seven million immigrants or people of
immigrant descent by 2000. The trend, he said, was losing white
people their hospital beds, their school places and their
neighbourhoods. It was all happening "in pursuance of a decision by
default, on which they were never consulted".

The Race Relations Act, which came to Parliament that year, would,
said Powell, be "like throwing a match on gunpowder". It would give
the authorities "the power to pillory them [white people] for their
private actions". Powell discussed integration. He thought it would
not occur because of "the growth of positive forces acting against
integration, of vested interests in the sharpening of racial and
religious differences".

This was the "canker" of "communalism", which he had witnessed
(though he did not mention them) during his four years in India in
the 1940s: "Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming
with much blood."

Others have attacked both these texts often and violently, and will
again. There is, indeed, much to be said against them, particularly
against Powell's choice of examples (excreta in letter boxes) and of
words ("charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies"), which cannot escape
the accusation that they turned black and Asian people into objects of hate.

But a fair-minded person, 40 years later, would find it hard to deny
that Paul and Enoch were on to something.

There has been an explosion of public obscenity. Artificial
contraception was supposed to remove the need for abortion, but
abortion has hugely increased. So have sexually transmitted diseases.

Judging by the divorce and illegitimacy rates, it would be hard to
argue, as people used to, that family planning has saved marriage.
The number of teenage pregnancies shows that the contraceptive
culture has not protected young girls very successfully.

States have indeed forced people into birth control. China's
one-child policy has so altered the shape of the family and the
psychology of each child that its rising generation may well threaten
the peace of the world.

As for science, it is now clear that there are no agreed limits about
when an embryo may be created, altered or destroyed. People are
becoming products.

And, yes, as men in pubs used to tell you all the time, "Enoch was
right", at least in the sense that the great growth in immigration -
his numerical projections proved accurate - has weakened our sense of
national solidarity and produced tensions leading to violence.

The strain on welfare, on policing, on "Britishness", on civil peace
is enormous. It was once unimaginable that British-born people would
blow up their fellow-citizens in the name of Islam, but in London in
2005, it happened.

It particularly interests me that both Paul VI and Enoch Powell
thought about something to which the Spirit of '68 was curiously
indifferent. What happens, they asked, to the weak?

It would be poor girls who would be exploited for sex without
marriage, and by the commercialisation of sex. It would be poor
whites, not people like the liberal Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, who
would find that they no longer "owned" their streets.

"The many, not the few" has been a great slogan of the liberal Left
in recent times. But the legacy of 1968 suggests that the many may
not have so much to thank them for.

Parallel with its 1968 season, the BBC is showing a series of
programmes about the white working class, treating it with excited
surprise, as if it were a rare and threatened species just discovered
by David Attenborough in a rain forest. There is a relation, not
fully considered, between the two subjects.

I leave conservative-minded people with this conundrum. Must we
always be gloomy Cassandras, or can we ever find a way of persuading
people we are right before it is too late?
---

Also, see:

1968 remembered

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/21/nosplit/bvtv1968.2103.xml

21/03/2008

Forty years ago there were riots in Grosvenor Square and Robert
Kennedy announced he would run for president. We team up with the BBC
to bring you a series of unique extracts from the BBC archives

...

.

Morgan Neville's "The Cool School"

Wistful Thinking:
Morgan Neville's "The Cool School"

http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2008/03/review_wistful.html

by Michael Joshua Rowin
(March 24, 2008)

"The Cool School" is one of a subset of documentary biographies that
might best be called "Scenes of Yesteryear." Like the recent "Weather
Underground," "Commune," and "American Hardcore"--whose respective
subjects include radical terrorists, hippie collectives, and
indigenous, anticommercial punk rock--"The Cool School" weaves
testimony from participants of a faded fringe movement with footage
from its heyday to take stock of the legacy of the marginal
subculture in question. These are nostalgic, sometimes commemorative
films employing a similar functional style to deliver content as
practically as possible, and they're so close to each other in
quality that a misfire ("American Hardcore"'s harried mess) usually
isn't all that far from a triumph ("Weather Underground"'s precise
portrait of revolutionary fanaticism).

As a result it's hard to avoid faint praise even when recommending
Morgan Neville's "The Cool School," which recounts Los Angeles'
frequently overshadowed 1950s and 1960s art scene. As "Scenes of
Yesteryear" documentaries go it does right by its subject, providing
an illuminating primer on a lesser-known strand of America's eruptive
postwar art movement, even as it doesn't do much aesthetically to
distinguish itself from the pack.

Of course, the story's the thing here, and with Jeff Bridges handling
voiceover duties "The Cool School" paints a clear picture of L.A.'s
inferiority complex in the Fifties, when the East Coast owned a
virtual monopoly on trendsetting modernism, with de Kooning and
Pollock leading the way, and San Francisco emerged as the West
Coast's Beat Era capital. But a legitimate scene began forming around
eccentric, pensive curator Walter Hopps and burly artist Ed
Kienholz's Ferus Gallery, founded in 1957.

Inspired by the freedom from pressure afforded by L.A.'s diminutive
status on the art world map and the city's unique collision of
Hollywood glamour and industrial commercial detritus, artists like
Kienholz, John Baldessari, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Ken Price,
John Altoon, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Wallace Berman forged
their own careers in abstract expressionism, assemblage, light and
space installations, and pop art, all with a sensibility deeply
rooted in the brash absurdity and chromatic shine of Venice Beach.

These were mostly Los Angeles natives who refused to move to New York
(or moved there and then quickly scrambled back) precisely because
their hometown allowed them to revel in a macho Californian culture
of cars, surfing, and girls (the scene's patriarchal dynamics are
unfortunately discussed only briefly), while also using it as raw
material for their satirical and subversive work. While initially
toiling in obscurity, Hopps and eventual Ferus cohort Irving Blum, a
curatorial Cary Grant, continually championed them--often with
controversial repercussions, as in the case of Berman, who was
arrested on charges of obscenity.

Recognition gradually arrived however, as did, inevitably, a host of
ego and power struggles. As the artists' reputations grew, Hopps
became director of the Pasadena Museum of Art (overseeing the first
retrospectives of Cornell and Duchamp), and Ferus expanded to take a
chance on some East Coast artists you might have heard of (Warhol,
Lichtenstein), and the original grittiness and underdog atmosphere in
which these artists thrived as a loose contingent of likeminded
painters and sculptors slowly evaporated.

It's the same sad tale of how money can taint something pure, though
in this case most of the principal players continued to do well for
themselves after the Gallery's swan song in 1966. There were the
unfortunate casualties of the Sixties (Altoon, who battled mental
illness and shock therapy) and betrayed friendships (Hopps, whose
wife left him for Blum, was hospitalized for a period), but most of
the artists went on to pursue their own visions outside an
increasingly chic and fame-oriented scene. In this regard "The Cool
School" frames the general movement as lovingly as it does the
individual artists, though a reunion of the survivors doesn't carry
the weight it should. Neville, a veteran of television documentaries
on music, literature, and Hollywood, pulls out a trick or two --
black-and-white shots with a single element in color -- to jazz
things up, but these are unnecessary since the film's straightforward
approach is usually good enough to impart the L.A. buzz circa late
Fifties, early Sixties (that there was a time and place when Frank
Gehry could hobnob with fellow interviewees Dean Stockwell and Dennis
Hopper is, even for a counterculture, pretty unique). The tone may be
insular and reminiscent, but that's just par for the "Scenes of
Yesteryear" course.
--

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also
writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.]

.

Happy Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[2 items]

Happy Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2008/03/breakfast_of_ch_98.php

by Jeff Shaw
March 24, 2008

One of the country's most accomplished artists turns 89 today.
...

BRAIN CANDY

Born in 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a firsthand participant in
watershed events of the 20th century, artistic and otherwise. He's a
writer and publisher, of course, but has meant so much more to the
artistic community, the country and the world.

A free speech pioneer, Ferlinghetti and his City Lights Press
famously faced legal sanction for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
A Navy veteran of World War II, he saw the devastation wrought on
Nagasaki mere weeks after the atomic bombing -- an event that
cemented his status as a lifelong pacifist.

Ferlinghetti is deservedly most famous for poetry, but he's also an
accomplished painter and experimental playwright. A man older than
Jack Kerouac, but a man who well outlived his friend the college
athlete by going to the gym every day while Kerouac was drinking. (A
fictionalized version of Ferlinghetti also appears in Kerouac's novel
Big Sur.) Also, you have love a nearly-90 man who coined the phrase
(and still sports a button proclaiming) "Fuck art, let's dance."

At the end of the day, though, Ferlinghetti is a poet, and a damn
fine one. Works like "Junkman's Obbligato" are at once bohemian
products of their era and keen expressions of timeless ideas:

Let's go
Come on
Let's go
Empty our pockets
And disappear.
Missing all our appointments
And turning up unshaven
Years later
Old cigarette papers
stuck to our pants
leaves in our hair.
Let us not
worry about the payments
anymore.
Let them come
and take it away
whatever it was
we were paying for.
And us with it.

A healthy chunk of Ferlinghetti's work is meant to be read
accompanied by jazz, as a sort of oral message punctuated with music.
This is true of his most famous work, "I am Waiting", from the
classic A Coney Island of the Mind. Celebrating the natural world --
and the magical, surreal everyday experience of the common individual
-- the poems lead us through screen doors, into candy stores and past
pastoral landscapes of unreality.

Writers often say that they write to explain the world to themselves,
to make sense of their own lives. Ferlinghetti is way ahead of most
of us, and has been for years. This passage from his poem
"Autobiography" is one of my favorites:

and I have read somewhere
the Meaning of Existence
yet have forgotten
just exactly where.
But I am the man
And I'll be there.

Published in 1958, that poem turns 50 this year. Part manifesto and
part mantra, it sets up a fair blueprint for the artistic life:
fumbling for the lost meaning of existence, the artist finds meaning
in the practice -- and comfort in knowing that the journey itself is worth it.

Fuck art, let's dance. Happy birthday, Ferlinghetti.

--------

I had the pleasure to recently work with Lawrence Ferlinghetti on a
film documentary. He shared his experiences from Jack Kerouac's novel
Big Sur. It was Lawrence's cabin in Big Sur that was used for the
production of the film. Lawrence was sharp, limber and highly
enthused. He is a remarkable man. Look for him in "One Fast Move or
I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur" supporting website is http://www.kerouacfilms.com

Posted by: Curt Worden at March 25, 2008

.

Film targets JFK conspiracy theories

[2 articles]

Film targets JFK conspiracy theories

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695263075,00.html

By Adam Beam
The Boston Globe
Published: Friday, March 21, 2008
"Oswald's Ghost" (PBS, WGBH Educational Foundation, rated TV-PG, $24.99)

"Oswald's Ghost" is an elegantly crafted, 90-minute obituary for the
conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

On the one hand, filmmaker Robert Stone (no relation to Oliver)
reports that about 70 percent of Americans still disbelieve the
official investigation into Kennedy's killing. Veteran conspiracy
jockey Mark Lane crows that, unlike the major networks and editorial
boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times, "I have been
right all along" about the plot to kill Kennedy.

But a more impressive roster of experts, including the late Norman
Mailer, Priscilla MacMillan and Todd Gitlin, has arrived at a
different conclusion. Edward Jay Epstein, who has criticized the
official Warren Report on the assassination, now thinks there was no
anti-JFK conspiracy. "As we cover decade after decade, not a shred
has come out that would indicate what this conspiracy was," Epstein
says. "After 40 years, none of the theories pan out."

I don't know what Stone's agenda was in making "Oswald's Ghost." I
understood it as a fairly subtle commentary on time. If there had
been more truths to reveal about the Kennedy assassination, time
would have yielded them. But it didn't. To borrow the language of
"The X-Files," popcult's greatest conspiracy homage of recent time:
Maybe the truth was out there all along.

Why is this relevant? Because we again are awash in conspiracy
theories. Every major news event attracts an accompanying backwash of
debunking, counter-factual argument and conspiracy-mongering. A
recent Vanity Fair reported that "many people in London" believe that
Prince Philip headed up a conspiracy to kill his erstwhile
daughter-in-law, Princess Diana. Really? As if anyone cared.

The main event in contemporary conspiracy-mongering is, of course,
9/11. A few weeks into the fall of 2001, a friend called me from
France and urged me to be the first American journalist to report the
"truth" about the Sept. 11 attacks. He then sent me French newspaper
stories "proving" that no airplane ever crashed into the Pentagon.
While it is true that my French isn't what it used to be, I wasn't convinced.

The French have not monopolized this version of events. Not
infrequently, I receive e-mails with subject lines like, "Yes, the
Bush/Cheney regime deliberately let 9/11 happen."

"The Pentagon was struck by a 'hijacked' airliner 45 minutes after
two other 'hijacked' airliners struck the WTC," this recent missive
continued, "without the airliner being intercepted, approached,
chased, or even seen by our air defenses? The Gov't still refuses to
release clear video of whatever happened at the Pentagon to this day,
six years later??? Why???"

This e-mail urges you and me to visit the Web site 911truth.org, and
all I can say is, feel free to exercise your First Amendment rights.
There is a "truth novel" (paging Mr. Orwell) about 9/11 coming out
from a "New York Times Best-Selling Author" later this month. Look
for it! On the Web site, you can check out the "peer-reviewed"
Journal of 9/11 Studies. The site also allows you to download
"resistance music," like Zan Overall's "I Want to Believe You, Mr.
President," sung by Bill Horn and 911Truth Chorus. Sample lyric: "The
more I learn about 9/11/Believing you gets harder to do."

You can watch clips of "Boston Tea Party" for 9/11 truth at the Web
site boston911truth.org. I saw a video of retired Brigham Young
University physicist Steven Jones explaining that he had found
chemical evidence of Thermate, "a high-tech incendiary that melts
steel like a hot knife through butter" in World Trade Center
detritus. A press release from architect Richard Gage announces that
"the official explanation of the total destruction of the World Trade
Center skyscrapers has explicitly failed to address the massive
evidence for explosive demolition."

Are there mysteries? Yes, there are mysteries. A friend of mine
thinks that American Airlines's Flight 587, which crashed in Queens
in the fall of 2001, was shoe-bombed. (Shoe bomber Richard Reid was
arrested a month later on an American Airlines flight.) Even though I
have since met an engineer who consulted on the investigation, which
attributed the crash to wake turbulence and pilot error, I think my
friend may be right.

But I don't think Dick Cheney, or the titans of capital, or the
agents of the Apocalypse blew up the World Trade Center and killed
3,000 people to further some dark cause. I think the plot was hatched
right where we think it was, in the faraway, hot sands of anti-American hatred.

I doubt the truth is out there. I think it is already here.

(DVD special features: A visit to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, "The
Zapruder Film and Beyond" and an interview with producer Robert
Stone. The DVD is available for purchase at www.shoppbs.org and
proceeds support public television.)
---

Alex Beam is a Boston Globe columnist

--------

JFK questions won't go away

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23397112-5003422,00.html

Dianne Butler
March 18, 2008

A BBC presenter is talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy
and puts the question, why is the nightmare still so fresh?

Yes, why is that? Of course, he was asking this in 1966 – do you
reckon he thought people would still be wondering the same thing 40
years later?

The footage is in a PBS documentary called Oswald's Ghost. And look,
it's entirely possible you don't in any way care about the JFK
murder, I accept that. SBS is running this on Friday night, which in
some circles is also known as Good Friday, so they too appear to be
aware that interest could be quite low.

But I don't care, I'm still going to tell you about it, it's a really
good show. And controversial – it comes out in favour of the lone
gunman theory.

Yes, a little bit crazy but there you are. The case that's made is
reasonably persuasive, see what you think. I'm still for the multiple
gunmen theory myself, and it's not just me. Lyndon Johnson never
believed Oswald acted alone, nor do most Americans – 70 per cent,
according to this. You could maybe – maybe – accept that Lee Harvey
Oswald did it on his own if he hadn't been himself killed by Jack
Ruby a couple of days later. So suss.

And I agree with Tom Hayden, the big political activist who's
interviewed here – he was also Mr Jane Fonda for an amount of time –
and who says that whenever it looked like the progressive majority
was coming to power in the 1960s, it was interrupted by killings,
killings performed by unknown forces. JFK in 1963, followed by Martin
Luther King then Bobby Kennedy in 1968. So when you look at it that
way, well, clearly there's more to it than just some bloke going to
work one day and shooting the president.

There is a range of material featured here – FBI phone conversations,
archives, various influential people, including Dan Rather, Norman
Mailer, Robert Dallek, Mark Lane and Gary Hart, who ran for president
a couple of times in the 1980s and ended up being tarnished by a sex
scandal. He's got some interesting things to say about the CIA.

And have you seen the Oliver Stone movie JFK? Do you remember how
Kevin Costner played District Attorney Jim Garrison? And how he was a
total hero? We get a somewhat different view of him here . . .

I really liked this. And I kept thinking what Michael Corleone says
in the second Godfather film – if history has taught us anything,
it's that you can kill anyone.

.

Boom Goes the Ego

Boom Goes the Ego

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/896agigg.asp

The worst generation.

by Kevin Kusinitz
03/20/2008

IF THE AMERICANS WHO lived through the Depression and won the Second
World War were the Greatest Generation, then the Baby Boomers would
have to be the Greatest Ego Generation. Pampered like no others
before them, free to explore their own interests while their parents
worked hard to put food on the table, the Boomers eventually pursued
pop culture as their time killer of choice.

Being a Boomer myself, I'd like to think that, subconsciously, we
were fully aware that learning to play guitar or storyboard a script
didn't, in the end, compare to saving the world from Nazism.
Therefore, we amped up the value of pop culture in order to make us
feel important--all the while secretly giving thanks to our parents
for providing us with the good life.

Yup, I'd like to think that. But I'd be wrong. We really do think
that our contributions to Top 40 radio and Cinema have had a
life-altering effect across the planet, and by God our kids had
better thank us for it and, oh yeah, could you turn down that lousy
rap music? Did I call that stuff music? Ha! In my day, we had real
music . . . Music that drove our parents' crazy the same way their
music drove their parents crazy. It's called "making way for
something new whether you like it or not."

However, the Boomers utterly refuse to get off the stage (see
Clinton, Bill and Hillary); they continue to think that nothing
before their time mattered.
Our parents might have had Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill,
but we had the Beatles!

Now, I take a backseat to no man in my Beatles worship (and I have
the Paul McCartney tie tack to prove it). But as my eyes grow more
jaundiced with age, I can only wonder who took honorary Boomer
Timothy Leary seriously when he proclaimed the Beatles "evolutionary
agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new
human species." I mean, if God had indeed sent them on some
top-secret bio-spiritual mission, the Men's Wearhouse would now be
selling Sgt. Pepper uniforms, and al Qaeda would have realized all
they needed was love rather than a one-way ticket into the World Trade Center.

Mistaking pop culture for epoch-making events came to a head in 1985
with the international Live Aid concerts. Organized with the best of
intentions by Bob Geldof, the idea was to finally rid Africa of
starvation, malaria, AIDS and, for all I know, restless leg syndrome.
Frank Zappa refused to participate, declaring it the biggest
drug-laundering scheme in history. Huey Lewis and the News took a
pass as well, believing the whole thing wasn't very well thought out
to do any good.

I can't vouch for Zappa's opinion, but the "Hip to be Square" boys
were proven correct when the food meant for starving children wound
up in the hands of corrupt African leaders and their equally-corrupt
military--when it wasn't just rotting on the docks, that is. If a
bunch of muscleheads like Huey Lewis & the News smelled something
rotten in Ethiopia, why didn't anybody else?

The moviemakers are no better. While directing An American President
in 1995, Rob Reiner boasted to friends that his movie would
single-handedly get Bill Clinton re-elected to a second term. How a
romantic comedy about a handsome, widowed president wooing a
beautiful, soft-spoken journalist had anything to do with a pudgy
good ol' boy and his harridan wife wasn't made clear. Moreover, while
Clinton was re-elected, it was due primarily to Bob Dole's cranky
demeanor. No matter--to this day Meathead probably thinks An American
President was the Diebold polling machine of his day, insuring a
victory for his candidate of choice.

Steven Spielberg didn't have as much luck when he opined that Munich,
his movie about the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, would
bring peace to the Middle East. I'm no history expert, but hasn't
that little quarrel between Jews and Arabs been going on for, what,
centuries? And suddenly the guy who directed Hook is the key to
getting both sides to throw down their weapons?

Sadly, Steverino isn't alone. Last year saw the release of anti-Iraq
war movies seemingly every week, all of which were supposed to bring
peace in our time. Yet Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, No End in
Sight, Grace is Gone and Lions for Lambs came and went like a kilo of
coke at the "Vanity Fair" Oscar bash. As if channeling Reiner and
Spielberg, director Brian De Palma went on record that his movie,
Redacted, would finally turn the public against the war.

De Palma's prediction itself was redacted as his movie got yanked
from U.S. theatres after grossing a beyond-paltry $65,388 over four weeks.

Putting the average ticket price at $8.00 (in New York, it's $12.50),
that would mean fewer than 8,200 tickets were sold. Even overseas,
where America-loathing comes with mother's milk, Redacted earned less
than $500,000. Lions for Lambs, the highest grossing of the bunch,
took in $15,000,000 domestically . . . on a budget over double that.
In an additional slap in the face, it was Tom Cruise's
lowest-moneymaker ever. When you can't pull in the Cruise fans, who
rival Oprah Winfrey's for feral devotion, you're doing something
terribly wrong.

The people who made these anti-war movies blame the media for
drugging "the masses" into tuning out "the truth." Wrong. The real
problem is that De Palma et al insist on wrapping the message around
the entertainment instead of the other way around. It was a lesson
learned by moviemakers in the past, which is why Dr. Strangelove, 12
Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, to name just three, are reissued
in spiffy new home video editions every few years while Redacted DVDs
will go straight to landfill. Lesson unlearned: punching the audience
in the mouth isn't the same as persuasion.

This didn't stop MTV from producing Stop-Loss, an anti-war movie for
Generation Z, scheduled for release later this month. Meanwhile, back
in the music world, the uni-monikored Bono has carved out a second
career strongarming presidents, princes, and peons to finance a
worldwide Utopia, where nobody is hungry, cold, or has hurt feelings.
Auditioning for the role of Jesus Christ II is time-consuming, no
doubt. Fortunately, Bono's band, U2, found a few minutes to move
their publishing company from Ireland to the Netherlands as a tax
shelter. That means less money for the Irish government to hand out
to starving children, but at least U2 will never go hungry. Bono,
remember, needs his strength so he can guilt-trip you into forking
over your dough. And isn't that what it's all about?

Reiner, Spielberg, Bono--bah. Looking over my generation, I'd say the
only ones who could honestly claim to have changed the world are Bill
Gates and Osama bin-Laden. And, to read some of the folks at the
Daily Kos, you'd be hard-pressed to figure out the real villain.

Astonishingly, one famous Boomer seems to have had an epiphany of
sorts. "I think that the time when music could change the world is
past," grizzled rocker Neil Young admitted recently. "I think it
would be very naive to think that in this day and age."

Thanks for the heads up, Neil. By the way, the Cottingley Fairies
don't really exist, either.
--

Kevin Kusinitz is a contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Online.

.

Brave New World for Hollywood as Aldous Huxley feud ends

Brave New World for Hollywood as Aldous Huxley feud ends

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3602725.ece

March 23, 2008
John Harlow in Los Angeles

When Leonardo DiCaprio was a young boy, he used to play hide-and-seek
in the overgrown gardens of a Hollywood Hills mansion owned by the
family of the visionary British author Aldous Huxley.

Now, 30 years later, the star of Titanic and The Aviator is paying
back the hospitality by putting his Hollywood muscle behind the first
big-screen production of Brave New World, Huxley's most enduring novel.

The Universal Studios movie, which Sir Ridley Scott wants to direct,
has become possible only because years of wrangling over the terms of
Huxley's will have finally been settled, his granddaughter Tessa
confirmed last week. "There is now nothing stopping this film," she said.

America, which claims the Surrey-born author as one of its own,
appears to be on the brink of a Huxley revival.

Fresh editions of his novels are in the works, Californian libraries
are bidding for his papers, which include a hoard of unpublished
manuscripts, and his last home above Los Angeles ­ where DiCaprio
played ­ may be turned into a writers' retreat.

Yet Huxley was a quintessential middle-class Englishman. Born in
Godalming and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he became
a friend of 1920s luminaries such as DH Lawrence and the philosopher
Bertrand Russell. Both men influenced Huxley's portrait of a future
London where sex is easy but love banned in Brave New World, which
was published in 1932.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1937, saying the light suited his poor
eyesight. Hollywood employed him to rewrite British classics for the
screen such as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. His rambling home
on Mulholland Drive, the highway that winds along the top of the
mountains overlooking Los Angeles, became a salon for intellectuals
from the astronomer Edwin Hubble to the Harvard psychologist Timothy
Leary, promoter of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which Huxley took as
part of a final ceremony as he lay stricken with cancer in 1963.

Until her own death at 96 last December, Huxley's Italian-born widow
Laura maintained the Mulholland home as an open house where she
became friends with George DiCaprio, the actor's artist father.

"Laura and I were friends, and Leo was friends with Laura's ward
Karen: they were toddlers playing together in these rambling old
gardens with an empty fish pond and wild flowers everywhere,"
DiCaprio, 64, recalled last week.

"Laura always wanted a film made of Brave New World, but the
technology was not there to make it look convincing. It is a vast
futuristic world to put on screen, packed with many ideas which made
it tough for some studios to deal with. And there were also family
issues," he said.

These issues hinged on the terms of Huxley's will. It left 80% of
future royalties to Laura and 20% to his son Matthew by his first
wife Maria, which on Matthew's death passed to his two children
Trevenen and Tessa.

They expressed what family friends call "disappointment" with this
arrangement, and made it clear they enjoyed "termination" rights,
which meant they could stop any film. Studios were not willing to risk that.

The Huxleys' literary agent, Georges Borchardt, who also represents
Ian McEwan and the Tennessee Williams estate, has negotiated a fresh,
undisclosed royalty deal with the younger Huxleys, which has cleared
the way for the movie.

DiCaprio will play John the Savage, who lives a "natural" life on a
reservation while the rest of cloned humanity is lulled into docility
with sex, soma (drugs) and feelies (films that also involve the
senses of smell and touch). He finally escapes celebrity to become a
lighthouse keeper.

"And Ridley Scott, who has just finished working with Leo on a film
called Body of Lies, has volunteered himself to direct," said George
DiCaprio, who is helping to produce Brave New World. "We are due to
see the first script next week."

Tessa Huxley, 54, said last week that she remembered playing as a
small child with her grandfather in the house on Mulholland. She
added: "I know my grandfather would be very pleased that his ideas
were about to reach a new audience around the world."

.

Paul [McCartney] is an old hippy at heart

'Paul is an old hippy at heart.
He holds true to the principles of love and peace'

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/03/20/paul-is-an-old-hippy-at-heart-he-holds-true-to-the-principles-of-love-and-peace-89520-20356741/

EXCLUSIVE MACCA: I FORGIVE

By Fiona Cummins, Showbiz Reporter
Fiona.Cummins@Mirror.Co.Uk
20/03/2008

Paul McCartney returned to his old hippy roots yesterday to bridge
the chasm that separates him from vengeful Heather Mills.

Forgiving his estranged wife for her squalid attempt to win a
£125million divorce settlement, he told friends he wants to maintain
a "close and cordial" relationship with her for the sake of daughter
Beatrice, four.

A close source said: "Paul is an old hippy at heart. He holds true to
the principles of the 60s - love, peace and understanding.

"It may sound surprising after everything Heather has put him through
but he'll do his damnedest to make sure they stay friends.

"He doesn't want war. He just wants to get on with his life,
concentrate on Beatrice and put the whole sorry episode behind him."

Heather, 40, was branded a liar, a fantasist and "her own worst
enemy" by High Court judge Mr Justice Bennett when he awarded her a
£24.3million deal earlier this week.

Sir Paul, 65, now feels "utterly vindicated". The friend said: "It
was Heather who chose to prolong their divorce. She could have ended
it at any time.

"Paul has maintained a dignified silence throughout and it's
obviously paid off - his name has been cleared."

The pal disclosed that it had taken huge inner strength for Macca and
his closest family not to go public over ugly allegations made by Heather.

Daughters Stella, 36, and Mary, 37, were particularly frustrated at
staying silent as the two-year saga unfolded.

Our source said: "They all had to bite their tongues repeatedly.

"There's still a temptation to deliver both barrels to Heather.

"But, thanks to the judge, the truth has finally come out. Now
everyone can make up their own minds."

Heather had claimed she needed £3.25million a year. But the judge
said she had "flagrantly over-egged the pudding" while her evidence
was "inaccurate" and "less than candid".

Yesterday's Macca's close friend Cilla Black also offered the former
model an olive branch. She said: "It's time to move on.

"There are no winners in divorce, it's very hard for everyone. I wish
her well. Now it's time to concentrate on their daughter."

Heather has hired US lawyer Gloria Allred - who represented Spice
Girl Mel B in her paternity battle with actor Eddie Murphy - to help
restore her image in the US.

Despite her court claim that her earning potential is "zero" she has
been lined up as a judge for Miss USA in April in Las Vegas.

Us reports allege she has been touting her story for £1million,
including "intimate photos and recordings" of her time with Macca.

But sources close to Heather insisted that was highly unlikely as the
settlement bans her from talking of her four-year marriage.

.

In Goa, life’s no longer a beach

[2 articles]

In Goa, life's no longer a beach

http://howrah.org/india_news/7814.html

24 March, 2008
By Pamela D'Mello

A Google search on the Scarlett Keeling murder shows up over 1,200
articles. With its ingredients of rape, sex, narcotics and a
homicidal drowning, the incident put Goa in the spotlight as never
before. Aside from the tourism region's trouble spots, it put the
region's policing under a scanner.

Blanket negative coverage in the British and national media portrayed
Goa as a drug haven where narcotics are easily available and crime overlooked.

Protests from director-general of police B.S. Brar that crime rates
in Goa are lowest in the country made no difference.

It took some time for the local administration to react. When it did,
it cancelled the licence of Lui cafe, the site of the Keeling
misadventure. All of the state's 280 beach shacks have been asked to
close by 11 pm. Patrolling in coastal areas has especially been
stepped up, says Goa IGP Kishen Kumar. The police began checking and
questioning those found on the streets after 2 am.

The state tourism department demolished some 50 illegal shacks, and
adhering to a high court order, scores of beach beds clogging the
narrow Baga beach stretch were cleared overnight.

Police prowl around Anjuna ­ the heart of the hippy and backpacker
haunt ­ and patrols have been increased on tourist frequented beaches.

The police rounded up a 100 persons, and another 20 were picked up in
south Goa, where a German tourist reported being molested on a lonely
beach stretch a week ago.

Curbs on night life may be a temporary measure and it comes at the
fag end of the tourist season, but the administration, nevertheless,
is keen to rein in the beach shack culture that has grown from simple
thatched beach eateries to an entire subculture. Over the next week,
the administration will hold a series of consultations with various
tourism stakeholders to evolve a community awareness strategy on
tourism issues.

Officially, the state has been hankering for some time to for an
image makeover, keen to reinvent itself as a premium exclusive
destination, but ground protests have stalled setting up of golf
courses, a prerequisite for this segment.

Goa has a multi-sectoral tourist package. At the top end are premium
beach resorts fronting long stretches of near private beach, virtual
tourist SEZs. A mid sector of one to four-star accomodation caters to
charter tourists, while budget hotels cover the budget end domestic
market. Alternative counter culture backpacker travellers hone in on
select beaches, Patnem and Palolem in south Goa, and Morjim, Asvem,
Mandrem and Arambol in north Goa with Anjuna, the former hippy
hangout, at its epicentre.

"Problems here may be localised, but it takes one rotten egg to spoil
an entire basket," says Goa chief secretary J.P. Singh. In tourism,
perception is everything and the state took a major hit with the mass
of negative publicity generated.

Anjuna has always got bad press for its trance parties and drugs.
Past attempts to stop its Wednesday flea market or clamp down on its
raves led to local protests from a section of villagers who have
developed their own symbiotic relationship with their guests. "We
don't want to use a sledgehammer where only a hammer is required, but
criminality, whether in drugs or land purchases, will have to be
addressed," said Mr Singh. Dealing with Anjuna will require community
support, the administration concedes.

A special tourist police force is being considered for Goa, in
consultation with the Union tourism ministry, chief minister Digambar
Kamat announced. The force will require specialised training to
patrol beaches round the clock and deal with other tourism-related issues.

--------

A DIPPY HIPPY'S SHAME

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/03/24/a-dippy-hippy-s-shame-89520-20361032/

Tony Parsons
24/03/2008

Fiona MacKeown, the mother of Scarlett Keeling murdered in Goa, has
gone into hiding, saying she fears for her life.

Fiona seems determined to portray herself as the victim in this tragedy.

But there is only one victim. In the hours before she was raped and
murdered, Scarlett was stoned, drunk and very much alone.

With her batty hippy mother and assorted siblings 100 miles away, the
15-year-old was left at the mercy of the kind of men who haunt the
bars of Goa in the early hours of the morning.

What a pushover she must have appeared to them.

This helpless child without anyone to protect her - not even the
25-year-old tour guide who, God help her, she had shacked up with as
a means of being fed.

Scarlett's mother is guilty of grotesque negligence.

The men who killed her deserve to be brought to justice, but so does
the mother who put her child in that situation.

It doesn't matter that Scarlett knew about drugs, that she was
sexually active or that she looked like a woman.

She was a child and deserved the protection that every child should
have. She did not get it.

Fiona MacKeown has never expressed any regret about dumping her
15-year-old daughter in the squalid underbelly of Goa.

"I certainly do not feel I was negligent," she says. And that is why
she deserves to be in the dock with the men who raped and murdered that child.

Fiona MacKeown is in hiding. So she should be. Hiding her face in shame.

.

Tom Hayden on Obama / Iraq

[2 items]

Nothing New in Obama's Iraq Speech

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/nothing-new-in-obamas-ir_b_92418.html

Posted March 19, 2008
by Tom Hayden

Sen. Barack Obama marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War with a
speech that will disappoint the peace movement while burnishing his
hawkish credentials with the national security establishment and media.

He failed to point out that Hillary Clinton's plan may keep U.S.
troops fighting in Iraq for five to eight more years.

He failed to dissociate from the grim counterinsurgency war
envisioned by Gen. Petraeus.

He failed to connect the war with the economic devastation and energy
quandaries facing the United States.

Instead, he simply repeated his plan to remove all U.S. combat
divisions in 16 months. But he will "leave enough troops in Iraq to
guard our embassy and diplomats, and a counter-terrorism force to
strike al Qaeda if it forms a base that the Iraqis cannot destroy."
He will dispatch two of those withdrawn American combat brigades to
Afghanistan, "to leverage greater assistance .- with fewer
restrictions .- from our NATO allies." And he will unilaterally
attack Pakistan's border region if there is "actionable intelligence"
about high-level al Qaeda leadership there, a policy deeply unpopular
among Pakistanis.

Under these proposals, Americans may be burdened with three quagmires
-- Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. There is no mention of the
simmering war and failed diplomacy surrounding Gaza and the West
Bank. And Iran will face "deeper isolation and steeper sanctions"
unless it abandons its nuclear program and threats against Israel.

In addition, under Obama America's massive military capacity will
increase by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines, as well as an
expanded Special Forces. NATO will become "a larger and more nimble alliance."

In fairness, Obama also promises to expand America's "soft power" by
doubling foreign assistance and cutting "extreme poverty" by half
[worthy goals if they are met, but which would fall still fall short
of John Kennedy's foreign aid levels measured as a percentage of
gross domestic product].

This is not a peace plan, as much as it is a withdrawal-from-combat
plan. More dying will be done by Iraqis. Obama offers a hawkish
posture meant to reassure elites and voters who may be worried about
Obama's credentials to be commander-in-chief. The plan may not work
even in its own terms. The core issue in Iraq is the proposed
Baker-Hamilton mission shift from an American combat role to
Americans advising Iraqis to take over the combat role, which has
failed so far. The number of Americans deployed in this
counter-insurgency role would be greater than the number now in
Afghanistan, including back-up forces.

As far as Afghanistan is concerned, two more American brigades would
be a down-payment on the full cost of a massive occupation war. And
it is an extremely high risk venture, though not impossible, to
attack al-Qaeda from the air in Pakistan's tribal areas without using
American ground forces. Obama is offering a best-case scenario for
the number and costs of troops that would be involved, even leaving
out a future confrontation with Iran.

There is little peace dividend or domestic economic recovery implied
by this security strategy.

Some of us have seen this before. In 1960, John F. Kennedy, accused
variously of being too "youthful" or "Catholic," ran to the right of
Richard Nixon on national security issues. He deliberately fabricated
a "missile gap" to use against Nixon. He dreamed up the Green Berets
as America's answer to Third World guerrillas. He appointed a
conservative, technocratic Cold War cabinet and military leadership,
including the certifiably-mad Curtis Le May who became chairman of
the Joint Chiefs. Perhaps all this was necessary to win the
presidency by less than one percent. We'll never know, but the civil
rights and student movements supported him because he called the wife
of Martin Luther King, and promised a Peace Corps, both in October.

Then Kennedy was manipulated straight into the Bay of Pigs in April
1961. One hundred U.S.-backed Cubans were killed and a thousand more
were rounded up. Kennedy was humiliated, completely blind-sided by
his own advisers. A fateful chain reaction was unleashed, with
violent and hysterical Cuban exiles holding political sway over U.S.
politics for a generation. (And as it turned out, after JFK was
murdered, spending for Vietnam doomed the Great Society, America's
cities went up in smoke, and 400,000 soldiers came home with bad
papers or strung out.)

A new John Kennedy was born of this 1961 disaster, a Kennedy more
suspicious of the CIA and the Pentagon, more interested in changing
the Cold War relationship with the Soviets with its peril of nuclear
war. Had he lived, things would have been different.

Will it take a disaster similar to the Bay of Pigs for Barack Obama
to learn the lessons of John F. Kennedy?

Of course, Obama could get lucky. After somehow winning the
presidency, Iraq might stabilize as Obama withdraws combat troops.
Iran might collaborate. Osama Bin Ladin might be uncovered and
killed, rendering al Qaeda ineffective and splintered. Afghanistan
could unite under NATO banners. But there is little evidence that
these scenarios will come to pass. The further pursuit of military
strategies is more likely to bog America down in unsustainable commitments.

The only way for peace advocates to really commit themselves to Obama
after this speech -- as I do -- is by clinging, first, to the
importance he brings to our racial crisis; second, crediting him for
an Iraq speech given five years ago, and third, assuming that he's
just doing now what he has to do and is open to changing direction
later. By the logic underlying Machiavellian politics, even McCain
could withdraw from Iraq. We vote our hopes and illusions, and wait.

By inflating his military credentials, however, Obama may be
deflating his greatest single qualification for leadership in a
violent and uncertain time of globalization. By continuing to tell
the lessons of his remarkable biracial, bicontinental life, Barack
Obama could radically reduce the potential "terrorist base" among
alienated young people the world over. By a willingness to commence
diplomacy with our adversaries, he could buy time and open the space
to reduce global violence, temporarily at least, in exchange for a
dialogue about new beginnings between America and the Middle East,
the Muslim world, and Latin America. But if he squanders all that
"soft" power, he could fail to find political solutions and even
become a target of Islamic hate like Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak,
Pervez Mussharef and Benezir Bhutto.

In thinking further about Iraq in this unfinished campaign, the
questions Obama needs to ask include these:

1. By what mechanisms will Iraq be "stabilized" while he withdraws
all US combat divisions? In an unexplained throwaway line, he simply
says "we will help Iraq reach a meaningful accord on national reconciliation."

2. How will fewer American troops, even Special Forces, successfully
combat al Qaeda as the combat troops withdraw?

3. How many American troops will be left behind? A reasonable
estimate is 50-100,000, including force protection.

4. Does he actually know who "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" is? Our media
faithfully repeat that it is both "homegrown" and "led by foreign
terrorists according to American intelligence." All sources report
that it is a small fraction of the overall insurgency. To what extent
will this al Qaeda decline in popular support as US combat forces
withdraw, or will the continued presence of US Special Forces give
them inviting targets for jihad?

5. Doesn't his hard line on Iran tend to preclude assistance from
Iran in helping stabilizing Iraq for the withdrawal of American forces?

6. Isn't there a need for a Dayton-style diplomatic process on Iraq
including all parties with stakes in a more stable Iraq, jump-started
by an American pledge to withdraw all our troops in a reasonable time
period? Unless there is a real likelihood of a power vacuum, why will
any other parties collaborate in what appears to be a continued
U.S.-occupation? What Obama says is vaguely promising "we will engage
with every country in the region -- and the UN -- to support the
stability and territorial integrity of Iraq...and launch a major
humanitarian initiative to support Iraq's refugees."

After his brilliant breakthrough speech on racism Monday, one of the
finest in American political history, the best that can be said of
his speech on Iraq is that it's protection against the cut-and-run
policies the Republicans will accuse him of. It's more like cut-and-paste.
--

TOM HAYDEN is the author of Ending the War in Iraq and The Tom Hayden Reader.

--------

Pressuring the Democrats on Peace:
A Commentary on the Fifth Anniversary of the War

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/pressuring-the-democrats-_b_92155.html

Posted March 18, 2008
by Tom Hayden

The 4,000th American soldier will die in Iraq sometime this week, the
fifth anniversary of the war. Hundreds of "winter soldiers" --
veterans of the war -- confess the shameful abuse inflicted on the
Iraqi people during those years. Yet the presidential candidates have
passed up the chance to say something new or hopeful that might end
the killing.

Any possibility of ending the war this year is long over. The panic
that gripped the national security elites last year that peace
sentiment might end the war in 2008 is safely past. [The hawkish
Democratic-leaning think tank, the Center for a New American
Security, fretted last fall that "if no bipartisan consensus is
reached before the Democratic and Republican primaries, the next
president will likely be elected principally on a "get out of Iraq
now" platform." James Miller, Shawn Brimley, "Phased Transition",
June 4, 2007, Not for Outside Circulation. ]

Those of us in the peace movement are all winter soldiers now, as the
war grinds on, perhaps for years, while our leaders drift. Gen.
Petraeus is getting his way with "setting back the American clock"
and his hope for "eight years and eight divisions." [Washington Post
interview, Mar. 7, 2004]

We can count on two developments, however. A spirited, well-funded
educational campaign linking Iraq to the economic recession will be
waged between now and November. And like it or not, the November
election will be interpreted either as a voter mandate for peace or
for the status quo. That offers the opportunity for an anti-war
campaign linked to the economy and oil issues, while de-linked from
devotion to any single presidential candidate.

John McCain is linked with Gen. Petraeus and the "surge" in their
rosy campaign to gain time for the brutal occupation to wear out the
Iraqi people. The Petraeus plan, as advocated by his top
counterinsurgency advisers, includes carrots-and-sticks for Sunnis
and Shi'a, and a "global Phoenix program" against all insurgencies,
meaning a low-visibility program of population control, detention,
divide-and-conquer tactics, repression and torture in the shadows
conducted by client armies with discreet American advisers. [The
first approach is by Stephen Biddle in Foreign Affairs [2006]. As for
the Phoenix recommendation, readers should rush to read Lt. Col.
David Kilkullen, here. Kilkullen already has scrubbed the call for a
Phoenix program from a later print version of the article,
substituting the Pentagon's "revolutionary development" formulation
that replaced the discredited Phoenix program.]

The Democratic candidates are more complicated, and perhaps more
disappointing, since 80 percent of Democratic voters favor a one-year
withdrawal.

Hillary Clinton repeats the phrases that these voters want to hear,
"end the war", and "bring the troops home." But she must know that
she doesn't mean it. Her slippery pledge is to "begin" troop
withdrawals within 60 days of being sworn in, but she refuses to set
a timeline for completing that withdrawal. She wants to shift the
American role from combat to counterinsurgency, leaving trainers and
advisers, counter-insurgency units, sufficient troops to "deter"
Iran, in short; set in motion a warfighting strategy similar to
Afghanistan for an unknown number of years.

Clinton's top foreign policy thinkers are Lee Feinstein at the
Council on Foreign Relations and Anne-Marie Slaughter at Princeton's
Woodrow Wilson School, who wrote in 2004 that "the biggest problem
with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far
enough." Enough said. [See "A Duty to Prevent", Foreign Affairs,
Jan./Feb. 2004]

Barack Obama's claims on Iraq seem to rest on what he said in October
2002, a solid difference between himself and Clinton to be sure. But
as Clinton repeatedly notes, hers and Obama's positions have been
mainly the same since Obama entered the Senate. This isn't fully
correct, since he has shown a more flexible diplomatic approach
towards Iran, while Clinton supported Bush's designation of Iran's
revolutionary guard as terrorist. But the public and the media seem
to accept the closeness between the two candidate's positions since
Obama's anti-war speech five years ago.

Obama also was the first to issue a timetable for withdrawal of
combat troops, in 16-18 months. But his credibility was undermined by
the remarks of a close adviser, Samantha Power, who helped write and
edit his book The Audacity of Hope, and presumably must know every
nuance of his thinking. When she told a British interviewer recently
that, if elected, Obama would consult the generals, review the
situation in Iraq, and only then decide what to do, he became for
many people another candidate whose word cannot be trusted, eerily
echoing the false peace promises of Sixties presidents Johnson and Nixon.

Obama has tried to clarify his stance by loudly declaring that he
will "end the war in 2009", a remarkable statement which so far
contains no explanation.

There are many reasons to support Obama, but a genuine peace plan
isn't one of them at this point. Obama appears trapped in the
quagmire of disagreeing advisors. While more open-minded than the
Clinton security coterie, they share the fear -- partly professional,
partly ideological -- of advising a superpower withdrawal. Worse,
they share the insider dread of following the populist instincts of
the voters in foreign policy.

On the record, Obama favors a "residual force" after pulling out
combat troops by 2010. This innocuous wording, which sounds like a
clean-up crew, would still be in the crossfire of sectarian combat
until all of Iraq's insurgents finally weary of battle. His position
is more nuanced that Clinton's, limiting the counterinsurgency forces
to fighting al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and not providing training for
Iraqi troops unless the Baghdad government reconciled its factions.

For both Clinton and Obama, the number of Americans left in the war
zone would be staggering, even after the withdrawal of most or all
combat troops. Including the backup forces and private contractors
necessary to support the residual role, the numbers could be
50-100.000. That would make Iraq look like Afghanistan, or Central
America in the late 1970s.

Only the pressure of the peace movement, bloggers and the mainstream
media might make Clinton or Obama break with their advisers and issue
an actual plan for ending the war rather than merely shifting from
combat to counterinsurgency. Since the next six months are the only
time the candidates can be forced to respond to voters' questions,
the mission of the peace movement is becoming clear. While rejecting
McCain as the neoconservative candidate of war, peace advocates can
loudly refuse to support the Iraq platform of either Democratic
candidate until they display more candor and commitment towards the
voters. With enough voices pressuring them, inside and outside the
Democratic Party, it will be difficult to silently support
counterinsurgency in the name of peace.
--

Tom Hayden is the author of Ending the War in Iraq, and the
forthcoming Writing for a Democratic Society, The Tom Hayden Reader.

.

Where Folk History Lives

Where Folk History Lives

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/03/23/where_folk_history_lives/

After 50 years, the genre has changed, but at Club Passim the spirit hasn't.

By Joan Anderman
March 23, 2008

I say folk music. You think guitar-strumming troubadour with furrowed
brow and earnest message. Or maybe you see a black-and-white snapshot
of a quaint and faintly distant cultural moment. Quite possibly, your
main reference point is A Mighty Wind. In our tech-savvy,
commerce-crazed, who's-next pop playground, whither folk?

In spirit, all over the place - from a slew of rustic young rockers
to fringe dwellers like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom to
punks-gone-acoustic and a new generation of old-time string bands.
Back-to-basics is an attractive enterprise in a world moving at the
speed of Bluetooth. The pursuit of simpler aesthetics - and, no
doubt, simpler times - has sparked an anything-goes, hybrid-heavy
folk renaissance that's scattered across the musical spectrum. But
it's only tangentially connected to the process, the value system,
and the community that came up a half-century ago and captured the
national consciousness.

For that, we go to Club Passim in Harvard Square. One of the key
players in the great folk revival of the '50s and '60s and the
longest-running folk music venue in the country, Passim turns 50 this
year. It's changed hands three times and names four times: Club 47,
Passim, Club Passim, and now, officially - as befits a
coffeehouse-cum-cultural institution - the Passim Center. Its
mission: the preservation and cultivation of folk music. The
organization includes a music school, free educational programming
for children, and an ongoing archive project.

But the heart of the place is a basement on Palmer Street outfitted
with a narrow wood stage, a few dozen tables, a vegetarian kitchen,
and a living legacy.

The young singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, who lived in Boston from
2001 to 2004, made a pilgrimage to Passim during spring break of his
senior year at Oberlin to find out if his songs were the soundtrack
to a pipe dream or if he was the real thing. "Passim is where the
songs had been sung by the people whose recordings I had," says
Ritter. "Phil Ochs, Mississippi John Hurt. The legend of Joan Baez
was one of the big reasons I moved there. It seemed like a place
[where] people got started."

The thing that distinguishes folk from other genres, more than the
songs' sound or sensibility, is its emphasis on cultivating human
ties as well as musical talent. It evolved through the so-called folk
process, of sharing songs and passing down techniques from
practitioner to practitioner over decades and centuries. At Club 47 -
which opened its doors on January 6, 1958, at 47 Mt. Auburn Street,
thanks to the sweat and savings accounts of recent Brandeis grads
Paula Kelley and Joyce Kalina - they took the process to a new level.

Originally envisioned as a European coffeehouse with a
progressive-jazz flavor, the club quickly morphed into a magnet for a
group of like-minded college students (and college dropouts). As much
social scene as music venue, Passim was, in the early days, something
like a clubhouse, manned by a bunch of dreamers with new ideas and
old guitars. "Everybody put their finger in the same socket," current
Passim executive director Betsy Siggins says. "And we all came out
budding folkies." Siggins, who dropped out of BU following freshman
year with her best friend, Joan Baez, waitressed at the club during
the week, cooked on Sundays, and ran the art gallery in the
afternoons. When babies started arriving, Siggins (who was married to
Bob Siggins of the Charles River Valley Boys) shared child care with
Maria Muldaur (then wife of Geoff Muldaur, a member of the Jim
Kweskin Jug Band).

"If you didn't like a community, you really didn't want to play at
the club," says Siggins.

Club 47, which would move from Mt. Auburn Street to its current
location on Palmer Street in 1963, was home to Baez and the Muldaurs,
Bill Staines, Tom Rush, Jim Rooney, Eric Von Schmidt, Bob Jones, Jim
Kweskin, and Peter Rowan, among others - and an extended national
family that included Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Bukka White, Taj Mahal,
and Mose Allison. Someone's spare couch, rather than a hotel room,
was the preferred accommodation.

"Very often I'd be down there three or four nights a week," recalls
Rooney, a Nashville musician and producer, coauthor of Baby, Let Me
Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years,
and the club's manager for several years in the '60s. "Inevitably
there would be a gathering later at somebody's apartment. We couldn't
get enough. New York was where business would take place, but in
Cambridge we tended to think of ourselves as being above all that."

TODAY, THOSE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS that were so integral to
the folk scene in the '60s - civil rights, the Vietnam War - no
longer provide a rich contextual fabric for the music. Emphasis on
traditional forms has exploded into a kaleidoscope of styles. And the
notion of folk music in the service of a larger, or universal, ideal
has receded, largely replaced by an emphasis on songcraft as personal
expression. But the core value of musical give-and-take, and by
extension the possibility of finding your voice as part of a vibrant
chorus of voices, remains intact at Passim. Folk-pop star Ellis Paul
cut his teeth at the club in the early '90s in the company of Martin
Sexton, Dar Williams, Patty Griffin, Vance Gilbert, and Catie Curtis.
"We all tried to outdo each other, and we all learned from each
other," says Paul. "I remember after-parties going until 4 or 5 in
the morning at the club with all the musicians in town."

The club was then operated by Bob and Rae Anne Donlin; he was a
Massachusetts-born beat poet who appeared in two of Jack Kerouac's
novels as the character Bob Donnelly, she was a former English major
known for mothering young artists. Both are now deceased, but during
their 25 years running the club (they took over in 1969, when it
became Passim), the couple helped launch the careers of such literate
tunesmiths as Suzanne Vega, Nanci Griffith, and Shawn Colvin -
although Bob is nearly as renowned for declining to book a young
singer-songwriter named Springsteen.

Meanwhile, Betsy Siggins was running soup kitchens and food pantries
in New York City, learning the craft of community building that would
serve her well when she came back to Cambridge, and Passim, in 1996.
"The world has become more bureaucratic, and the need for a sense of
order is profound," she says, "but I think that the visions and the
dreams and the way you begin to find yourself, I still see it in the
kids who sing here. I see it at open mike - kids who can't tune their
guitar, and they're terrified and putting out everything they can for
that one song onstage. Nobody says boo to you here. It's very forgiving."

Also forgiving: Harvard University, which owns the building where
Passim's performance space and offices are located. A nonprofit
organization, Passim has always struggled financially, and when the
university acquired the property, it forgave Passim past rent and
negotiated a long-term rental agreement that was significantly
under-market. Richard Boardman, one of Harvard's senior fund-raisers,
provides Passim with consulting services. The university routinely
offers the free use of Sanders Theatre for high-profile Passim
concerts, including the upcoming 50th-anniversary celebration with
Joan Baez, and has two representatives on Passim Center's board.

Passim appears eager to expand its footprint by creating an
exhibition gallery for the archive, and many believe the club would
benefit from updating and enlarging its performance space. But no
plans can be made until the fall. That's when a yearlong,
universitywide arts study launched by Harvard president Drew Gilpin
Faust - the first since 1956 - will deliver the results from a
commissioned task force examining the role of arts in the curriculum
and community as well as the university's allocation of resources. At
least so far, Harvard seems to understand Passim's stature. Jack
Megan, director of Harvard's office for the arts and a board member
at Passim, says, "It's incredibly important to make sure the Square
isn't just a center for banking institutions."

As Passim looks to secure its future as a cornerstone of the arts
community, one of its challenges is to remain culturally relevant.
Critics say that Passim isn't forward-looking or broad-minded enough,
pointing, for example, to the so-called freak-folk movement that's
been a burgeoning youth market for several years but whose main
purveyors have never played at Passim. The club's longtime manager
and booker, Matt Smith, says that's not because the club lacks vision.

"People like Devendra and Joanna [Banhart and Newsom, the scene's
poster children] have agents that know the rock rooms. That's how the
game goes with booking," says Smith. "It's a database. Or maybe an
act wants a room with beer. We have a lot of edgier artists that play
the Campfire [Passim's twice-yearly festival]. That's why I didn't
want to call it a folk festival. The name has a bad rap."

Which brings us to the age-old question: What is folk?

Dar Williams says that a folk musician is "an artist who makes you
look at the map differently, a person who sits on her bed and writes
a song and gives Iowa and Buffalo and Scranton and Westchester County
poetic ambience."

Steve Earle says folk musicians are "searching and principled."

Josh Ritter believes "folk music is anything you can hum in the car
on the way home."

Interpretations of the word are as bountiful as the sounds folk
musicians make. But the guy who runs the country's oldest folk club
offers an appealingly pragmatic view. "Sometimes it's an economic
status more than a genre," says Matt Smith. "I can't afford a band.
So I'm a folk singer."
---

Joan Anderman, a music writer for the Globe, last wrote for the
magazine about singer James Taylor. E-mail her at anderman@globe.com.

.

Denver museum sees same value in rock posters as local collector

Denver museum sees same value in rock posters as local collector

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_RelishArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173355010624&path=!entertainment!music!&s=1037645508978

by Patrick Cole
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Bloomberg News
Winston-Salem Journal

David Tippit thought his obsession with psychedelic posters from the
1960s era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll was a personal quirk. Then
he learned that the Denver Art Museum in Colorado shared his fascination.

Tippit, 59, a former cellular biologist who lives in nearby Boulder,
has donated a portion of his 875 first-edition poster collection to
the museum and sold the rest to the museum.

The posters, with their colors and hallucinatory illustrations, were
commissioned by such rock-concert promoters as Chet Helms and Bill
Graham to advertise concerts by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson
Airplane, Janis Joplin and other acts at venues across the country in
the '60s and '70s.

The museum declined to say what it paid. Officials and Tippit
declined to break down the number of posters given and those bought.
Eric King, a poster-art consultant who was hired by the museum to
appraise the collection, said that it is worth $1.2 million.

Tippit said he collected the posters for about 20 years because they
were affordable, not because he's a fan of the generation's music.

"I couldn't collect French impressionist paintings, so I was looking
for an area that was undiscovered," he said. "I thought these things
should be in a museum one day."

The museum agrees. The posters are important because they capture the
radical social changes of the time - antiwar sentiment, sexual
freedom, women's rights and environmental activism, said Darrin
Alfred, the museum's assistant curator of graphic design.

They also mark a movement "from modernism to more expressive forms,"
he said. "Tippit's collection was like nothing I had ever seen before
in quality and scale."

Among the posters are those from Family Dog Productions that promoted
Bo Diddley, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other acts at the
Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970 and first-edition
prints of Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters concerts that Graham promoted
from 1966 to 1970.

.

[Tom] Hayden’s Hell

Hayden's Hell

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=367543A0-1768-493C-8D43-EFDFBCB1F7E6

By Kathy Shaidle
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, March 21, 2008

It is a disgraceful and shameful name for all those who opposed
communism with honor in Southeast Asia four decades ago.

Tom Hayden.

The superstar anti-Vietnam War activist, one of the infamous "Chicago
7" defendants, is still making sure that name of shame is connected
with Vietnam -- the tragic nation he helped destroy in the 1960s and
'70s through his collaboration with the North Vietnamese Communists.
After having made a lucrative career out of hating his own country
and the free economy on which it is based, Hayden, now aged 67, is
evidently going strong.

Unsurprisingly, the latest utterance of the one-time president of the
radical Students for a Democratic Society will do little to enhance
his already fading and self-created reputation as a supposed
forward-thinking visionary. The March 10, 2008, issue of Nation
magazine carried a long essay by Hayden entitled "The Old
Revolutionaries of Vietnam." A poorly written, passive-voice exercise
in self-pity, Hayden's essay recounts his return to the Southeast
Asian country he visited throughout the 1960s and '70s. As detailed
in DiscovertheNetworks.com:

Among the most visible and outspoken mouthpieces of the pro-Communist
camp during the Vietnam War era, in the early 1970s Hayden organized
-- along with his wife Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy -- an
'Indo-China Peace Campaign' (IPC) to cut off American aid to the
regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. The IPC worked tirelessly to
help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge (led by Pol
Pot) emerge victorious.

"Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and to the 'liberated'
regions of South Vietnam to make a propaganda film titled
Introduction to the Enemy (1974) whose purpose was to persuade
viewers that the Communists were going to create an ideal new society
based on justice and equality.

That "new society based on justice and equality" ultimately witnessed
the murder of 2.5-million Indochinese peasants by Hayden's
revolutionary heroes. But the author of the hippie manifesto, "The
Port Huron Statement," is not about to let all those corpses get in
the way of his narcissistic nostalgia trip for the Nation:

During Christmas 2007 I traveled back in time with my family, to
Vietnam, for the first time in thirty-two years," Hayden writes. "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.' (…) 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?

That opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest: oddly chosen scare
quotes, plenty of question marks, and plenty of self-obsession.

Those first-person pronouns are real. Musing upon an old photo of
himself, Hayden can't resist claiming, for example, that he's gained
a mere ten pounds in the intervening thirty-five years. But Hayden's
questions are mostly rhetorical. He still subscribes to the stale
Marxist theory he first swallowed whole in his early twenties. As he
finds out to his dismay, however, most Vietnamese don't.

"Not even Vietnam [itself] can shake him," writes Robert Fulford, in
a scathing takedown of Hayden's preening travelogue. "Its economy
grows swiftly and so does its per capita GDP. It's a single-party
state, still using the name Communist Party, and it has economic
freedom without the other kinds of liberty. During his trip, a
leading Vietnamese novelist told him, 'Some Americans may sympathize
with communism, but I lived under it and couldn't stand it.' The
novelist has a son making millions traveling for a high-tech corporation."

The only resident of Vietnam more distressed than Hayden by all this
prosperity is – not surprisingly – another former American anti-war
activist turned ex-patriot and capitalist: Gerry Herman is a now
successful film distributor, and even he just seems irritated because
China is getting better trade deals than his adopted country.

"Far be it from me," says Hayden, "to question the desire of the
Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else."

But of course, Hayden does just that, for thousands of workmanlike
words. What else can he do, having devoted his entire adult life to
fighting American capitalism and "imperialism" in book after book,
and demonstration after demonstration? Unlike those of many of his
contemporaries, Hayden's Communist sympathies were no mere fashionable pose.

As his former fellow radical David Horowitz recalled:

Hayden and I were deadly serious about our revolutionary agendas.
During the Vietnam War, Tom traveled many times to North Vietnam,
Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet communist North Vietnamese and Viet
Cong leaders. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen "rice
roots democracy at work." (…) Hayden offered tips on conducting
psychological warfare against the U.S. He arranged trips to Hanoi for
Americans perceived as friendly to the Communists and blocked entry
to those seen as unfriendly, like the sociologist Christopher Jencks.
He attacked as "propaganda' stories of torture and labeled American
POWs returning home with such stories as "liars."

And Hayden's "revolutionary" activities were not confined to
traitorous oversees excursions:

On the domestic front, Hayden advocated urban rebellions and called
for the creation of "guerrilla focos" to resist police and other law
enforcement agencies. For a while he led a Berkeley commune called
the "Red Family," whose "Minister of Defense" trained commune members
at firing ranges and instructed high school students in the use of
explosives. He was also an outspoken supporter of the violence-prone
Black Panther Party.

Today, Hayden allows himself to wonder – in only the most tentative
manner, of course, with the usual disingenuous rhetorical questions –
whether or not he and his radical comrades might have been wrong all along:

"The question," Hayden writes, "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?"

The natural desires of ordinary people, be they American or
Vietnamese, to trade in goods and services, to enjoy decent food and
housing and to exercise their basic human rights, are summarily
dismissed as "chaotic" and "unpredictable" by an obviously shaken Tom
Hayden. (No doubt Adam Smith would be mystified and perhaps amused to
hear capitalism compared to quantum physics.)

Hayden's only hope of achieving equilibrium is to do the unthinkable:
humbly renounce his delusions. Fortunately, he has a couple of timely
examples to imitate should he care to do so.

Robert Fulford noted the delightful coincidence of Hayden's Nation
essay appearing at the same time as a Village Voice column by the
acclaimed playwright David Mamet, entitled "Why I Am No Longer A
'Brain Dead Liberal.'" Mamet chronicles his somewhat reluctant
journey from Left to Right, such as his newfound respect for
corporations and limited government.

"It may seem odd," Fulford remarks, "that a much-admired writer makes
such a noise about the banal fact that he thinks the society he's
always lived in is grounded in sound principles and operates
reasonably well. But in his milieu, that opinion remains big news."

More "big news" was made shortly thereafter by another playwright.
Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Tom Stoppard issued a
remarkably similar declaration. Even in its soixante-neuf heyday,
admits Stoppard, he considered the Left "politically dubious,"
writing that he "was embarrassed by the slogans and postures of
rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris [in 1968]. . .
seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have
been born -- the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the
toleration of dissent."

The way it looks now, Tom Hayden will resist joining Stoppard and
Mamet to his dying day. And when all is said and done, he can never
undo the enormous damage he helped perpetrate upon millions of
Indo-Chinese people. Longing for a Vietnam that now mirrrors
everything he wished to destroy, the anti-war activist now faces his
destiny: going down in history as, at best, a pathetic footnote or a
cryptic joke, and at worst, an accessory to mass murder and
oppression ultimately repudiated even by the oppressors.
---

A blogger since 2000, Kathy Shaidle runs FiveFeetOfFury.com. Her new
e-book Acoustic Ladyland has been called a "must read" by Mark Steyn.

.

To the Ramparts (Gently)

To the Ramparts (Gently)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/nyregion/thecity/23sds.html

By BEN GIBBERD
Published: March 23, 2008

ONE March morning two years ago, a Pace University freshman named
Brian Kelly and a dozen or so friends piled into a few cars and drove
to the university's Westchester County campus in Pleasantville, to
attend a speech by former President Bill Clinton.

After the speech, which was part of the university's centennial
celebration, they submitted written questions for Mr. Clinton, as
they had been invited to do.

Toward the end of the session, when they did not hear their questions
asked of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Kelly tried a different tack.

"A friend and I got up and interrupted as a question about peace and
democracy was being put to him by the university president," he said.
"And we said: 'You're a war criminal! What about Iraq and Bosnia and
so forth?' "

Mr. Kelly and his friend were swiftly plucked from the auditorium by
Secret Service agents and questioned for nearly an hour in a back
room, he said.

Mr. Kelly speaks out a lot about politics these days, and not
surprisingly. People like him are the new face of Students for a
Democratic Society, the radical group that made headlines so often at
the end of the 1960s.

On April 23, 1968 ­ 40 years ago next month ­ students at Columbia
University, most notably S.D.S. members, took to the streets in the
first major protest over the school's plan to build a gym in
Morningside Park; later in the spring, protesting the Vietnam War,
the students seized several university buildings. By the time the
demonstrators were forced out by the police, more than 700 students
had been arrested and 150 had been hospitalized.

In the past few years, S.D.S. has re-emerged. But despite Mr. Kelly's
affiliation with the group and his actions during Mr. Clinton's
speech, he and other members of the new generation of S.D.S. approach
politics in a strikingly different way from the firebrands of 1968.
Mr. Kelly, for example, who spends much of his time hunched in front
of his computer, sometimes sounds more like an earnest sociologist ­
the subject is his major ­ than a campus radical intent on scaling
the ramparts.

"Society is made up of institutions, and institutions are built on
consent," Mr. Kelly said one recent morning during a wide-ranging
conversation at a Starbucks cafe near Union Square. "And if you get
people to say, 'We withdraw our consent, we want new institutions, we
want better policies,' that's how movements are built."

The Stereotype, the Reality

"The mass media, with a little help from the older liberals, have
painted a tyrannizing caricature of the 'Student Rioter,' " the
journalist Jack Newfield wrote in The New York Times in May 1969 in
his review of "The Strawberry Statement," James Simon Kunen's account
of the unrest at Columbia. "He has long dirty hair, an insatiable
libido, and a four-letter word vocabulary. He is violent, irrational,
anti-democratic."

Sitting in Starbucks, Mr. Kelly, a clean-shaven, neatly dressed and
highly composed 21-year old with close-cropped hair, hardly resembled
the stereotypical radicals of 1968. Only the small pin on the lapel
of his light brown jacket, depicting a bomb with a red line through
it, and another on his shirt, reading "sds," hinted at his politics.

He chose his words slowly and with a politician's care, and his lean
physique and wholesome demeanor suggested a track team member or an
Eagle Scout ­ both of which Mr. Kelly was when he was growing up in
Orange County, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city. His father
is a computer programmer, his mother sells real estate, and both, he
says, have been accepting of his political activities.

"They were a little hesitant after the Clinton thing, but they never
asked me not to do anything," Mr. Kelly said. "I think they understand."

In high school, he was a student activist who engaged in what he
described as "general liberal politics ­ blood drives, food drives,
stuff around Darfur, that kind of thing."

As a freshman at Pace's main campus in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Kelly
joined the school's chapter of the Campus Anti-War Network, a
national group opposed to the Iraq war. After S.D.S. was revived in
January 2006 by two high school students, one from North Carolina,
the other from Connecticut, the antiwar chapter became the Pace
S.D.S. chapter. Other city schools with S.D.S. chapters include
Queens College, New York University, Columbia University, Pratt
Institute and New School University, most with about 25 members.

When the Pace chapter was born, Mr. Kelly's activism really took off
and he became, as he put it, "basically a full-time organizer" for
the revived S.D.S. But when it comes to his attitude toward the
violence of the '60s, Mr. Kelly will never be mistaken for some of
his predecessors.

"I actually think violent action isn't radical at all," he said
firmly. "Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to
change society. Violence doesn't change society, and if it doesn't go
to the root of the problem, it's not radical." Mr. Kelly paused. "I
don't know what it is," he added, "but it has nothing to do with what
I want to do."

Drama, Yes. Violence, No.

Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied
away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two
years ago during a protest on Pace's Manhattan campus, and once a
year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for
occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither
arrest led to any charges.

No charges grew out of Mr. Kelly's brief face-off with Mr. Clinton
either, although the encounter had its unnerving moments.

"We were about 100 feet or so away from the president," Mr. Kelly
recalled. "And it all happened so fast I don't remember being scared
­ more kind of nervous. These guys in generic suits just came toward us."

Although he and his friends were not arrested, Mr. Kelly said that
the Secret Service agents who grilled him and his friend called them
"clowns" and said they might be held for 72 hours and forced to
undergo psychiatric evaluation. Their cars were also searched without
their consent, Mr. Kelly said, and their S.D.S. colleagues were questioned.

(Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said of the episode, "We
have great respect for individual freedoms, specifically freedom of
speech, and do not set out to engage individuals who do not pose a
threat to protectees. However, that determination in many cases
cannot be made without simply speaking to people first.")

Despite the events of that day, Mr. Kelly said he had never
experienced hostility on his campus. "Disagreement among some
people," he acknowledged, "but it's a New York City campus, so a lot
of people are progressive. Or a lot of people are just disengaged
with politics. I'd say those are the typical reactions."

His main goal, he said, "isn't to take over a building, it isn't to
block a recruitment center. It isn't to do any of these tactics that
people kind of zero in on from the '60s. Our biggest goal is to get
more people who are politicized, who are progressive, who want to
join in a mass movement to help change the world." Amid the chatter
of the cafe and the piped-in music of Sheryl Crow and Frank Sinatra,
Mr. Kelly's phrase hung in the air, a momentary echo from another,
more idealistic age.

Cerebral Activism

Once upon a time, radical politics was a physical, messy and often
violent undertaking.

"You're playing with fire and fire burns, baby," Mr. Kunen wrote in
"The Strawberry Statement." "I mean this. I mean it well. Hear me:
you're going to get human or your stinking bodies are going up
against the wall. I don't get mad easily but I'm mad now and I'm
going to stay mad until things change."

These days, such undertakings are much more reasoned and cerebral.

"The majority of what I do is just talking to people ­ it's about
consciousness-raising," Mr. Kelly said as he nursed his coffee. "A
lot of people have this view of radical revolutionaries who want to
overthrow this or that, but that's not how society works."

Instead of confrontations, he said, he and his colleagues are focused
of persuading a critical mass of people to join them.

"It's getting 50, 60, 100 million people," he said. "It's not small
groups of people taking action. It's masses of people taking action."

This grass-roots approach means that today's S.D.S. spends much of
its time getting the word out.

Mr. Kelly, for example, works on the national S.D.S. Web site,
studentsforademocraticsociety.org, which was created by Tom Good, a
prominent activist from the '60s. Mr. Kelly also holds meetings on
campus and travels to other colleges and high schools to help advise
new chapters. S.D.S. estimates that the organization currently has
about 120 chapters and 3,000 members in the United States.

Mr. Kelly, who lived last year in an apartment in Alphabet City and
is staying with his parents while he looks for a new apartment, also
spends ever more time on his computer and his cellphone, fielding
calls from activists around the country. He tends his own personal
Web site, too, walkingbutterfly.com, which he describes as "a blog to
strategize and envision how we escape the institutions which clip our wings."

Recent items on the site included news of a forthcoming union strike
against the Iraq war; a video, "Gay Scientists Isolate Christian
Gene"; and a link to an article about superdelegates who might
support Barack Obama.

"If this is true, it would be very relieving and good ­ the age of
the Bushes and Clintonian Democrats seriously needs to end," Mr.
Kelly wrote on his Web site about the article.

"Obama's policies are not what I want," he said, "but the language
that he's using, I think the progressive movement can take that same
language and build a popular movement around it."

Just as opposition to the Vietnam War energized the young radicals of
the '60s, the war in Iraq has proved to be a major catalyst for Mr.
Kelly and his peers.

"When the United States invaded Iraq, I remember sitting in a
classroom and some teachers came in and put the news on a
television," Mr. Kelly said. "I was sitting by the window and the TV
was just going on about 'shock and awe' and I couldn't understand it.
It didn't make sense.

"I just remember at that moment thinking that the United States had
attacked a third world country for no reason, and that I was on the
wrong side of the line. And it consciously clicked in my mind that I
never wanted to be on that side of the line again."

Through a Lens of Politics

The line between Mr. Kelly's activism and the rest of his life has
blurred, as it has for many deeply committed people. Even his main
escapes from politics ­ hikes in Prospect and Central Parks or in the
Appalachian Mountains ­ are often spent talking issues with
like-minded friends.

In explaining his deep focus, Mr. Kelly gave one of his considered
pauses, then leaned forward in his chair to put a little distance
between himself and the cluster of noisy high school students behind him.

"Have you seen 'The Matrix'?" he asked. "Do you know the scene with
the red pill and the blue pill? You choose one or the other, and then
you fall down the rabbit hole. It's kind of like that, I think.
Everyone sees the world through a different lens. For me, I guess
that lens is of politics."

Such dedication is not easy to sustain unaided. Mr. Kelly has several
mentors, including Michael Albert, a founder of the S.D.S. chapter at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who now oversees an array
of radical magazines and Web sites for a group called Z
Communications. ("The spirit of resistance lives," the Z Web site
declares.) Mr. Kelly sought out Mr. Albert a few years ago, and they
now talk to each other frequently.

Mr. Albert, who lives on Cape Cod, sounded amused rather than rueful
when describing the differences between the radicals of his day and
those of Mr. Kelly's.

"All that was required in the old days," Mr. Albert said, "was to
point out the causes of pain and suffering ­ which was the system ­
and that could instantly be converted to anger and then channeled
into activism. Now, you point out how bad things are, and everybody
already knows it. So it's not cynicism we're up against, it's
reasoned disillusionment. And Brian and some of the others are very
good at countering that."
--

Perhaps the most powerful emotion that sustains Mr. Kelly is hope, an
emotion that his radical forebears, for all their differences in
style, would find remarkably familiar.

"I am optimistic for the future, very optimistic, actually," said Mr.
Kelly, who plans to continue his activism after graduation. "Youth
movements around global warming are everywhere, and are going to
explode in the next year. I think that organizations working to end
the war in Iraq are going to see a tremendous surge in membership.

"The empire that Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich and all those Republican
strategists and pollsters and leaders built in the last 40 years is
going to blow up in their faces, and they're really scared." he
continued. "I mean, I actually think that's going to happen."
---

Ben Gibberd is the author of "New York Waters: Profiles From the
Edge," with the photographer Randy Duchaine.

.

Todd Gitlin on Obama

[3 items]

Todd Gitlin Reviews Obama's Speech

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/03/18/todd-gitlin-reviews-obama-s-speech.aspx

18.03.2008
by Todd Gitlin

We reached out to several friends of the magazine to respond to
Obama's big speech in Philadelphia today. Here's what Todd Gitlin,
professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, had to say.
--

This speech was a triumph on so many levels, does one dare hope it
will turn the trick for hordes of parsing skeptics and listeners
whose eyes did not water?

First, Obama took the high road, which is also the long and demanding
road. He refused to "move on" with a cursory acknowledgment that
"mistakes were made." He did not acknowledge. He preached and he
reasoned. The law professor was in the pulpit. He refused to settle
for sprinkling what have become the automatic contemporary word-drops
of "distancing." It will still be possible to parse his words for
insufficiencies of denunciation, but Obama's gamble was that he could
turn Wright's damnable sins into a pivot for a sermon about how the
past can be overcome, about how American it would be to accomplish
that hard and necessary objective. "We may have different stories but
we hold common hopes"--that was the theme. I don't know if this is
true, but we will find out whether it is what America needs to believe.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he
said of the Reverend Wright. "I can no more disown him than I can my
white grandmother--a woman who helped raise me, a woman who
sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as
she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her
fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more
than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made
me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of
America, this country that I love." Now, the Reverend Wright's
damnations were not simple expressions of racial fear. Or were they?
With his little history lesson, extrapolated from black experience to
everyone else's paranoia--all that white anger "grounded in
legitimate concerns"--Obama was saying that those statements of
Wright he rejected and denounced stemmed from a long ugly history of
racial fear; and that the only people to overcome "the racial
stalemate" with are the people one belongs to. Politics is crucial,
politics is the only way America will improve, but the place of
politics is among imperfect persons. He did not flatter America by
saying the only angels of its nature are the better ones.

An interesting subtext: filial pride. Family values, you might say.
Wright, a parental force, stands for him as a man who came from
somewhere, an imperfect American. America, in other words, is
imperfect and drives toward a higher form of imperfection. Wright's
error was in speaking as if society was static! So Obama challenged
his listeners: Are you, with Wright, stuck in the past, or are you
ready to roll? What Obama was saying is that America is a perennially
self-starting community paradoxically mired in the past, but its
opportunity is to overcome that past, and its test is to strive to do
that--not by demonization but on a couple of wings and a lot of prayers.

And finally, the temperature of this speech is one of its messages;
or should I say invitations? Obama kept his cool and turned up the
heat at the same time. For those who have not yet voted, and
crucially to the superdelegates, he raised the stakes, asking them
all: Can you, too, keep your cool and your heat at the same time? The
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he said, had spoken in an "incendiary"
manner, but Obama offered himself as the man who rises from flames
and invites you to rise from your own. He took a grievous
embarrassment and moved his lesson to the plane of prophecy. Talk
about hope; talk about audacity. Tears came to my eyes. I don't think
I'm especially hard-hearted, but I cannot think of another time when
the speech of a presidential candidate watered me up.

At his own moment of crisis, in 1952, Richard Nixon finicked his way
into history accompanied by a non-returnable cocker spaniel named
Checkers. In 2008, Obama chose his own game: a new hybrid of chess.
It might be a game-changer. We'll find out.

--------

"Let People Draw Their Own Conclusions"

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/19/let_people_draw_their_own_conc/

By Todd Gitlin
March 19, 2008

How long a shot was it that we could finally have an election that
didn't turn intto a referendum on the Sixties? Very long.

And so, just as the Democrats seem to be launched toward the
inevitable, here come the fusillades from the Swift Boaters, fully
equipped with Rev. Wrong videos that arrived in the nick of time to
confound Democrats, leave Obama chastened (or so he appeared in
Fayetteville today as he addressed the Iraq catastrophe) and not
least, to lift the hearts of Republicans. Politico reports how
thrilled they are at the prospect of running against Obama's
blathering father-surrogate, his flagless lapel, his wife's belated
discovery of American pride, and assorted attendant baggage. The
slash-and-burn commercials write themselves:

"It's harder for people to say it's taken out of context because
these are Wright's own words," noted Chris LaCivita, the Republican
strategist who helped craft the Swift Boat commercials against Kerry
that employed the use of their target's own language when he returned
from Vietnam and returned his medals. "You let people draw their own
conclusions."
"You don't have to say that he's unpatriotic; you don't question his
patriotism," he added. "Because I guaran-damn-tee you that, with that
footage, you don't have to say it."

The lineaments of the McCain campaign then write themselves straight
from the Atwater-Rove playbook: McCain feigns the high road--Rev.
Wright? Americans know he's obviously wrong for America but I have no
comment on anyone who chose to sit at his feet--while the packs who
accompany him turn Wright into a Swift Boat commander named Willie Horton.

We get another inkling of the double-barreled, double-coded campaign
to come in a McCain direct mail fundraiser reported today by the
alert Spencer Ackerman. It begins:

"My Friends,
"I am not running for president to be somebody, but to serve our
country with honor."

The mailing doesn't come right out and say, Barack Obama looks an
awful lot like that fellow who used to run for president saying "I am
somebody." It's double-coded. It says: I am somebody already: Teddy
Roosevelt. I am not becoming, I am being. I am not aspirational, I am
accomplished. And it also sounds this vague echo to tickle the
memories of anyone who remembers 1988: Obama is striving to prove
he's someone he's not. And in fact he is already somebody else: that
other wild-eyed preacher somebody, the Rev. Jesse.

Maybe the copywriter thought this, maybe half-thought it, maybe
didn't think it all--didn't have to think it. The political-mythic
unconscious does all the work.

There's be lots more of this coming. It will come with annoying
reminders that Obama offered no evidence that he ever, in all the
years Wright inspired him, felt inspired to challenge his spiritual
father. (Ed Koch sounded this theme on NY1 last night.) Clinton
supporters are already accusing Obama of sleight-of-hand. Some of
those who were impressed, even dazzled, by his Philadelphia
performance will keep trying to tie him to heavy, heavy Wright. It's
one thing for Obama to declare that America is not perfect, that he
is "an imperfect vessel" and his campaign "imperfect" as well. It's
another for him to convince the unconvinced that his imperfections
are baggage worth carrying.

It was always going to come to this in a McCain campaign. It will
come to the equivalent winks and smears if his opponent is Hillary
Clinton. Obama and Wright, meet Clinton and Saul Alinsky, her senior
thesis subject; Clinton and Bob Truehaft, the Communist lawyer she
once worked for; Clinton and Susan Rosenberg, the Weather
Undergrounder pardoned by her husband. It isn't that Obama has
nothing to answer for. It's that one way or the other, the Republican
story will turn out the same: My Opponent Is Un-American.

--------

The left's patriotism gap

http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2008/03/15/opinion/syndicated_columnists/325064.txt

by Jonah Goldberg
March 16, 2008

"Unity is the great need of the hour. ... Not because it sounds
pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only
way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this
country. I'm not talking about a budget deficit. ... I'm talking
about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm
taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to
understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's
keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a
single garment of destiny."

So quoth Barack Obama in Atlanta on Jan. 20, but it might as well
have been last week, so central is unity to his presidential
campaign. And then there's Michelle Obama. "We have lost the
understanding that, in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to
one another," the would-be first lady said at a rally last month.
"That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to
get things done."

What is fascinating here is not the sentiment, but what's missing
from it. The P-word.

To invoke patriotism seriously is to brand yourself either an old
fogy or a right-wing bully. If Barack Obama spoke about patriotism
with the sort of passion he expends on unity, many would take him for
some sort of demagogue.

But what on Earth could he mean by unity other than a kind of
patriotic esprit de corps for the good of his country? Indeed,
patriotism is far preferable to unity. (Mafia syndicates and
terrorist cells are unified, after all.) Patriotism is a species of
unity that has some redeeming moral and philosophical substance to
it. In America, patriotism, as opposed to nationalism, is a love for
a creed, a dedication to what is best about the "American way."
Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says, "My country is always
right." Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.

If you read the speeches of leading Democrats before the Vietnam war,
it's amazing how comfortable they were with patriotic rhetoric. "Ask
not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country" stands foursquare against so much of our entitlement culture.

Vietnam, of course, changed that. "The tragedy of the left," Todd
Gitlin wrote in his 2006 book, "The Intellectuals and the Flag," "is
that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an
appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide."

Suicide might be strong, but the left certainly amputated itself from
full-throated patriotic sentiment. Most Democrats speak mellifluously
about unity but get tongue-tied or sound as if they're just
delivering words plucked from a political consultant's memo when they
talk of patriotism (Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is an exception). Sen.
John Kerry, who made his name vilifying the Vietnam war, suddenly
wanted credit as a patriot for the same service when he ran for
president in 2004. His opening line at the Democratic convention ­
"I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty" ­ was cringe-inducing.
The words came out as ironic, almost kitschy. The message seemed to
be, "I can play this game better than that chickenhawk George Bush."

When Democrats do speak of patriotism, it is usually as a means of
finding fault with Republicans, corporations or America itself. Hence
the irony that questioning the patriotism of liberals is a grievous
sin, but doing likewise to conservatives is fine. That's how
then-candidate Howard Dean could, with a straight face, insist that
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft "is no patriot. He's a direct
descendant of Joseph McCarthy."

Indeed, the one area in which Obama explicitly invokes patriotism is
in the realm of economics. He proposes a Patriot Corporation Act that
he claims would reward corporations that keep jobs in the United
States. ("Now here is a Patriot Act everyone can get behind," gushed
William Greider of The Nation.)

Mrs. Obama famously declared last month that her husband's candidacy
elicited pride in her country for the first time in her adult life.
I'd like to think that's not really what she meant, but it's at least
a sign of how ill-equipped she and so many others on the left are
when it comes to discussing such issues.

And it's a crying shame, even though the Democrats' rhetorical
disadvantage is a huge boon for the Republicans. One cannot credibly
talk of love of country while simultaneously dodging the word and
concept of patriotism.

And, I would argue, one cannot sufficiently love one's country if you
are afraid to say so out loud. Better that our politics be an
argument about why and how we should love our country, not about
whether some do and some don't.
--

Jonah Goldberg is a syndicated columnist.

.

A Tree Grows in the Haight-Ashbury

A Tree Grows in the Haight-Ashbury

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/21/CM6PU9LSN.DTL

Laura Fraser
Sunday, March 23, 2008

Not long after I moved into the Haight-Ashbury, more than 20 years
ago, a hippie friend gave me a redwood seedling and told me to go
plant a tree. This particular sequoia sempervirens was about 3 inches
tall, and it seemed like a foolish gift, a futile gesture of
idealism. It's one thing to write a check to help save 300-year-old
redwoods in Humboldt County, but that poor tree had little hope of
surviving in the transitory Haight. Still, I put it in a pot and
watered it occasionally.

Other than that, for the next few years, I ignored the redwood. It
was a straggly thing, always on the edge of expiring. But it survived
on top of the piano in my Victorian flat, and presided over a
household of ever-changing roommates: a chef who ran off to join the
circus, a South African refugee, a Mexican journalist and one artist
or musician after another. By the time the household had settled down
to just two, the redwood had grown into a tiny Christmas tree, strong
enough to hold a few dangly earrings as ornaments.

I never intended to stay in the Haight so long. I live a block from
the corner of Haight and Ashbury, where tourists snap photos and buy
tie-dyed T-shirts, and I tell people that if my neighborhood weren't
close to Golden Gate Park, I wouldn't like to live here. The Haight's
hippie history is embarrassing, as if I smelled like patchouli by
association, and here in middle age I've caught myself saying I live
in Cole Valley instead. The Haight has always been grungy, a magnet
for runaways and druggies. I get tired of walking past discarded
couches, pizza boxes and pools of vomit, and the fact that it's the
only neighborhood where you can buy pot and a pipe to smoke it in at
3 in the morning isn't much of an advantage. For a while, people sold
crack on the corners, and the neighborhood's seamy edge turned
menacing, but they, too, moved on. It is not a place where most people stay.

I've stayed because my flat has high ceilings, hardwood floors, a
huge garden - and rent control. Built in 1910 almost entirely of
redwood, it swayed gracefully in the 1989 earthquake, without a
single object being displaced. The rent control helped me weather the
dot-com boom and stay in the city I love - unlike many artists and
musicians who had to move on.

The Haight-Ashbury has always been uneasily composed of those who can
afford the ever-increasing rents versus those who cram six to a flat
or sleep on the streets, but in recent years, it has become even more
polarized. Middle-class renters like me - writers, artists, teachers,
nonprofit staff - seem to be in the minority. The homeless people,
familiar faces after all these years, look increasingly desperate,
and the line for food at the church on my street stretches the entire
block. Cafes where you could once hang out all day have made way for
boutiques, and home prices have reached the millions.

But a few longtime establishments remain, making the Haight a real
neighborhood, where sales clerks greet you by name, ask how you liked
that book or movie, help you pick out the best tomatoes or explain
how to dye fabric or put up your shelves. There are no chain stores
here - even the Gap moved on - and however raggedly hippie it may be,
the Haight prides itself on its idealistic, independent spirit.

I grew roots in the Haight: I tended the garden, planting rosemary,
agapanthus, Mexican sage, calla lilies and whatever else could
withstand the snails. Eventually, I decided to transfer my sad little
redwood tree to the soil, too. Optimistically, I gave it plenty of
room, along with extra water and soil, since the Haight is built on
sand dunes. Every so often I plucked snails from its delicate limbs
and sometimes wondered how long it would take to die.

Then we had El Niño, the nine-umbrella winter of endless rain. When I
finally ventured into the garden in spring, the redwood tree had
disappeared under huge fennel fronds and grass. I weeded and was
surprised: suddenly, my tree was 3 feet tall. It had sprouted a skin
of red bark, as if it had gone through puberty. I felt proud.

After this winter's rainstorms, my redwood tree is as tall as I am. I
stand next to it as if beside a child I never had, measuring on
tiptoe. Now I'm certain of its survival, and glad I have at least
replaced one of the millions of redwoods that were logged to build
houses such as the one I've gratefully inhabited for so long. Only 5
percent of the 2 million acres of redwoods that lined this coast
remain - though I doubt any of them sprouted in this particular soil.
Still, I hope that long after I'm gone, after we're all gone, my
redwood tree will live on.

It sometimes seems as if there's so little we can do to help save
this planet, and even some of the latter-day hippies panhandling on
Haight Street have stopped being optimistic about peace, love and
Mother Earth. But the morning sun shines through the leaves in Golden
Gate Park, musicians tune up their guitars and we do each day what we
can: take public transportation, compost, recycle, use less energy,
donate to environmental groups, plant a tree. That may sound
idealistic, but I can't help it: I am a citizen of the Haight-Ashbury.
---

Laura Fraser is a freelance journalist whose last book, "An Italian
Affair," was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle
best-seller. She is at work on another memoir.

.

I wasn't born in 1968 - but I yearn for its dizzying spirit

I wasn't born in 1968 - but I yearn for its dizzying spirit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/21/1

Evaluating the Prague Spring or Tet offensive is one thing, but the
demise of the left-utopian soul is truly a theme for our times

by John Harris The Guardian
March 21 2008

Do you remember Mick Jagger showing up at Grosvenor Square, the
trouble at the LSE and les événements de mai? Do the names of such
campus icons as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke mean much? If
not - and the odds aren't good if you're much under 55 - don't worry.
The 40th anniversary of the convulsive events of 1968 is upon us, and
any time now it might feel as if we've all fallen into a time warp.

Coverage has been spreading since January. As part of a London-wide
season titled All Power To The Imagination, the Barbican has
scheduled a 1968 celebration called History Is Now, and the Hayward
Gallery will open an exhibition of the silk-screened calls to arms
pasted around Paris. The obligatory South Bank Show special was
screened last Sunday - though as if to trump the rest, Radio 4 is
broadcasting not only a series of substantial programmes, but
five-minute "sound capsules" to be aired every day for six months.

These will include sober evaluations of such watershed episodes as
the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring and the assassination of Martin
Luther King, but there's a fascination in the upsurge of protest
forever parcelled up as Student Revolt. In among the stories of
yippies, Maoists, Enragés and occupation committees, you can already
make out everything from sneers to sighing nostalgia, but there are
also themes that speak volumes about our times.

In France, as evidenced by Nicolas Sarkozy's self-proclaimed quest to
"liquidate" 1968's legacy, the anniversary highlights the battle
between what Sarko once called "morality, authority, work and
national identity" and the supposedly pernicious ideas of the liberal
left (though how the appetites of "President Bling-Bling" fit into
all that is an interesting question). On this side of the Channel,
things are far less charged, but the flood of retrospection serves to
point up one particularly resonant subject - the demise of a
left-utopian spirit that we might do well to rediscover.

I wasn't even born in 1968, but the year's events - and in
particular, the French end of things - have long filled me with
generational envy. In 1988 the 20th anniversary seemed to make
everything clear, when a brilliant Channel 4 season revealed what my
lot seemed to be lacking: the rebel mindset, certainly, but also a
strain of politics so all-encompassing that it seemed dizzying. Two
decades on, we were presented with pop culture timidly pulling away
from any meaningful engagement, and a left fragmenting into arcane
irrelevance or the dominance of single issues. Our predecessors
seemed to have confidently taken issue with just about everything.

Looking at lists of slogans daubed on walls in the Latin Quarter only
deepened the tantalising sense of a world long gone. As well as the
stuff that had quickly congealed into cliche ("Be realistic, demand
the impossible"), there were endless examples at once audacious and
seductive: "They are buying your happiness - steal it back"; "The
alarm clock rings - first humiliation of the day"; "You will all
finish up dying from comfort"; and, perhaps most presciently,
"Forests came before men - the desert comes afterwards."

The best place to start, and finish, remains Guy Debord's 1967
treatise The Society of the Spectacle, the set text of those
mercurial revolutionaries the Situationists. Built from
headache-inducing prose, it now reads like an early insight into the
overmediated age that, back then, was just beginning. "In societies
where modern conditions of production prevail," goes its opening
passage, "all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation."

Hopelessly damaged by alcoholism, Debord committed suicide in 1994,
an act seen as one last protest against the fact that his beloved
Paris had lost its anarchistic aspect and become so consumerised. A
world where celebrity culture - about which Debord prophetically
theorised - runs rampant, and time spent online supplants human
contact, represents the grim fruition of just about everything he wrote about.

But let's not get carried away. In France, les événements were
swiftly followed by the overwhelming election victory of the Gaullist
right. At 40 years' distance, plenty of 1968 pamphlets and monographs
seem to lose the idea that activism is meant to focus on changing
lives, and end up luxuriating in politics-as-literature. And some of
those who have kept 1968's flame flickering are hardly the most
appealing bunch. A couple of years ago, I reluctantly stood in for
one of Debord's biographers at a literary event and talked about a
book I'd written that focused on the 2005 election and Labour's
record in office. For one grumpy soixante-huitard, a conversation
about the working families tax credit was the last straw, and he
flipped, apparently desperate to get back to commodity fetishism and
spectacular consumption rather than the urgent stuff of the real world.

Then again, he may have had half a point. To look back 40 years is
partly to understand that if you retreat from big ideas you risk
losing essential political equipment - Nick Davies's recent book Flat
Earth News, for example, reveals that the word "capitalism" is less
common in the modern press than "crap". Moreover, if you dispense
with romantic and existential aspects of politics as mere frippery,
you may well knock away the philosophical foundation of what you
profess to believe. A famous Parisian graffito captures the essential
point: "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without
referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is
subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of
constraint - such people have a corpse in their mouth."

To be fair, the more clued-up parts of the anti-globalisation
movement seem to understand all this (witness the very '68-esque
slogan "Another world is possible"), though their efforts hardly
detract from the predicament of those of us too young to have once
occupied libraries and daubed walls. As part of the long defeat that
spread through the 70s and 80s, the left allowed idealism to be
appropriated by its enemies, and look where it got us. Exactly 20
years after the events of May '68, Margaret Thatcher chillingly
claimed that "Economics are the method; the object is to change the
soul." So it proved: we may now live in a utopia, but it's the one
dreamt up by the free-market right.

john.harris@guardian.co.uk

.

Forum debating LSD, other hallucinogens

Forum debating LSD, other hallucinogens

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science/2008/03/21/forum_debating_lsd_other_hallucinogens/4813/

Published: March 21, 2008

BASEL , Switzerland, March 21 (UPI) -- The first World Psychedelic
Forum opened Friday in Switzerland to highlight renewed scientific
and cultural interest in hallucinogenic drugs.

Fifty experts from around the world are participating in the
three-day forum in Basel, Switzerland, to debate "the
multi-dimensional psychedelic experience with its tremendous
potential for expanding consciousness and for self-awareness," forum
officials told Swisinfo.com.

"(There) are very few people who know what psychedelics are about and
many people think that LSD, heroin and cocaine are just illegal
drugs," forum project manager Lucius Werthmuller told Swissinfo. "We
want to let people know that psychedelics like LSD are not toxic,
they don't lead to addiction and they are really safe if they are
used the right way on a stable personality."

Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, 102, who discovered the mind-altering
LSD -- or lysergic acid diethylamide -- will be honored during the
seminar. Doctors originally thought it could be used in psychotherapy
but it became popular in the 1960s drug culture.

Last December the Swiss medical authorities said they approved
LSD-assisted psychotherapy trials on patients suffering from
advanced-stage cancer and other terminal illnesses, the first
therapeutic study of its kind on humans in 35 years.

.

Operation Midnight Climax

OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=11209

Weird and twisted tale from San Francisco Telegraph Hill

23 March 2008

Weird, twisted and bizarre tales about the San Francisco Bay Area are
so numerous some merely make us yawn. But if any one story stands out
for its sheer audacity, moral depravity and utter madness­this is it.

Years ago I came across a magazine article about something called
Operation Midnight Climax. I knew it had to be a joke. The CIA, with
the blessing and full cooperation of both the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics and the SFPD sets up and runs an LSD brothel in San
Francisco for ten solid years? Who do you think you're kidding?
Still, I dutifully dug for corroborative facts concerning this
alleged operation.

Turns out Operation Midnight Climax was no joke.

Its story is particularly timely in light of revelations concerning
secret Bush Administration memos green-lighting CIA and Army
Intelligence torture techniques supposedly designed to obtain
information from "detainees" and "enemy combatants".

Back in the 1950's and '60's CIA experiments aimed at obtaining
information and controlling human behavior gravitated to covertly
dispensing numerous powerful psychotropic drugs. The CIA's original
charter prohibited it from engaging in any domestic operations. Yet
many of these drugs were given to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil without
their knowledge or consent. Anyone interested in this unseemly
labyrinth can trot down to the the library or just google MK-ULTRA.
If ever there was a reason to inform ourselves and hold political
feet to the fire concerning our inalienable rights it's MK-ULTRA. Its
many programs had no external oversight and no accounting. For years
fully 6% of the CIA's entire budget went into MK-ULTRA programs that
even Congress knew nothing about.

But I'm wandering from the story at hand, namely:

Operation Midnight Climax­a Bay Area baby born of MK-ULTRA.

He was a tough, fat, bald guy­a character right out of Hollywood
central casting. Back in the early 1950's an itinerant San Francisco
journalist, former OSS operative and then Federal Bureau of Narcotics
agent named George Hunter White, aka Morgan Hall, was assigned by his
boss Harry Anslinger to team up with the CIA. Together they created
Operation Midnight Climax. White's assignment: explore and record how
a new drug called LSD affects behavior when consumed by unsuspecting
male johns in the company of drug addicted hookers. A great comedy
scenario, if it weren't so damn perverse.

By day George Hunter White continued to work the streets of San
Francisco, ferreting out drug deals and drug dealers, setting them up
and taking them down. By night he'd repair to the portable toilet his
friend Leo Jones had provided him behind the two way mirror set into
a wall of "the pad's" Telegraph Hill bedroom. The L-shaped Chestnut
Street duplex featured fantastic views of the San Francisco Bay. It
was festooned with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, hidden microphones, tape
recorders and a refrigerator stocked with pitchers of martinis. White
was a notorious booze hound. He'd knock back a quart or more of gin
nightly perched on the seat of his toilet scribbling notes on
concurrent activities in the adjacent bedroom.

But dosing unwitting johns produced, well, wildly inconsistent
results. White observed innumerable men behave in ways that suggested
insanity. So White gave LSD the pet name "Stormy". It fit. The
"psychedelic revolution" was still years away. We can hardly imagine
how the varied socio/ethnic/economic group of philanderers who wound
up at "the pad" must have reacted when dosed. Most had never heard
of, much less consumed any hallucinogenic substance before.

Richard Stratton interviewed George White's last living Operation
Midnight Climax associate for Spin Magazine in 1994. According White
lieutenant Ira "Ike" Feldman:

"White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that
fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip
of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty
tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of
prostitutes for clandestine use. That's what I was doing when I
worked for George White and the CIA."

George Hunter White continued operating his Telegraph Hill LSD
brothel until 1965, when he retired from the service. He moved to
Stinson Beach. Locals came to know him as Colonel White. He became
the Stinson Beach Fire Marshall­and, after a few years on the wagon
White died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975.

Upon his death White's widow gifted the Electronic Museum at
Foothills Junior College, forty miles south of San Francisco, with
his diaries. According to a Washington Post article dated September
5, 1977 these diaries:

"provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and
safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of
the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man
who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who
worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned
prominently include James Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell.
Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20
(1977) before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project."

Upon retirement George Hunter White wrote to Harry Anslinger, his old
boss at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reflecting on White's many
years of service:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled
wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where
else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape,
and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

And so concludes yet another true San Francisco tale about your
American taxpayer dollars working to protect you and yours.

.

LSD Helped Forge Alex Grey's Spiritual, Artistic and Love Lives

LSD Helped Forge Alex Grey's Spiritual, Artistic and Love Lives

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/24/findrelig.DTL

David Ian Miller
Monday, March 24, 2008

Alex Grey paints souls. His work shows human bodies ­ rendered with
medical-illustration precision ­ wrapped in layers of sacred energy.
Whether you believe Grey's work depicts the reality of divine auras
or a particularly vibrant artistic license doesn't much matter. His
paintings have an uncanny effect on viewers, making them sense ­ or
at least consider the possibility of ­ the subtle energies that
surround us and how these personal force fields might change
depending on our intention, actions and moods. They are modern-day
religious icons and mandalas for 21st century Westerners.

Grey, 55, lives and works in New York City with his wife, the painter
Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey. The Greys host
regular full and new moon all-faiths-welcome gatherings at their
Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary and art gallery where selected
paintings of Grey's are on permanent display. I spoke to him by phone
about art's power to transform, Tibetan Buddhism and the danger of
chasing many rabbits but catching none.

In an essay of yours called "What Is Visionary Art?" you wrote that
the artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. How do you do
that, if you can put that into words?

I think that that's why artists make art ­ it is difficult to put
into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the
flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this. Their edict
was, in order to paint the mountain you must become the mountain.
That's one way to make the soul perceptible, when one mirrors
something and then expresses it from that perspective. Then there are
what I think of as gifts of the divine imagination, when one can gain
a glimpse into the visionary realm. Some of these visions are so
intense that they burn themselves into your neuronal fabric. And so
you remember them, and then you make a drawing or, if it was an
auditory thing, you write down or hum or do whatever the musician does.

You had a kind of vision as a young man that changed your life and
work. Can you tell me about that?

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing
some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to
the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money. I came back
exhilarated and exhausted, not to mention slightly suicidal. I was
pretty young, like 21. I'd been searching, and I just didn't
understand what my life was all about. So at one point I kind of
asked, "If there is a God, then please give me a sign."

Then, on the last day of art school, I was standing on a street
corner, saying goodbye to my professor, when this woman drove by and
invited us to a party later that night. My professor picked me up
that evening and offered me a bottle of Kahlua and LSD, and since I
felt like I had nothing to lose ­ I had never done psychedelics
before ­ I tried it. I drank about half the bottle. And when we got
to the front door of the lady giving the party, I told her what was
in the bottle, and she drank the rest of it. I went into her
apartment, sat on a couch and closed my eyes; inside of my head it
seemed like everything was in a big, dark tunnel, but I was revolving
around in a spiral toward the light. There was this beautiful,
amazing kind of luminosity, a kind of light that I'd never imagined.
It was the light of love, the light of redemption, in a weird way. I
felt a kind of ecstatic joyfulness that was a real release from my
depression, and I saw the experience as symbolically important in
that I was in the dark, going toward the light.

This was a kind of spiritual awakening for you?

Exactly. It was like going through a spiritual rebirth canal. And it
was like nothing I had experienced before. I called the girl (the
party giver) the next day, and asked if we could get together and
talk about the experience. She ended up being my wife, 33 years ago.
So it was a definite turning point. I had met a sort of divine love
in the flesh in the form of my wife, and this definitely opened me up
to a new realm.

How did this change your art?

Well, it kind of monkey-wrenched everything, to begin with. I became
really interested in the study of consciousness. I started making
drawings about what I'd seen, and we continued to explore with psychedelics.

On one occasion of doing that ­ we would take a dose of LSD, lay in
bed with blindfolds on and listen to Bach organ music ­ we went into
a space that we called the "universal mind lattice." In this state,
our identity with the physical body melted down into a kind of
fountain and a ball of light that was connected with an infinite
expanse of very similar balls of light; it seemed like the same kind
of energy was running through all of us, and every other being and
thing in the universe was one of these balls of light, infinite and
omni-directional. It was a perspective that seemed outside of time,
somehow. It made me start to search in mystical literature for
descriptions of similar experiences. And it inspired us to make art
about infinite interconnectedness or unity, which became the
criterion for our work.

When did you first have the idea of creating a sacred space for
people to view your art?

My wife and I had a kind of simultaneous vision while we were having
our first MDMA experience. We both saw ourselves walking through this
kind of futuristic chapel, a kind of sacred space. At that point we
had the realization that we should not sell our artwork but instead
create a new kind of sacred space to house it. That became almost
like an edict. Of course, as artists, it's hard enough to make a
living selling your art, but if you keep your work in order to house
it in a sacred space, then you are creating extra challenges. But
that was our inspiration at the time. We wanted to build a new kind
of sacred space.

What did you build?

Our dream was to create a Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. The Sacred
Mirrors are a series of paintings that I created. Allyson inspired
them and named them, but I painted them over a 10-year period. And
we've added a number of other works to the collection ­ there are
about 50 pieces right now, including works by other artists.

What kinds of experiences do people have there?

Sometimes the artwork has validated a visionary experience that
people have had. Another function has been a kind of adjunct to
people's healing. The Mirrors (represent) healthy, whole systems of
the anatomy, and people can stand in front of them and mirror what
they are seeing. There have been people who have had heart problems
and things like that who have used them in this way.

We have a lot of spiritual teachers who have come there and taught,
but our primary goal is to inspire people to unite their creative and
spiritual lives, and to create their own kind of sacred art. A number
of people do video work, and there have also been dance performances.
It's become like a cultural center, but with the particular slant of
a kind of visionary culture.

The creative principle is less about dogma and more about opening
ourselves to the evolution of consciousness. It's always been a part
of our understanding of God. God is the creator. God is the, "Behold,
I make all things new." The more religions are fixated on having a
dogmatic sense of truth, the more likely they are to blow each other
up. So being open to God as a creative principle could provide for a
new kind of dialogue between the faiths, which I think is crucial at
this time.

What happens at the full moon ceremonies?

My wife describes them as a kind of interfaith variety show. We have
an imam for the New York correctional system, a wonderful fellow
named Dawoud Kringle, who plays his sitar and gives teachings based
on Islam and Sufism. My wife covers the Jewish beat, and she goes
over the Parsha (Torah passage) for that week, and I frequently will
give a Christian or a kind of offbeat creative poetic kind of reflection.

You advocate a kind of inclusiveness towards the world faiths. Is
there a particular tradition that you are most aligned with?

I was talking to my friend, Ken Wilbur, about how much I loved all
the different traditions ­ Kabbalah has this wonderful tree (of
life), the mystic Christians have their particular practices that are
really wonderful, and the Sufis ­ oh my God, what an amazing approach
to the divine! And he said, "Alex, chase many rabbits. Catch none."
Basically, choose one and go with it for a while. And so, with that
kind of admonition, I wound up choosing Tibetan Buddhism as my path.

Why did you choose Tibetan Buddhism?

I think that in the wake of my psychedelic experiences it was the
approach that more closely modeled the multidimensional experiences
that I was having, and it talked about a kind of hierarchy of beings,
very similar to the sort of celestials that you can find in the
Christian tradition or in the kabbalistic or the Sufi tradition, but
they were very specific. They had names. You could work with them.
You could invite them into your own being. And it was after reading
(Tibetan Buddhist book) "Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked
Awareness" that I just absolutely fell in love with Tibetan Buddhism,
and I had a strong visionary experience without any kind of drug influence.

Do you still do drugs?

Well, actually, I haven't for quite a while.

Why not?

I think part of it has been the responsibility of being a kind of
leader of our community in the chapel. So basically, my wife and I
are doing more meditation and yoga ­ more standard spiritual
practices ­ and doing our artwork. We have not felt the need or the
desire for the substances, even though I feel like they should be
regarded as sacraments, and there should be a place in our society
for making use of their powerful ability to open people up to the
visionary realm.

What are the artistic challenges in translating inner worlds or the
realm of the soul to a canvas?

The first challenge is to have an authentic mystical experience.
That's not such an easy thing to have happen, and it can happen in a
variety of ways.

How do you know that you have an authentic mystical experience?

I think that's kind of self-revealing. You know, when you see the
face of God, or when you have an overwhelming, ecstatic, blissful,
visionary experience, there is no doubt about it. It isn't like: "Did
it happen?" It's unforgettable. And you are a changed person in some
way. I wish there were a word for the ecstatic blissful liberation,
but when you have a glimpse of it you know what the mystics are
talking about. Except they are talking about a life lived in the
light of that.

And then translating that into art?

That's the challenge! So frequently the visions are very dynamic,
they change. But then there is a sense, with some of them, where you
are in a place that is very recognizable. It has a form. And so you
basically come back and start drawing it. Both my wife and I make
notations as quickly as possible after experiencing the state. You
notice if there were colors involved or what kind of shapes there
were or what kind of light was there. And then you make these little
sketches ... and that's the best I can really say. But many people
have had these experiences. It is just difficult to portray them.

Difficult to portray and perhaps difficult to relate to if you
haven't had the experience?

Absolutely. For some people, maybe my artwork just seems like fantasy
or something. However, if you have had any kind of a mystical or
cosmic experience, I guess, then people seem to recognize the territory.

In an interview from some years back, you were talking about your
"inner wienie," which tells you what you can't do, versus "the
primordial that flows through all of us and that "with it, everything
is possible." Can we talk a little bit more about that? How do you
quiet the inner wienie and connect with the primordial?

That's funny. That language isn't what I'd use today, but it's
probably an apt description of the kind of cowering ego before the
forces of the world. I think that basically you commit to what your
imagined highest possibility is and to being as loving and
straightforward in your relationships as possible. You also have to
listen very deeply and look to see what you are being guided towards.
You can't always be super clear about these things. It can be very
challenging. I mean, it is for me.

Is "the primordial" God or something else?

I use a lot of different words for God ­ infinite intelligence,
primordial, perfection or universal creativity. All of these, to me,
are God. And God is a word, I think, that some people feel
uncomfortable with, so they can use another word, you know? It's the
great mystery. And it's the core of our being. And it's the greatest
expanse of everything in the cosmos. God's inexplicable. God is
beyond the everything. And yet we can't cease to blather about it.
---

Finding My Religion wants to hear from you. Send comments on stories
and suggestions for interview subjects to miller@sfgate.com.
---

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor
David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance
writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a
technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired
News and The New York Observer.

.

Grokking open source

Grokking open source

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17232/1141/

by David M Williams
Thursday, 20 March 2008

"Grok" is a word that you may not know, but it has been in use since
the 1960's. It is commonly taken to mean "understand" but it is so
much more than that. Do you grok open source? The word is the key to
understanding why talented developers give of their time.

The word "grok" was coined by popular science fiction author Robert
A. Heinlein and was first used in his novel Stranger in a Strange
Land. He wrote,

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a
part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in
group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by
religion, philosophy, and science­and it means as little to us
(because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

In Heinlein's stories, the men from Mars exist. Not only do they
exist, they're pretty thirsty it turns out. When they drink water it
is such an experience that the Martians become one with the water,
the water becomes one with the Martian. They grok each other. Things
which once had independent existences become forever intertwined with
each other and form a new reality which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Lest you think grok to be purely a geeky term, it has been used so
widely that the Oxford English Dictionary accepted it into their
tome, and thus the legitimate English language. The dictionary
defines it thus, "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to
establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate
sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment."

The word enjoyed popularity in the 1960's counter culture although it
later became more concentrated in computer culture. The
near-legendary Jargon File (otherwise known as the Hacker's
Dictionary) contained a definition for grok from the beginning. The
current entry reads

To understand. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. When you
claim to 'grok' some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that
you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but
that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example,
to say that you "know" LISP is simply to assert that you can code in
it if necessary ­ but to say you "grok" LISP is to claim that you
have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with
the implication that it has transformed your view of programming.

I'm sure a picture is forming in your mind; to grok something means
not just to be aware of it or to mentally apprehend it. To grok it
means you absolutely, really, completely just get it. It's natural to
you. It makes sense. The concept lives and breathes through you and
you espouse it.
So, do you grok open source? The question has a much richer and
clearer sense now.

There are a lot of people who don't grok open source. They ask things
like "How can you ever possibly make any money out of that?" or "Why
would you give away all your code and secrets and intellectual
property?" and "Don't you get what you pay for?"

.Another common question asked of open source software is simply "How
can it be any good?" After all, what type of programmer gives away
his or her code? And surely it's only supported in a lame way, on
nights and weekends if even that. Not to mention that it can never be
innovative; surely open source developers are just copying what's
already out there – they're not working to break whole new ground. Right?

Wrong. These questions may, possibly, make some logical or pragmatic
or business-oriented sense. Yet, a fundamental aspect has escaped.
The open source community are passionate and ideological. They share
a set of values for which they feel strongly. The people who question
why open source developers do the things they do ask these questions
because they do not really understand what matters to the open source world.

Perhaps ironically the people asking these questions may well have
participated in some form of service organisation in their home
towns. My own father was a long-time member of Rotary and is a past
President of his local club. The members of Rotary are business
people who donate their time to raise funds for schools and for
health and to give school children opportunities to spend a year
abroad in an exchange program, among other things.

Similarly, there are service clubs and volunteer organisations which
specialise in building homes for others, for helping homeless people
be warm and well fed, and not to mention the brave volunteer
firefighters and others who put themselves in the line of danger.

On the one hand it may be tenuous to suggest that giving away
software in any way compares to the pure nobility of these
activities. Yet, on the other hand, open source software helps
provide affordable computers to children in developing nations by
totally eradicating any fees for operating systems or applications.

It would be quite wrong of me to suggest all open source software is
self-sacrificing in that way. However, even so, open source software
makes it possible for small business to become competitive when they
otherwise could not be. It provides some of the finest network
administration tools available anywhere. It is the backbone of the
entire Internet. It unfurls a world where people can run a rich suite
of applications on their computer without having to resort to piracy
if they cannot afford, or do not wish to pay for, the items they desire.

The open source community has built itself on a shared set of ideals
and values that has given rise to such remarkable achievements as the
Linux kernel and the Apache web server – the most used web server on
the planet.

Further, open source provides trust and confidence. I wrote
previously about a terrible application called G-Archiver which
purported to help backup your Gmail mailbox but sneakily e-mailed
your username and password to the author. This problem would not have
happened in an open source system.

This is because open source software is transparent. The source code
is visible to all. It can be inspected and analysed in depth, by
anyone around the globe. You need not fear that the published source
code differs from the compiled executable because you can recompile
it yourself from source code. You can, under many free software
licenses, modify the code and use it for yourself or redistribute it
for the benefit of others.

It took many months until anyone noticed G-Archiver was doing this.
By contrast, a rogue open source app would be detected swiftly –
because it is so exposed. There would have been a rapid discovery and
the damage greatly minimised and contained. Alas, no matter how many
times your operating system warns you the program you are about to
run could be malicious you just cannot have unfettered confidence in
the integrity of a proprietary or closed-source program. With open
source there is no mystery; every single line of logic can be put
under the microscope and any flaws, whether intended or
unintentional, laid bare.

You could look at the numbers. Linux is the #1 server operating
system providing domain hosting on the public Internet. The bulk of
e-mail sent through the Internet originates through sendmail. PHP is
the major server-side scripting language used online. Over 75% of all
DNS domains are serviced by an open source application.

Why is this so? It's not because all these guys are making a fortune
out of their work. It's not because they're being bankrolled by large
companies. It's not because they just wanted to copy something which
had already been done and got lucky.

The real reason for the success and proliferation of open source is
because of the sheer overriding devotion to the cause among its
developers and advocates and users alike. They believe in it. They
share a goal of empowering computer users to have the freedom to use
their systems as they like without any restriction on their liberty,
without vendor lock in, without having a curtailed chance to review
software they might consider purchasing.

This liberty breeds passion for quality and passion for utility and
the result is damn fine software which benefits you and benefits me.

Another matter which causes furrowed brows is how you get any support
for free software. Yet, conversely a hallmark of good open source
projects is an incredible community of informal and freely available
support which centres around e-mail lists, wikis, irc chat channels,
open documentation and bug trackers. True, these may take a bit more
digging to find than commercial level support – but they do offer
support simply not available with proprietary software: you can
interact directly with the people who created the software, and those
who have experience with installing and maintaining it along with
users who have likely encountered similar problems to yourself.

Open source is part of these developers and advocates and it
permeates their worldview and outlook. These people do it because
they grok it. Do you?

.

World's best-known protest symbol turns 50

World's best-known protest symbol turns 50

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7292252.stm

20 March 2008
By Kathryn Westcott
BBC News
[]

It started life as the emblem of the British anti-nuclear movement
but it has become an international sign for peace, and arguably the
most widely used protest symbol in the world. It has also been
adapted, attacked and commercialised.

It had its first public outing 50 years ago on a chilly Good Friday
as thousands of British anti-nuclear campaigners set off from
London's Trafalgar Square on a 50-mile march to the weapons factory
at Aldermaston.

The demonstration had been organised by the Direct Action Committee
Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND) joined in.

Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious
objector from West London, persuaded DAC that their aims would have
greater impact if they were conveyed in a visual image. The "Ban the
Bomb" symbol was born.

He considered using a Christian cross motif but, instead, settled on
using letters from the semaphore - or flag-signalling - alphabet,
super-imposing N (uclear) on D (isarmament) and placing them within a
circle symbolising Earth.

The sign was quickly adopted by CND.

Holtom later explained that the design was "to mean a human being in
despair" with arms outstretched downwards.

US peace symbol

American pacifist Ken Kolsbun, who corresponded with Mr Holtom until
his death in 1985, says the designer came to regret the connotation
of despair and had wanted the sign inverted.

"He thought peace was something that should be celebrated," says Mr
Kolsbun, who has spent decades documenting the use of the sign. "In
fact, the semaphore sign for U in 'unilateral' depicts flags pointing
upwards. Mr Holtom was all for unilateral disarmament."

In a book to commemorate the symbol's 50th birthday, Mr Kolsbun
charts how it was transported across the Atlantic and took on
additional meanings for the Civil Rights movement, the
counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s including the anti-Vietnam
protests, and the environmental, women's and gay rights movements.

He also argues that groups opposed to those tendencies tried to use
the symbol against them by distorting its message.

How the sign migrated to the US is explained in various ways. Some
say it was brought back from the Aldermaston protest by civil rights
activist Bayard Rustin, a black pacifist who had studied Gandhi's
techniques of non-violence.

Vietnam

In Peace: The biography of a symbol, Mr Kolsbun describes how in just
over a decade, the sign had been carried by civil rights "freedom"
marchers, painted on psychedelic Volkswagens in San Francisco, and on
the helmets of US soldiers on the ground in Vietnam.

"The sign really got going over here during the 1960s and 70s, when
it became associated with anti-Vietnam protests," he told the BBC
News website.

As the combat escalated, he says, so did the anti-war protests and
the presence of the symbol.

"This, of course, led some people to condemn it as a communist sign,"
says Mr Kolsbun. "There has always been a lot of misconception and
disinformation about it."

As the sign became a badge of the burgeoning hippie movement of the
late 1960s, the hippies' critics scornfully compared it to a chicken
footprint, and drew parallels with the runic letter indicating death.

In 1970, the conservative John Birch Society published pamphlets
likening the sign to a Satanic symbol of an upside-down, "broken" cross.

While it remained a key symbol of the counter-culture movement
throughout the 1970s, it returned to its origins in the 1980s, when
it became the banner of the international grassroots anti-nuclear movement.

Power

The real power of the sign, its supporters say, is the reaction that
it provokes - both from fans and from detractors.

The South African government, for one, tried to ban its use by
opponents of apartheid in 1973.

And, in 2006, a couple in suburban Denver found themselves embroiled
in a dispute over their use of a giant peace sign as a Christmas
wreath. The homeowners' association threatened them with a daily fine
if they didn't remove it.

The association eventually backed down because of public pressure,
but a member told a local newspaper it was clearly an "anti-Christ
sign" with "a lot of negativity associated with it.".

Commercial

CND has never registered the sign as a trademark, arguing that "a
symbol of freedom, it is free for all". It has now appeared on
millions of mugs, T-shirts, rings and nose-studs. Bizarrely, it has
also made an appearance on packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

A decade ago, the sign was chosen during a public vote to appear on a
US commemorative postage stamp saluting the 1960s.

The symbol that helped define a generation of baby boomers may not be
as widely used today as in the past. It is in danger of becoming to
many people a retro fashion item, although the Iraq war has seen it
re-emerge with something like its original purpose.

"It is still the dominant peace sign," argues Lawrence Wittner, an
expert on peace movements at the University at Albany in New York.

"Part of that is down to its simplicity. It can be used as a
shorthand for many causes because it can be reproduced really quickly
- on walls on floors, which is important, in say, repressive societies."

And can its success be measured? Fifty years on, wars have continued
to be waged and the list of nuclear-armed states has steadily lengthened.

But the cup is half-full as well as half empty.

"There are many ways in which nuclear war has been prevented," says
Mr Wittner. "The hawks say that the reason nuclear weapons have not
been used is because of the deterrent. But I believe popular pressure
has restrained powers from using them and helped curbed the arms race.

And the symbol of and inspiration for that popular pressure, says Mr
Wittner, is Mr Holtom's graphic.
--

Peace: A biography of a symbol is published by National Geographic
Books in April.

.

The Longest Walk 2

The Longest Walk 2

http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17599

March 20, 2008
by Marty Durlin

On a chilly day in March, two dozen weary walkers are resting at the
Ute Indian Museum in Montrose. In the shadow of western Colorado's
Shining Mountains, surrounded by relics of the tribe who once
inhabited the area, the group is taking a two-day break on its
five-month journey from California's Alcatraz Island to the nation's capital.

After 1,000 miles and a month on the road, the Long Walkers seem to
enjoy relaxing in the comfortable atmosphere of the museum, eating
pizza as they watch a film about Western Shoshone efforts to reclaim
traditional lands. The walkers are young and old, Indian and white.
There's a core group of approximately 30, along with an ever-changing
group of supporters, whose ranks ebb and flow as the walk heads east.

Their trek commemorates the Longest Walk of 1978, which began with 17
participants in San Francisco and ended five months later with 30,000
in Washington, D.C. The original Longest Walk halted a congressional
effort to abrogate treaties that protect Native sovereignty. It also
helped spur the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act
in August 1978.

The 2008 walk, which began Feb. 11, is "a cry out to all native
people for unity and solidarity," according to Jimbo Simmons, a
Choctaw. It's split into two different routes. Simmons is leading the
northern one, which follows the same trail used by the walkers 30
years ago. And American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks, now
in his 70s, is leading the southern route, which passes through
Indian land. Both Simmons and Banks are veterans of the original walk.

"Nothing's changed," Simmons says. "There's still a systematic
violation of human and natural rights."

Despite the passage of the Religious Freedom Act, Simmons says
threats to Indian sacred sites have intensified. He mentions 15 sites
that are threatened or already compromised: Mount Shasta in
California, for example, where tribes and environmentalists are
fighting geothermal development, and Bear Butte in South Dakota,
where bikers, chainsaws and a shooting range have desecrated Lakota
sacred areas. At Yucca Mountain in Nevada, sacred to Shoshone and
Paiute people, tribes have played a prominent part in protesting a
long-planned nuclear waste dump.

Simmons emphasizes that "all life is sacred, all places are sacred.
The survival of indigenous people depends not on just one area, but
on the entire life system. Our cultural survival is at stake."

There are as probably as many reasons for walking as there are
walkers. For Willie Lone Wolf, a Navajo/Ute who left his construction
job in Oakland, Calif., to join the walk as bus driver and drum
keeper, the walk is "for our ancestors … our mother, the earth, all
life that is sacred, for future generations."

The hardest part so far, he says, was through Nevada, "the loneliest
highway in America." They were encouraged in this desolate stretch by
the local Shoshones and the Paiutes, "who walked with us, fed and
housed us, and took care of us."

For Washoe Chris Fred, who joined in Carson City, the walk is a
spiritual journey he undertook to cleanse himself from drinking.

Along the route, Simmons says, the walkers have received "many many
medicines, representative of the support and need to protect the
earth that people feel." The medicines include feathers, staffs,
medicine bundles and sage. Some of them are arranged on the dashboard
of the "media bus," which contains an audio studio for daily
streaming and archiving (www.earthcycles.net), powered by a mix of
solar and wind energy and heated with a wood stove.

"When we get to D.C., we'll create one huge altar," says Simmons, who
predicts that 1 million people will turn out by the end of the march
in July, when the walk's two routes converge.

Simmons expects to see people from around the world, in support of
the U.N.'s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted
by the General Assembly in September 2007. The United States joined
New Zealand, Canada and Australia in voting against the declaration.

As for the apology to Native peoples recently issued by the U.S.
Senate, Simmons says it's "just words. If they were sincere, they'd
give back the land and the livelihoods they destroyed."

Simmons says the 1978 walk gave him, as an Indian youth, "a sense of
identity and direction." The younger people on the current walk, and
those they meet along the way, participate in "holding the vision and
moving forward with intention," he says. "We're investing in and
trusting the younger generation, and depending on them for their
advice and skills."

After Montrose, the walkers move on to Gunnison, then to Pueblo,
covering between 20 and 80 miles each day. The act of walking "brings
back into focus the traditional knowledge that's been locked away for
generations," says Simmons. "All of our traditions and ceremonies are
based on nature. The walk itself is a prayer."
--

The author is the Online Editor for High Country News.

.

You say you want a revolution

You say you want a revolution

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080322.BKKUNZ22/TPStory/Entertainment

DARRYL WHETTER
March 22, 2008

MY REVOLUTIONS
By Hari Kunzru
Dutton, 277 pages, $28.50

Former French prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aristide
Briand is probably the true source of a political line inaccurately
attributed to Churchill: "The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no
heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head." This
relationship between maturation and politics is the focus of English
novelist Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions. When youthful idealism and
(narcotic) dreams of a better future propel underfed militants to
reach for dynamite and a pistol, however, more is debated than just
whether politics is best trusted to the head or the heart.

Like The Darling, by Russell Banks, and Neil Gordon's The Company You
Keep, My Revolutions is a midlife crisis novel with a moral and
judicial twist. In 1998, on the eve of his 50th birthday, Englishman
Michael Frame may finally cease living the double life he's
successfully maintained for nearly three decades. Michael's current
partner and stepdaughter know nothing of the youth he spent as what
his radical cadre deemed a revolutionary, and what the English courts
would call a terrorist. His family doesn't even know his original name.

Commencing his "self-invention" as a scholarship student during
London's fervent sixties, Michael quickly begins to do more than just
join protest marches. When the hand of fate sees him, but few others,
arrested and jailed, he emerges from a brief stint in prison, ready
to renounce everything save the revolution. Family, study, stable
housing, health and most happiness are rejected as traces of "pig"
culture, while pamphleteering, squatting and petty crime are intended
to get the troops out of Vietnam, redistribute wealth and liberate
workers, women and the consciousness.

This revolution may have been fuelled by the sixties pharmacopoeia of
weed, LSD and speed, but Kunzru admirably liberates the politics of a
specific time to pose enduring questions about social and personal
change. Michael privately confesses that his present-day romance, in
the 1990s, is founded on misinformation and delusion, but at 50, he
honestly wonders if all relationships aren't layered with lacunae and
half-truths. Indeed, some of the conflict of "individualist" versus
"collective" action persists from his radical youth into his
confessedly passive middle-age. His co-revolutionaries, modelled on
England's Angry Brigade, push all comfort levels, including their
own, striving for a "totalitarian sharing" which has them removing
bathroom doors to diminish privacy and frequently deriding each other
in "criticism-self-criticism" sessions.

This dedication to self-criticism combines biting realism and a
rewarding literary device to air the indictments many people would
never dare to say. The personal doubts and collective infighting of
Michael's group escalate, along with their threat to the state and to
each other, and this same commitment to truth will continue in
Michael's later life. His combination of years of meditation in a
Buddhist monastery and middle-aged domesticity prompt him to admit:
"All things are transitory. All things must pass. Attachments,
whether to material possessions, to people, to places or a name, are
futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away." The same
candour with which Michael alternately denounces and is denounced
makes Kunzru's sober, fearless voice genuine, not platitudinous.

Kunzru's dual commitment to realism and a good read sees him attend
to another relevant aspect of sixties politics: sex. These dissenting
middle-class refugees personalize their politics with that other
quintessential flower child drug, the Pill. In squat after squat in
condemned buildings, Michael and his unwashed peers attempt polyamory
in their cramped quarters, pursuing free love in front of others
sleeping on the same dirty floor. One strident female insists on
making even the sex revolutionary, hurtling insults and performing or
seeking erotic torture. Here Kunzru, who was recently recognized by
Granta as one of the 20 best fiction writers under 40, shows his age
a little, writing more vividly of young sex than he does of midlife
love. Michael's past is only a threat to his present because of his
current romantic relationship, yet we don't see why or even how he
loves the woman he has shared his life with for 16 years.

My Revolutions simultaneously admires and critiques the militancy of
youth. Given the youthful demographics of many of today's more
politicized countries, this attention on young firebrands gives the
novel an immediate global relevance, but also a narrative challenge
Kunzru doesn't quite meet. Love isn't the only aspect of life in
which his sympathy and intelligence are more devoted to the young
than the aging. The present-day scenes are repetitive and flat, with
a morose Michael simply changing locations for his late-night drinking.

Judiciously, Kunzru sets the present tense of the novel in 1998, a
recent yet already different time, in which resistance to state
authority was both more viable and more palatable. This split between
the sixties and the late nineties also makes My Revolutions an
implied elegy for days of greater political involvement, now that
even voting in the West seems radical. My Revolutions isn't afraid to
pose sharp questions about inherited complicity and inherent
selfishness, and we too are baited into self-criticism. Kunzru
skewers us with indicting questions we might be afraid to answer.
--

Darryl Whetter remembers the smell of tear gas, but now makes his
revolutions with a bicycle. His debut novel, the bicycle odyssey The
Push and the Pull, appears next month.

.

60s: A long, strange time deconstructed

60s: A long, strange time deconstructed

http://washingtontimes.com/article/20080323/BOOKS/186829321/1010

By James E. Person Jr.
March 23, 2008

Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-) recalls that during
his boyhood his elders looked upon the cultural wreckage wrought by
Soviet Communism and remarked, "Men have forgotten God; that's why
all this has happened." In a like manner, many Americans today look
at the best and worst aspects of the present day and explain, "All
this got its start back in the 1960s." Which was the era when, as
certain intellectuals instructed us at the time, God was not only
forgotten, but had in fact died.

As a time of social turmoil, the extraordinary 1960s cannot be marked
off in a neat 10-year period. For in truth, our modern time of
troubles lasted roughly from the outset of John F. Kennedy's
administration until April 1975 and the humiliating fall of Saigon to
Communist North Vietnamese forces. Not surprisingly, then, the 1960s
are remembered today as either the best or the worst of times, defensively so.

In "The Sixties Unplugged" Gerard DeGroot, professor of Modern
History at St. Andrews University and the author of several books on
Western cultural history, seeks to debunk the popular legend of the
Sixties as a golden age of peace, love and understanding. He states
his case in 68 short, thematically self-contained chapters covering
the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street fashion, the
Tonkin Gulf incident, Woodstock, the rise of conservatism as a force
on college campuses and numerous other topics.

Mr. DeGroot's book also looks at international goings-on, briefly
essaying the bloody struggle for political power in Indonesia, the
life and significance of the hate-filled, curiously over-praised Che
Guevara, and much else besides. In doing so, he has written a book
containing a little something to offend ­ and enlighten ­ just about everyone.

One myth, dear to the heart of many Americans, is that the Sixties
was an era of sharing and brotherhood, and progress. But alas, this
is buncombe, like perceptions of the shining legend of Woodstock
Nation, the spotlessly noble character of Mohammed Ali, the
simon-pure idealism of John F. Kennedy and a host of other cherished
myths. Mr. DeGroot examines these topics and individuals with an
unsparing eye, providing a warts-and-all perspective on each of them.

Mr. DeGroot notes that the Sixties youth movement was largely a
response by the children of the Greatest Generation who saw no reason
to share their parents, Depression-forged ethic of "Use it up, Wear
it out, Make it do, or Do without." In an affluent age, what was the
point of that?

Instant gratification married to a sense of Pharisaic
self-righteousness became the attitude of the hour. At one point Mr.
DeGroot approvingly quotes Kirkpatrick Sale, whose assessment of the
idealistic young people who formed Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) might well describe America,s largely white youth movement in general:

"They tend to feel guilty about the comfortable, privileged, often
very rich homes from which they come, especially when they try to
take their message into the mangled, oppressed and very desperate
homes of the poor. They feel guilty about what they regard as their
own inescapable middle-class racism and that of the society that has
showered its benefits on their parents. . . . And they feel guilty
that the society which has given them and their families so much, and
which they have spent the better part of their adolescence trying to
change, is obdurate in its basic iniquities."

In light of this withering assessment, it is important to note that
"The Sixties Unplugged" is not simply an exercise in downplaying
everything about the decade, for Mr. DeGroot finds several persons to
be genuine heroes, such as Cesar Chavez, soft-spoken founder of the
United Farm Workers, and Rachel Carson, whose book "Silent Spring"
essentially launched the modern environmental movement.

He also has words of admiration for those who bravely effected
changes in American race relations through nonviolent direct action,
a path that led sometimes to humiliation, physical assault, and death.

Nor will conservative readers of "The Sixties" come away entirely
unscathed. For example, Mr. DeGroot's description of Ronald Reagan as
more a crafty political opportunist and populist than a conservative
may raise eyebrows among many readers ­ who may be further surprised
by the author's spot-on assessment of Reagan's significance: "The
most successful political revolution of the 1960s was not conducted
by students, nor was it left-wing. It was instead a populist
revolution from the right, which had Ronald Reagan as its standard bearer."

Mr. DeGroot strives to capture everything of note in the Sixties; and
he admits from the outset that there are omissions, as it is
impossible to tackle every key person and event of the era. Fair
enough. Still, the reader may regret that there is no mention of
mainline Protestant Christianity,s decline as a living faith in the
West during the 1960s.

To his credit, Mr. DeGroot explores the impact of Vatican II and Pope
Paul VI's pronouncements against artificial birth control in the
encyclical "Humanae Vitae," but he is silent on the transformation of
Protestantism into an uninspired and uninspiring forum for mere
socializing, overseen largely by trend-seeking clerics.

It is possible that this development that flowered during the
Sixties, along with the Catholic laity,s mixed response to "Humanae
Vitae," led many to embrace the ideologies Mr. DeGroot describes so
well throughout his book, ideology being a secular substitute for
religion. What Mr. Solzhenitsyn recalled from his youth in Russia may
have been true, at least to some extent, for America and other
Western nations during the Sixties, as well: "Men have forgotten God;
that,s why all this has happened."

Read alongside Tom Brokaw,s book "Boom! Voices of the Sixties," Mr.
DeGroot,s "The Sixties Unplugged" stands as an informative,
well-researched, mostly on-the-mark response to the claims of graying
Baby Boomers about the wall-to-wall wonderfulness of that long,
strange trip of a decade.
---

James E. Person Jr. is the author of "Earl Hamner: From Walton's
Mountain to Tomorrow" (Cumberland House).

.

Echoes of 1968 [by Todd Gitlin]

Echoes of 1968

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/29960

By Todd Gitlin
PUBLISHED MARCH 24, 2008

In 1976, on a visit to Columbia, I was surprised to spot, on a wall
of the Journalism building abutting college walk, the spectral
remains of the spray-painted initials "sds." Thirty years on, those
faded letters have long since vanished, but it feels to me frequently
that the specter of 1968's convulsive events still haunts the campus,
dimly echoing Matthew Arnold's "alarms of struggle and flight" where
once "ignorant armies" clashed by day and night.

The campus will hear the story this spring­how, amid the horrific
Vietnam War, in the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr., in revolt against a high-handed University
administration, the black students and SDS radicals seized buildings.
And after several days of occupation, the police marched in, pushing
through barricades, injuring more than 140, arresting more than 700,
producing spectacular images of exuberance and panic, whereupon came
strikes and wounds, boycotts and polarization, swirls of chaos,
reform, and "radicalization"­in the theory of some, the jump-start of
a spirit of revolution.

In a culture allergic to history, we tend to pluck our collective
memories out of their contexts, to strip them down to anniversary
moments suitable for framing, hissing, and cheering. Understandably,
many students today who yearn to transform the world to something
more livable draw inspiration from what they think of collectively as
"the Sixties," an amalgam of epiphanies and confrontations that left
the country freer, properly chastened, and closer to "a more perfect
union." Activists, like other mortals, engage in a search for what
the literary historian Van Wyck Brooks famously called "a usable
past." If you believe, as I fervently do, that the movements of the
'60s were, on balance, morally necessary torrents of justice and
reason, then is 1968 that past? More no than yes, I would say.

Columbia's 1968, in April and May, was one episode in that year's
sequence of rising militancy and cataclysmic confrontation. In the
interval between the anguish of two devastating assassinations, the
occupiers of buildings felt righteous and redemptive. War research
and a two-tier gymnasium were the symbolic reasons. But the issues,
to borrow a slogan of the time, were not the issue. To the organizers
at that moment, what was called SDS's "action faction," the fury of
an onrushing identity was the deeper reason. They looked at the
University and saw a battlefield. Conquer the University or humble
it, and you moved the world­so thought the maestros of purification,
riding an arc of moral giddiness toward some sort of apocalypse.
Those of more complicated views were shoved aside. In the iconography
of the time, hugely amplified in the country's media capital,
Columbia became a stop on the Revolution Express. But the delirium of
the year was predicated on a drastic misreading of the actual balance
of forces.

Anyone who wants to change the world needs to appraise the world
lucidly and think of militancy as a means, not an end. The insurgent,
communal moments of 1968 were giddy, moving, indelible. They were
also delusory, for the militant surge masked the movement's
fractional nature and weakness. The sequence of 1968, revved up at
Columbia, culminated in the Chicago Democratic Convention
demonstrations of August, when the police ripped into antiwarriors
who, tasting the heady and desperate power of negation, couldn't
quite decide whether they were on the brink of a police state or a
revolution (or, confusingly, both at once). That week, proverbially,
the whole world watched, but the whole of watchful, fretful America
did not side with the demonstrators. To the contrary: they sided with
the working-class police against what they thought of as overeducated
brats abusing their privilege.

The tragic side of 1968 followed from the fact that the party which
organized power and the movements which agitated for justice were at
loggerheads. The responsibility for the fatal breach was chiefly
Lyndon Johnson's, since it was he who gambled the party's future on a
phantasmagorical war. But still, given Johnson's grievous sins, the
leadership of the movement was not wise. The confrontation politics
of 1968 took for granted a decades-old Democratic consensus that was
in the process of dissolving. Hell-bent on going-it-alone, it
drastically underestimated the Right. The upshot was that movement
helped sabotage the party, which collapsed in the November election
and ushered in two generations of Republican domination. For decades
since, those who have celebrated the clashes have breezily overlooked
the denouement.

In a frenzy of polarization, 10 weeks later, Richard Nixon won the
election by applying artful pressure on a cracked Democratic
alliance. With Nixon's election came five years plus more of war,
leaving a million more Vietnamese deaths along with some 21,000 more
Americans. How can there be a remembrance that does not also remember
that awful denouement?

For years, observers have deplored (or celebrated!) the apparent
acquiescence of America's youth, so much less committed and colorful
than the insurgents of yore. But it seems to me, more often, that the
practicality of today's students is worthy and justified, though
sometimes extreme. They are self-preoccupied, true. Sometimes beyond
reason or empathy, they are too cynical even if they disguise their
detachment as "irony." But there is also a graceful compensation.
Most of the more idealistic activists want results more than
self-expression. They gravitate toward service­a healthy impulse. But
"making a difference" is largely something that individuals do when
they pool their commitments. And so it is bracing to watch students
reinvigorate party politics by putting movement-style energy and
principle to work in institutions previously as fossilized as the
Democratic Party. In 2004 and 2006, recognizing that no progress was
imaginable as long as the Bush alliance of plutocrats, theocrats, and
empire-builders ruled Washington unimpeded, thousands of them
volunteered in favor of antiwar Democrats. Now, legions enlist in the
focused insurgency of the Obama campaign.

The '00s can't be the '60s and ought not to be, any more than the
'60s could be, or should have been, the '20s. The present campaign
makes plain that the commitments of 40 years ago are still working
their way through our imperfect union. No wonder: what erupted then
was incendiary, deep and long-burning. What was at stake, what
remains at stake, were and are long-buried conflicts over American
principles, over the meaning of freedom, race, nation, sex, and
obligation. Since the past only exists in the present, retro politics
are not what we need. We do not have ceremonies of innocence to
commemorate. If we aspire to clarity and ingenuity, we do not need them.
---

The author is a professor of journalism and sociology and the author
of 12 books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and
Letters to a Young Activist.

.

Killing [People's] park to make it safe

[2 articles]

Sound Planning Can Revive People's Park

http://www.dailycal.org/article/100961/sound_planning_can_revive_people_s_park

By Scott Van Kampen
Contributing Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Residents just south of People's Park on Dwight Way did not always
feel obligated to ensure their safety with iron gates. The park did
not always look so haphazard, and it was not always the brunt of
student jokes.

The park today has little recreational value to students or community
members as a whole, defying its purpose as a community park. The area
serves largely as a campsite and resting place for Berkeley's
transient population. For the past 30-plus years, it seems the
university and student population have given up on creating an
accessible recreational facility out of People's Park. But we don't
have to write off the space so soon: It has the potential to become a
cherished space if the university and students take a much more
aggressive stance on laying out People's Park with proper planning in mind.

Noted California city planner William Fulton recognizes the
distribution of recreational facilities, such as parks, as integral
to planned cities. However, if the facilities do not serve their
purpose to the public, their distribution in a given area is of little matter.

Many of the major challenges presented by the park's current state
have literally grown out of the ground. The unabated tree growth on
the east end has made the area both permanently shaded and shady.

The trees shed a thick leaf layer on the ground, making the area more
like a campground than a park. Additionally, the gardens on the west
end of the park host dense, tall vegetation that conceals a foot
traffic area, making it more amenable to shady dealings than family fun.

The aestheticism of the park is hurt by the vandalizing of wooden
benches. The modest stage in the middle of the park screams underinvestment.

The university recently enlisted the help of consulting group
MKThink. Among its recommendations is the thinning of vegetation to
allow more sunlight and open space, creating a much more park-like
atmosphere. Grass would replace the dead leaf layer near the east
trees and paved pathways would beautify the garden section.

In general, it would be a great service to the university and
Berkeley community to employ the services of a landscape architecture
firm or our esteemed faculty in the College of Environmental Design
to reinvigorate the land space. It would be a wonderful opportunity
to reclaim and re-engineer the park under John Galen Howard's
beautifully envisioned Athens of the West movement, placing People's
Park in the company of campus landmarks such as Wheeler Hall and the
Campanile.

Well-maintained, paved walkways, inviting green gardens, and
Greco-Roman stone stages would certainly make for a place more in
line with the intended land use. However, cooperation between the
city, university, and residential and student community is paramount.
Police patrols should ensure that the park is not abused and Mayor
Tom Bates must do his part in cleaning up Telegraph Avenue. He
himself admitted to the Los Angeles Times that "over time, people
have come to realize that the park has not become what they had hoped
it would be ... right now it is not a place that a lot of people are
comfortable going to."
--

Scott Van Kampen is a UC Berkeley student.

--------

Killing the park to make it safe

http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?0096009

by Sonnie Day

The latest threat to People's Park in Berkeley -- a living testament
to the struggle to reclaim land and the dream of sharing it in common
-- comes in the form of University of California sponspored proposals
to "re-design" the park. To defend the park, we need to go to the
meetings of the university-appointed advisory board, and we need to
be proactive about creating community based process.

People's Park has always relied on "user-development" -- the process
of those who use the park collectively deciding what should be done,
and then doing it. In 1969, the Park was created spontaneously and
without permission. Much in the spirit of Brazil's Landless Workers'
Movement, People's Park has been a 39 year experiment in tending
gardens, feeding one another, building and keeping up tables and
benches, the free clothes rock, the free-speech stage, and providing
community. The concept of paid contract workers implementing a design
by "experts" that was commissioned by bureaucrats is completely
against the nature and unique value of People's Park.

In a recent Orwellian twist, the design architects hired by UC
Berkeley published a report declaring that People's Park was
under-utilized and lacked diversity. In fact, People's Park has more
users per area than probably any other Berkeley park and is arguably
one of the more diverse places on Earth. What "lack of diversity"
meant in their report was that some well-off, white, "nice" people
don't feel comfortable using the Park.

The semantics of the debate on People's Park are carefully couched in
politically correct wording, seldom using words like "class", "race",
or "gentrification". Instead it is worded as issues of "comfort" and
"safety". What's really going down is that the Park has become a
sanctuary for people who are increasingly marginalized. Skyrocketing
rents, closed psychiatric wards and spinning times have left many
homeless and unwelcome in other parts of the city. It's challenging
all right. In the face of all this, the Park has provided a
remarkable service -- giving tangible, physical support and more
subtly providing a scattered, yet real web of community for those
most in need.

Unfortunately this creates a place that is understandably
"uncomfortable" to those who are used to more predictable and
controlled environments. One is likely to find folks talking to
themselves, partying or hustling a few bucks.

Meanwhile the population of both the City of Berkeley and the
University of California students has been getting richer and whiter.
"Compassion burnout" is exhibited in recent Berkeley anti-homeless
legislation and a San Francisco Chronicle columnist spewing homeless
hate on the front page. The University, neighbors and rich hill folks
would like to see it "cleaned up." So here we are, the soul of
Berkeley and People's Park teetering in history.

The Park has its problems. The Park is not the cause of these
problems. One should look toward economic structures and social
dynamics for the cause. In fact, the Park alleviates the symptoms. I
shudder to imagine Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley without the Park. The
green space and singing birds and freedom is the breath of soul all
us city dwellers need.

Of course the common goal is to have the Park inviting and nurturing
for all. The challenge is to create this. That is not the same as
removing people who make others, who have to witness their difference
or suffering, uncomfortable. Instead we should focus on creating an
active, diverse and healthy place. Dilute the problems with the solution.

And since People's Park is a do-it-yourself kind of place, it is upon
all of us to make it more how we dream it could be. If folks would
like to see more neighbors' picnics, well bring your neighbors and
some food and blankets. There have been great ideas lately of
activities for the Park including Tai Chi classes, art shows, movie
nights, tea parties, theater, beer-fest etc. Organize an activity!
Come to the Park, enjoy it, share music, food, conversation, sun,
chess, Frisbee, gardening. People's Park is yours, believe in the
dream of sharing.

A member at the last People's Park Advisory Board actually passed a
proposal for a design "competition". People's Park is about
cooperation not competition.

If you care about the Park, please come out in support of it now. We
are planning a "Quest for Common Ground" process to vision the park
in the spirit of cooperation. There will be visioning activities on
Sunday Mar 30 (April 6 rain date) and on the Anniversary, Sunday
April 27, in the Park.

UC advisory board meetings are on the first monday of each month at 7
pm at 2362 Bancroft Way in Berkeley. Check www.peoplespark.org for
the UC architects' proposal and updates. Please get involved in these
processes soon to add our generation's contribution to this unique legacy.

.

Sara Jane Olson Re-Arrested

[4 articles]

Former SLA member Sara Jane Olson released from Calif prison

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8645394?nclick_check=1

By DAISY NGUYEN Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 03/20/2008

LOS ANGELES­Former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson,
who hid for years by posing as an ordinary housewife, has been
released from prison after serving time for trying to bomb police
cars, a state Department of Corrections spokesman said.

Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, walked out of the Central
California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on Monday, prisons
spokesman Bill Sessa said.

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison
for the attempted bombings of police cars in 1975 for the SLA, the
urban guerrilla group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
Olson vanished soon after she was charged for the attempted bombings
and reinvented herself as a housewife.

"Like all inmates in her circumstance, she earned time for her good
behavior in prison, she wasn't treated any differently than anybody
else," Sessa said.

An e-mail message left with Olson's attorney was not immediately returned.

Olson was caught in 1999 when her minivan was pulled over by police
near her home in St. Paul, Minn. After she was returned to Los
Angeles for trial, Olson pleaded guilty for the attempted bombings.

The union that represents Los Angeles police officers Police was
dismayed by Olson's release.

"She needs to serve her full time in prison for these crimes and does
not deserve time-off for working in prison," Los Angeles Police
Protective League President Tim Sands said in a statement.

--------

Victim's son angered by ex-SLA member's release

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_8660848?source=most_viewed

6 years in prison too lenient for mother's death, says Jon Opsahl

By Bill Lindelof, McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Article Created: 03/22/2008

SACRAMENTO ­ The release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member
Sara Jane Olson from prison has angered Jon Opsahl, whose mother was
gunned down in a Carmichael bank by the SLA.

Myrna Opsahl was shot in the lobby of a Carmichael bank at the hands
of the Symbionese Liberation Army during an April 21, 1975, bank robbery.

After serving six years in prison for his mother's death and for
trying to bomb police cars, Olson is now free. She walked out of the
Central California Facility in Chowchilla on Monday.

"She's out of prison too soon by far," he said Friday. "It's another
in a series of slaps in the face of victims by the justice system."

On Friday morning, when Jon Opsahl's daughter turned on the family
television set in Southern California, he found out about Olson's release.

"There it was on TV: 'Sara Jane Olson has been released from
prison.'" said Opsahl. "That's a good four years before when I
thought she would be released. It was a surprise," he said. He added
that he planned to call the Sacramento district attorney for more information.

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison
for the attempted bombings of Los Angeles police cars in 1975 for the
SLA, the terrorist group that also kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

Olson also pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in
connection with the 1975 shooting death of Opsahl. She was serving a
concurrent, 6-year sentence in that case.

Jon Opsahl, 48, who led the quest for justice in his mother's
killing, recounted his understanding of the case: "Somewhere along
the line, she (Olson) evidently got the 14 years reduced to 12 and
then somewhere along the line she got the six years to be served
concurrently with the L.A. crime. And now to get time off for good
behavior is just crazy. I count that she just served six years in prison."

Olson changed her name, married a doctor and had three children
during her time in hiding. She was arrested in 1999 by the FBI.

Opsahl said it was important to remember Olson's crimes.

"This is a woman who was involved in multiple bombings, my mom's
murder and then was a fugitive for over 23 years," he said.

He believes that the court system is too lenient.

"My mother being killed at 42 is not justice and yet they want to
bend over backward for these criminals and render the police
impotent," he said.

The union representing Los Angeles police officers is also protesting
her early release.

--------

A return to prison, not St. Paul

http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/16927196.html

A review after Sara Jane Olson's release showed she wasn't supposed
to be freed until 2009, California officials said. She learned the
news while waiting to fly home.

By TIM HARLOW, Star Tribune
Last update: March 23, 2008

Sara Jane Olson's taste of freedom was short-lived.

Just days after being told she could serve her parole in Minnesota,
Olson is back in a California prison, where she'll stay for almost
another year.

California Corrections Department officials said Saturday that
criticism of Olson's release spurred a review of her case. That
review showed that her parole date had been miscalculated -- she was
not supposed to be released until March 17, 2009. Chief Deputy
Secretary Scott Kernan said the mistake was made in 2004.

Olson was waiting at Los Angeles International Airport to board a
flight back to her St. Paul home when she learned of the turn of
events, her lawyer David Nickerson said. Olson, a former Symbionese
Liberation Army member, was escorted to her mother's home in
Palmdale. She then was taken to a state prison in Corona, officials said.

Los Angeles police union officials had sharply criticized Olson's
release after she served six years for her role in the attempted
bombing of police cars in 1975 and a deadly bank robbery. Nickerson
blamed that reaction for Olson's return to prison.

"They would not have done this if they had not gotten this pressure,"
he said. "Absolutely. This is entirely a result of police pressure.

"This is like the Gestapo picking up somebody off the street,"
Nickerson added. "This action is illegal. They will be sued."

Nickerson said he plans to challenge the decision on the grounds that
Olson, having been placed on parole, can't be taken back into custody
unless she violates the terms of her parole or commits a crime.

Reached at home Saturday afternoon in St. Paul's Highland Park
neighborhood, Olson's husband, Dr. Fred Peterson, said he was
surprised by his wife's sudden detainment. Peterson had returned to
St. Paul from California earlier Saturday. Asked whether her new
incarceration would be for a prolonged period, he said, "I don't know."

At a news conference, Kernan of the Corrections Department called
Olson's case "extremely complicated, given the amount of changes to
the sentencing laws that have occurred over the last 30 years."

Los Angeles Police Protective League President Tim Sands praised the
review of Olson's case that ended with her back behind bars.

"Justice is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann Soliah can
simply wander back to Minnesota after having only a token sentence
for murder and attempted murder,'' Sands said. "Her prison sentence
is not completed until her time on parole has been served. She was a
flight risk 30 years ago, and she is a flight risk now."

Olson, 61, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was freed Monday from
the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla after serving
six years. Kernan said she would be moved back to Chowchilla.

Olson had originally been ordered to serve two concurrent six-year
sentences for the attempted bombing and a bank robbery in which Myrna
Opsahl, a customer, was shot and killed.

Jon Opsahl, her son, had called the Sacramento district attorney's
office and said he believed Olson had not served enough time.

Olson spent years on the run for those crimes, which occurred when
she was a member of the SLA, an urban guerrilla group best known for
kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. She had disappeared
shortly after being charged with the attempted bombing and remained
free until FBI agents acting on a tip following a television report
on the case stopped her minivan near her St. Paul home in 1999.She
pleaded guilty in 2001 to attempting to bomb Los Angeles police cars.

Olson earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison,
serving on a maintenance crew that cleaned the prison's main yard.

On Wednesday, Olson was given permission to return to St. Paul by the
Minnesota Department of Corrections, a department spokeswoman said.
Ramsey County community corrections also approved her transfer to
Minnesota, and California authorities notified the county that she
had been given permission to leave California on Friday, with her
arrival scheduled for no later than today.

Friends and supporters who had praised her involvement in local
theater and volunteer activities during the years she raised a family
in St. Paul were disappointed to learn that her release had been revoked.

"I was totally surprised,'' theater director and close friend Wendy
Knox said angrily. "Who is not doing their job? To put her and her
family through that is one more unconscionable act."

"This is torture," echoed Peter Rachleff, an Olson supporter from St.
Paul. "For someone to be told by authorities that they are free --
and to have operated within constraint of parole and did what she was
told to do, and then taken back into custody, is outrageous. We
should be ashamed that anybody should be treated like this."

Santa Clara University law Prof. Gerald Uelmen said he found it "hard
to imagine" that state officials could have made a mistake in
calculating the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve. Uelmen,
executive director of the California Commission on the Fair
Administration of Justice, said he had never heard of an instance in
which a prisoner was released early by mistake.

However, he added, "if she was erroneously released, they can take
her back into custody until she serves her sentence" in full.
---

Staff writer Dee DePass contributed to this report, which also
contains information from the Los Angeles Times and the Associated
Press. Tim Harlow • 612-673-7768

--------

Sara Jane Olson Re-Arrested

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032308H.shtml

By Henry Weinstein and Andrew Blankstein
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 22 March 2008

The former member of the SLA, paroled Friday, is detained at LAX.
Officials says she has to serve one more year.

California authorities re-arrested Sara Jane Olson at noon today
as she was about to fly to Minnesota from Los Angeles and said she
must serve one more year in prison.

The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had
been paroled on Monday from a California women's prison after serving
about six years for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police
officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

Officials from the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation said at a news conference this afternoon that they had
miscalculated the amount of time she should serve in a separate case
in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating
in a Sacramento bank robbery in which another SLA member killed a customer.

"Sara Jane Olson's case is extremely complicated, given the
amount of changes to the sentencing laws that have occurred over the
last 30 years," said Scott Kernan, the correction department's chief
deputy secretary of adult operations. "Upon request for review,
[Corrections Department] case records staff immediately reevaluated
this sentence calculation and, in coordination with our legal affairs
unit and the Board of Parole hearings, has revised the sentence
accordingly to ensure that all appropriate time is served."

When news organizations reported her release on Friday, law
enforcement officials reacted with dismay and raised questions about
whether she had been released too early. Corrections Department
officials acknowledged that they began an intensive review of their
internal calculations about the sentence after those concerns were
raised, but they denied that they had bowed to pressure.

Shawn Chapman Holley, the attorney for Olson, who had changed
her name from Kathleen Soliah, said her client called her Friday
night and told her that prison officials had detained her at Los
Angeles International Airport when she was about to board a plane for
Minnesota and that she had then been taken to her mother's home in Palmdale.

Holley said that on Saturday morning, she called an official of
the Corrections Department and was told that there might have been "a
computation error" regarding the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve.

Holley said Olson's husband and an official from the Corrections
Department told her that her client was being taken to a prison in
Frontera. She said she was outraged by the action and asserted that
her client had been illegally arrested and is now being "illegally imprisoned."

Earlier in the day, Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the
agency, said that when she left her office Friday, she had been
informed that department officials had cleared an out-of-state parole
transfer for Olson, "and she was going to be traveling to Minnesota."

Olson had lived in Minnesota for a number of years before being
arrested on charges related to the 1975 plot to plant pipe bombs
beneath police cars in retaliation for a shootout with Los Angeles
police that left six SLA members dead.

Holley said she had told Olson goodbye Friday at the home of a
Southern California friend. "She met with her parole agent earlier in
the day," Holley said. "He told her she was free to go to Minnesota
and told her to tell her Minnesota parole agent to call her Los
Angeles parole agent on Monday as a formality."

But about 11:15 Friday night, Holley said, she received a call
from Olson, who told her that law enforcement officials at LAX "were
telling her her travel pass was rescinded and they would escort her
back to her mother's home in Palmdale."

After midnight, Holley said, she got another call from Olson,
telling her that she had been taken to her mother's home in a law
enforcement convoy and that although she was not under arrest, law
enforcement officials had stationed a car in front of the house and
told her she would be followed if she left.

Like most California inmates, Olson earned credit against her
sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance
crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California
Women's Facility in Chowchilla, according to prison officials.

Law enforcement officials express outrage last week after news
reports of Olson's release.

Holley scoffed at the suggestion that there had been "a
computation error."

"We received an order from the state parole board more than a
month ago informing us that she would be released on March 17,"
Holley said. "The idea that suddenly they discovered an error is
untrue," Holley said.

"What appears to be the truth is they are bowing to pressure
from the Police Protective League or someone else.

"We have researched the law, and she is officially on parole,"
Holley said. "The only way someone on parole can be taken into
custody is if they have violated parole and it has been determined at
a hearing that they have violated parole. There is no allegation that
she violated parole."

Police Protective League President Tim Sands issued a statement
today after learning that Olson had been prohibited from leaving the
state: "Justice is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann
Soliah can simply wander back to Minnesota after having only a token
sentence for murder and attempted murder. Her prison sentence is not
completed until her time on parole has been served. She was a flight
risk 30 years ago and she is a flight risk now."

Holley said she was contemplating filing a habeas corpus
petition seeking Olson's release.

A source at the Los Angeles Police Department said the local
airport police had helped state Corrections officials detain Olson at
the airport without incident Friday night.

After the 1975 incident, Soliah legally changed her name to
Olson and married Gerald Peterson, an emergency room physician. The
couple lived for a while in Zimbabwe before settling in St. Paul,
Minn. Olson lived the quiet life of a homemaker and mother of three
daughters in an upscale neighborhood and appeared in local theater productions.

Olson was apprehended in 1999 after being featured on TV's
"America's Most Wanted." Her case was moving toward trial on Sept.
11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, she struck a plea deal in the
bombing attempt, saying she feared she would not get a fair trial.

For the murder conviction, she received one-year sentence. For
the botched bombings, she was initially sentenced to five years and
four months, but that term was extended to 12 years by a state prison
board after the board designated her a serious offender.

Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen said he found
it "hard to imagine" that state officials could have made a mistake
in calculating the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve.
Uelmen, executive director of the California Commission on the Fair
Administration of Justice, said he had never heard of an instance
when a prisoner was erroneously released early.

However, he added, "if she was erroneously released they can
take her back into custody until she serves her sentence" in full.
---

henry.weinstein@latimes.com
andrew blankstein@times.com

.

LSD, Ketamine and Cannabis could treat conditions from headache to diabetes

LSD, Ketamine and Cannabis could treat conditions from headache to diabetes

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3593278.ece

March 20, 2008
Arran Frood

Could Ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms one day be legitimate
prescription medicines? It sounds unlikely, but doctors and
researchers in the US and across Europe believe it is possible and
that new science will prove the case.

Second chances are rare in science. In the Fifties and Sixties,
hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD, were hailed as the magic bullet to
everything from alcoholism to migraine. But they became caught in the
crossfire of the cultural wars of the times. Western politicians
banned the use of psychedelics in research once they started to be
used recreationally, and became associated with flower-power and the
counter culture. The drugs were dangerous; the science was flawed;
the researchers biased.

But a comeback has been under way for more than a decade. A new
generation of researchers say that psychedelic drugs can treat
conditions such as addiction, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder
and a type of headache called cluster headache.

Studies with Ecstasy and LSD are planned or are under way in the UK,
Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Israel. And so big is this scientific
movement that researchers and speakers are gathered this weekend in
Basel, Switzerland, for the inaugural World Psychedelic Forum. Here
are some of the drugs they may be discussing. ECSTASY In the mid to
late-Eighties, Ecstasy, or its chemical name MDMA, was used
therapeutically by psychotherapists on the West Coast of the US. They
were wowed by its ability to break down psychological barriers
between patient and practitioner, and instil feelings of empathy and
calm. It was found to be particularly useful in marriage counselling.

How it achieves its effect is not clear, but it is thought to affect
the action of two moodenhancing brain chemicals, serotonin and
dopamine. Proponents say that the drug allows people to open up and
express themselves in ways that they otherwise might not be able to.
They are also more relaxed and calm, which helps to stop them
becoming traumatised again when they revisit painful memories. The
drug is neurotoxic at high doses, but the debate continues as to
whether a few low to medium doses causes permanent damage.

Supporters argue that any risk is outweighed by the possible benefits
for people who have not responded to conventional treatments, and
that limited exposure to the drug in moderate doses will not result
in addiction or long-term memory problems. Michael Mithoefer, a
clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Medical University
of South Carolina, is finishing a study into MDMA's effect on
patients with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. He
says the preliminary results are promising and that the therapeutic
response "warrants our going on to larger studies".

LSD

The "classic" hallucinogens, such as LSD and psilocybin (the active
ingredient in "magic" mushrooms), also affect the serotonin and
dopamine systems in the brain. LSD causes hallucinations, commonly
known as a "trip". Researchers believe that it may be useful in
treating severe headaches known as cluster headaches. These usually
centre around one side of the head, and can occur several times a day
for weeks, before stopping for long stretches of up to several
months. Scientists believe that these can be treated with a
sub-hallucinogenic dose of LSD, which does not cause the wild visual
distortions associated with larger doses.

How can a hallucinogen prevent a type of headache? They have a
similar chemical structure to serotonin and exert their effects by
binding to some of the same receptors as serotonin, a property that
is exploited by some mainstream migraine drugs, such as sumatriptan
(Imigran) and methysergide.

Andrew Sewell and John Halpern, of McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical
School, conducted interviews confirming that LSD and psilocybin were
both more effective than conventional drugs at stopping a new cycle
of headaches, and that psilocybin was the best drug of all to abort
an attack. Halpern is developing full clinical trials. Studies are
also under way in Switzerland and the US using LSD or psilocybin as a
palliative care agent for patients with anxieties associated with
terminal cancer.

KETAMINE

Ketamine is an anaesthetic developed in 1962 for human and veterinary
medicine. It works on a wide range of receptors and sites within the
brain, with recreational users reporting feelings of euphoria and
out-of-body experiences. It is neurotoxic at high doses (at least in
rats), but smaller doses could have safer medical benefits, and act
as an antidepressant.

In 2006, scientists from the US National Institute of Mental Health
injected 17 patients suffering from depression - and who had failed
at least six previous drug treatments - with either a low dose of
ketamine or a placebo. More than two thirds responded favourably to
the drug within a day. However, its psychedelic effects may have to
be smoothed out before it can be used therapeutically.

CANNABIS

Users say that cannabis makes them feel relaxed and congenial. It is
also known to increase appetite. The drug, or its chemical
derivatives (cannabinoids), is used in the US as an appetite
stimulant for Aids sufferers and chemotherapy patients.

The cannabis-based medicine Sativex uses fewer psychoactive
cannabinoids and is licensed in Canada as an under-the-tongue
analgesic spray for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis and
advanced cancer. It is also available in Spain and the UK on a
case-by-case basis. Researchers are investigating the drug as a
potential treatment for conditions such as glaucoma, obesity and
diabetes, and as an agent against addiction and hypertension, as
revealed recently by scientists at the University of Nottingham.

THE FUTURE?

Not everyone believes that using hallucinogenic drugs for medical
purposes will be fruitful, or that it is warranted. "You have to look
at research policy within the usual rules without giving way to
passion or modern fashions," says Griffith Edwards, the co-founder of
the National Addiction Centre.

He says that the risk to the individual of experiencing drug-induced
negative effects must be considered. It may be that a new generation
of psychotherapists are viewing the past with kaleidoscope eyes, and
that the medical benefits may be a mirage based on bad science in the
past when risks were under-reported and follow-ups inadequate.

While scientists and medics do not dispute the catastrophic effects
that these drugs can have on physical and mental health when taken
recreationally, the pace of research into the medical benefits of
such substances, when taken in a controlled setting, shows no signs
of slowing down.

.

Bradenton's Graeme Edge on Moody Blues' longevity

Bradenton's Graeme Edge on Moody Blues' longevity

http://www.bradenton.com/entertainment/story/481787.html

By SCOTT HARRELL
Special to the Herald
March 23, 2008

Looking at the wide spectrum of current big-name pop artists, it's
tough to guess which, if any, of them will still be around 20 or 30
or even 40 years from now.

There are groups that consistently deliver critically lauded
material, like Radiohead and Wilco, that might still be selling music
and filling halls a few decades down the road. These are niche
outfits, however, acts whose singles don't top the charts and receive
endless radio airplay, and whose names aren't well-known among
pedestrian listeners, particularly the younger consumers that make up
pop culture's primary target market. The music industry is in flux,
with the Internet fostering a movement toward one-shot, one-song
instant digital gratification - not to mention inserting fans into
every potentially embarrassing moment of every pop star's life - and
the resulting sounds and trends are conspicuously of-the-moment.

It all begs the question: Can a new artist even hope to sustain a
lifelong career?

"That's so hard to say," muses Graeme Edge, drummer and vocalist for
one of British rock music's most enduring outfits, The Moody Blues
and a Bradenton resident. "I haven't seen anything as yet that looks
like it's not going to burn out. There are so many more problems
these days. You raise your head above the parapet and become a star,
and everybody's after you on the Net, and with telescopic lenses,
they wanna catch you picking your nose. Nothing's sacred anymore."

The affable Edge, a Suncoast resident who's lived in the Bradenton
area for the better part of 20 years, will turn 67 the day after his
band's concert at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall this Saturday, so
knows a little something about longevity. Since reaching No. 1 on the
British charts with their second single "Go Now" in 1964, The Moody
Blues have weathered the waxing and waning of countless musical fads,
remaining icons of the psychedelic era and classic rock in general.

The band's signature tune, "Nights in White Satin," is still a staple
of the airwaves 40 years after its release, and its lush, subtly
complex style can be detected to this day in genres from acoustic
singer-songwriter folk to arty prog-rock and underground pop.
Granted, The Moody Blues last had a new hit in 1986 with "In Your
Wildest Dreams," but hitting the charts 20 years into an already
heralded career is no mean feat, and the group's staying power is
amply evidenced by the adulation with which reissues of its first
seven albums were received just a decade ago.

No artist knows exactly the combination of elements that lead to such
staying power. The Moody Blues' path to immortality is less traveled
than most, though, for a variety of reasons. While many artists hit
upon a specific sound early and continue to mine it for similarly
styled material for the rest of their careers, The Moody Blues
experimented almost continuously with various textures, tempos and
arrangements, surviving the end of the late-'60s psychedelic craze by
evolving beyond it.

"It wasn't a conscious decision," Edge says. "We were just led by
what interested us. Like any child, when a new toy came out, we
wanted to play with it."

That tendency stretched past the music itself, into the realm of the
constantly changing technology and media used to create, produce and
present music. The Moody Blues were one of the first acts to actively
experiment with stereo recording, and widely incorporate use of the
Mellotron, an instrument that uses an organ-like keyboard to trigger
loops of taped sound, and must have seemed incredibly futuristic
nearly half a century ago. More recently, the group had an
opportunity to flirt with a new avenue of exposure by providing music
for the 2001 IMAX film "Journey into Amazing Caves."

"We've always accepted (new technology) as it's come along, but we've
never actually been the instigators" says Edge. "IMAX was a thrill,
when it came to us. We've always enjoyed it, it's always interesting
to work in a new medium."

Perhaps the key to a lifelong career in pop music is to always follow
your own instincts. Then again, perhaps not - the annals of modern
entertainment are full of wildly creative individuals who achieved
little success, or none at all, by turning their backs on the signs
of the times. For Edge the real satisfaction comes from just enjoying
the music he's played, and is playing.

"Playing live is something I'd still be doing even if I wasn't
getting paid," he says. "I love an audience, and I love playing music."
---

If you go

What: The Moody Blues
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota
Tickets: $59, $69 and $75
Pre-show party: Head to the show early for Burgers & Beer by the Bay,
beginning at 6 p.m. There will be $3 hamburgers and $3 beer on the
Sarasota Bayfront.
Information: 953-3368

.

Free love ain’t free anymore

Free love ain't free anymore

http://www.thedailycitizen.com/articles/2008/03/21/news/opinion/opinion04.txt

Thursday, March 20, 2008

In the late 1960's the Hippies took this world by storm. Their battle
cries advocated free love and a demand to do your own thing. What
legacy did all that leave for us today?

First, let's look at the free love that they vehemently advocated
with such arrogance and disdain toward traditional values at that
time. What really happened to our society when we opened our TVs,
movies, and minds to free love?

It didn't take long for free love to become synonymous with sex
without rules. Having sex with anyone and any time was okay.
Afterall, it was what our heroes in the movies, in athletics and in
politics were doing, so it must be okay.

The impact of all of this has finally come home to roost. You can't
turn on the TV at any time of the day and not see or hear some
reference or display of sex. And many times it is their first date.

Of course, even the newspaper is filled with articles concerned with
the sex life of this or that person. Headlines of politicians'
escapades are legendary. Oral sex is no longer sex. The use of
high-priced prostitutes is now a classy business. And so forth and so
on the stories have gone since the concept of free love was pushed
down our throats by hypocritical advocates of change.

Why the anger? Have you read the latest reports that show one out of
four girls in the 18 to 25 year old range will have a sexually
transmitted disease? Ads openly display people with sexually
transmitted diseases smiling as they advocate a pill they take to
combat their illness. Why combat it? They are still having free sex
with whomever and whenever they want. They are sooooo happy!

Have you been reading the stories of the high rate of oral cancer
that has been spawned by free lovers' oral sex habits? Afterall,
didn't a president of this nation declare he was not having sex with
that woman ­ it was just oral copulation. Cancer of the mouth and
esophagus are two of the most painful cancers you can contract. And
having a jaw removed leaves a lot to be desired.

Have you not seen the statistics of a typical small town high school
with 5 percent of the female students pregnant? That means in a high
school of about 1,000 students, with about half being female, you can
expect to find 25 pregnant unmarried females in the classrooms. Hmmm,
it makes one wonder about our local schools. I have seen some
beautiful lives with great potential be completely destroyed by an
unwanted unmarried pregnancy. It makes for a long hard road to hoe.

The hippies were wrong, love is never free. Love comes with
commitment and assumption of responsibilities. Love requires respect
of all involved ­ the two parties plus any issues forthcoming.
Responsible love is more what we need than free love. Quality in the
proper setting is more precious than a quantity of events with a
multitude of partners.

Which brings me to the second part of their movement ­ a demand to do
your own thing. This aspect also has left a huge legacy. But not a
legacy to be proud of, because it is behind the dumbing down of this
great nation.

We have forced schools to seek the lowest level and not fail anyone,
because anything else would harm one or two individuals' rights to be
whatever. Instead of lifting up academics as a necessity of daily
survival, we have made it a boring chore and not cool. Drinking and
playing extra loud music ­ now that is cool.

No! Let me tell you what is not cool. A person who graduates from
high school and never really read more than a text message or email
and demands to enter college. It doesn't matter to them that they may
have taken up a slot and scholarship of a poor but more serious
student. They are hell bent on attending college and cheering at the
games and joining in on the binge drinking, because it is cool. Then
after five or six years they graduate and discover that doing their
own thing has lead them to a higher-level job. Instead of flipping
burgers they are the shift manager, supervising those flipping the
burgers. Yeah, I gotta do my own thing.

It is time for all those old hippies to rectify their mistake on
society. Get out and send new messages and battle cries. Advocated
that free love ain't free and it has a high negative cost and impact
on more lives than one. Then let them know that a demand to do your
own thing is actually an infantile cry of a person with no real
perspective or contributable skills in life.

Then you may leave a legacy you will be proud of just as that
generation before you did for us.
---

Dennis Bennett is a columnist for The Daily Citizen.

.

Sun, Sand & Drugs [Goa]

[2 articles]

Locals upset with dent to Goa's image

http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14625631

Wednesday, 19 March , 2008

Panaji: Goa is getting into the news for the wrong reasons, and a lot
of residents are hot under the collar over the manner in which their
state is being projected following the rape and murder of British
teen Scarlett Keeling.

The 15-year-old's death on February 18 - after she was drugged and
raped – has triggered an explosion of news coverage, and intense
focus continues over the case nearly a month later.

Oscar Rebello, a prominent medico who has taken to social campaigns
in recent years, angrily told IANS: "There's mass hysteria being
generated by the press. Goa is being given the image of a place of
seedy drug joints. It projects as if every Goan is waiting to have
sex with any White female."
Some like rock star Remo Fernandes have pointed out that the problem
wasn't new. He quoted from the lyrics of a song pointing to the
narcotics problem.

Police in Goa, which is visited by 2.4 million tourists each year,
including some 300,000 from overseas, have been accused of trying to
underplay the death and pass off the murder as a beachside drowning,
and delaying news about the death.

After the intense publicity in the British press, followed by as much
on Indian television and the mainstream media, police charged an
employee of a beach shack with murder after having sex with the
15-year-old and another local for "drugging the girl with a cocktail
of narcotics".

Goa police top brass, when asked, have pointedly denied that their
belated action was due to intense media pressure, which could have an
unsettling effect in the state's largest foreign-tourist market, Britain.

Following this sensational case, Goa has been repeatedly accused of
poor policing and bad governance.

Goan author Maria Aurora Couto, whose husband has been a prominent
official here and elsewhere, has charged those with promoting tourism
here of sending out a "perverted image...one based on the colonial
gaze" that attracts the wrong kind of tourists and attention.

For more news, analysis click here>> | For more Science and Medicine
news click here >>

A British woman tourist, who said she was a police officer back home,
accused police of blatant corruption and bribe collection on the beachside.

But North Goa-based lawyer Filipe Cordeiro said: "The influence of
tourism on Goan youth, the problem of drugs, is nothing new. In my
class of 1975, we had quite a few of us who had problems with drugs.
It's an on-going battle."

He noted that the nature of the drugs may have changed - from 'hash'
and 'mandrax' to 'ecstasy' - but the problem was the same.

"Tourists will always behave irresponsibly, let's not forget the
hippies of the 1970's and how 'responsible' they were! We have a more
recent and pervasive phenomenon of young Indians coming to Goa,
binge-drinking and then fighting losing battles with the sea, or
worse with other vehicles on the road. How do we in Goa address this
issue?" asked Cordeiro.

"If young Scarlett were to behave similarly, drink heavily, snort
drugs, roam around alone late into the night, in any city in the UK,
I'm not too sure she would be any safer than in Anjuna. What can we
do to help our children recognise the dangers of the 'party' culture?"
--

Full coverage: Scarlett murder case
http://sify.com/news/fullcover.php?event_id=14623491

--------

Sun, Sand & Drugs

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/LEADER_ARTICLE_Sun_Sand__Drugs/articleshow/2888578.cms

22 Mar 2008

There's a kind of hush all over Goa these days. It all began a month
ago, to be precise. First, a British teenage girl's body washes up in
Anjuna, its most (in)famous beach and hippie hangout. Then, not
surprisingly, the local police goof up, saying that she drowned in
shallow water. A media outcry and public outrage from the mother
later, the police order a second autopsy, and conclude that the girl
was raped and left to die. Two men are arrested for allegedly plying
the girl with drugs, sexually assaulting her, and leaving her to die.

So is Goa paradise lost - once again? Four decades after catapulting
to the world's tourism map for its excellent climate, palm-fringed
beaches, cheap alcohol, whitewashed churches, brown-tiled, low-slung
homes, clean villages and easy availability of drugs, the place was -
and remains - India Lite, as someone called it. Or, if you like, a
place to escape the real India.

The hush is more pronounced in Anjuna these days. Famous for its
grubby beach shacks, crescent-shaped beaches hemmed in by lush hills,
crowded flea markets, drug-fuelled parties and seedy Ayurveda spas,
the place is getting all the attention for all the wrong reasons.
Discovered by hippie travellers in the 1960s, Anjuna is where Graham
Greene, during an early visit, found it possible "to forget the
poverty of Bombay, 400 miles away, the mutilated beggars, the
lepers..." It is where, some four decades later, William Dalrymple
spotted on the dunes by the shore what "appeared to be a topless
six-a-side female football team - an odd sight anywhere in the world,
but an astonishing one in India".

In the years between, hippies, punks, Rastafarians, devotees of
new-age gurus all hung out in Anjuna, swapping drugs, music and
sexual partners. Bob Dylan, John Lennon and The Who, according to
legend, dropped in during the mid-1970s. The beach even birthed the
Goa trance, a home-grown electronic dance music, before house and
techno music invaded the scene in the early 1990s, and even spawned a
'world-famous' eponymous deejay. Tourists bent rules bribing a
typically feckless police to take over parts of beaches, putting up

'Indians not allowed' signs to keep away the natives from the parties
and raves and nude sunbathing. The place was seen by many as a
secluded, whites-only haven for hippies, who according to a
researcher, could "freely indulge in drugs, nude sunbathing and
all-night full-moon parties".

In a strange way, Anjuna exemplifies what is right and wrong with
foreign tourism in Goa today. Foreigners - hippie, white trash and
otherwise - have lifted living standards in the area. Business at the
weekend flea market hawking anything from tribal jewellery to Hindu
charms to imported thongs and lager remains brisk. As at the shacks
selling 'six-pack menus' - Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican,
Organic, Thai - and everything else. Live bands with names like
Kundalini Airport and Bindoo Babas draw in the audiences. Friendly
locals rent out cheap rooms to foreigners.

The bad news is 17 of the 74 foreigners who have died in Goa in the
past two years were in Anjuna, and 11 of them are suspected to have
died of drug abuse. (Their viscera reports are still awaited because
the samples have to be flown to overworked federal forensic
laboratories in Hyderabad and Mumbai.)

Anjuna's only hospital, a 20-bed private operation, treats an
increasing number of drug overdose cases. So does a neighbourhood
alcohol and drugs rehab and detox centre. Young men drop out of
school, hustling tourists and earning easy money. Goa eminences hate
the place - designer Wendell Rodricks told me that it was a "dark
spot" on the state. "I don't go there", he told me. "It is a place
that is hung over from the 1960s, but sadly with more potent drugs
than hashish".

In the end, Anjuna appears to have become a victim - as many parts of
Goa - of its warped success. 'White trash', as locals scorn
backpacking tourists, have lifted living standards of natives, but
material progress has come at some cost. The government-licensed
shacks are an eyesore and wouldn't be allowed anywhere in the
developed world, as would be the easy availability of drugs.

But, obviously the girl's murder and the rising notoriety of beaches
like Anjuna, is not going to slow down foreign tourism to Goa, thanks
to its cheap and cheerful charms. And even if the foreigners went
away, Goa would not have much to fear - Indian tourists regularly
out-number their foreign counterparts by seven times every year and
outspend them too. The place is no less safer from many other places
frequented by hippies and freaks anywhere else in the world - Bali
and Kathmandu, for example. Women are safe - in the past two years,
there have been three cases of rape of foreign tourists, before the
murder of the British teenager.

No wonder Goa has been consistently getting over two million tourists
annually for the past five years. To talk about making the place more
pricey and expensive to mop up more tourist dollars, as many have
been saying, is plain silly: a mix of growing domestic tourism and
budget, backpacker, and high-end foreign tourism possibly suits Goa
and its people the best. Clean up the beaches of the detritus, drugs,
ugly shacks and cheap thrills, and the place will get its groove
back. The ageing remnants of the flower children - "fossiled relic of
Haight-Ashbury", as Dalrymple describes them - may complain feebly,
but who cares?
---

(The writer is India editor of an international news website.)

.

Radical Seattle Remembers

Radical Seattle Remembers

http://eatthestate.org/12-14/RadicalSeattleRemembers.htm

by Jeff Stevens

March 23, 1967: The Cocoon Breaks, The Helix Emerges

Seattle has a long history of alternative newspapers, some better
than others, all vital in the collective process of stirring the
complex pot of a healthy local media scene. Most, if not all, of the
past four decades worth of such endeavors--including and especially
the paper you're now reading--owe a great debt to Helix, the
groundbreaking chronicler of Seattle's counterculture whose debut
issue was published on the date in focus here.

Helix was conceived in late 1966 during discussions at the Free
University of Seattle, an alternative college located in the
University District. These discussions were inspired by the recent
flowering of underground newspapers in other counterculturally rich
cities, such as the Berkeley Barb, San Francisco's Oracle, and New
York's East Village Other. Helix's prime instigators included Paul
Dorpat, a wayward University of Washington grad student, and Paul
Sawyer, a Unitarian minister. This circle quickly grew to include
future famous novelist Tom Robbins, Seattle P-I cartoonist Ray
Collins, and Jon Gallant, co-founder of Seattle's legendary
underground radio station KRAB-FM (predecessor of today's KEXP).

Serendipitously named after Watson and Crick's description of DNA
during a particularly productive session of beer-drinking and
brainstorming at the Blue Moon Tavern in February 1967, Helix emerged
from its fertile countercultural cocoon to immediate success. The
first 1,500 copies of the 12-page, multi-colored tabloid were quickly
snapped up off the streets of the U District. During its three-year
reign of weekly publication, Helix would sponsor a number of
important countercultural events in the Puget Sound region before
finally folding in June 1970. It also launched the career of Walt
Crowley (1947-2007), the much-revered local writer, historian and
rabble-rouser, who joined the paper's staff, first as an illustrator
and later as an editor, in May 1967.

Today, Dorpat has also made a name for himself as a celebrated
Pacific Northwest historian. Meanwhile, Helix's heady brew of radical
politics and groundbreaking graphic design has rarely, if ever, been
surpassed locally, its closest competition arguably being The Rocket
(1979-2000), Seattle's greatest music-centric monthly to date.
Selected issues of Helix can be viewed online in PDF form at the UW
Libraries Special Collections website. Take this, sisters and
brothers, may it serve you well.
--

Source: Walt Crowley, "Rites of Passage" (University of Washington
Press, 1995).

.

Home Is Where the School Is

CLASS ACT

Home Is Where the School Is

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032101451.html

By Gregory J. Millman
Sunday, March 23, 2008; Page B01

During a break in a high school debate tournament not long ago, my
17-year-old son struck up a conversation with a student on the rival
team from a New Jersey public school. "Where's your school?" asked
the boy. When my son replied that he was home-schooled, the student probed.

"How do you socialize when you're at home all the time?" he asked.

"Well, for one thing, I'm here, right?" my son laughed.

My children have gotten used to most of the standard questions from
their conventionally schooled peers: Are you super-religious? Do you
stay at home in your pajamas and watch TV all day? Is your mom a teacher?

Adults, on the other hand, can be surprising. Like the professor at
the community college where one of our sons was taking a course, who
went out of her way to pull him aside, sit him down and tell him,
"You home-schoolers think you can change the world. But you can't.
Nobody can."

It's hard to generalize about home-schoolers, but if there's one
thing we know, it's that we are changing the world, or at least the
world of education choices. Others, though, see us as either
misguided or threatening -- and probably cheered last month's
California appeals court ruling that all children in the state must
be taught by credentialed teachers. At least 166,000 California
children are home-schooled. And most home-schooling parents don't
have teaching credentials, so the ruling is worrisome, even though
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it "outrageous." The decision will
probably be appealed, but the teachers' unions are applauding in the meantime.

Nonetheless, home-schooling is booming. In 2003, the National Center
for Education Statistics estimated that the home-schooled population
nationwide was 1.1 million. And the National Home Education Research
Institute estimates that it may be growing at double-digit rates.

There's no denying that the modern home-schooling movement was born
of the desire to shake off stultifying school bureaucracies and to
sidestep the uncertain mission of public schools, which is set by
adults with often conflicting priorities for children. A century of
ideological struggles has defined the hodge-podge taught in schools,
and they persist to this day. Will schools teach evolution or
intelligent design? Offer safe-sex or abstinence-only instruction?
Encourage art and dance or treat them as distractions from No Child
Left Behind tests? Home-schoolers can make our own decisions based on
what's best for our children.

But "home-schooling" is a misnomer, really. Most of it doesn't even
take place at home, and the schooling has little in common with what
goes on in school. The legal definition varies from state to state,
as do registration and other requirements. In New Jersey, the law
only requires parents to see that their children get an education
"equivalent" to public instruction.

What home-schoolers most readily reflect are the virtues of the old
American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising -- we
co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our
children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we've found that
home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed.

And contrary to most popular belief, home-schooling isn't the
brainchild of religious fanatics. It actually got started in the
counterculture of the 1960s. In his landmark 1964 book, "How Children
Fail," teacher and education reformer John Holt accused schools
themselves of causing students to fail; eventually, he came to
advocate a sort of "underground railroad" out of compulsory
schooling. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s
that the movement spread through communities that believed public
schools were threatening their moral values.

The boundaries between the counterculture and Christian home-school
traditions blurred through the 1990s and 2000s, as home-schoolers
from various backgrounds came to discover how much they actually have
in common. Today, a well-established and widespread infrastructure of
home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling
accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn't consider
themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly
religious. People like my family.

My wife and I hadn't originally planned on home-schooling, but with
six children and one modest income, we couldn't afford a house in one
of the better school districts in the state. We were living in
Plainfield, an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically
poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic
mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence. In one
notorious incident, third-graders in one school were strip-searched
because someone suspected one of them of stealing $20. That wasn't
what we wanted for our children. We first tried a local Catholic
school, but we thought that the teachers' expectations for students
were too low. Since we couldn't afford classy private school
tuitions, we turned to home-schooling.

Though we first tried to teach the children what the official
curriculum standards said they ought to be learning in school, we
soon realized that this only made sense in the context of a school.
So we scrapped dry textbooks and workbooks and found more interesting
ways for our children to learn.

We haunted used-book sales and assembled a library of classics for
pennies on the dollar. We introduced statistics by driving to Florida
for spring training (learning some geography on the way). When the
dollar was strong and the airlines offered good deals in the
off-season -- when other children were in school -- we took ours to
Europe to see the great art and architecture or to learn about
ancient Rome by walking through the Forum. Travel showed our children
things they never could have learned in classrooms.

For several years, they participated in a fife and drum corps,
playing colonial and traditional patriotic music, marching in
parades, learning not only music and history but also teamwork,
perseverance, discipline and a great deal about the communities
through which they marched. This kind of experience is fairly typical
of home-schooling.

Home-schoolers also work across a much wider socioeconomic spectrum
than the conventionally schooled. We have worked on many projects,
and in many organizations, that draw participating home-schoolers
from all around our state, from far beyond school district borders.
We joined a Shakespeare troupe founded by a single mother who was a
college professor of literature. She taught the children to find the
characters through the language, and they staged a complete
Shakespeare play every year. Other members of that troupe founded a
home-schooled robotics team, building robots to compete in regional,
national and international events. We founded a debate and speech
team that continues to compete at the middle school and high school levels.

The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children
outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized
academic tests but also on tests of social skills. This, I believe,
isn't because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them
but because we do better things than schools do.

I've never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as
"learning disabled," for instance. There are many kinds of
intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one.
Take late reading. A conventional school education depends on written
textbooks and workbooks and homework, so a child who can't read is
unable to learn. But home-schoolers have developed systems and
approaches that work with the kind of talent and intelligence a child
has. One of our sons didn't read until he was 8 years old. That was
no disability, though. He learned from audio tapes and DVDs and from
being read to and -- very importantly -- from going outside and
looking around. He could spot a deer on a hillside or a bluebird in a
tree long before the rest of us. When he finally decided to read, he
jumped into "The Chronicles of Narnia" and finished the series within
weeks. "I want to read the books before I see the movie," he told us.

Home-schooled students' high performance continues into college.
Admissions officers at IUPUI, a joint-venture urban campus of Indiana
University and Purdue, and at Georgia's Kennesaw State University,
have tracked the performance of admitted home-schoolers and found
that they earn higher GPAs than the general student population.
Associate Dean Joyce Reed of Brown University has called
home-schoolers "the epitome of Brown students," telling the
university's alumni magazine that "they are self-directed, they take
risks, and they don't back off." Admissions officers at other highly
selective colleges, such as Swarthmore and Stanford, have made
similar statements. Some colleges and universities are admittedly
more open than others to making the effort to understand
home-schooling, but we've gone through the admissions process with
three daughters, and all were admitted to excellent colleges.

Conventional schools are like the nation's Rust Belt companies,
designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of
international competition today. School boards and administrators
should be concentrating on ways to make schools more like
home-schooling -- not on ways to force home-schooled children to go
back to schools. People who are free to think for themselves usually
get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats
can devise.

Those are the kinds of principles that gave us California's Silicon
Valley. Let's hope that someday soon, home-schooling will be
perfectly legal there once again.
--

gregandmartine@gmail.com

Gregory J. Millman is co-author, with Martine Millman, of
"Homeschooling: A Family's Journey," to be published in August.

.

Three Books That Will Take You Back on the Road

Three Books That Will Take You Back on the Road

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/travel/23books.html

By RUSHA HALJUCI
Published: March 23, 2008

KEN KESEY was one of an eclectic group of writers challenging society
in the late-1950s and 60s ­ the "turn on, tune in, drop out"
generation, as it was later called by Timothy Leary. And some of
their books called many of their readers to the open road. Here are
three notable examples.

"TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA,"
by Richard Brautigan

The Premise Written in 1961 while camping in Idaho's Stanley Basin,
this novel ­ a cult favorite of college students in the 1970s ­ was
published in 1967 by the Four Seasons Foundation. An editor for
Viking Press, one of the publishing houses that passed, said of the
book, "I gather from the reports that it was not about trout
fishing." Indeed, this is an almost plotless novel, told in episodic
vignettes, that criticizes modern American life for having turned
away from nature. The title, "Trout Fishing in America," recurs as
character and noun throughout the novel.

The Trip Idaho is, in fact, a place with great trout fishing, and
among the rivers that continue to attract vacationing fishing
enthusiasts are Silver Creek, in south-central Idaho (primarily in
Blaine and Boise Counties); Paradise Creek in the north, which flows
through the college town of Moscow; and the middle fork of the Boise
River, northeast of Boise, in southwestern Idaho.

Back Story The book received immediate acclaim upon publication,
bringing Brautigan fame and the designation as the voice of the
counterculture movement. But Brautigan rejected that label and, in
later interviews, expressed his scorn of the hippie culture.

"THE SUBTERRANEANS,"
by Jack Kerouac

The Premise The young rebels of 1950s San Francisco, who, in the
words of an advertisement later promoting the 1960 film of the novel,
"live and love in a world of their own. This is their story told to
the hot rhythms of fabulous jazz!"

The Trip North Beach in San Francisco is the historic neighborhood of
the Beats. Today, you will still find several jazz bars and clubs
from that era, including Vesuvio Cafe (225 Columbus Avenue), open
since 1948, and Tosca Cafe (242 Columbus Avenue), open since 1919.

Back Story The love affair the autobiographical novel is based on
took place in New York, but according to reports at the time, Grove
Press, Kerouac's publisher, had the author change the location to San
Francisco to minimize exposure to libel suits.

"NAKED LUNCH,"
by William S. Burroughs

The Premise Published in 1959, the novel ­ related short stories
detailing a drug addict's life ­ is an experimental satire that uses
the "cut-up" nonlinear technique.

The Trip The narration follows the character William Lee through
America, Mexico and finally Tangier, Morocco, where Burroughs wrote
sections of the book in the Villa Muniria, also a hangout of Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The hotel still operates today under the
name Hotel el Muniria, with rates for a double room starting at less
than $30 a night.

Back Story The novel was banned in 1962 after an obscenity trial in
Massachusetts, a decision overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court in 1966.

.

Fun In DC With SDS

Fun In DC With SDS

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_curt_day_080322_fun_in_dc_with_sds.htm

by Curt Day
March 23, 2008

March 19th, the fifth anniversary of the war, started early for me,
4:00 to be precise. That is the time I needed to wake up so my friend
and I could get to D.C. at a reasonable time. Though the trip started
in darkness and rain, we made good time and got to the city without a
skyline just in time to participate in what would be a smorgasbord of
antiwar activities.

Our first event was IVAW's, Iraq Veterans Against The War, march.
This march proceeded to a small area of grass where we stopped and
waited for a sound system so we could listen to Buffie St. Marie sing
"Unive