What Is the True Story of McCain’s Wartime Experience?

[See URL for embedded links.]

What Is the True Story of McCain's Wartime Experience?

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/102808.html

by Mary Hershberger
October 28, 2008

Journalists have had years to vet John McCain's account of wartime
heroism in Vietnam. But no real critique of its veracity has emerged
from leading media outlets. Reporters and commentators remain
remarkably disinclined to investigate a major underpinning of
McCain's argument that he is qualified to be commander-in-chief.
Here, historian Mary Hershberger questions why.
--

As we approach the end of an astonishing campaign season, one thing
grows clear: John McCain's campaign has suffered a string of
disastrous decisions. These mistakes have overwhelmed even the
campaign's trump card­its image of John McCain as war hero. And not
just an ordinary war hero but one who was captured by enemies,
imprisoned near death, and "resurrected" to return home with visible
wounds that marked his sacrifice.

Aside from the patriotic fervor and powerful religious themes this
tale evokes in American Christians who believe that redemptive
violence lies at the core of their faith, McCain's campaign correctly
counted on the media treating the image of war hero as if it stood
outside history, beyond journalistic scrutiny. The "swift boating" of
John Kerry four years ago left the media reluctant to engage in
legitimate examination of John McCain's claims.

As a historian who has studied Vietnam War documents, I read McCain's
Faith of My Fathers with growing concern over the troubling
inconsistencies and internal contradictions that I found there. When
I sought out official reports, news accounts, film footage and other
reliable sources to help resolve these contradictions, I consistently
found questionable assertions in McCain's claims. All memoirs are
constrained by the limitations of our memory, but McCain's accounts
are unusually problematic, with many stories grossly exaggerated or
simply made up.

Given the media scrutiny heaped upon Cindy McCain's life during this
campaign, one might expect the candidate himself would face equal
investigation. That has not been true. When I wrote a piece
documenting McCain's less-than-heroic actions following the
disastrous fire on the USS Forrestal, mainstream print newspapers and
magazines turned it down, including those that printed investigative
pieces on his wife and relentlessly dredged up every scrap of
information to expose her vulnerabilities. Ask yourself­have you seen
investigative reports of McCain's claims about his military record
that match the level of scrutiny given his wife?

McCain's war record is a legitimate topic of investigation precisely
because he cites it as evidence that he should be president, as proof
that he is tested and ready to lead from day one. As such, it ought
to be more thoroughly examined than anything else. The few
investigations that have been carried out are not reassuring.

On the single issue of his plane crashes, for example, the Los
Angeles Times has concluded that "though standards were looser and
crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out." A
pilot whose performance included two plane crashes and a collision
with power lines usually underwent official review to determine his
fitness to fly. McCain refuses to allow his military records to be
released so that the voting public can see whether his record matches
his claims.

Much of the mainstream media frequently repeat without question
McCain's assertions about his war record, including his recent claim
that he was on track to be promoted to admiral when he left the Navy.
It is due to the diligence of writers on the Internet that claims
like this have been investigated.

A recent column by John Dean at Findlaw.com, which includes a Q & A
with me, looks at other areas in which McCain has made claims at
stark odds with official documents or news reports. Dean concludes
that the dwindling importance of the mainstream media is related to
its reluctance to "sort fact from fiction" in the wake of the Swift
Boaters. The result is that the media gives McCain a pass "rather
than risk irritating him by digging out the truth of his military background."

The irony of McCain's free pass is that newspapers like the New York
Times need look no further than their own pages to check his claims.
For example, McCain says that when he was shot down on October 26,
1967, the Vietnamese beat him over and over and refused to provide
medical treatment for days until, in desperation, he told them that
his father was an important military officer. In contrast, the New
York Times, on October 28, 1967, quoted Hanoi radio reporting the day
before that, "the son of the commander of the United States Naval
Forces in Europe was captured in North Vietnam." At the time, the
New York Times reported that the Vietnamese knew about McCain's
family connections as soon as he was captured, not days later. Which
story is true?

Likewise, as a Rolling Stone piece recently pointed out, the New York
Times reported on November 11, 1967, less than two weeks after McCain
was captured, that he had said that Vietnam appeared to be winning
the war and the United States appeared isolated. There is a
significant conflict between this and McCain's memoirs, one that has
gone unexamined in the Times.

I have found enough compelling discrepancies between McCain's claims
of his treatment in Hanoi and other sources, including his fellow
POWs, to cast serious doubt on his overall account of mistreatment
and torture there. McCain's account of his meeting with French
journalist Francois Chalais four days after he was captured asserts
that he was combative with guards in the room and refused to talk
about the care he was receiving. His account is significantly
undercut by recently released filmed footage of that meeting and by
Chalais' printed report at the time.

Many newspapers that recently endorsed Barack Obama also paid homage
to McCain's record as a war hero and former prisoner of war and have
lamented that, as the St. Petersburg Times put it, "his campaign in
recent months has been unworthy of his record." If the media had
examined his war record as it should have, rather than taking his
self-serving memoir at face value, it would be less surprised today
that McCain the candidate has been prone to poor judgment, erratic
behavior under pressure, and risky decision-making. The similarities
between John McCain's campaign record and his war record outweigh
their differences.

.

Documentary Examines Lennon and McCartney Partnership

DVD Documentary Examines Lennon and McCartney Partnership

http://www.antimusic.com/news/08/oct/22DVD_Documentary_Examines_Lennon_and_McCartney_Partnership.shtml

10/22/2008

MVD has announced a Nov 25th release for Composing the Beatles
Songbook: Lennon and McCartney 1966 / 1970. The DVD is an independent
documentary film that reviews the partnership, music and impact of
Lennon and McCartney as composers during this hugely creative period.

From the first bars of Eleanor Rigby to the closing Abbey Road
song-cycle, this film shows how they barely put a step wrong in
making the most joyous music the world had ever witnessed. Drawing on
rare footage, classic performances and penetrating revelations from
friends of the pair, Beatles academics and musicologists, we here
discover the true story of how those classic songs were written.

With contributions from; friends Barry Miles, Klaus Voorman and
Maureen Cleaves; musicians Alan Moore and Chris Ingham; journalists
Robert Christgau [Village Voice] and Anthony De Curtis [Rolling
Stone]; authors Johnny Rogan, Pete Doggett, Steve Turner, and Nigel
Williamson and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini.

This project is an independent review requiring independent editorial
control. The program is not licensed or authorized by Paul McCartney
or the estate of John Lennon, nor by any company associated with the
ownership of their music.

.

Barter Faire showcases 'gems' of American culture

Barter Faire showcases 'gems' of American culture

http://media.www.whitworthian.com/media/storage/paper1220/news/2008/10/21/Scene/Barter.Faire.Showcases.gems.Of.American.Culture-3506299.shtml

Tyson Motsenbocker, Staff Writer
Issue date: 10/21/08

http://www.okanoganfamilyfaire.net/

All the signs in front of the hotels between Colville and Republic in
Washington state read something along the lines of "Welcome Hunters,
No Vacancy." While the deer season opens in some of the wildest land
in Washington, over 10,000 people are migrating through to find their
way to the 34th annual Okanogan Family Faire. In Republic, a group of
individuals wearing orange vests and camoflauged ballcaps sit to
cheer on the hordes of unique vehicles making their way to the valley
in the Okanogan highlands that the Faire calls home.

In 1973, a group of like-minded individuals created the Faire in
order to gather together during the fall and trade tools, foodstuffs
and other items for the winter. At the time, the Faire was a simple
way for many of the nomadic and stationary people of the Hippie
generation to gather and trade unneeded items for needed ones – it
was a simple act of nesessity.

The Faire quickly gathered cultural traditions and values, such as
antiestablishmentarianism, world peace and brotherly love. In its
origin, the Faire was an event created out of nessesity. Today, the
ideals upon which the Faire was based stand, but the nessesity has long gone.

Marking the way up the steep, dusty road to the flat where the Faire
is held are a series of multicolored signs. The signs read "Peace,"
"Take care of one another" and "Welcome, you're family now."

The vehicles climbing up the hill next to them are no less colorful.
Many look to be from another generation entirely. A multicolored
school bus with a drum kit nailed to the roof for instance.

Soon after follows a small army of Volkswagen buses, an ancient,
unrecognizable station wagon riddled with political bumper stickers
and a 1970s double decker tourbus converted to a café. License plates
on the slow moving vehicles range from the Alaska's Yukon to
California, Virginia to Mexico.

Farther up the road is the burned out carcass of an old car. A group
of young people surround it, singing Bob Dylan songs and smoking
cigarettes. At the entrance is a man with a white beard and a kilt
selling tickets for ten dollars a piece.

From the hill overlooking the Faire the plain circular plan of the
booths is visible. The layout resembles a target with a circular
clearing in the center, working it's way out into the campsites at
the fringes.

In the day-parking lot a mass of people lounge around their
respective cars, gathering barter goods or putting the finishing
touches on the wares they hope to trade. During the day these
campless traders will walk from booth to booth to trade goods.

Any number of goods for any size price or barter can be found lining
the narrow walkways. Alumnus and Barter Faire veteran AJ Hanenburg
has visited the Okanogan Faire three times.

"I've seen everything up for sale there. Lots of organic perishables,
bicycles, tools, antiques, garbage," Hanenburg said. "I've seen
people walking around with fish tanks full of buds of [marijuana] for
barter. You can find just about anything."

Indeed, as Hanenburg points out, the drug culture is quite prevalent.
It would be unusual to go over an hour without being propositioned to
buy or sell drugs. It would be even more unusual to go an entire day
at the Faire without someone putting a burning joint in your face, he said.

Just because the Okanogan Family Faire has the word "family" in its
title doesn't mean it's rated G. Despite the clear rules and
regulations barring drug use and encouraging a family atomosphere,
the free love and mental expansion movement of the late '60s
continues to play a big role in the culture of the Faire. Considering
the virtual nonexistance of any form of security, one has to wonder
if these rules are more like suggestions.

Once the sun goes down, the Faire changes form. Instead of the
peaceful, albiet slightly smoky farmers market it represents during
the day, it becomes a wild celebration. Marking the various
intersections of the Faire stand small "hospitality fires." These
fires offer refuge to the roaming nightlife of the Faire.

Often there will be a large pot of community stew or soup which the
caretakers of the fire provide to the wandering public. Other
hospitality fires will host live music or storytelling.

The wilder side of the Faire can be found in the center of the
circle. A large pile of wood which is gathered during the day,
becomes a flaming inferno of a fire upon sundown. Surrounding the
fire is a layer of dancers, a layer of drummers and a large group of
onlookers. The drumming and dancing is known to continue through the night.

The Okanogan Family Faire, although notably rough around the edges,
is a one-of-a-kind event. Because the Faire is located on private
land and run by a private organization, many unique things happen
there. The hippie movement has long been rendered dead by most. Even
many of those who sympathized with the movement in its prime have now
grown apart from the revolutionary ideals that made it historic.

The Okanogan Faire and others like it stand as signposts to a bygone
era. Upon a little searching, it is possible to stumble upon some
true gems of American culture, and rarely are such dramatic examples
of alternative culture availible in such near proximity to Spokane as
the Okanogan Family Faire is.
--

Contact Tyson Motsenbocker at tyson.motsenbocker@whitworthian.com.

.

Sympathy for the devil? [London Film Festival]

[2 articles]

Sympathy for the devil?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-971259.html

The Baader-Meinhof gang, IRA hunger-strikers, ETA and Che Guevara:
terrorists or freedom fighters? At the London Film Festival, you
decide. Nick Hasted reports

Friday, 24 October 2008

When the Twin Towers fell seven years ago, the expectation was that
cinema screens would soon be swamped by yet more of the jabbering
Arab madmen Hollywood already favoured as villains. Instead, the
theme of this year's London Film Festival springs from a series of
films which show sympathy for the terrorist, humanising those who
commit inhuman acts.

It is the first great wave of 1970s terrorism that is mostly being
examined. Downfall writer-producer Bernd Eichinger turns his
attention from the Nazis to the violent backlash among their children
in The Baader-Meinhof Complex. United Red Army takes us to Japan, and
the titular, armed anti-US movement which tortured and killed
"backsliders" and trained for rebellion in remote mountains, where
the army besieged and killed them in 1972. Bullet in the Head takes a
coolly objective look at the 2007 killing of two Spanish Civil
Guards, allegedly by the ETA.

Finally, Steve McQueen's Hunger takes us inside the excrement-smeared
cells of Bobby Sands and his fellow, fatal IRA hunger strikers.
Hunger's failure to provoke the usual outrage in the UK press at IRA
films shows the safely historical nature of most of these tales. But
their relevance to our post-September 11 world is implicit.

"Pictures are suddenly being made about this period's terrorism now
because we needed time to reflect," Eichinger believes. "I did The
Baader-Meinhof Complex not because the time is right, but because the
time is right in me. It took that long to realise what really
happened. It's like Hollywood making Vietnam films in the 1980s. I
met Oliver Stone in 1978, and he had already written Platoon. Later I
told him it was a blessing it had taken 10 years."

After the appalled shock at the September 11 carnage, and the outrage
in mainland Britain as one splintering of limbs by IRA bombs followed
another barely a decade ago, what feels new about these films is the
unflinching stare into the human faces who commit such acts. There
have been sympathetic IRA members in British cinema before. But no
film has spent quite so long in their world as Hunger. After 90
minutes inside the cold grey violence of the Maze prison, watching
Michael Fassbender's Sands explain the political rationale for
willing his body agonisingly to waste away, you find yourself understanding.

"That's what cinema does," says Hunger's co-writer, the playwright
Enda Walsh. "We're allowed the time to bond with people we initially
think are absolute monsters. With terrorism we only see the terrible
violence being wrought. I want people to feel the extraordinary
dysfunction of that period. And hear a man who was incredibly
articulate and funny, and was alive. He was a human being, and he had
warmth and attitude and dreams, and a belief. But his belief was a
political belief, and his life began to circle around that one tiny
belief, and he became willing to die for that, and kill for that.
Giving someone a voice is an important thing. Then we can respond to
such men, and who they killed themselves."

The Baader-Meinhof Complex shares Walsh and McQueen's devotion to
research, and adds a panoramic sense of the historical moment from
which Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof launched their decade-long
onslaught against the West German state, ending in hunger strike and
suicide in 1977. These terrorists begin as hippie free-lovers
fighting what they saw as a fascist German regime. Like United Red
Army, and Marco Bellochi's extraordinary 2003 requiem for Aldo Moro
and his Red Army murderers, Good Morning, Night (an Italian trauma
revisited in another LFF highlight, Il Divo), there is nostalgia for
a lost world of left-wing ideals. We have been drawn into this
titillating company when the first dead banker is tossed like garbage
from a car.

"You can be very human and a very big monster at the same time,"
Eichinger says. "Ulrike Meinhof was a very respected journalist, she
had a husband and two kids and was 35. She had very bourgeois taste.
And Baader was not without charm. That's what I wanted to show. These
people were not demons. They were middle-class with an education.
They're human, and then they did inhuman things. People who say they
are driven by idealism are sometimes the cruellest around. They think
they are entitled to kill, as long as it serves the purpose. They
acted like their Nazi parents."

It is the careful fairness of these films that gives awful weight to
the moments when ideals are put into bloody action. During Sands's
almost saintly martyrdom, Hunger shows an IRA gunman walk into the
old people's home where a warder is visiting his feeble mother and
blow his brains out. Can Walsh find sympathy even for this murderer?

"You see that, and think: what an extraordinarily cold act," he says.
"What's his history? What's making him do that? Those men are aware
of and feel all the history, the hardships of Irish people, it's in
the DNA. But some people would think they're bloody animals ­
terrorists. As soon you put something on screen, you feel you could
be glorifying these men. That's why Hunger withholds emotion. You
don't want to make pornography out of a historical disaster."

You can tease a narrative from this year's LFF, starting with Steven
Soderbergh's Che, in which Benicio Del Toro's charismatic freedom
fighter Che Guevara outwits a superior, US-backed oppressive army and
helps liberate Cuba. The Baader-Meinhof Complex sees Che invoked and
deadly force used in the context of central Europe, petering out in a
1977 hunger strike, the year Bobby Sands entered the Maze. The
missing next chapter is a film daring to humanise an al-Qa'ida member
while doing justice to their monstrous acts.

Eichinger knows his film has contemporary relevance. "There was a
certain chord, a tune already coming up when the Baader-Meinhof
people explained why they were making terrorist acts. They said it
was because of the domination of capitalism and especially the United
States. And it's the same feeling we now face in the Islamic
fundamentalist terrorist scene. Pandora's box has been opened."

"That is why all these films are coming up," agrees Walsh. "Maybe we
have to have a conversation with ourselves about what our notion of
terrorism is. What we initially thought about al-Qa'ida after
September 11 is probably very different, more complicated and more
real now. We have to look at the people's backgrounds. But I'm
sitting here talking in a Soho coffee shop. I'm not in Israel, so
it's obnoxious and glib of me to say that. All we're doing is making
cinema. But we're doing it for hopeful reasons. There's nothing so
strange as feeling empathy in a cinema for someone you initially
thought you couldn't connect with, and understanding, a tiny bit, how
they got to such a point. Then they become human. That's the only way
out of this impasse we're in."
--

London Film Festival screenings: 'Bullet in the Head', tonight at
6.30pm and tomorrow at 4.30pm, Brixton Ritzy; 'The Baader Meinhof
Complex', 26 October and 28 October, Odeon West End. 'Hunger' opens
on limited release on 31 October, and 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' on
25 November

--------

This is no time for heroes with bad causes

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5026343.ece

We must resist being seduced by the revolutionary glamour of Che
Guevara, Bobby Sands and Ulrika Meinhof

David Aaronovitch
October 28, 2008

At the end of part one of Stephen Soderbergh's immense movie
biography, Che, the audience at its London opening yesterday
applauded, and some whooped.

I don't think Soderbergh, the occasionally demanding auteur, was the
whoopee, but rather the long-dead revolutionary himself. For
Soderbergh's Che Guevara is heroic, determined, paternalistic,
idealistic, humorous, outspoken - a father-doctor-lover-warrior
combination to excite all but the feeblest pulse. If he has a problem
it is his obstinacy in smoking cigars despite being an asthmatic.
True, in the movie he executes a couple of criminal wretches when he
is in the Cuban forests, but it is wartime and their crime was rape,
and in movies rape can only be punishable by death. It was
interesting that while the audience laughed at the condemned rapist
wanting more rum, they went very quiet when the unreconstructed Che
used the word maricón (faggot) as a term of abuse. Death yes, homophobia no.

Che, however, used to execute non-rapists too. In January 1957, up in
the hills, for example, he shot Eutimio Guerra in the head with a
.32-calibre pistol for being suspected of passing on information, and
a campesino by the name of Aristidio, for cowardice. This was
confided in his diaries. One not unsympathetic biographer remarked
that Che liked to see whether condemned men met their deaths with
courage, or like a maricón.

Once the revolution in Cuba was won - 50 years ago in January - Che
took command of the military court convened at La Cabaña fortress in
Havana, and processed the death sentences of dozens - possibly
hundreds - of prisoners after the most cursory of trials. A left-wing
Basque priest officiated for the condemned. "I pleaded many times
with Che on behalf of prisoners," he said later. "I remember
especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge."

These semi-judicial murders were only one part of Che's
implacability. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Che
was prepared to countenance a first nuclear strike by Soviet missiles
against the United States. One can imagine that it was with some
relief that Fidel Castro saw him depart for Bolivia and oblivion.

The point is that being heroic is not, in itself, a cause for
celebration. It can be quite the opposite. This was suggested to me
again by a review of the new film Hunger, which opens this week.
Hunger deals with the republican hunger strikes in the Maze prison in
Northern Ireland in 1981, in which ten IRA and INLA prisoners fasted
to death. The reviewer writing in The Guardian was Ronan Bennett, a
former republican prisoner, now a much esteemed novelist and playwright.

The film's main character is the IRA man and Sinn Fein MP, Bobby
Sands, and the film-makers have captured "Sands' unsentimental
idealism, resilience and determination", "allowing him to emerge
undiminished in body or spirit", in the "simple recognition of his
full, complex humanity".

But what would any of this avail us if Sands's cause was a bad one?
Heroism is not confined to the virtuous - ask former members of the
Waffen SS. Here Bennett lauds the moviemen for permitting "what is
implicit in each scene to emerge unforced and unstressed...[and
throwing] us as viewers in at the deep end, trusting that what we see
will eventually make us understand", but admits somewhat
contradictorily that "the emphasis is on the State as the perpetrator
of violence and on republicans as the victims, something the 100,000
people who lined Sands's funeral route would have had no trouble in
recognising".

Sands died on May 5, 1981. The second hunger striker, IRA man Francis
Hughes, died exactly a week later. I am sure he would also have
possessed a complex humanity. Hughes's problem - unexplored by Hunger
or Bennett - was his habit of depriving other people of theirs. To
take one example, on February 8, 1978, William Gordon, part-time
soldier and school welfare officer, was, as on every weekday morning,
driving his son and daughter to their primary school. Presumably this
pattern was known to the IRA team led by Hughes, which planted a bomb
under Gordon's car. The seven-year-old boy was blown clear, but badly
injured. His father was killed instantly, his ten-year-old sister decapitated.

This one example will do. Between 1969 and 1999 thousands of British
citizens were killed, the large majority by republicans. And this is
Bennett's political judgment on the importance of Sands (and,
presumably, Hughes) that he "probably did more to turn the tide of
the republican struggle than any other individual. His death garnered
worldwide attention and sympathy, and it marked the beginning of the
long run of electoral successes that eventually propelled Sinn Fein
into government".

In other words the IRA changed strategies, winning its goals through
an increasing use of political rather than violent means. So, in a
way, it was all - though horrible - worth it. A new book, Gunsmoke
and Mirrors: How the IRA Dressed up Defeat as Victory, by the
Observer journalist Henry McDonald, explicitly challenges this
self-exculpatory mythology.

Sands's death came 12 years into the Troubles and 13 years before the
first ceasefire. His funeral orations and those for his fellow hunger
strikers helped to recruit a new generation of benighted bombers and
shooters. What eventually forced the change of strategy on the IRA
was not the success of the ballot box, but the defeat of the
Armalite. McDonald argues that the key year was not 1981, but rather
1987 when one unit of the IRA was rubbed out by the SAS in Loughgall,
and when an IRA bomb on Remembrance Sunday in Enniskillen caused
international outrage. It was in this year, points out McDonald, that
Gerry Adams made approaches to Charlie Haughey, the Irish Prime
Minister, about charting a new course.

In the end Adams and Martin McGuinness - brave though they have been
- achieved for themselves no more and no less than a peaceful civil
rights movement would have achieved ten years earlier and with 3,000
fewer deaths. It is this that republicans cannot bring themselves to
admit, and that the mythologists want to obscure.

Also showing this week at the London Film Festival is a new German
film about those other armed rebels, the Baader Meinhof gang. I think
Ulrika Meinhof probably possessed qualities of idealism, resilience
and determination. Just like Sands, just like Che. It should remind
us that, with nothing certain and a world recession on the way, this
is a bad time to be lauding bad heroes.

.

IRA lost its war chest in Wall Street disaster

Irish eyes aren't smilin':
IRA lost its war chest in Wall Street disaster

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/10/21/irish-eyes-arent-smilin-ira-lost-its-war-chest-in-wall-street/

Bruce Watson
Oct 21st 2008

Over the past few weeks, as the stock market has had bigger mood
swings than Judy Garland popping pills on Christmas day while riding
a roller coaster during an earthquake, the news has almost entirely
focused either on the travails of average Americans or on the morally
repugnant machinations of Wall Street geniuses. This narrow
perspective, however, ignores the larger impact of the real estate
bubble and the subprime meltdown. As trillions of dollars have
seemingly evaporated from the world, it's worth considering who
actually owned the money that has disappeared.

One group that lost big was the Irish Republican Army. After the IRA
signed a ceasefire in 1997, it followed the advice of its financial
advisors, investing its war chest into the U.S. property market. It
subsequently moved its funds into high-dividend deposit accounts in
the U.S. According to some reports, the recent Wall Street meltdown
may have cost the former terrorist group as much as $274 million.

Like many American investors, the IRA is currently "in a state of
panic" over the loss of its investments. On the other hand, unlike
most Americans, the IRA also has a history of armed revolt and a
demonstrated willingness to handle its grudges at gunpoint. Right
now, I'm really glad that I don't work for AIG!
--

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around
cheapskate. Right now, he's wondering if Peru's "Shining Path" or
Germany's "Baader Meinhof" was heavily invested in the market.

.

'60s leftist William Ayers: Time for GOP to get over it

[4 articles]

'60s leftist William Ayers: Time for GOP to get over it

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/10/26/2008-10-26_60s_leftist_william_ayers_time_for_gop_t.html

BY RICHARD VANDERFORD
DAILY NEWS WRITER
Sunday, October 26th 2008

The man the GOP loves to hate tiptoed out of hiding Sunday - if only
to blast Fox News and the rest of the media for his predicament.

William Ayers, the '60s radical who is one of John McCain's talking
points in his criticism of Barack Obama, told a Manhattan panel
discussion audience he was tired of being used as cannon fodder in
America's political wars.

"[Fox host] Bill O'Reilly comes on his show and first thing he says
is, 'Why won't this Ayers story die?'" Ayers told well-wishers. "And
then he spends 10 minutes talking about it."

Ayers, a University of Illinois education professor in Chicago, has
mostly kept a low profile since McCain started using him as a poster
boy for Obama's supposed left-wing leanings.

He kept quiet as Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin
accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists," a dig at the fact
that Ayers and Obama once served on a charity board together.

The press was barred from the discussion yesterday at the Stella
Adler Studio of Acting near Gramercy Park, but a Daily News reporter
managed to get inside.

The former member of the Weather Underground beamed at the attention
paid by the audience of about 60 people, many of whom were decked out
in Obama gear.

The crowd gave Ayers a warm welcome, guffawed at jokes about
"redistributing the wealth" and nodded at his complaints about the
"Republican revolution."

After the talk was over, event organizers attempted to sneak Ayers
out a back door to avoid the media.

Waiting reporters gave chase, but Ayers sputtered, "No comment," and
darted into a cab.

--------

'Washed-up Terrorist' Ayers Stays Mum on Ties to Obama

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Vote2008/story?id=6120141&page=1

Works Hard to Duck Reporters, Says Radicals Being "Demonized" by Fox News

By BRIAN ROSS and MOLLY DEAN
October 27, 2008

His relationship with Sen. Barack Obama has become a major theme of
the McCain campaign.

His background with a 1960's domestic terror group, the Weather
Underground, has been recounted in hundreds of news articles.

His words could add to the evidence that debunks the claims Obama was
"palling around with terrorists."

But Bill Ayers is staying mum, and working hard to duck reporters and
the campaign spotlight in the final week before the election.

He told a journalism student attending a education justice symposium
in New York Sunday he and other former radicals were being
"demonized" by Fox News. "We're nice guys, right?"

Asked by the student, if he repudiated the actions of the Weather
Underground, which carried out a series of 1960's robberies and
bombings that killed at least six people, Ayers walked away without answering.

Ayers declined requests for an interview from ABC News, and after the
appearance in New York, he used a garbage-littered freight elevator
in an unsuccessful attempt to duck ABC News cameras waiting outside.

(Click here to watch Brian Ross' encounter with Bill Ayers.)

"I have nothing to say," he told ABC News as he left the building,
accompanied by several burly men in dark suits.

Asked about Sen. John McCain's description of him as a "washed up
terrorist," Ayers said nothing as he raced to find a taxi.

Ayers appeared as an "artist" at a forum devoted to dealing with
issues including educational injustice.

Organizers of the event attempted to stop media coverage by falsely
claiming Ayers' appearance had been canceled.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, made
no mention of his radical past or Sen. Obama during an hour and a
half presentation to a group of about 50 people attending the Harold
Clurman Festival of the Arts.

Obama served on the board of an education reform group with Ayers in
Chicago, where both men were prominent figures.

When Obama first ran for public office, in 1995, Ayers held a
fundraiser for him at his house, according to a February 2008 article
on Politico.com.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama told Charlie Gibson, "This is a
guy who engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight
years old."

Obama said he had talked with Ayers about school reform issues, but
said, "the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign,
that he is an adviser of mine, that I've palled around a terrorist,
all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points."

Charges against Ayers were dropped in the 1970's after revelations of
illegal FBI wiretapping.
--

Molly Dean is a 2008 intern at the Brian Ross Investigative Unit at
ABC News. She is a graduate student in journalism at New York University.

--------

'The Factor' Confronts Williams Ayers

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,444227,00.html

Monday, October 27, 2008
By Bill O'Reilly

As I said before, the radical Chicago teacher Bill Ayers is Barack
Obama's worst nightmare. Here's a guy who simply won't go away, a man
most Americans detest, but a legitimate issue when evaluating a
potential president's associations.

One caveat here: "The Factor" believes the economy and national
security are the two most important issues in this campaign by far.
We don't believe William Ayers rises anywhere near those things.

However, Ayers is interesting. Here's a guy who calls himself an
anarchist, has admitted committing terrorist acts, even participated
in bombing a police station here in New York City. And Barack Obama
gave him a blurb for his book in the Chicago Tribune? That, ladies
and gentlemen is no small thing.

Ayers has been hiding out. We watched him for a number of days before
"Factor" producer Jesse Watters finally caught up with him.

Click here to watch "Talking Points."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JESSE WATTERS, "FACTOR" PRODUCER: How do you feel being the
centerpiece in this presidential election?

BILL AYERS: All right.

WATTERS: What's your relationship with Barack Obama, Mr. Ayers? Did
he write a blurb for your book and sit on a panel with you?

AYERS: This is my property. Would you please leave?

WATTERS: Mr. Ayers, do you want to take this opportunity to apologize
for your terrorist acts? Mr. Ayers, don't you think it's time for
some repentance? Do you still consider yourself an anarchist?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Did you notice the red star on his shirt there?

Now here's the irony. After Jesse's brief chat with Mr. Ayers, the
guy calls the police, the same police he tried to kill back in the
'60s. That is called irony.

Well, the police came and escorted Ayers back to his car. Don't you
just love this? When a terrorist guy needs some help, who does he
call? The cops, like everybody else.

Now some misguided souls feel sorry for Bill Ayers. I don't. He's had
plenty of time to apologize for trying to hurt fellow Americans. He
has never said he's sorry, most likely because he's not sorry.

I actually think Barack Obama should apologize for hanging with the
guy. He should throw him under the bus just like he did Reverend
Wright. Look, senator, everybody makes mistakes. You made one. This
is a bad guy. Just say you made a mistake in judgment. Then it goes all away.

But Obama has not done that, so poor Jesse had to track Ayers down.
That should be the end of the story but, of course, it won't be.

And that's "The Memo."

--------

William Ayers: No comment, thank you

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/10/william_ayers_no_comment_thank.html

Posted October 27, 2008
by Mark Silva

Willliam Ayers, the Chicago education professor and former leader of
the 1960s Weather Underground, has been villified in the presidential
campaign underway as a "washed up terrorist'' - with Democrat Barack
Obama, who has served on civic boards with the educator, accused by
John McCain's campaign of "palling around with terrorists.''

But Ayers, for his part, has nothing public to say about it all, as
an encounter with journalism students and ABC News over the weekend
underscored.

Ayers told a journalism student attending an education justice
symposium in New York on Sunday that he and other former radicals
were being "demonized" by Fox News, ABC reports. "We're nice guys, right?"

Asked by the student if he repudiated the work of the Weather
Underground, which carried out a series of 1960's robberies and
bombings, ABC reports, Ayers walked away without answering. Ayers
declined requests for an interview from ABC News, and after the
appearance in New York, he used a garbage-littered freight elevator
in an unsuccessful attempt to duck ABC News cameras waiting outside.

"I have nothing to say," he told ABC News. Asked about Republican
Sen. John McCain's description of him as a "washed up terrorist,"
Ayers said nothing "as he raced to find a taxi,'' according to the
account by ABC's Brian Ross and intern Molly Dean, a graduate student
in journalism at New York University..

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, made
no mention of his radical past or Obama during an hour and a half
presentation to a group of 50 at the Harold Clurman Festival of the
Arts. Obama, however, who served on civic boards with Ayers and
attended a reception at his home during his first campaign for the
state Senate, has told ABC's Charlie Gibson, "This is a guy who
engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old."

The two have spoken in recent years about school reform, he added,
but "the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign,
that he is an adviser of mine, that I've palled around a terrorist,
all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points."

.

The Left Tries to Find John McCain's Bill Ayers

The Left Tries to Find John McCain's Bill Ayers

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/the_left_tries_to_find_john_mc.html

October 27, 2008
by Humberto Fontova

Senator Biden's asinine comment about the forthcoming president's
"test" provoked John McCain's quick rejoinder: "I've already been
tested." Then that French video of the wounded John McCain in a Hanoi
prison came along as stark proof.

While recently endorsing Barack Obama (for the second time), Fidel
Castro made a point to insult the brave and grievously wounded man
featured in that video as, "a tool of the Miami Mafia." (i.e.
Americans of Cuban heritage who refused to serve as Castro's tools,
and today overwhelmingly refuse to serve as the Democratic party's
"Hispanic outreach" tools.)

Yet Fidel Castro knows full well that John McCain, along with his
naval-pilot Band of Brothers -- even under a form of "persuasion"
that few of us can even imagine -- serve as tools for nobody, except
for the nation they swore to defend.

Fidel Castro knows this better than most. No doubt he heard it
point-blank from the "interrogation specialists" he sent to North
Vietnam in 1967-68. When John McCain addressed a crowd of Bay of Pigs
veterans and former Cuban political prisoners last year he learned
that he and his fellow POW's in North Vietnam had shared torturers
with the Cuban-American freedom fighters then hosting and applauding
him, which included the longest-suffering political prisoners in
modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and
torture chambers for a period three times as long in the Castro/Che
Gulag as Alexander Solzhenytzin suffered in Stalin's Gulag.

"Anything that I and my friends might have experienced is nothing -
nothing -- compared with what some of the men in this room went
through," a gracious John McCain said as many of his hosts misted up.

"I'm introducing a man who suffered the prisons, as I did," said
Roberto Martin-Perez, who introduced McCain on the podium.``This
honor that's been conferred upon me is not only mine but the
thousands of victims who have suffered because of this terrible
doctrine' (Communism.)" Senor Martin-Perez suffered 28 years in
Castro's Gulag, repeatedly spitting in the face of the Communist
torturers who demanded his "confession." Thus The Huffington Post,
Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground all recently denounced Senor
Martin-Perez (who also narrates a McCain campaign ad) as a
"terrorist," and McCain's association with him as the Republicans'
own Ayers scandal.

Fine. Let Democrats equate an anti-communist U.S. citizen who
honorably stood up to 28 years of torture by sadists serving a
Stalinist regime that denounced the U.S. as "a vulture preying on
humanity!" and came closest to nuking us, to Bill Ayers. And let that
Stalinist regime's dictator endorse their candidate. No Republican
campaign ad could make the ramifications of this election any clearer.

In 1967 Castro sent several of his regime's most promising sadists to
North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in
finer points of their profession. Testimony during Congressional
hearings titled, "The Cuban Torture Program; Torture of American
Prisoners by Cuban Agents" held on November 1999 provide some of the
harrowing details.

The communists titled their torture program "the Cuba Project," and
it took place during 67-68 primarily at the Cu Loc POW camp (also
known as "The Zoo") on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. In brief, this
"Cuba Project" was a Joseph Mengelese experiment run by Castroite
Cubans to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human
can endure before cracking. The North Vietnamese never asked the
Castroites for advice on combat. They knew better. Unlike director
Steven Soderbergh, they probably saw through the whole "Che as
Guerrilla" hoopla for what it was and is: a Castroite hoax to
camoflauge the Inspector Clousseau-like bumblings of an incurable
military idiot -- and more specifically, Castro's own hand in the
idiot's offing. The North Vietnamese sought Castroite tutelage only
on torture of the defenseless, well aware of their expertise in the matter.

For their experiment the Castroites chose twenty American POWs-mostly
Navy flyers. One died: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force*
F-105 pilot. His death came slowly, in agonizing stages, under
torture. Upon learning his Castroite Cuban affiliation, the American
POWs nicknamed Cobeil's torturer, "Fidel." POW Captain Ray Vohden testified:

"The difference between the Vietnamese and "Fidel' was that, more or
less, once the Vietnamese got what they wanted they let up, at least
for a while...Not so with Fidel,...'I'll show him,' Fidel said to me.
'I'll make him (Colonel Earl Cobeil) so happy to bow down when I
finish with him, he'll come crying to me on his knees begging me to
let him surrender!......When I saw 'Fidel' with the fan belt I was
surprised because up to that time I had never heard of anyone getting
hit like that. Slaps, punches, straps, manacles, ropes, yes.

"But 'Fidel' was going to show the Vietnamese a new trick... Earl
Cobeil, had resisted 'Fidel' to the maximum. Now I could hear the
thud of the belt falling on Cobeil's body again and again, as Fidel
screamed "you son of a beech! You f**ker . I will show you! I will
show you!' I could hear the thud of the belt falling on Earl Cobeil's
body again and again. I almost threw up each time I heard the belt
hit Earl's body. I didn't think any human could endure such a thing.
The guards all stood around laughing and yelling in Vietnamese. It
had been far easier for me to endure the straps myself then to have
to go through this.

"They (the North Vietnamese) tortured to obtain military information
or a political statement, they punished us for breaking their
rules....but rarely tortured indefinitely just for the sake of
torture. Eventually they always let up....However, the Cubans
unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick man to death."

"Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him,"
testified another fellow POW, Col. Jack Bomar. "He had been tortured
for days and days and days. "His (Cobeil's) hands were almost severed
from the manacles. He had bamboo in his shins. All kinds of welts up
and down all over; his face was bloody. He was a complete mess. They
brought him into the room and as far as we could tell, Captain Cobeil
was totally mentally out of it. He did not know where he was. Then
'Fidel' began to beat him with a fan belt......When he ('Fidel') lost
his temper, he was a complete madman. He would get red in the face;
he just exploded with rage, especially if you refused to bow to him
like Cobeil refused to do."

"Fidel's" month long beatings of another U.S. POW named Jim Kasler
were "among the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in
Hanoi," according to the book Honor Bound. "Fidel" flogged Kasler
"until his buttocks, lower back and legs hung in shreds, and at the
end he was in a semi-coma."

These hearings, by the way, identified this "Fidel" with great
probability as Fernando Vecino Alegret, who served until quite
recently as Cuba's "Minister of Education," and thus hosted many of
those visiting delegations of smiling U.S. scholars and educators who
return enchanted with the marvels of Cuban literacy and health-care.
The Congressional hearing concluded:

"The ruthless nature of the (Cuban) interrogators and the severity of
their actions led prisoners such as Captain Raymond Vohden and
Colonel Jack Bomar to question how human beings could so batter
another human being. They (the American POWs) stood firm in the face
of unrestrained brutality, intimidation, and humiliation."

Think about it: the very declarations people like Michael Moore, Sean
Penn, Danny Glover, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright and
so many other Obama-backers broadcast for free publicity, Fidel
Castro and Ho Chi Minh's prisoners refused to sign to save their
lives, or to end years of daily torture. Also note that John McCain
enjoys overwhelming support from these men.

Could the ramifications of this election be any clearer?

I'd say John Mc Cain passed his test with flying colors--the glorious
colors of the flag he swore to defend.
--

*hat tip to Steve Lohr for pointing out he was from the USAF not the
Navy. AT has some sharp readers. The Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel,
Associated Press all have Earl Cobeil as a Naval pilot. But Lohr
is exactly right, as my Air Force veteran cousin also pointed out to
me this morning. HF
--

Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the
Real Che Guevara. visit hfontova.com

.

The Baader-Meinhof gang

[3 articles]

The Baader-Meinhof gang

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45715,features,briefing-the-baader-meinhof-gang

OCTOBER 27, 2008

A controversial German film, shortly to open in Britain, has
rekindled memories of the gang that terrorised 1970s Germany

What kind of gang was it?

A violent, leftist collective consisting of some 60 people with roots
in the revolutionary student movement that swept Europe and the US in
1967-8. Its legacy of self-styled "armed resistance" -
assassinations, kidnaps and bombings of the German establishment -
has been argued over ever since. The Red Army Faction (RAF), as it
formally called itself, was founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, his
girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (pictured) and Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing
journalist. It started by burning down department stores, then moved
on to full-scale terrorism. In ever more brutal attacks, the group
killed a total of 34 people, mainly bankers, government officials,
their chauffeurs and bodyguards. Thirteen gang members also died.
Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin, were arrested in 1972 and prosecuted in
1975. Meinhof killed herself during the gang's three-year, chaotic trial.

And did that put an end to the violence?

No. With the leaders locked in a specially-built prison wing, a
second wave of RAF militants launched a campaign of violence to force
their release. For a few months in 1977, in what is known as the
'German Autumn', the gang posed the most serious internal threat to
Germany since WWII. They murdered the chief federal prosecutor,
kidnapped the country's leading industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer,
and, with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked
a Lufthansa airliner, flying the plane to Somalia and demanding the
release of their comrades. When news broke that German commandos had
stormed the jet, killing three hijackers and freeing the hostages,
Baader, Ensslin and another gang member committed suicide. The next
day, Schleyer was shot in a forest on the Dutch border - his body was
found in the boot of a car in Mulhouse - and a letter was sent to the
French paper, Liberation: "After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin
Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless
to our pain and our rage."

And what were they so enraged about?

Like Italy's Red Brigades and other 'revolutionary' groups of the
late 1960s, Baader-Meinhof railed against what it saw as capitalist
authoritarianism, best exemplified by the US government and its
invasion of Vietnam. In Germany, that rage was mainly directed
against the country's failure to exorcise its Nazi past: in 1966, for
instance, Kurt Kiesinger, an ex-Nazi Party member, became West German
chancellor. By contrast, left-wing radicalism was suppressed and the
Communist Party banned. The RAF's founding myth was the shooting of
Benno Ohnesorg, a bystander killed by police in 1967 at a mass
student protest against the Shah of Iran, who was visiting Berlin.
"They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against.
This is the Auschwitz generation," said Ensslin. "We must arm
ourselves!" In 1970, several members of the group went to the Middle
East to be trained by the PFLP.

What does the film aim to do?

Like two previous German films, The Lives of Others and Downfall, The
Baader Meinhof Complex, which opens in the UK on 14 November, is an
attempt to demystify a traumatic period in
German history. "We tried in this film to show what the RAF really
were," says Stefan Aust, former editor of Der Spiegel, on whose
bestselling book the film is based. "They felt themselves being
revolutionary [but] in the end it was a group of people killing
others and in the end themselves."

Then why is it so controversial?

Many have condemned it for its exciting, Bonnie-and-Clyde depiction
of the gang members. The widow of Jurgen Ponto, a banker killed by
the group, has returned the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's highest
civilian honour, in protest. Bettina Rohl, the daughter of Ulrike
Meinhof, has slated it for its "hero worship". This movie, says the
film critic for Berliner Zeitung, has given Andreas Baader the cult
status he always craved: "Posthumously he has become the hero of a
real action film."

But what could be considered chic about these killers?

Baader was the handsome, dissolute son of a history professor;
Ensslin the daughter of a respected vicar; and Meinhof a pacifist
gone AWOL: a shy journalist who forsook her children for terrorism.
The gang drove Mercedes and BMWs, dubbed 'Baader-Meinhof Wagons'. At
their most fashionable, the group had a broad network of
sympathisers: radical, usually bourgeois, Germans who saw them as
leather-jacketed rebels enacting their own frustrations. One in four
West Germans under thirty felt "a certain sympathy" with them. Later,
the suicides of Baader and Ennslin made them martyrs to hard-core
leftists, some of whom still insist they were murdered. Even now,
their mystique endures: you can buy RAF T-shirts with the group's
machine-gun logo; a few years ago a fashion designer adopted the
slogan "Prada-Meinhof". In 2002, the ICA had a month of shows and
talks called 'Red Army Friction'. They belong, albeit awkwardly,
wrote the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson, to an historic
German "tradition of doomed struggle, fighting to the end in order to
leave a message for the future".

What effect did the RAF have on German politics?

Most historians agree that all it achieved was to make West Germany a
more paranoid, repressive place than before. In the security
clampdown, the BKA (the German equivalent of the FBI) became a hugely
powerful institution and hasty laws banned all so-called 'radicals'
from public service. Peaceful leftwing groups that had been inspired
to join mainstream politics were weakened by the group's example. And
if the Baader-Meinhof gang wanted to provoke a violent response from
the state that would encourage more 'revolutionaries' to take up
arms, that failed, too. Most Germans welcomed the strong response of
the state and the end of the violence. "It was really a threat to the
stability of this country," says Aust. "And actually it was the only
threat after the War that this country ever had from the inside."

Where are they now?

Although the RAF did not formally disband until 1998, it was hugely
discredited after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the group was
shown to have been supported by the East German Stasi. Its last
attack was the bombing of a prison in 1993, in which no one was
seriously injured. Some of its members remain in jail; others have
attempted to lead quiet, post-terrorist lives. Astrid Proll, for
instance, who drove a getaway car for the gang and insists she left
the RAF "before it got really cruel", worked in London as a park
attendant and mechanic before being discovered in 1999 working as a
picture editor at The Independent. Ulrich Scholze, who stole cars for
the RAF, is reported to be working as a teacher of textile and design
in north Germany, while Irmgard Moller, who killed three people at a
US Army base and tried to stab herself to death, is living in
anonymity in Hamburg. Horst Mahler, a radical lawyer who defended
Baader and Ensslin in court and later joined the gang, organising
training trips to the Middle East, is now an ideologue for the German
neo-Nazi movement.

--------

German director says did not glorify Baader Meinhof

http://in.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idINTRE49N6UC20081024

Sat Oct 25, 2008
By Silvia Aloisi

ROME (Reuters Life!) - German director Uli Edel said on Friday he
tried to portray both the fascination and horror sparked by the Red
Army Faction, the left-wing guerrilla movement at the center of his
latest film.

"The Baader Meinhof Complex," screening at the Rome film festival,
tells the story of the founding members of the faction and the trail
of blood they left behind them in a decade-long campaign of bombings,
killings and kidnappings.

The film, shot in a documentary-style and based on a bestselling book
by Stefan Aust, has been picked as Germany's entry for best foreign
language film at the 2009 Academy Awards.

At home, where it premiered last month, it has rekindled a
long-running debate on a bloody chapter of post-Nazi Germany that
still haunts the country.

It has also drawn mixed reviews as some critics felt the film
glamorized the militants, played by some of Germany's most famous
actors, and focused too little on the suffering of the victims and
their families.

"My aim was to bring people to face the reality of those years and
also show that some of the characters could seem very cool and
attractive and then become terrifying," Edel told reporters after a
press screening.

"My country has not yet reconciled itself with that period and I hope
the film helps the debate," he said.

Aust, whose book is considered a reference work on the guerrilla,
added: "This is history but people are still affected by it, as if it
happened yesterday or the day before.

The Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang"
after founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, grew out of the
student protest and anti-Vietnam war movements in the West Germany of
the late 1960s.

The group is suspected of killing 34 people between 1970 and 1991 as
a "second generation" of militants took over from Meinhof and Baader,
who committed suicide in prison in 1976 and 1977 respectively. The
movement disbanded in 1998.

Edel, best known abroad for his 1981 film "Christiane F." about a
teenage heroin addict in Berlin, said he too as a university student
had at first sympathized with the RAF, like many young Germans at the time.

"I told the story the way we lived through it. I was fascinated by
them and that continued up to a certain point. The film shows clearly
at what stage the fascination turned into horror and you could no
longer identify with them," he said.

The film, billed as the most expensive in German history, mixes
original newsreel with graphic reconstructions of the attacks carried
out by the militants -- which Edel said were accurate down to the
number of bullets used in each murder.

While some of the victims' relatives felt the film was too soft on
the Red Army Faction and its motivations, others have praised it as
thorough and balanced.

"It shows the whole unrestrained brutality of the RAF without
damaging the memory of the victims," said Joerg Schleyer, son of
employer federation head Hanns Martin Schleyer who was kidnapped and
murdered by the RAF, to German media.

--------

Bestselling authors: Financial crisis may lead to comeback of the
German terror scene

http://www.lifegen.de/newsip/shownews.php4?getnews=m2008-10-21-4819&pc=s01

(2008-10-21)

A dangerous comeback of German terrorism may be under way - that is
what the authors and publishers Marita Vollborn and Vlad Georgescu
are predicting in their book "Brennpunkt Deutschland". According to
the book, which appeared a year ago, state guards have been observing
a burgeoning of militant activities and even signs of extremely
violent extremism for years. The reduction of social services and the
emergence of the NPD were visible at the same level as the return of
the armed Left - and appear to be a possible scenario for the future.
"The current financial crisis could initiate the rising of the
extremistic scene, because, seen from their perspective, government
support measures for fianancial institutions are a provocation
considering unemployment and Hartz IV", Georgescu fears.

The entire Federal Republic may be in danger, as the book authors
write: "Apart from the rise of the extreme right state officials also
witnessed the powerful comeback of the militant Left since the
beginning of the new millennium. The question of whether violence
should be a legitimate means of eliminating the existing system is
being solved: The militant groups opted for it after more than ten
years of discussion - and continue to enforce their targets back to
the armed struggle. "

After the end of the Red Army Faction (RAF) by the media as well as
no longer perceived new generation of left Autonomous scene acting in
comparison to their predecessors as a loose network - a logistical
finesse, which in this country long before the idea of network Al
Qaeda has been implemented . "The operating units of the militant
Left usually consist of two groups; in this way can be annoying
Section 129a of the Penal Code in the case of an arrest. Under the
Act, there is a terrorist organization is build up from at least
three offenders, "explained Vollborn and Georgescu.

Marita Vollborn, Vlad Georgescu
Brennpunkt Deutschland. Warum unser Land vor einer Zeit der Revolten
steht. (Why our country is facing a time of revolts).
Gustav Lübbe Verlag Gustav Luebbe Verlag
ISBN: 3-7857-2282-6 ISBN: 3-7857-2282-6
Hardcover/Festeinband Hardcover / Fixed Binding
Preis: 18,00 EUR (D) 18,50 EUR (A) 31,90 SFR Price: 18,00 EUR (D)
18.50 EUR (A) 31.90 SFR

.

Former Panther speaks to Univ. [Elaine Brown]

Former Panther speaks to Univ.

http://media.www.redandblack.com/media/storage/paper871/news/2008/10/22/News/Former.Panther.Speaks.To.Univ-3498245.shtml

ERIKA WELLS
Issue date: 10/22/08

A former leading member of the Black Panther Party called on black
students Tuesday to continue to address issues of racism at the University.

Author and lecturer Elaine Brown spoke as part of an annual lecture
series sponsored by the Institute for African American Studies
Student Association, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and the Institute for
Women's Studies.

Brown, who was a chairperson of the Black Panther Party from 1974
until 1977, said she wants blacks to consider what they want
accomplished socially and to recognize problems such as poverty and
injustice in the Black community.

"I'm speaking about the ongoing oppression of black people. Some of
us have lost sight, so we need to return to addressing these issues,"
Brown said. "The University is racist."

Kevin Character, a black student from Macon, disagreed with her opinion.

"I don't think that the University is racist," said Character, who
was not present at the lecture. "I just think that it's the way we've
been cultured. I think we've come a long way, but we have a long way
to go. We have separation because I think that's what makes people
comfortable."

Sean Spade, a white student from Hiawassee, joined about 80 others to
hear Brown speak.

"I wanted to hear what it's like for someone from a different
perspective, from a side of the story that is untold," he said.

Brown speaks at colleges and universities across the nation about
"New Age Racism," gender oppression and class disparity toward an
"inclusive and egalitarian" world society.

"I've been to many campuses and wouldn't categorize black students at
the University as more or less conscious than blacks students at
Spelman or Georgia State," Brown said. "But some blacks forget that
their education was paid for by the blood and sweat of their ancestors."

Character said it's important for black students to remember their
roots "but also move forward."

"Anyone getting an education can definitely appreciate how they got
here," he said. "That goes for anyone - black or white."

.

Prison movie is premiered [Mumia Abu-Jamal]

Prison movie is premiered

http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/edinburgh/Prison-movie-is-premiered.4631773.jp

Published Date: 27 October 2008

A HARD-hitting new documentary on the case of US death row prisoner
Mumia Abu-Jamal will premiere in Edinburgh today.

The feature-length In Prison My Whole Life examines the controversial
case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party activist who
has been in prison for murder in the United States since 1981, much
of that time facing execution, and is showing at the Cameo cinema,
with support from Amnesty International.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's original trial was unfair and in violation of
international standards.

Supporting the event, Amnesty International Scottish Programme
Director John Watson said:

"We've repeatedly drawn attention to Mumia Abu-Jamal's plight and we
strongly welcome this film as a fresh opportunity to focus attention
on his current situation."

An Election on the Pine Ridge Reservation

An Election on the Pine Ridge Reservation

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-giago/an-election-on-the-pine-r_b_136344.html

Tim Giago
Posted October 20, 2008

It is said prior to every election that this is one of the most
important elections of our time. And then the voters go out and
re-elect the same old politicians. Change?

On November 4, 2008 the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South
Dakota are looking at new choices. Neither of the top two candidates
has ever served as president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Russell
Means, commonly known as an Indian activist, and Theresa "Huck" Two
Bulls, the current South Dakota State Senator, former Vice President
of the Tribe and four-time elected Tribal Secretary are facing off
for the office of President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Russell Means, a convicted felon, was pardoned by former South Dakota
Governor Bill Janklow thus setting him free to run for public office.
He is best known by tribal members for his often outlandish actions
in promoting the American Indian Movement. If elected president there
are those who fear that he will take the Tribe in a direction that
would jeopardize federal funding for the many tribal programs by his
non-conformist approach to solving problems. But then again, maybe
that is exactly what the OST needs at this stage in their history.

For example: The gaming compacts issued by the State of South Dakota
to Indian tribes limits the number of gaming devices in their casinos
to 250 regardless of the size of the tribe. Most Lakota find this to
be an infringement upon their sovereign rights. Means is not afraid
to challenge ignorant, and yes racist, laws such as this. In fact,
there are many things that need to be shaken up on the Pine Ridge
Reservation and it will take a person of extreme courage and
confidence to get it done. Means has never been at a loss for courage.

"Huck" Two Bulls is the most experienced lawmaker of the two. She was
working alongside of OST Attorney Mario Gonzalez on the Black Hills
Claims Settlement 28 years ago. She knows Indian law and Indian
politics. Above all she is honest beyond doubt and dedicated to
serving the people of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Two Bulls has never
backed down from a fight and is more likely than not to follow the
letter of the law when making decisions that have a direct impact
upon the future of the tribe. Serving as Secretary of the Tribe for 4
terms has allowed her to sit in at most Tribal Council meetings and
to take the notes of the meetings, but more than that it has allowed
her to get one of the best educations on tribal politics and history
than any candidate in the past.

The first woman ever elected to serve as President of the Oglala
Sioux Tribe, Cecelia Fire Thunder, was impeached by the Tribal
Council. Some fear that this action could cost votes for Two Bulls.
Gender discrimination is not out of the question in this election.

Perhaps the pundits are right and this is one of the most important
elections in the history of the Tribe. Means has spent most of the
last 20 years making movies in Hollywood and some were very good
movies, while Two Bulls has been working long and diligent hours at
home on the reservation trying to improve the lives of the people of
the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Theresa "Huck" Two Bulls will make every effort to keep the waters
calm, while her opponent, Russell Means, may generate a tsunami. The
differences between the two candidates are definitive and quite
clear. Once again the future of the Pine Ridge Reservation is in the
hands of the people.

Among the young Means is very popular because of his movie career. He
has also made headlines with strong comments intended to shake up the
white race. The turnout for the Primary Election was unusually weak
for the Pine Ridge Reservation and a large turnout in the General
Election should favor Two Bulls. However, no one can read the minds
of the voters and we will know what the people were thinking on the
morning of February 5, 2008.

I wish both candidates the best of luck.
--

(Tim Giago, Oglala Lakota, is from the Pine Ridge Reservation. He is
the recipient of the H.L, Mencken Award for Journalism, The Golden
Quill Award for Outstanding Editorial Writing from the International
Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and the Honor Award for
Distinguished Services to Journalism by the University of Missouri
School of Journalism)

.

Beneath the Yippies, Lenny Bruce Lives

Beneath the Yippies, Lenny Bruce Lives

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/beneath-the-yippies-lenny-bruce-lives/

By Corey Kilgannon
October 27, 2008

Lenny Bruce may be gone but his irreverent brand of comedy lives on
every Wednesday and Thursday night in the basement of the Yippie
Museum at 9 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

In July, a group of left-wing comics started the Lenny Bruce Comedy
Club, which has all the run-down charm and outrageous repertoire of
an old beatnik joint. You walk down off the sidewalk down the iron
staircase and immediately onto the stage area where some hyped up
comedian is invariably launching into some profanity-laced diatribe
about some abuse of power, or how the college kids have taken over
the Village. Behind them is an unpainted brick wall latticed with
pipes and electric meters.

Last week, a comedian named Laura D. complained about her former pot
dealers. One had the nerve to get sick and go into the hospital, and
the other "ruined my high" by going on and on about the show he was
pitching to Channel 13.

Then, Randy Credico ­ who was in the news last July when he got
arrested after warning pot smokers about the police in front of his
home on Gay Street in the Village.

Mr. Credico hosts these evenings, along with the comedian Danny
Vitale, formerly of "Saturday Night Live." Mr. Credico did
impersonations of a slew of politicians. He did Rudolph Giuliani
("It's a great city, it's a wonderful city.") and lampooned his lisp
and former comb-over hairdo.

Then the Newsday columnist Ellis Henican took the microphone and
discussed being the token liberal on various conservative television
news commentary programs, where his job is to "get into personal and
angry fights with a whole tribe of angry blonde women in miniskirts
who look at me and see their ex-husbands."

The longtime Greenwich Village folk singer known as R.T., who has
long curly hair and a long gray beard, said after performing that the
comedy nights try to keep alive the counterculture spirit of Lenny
Bruce, and for some comers, to emulate his drug use.

Mr. Credico played down the drug use but played up the alcohol use:
"You have to be an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic to get in,"
Mr. Credico said.

There is no cost or cover or minimum. In fact, alcohol is not served,
but you are welcome to bring your own. Soft drinks and coffee is for sale.

"There is a corkage fee, but I'm not sure what it is," Mr. Credico
said. "OK, it's more like a voluntary corkage fee. Actually, we don't
really charge anyone anything. Even the comedians don't get paid.
It's like sitting in the park, only you don't get arrested. Actually,
we'll probably be a homeless comedy shelter before long."

.

Woodstock at the state's top court

Woodstock at the state's top court

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=731554&category=REGION

By CAROL DeMARE, Staff writer
First published in print: Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Woodstock ­ a cultural phenomenon of the '60s ­ is on the Thursday
calendar at the Court of Appeals. The high court's newest lecture ­
and last one of the year ­ is "Woodstock: The Music of the First Amendment."

Three speakers will bring the audience back to those incredible three
days on the 600-acre Bethel dairy farm of Max Yasgur in August 1969.

Yasgur's son, Sam Yasgur of Monticello, now the Sullivan County
attorney, played a vital but little-known part in convincing his
father to allow the Woodstock Music & Art Festival to be held on the
family's land.

Michael Lang, of Woodstock, a concert promoter, producer and artists'
manager, was co-creator of Woodstock and later co-producer of
Woodstock '94 and Woodstock '99.

Phil Gitlen of the Albany firm of Whiteman Osterman & Hanna was a
counsel for Woodstock '94 and Woodstock '99 festivals.

Chief Judge Judith Kaye is looking forward to this lecture. It will
be her last as chief judge ­ she retires at the end of the year ­ and
she "wanted this to be a powerhouse."

Kaye grew up in Monticello and her family knew the Yasgurs. Mimi
Yasgur, the wife of Max, shopped at Kaye's parents' store. Kaye is
thrilled with the speakers who will relive the festival as the 40th
anniversary approaches.

"In retrospect it was a gigantic peaceful festival, a half million
came," Kaye said. It was "an example of freedom of expression."

Gary Spencer, court spokesman, called Woodstock, "one of the major
events of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Among the performers were Joan Baez, Blood, Sweat and Tears,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Country Joe McDonald & The Fish,
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joe Cocker, Arlo Guthrie, Grateful
Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.

Lectures began in 2006 with three, and another three were held last
year. This is the third this year. The idea was "to bring the public
into the courthouse," Kaye said. "This is a public building. We don't
just want lawyers arguing cases here. We want the public to see this
beautiful building and expose them to the work of the court."

Space is limited. To reserve a seat at the Eagle Street building,
call 455-7741. The event is co-sponsored by the Historical Society of
the Courts of the State of New York.

...

.

How Tom and Dick got 'Smothered'

[3 articles]

For CBS, it was the brothers' third strike

http://www.sacbee.com/172/story/1336423.html

Controversial Season 3 was the Smothers Brothers' finest - and their last

By Hector Saldana
San Antonio Express-News
Published: Friday, Oct. 24, 2008

For the Smothers Brothers, there would be no season more
controversial or entertaining – it was the stuff of legend.

By 1968, the comedy team's admittedly rather conventional CBS variety
show had become a lightning rod for its views on politics, censorship
and the Vietnam War. On Sundays, their comedy platform – open to
George Burns and Jack Benny as well as David Steinberg and George
Carlin – was the hippest thing going.

The Beatles came to them to premiere "Hey Jude" and "Revolution." The
Who's Keith Moon nearly blew up the set in the finale to "My
Generation." They gave the world Pat Paulsen running for president.

Those scenes, along with the bickering brothers' trademark red sports
coats, are found on the new four-DVD set "The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour: The Best of Season 3" ($49.98) from Time-Life.

Eleven uncensored episodes, as well as a never before seen appearance
by Robert F. Kennedy, additional footage and bonus material complete
the set. Tom and Dick Smothers like to say it was all an accident,
that they were a product of the times. Perhaps, but they came to
define the times, too.

While that third season played out, LBJ announced he would not seek
re-election. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were
assassinated. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago became a bloodbath.

Two years earlier, CBS had given the Smothers Brothers artistic
control to make a "socially relevant" show. But by the second
episode, Dick Smothers recalled, CBS was telling them "you can't say
that." The third season, arguably their best, would also be their last.

"Hee-Haw" aired in the time slot the next year.

Tommy Smothers was the uncredited producer, "the heart and soul,"
according to his brother, hiring and firing writers. By the third
season, he had recruited Rob Reiner and Steve Martin. Most of their
writers were younger than 30. (Tommy recently received an honorary
Emmy for writing on the '68 shows.) The show, which was performed in
front of a live audience, was "edited with a razor blade," Dick Smothers said.

He says they're not bitter about the experience.

"Maybe them firing us made us live longer in the minds of our fans,"
he said. "They killed us but we're not dead."

In an interview in connection with the DVD release, he discussed the
series and its repercussions on the brothers and the country.

Q. How did such a straight folk-comedy act become the epitome of hip?

A. It would be great to say we planned it out. The third season,
socially, politically, geopolitically, was a whole different country.
It's hard to believe what happened in this country (from 1966 to
1968). We call it the scene of the accident. When they hired us . . .
the country was not in that sort of turmoil. Vietnam wasn't on every
front page. The civil rights was starting to get national concern.
But nothing had happened yet.

Q. Did you feel like lightning rods immediately?

A. No, we weren't. But from the very start in San Francisco, hippies
and people in North Beach would come see our show at the Purple
Onion, saying, "We got your message." We had no idea of the message they got.

Q. Are the old episodes still relevant?

A. It's the same thing all over again. Except the times today are on
steroids. That was the first time young people didn't leave it up to
their parents and grandparents to make the choices. We thought young
people could make an impact, and they did.

Q. Is there a danger of being too political on TV?

A. Tommy came close to it. He went to a party with (Tom) Hayden and
(Jane) Fonda and all these people. He came back and said, "I found
out what's wrong with me. I saw Jane Fonda, and I found out. I lost
my sense of humor. She doesn't have a sense of humor." And that's
deadly for a comedian.

--------

TV review: How Tom and Dick got 'Smothered'

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/21/DDGQ13L1F3.DTL

David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Smothered: The Censorship Battles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour: Written, produced and directed by Maureen Muldaur. 7:30 p.m.
Oct. 30 on KQED.

At the beginning, the CBS moguls didn't know what they were getting
into. At the end, they didn't know what hit them.

In the late '60s, the Tiffany Network was looking for a new "kamikaze
show" to follow the other nine attempts to beat NBC's "Bonanza" in
the Sunday night ratings. There wasn't time to get a scripted show
ready, so the network took a chance on a pair of clean-cut comics on
the folk music circuit. And "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" had
its premiere in February 1967.

Maureen Muldaur's 2002 film, "Smothered: The Censorship Battles of
the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," could have been made at any point
after CBS fired the brothers in 1969 - certainly, it might have
helped the boys during the long, lean period after their show was killed.

But the fact that it was made recently, at a time when even the
tamest TV shows thrive on references to contemporary politics and
social mores, makes it all the more valuable. Why? Because it reminds
us that there will come an inevitable time when we'll look back at
issues like Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction and marvel that a
supposedly civilized culture can have its priorities so screwed up as
to care about such silliness.

Muldaur's film, which will be broadcast Oct. 30 on KQED with Tom and
Dick Smothers present in the studio to talk about their fabled comedy
show, is probably too long, but it's the perfect companion to the
newly released DVD set of the "Comedy Hour" final season (see review at left).

The film, first made for Bravo, begins with a bit from the show
itself, where a handful of network censors (one played by staff
writer Steve Martin), take turns looking at and discarding pages of
the script until only a single sheet is left. The last censor eyes it
up and down, pronounces that it contains nothing funny at all and
approves it for broadcast.

At first, the Smothers' show seemed pretty typical fare for the day,
with guest stars such as George Burns and Jack Benny. But, as writer
Mason Williams says, around the 10th show, Tommy (who was always the
mastermind of both the show and the brothers' act) began to inject
topical bits into the writing. There was comic and eventual
presidential candidate Pat Paulsen speaking in an "editorial" against
gun control, for example: "If you're old enough to get arrested,
you're old enough to carry a gun," he says.

The censors cut bits they could understand, but, hysterically, didn't
cut former San Francisco performer Leigh French's routine as a
zoned-out hippie chick, advising women on lifestyle issues.

"I'd like to greet you ladies as I always do," she says, pausing
before adding a spacey: "Hi-i-i-i."

She then goes on to tell viewers how to get rid of roaches in their homes.

The CBS censors thought she was talking about the insects.

And if they didn't cut whole segments, the censors had them chopped
up beyond recognition. Joan Baez introduced a song to her
then-husband, David Harris, a few months before he was set to go to
federal prison for draft evasion. The song itself is left intact, but
Baez's intro, in which she discusses why Harris is going to jail, is
cut so badly, there's no vocal or visual continuity between frames.

Former writers such as Williams, Rob Reiner and Carl Gottlieb (the
latter two recruited by Tommy Smothers from San Francisco's the
Committee) and comic-turned-director David Steinberg join the late
writer David Halberstam; former CBS executive Michael Dann, who first
put the show on the air; the show's producer, George Sunga; and
former censor Perry Lafferty in talking about the battles that went
on during the show's aborted run. To their credit, Lafferty and Dann
seem to know better than to defend CBS' decision to yank the show.

The film is pretty compelling on its own, but it works better in
tandem with the "Comedy Hour" final season DVD. Together, they remind
us of how far we've come as a culture, and, sadly, how far we still have to go.
--

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.

--------

DVD REVIEW:

They're Finally Here ­
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: The Best of Season 3!

http://eclipsemagazine.com/dvd/7043/

October 22nd, 2008
by: Sheldon A. Wiebe

I remember, with great fondness, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
Tom and Dick Smothers started out as a comedy/folk duo, playing clubs
like the legendary Purple Onion. When CBS offered them their own TV
show, they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. The
Brothers Smothers started fairly innocuously, but as the series
progressed it became a bastion of political satire that caused one
U.S. president, LBJ [who clearly had a sense of humor], to send the
duo a letter of praise ­ and another [Johnson's successor, in fact]
to ask CBS to take them off the air [making them the second top
ten-rated series to be removed from a network's schedule because a
sitting president didn't like it ­ the first being The Wild Wild West].

My favorite moment of the series came as the teaser for one episode
that found Tom and Dick noting that CBS had been getting a lot flack
because of the show, and that henceforth the audience wouldn't hear
"anything you wouldn't hear in your own home…" followed by the sound
of a toilet flushing. The Best of Season 3 has moments that match
that hilarious moment [the opening song of the season premiere, We're
Still Here, for example notes that they've survived, among other
things, the network's censors]. And presented some of the most
memorable musical performances of sixties television ­ as when Jim
Morrison of The Doors blanked on the words for Touch Me, or when
Donovan turned the show into a love-in/sing-along for Happiness Runs.
And where else would you find George Harrison stopping by just for a
couple minutes to urge the brothers to keep on keeping on?

Most of the eleven episodes included here are edited ­ partly for
content [not all the moments on the show were gems, and not all of
the show's musical guests were all that memorable], and partly
because the pacing of variety shows [and television in general]
wasn't anywhere near what today's audiences are used to. What
remains, though, is the wit and charm of the Smothers Brothers and
their show's writers ­ along with some hot button issues that
contributed to their show's demise ­ including a medley that was
excised from the season premiere because of controversial content
[activist Harry Belafonte performing a carefully structured medley of
calypso songs before a screen on which played scenes from the
Democratic Convention of 1968]; a comedy sermonette by David
Steinberg [part of the episode that CBS removed from the schedule
when they fired the brothers, and other odd bits [like the take-off
on Bonanza that dared question why the series featured only men as
regulars...]. Also included is the CBS Special, Pat Paulsen For
President, possibly the funniest campaign film of all-time [and,
given the manner in which Paulsen spoke about the issues, another
nail in the Comedy Hour's coffin].

Along with the eleven episodes [which include that unaired ep], The
Best of Season 3 also comes with a mitt full of bonus features. Two
such are especially noteworthy: when you click on certain episodes in
the Episode Selection menu, before it plays, you will hear Tom
Smothers comment on the notable circumstances of that episode, and,
again, when you use the Episode Selections menu, you can choose to
screen each ep with an Introduction and Close by the Smothers Brothers.

Other Features: Disc One: Interviews With Harry Belafonte, Bob
Newhart, Third Season Producer Allan Blye, Doors' Drummer John
Densmore, Filmmaker Chuck Braverman, and Writer Rob Reiner;
Featurette: A Fable For Our Time [Tom smothers reflects on the series
the duo's battles with the network]; Rehearsal Footage Shot By 60
Minutes [aired January 7, 1969]; 1969 Emmy Awards Clip; Photo
Gallery, and CBS Documents: Network memos and other documents
regarding some of the show's controversial elements.

Disc Two: Interviews: Just Collins, Bob Einstein [Writer/Occasional
Performer]; Mom Always Liked You Best ­ Tom, Dick and Mrs. Smothers;
Dr. Benjamin Spock Interview [censored from season three premiere];
Photo Gallery, and CBS Documents.

Disc Three: Interviews: Joan Baez, Jackie Mason, David Steinberg;
Excerpts from Tom and dick's Post-Cancellation Press Conference;
Jackie Mason Dress Rehearsal; Joan Baez Dress Rehearsal and Alternate
Performance; Episode Promos; Smothers Brothers 2000 Reunion at the
U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado; LBJ Letters; David
Rumsfeld's "Department of Peace" Letter; CBS Documents; Photo
Gallery, and Tom's Final Reflections.

Disc Four: Robert F. Kennedy With Pat Paulsen and Tom Smothers ­
never before seen outtakes from the Pat Paulsen For President
special; Interview Outtakes From special: Woody Allen, David Frye,
Eddie Fisher, Paul Hornung, Nancy Ames, and Jerry Stiller and Anne
Meara; Pat Paulsen at the White House; Pat Paulsen at the 1968
Democratic National Convention; Pat Paulsen Comedy Club Act at the
Pierce Street Annex, Anchorage, Alaska [March 31, 1992]; E! Intro
segment to Pat Paulsen For President; Photo Gallery; Pat Paulsen's
Malignant Humor ­ Pat's personal notes from his fight with cancer, At
Paulsen's Memorial humor.

Grade: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: Best of Season 3 ­ A

Grade: Features ­ A+

.

Old Hippie Becomes New Radical

Old Hippie Becomes New Radical

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-moulden/old-hippie-becomes-new-ra_b_136793.html

Julia Moulden
Posted October 25, 2008

Don Stannard-Friel didn't have to go far to create a New Radical role
for himself. Don is a professor of sociology and anthropology at
Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, a leafy suburb of San
Francisco. Today, many of his classes are conducted in the inner city
-- the infamous Tenderloin district.

After we were introduced, I realized that Don would be the only "old
radical" in my book: his life parallels the major events of a
generation. A kid from New Jersey, he moved to San Francisco "at the
end of the beatnik period and the beginning of the free speech era."
In 1966, he got married, became a father, and moved to
Haight-Ashbury. He was studying at San Francisco State College when
"all hell broke loose." As his political consciousness was awakening
-- and while going to antiwar demonstrations with his baby on his
back -- he began to study sociology. "My professors were using the
cultural revolution taking place all around us as their material, and
they were doing ethnographic studies -- going into the field with
us." While working toward his Ph.D., Don worked in a psychiatric
hospital, and he became part of the mental patients civil rights
movement. Over the next decade, he completed his degrees, got
divorced, and remarried. "We had a hippie wedding in Golden Gate Park
and lived communally for a number of years. They were wonderful times."

After several decades of teaching, Don was feeling the need to clear
his mind and refresh his spirit. He took a break and headed for the
Tenderloin district where he'd lived as a poor student. He wanted to
really get to know the community and write about his experience. When
he was ready to return to teaching, he realized that this time it
would be different. It would call on every part of him -- the young
activist, the curious student, the experienced professor, and the man
who knew and loved this difficult part of a world-famous city. Don
designed a series of courses that would take his students into the
community, interacting with local people so that they could learn
from them and help them at the same time. It's the ideal intersection
of what he had to offer and what his young charges wanted. "It's
perfect or this new generation. They're not interested in political
action like we were. These kids were raised on community service --
it was part of their curriculum from when they were quite small. They
want to do things, to make a difference. It's quite a shift from my
generation."

His students love what is affectionately known as "Tenderloin U." and
all that it has to offer, such as a street retreat, where they spend
up to a week with a homeless person. Even kids who don't show much
enthusiasm for traditional studies who up for Don's classes. "It's
hard for suburban students to get into San Francisco and find where
we're working each day. But they do it without fail." As you might
expect, the idea initially wasn't popular in all quarters; there was
considerable resistance from Mom and Dad. "I had parents calling me
and saying 'I'm spending $35,000 to send my kid to university, and
you're taking her to the Tenderloin?'" But now that it's working so
well and students are so enthusiastic, there's widespread support.

Like other New Radicals, Don discovered that relationships paved the
way for his new work, giving him street credibility. He lived here as
a young man, some 40 years ago and, more recently, spent time getting
to know people in the area. "Someone will look at me and say, 'Who's
this white guy with his white beard?' and I'll mention someone I
think they might know. Either they relax immediately, or they check
me out and figure out that we're here to help."

Don has also developed a good working relationship with the local
police, something this former hippie never imagined himself doing.
For instance, the police are part of the Tenderloin Hallowe'en party:
they bring food for 400 or so children each year. "When I was young,
it was all about 'we've got to change the world through revolution!'"
Today, he's more open to other people's points of view, and he talks
to his students about what he now believes is true: that it's all
about making a difference in a single person's life. "I tell them,
when you change a person's life, they change others, and the people
they touch do the same. it becomes a geometric progression. it
doesn't take long before you're changing thousands of lives, all
because of that one person."
--

Please share your thoughts by commenting below, or by emailing me at
julia@wearethenewradicals.com.

.

Bobby Seale on 'Chicago 10,' Panther's Effect, Obama

Bobby Seale on 'Chicago 10,' Panther's Effect, Obama

http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2008/10/bobby-seale-on-chicago-10-pant.html

By Roger Catlin
October 22, 2008

In one of the most bizarre aspects of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial
covered in Brett Morgan's film "Chicago 10" tonight on "Independent
Lens" was when Black Panther Party President Bobby Seale was
literally bound and gagged in the courtroom.

He was not gagged at press tour in July when he spoke voluminously
about the film, those times, what's happened since and Barack Obama's
candidacy.

"That year, 1968, was profound for me," he said. "It was the growth
of my Black Panther Party following the death of Martin Luther King.
Bobby Kennedy was killed, and then, there was the lashing of the
Democratic National Convention. And, of course, I wound up on trial
behind that."

But a lot has been accomplished since then, he said.

"I mean, when we started my organization in the mid-1960s, 1966,
there were less than a hundred duly elected black politicians," Seale
said.Today, he added, "there's over 15,000 duly elected black
politicians there, double the amount of women being elected who
weren't being elected at that time, plus the Latinos and other
peoples of color. So I think that's a big change."

Even so, "it's just a continuing thing," he said. "I see a lot of
gain and a lot of problems still yet to be solved."

Indeed, he cites two former Black Panther party members who are now
in the United States Congress -- Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Cal.) and Bobby
Rush (D-Ill.). "We have other politicians being elected in cities all
over the United States of America and various places who were former
Black Panther party members," Seale says.

As for Obama, Seale says, "it's like a progressive necessity, to me,
that he becomes the President of the United States of America in
terms of evolving a psychology for America humanity to understand
that we've somewhat gotten rid of the histories old institutionalized
racist crap that went down in our so-called democracy. That's what
Obama represents in that context."

All of this happened at the TV writers press tour, keep in mind. So
naturally there was one weird exchange. Such as a reporter who
probably thought he was being sarcastic when he asked:

Q. Bobby Seale, have you lost any of your passion over the years? And
if not, what is your secret?

A. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for any
one people to dissolve the political bondage which are connected with
another and to assume among the powers of the Earth to separate and
equal station at which the laws of nature and natures God entitled
them a decent respect to the opinions of human kind dictate that they
should declare the causes which impel them to dissolve their
political bondage with a long train of abuses and use of patience
pursues and invariably invents a design, a design to reduce a people
under absolute despotism, then it is the right of the people to alter
or change that government and provide new guards with a future
security in happiness.

Hardly anybody noticed that this fast-spoken screed was actually the
Declaration of Independence committed to memory. So he added:

No, I don't think I've lost too much passion. I hang in that, and I
believe that. I truly believe in all of this.

.

What Vietnam Teaches Us [By Henry Kissinger]

What Vietnam Teaches Us

http://www.newsweek.com/id/165653

A new look at the brilliant yet flawed McGeorge Bundy illuminates
mistakes we're still making today.

By Henry Kissinger | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 25, 2008

For America, the Vietnam War was the traumatic event of the second
half of the last century. Entered into with a brash self-confidence
after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy,
our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since
the Civil War. As a result, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam two years
after the troops had been withdrawn, and the last Americans left
Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) by helicopter from the roof of our
embassy. No account of that period adequate to the emotion and drama
of the time has yet appeared. The dwindling number of witnesses of
the period remains traumatized by its passions or divided by their
own pasts. For younger leaders, an understanding of the controversies
of their fathers has proved elusive, obliging them to slide into the
same dilemmas in their contemporary policies.

"Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam"
does not fill that vacuum. It does, however, illuminate the five
years (1961–1966) during which the defense of South Vietnam was
Americanized. Tracing the efforts of one of the most prominent public
servants of the time, it seeks to come to terms with America's entry
into its tragedy.

McGeorge Bundy was dean of the faculty when I was at Harvard. For an
entire generation of Harvard graduates, Bundy was the beau ideal of
the academician-activist whose intellectual acuity was matched by
devotion to public service. Brilliant and fiercely articulate, he was
a warm and thoughtful human being behind the Boston Brahmin crust. He
had had a spectacular academic career. Elected to the Harvard Society
of Fellows, he became eligible for a faculty appointment without
having to acquire a doctorate. He became the dean of the faculty at
the age of 34. At Harvard the conviction was widespread that the next
change of administration (whether Republican or Democrat) would find
Bundy (himself a Republican) in high office. Many of his
contemporaries saw in him a future secretary of state.

In 1961, John Kennedy appointed Bundy as national-security adviser.
At that time, this office was considered an essentially
administrative position. In one of the most spectacular career
misjudgments ever, Paul Nitze turned it down in favor of a midlevel
job in an operating department. Bundy created the modern portfolio of
the national-security adviser. Since the flow of memoranda from
various departments concerned with national security had become too
vast, Bundy's office turned into a clearinghouse. Ever since, the
National Security Council has prepared­or, at least, is in perhaps
the best position to prepare­the range of options among which the
president chooses (including, if the occasion requires, options not
put forward by any department). If that task is neglected, the
president flies blindly, driven from crisis to crisis, without the
guidance of strategy.

For five years, Bundy performed his duties with the articulateness
and deftness with which he had managed the Harvard faculty. This
included the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile period and the nuclear
test-ban agreement. Then his grip loosened with the decline in the
fortunes of the Vietnam War, whose public advocate and, to some
extent, co-manager he had become. He retired in 1966, never to hold
public office again.

After leaving office, Bundy became the target of David Halberstam's
"The Best and the Brightest," which used him to illustrate the thesis
that the cream of the establishment led America astray in Vietnam.
The book set the tone for most of the subsequent assessment of the
war. Bundy bore the opprobrium with dignity, never answering the
criticisms directly and perhaps privately agreeing with some of them.
Toward the end of his life, he began, with a research assistant, to
assemble materials for reconstructing the events that had pushed
America from hope to despair. He died before he could begin the manuscript.

Bundy's researcher, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now turned their
collaborative effort and some fragments of Bundy's writing into
"Lessons in Disaster." It's his own effort, representing the
researcher's view, not authorized by the Bundy family. It's also a
strange yet fascinating book. No one is said to be a hero to his
valet; this book permits one to extend the truism to research
assistants. "Lessons in Disaster" is relentlessly hostile to its
subject, not so much to Bundy's person­whom it treats respectfully­as
his policies. With the hindsight of some decades, it helps explain
many facets of Bundy's performance yet misses its tragedy. The book
is an illuminating window into a seminal time. It is also further
evidence of the inability of America to transcend the debates that
tore it apart a generation ago.

Bundy successfully managed the legacy of America's postwar policy in
Europe and toward the Soviet Union. Where he failed was in extending
to Southeast Asia the policies that reconstructed Europe and
eventually won the cold war. The difficulty was that Southeast Asia
presented a different strategic problem. In Europe, governmental
institutions had survived the ravages of the Second World War. The
threats they faced were to their economic expectations­compounded by
the Soviet troops along their borders. The Marshall Plan took care of
the first threat; NATO addressed the second.

None of these conditions existed in South Vietnam. The dividing line
in Vietnam was technically a demilitarized zone never accepted as an
international frontier by Hanoi, which was attempting to undermine
governmental institutions by guerrilla warfare. In this war without
front lines, military containment took on a different meaning. In
Europe, there were established states, the legitimacy of whose
governments was firmly established; in South Vietnam, there was no
legacy of a state at all. Governmental institutions had to be created
while under constant military attack. In Europe, the basic challenge
was territorial integrity; in Southeast Asia, it was governmental legitimacy.

The new Kennedy administration paid lip service to this distinction,
but never solved how to act on it. The Truman and Eisenhower
administrations had slowly increased the American commitment in South
Vietnam. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, Hanoi had
committed its forces in all countries of Indochina. During the
transition period, Eisenhower had told the president-elect that if
North Vietnamese infiltration continued, American combat forces
should be sent to Laos.

The Kennedy administration accepted the conventional wisdom regarding
the issues; it rejected the strategy. Like its predecessors of both
parties, it assumed containment to be indivisible and the domino
effect of the collapse of South Vietnam to be a kind of natural law.
As described by Goldstein, Bundy and his senior colleagues defined
the domino effect as involving the Philippines, Thailand, Japan,
Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan. The new Kennedy
administration even added a philosophical refinement. Vietnam was no
longer treated as one of many fronts in the global cold war but as
the central front. Conventional aggression having been stymied by
NATO, guerrilla warfare needed to be similarly frustrated in Vietnam.
China and the Soviet Union were perceived as part of a joint
enterprise to tip the global equilibrium.

With the perspective of nearly four decades, it is possible to
challenge these assumptions. Communism has proved not to be
monolithic; the dominoes did not fall with the collapse of South
Vietnam (though 10 years of effort may have helped steady them); the
problem of how to deal with guerrilla warfare has grown worse, not better.

Goldstein argues with some justice that Bundy should have raised
these possibilities. And from the present perspective, it would be
the task of the modern NSA to bring such issues to the attention of
the president. But one must remember that governments run by
addressing conventional wisdom, not by challenging it. Caught between
established convictions and his premonitions, Bundy concentrated on
managing the crises in terms of familiar patterns. No cabinet-level
official challenged that established view (not even George Ball, who
opposed escalation in Vietnam for other reasons). Nor did many
observers on the outside.

With departmental memoranda and personal letters seeking to influence
the president, the real debate took place more or less ad hoc in the
meetings of the National Security Council or at informal meetings of
cabinet-level officials. Decisions were reached but no settled
strategy was agreed upon. The administration slid into a series of ad
hoc decisions that pre-empted Kennedy's strategic choice. Presidents,
in any event, are prone to avoid confrontations, having reached their
eminence in part by merging seemingly contradictory constituencies.
Both Kennedy and Johnson, according to Goldstein, occasionally went
so far as to instruct cabinet members on what recommendations they
would welcome at formal meetings in order to avoid having to overrule
some associate openly.

In reading the Goldstein book, one is struck by the informal, almost
conversational, tone of the process as Bundy was feeling his way.
Thus, in November 1961, Bundy wrote to the president: "The other day
at the swimming pool, you asked me what I thought, and here it is. We
should now agree to send about one division when needed for military
action inside Vietnam." Goldstein reports no accompanying options
paper, no definition of the meaning of "about one division," nor a
definition of a desired strategic outcome.

Goldstein leaves little doubt that Kennedy was opposed to sending
combat troops to Southeast Asia. He flatly refused to follow
Eisenhower's recommendation, supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
with respect to Laos in 1961. He resisted similar proposals
concerning Vietnam in 1963. It was more the result of a visceral
reluctance than a strategic judgment. In fact, on the formal level
Kennedy was ambivalent, torn between considering the survival of
South Vietnam essential for national security and being loath to
achieve this goal with American combat forces. That decision could be
postponed in 1963, but it became unavoidable in 1965 when Johnson was
president and Vietnam was on the verge of collapse.

As it happened, Johnson's options and his dilemmas were made more
acute by a decision taken in the last weeks of the Kennedy
presidency, to which the loose procedures of the National Security
Council staff made a fateful contribution.

Guerrilla war in a developing country elaborating its political
institutions almost inevitably produces a dilemma that has heretofore
proved insoluble. Since civil war is ultimately about legitimacy, and
legitimacy is unachievable without security, a gap opens up between
these requirements. Security is impossible without authority;
legitimacy is ultimately unsustainable without consensus. But the
time scale for achieving democratic consensus is longer than that for
bringing about security.

As the guerrilla war raged in Vietnam in 1963, some American
officials became convinced that the governing president's
authoritarianism was a fundamental cause of the impasse. The
administration came to believe that Vietnam's military would provide
a more cohesive and perhaps more democratic governmental framework.
On a weekend when both Kennedy and Bundy were out of town, the
assistant secretary of state, together with an NSC staffer, contrived
an instruction to the U.S. ambassador in Saigon that was used to
trigger a military coup. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were
assassinated. A series of coups followed during which a coherent
strategy became ever more problematic. Hanoi saw in this turmoil an
opportunity to introduce regular combat troops into the South.

Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later. The decision to send
combat troops, left in abeyance in 1963, became Johnson's. Goldstein
traces the evolution of the debate, in which the principal
advisers­Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Bundy­and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff strongly advocated a significant buildup of combat forces.
Goldstein argues that Kennedy, while accepting the domino theory,
would have lived with its consequences, including the communization
of all of Southeast Asia, rather than send a large expeditionary
force to Southeast Asia. But we cannot know his reaction had he been
presented with the strongly held, united views of his principal
foreign-policy and security advisers­assuming that they would have
presented their recommendations with comparable vehemence to a
reluctant president.

When the United States goes to war, it should be able to describe to
itself how it defines victory and how it proposes to achieve it. Or
else how it proposes to end its military engagement and by what
diplomacy. In Vietnam, America sent combat forces on behalf of a
general notion of credibility and in pursuit of a negotiation whose
content was never defined. The credibility point was reflected in an
amazing Bundy statement quoted by Goldstein: that it would be better
for America's credibility to lose after sending 100,000 men than not
to have resisted Hanoi at all.

Another self-inflicted handicap was the reluctance to view Indochina
as a single strategic theater. Eisenhower was almost certainly right
when he described a defense of Laos as essential to the defense of
Vietnam. But Bundy resisted that proposition with the argument to
Kennedy, according to Goldstein, that "Laos was never really ours
after 1954. South Vietnam is and wants to be." This distinction
produced the anomalous situation in which half a million Americans
fought to achieve a stalemate in Vietnam, a military objective
rendered nearly impossible by enemy bases in Cambodia and supply
lines through Laos.

As for negotiation, Bundy argued that once Hanoi's efforts to
dominate South Vietnam were thwarted, an undefined compromise would
emerge through diplomacy­in effect, a strategy seeking stalemate, not
victory. But stalemate violates the maxim that the guerrilla wins if
he does not lose. The escape hatch of diplomatic compromise was based
more on American nostalgia than Hanoi's mentality. Hanoi's leaders
had fought a decade against France and battled the United States for
a similar length of time, not to achieve a political compromise, but
to prevail. The effort required to bring about a compromise was
indistinguishable from the requirements of victory­as the
administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience.

A reviewer cannot pretend to sum up a generation's travail in a book
review. A few observations will be in order:

• WHEN THE PRESIDENT IS ASKED TO CONSIDER GOING TO WAR, HE MUST BE
PRESENTED, ABOVE ALL, WITH AN ANALYSIS OF THE GLOBAL STRATEGIC
SITUATION ON WHICH THE RECOMMENDATION IS BASED.

• THE PURPOSE OF WAR IS VICTORY. STALEMATE IS A LAST RESORT, NOT A
DESIRABLE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE.

• VICTORY NEEDS TO BE DEFINED AS AN OUTCOME ACHIEVABLE IN A TIME
PERIOD SUSTAINABLE BY AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION.

• HAS TO BE PRESENTED TO THE PRESIDENT A SUSTAINABLE DIPLOMATIC FRAMEWORK.

• DIPLOMACY AND STRATEGY MUST BE TREATED AS A WHOLE, NOT AS
SUCCESSIVE PHASES OF POLICY.

• AUTHORITY FOR DIPLOMACY AND STRATEGY MUST BE CLEARLY ASSIGNED.

• THE ADMINISTRATION AS WELL AS CRITICS SHOULD CONDUCT THEIR DEBATES
WITH THE RESTRAINT IMPOSED BY THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE UNITY OF OUR
SOCIETY HAS BEEN THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.

Should Bundy have come to conclusions such as these earlier? This is
the implication of Goldstein's book. But to do so, Bundy would have
had to abjure the views of a generation avowed since Truman's
disputes with MacArthur 15 years earlier­that force should be applied
in minimum increments, that strategy and diplomacy were separate
spheres to be conducted consecutively, that American principles
applied in an undifferentiated manner globally were established
maxims of a successful policy. These principles were implemented in
Vietnam in the early 1960s by the best, not the worst, of their
generation. If the policymakers lacked perspective, their critics
lacked compassion.

Throughout history, every problem America had recognized had proved
soluble by the application of resources and idealism. Vietnam proved
obdurate. Mourning the assassination of a president with whom it had
identified, and perplexed by an impasse to which its own theories had
contributed, the intellectual establishment ascribed its traumas to a
failure of the American experience and the moral inadequacy of its
leaders. This turned the national debate from an argument over
feasibility into a crusade increasingly settled by confrontations
designed to demonstrate a moral indictment. In that sense, Bundy was
victim as much as cause of the forces unleashed as America was
obliged to adapt its history to a changing world.

.

Journey in Vietnam

Low prices, hard-working people, history mark vivid journey in Vietnam

http://www.freep.com/article/20081026/FEATURES07/810260350

Story and photos by ELLEN CREAGER • FREE PRESS TRAVEL WRITER
October 26, 2008

HOI AN, Vietnam -- Temples and monuments are interesting. But they
don't hold a candle to Vietnam's people.

Why? The duality of this nation, with one foot in slow, ancient ways
and the other in a hectic future, begs to be noticed. The only way to
do that is to get out of the tourist bus. Step out of the bubble and
meet people. Walk around. Ask questions. Pay attention.

Since Vietnam normalized relations with the United States in 1995,
the nation of 85 million has soared economically. Skyscrapers rise.
Cell phones spread.

But work here is labor intensive. People still pick rice by hand. If
a tablecloth takes 10 weeks to embroider, so be it. If silk requires
the cultivation of silkworms, consider it done. If a hole needs
digging, bring on 10 men with shovels.

Although Vietnam likely won't meet its goal of 5 million tourists
this year because of the slowing world economy, more than 330,000
Americans have already visited this year, up 6% from a year ago.
Vietnam is not only historically meaningful to Americans, it is
amazingly affordable.

With $3 dinners and $60 hotel rooms, you can spend nearly three weeks
in Vietnam for the same price as a week in Europe. It's also possible
to plan a custom trip at a reasonable price. Best of all, you can
request cultural tourism opportunities that will expand your experience.

The wider you roam, the better you will understand this country.

Here are six indelible images of Vietnam:

Hoi An (central Vietnam)

Mr. Sanh, Mrs. Bay and I sit in a shallow wooden boat on the Thu Bon River.

They drop a trailing net and lift their paddles.

Then ...

Bam! Bam! Bam! They hit the sides of the boat. They give me a paddle.
Bam! I hit the boat. The noise, they say, attracts fish. We paddle
back and pull up the silvery net, revealing four wriggling fish no
bigger than my hand from the brackish river.

We throw the line out again. And again. And again. Along the
riverbanks grow thick water coconut palms. During the Vietnam War,
the Viet Cong hid in those palms, unseen by their enemies.

Mr. Sanh and Mrs. Bay -- I never do find out their first names --
fish to make a living. They fish to eat. They live on the riverbank
in a small concrete house, which has electricity and a TV. So their
whole world is not fishing. Just most of it.

This town, Hoi An, is also an arts mecca, a haven for painters,
lantern makers and silk makers. You can have a custom suit made
overnight. You can buy original art. You can visit a Chinese temple
or Japanese bridge. You can go to the beach on the South China Sea.

Or, you can just go fishing.

Duong Lam (2 hours northwest of Hanoi)

Mr. The Ha Huu brews his own soy sauce and sells it. He knows how to
raise honeybees and grow rice. He lives in a 375-year-old home of red
brick, owned by his family since it was built.

Mr. The's wife serves visitors a complex meal she whips up on two
tiny kitchen burners -- seaweed-wrapped pork, delicate fried tofu,
spring rolls -- while Mr. The regales tourists with the history of his house.

Eleven framed pictures of Catholic saints hang on the walls. They
were given to Mr. The's relatives by missionaries decades ago. He
says he is Catholic. Also Buddhist. Also, like most Vietnamese, he
worships his ancestors.

Mr. The has opened his house to tourists, offering lunch. Afterward,
he takes them on a driving tour of his village, including the pagoda
where he worships and an old Buddhist temple.

Duong Lam evokes an old Vietnam -- no billboards, little traffic and
quiet vistas of farmers in conical hats harvesting rice growing heavy
in the fields.

Mr. The has relatives in America. They lived in Saigon and fled after
the Vietnam War.

They came back to visit him once, but he's never been to visit them.

What do they do in America? I ask.

He shrugs. "Something with fish."

Hanoi (northern Vietnam)

It is pouring rain. I step out from my hotel onto the crazy street,
cars and motorbikes going every which way, heedless of traffic signs,
honking, honking. My umbrella keeps inverting in the post-typhoon
wind. I need another. I walk past many small shops, but I can't see
inside their dark interiors. Then I see a little girl minding a shop.
Behind her is a shelf with one red plaid umbrella.

How much is the umbrella? I ask. She runs to get her father, or maybe
it's her uncle or brother. He says $3. I nod. I give the girl $3. I
pop open the new umbrella and walk down the street, just like a Hanoi
woman, deliberately and with dignity.

I try not to cross the street for fear of being killed by a
motorbike. I look up at wrought iron balconies and slanted red roofs,
at thick electrical lines crisscrossing like spider webs. The city of
6 million is full of funky and colorful French-inspired four-story
houses only about 12 feet wide and very deep, so multiple generations
can live together. On the ground floor is usually a shop. On the
upper floors, the families.

The streets are a maze of all these shops. Different streets have
shops that sell the same thing. So there's the paint street, the
appliance street, the shoe street, the box-and-paper street, like a
mall without a map.

Before I get completely lost, I navigate back to the hotel in the rain.

Cu Da (10 miles west of Hanoi)

A one-legged man in his tiny shop beckons me inside. His shop is part
of a crumbling villa at least 150 years old. His town is billed as
another "ancient village" like Duong Lam, another stop on the
cultural tour I requested. But Cu Da is not ready for tourists.

Inside his courtyard, five dogs whimper and bark. He shouts at them
and they cower away. He just recently moved to this old home, which
looks out on a dirt street. Rain falls steadily. A motorbike roars
past. Across the street is the Nhue River, which smells ripe and
heavy with sewage. Trash litters the bank and boxes float down the
shiny dark surface. The smell is overpowering. Like some other
"former" rivers in metropolitan Hanoi, Nhue has become a sewer.

The village is in an otherwise pretty spot, surrounded by rice
paddies and fields of arrowroot, which the residents make into flour
for vermicelli noodles. Canals contain plenty of fish, caught with
picturesque bamboo fishing traps. Morning glories grow in the canals.
Rice paddies line the road.

Many dogs -- small, short-legged and brown -- roam the streets.
Chickens cackle. Ducks skitter.

Like the chickens and ducks, the dogs will be killed and eaten.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City, southern Vietnam)

Saigon living, admits my guide Bui Do Cong Thanh, is more relaxed
than in the uptight north.

"We are in a hurry here to do business, but there will suddenly be a
moment in the day that we notice we have forgotten to see the bird
singing in the tree," he says. "We love life."

They also love danger. On the roads, everyone goes. Nobody stops, not
even for traffic lights. Wild drivers on motorbikes carry everything
from ladders to stacks of caged birds to babies on their laps.

This has been a sophisticated -- and even decadent -- tourist and
ex-pat destination since the French ruled Indochina in the first half
of the 20th Century. Novelist Graham Greene wrote "The Quiet
American" here. War correspondents hung out at the Rex Hotel, which
today is finely restored and accepting guests.

And tell this to your mail carrier next time you see him. The most
interesting building in Vietnam's largest city (7 million people) is
the Saigon Central Post Office. Built by the French, it has glorious
arching ceilings and a cathedral-like air. A giant portrait of a
smiling Ho Chi Minh hangs high on the wall.

The post office is the second busiest tourist attraction in Saigon,
after the Cu Chi tunnels.

Cu Chi (45 miles north of Saigon)

Squeeze down the stairs and through a low, tiny tunnel. Hunch over
and follow the man with the flashlight.

It is claustrophobic and panic-inducing. Also riveting.

The Cu Chi tunnels are the most famous site from the Vietnam War.

From about 1965 to 1975, 16,000 Viet Cong and their families lived
underground here. Their mission? Hold territory in South Vietnam and
fight off the American attack.

Visitors can see how the Viet Cong expanded into about 125 miles of
tunnels. They dug by hand, using only tiny shovels and small bamboo
baskets. The incredibly complex web was complete with booby traps,
secret smoke-releasing structures, air vents disguised as termite
mounds, and weapons created out of leftover metal bomb parts.

Cu Chi was the terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, connected to North
Vietnam during the war.

Above ground, American forces dropped bombs and chemicals to strip
the land and force the Viet Cong from their underground lair. It did not work.

Now, Cu Chi has a souvenir shop. Its grounds include parts of the
original tunnels visitors can walk through (widened for larger
Westerners), some original bunkers and some B-52 bomb craters. It
also has a visitors center with a cutaway scale model of the
three-level tunnel complex, which looks an awfully lot like an ant
farm. Visitors also see a 10-minute scratchy black-and-white film
about Cu Chi, produced by the Vietnamese in 1967 during what they
call the American War.

"Like a crazy bunch of devils, the Americans fired on women and
children and chickens ... who were destroyed by the bombs and bullets
of Washington, D.C." the movie's narrator says.

My guide says some American visitors are upset by that film. I found
it interesting as an historic artifact.

And a testament that former enemies can turn into friends.
--

Contact ELLEN CREAGER at 313-222-6498 or ecreager@freepress.com.

.

S.F. State to mark 40th anniversary of strike

S.F. State to mark 40th anniversary of strike

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/26/BAI01385JS.DTL

Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2008

For nearly five months in late 1968 and early 1969, near anarchy at
San Francisco State played out on national television as police
thumped striking students with batons and hundreds of students were
arrested after throwing rocks and firebombs.

The strike, led by minority students angered by their lack of
representation on campus, marked the most violent chapter in the
campus' history, paving the way for student activism around racial
issues across the nation. It also fueled the political career of
campus president S.I. Hayakawa, who later was elected to the U.S. Senate.

This week, the campus is holding a series of academic discussions and
cultural activities to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the strike.

Critics of the strike said some of its goals did not justify the
violence. But ethnic studies experts and historians say it brought
positive change to the university, particularly the creation of its
College of Ethnic Studies, which includes Asian American Studies,
Black Studies, La Raza Studies and Native American Studies.

The ethnic studies college now has nearly 50 tenure-track professors
and 20 lecturers, and it is adding the study of Arabs and Muslim
ethnicities as well as race and resistance studies.

Before the strike, the university occasionally offered a black music
or black sociology class taught by part-time faculty, said Joseph
White, who was dean of undergraduate studies and was faculty sponsor
for the Black Student Union at the time.

"Black people were invisible in higher education in California,"
White said. "We were invisible on the faculty, in the curriculum and
on the staff. And we were almost invisible in the student body."

The strike "changed the legacy of San Francisco State," White added.
"It changed San Francisco State to a multicultural campus. Those
ideas we fought so hard for now are a reality not only at San
Francisco State University but all over the United States."

Following revolutions

Black students and the Third World Liberation Front were following
revolutions in Africa, Latin America and Asia in leading the strike
at what was then San Francisco State College.

On Nov. 6, 1968, they called for the closure of the campus until
their demands were met, including the rehiring of Black Panther
George Murray, a graduate student and instructor who was suspended
after he urged black students to bring guns on campus.

But more significantly, the group, which included blacks, Latinos,
whites and Asians, wanted a speedy establishment of a Third World
college representing all ethnicities. They also wanted the admission
of more black and other minority students.

UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Carlos Munoz Jr., who teaches a course
on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, said the San Francisco
State strike was for students of color the equivalent of the Free
Speech Movement in the mid-1960s in Berkeley.

"It sort of brought the civil rights movements around the country to
a more inclusive framework," Munoz said. "Jesse Jackson had not yet
organized the Rainbow Coalition. What happened at State was the first
large-scale multicultural effort and set the tone for that kind of
rainbow politics."

When the strike began, most students went to class. But the strikers
quickly spread chaos on the campus, banging on classroom doors and
threatening to forcibly remove students and teachers if they did not
leave. Strikers also cut electric cords on typewriters, telephones
and copy machines in academic offices, while toilets and bathroom
sinks were backed up and overflowed into hallways, said San Francisco
State Professor Jason Ferreira, who wrote his doctoral dissertation
on the strike.

After a long weekend, campus President Robert Smith called in
hundreds of police in full riot gear, and on Nov. 13, police showed
up at a student gathering and began to arrest students and other
participants, Ferreira said. In response, students began throwing
rocks and the battle escalated until Smith decided to close the
campus indefinitely.

Gov. Ronald Reagan and the California State University Board of
Trustees ordered Smith to reopen the campus. He resigned instead and
was replaced by Hayakawa, an English professor, who opened the campus
Dec. 2 under a "state of emergency," with a ban on picketing, sound
amplification or any other form of protest activity without
administrative approval, Ferreira said.

The next day, which came to be known as "Bloody Tuesday," Hayakawa
ordered police to remove strikers who had assembled. They chased
students around campus, attacking them, Ferreira said.

Later, after a rally with prominent black leaders including Carleton
Goodlett, editor of San Francisco's Sun Reporter, Democratic
Assemblyman Willie Brown, Berkeley City Councilman Ron Dellums and
the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church, police sealed off
the central campus and began "indiscriminately" beating students,
faculty, campus staff, community members, medics, photographers and
even church officials, Ferreira said.

Pioneer in ethnic studies

Early in 1969, the university agreed to many of the student demands,
including the establishment of the nation's first and only college of
ethnic studies. The strike ended March 20.

Retired San Francisco police Lt. George Eimil, who was on campus with
about 100 officers every day during the strike, was critical of the
students' tactics.

"Did their 15 demands justify the bombings? Hell no," he said. "They
placed a bomb in the administrative offices while school was in
session. They were setting fires in the library. They were putting
people's lives in serious danger."

But Laureen Chew, now associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies
and one of nearly 700 students jailed during the strike, said the
battle was necessary. As an Asian American, she had faced racism in
high school and from customers of her parents' laundry shop who
called her father a "stupid Chinaman."

Her conservative parents did not know she was involved in the strike
until she was arrested. She served 20 days in jail in connection with
misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace, illegal assembly and
failing to disperse.

"You have to look at all the social justice agendas that have
happened in the past 40 years," Chew said. "We were the first to put
many of those on the agenda. You have to fight for those things to be
included in the curriculum."

About 500 other colleges and universities have ethnic studies
departments or programs, but San Francisco State University is the
only one with a college of ethnic studies, said Larry Estrada,
president of the National Association of Ethnic Studies and director
of American Cultural Studies at Western Washington University.

Kenneth Monteiro, dean of San Francisco State's College of Ethnic
Studies, said the strike is taught in the campus' courses on history,
organizing and social justice. He said the strike was a key flash
point among similar movements around the world.

"When you say Kent State, I think of anti-war protests. When you say
free speech, I think of UC Berkeley. If you say multi-ethnic
struggles, it is San Francisco State," Monteiro said. "This was one
of the watershed events, that blast that opened the doors. It wasn't
that the other struggles weren't important, but this was the Normandy."
--

If you go

Events marking the anniversary of the strike will be held from 8 a.m.
to 9 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday. Registration and the full schedule of events and speakers
is available at links.sfgate .com/ZFDY.
--

E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.

.

The Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed

The Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/63423/the-moody-blues-days-of-future-passed/

Yesterday's Jukebox

[24 October 2008]
by Evan Sawdey
PopMatters Associate Interviews Editor

When looking back at the Moody Blues from a strictly historical
perspective, one thing becomes immediately clear: it's astonishing
that the band even existed at all.

By all means, the Moody Blues are a band that history should have
swept aside, a group that would be forever relegated to One Hit
Wonder status and left in the margins of the Big Book of Rock
History, but their sheer gall and audacity made them endure in ways
that most people never even thought possible. After all, it was in
1964 that this small time R&B combo scored a UK #1 with "Go Now", a
cover of a song by an obscure singer named Bessie Banks. At the
time, the Moodys didn't even have their most famous lineup. The band
consisted of Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas, Graeme Edge, Denny Laine, and
Clint Warwick­the latter two of which wouldn't even be with the group
two years following "Go Now" and its stream of unsuccessful follow-ups.

With the addition of both John Lodge and Justin Hayward in 1966, the
group suddenly found a dynamic that was comfortable, daring, and
ambitious all at the same time. Though Pinder and Thomas were
hacking away at songs for years, it was Hayward who proved to be
golden touch­a songwriter with a gift for radio-friendly melodies
that were as lavish as they were accessible. All five members were
formidable songwriters, but, really, their label didn't care. Decca
Records­quite famously­had the band on a short leash, as multiple
singles and albums failed to live up to sales expectations, leaving
the band with a heavy amount of debt. Downgraded from headliners to
session musicians, Decca felt that they could use this very
melody-heavy group for a bit of a gimmick: they would bring the joys
of surround sound to Britain.

Commissioned to record a stereophonic "rock" version of Dvorak's New
World Symphony , the band was given a top-notch producer (Tony
Clarke), a full orchestra, and­most critically­conductor/arranger
Peter Knight. Though initial sessions went admirably, the Moodys
just couldn't muster the enthusiasm needed to finish the
project. Still, with an orchestra on hand (and with Knight's
colorful gift for arranging), the band were able to convince Clarke
to record some of the group's own songs. Though Decca was initially
appalled that the band would be brash enough to hijack their pet
project, they let it go through, and the result was Days of Future
Passed, one of the most unlikely bestsellers in all of rock history.

Now, 40 years down the line, we are receiving re-pumped and
repackaged versions of the Moody Blues' "seminal albums", starting
with 1967's Days of Future Passed and spanning to 1972's Seventh
Sojourn. Over the course of these seven remastered discs, we hear
the sound of a band willing to push the very notion of what
"theatricality" is in a pop-rock context, starting out grand before
settling into something of a routine. Though bolstered by some
excellent bonus tracks (b-sides and radio sessions proving to be the
best of the bunch), an album-by-album look at the group's seminal
years yields more questions than answers, with highlights mixed
throughout a series of songs that sound great by themselves, but far
too similar when bunched together side-by-side.

Days of Future Passed still remains the group's calling card, and for
good reason. This disc emerged in 1967, right as the Beatles were
conquering the audio-junkie realm with a little disc called Sgt.
Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sparking a sudden interest in
stereo records, the timing of Future Passed (a title decided by the
record label, of all things) was impeccable. Though the group's
songs melded a whole variety of English pop and folk styles (just
listen to how "The Morning: Another Morning" begins almost as a
RenFaire chorus before turning into something resembling a Broadway
showtune), Knight's lavish orchestral interludes are what ultimately
tied the disc together, giving strength to both the thematic and
melodic cohesion of the disc. Sure, there were moments of unabashed
pop ("Lunch Break: Peak Hour"), but, really, few songs would come to
define the band more than Hayward's own composition, "Nights in White Satin".

Once again assisted by Knight, "Nights in White Satin" wound up
becoming a ballad as omnipresent as it was innocuous, the radio
versions often leaving out the closing spoken word epilogue, as it
didn't really make sense unless you heard the entire album (all while
running dangerously close to pretension, a juggling act the group
would impose on themselves from this album onward). Really, the
Moodys didn't do anything groundbreaking or revolutionary with Days
of Future Passed­they just happened to release the right disc at the
right time. They had a hit song, a hit album, and soon they were
making radio and festival appearances just about everywhere (some of
which are included on this '08 reissue, the best moment being a spry
cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" recorded for BBC Radio).

Yet, as first-time fans came to realize, the band didn't take their
orchestra with them, making it very hard to recreate some of the
album's best moment in a live setting. Though Decca was pleased with
the surprise success of Days of Future Passed, they weren't about to
spring for another orchestra to do the band's bidding. As a result,
the band began shying away from deliberately complex suites, focusing
instead on songs that could be recreated in a live context. Knight
was given the boot, and, to a sad degree, the band's most adventurous
tendencies went with him.

The lack of an orchestra suddenly gave renewed focus to keyboardist
Mike Pinder, who had just discovered a new instrument called the
Mellotron. Really, the Mellotron would be used to recreate as many
string parts as possible, but it also gave Pinder a bit more leeway
as a songwriter, even if he didn't really wind up blossoming as one
until a few albums later. With 1968's In Search of the Lost Chord,
the band began relying on vocal harmonies a lot more, all while
refocusing their sound around what their guitars could do. Opening
track "Ride My See-Saw" was just as joyous as any moment on Days of
Future Passed, but removed from a thematic context, the band's songs
began to show their limits.

In retrospect, there really aren't all that many standout moments on
Lost Chord, which makes the sudden appearance of "Legend of a Mind" a
surprising and welcome relief. "Legend" begins with the famous line
"Timothy Leary's dead...", a song that was never intended as a direct
tribute to the LSD maestro, but, really, it would be hard to tell
that to the hundreds of drug-addled fans that were caught up in the
weed-worthy trips that the Moodys provided on Future
Passed. Somewhat against their wishes, the Moodys were becoming
known as a "drug band", a group whose lavish LPs were a safe haven
for the late-night pot smoker. Unintentional icons during the tail
end of the Flower Power era, the band would eventually rebel against
this image­most notably with the 1973 single "I'm Just a Singer (In a
Rock and Roll Band)"­but for the time being had to sit back and idly
accept it as they began racking up sales and charting singles in the
wake of Future Passed (though why excellent songs like "The Actor"
were never given single consideration still remains something of a mystery).

Now focusing more on studio compositions and less on touring, 1969
brought forth not one but two albums from the Moody Blues: On the
Threshold of a Dream and the laboriously-titled To Our Children's
Children's Children. Both of these discs attempt half-hearted
concepts in the vein of Future Passed, but it's Threshold that comes
off as the creative rebirth the guys needed in the wake of Lost
Chord. Though Threshold opens with an innocuous pop ditty like Lost
Chord did, "Lovely to See You" feels lose and lively in a way that
Chord never did. The jazzy lament "Dear Diary", the first great
Pinder composition "So Deep Within You" (half Bond theme and half
Vegas show opener), and another fantastic Hayward composition in "Are
You Sitting Comfortably" all add up to the best disc the group had
put out since Future Passed, even if the closing "Voyage" suite feels
a bit excessive.

To Our Children's Children's Children starts off as promising with
the fiery "Higher and Higher"… at least until voices come in and
begin to describe some of the most absurd concepts this side of "I Am
the Walrus", or any other latter-day Lennon composition ("the power
of ten billion butterfly sneezes"? Really?). Perhaps collapsing
under the pressure of putting out a second album during the same
year-length period, the joyous moments like "Floating" feel
undeniably forced, while the effective ones are cut all too short, as
when Hayward's acoustic lament "I'd Never Thought I'd Love to Be a
Hundred" clocks in at 65 seconds and leaves us pleading for
more. Too often, this album feels like a desperate grab for
relevance, as the sitars on "Sun Is Still Shining" feel like they've
been tossed in just for the hell of it, much as how the tacked on
Hayward/Thomas single "Watching and Waiting" flat-out lacks the
boldness of earlier triumphs.

By this point in time, the Moodys were slowly playing into their own
established personalities, as their albums­despite retaining the
services of Tony Clarke all the way through­were, quite obviously,
just a collection of good and bad songs, showing no signs of musical
progression whatsoever. 1970's A Question of Balance did little to
quell this notion. Once again, the group opens with a fiery pop
number (the Vietnam War-attacking "Question"), and, once again, we're
given a smattering of songs both good ("How Is It ... ") and anemic
("Dawning Is the Day"). By the time the album reaches the self-pity
anthem "Melancholy Anthem", it honestly feels as if the Moodys have
reached the point of creative bankruptcy… which is what makes 1971's
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour such an unexpected delight. Lead-off
pep single "The Story in Your Eyes"­much like "Ride My See-Saw" only
a few years earlier­is uptempo without feeling too calculated, much
as how the gentle ballad "Emily's Song" (a tribute to John Lodge's
daughter) works simply by not being too sorrowful or indulgent. In
fact, the wiry guitar solos at the end of "After You Came" reveal the
band actually having fun, something that hadn't radiated from the
Moody Blues camp for some time. Though it may not hold the same
gravitas as Future Passed, the shared spirit of camaraderie shines
through both on this and on Seventh Sojourn­the last album they would
release in this "classic era" lineup.

Though essentially a continuation on the sound and vibe that drove
Favour, Seventh Sojourn proved to be a fitting if somewhat
unspectacular swan song for the band. The singles (the prog-affected
"Isn't Life Strange" and "I'm Just a Singer...") were strong, the
album tracks were genuinely pleasant ("You and Me", despite being yet
another anti-Vietnam tune, at least outpaces "Question" in terms of
sheer enjoyability), and even the filler (the opening trio of songs)
is at least passable and not grating. It may not have been the
group's crowning achievement, but it was still a worthy cause for
celebration, all while masking the great battle of egos that was
happening behind the scenes, forcing the group to splinter shortly
after this album's release.

Years later, the band would remain a great concert draw, and they
would even pen strong hits in the '80s ("Gemini Dream", "In Your
Wildest Dreams", really anything with "dream" in the title), but it
was these seven albums that would ultimately come to define the Moody
Blues' legacy on pop music. They never were the most innovative
group, but they didn't need to be. They found a niche style and
played into it very well (and, at times, too well).

There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer and Ned Flanders go
to Vegas, passing by a hotel marquee which reads "TONIGHT: The Satin
Knights Play the Moody Blues­OPENING ACT: The Moody Blues". It's a
very conscious jibe at the band (who lent their voices to the
episode), but it also was a wry note of how the group had become
something of a parody of themselves. That said, few parodies have
ever produced such a wealth of enduring music over such a finite span
of time­a claim that very, very few bands can lay claim to.

.

Days of fear and loathing

Days of fear and loathing

http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/film/days-of-fear-and-loathing/2008/10/23/1224351405607.html

October 24, 2008

A new film casts a calm eye on Hunter S.Thompson, says Craig Mathieson.
--

MOST everything about Hunter S. Thompson was contradictory. As a
writer he was a brilliant one-of-a-kind who spawned a league of
abject imitators.

Politically he was an icon of the counterculture left who proudly
revelled in his right to bear (and often fire) arms. As a person he
was a paragon of excess who did most of his best work while in the
bosom of his family. He craved straight answers, but gave few of his own.

Thompson, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2005, has
been the subject of numerous profiles and documentaries, most of
which he overwhelmed with his mere presence.

The posthumous Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson,
directed by Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, is
altogether something more. It applies a calm, inclusive eye to the
author who turned the haywire phrase "fear and loathing" into a trademark.

"I thought everyone had lost sight of what a great writer Hunter
was," notes Gibney. "These days people in power have got used to
manipulating American reporters by insisting that they play by the
rules of phony objectivity. Hunter didn't play by those rules and he
wasn't afraid to speak truth to power."

The focus in Gonzo is on the late 1960s and '70s, the period when
Thompson was at the peak of his creative powers. His works from that
era, including the books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and
Loathing on the Campaign Trail, are now landmarks, savagely funny and
incisive examples of participatory journalism taken to the extreme
that became known as gonzo.

The film opens with Thompson's last truly great work, a staggeringly
prescient column about what would become the Bush Doctrine written on
the morning of September 11, 2001. But including it makes clear the
barren years that surrounded it, when Thompson was holed up in a
rural Colorado compound, monitoring the world via cable television
and receiving visitors who basked in his torrid celebrity. As
entertaining as the story is, it's ultimately a tragedy.

"He had flashes of brilliance towards the end, but they were few and
far between," concedes Gibney. "None of them had the sting and the
sense of being of the moment as the earlier writing did, except
perhaps for the piece on 9/11."

The film has an all-star cast, with Thompson's friend Johnny Depp,
who played him in the 1998 film adaptation of Las Vegas, providing
readings of his works, while those interviewed include former US
president Jimmy Carter and writer Tom Wolfe. But Gibney himself was
never part of Thompson's circle, allowing him an outsider's perspective.

"That caused problems at first, but it was also an advantage - the
same one Hunter enjoyed covering the presidential campaign in 1972 -
in that you see things with a less jaundiced eye," Gibney says.

The flipside to Thompson's creative energy was a heavy use of
recreational drugs and liquor, as well as a series of marital infidelities.

Thompson's son Juan remembers his father as someone who was just
starting the day when he arrived home from school, while the writer's
first wife Sandi discusses their life together and the events that
culminated in their 1980 divorce.

"He was a pretty irresponsible guy personally, quite narcissistic. A
lot of artists are like that, but it doesn't excuse it. You had to
show that side," Gibney explains. "At the same time he was very funny
and you had to show that too."

Due to the amount of time it took to document the archival footage
held by Thompson's estate, Gibney ended up editing Gonzo and the
documentary he made after it, Taxi to the Dark Side, at the same time
(Taxi went on to win the Academy Award for best feature documentary
earlier this year). He would go back and forth between editing
suites, from Thompson to the story of Dilawar, an innocent Afghan cab
driver who died after being interrogated by US troops.

Together with his earlier work, the 2005 corporate fraud dissection
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi and Gonzo form an
unintentional trilogy about America's change under George W. Bush.
Hunter S. Thompson was depressed by Bush and his Administration,
whereas his Republican predecessor Richard Nixon had enraged him.

"Hunter was a humorist, but his humour sprang from a great anger over
injustice and people who just relentlessly lied," concludes Gibney.

"None of us would give a shit about a guy who took a lot of drugs and
drank a lot of booze if he hadn't been such a gifted writer."
--

Gonzo screens at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until November 4.

.

Revamped Jefferson Starship sets course for Cleveland

Revamped Jefferson Starship sets course for Cleveland, with Paul
Kantner at helm

http://www.cleveland.com/popmusic/index.ssf/2008/10/revamped_jefferson_starship_se.html

by John Soeder / Plain Dealer Pop Music Critic
Tuesday October 21, 2008

PREVIEW
Geezeroo 3
What: Jefferson Starship headlines a benefit concert for the
Cleveland Metropolitan School District's arts programs.
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24.
Also on the bill: Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver
Messenger Service.
Where: House of Blues, East Fourth Street and Euclid Avenue, Cleveland.
Tickets: $25-$150 at the box office and Ticketmaster outlets, or
charge by phone, 216-241-5555 (Cleveland) or 330-945-9400 (Akron).
--

Singer-guitarist Paul Kantner is at the helm of a new Jefferson
Starship, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted group that got its
start in the 1960s as Jefferson Airplane. The band's latest album,
"Jefferson's Tree of Liberty," features covers of folk songs by the
likes of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Kantner, 67, gave us
a ring last week from his home in San Francisco.

Q: Who are we going to see onstage for Jefferson Starship's gig here?

A: We never know these things, do we? [laughs]

Definitely me and our new singer, Cathy Richardson, who is a splendid
human being. And [bassist] David Freiberg, [keyboardist] Chris Smith,
[guitarist] Slick Aguilar . . . and our drummer, Donny Baldwin.

[Singer] Marty Balin is a maybe. . . .He has a disabled daughter at
home [who] he has to take care of.

So we're up in the air on Marty all the time. But the rest of the
band . . . is splendid, so it's not a big worry.

We do a little stuff from [Jefferson] Airplane, from Starship --
Starship 1, Starship 2, Starship 3 -- whatever. Jefferson Starship, I
should say.

Everything from "Ride the Tiger" to "Let's Get Together" to stuff off
our new album.

Q: The folk songs on your new album are timeless. And, for better or
worse, timely.

A: Seems to be that way, with everything going on. . . . They seem to
have an appropriate connection to what's going on, just in terms of
normal life stuff.

I have about 100 old folk songs that I used to do and like and love.
We just went through and picked a bunch.

I have a whole list . . . for a follow-up album of just lovely folk
songs that are just some of the most beautiful songs in the world,
from my point of view.

Q: You're a sci-fi guy, right?

A: Well, sci-fi isn't the only thing I do, you might've noticed. I go
in and out of it in various times and phases.

I found the value of science fiction very early on, in terms of
opening up your imagination to the abstract and the unusual and the
impossible even. In the science-fiction days of my youth, we had all
the great writers like [Isaac] Asimov and [Robert] Heinlein and
[Arthur] Clarke, on and on and on. It was very illuminating for me as
one of the steps in my reading history.

Q: If I have my history straight, you came up with the name Jefferson Starship.

A: True.

Q: Yet you've wrangled in court with former lead singer Grace Slick
and the band's ex-manager over rights to the name. Why not just call
this group something else and spare yourself a headache?

A: Uhhh . . . maybe lack of imagination?

There's a certain strength to that name. . . . I like the history --
the good history of it. And I'm working on erasing the bad history of
it, in the '80s when it went bad. I had to leave the band, it got so
bad. I'm usually the last one at the party, as a general rule.

Q: Did I just hear you say in so many words that we're not going to
hear "We Built This City" in Cleveland?

A: You probably heard that. [laughs]

.

Oh, wow, man. Cheech and Chong ...

Oh, wow, man.
Cheech and Chong says their time apart has gone up in smoke

http://www.twincities.com/ci_10797362?nclick_check=1

By Rodney Ho
Cox News Service
Article Last Updated: 10/24/2008

For anybody who didn't partake in the pot culture of the 1970s,
Cheech and Chong were a curio, a one-joke comedy team. But their fans
enjoyed the joke, making them huge stars, both on comedy stages, on
albums and in film.

But Cheech Marin got tired of it all, leaving behind Tommy Chong in a
bitter trail of ashes in 1985. The pair tried and failed numerous
times to reconcile ­ until now.

And crowds are inhaling tickets fast and furiously, welcoming them
back with open arms. The tour stops Saturday night in Minneapolis.

"Our first concert in Ottawa, the audience seemed to clap for a good
10 minutes before we even started doing comedy," Marin says.

Once they started the act, it was like two decades disappeared in a
cloud of smoke. Cheech and Chong resurrected old comedy routines such
as "Let's Make a Dope Deal," scenes from "Up in Smoke," and classic
songs such as "Mexican Americans" and "Born in East L.A."

"It felt seamless," Chong says.

"He's been out there by himself ­ doing standup ­ struggling,
sweating," Marin teases Chong. "We get back together, and this is easy."

"When a show's over, I'm ready to do it all over again!" Chong adds.

Chong says it's amazing how many younger people who weren't even
alive when they last did a comedy tour in the early 1980s are in the crowd.

"Those aren't old hippies," Chong, 70, says. "Old hippies became old
homeless guys afterward."

"It's a lot of Yuppies and Guppies," Marin, 62, notes. "And their kids."

They even get intellectuals.

"After the Toronto show, this guy came up to Cheech, and he says,
'I'm in the department of philosophy. I teach critical thinking. I
use you guys all the time in references,"' Chong says. "We influence
people to no end."

Chong says the tour came about partly because his kids started
bugging him to make amends with Marin. "My son," he said, "wants a
little inheritance."

Thanks to their films, which remain rental staples at Blockbuster,
Chong notes that "we left this legacy that was handed down like a
rite of passage. It led to all these movies today." Indeed, films
such as "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" and "Pineapple Express"
can trace their roots to Cheech and Chong.

"You can't take pothead movies seriously," Chong says. "Those who do
don't know anything about pot. The whole idea is you get wacked.
Anything can happen. That's what I like about 'Pineapple Express.' "

Is pot culture more acceptable now than the 1970s?

"It's more widespread than before," Chong said. "But let's gauge it
this way: If John McCain wins, pot isn't as popular as it was. If
Barack Obama wins by a landslide, that will tell you right there."

But McCain's running Sarah Palin has admitted to smoking marijuana as
a teenager (as did Obama.) "She's from Alaska," Marin says. "What
else is she going to do there?"

Though both support Obama, they say it might be more fun to do pot
with Palin: "She's loveable," Chong says.

Marin, who opted for a more mainstream acting career after he split
from Chong, doesn't smoke weed anymore. Chong still tokes. In fact,
he spent a few months in jail in 2003 and 2004 for hawking pot paraphernalia.

That experience inspired Chong to write two books, including a recent
autobiography, where he isn't always kind toward Marin. Marin says
he's chosen not to read the book to keep the peace.

"I'm not allowed to," he cracks. "It's unauthorized. I'll have to
break my parole and have to go back."

Marin then adds, "Wait till we make a lot of money on this tour. Then
I can afford to sue him."
--

Who: Cheech and Chong
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis
Tickets: $59.50-$39.50; 651-989-5151

.

'When the White House Was Ours,' by Porter Shreve

'When the White House Was Ours,' by Porter Shreve

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-book25-2008oct25,0,75997.story

By Diana Wagman
October 25, 2008

Porter Shreve's latest novel, "When the White House Was Ours," is an
odd stew of nostalgia and affection, condescension and judgment. It
begins in 1976. The narrator, 15-year-old Daniel, moves with his
mother, father and sister to Washington, D.C., where his father plans
to open an alternative high school in the large but dilapidated house
of the title.

They are the family we recognize from countless novels: wacky and
creative, always teetering on the precipice of financial ruin. Mom
and Dad have teaching degrees, but they have lived a peripatetic
life, and Daniel has little faith in this latest venture. Dad's heart
is, as always, in the right place, but the realities of money,
recruiting and the landlord's demands are not part of his vision.
Throughout, Daniel acts as the more mature man of the family.

Enter Mom's brother, Linc, his wife, Cinnamon (née Cynthia), and
Cinnamon's lover, Tino. They have escaped from a failed commune,
older but no wiser, driving across the country in a VW bug covered
with ads for Salem cigarettes. Obviously they are on the lam. And the
free love they proudly espouse leaves Linc unhappy and sullen. They
represent the end of the '60s era hippies, and the trio is portrayed
as pathetic and ridiculous. They decry "The Man" and use Abbie
Hoffman's "Steal This Book" as their bible. They have no compunction
about stealing or lying to get what they want, but in this
whitewashed tale, they operate in only the friendliest and nonviolent of ways.

Will the school succeed? Will Mom and Dad divorce? Will Linc and his
cohorts get arrested and ruin everything? These are the questions
that keep the plot moving forward. There are laugh-out-loud scenes
and wonderful passages about nuns and teenage sex and dumpster
diving. Shreve is a good writer with many strengths. His previous two
novels, "The Obituary Writer" and "Drives Like a Dream," were
critical successes, but in those books, his characters are subtler
and his stories more complex. The cast here borders on cliché: the
Republican landlord, his rebellious daughter and particularly Quinn,
the homeless black boy who becomes like one of the family.

Politics, specifically Jimmy Carter's campaign for the presidency, is
a large part of this novel. Daniel is obsessed with the presidents.
He writes his own biographies of each and is a fount of historical
and arcane knowledge. It is his most unique feature -- funny, and
well done. In one passage, the family gathers "to watch Texas
Democrat Barbara Jordan become the first black woman to deliver a
keynote address at a major party convention. . . . This period when
we lived in Washington, in a white house not far from the real White
House, will always live in my memory as the pivotal moment for my
family, but it also marked my dawning awareness that our lives were
converging with something larger than ourselves, a whole country at a
crossroads." A crossroads? Or the brink of a hole we have been
descending into ever since? It is depressing to read and remember the
promise the country felt at the election of Carter. It is
discouraging to know the changes wrought so violently starting in the
'60s were not more lasting and significant. Hippies have become
little more than Halloween costumes.

Of course, these things are not Shreve's fault. Still, he seems to be
pointing a patronizing finger at the well-meaning liberals and
shaking his head like Ronald Reagan as he says, "There you go again."
Daniel's little sister demands a "normal school." Mom wants a nice
house with furniture. Daniel misses the prep school where his father
taught before. The overarching message of the novel is that the
ideals of youth cannot be sustained -- nor should they be. We must
grow up in all the conservative and traditional ways. Get a real job.
Give up the dream; it's probably impossible anyway. By making the
father's aspirations and the hippies' attempt at living off the grid
laughable and sometimes stupidly dangerous, Shreve belittles both.

Finally, and unfortunately, the author leaves us with a sentimental
and cloying present-day epilogue. Surprise, surprise! Everyone has
become a respectable, contributing member of society -- that means
financially sound. Even undereducated Linc has serendipitously
founded a frozen yogurt empire. No one actually says the words "sell
out," but they ring loud and clear.
--

Diana Wagman, a Cal State Long Beach professor, teaches screenplay
writing and is the author of the novels "Skin Deep," "Spontaneous" and "Bump."

.

Moon is in the seventh house for CCM's 'Hair'

Moon is in the seventh house for CCM's 'Hair'

http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081026/ENT/810260325/1005/NEWS01

By Ellen S. Wilkowe • Daily Record
October 26, 2008

When Aron Davis of Dover first auditioned for the County College of
Morris production of "Hair," the show had to, well, grow on him.

"I heard about the hippie era and I did some research on it; thank
God for YouTube," he said. "But it sparked an interest in me. It's
more than a rebellion, but a belief."

Billy Long of Rockaway had more of a sign-me-up attitude.

"A rock opera with a nude scene?" he said. "But it's a deep story and
more than hippies and drugs."

Come Wednesday evening, Davis (who plays the character Hud) and Long
(as Berger), alongside 32 other "tribe" members, will revisit 1968 as
they take the stage at the Dragonetti Auditorium on the college's
Randolph campus for the opening night of "Hair."

The Performing Arts production is part of the college's continuing
40th anniversary celebration.

As for the nude scene?

"It will be tastefully done," Davis said. (Tastefully, as in nude
body suits silhouetted behind a screen.)

"It's how they express to society that this is how God made us and to
embrace it," Davis said.

Written by James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot, "the American
tribal-love rock musical" first turned heads in 1968 with its
depictions of illegal drugs, disrespect for the American flag and, of
course, the nude scene.

Staged during the sexual revolution and the anti-war movement, "Hair"
follows the lives of a group of politically active and war-incensed
hippies living together in New York City.

The 40th anniversary committee wanted something "reflective of the
times," chairwoman Bonnie Murphy said.

The other contenders included "A Greek Tragedy" and "Promises, Promises."

"I was a little hesitant at first," said director Marielaine Mammon,
Music Department chairperson and coordinator for Performing Arts.

The committee's endorsement of the controversial play also surprised
Mammon, who provided her own interpretation, figuratively and professionally.

With the ongoing war in Iraq and political unrest "it's the same day,
different page," Mammon said.

With 34 cast members and 42 songs, "everyone has a moment in the sun
to sing," she said.

"Hair's" score includes the popular "Aquarius," "Good Morning
Starshine" and "Hair."

Weeding out songs from the original 58 came down to a matter of
explicit lyrics, but the play still includes the songs most important
to the plot, Long said.

Like the original, CCM's interpretation does retain its share of
sexual overtones, expletives and drug depictions, making "Hair" the
first of Mammon's 64 plays to include a disclaimer.

The play also is big on special-effects lighting and sound, plus
enhancement like removing the first few rows of the auditorium for
audience interaction.

In preparing for their roles, cast members relied on YouTube or the
movie version of "Hair" -- "very different from the play," Long said
-- plus researching each song in depth.

In turn, they walked away with a history lesson or heightened
awareness -- even Mammon.

For example, the song "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" refers to the first
Marine combat battalion that landed in Da Nang, escalating the
Vietnam conflict, said Chris Gordon of Roxbury, who plays Claude.

"And we're still at war," Mammon added. "This made all of us aware of
the concerns that are still with us."

Six weeks in the making, the cast rehearses several nights a week --
even Sundays -- in addition to their normal curriculum, which
includes lots of late-night diner runs.

"The rule is, classes first," Mammon said.

With full-costumed rehearsals going down to the wire until opening
night, sleep will probably take a back burner to the adrenaline
already taking over some very excited cast members.

"Come see the show; you don't see this happening every day," Long said.

In showering her praises on the cast members, Mammon also extended
her graces to the college for its support.

"Next Wednesday is up to them," Mammon said.
--

Ellen S. Wilkowe can be reached at (973) 428-6662 or ewilkowe@gannett.com.

.

When Patty Hearst met revolution

When Patty Hearst met revolution

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/26/when-patty-hearst-met-revolution/

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Patty's Got a Gun:
PATRICIA HEARST IN 1970s AMERICA
By William Graebner
University of Chicago Press, $20, 192 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

Thirty-three years ago come February, the nation was fascinated to
the point of obsession by a criminal trial taking place in
California, a criminal trial with a celebrity defendant, a
prosecution called the Trial of the Century. No, not O.J. Simpson
(that was 1995, not 1976), but you may be forgiven the mistake, for
the same prominent defense lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, was front and
center in both cases. It was the criminal trial of newspaper heiress
Patricia Campbell Hearst, and, unlike the Simpson case, the jury's
verdict went against the defendant. Why that happened is the point of
this very late-blooming study.

One might call William Graebner, emeritus professor of history at
SUNY Buffalo, a cultural historian, as several of his many books have
dealt with contemporary popular mores, but he has also written about
coal mining and the "institution" of retirement, and what he terms
the Age of Doubt, America in the 1940s. So he's a prolific writer
with a wide range of interests and an encompassing take on whatever
subject happens to move him. In this case, it's Patty Hearst,
yesterday a headline, today a bit player in the quirky movies of John
Waters (or should that be the movies of quirky John Waters?).

On Feb. 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of the
super-rich Randolph and Catherine Hearst, was kidnapped from the
modest Berkeley apartment of her fiance, Steven Weed, a graduate
student in philosophy. Her captors were a small band of would-be
revolutionaries who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army
(SLA), and at the time of her abduction had committed one murder and
a number of other violent acts, and would go on, ostensibly with her
now one of them, to rob banks and kill another person. The SLA
consisted of seven young white men and women, all from middle-to
upper-middle-class backgrounds, and their leader and sole black
member, Donald Defreeze, an escaped convict who called himself Field
Marshall Cinque.

Within weeks of her kidnapping, Ms. Hearst was heard on tapes
supplied to the media by the SLA, denouncing her parents and their
lifestyle and announcing she had joined the group of self-styled
urban guerrillas. On April 15, the SLA, with Ms. Hearst dressed as
"Tania," wearing a black beret and carrying a machine gun and now
apparently one of them, robbed a San Francisco bank. In May, two SLA
members, William and Emily Harris, again with the "help" of Ms.
Hearst, robbed a sporting goods store. As a result, many Americans
believed she had renounced her family and her former life and joined
her kidnappers.

The next day, in a horrible confrontation seen live on television,
Cinque and four other SLA members died in a house fire that resulted
from a shootout with the police. Ms. Hearst, still with the Harrises,
was not in the dwelling. After that, there were no messages from
Tania or Patty, and for over a year, the country speculated on where
she might be. Their question was answered on Sept. 18, 1975, when she
and Wendy Yoshimura were captured in San Francisco.

The trial of Patty Hearst was the biggest media event of its kind --
"Criminal Trial of the Century" --since Bruno Hauptmann was convicted
of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby in 1935. Hearst claimed her actions
were the result of fear, intimidation and perhaps also brainwashing.
She said she'd been kept in a closet so small she couldn't lie down
in it, that she had been raped by Cinque, and that she had been told
even if she escaped, the SLA would find her and kill her.

The prosecution said she was, to quote one of their expert witnesses
"a rebel in search of a cause," and the defense said she had no
choice but to act as she had. After a five-week trial, the jury found
Patty Hearst guilty of bank robbery and sentenced her to seven years
in prison. (She served 22 months, and then President Carter commuted
her sentence. President Clinton granted her a full pardon in 2001.)

Why didn't the jury believe Hearst? According to William Graebner,
the jury convicted Hearst because she symbolized the excesses of
overindulgent youth, not to mention the coddled life style of the
very wealthy, and the sexual revolution of the countercultural 1960s
with its sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Instead of looking back toward the victims of the '50s, '60s and
'70s, it looked ahead, suggests Mr. Graebner, to the (supposed)
return of personal responsibility in the Reagan '80s.

"Patty went to jail because the government's story was the one
Americans wanted to hear at that moment in the mid-1970s; they had
had their fill of victims, wanted more than mere survival, and
yearned to shed the cloak of determinism. ... In the end, this story
was less about Patty than about what Americans wanted to believe of
themselves that they were a resilient people, possessed of free will,
capable of transcending the malaise that was settling over the
nation, capable even, as Patricia Hearst had not been, of heroism."

To get to those conclusions, which appear at the very end of this
short and intriguing, if also occasionally annoying, book, the author
dissects what seem to be all the possible explanations for her
behavior - from victimization to paranoia by way of the Stockholm
syndrome and Cardinal Mindzenty and brainwashing.

In earlier chapters, he spends (at least for me) way too much time
listing the reactions of small town editorial writers. When he gets
to the meat of the victim vs. hero argument, it gets downright interesting.

The annoying bits (again, for me) are that this is all secondary
source material; there's no new research here, at least no current
interviews with the principals, from Ms. Hearst to Bailey to Browning
and Bancroft (the prosecutors). There's also way too much reliance on
movies and songs and novels as indicative of national attitudes.
Perhaps I'm being fusty, but sometimes, as has been said, a cigar is
nothing but a cigar.

While it is far preferable to have the questions raised by the
verdict in this case discussed seriously rather than sensationally, a
little bit of on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other goes a long way.
Eventually, I felt as if I were listening to the closing arguments of
both sides being made by the same attorney.

Near the end, William Graebner, who calls his book an "essay," says
it's time for the author to "clear everything up, once and for all.
Reveal the truth. The problem is, it can't be done ... because there
is no clarity to be had, no truth to be revealed. . .." Well, maybe
so, but that's more than a tad unsatisfying. Still, the issues in the
case were never really resolved, so it's useful to examine and think
about them again. As for me, I can never forget reading, during the
trial, a letter to the editor in Time magazine that said that under
Hebraic law, a kidnap victim can never be held responsible for his -
or her - subsequent actions.
--

John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.

.

The Beach Boys And The Satan

DVD Review:
The Beach Boys And The Satan

http://www.bloggernews.net/118291

Posted on October 22nd, 2008
by Simon Barrett

Wind your clocks back to the late 60's, it was a truly interesting
period. High in conflict, the Vietnam War was consuming Americas
youth in frightening numbers, and presidential approval was so low
that the only president with worse ratings is our current one, George
W. Bush. You need an electron microscope and a school full of PhD's
to discover GW's approval rating. My theory is that it is some small
community in the middle of Montana that has no access to TV, Radio,
or the Internet, and has no clue about the world outside of their 40 acres!

Aside from the political issues, the late 60's had huge amounts of
racial tension. Inner cities were burning, literally! The 60's also
gave us the summer of love. The Hippies ruled in Frisco and
Woodstock. The average middle class American was shocked by the idea
of Free Love, Drugs, and musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Enter the Beach Boys. Happy surf dudes from sunny Southern
California, young, good looking guys surrounded by young bikini
wearing female fans. This must have caused apoplexy in the bible
belt, where there is an unwritten 11th commandment 'Thou shalt not
have fun'! For the rest of America though, they represented a new and
and exciting youth. The surfing music style had arrived.

The question is, were they what they seemed? And this is the question
that is explored in The Beach Boys And The Satan. The Satan in this
particular case is none other than everyones favorite cult leader,
Charles Manson.

What few people realize is that Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson was
part of The Family. He had drifted away shortly before the horrendous
murders of Sharon Tate and her friends, but he is forever a part of the story.

The Beach Boys And The Satan is a very well put together movie, using
vintage footage, contemporary interviews, and a thoughtful voice
over, it gives much food for thought. That summer of love, might well
have been something else.

.

Brinks’ Memorial set in Rockland

Brinks' Memorial set in Rockland

http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/October08/20/Brinks_mem-20Oct08.html

October 20, 2008

CENTRAL NYACK – The 27th Brinks' Memorial will be held today at 4
p.m. to mark the date when the Weatherman Underground and the Black
Liberation Army teamed up to commit an armed robbery of a Brinks'
armored car in the upper parking lot of the Nanuet Mall.

In the process, Brinks' guard Peter Paige was moved down by automatic
weapon fire and his partner was wounded.

The suspects then left the scene with a considerable amount of money
and fled in an unknown direction in several vehicles.

A description was broadcast on police radio and a concerned citizen
reported the suspects were changing vehicles behind what is now
Office Depot on Route 59 in Nanuet and one of the vehicles as a U-Haul truck.

A roadblock was set up by Nyack Police at the entrance to the thruway
at Mountainview Avenue.

While the police were questioning the driver of a U-Haul truck they
had stopped, several suspects leaped from the back of the truck and
fatally wounded Nyack Police Sgt. Edward O'Grady and Police Officer
Waverly Brown.

Suspects, who were later captured, were tried in nearby Orange County
Court under extremely tight security.

.

Accused killer convicted of crack charge [Harold Taylor]

Accused killer convicted of crack charge

http://www.newsherald.com/news/killer_69066___article.html/accused_panama.html

October 23, 2008
By David Angier / News Herald Writer

PANAMA CITY ­ In the span of two years, Harold Taylor went from being
a quiet Callaway neighbor, to an accused cop-killer to a convicted felon.

Jurors on Thursday convicted Taylor, 59, of purchasing a rock of
cocaine on Dec. 6, 2007, from an undercover deputy. He faces up to 15
years in prison when Circuit Judge Richard Albritton sentences him Dec. 9.

The transaction was caught on video and audio tapes, which were
played for jurors during the trial. Taylor bought $20 worth of the
drug, but apparently disposed of it between the transaction and his
arrest at his car door.

Taylor's lawyer, John Beroset of Pensacola, told jurors in his
opening statement that Taylor had done nothing criminal that night.

"All the evidence is going to show in this case is Harold Taylor
talked to an undercover officer," Beroset said. "That's it."

Prosecutor Brian Barnes, however, said the crack rock may have been
dropped and blended in with the gravel on the ground. It wasn't
important, he said, to a determination of guilt.

"He was not charged with possession of cocaine," Barnes said. "He was
guilty of this offense when he took that $20 bill" and bought the crack rock.

Taylor was arrested in January 2007 on a warrant out of California,
charging him with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. California
authorities accused Taylor and six other men of attacking an
Ingleside police station on Aug. 29, 1971, with the intent to kill
everyone inside.

Investigators said Taylor was a member of the Black Liberation Army,
an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. During the attack on the
station, a police sergeant was shot and killed.

Authorities dropped the conspiracy charge a short time later, saying
the statute of limitations had expired. Taylor was released from jail
after posting a $350,000 bond, but California authorities have yet to
transport him out of the area.

Apparently, the murder charge still is pending. At the time of his
arrest on that charge, his neighbors described him as quiet and solitary.

Prior to the trial starting Thursday, Albritton had to decide whether
to allow several witnesses to testify. Beroset argued that three
people Barnes intended to call had not been listed as witnesses.
Barnes, who recently inherited the case through the reassignment of
prosecutors, said the witnesses were included in discovery and the
defense would not be prejudiced by their testimony.

Beroset said the rules for listing witnesses are specific. Barnes
acknowledged that it is the state's duty to disclose witnesses, but
said lawyers "practice informal discovery in Bay County." Senior
prosecutors Joe Grammer and Mark Graham were assisting Barnes in his argument.

Albritton said there was a violation of the discovery process, but
said it was trivial and would not prejudice the defense. He told
Barnes, however, that he was tired of seeing these problems in his court.

"This is happening over and over in this court," Albritton said. He
said he wasn't blaming Barnes specifically, who is new to his
division, but said if any prosecutor is not ready for trial, he would
be "glad to give you more time. Spread that word when you get back
across the street" to the State Attorney's Office.

.

Student activist group vows to avoid radical past

Student activist group vows to avoid radical past

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/news.aspx?id=101959

by Jason M. Breslow
Oct 23, 2008

WASHINGTON ­ Student activist Malcolm Harris is no William Ayers, but
he is plenty familiar with the attacks on Barack Obama for his
connections to the onetime radical. So Harris expected a question or
two about his own activism and Ayers' was bound to come up. If he was
offended, it barely showed. More than anything, Harris was puzzled.

"We're less connected than Barack Obama to Bill Ayers and that's not
very connected at all," Harris said. "He has no part in our organization."

Harris belongs to the University of Maryland at College Park chapter
of Students for a Democratic Society, the activist group that
unraveled late in the 1960s when a fraction of members, including
Ayers, split off to start a more radical group known as Weatherman,
and later the Weather Underground. The group gained notoriety for its
violent approach to protesting the Vietnam War; Weather announced a
"declaration of war" on the United States and claimed responsibility
for several domestic bombings.

More than three decades later SDS is alive again, drawing a new
generation of youth both dismayed by the current state of American
politics and attracted to the original organization's commitment to
the concept of "participatory democracy."

In the two years since the new SDS was launched, approximately 2000
students have joined the more than 100 chapters that have sprung up
on college campuses.

There are chapters at old bastions of student activism, such as
Columbia University and the University of Chicago, and less obvious
spots, such as the University of North Dakota. And while members of
the old guard helped the new SDS get established, they have minimal
influence on the group.

"We are our own generation with our own needs and our own desires,
and SDS in the 60s has some really good lessons for us, but they're
not, you know, they're not that relevant," said Jon Berger, a
government and politics student and SDS member at Maryland.

"Their on their own, as they should be, and making their own
decisions, as they should be," said Paul Buhle, a member of the
original SDS and senior lecturer in history and American civilization
at Brown University.

One of the biggest lessons learned from the old organization was the
pointlessness of violence.

"I would say that bombing a building is even a less radical action
than organizing a student strike because bombing a building doesn't
address the root causes of problems that we're seeing," said Berger.

"We don't blow stuff up. We promise," said Harris.

Nor should they, warned Mark Rudd, a former Weather Underground
leader. Rudd, who describes himself these days as a "progressive
Democrat," said the more radical activists become, the more they risk
isolating themselves.

"I'm not going to give them advice, except for whatever they do, aim
for a mass movement," Rudd advised. "Don't isolate yourselves and
become merely a subculture," he added.

Another lesson new SDSers took away from their predecessors was to be
more inclusive of the views of all members, as opposed to just those
of white males. Multiple caucuses have formed within the new SDS,
such as the "Queer Caucus," the "Womyn's Caucus," and the "Persons of
Color Caucus."

"We all have different ideas, different political beliefs, but we
organize around the causes we have in common," said Jevonne Bowman,
who in early September founded the SDS chapter at Howard University.

Partly due to this emphasis on inclusiveness, the new SDS is more of
a multi-issue organization than the original, which focused primarily
on racism and ending the Vietnam War. And while the war in Iraq is
certainly a top concern for SDS, it does not always take precedence.

The 15 or so members at Howard, for example, are seeking to
strengthen their university's commitment to the environment and
sustainability. At the larger U. of Maryland chapter, members have
made student debt and the cost of tuition their top priorities.

The scattered focus of the new SDS is also the consequence of a much
less centralized power structure than the one that held sway under
the original group, which was founded in 1962. There is no national
office, nor are their national elected officials. Instead, members
across the nation mainly organize over the Web through multiple
listservs, blogs, and social networking sites such as Facebook.

SDS is "clearly trying to respect that local autonomy," said Edward
P. Morgan, a professor of political science at Lehigh University and
author of "The 60s Experience: Hard lessons about Modern America."

"At some level that's going to muddy the message," according to Morgan.

SDS has thus far sought to take more creative approaches to getting
out its message. To mark the anniversary of the war in Iraq, for
instance, Washington area SDS members held a "Funk the War" dance
party at the offices of companies the organization sees as profiting
from combat.

"We dance, we throw glitter. It's a really good time," said Bob
Hayes, a mechanical engineering student at Maryland, who along with
Harris helped found the chapter there.

"At the same time we send the message that students are no longer
accepting this war and that war based on empire, or war in general,
is not something we can tolerate," Hayes said.

Hayes said he and Harris started an SDS chapter because they wanted
to belong to a group that approached issues "from a different
direction than other groups that existed already."

Similarly, Jevonne Bowman at Howard, said she was inspired to start
an SDS chapter because she wanted more of a voice in campus matters.

"Just because someone is older doesn't mean that they're wiser … We
are taking our power back," Bowman said.

Despite her desire for more of a say, Bowman is still not sold on the
power of voting and said she is unsure whether she will vote on Nov. 4.

Malcolm Harris expanded on Bowman's concerns. Within SDS, he said,
"there are people who think voting is counterproductive and there are
people who think voting is a necessary half measure that's not going
to get you everything you want but it's part of playing the game."

And although he described his political views as in line with
"leftist strategic essentialism," Harris said he intends to vote for
Obama. Berger and Hayes said they both plan to vote for a third-party
candidate, but only because their home state of Maryland is already
plenty blue.

.

Obama's Foundation Funded the Former "Communist Party" Leader

Obama's Foundation Funded the Former "Communist Party" Leader

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=38090

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=74B7DB99-A934-4340-9D46-1438C29400C3

By Matt Hadro
CNSNews.com | Monday, October 27, 2008

A foundation chaired by Barack Obama that was designed to improve
Chicago public schools gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the
Small Schools Workshop, an organization led by former Weatherman Bill
Ayers and by Michael Klonsky, a former chairman of both Students for
a Democratic Society and, according to The Washington Post and New
York Times, a group called the "Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)."

"Ayers and an old comrade from SDS, Mike Klonsky, run the Small
Schools Workshop to mentor and provide guidance and technical support
to educators seeking to start small schools," The Chicago Tribune
reported on Sept. 16, 2001.

In a September 6, 1977 article headlined "China's Ideal American;
U.S. Marxist Gets Red-Carpet Welcome in China," The Washington Post
said Klonsky was "chairman of the newly organized Communist Party
(Marxist-Leninist) of the United States of America."

"Secretary of State Cyrus Vance got a good reception in Peking last
month, but nothing like the red-carpet treatment received by that
distinguished representative of the American people, Michael
Klonsky," the Post reported, before asking: "Michael who?"

Answering its own question, the Post said: "Klonsky, as it turns out,
is the chairman of the newly organized Communist Party
(Marxist-Leninist) of the United States of America, an amalgam of
various pro-Peking leftist troops whose memberships are not thought
to total more than a few hundred people--if that. Klonsky enjoyed a
period of notoriety during the late 1960s when he headed Students for
a Democratic Society and, for the first time, brought a radical
Communist rhetoric to that New Left organization."

The August 26, 1977 New York Times, citing Klonsky as leader of the
Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), reported that he was one of only
five Americans other than Secretary of State Vance and former
President Richard Nixon and two Chinese-American scientists to have
met with new Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hua Kuo-feng.

According to publicly available IRS 990 documents, the Small Schools
Workshop that Klonsky ran with Bill Ayers received at least $800,000
from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) between 1998 and 2002.
Obama chaired the CAC.

Leftist Activist

Klonsky "spent his college years in the late 60's and early 70's as
an activist at what is now California State University, Northridge,"
according to a March 5, 2000 story in The Chicago Tribune.

It added: "Mike Klonsky, who teaches education at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, was a member of the Students for a Democratic
Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)."

Klonsky in 1968 "was national chairman of the S.D.S. and a
demonstration organizer" during the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, The New York Times reported on Aug. 26, 1996.

In an Aug. 24, 1996 piece in the Toronto Star that described Klonsky
as an "angry student organizer" during the 1968 Democratic
convention, Klonsky was quoted as saying he had entered the
"political process."

"He heads a project to revitalize Chicago's inner city schools," the
Star reported. "He shows up at the office in jeans and a T-shirt. He
is speaking out against racism, working with the poor and railing
against the rise of right-wing politics in America."

"We have to keep our guard up, make sure that progressive people are
still active and conscious and aware," Klonsky told the Star. "I've
become part of the political process."

When the SDS splintered in 1969 ­ in what The Chicago Tribune
described as "a showy and disastrous split"--Ayers, his now-wife
Bernardine Dohrn and others formed the violent Weatherman faction.

"I led the fight against the Weatherman," Klonsky told the Tribune in
Sept. 2001. "I wasn't big on blowing up toilets and statues."

Klonsky then founded the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) in
June 1977 in the Midwest, according to the Washington Post's
September 1977 article, after which he traveled to China in July 1977
and met with the Chairman Hua Kuo-feng of the Chinese Communist
Party, who gave him, according to the Post, "what still stands as the
warmest reception ever given an American by the new Chinese leader."

"Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien told Klonsky at the banquet that the
founding of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of the United
States reflects the aspirations of the proletariat and other working
people of the United States and is a new victory for the
Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States," the Post reported.

The Post continued: "Klonsky replied, according to the Chinese news
agency, 'As a Marxist-Leninist party in one of the two superpowers,
and recognizing our responsibility to lead the struggle to topple the
U.S. imperialist ruling class, we are determined as well to make a
contribution to the worldwide struggle against the two superpowers,
the United States and Soviet social-imperialism, the main enemies of
the peoples of the world.'"

The party collapsed in 1981, however.

"Between 1979 and 1981, the CPML, which had become internationally
recognized as China's favorite American party (CPML chairman Mike
Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to
Beijing), dissolved in a rapid series of factional splits and
departures," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow wrote in
July 9, 2002 Village Voice review of "Revolution in the Air: Sixties
Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che" by Max Elbaum.

School reform advocate

In the 1990s, Klonsky became a professor at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, where he and Bill Ayers would join forces in the
Small Schools Workshop.

"We started the Small Schools Workshop in 1991, with the goal of
supporting Chicago's reform-minded teachers as they tried to create
new, smaller learning communities," Klonsky and Ayers wrote in a
February 2006 article they jointly authored for Phi Delta Kappan
magazine, titled "Renaissance 2010: The Small Schools Movement Meets
the Ownership Society."

The bio-line for the article specified that Ayers founded the Small
Schools Workshop in 1991 and that Klonsky "has served as the
workshop's director since 1993."

"Our vision of small schools was closely connected with issues of
social justice, equity, and community," they wrote.

Klonsky repeatedly has been identified as "co-director" or "director"
of the Workshop.

An Aug. 26, 1996 Associated Press story noted: "Mike Klonsky, a
former SDS leader and '68 protester, is helping reform Chicago's
troubled public schools as co-director of the Small Schools Workshop
at the University of Illinois-Chicago."

A March 5, 2000 Chicago Tribune story said Klonsky "remains active as
co-director of the Small Schools Workshop based at UIC (University of
Illinois at Chicago)."

A 2006 news release from Nova Southeastern University in Florida,
announced Klonsky's arrival there, identifying the educator as
"director of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago, Illinois."

Of his collaboration with Ayers, Klonsky told the Chicago Tribune in
2001: "Now we're on the same train. We still disagree about things,
but . . . as long as we don't talk about '69, then we're OK."

"We've learned how to work within the system. The fight to save and
improve public education embodies all the issues we were fighting for
back then," he added.

Reached by phone by CNSNews.com, Klonsky declined to be interviewed.

.

Ayers Fracas Airs New Left’s Old Grudges

Ayers Fracas Airs New Left's Old Grudges

http://www.forward.com/articles/14437/

By Marissa Brostoff
Thu. Oct 23, 2008

Toward the end of a long campaign in which Barack Obama spent months
trying to reassure Jewish communities that he does not secretly
harbor an anti-Jewish agenda, something ironic happened: John McCain
tried to tar his opponent by linking him, indirectly, to an
organization associated with a particularly Jewish strain of 1960s radicalism.

Bill Ayers, the fugitive activist turned education professor with
whom McCain has attempted to link Obama, was a leader of the
Weathermen, a leftist organization that advocated the overthrow of
the United States government in the 1960s and 1970s. The group was a
small revolutionary offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, a
national organization that played a major role in the creation of the
student antiwar movement ­ and that historians estimate was 40-50% Jewish.

Judging from the response to Ayers's return to the headlines, the
legacy of the Weathermen does not rank high on the list of voters'
concerns in 2008. But for some segments of the left and right,
intense and sometimes ambivalent feelings about the group are still
very much alive ­ and nowhere is this more true than among the
generation of Jewish activists who cut their political teeth in 1960s
radical politics.

"They were trying to protest this war and these injustices in a very
dramatic way," said Larry Bush, who was active in the 1970s in
Prairie Fire, a political organization with ties to the Weathermen.
Bush is now the editor of Jewish Currents, the magazine of the
progressive Jewish organization Workmen's Circle. "That doesn't mean
that they might not have gotten really out of hand. But I have to
admit with some embarrassment that as a radical teen I was excited by
the bombings."

For most Americans, these reminiscences likely seem as obscure as the
forgotten battles between Trotskyists and Stalinists among leftists
of an earlier age. The McCain campaign has called Ayers a terrorist
but has barely brought up the Weathermen and its ideology.

"Americans don't know the difference between socialism and
communism," said historian Michael Kazin, who was briefly a member of
the Weathermen before the group engaged in violent action, and has
since become a fierce critic. "Palin and McCain have tried to connect
Obama to socialist ideas, but I think they've probably dropped that
because people don't know what they're talking about."

For the people involved, however, much of this history is still
incredibly fresh.

"Everybody knew people who joined the Weather Underground," said
Ronald Radosh, a historian of the Cold War and a onetime SDS faculty
adviser at the City University of New York who began to drift
rightward in the late 1960s. "'I don't agree with their tactics,'
people would say, 'but I like what they're doing.'"

The Weathermen became the Weather Underground Organization in 1970
when members "went underground," hiding from the law and disguising
their identities while plotting attacks on the government. The group
planted bombs outside government buildings and has been accused of
attacking government officials.

There were only around 200 Weathermen, and no statistics exist on
whether the group was Jewish to the same degree as SDS ­ but, as in
the more mainstream organization from which it broke off, "certainly
some of the key people in the Weathermen were Jewish," Kazin said.

Indeed, Ayers's wife Bernardine Dohrn, one of the principal leaders
of the organization, had one Jewish parent. Other prominent Jewish
members of the Weathermen included Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert,
who were convicted of murder after a 1981 armed robbery; Ted Gold,
who was killed when a bomb he was helping to prepare went off
accidentally; and Mark Rudd, who spent most of the 1970s underground
before he turned himself in to police, in 1977.

The prominence of Jews among the Weathermen has not gone unnoticed
since the group has emerged in the news. On David Duke's Web site,
the former Ku Klux Klan head claims that Obama had ties to the
organization, which he calls a "Jewish-led communist gang."

"Nobody else has the guts to pick that up," said Rudd, who is
currently an organizer for a new incarnation of SDS.

Now, 40 years after the formation of the Weathermen, former members
of the group and other New Left activists are still arguing about the
ideologies of that chaotic time, but also about what led so many
Jewish young people to become involved in New Left movements like the
Weathermen.

"There are so many different theories," said Dick Flacks, a sociology
professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who helped
found SDS.

Some historians, including Radosh, have argued that the Jewish youth
involved in the Weathermen and other radical organizations

were predominantly red-diaper babies continuing a tradition of Jewish
leftism inherited from parents and grandparents active in the labor
and socialist movements. Another, more subtle theory, says these
youngsters rebelled against their parents' Stalinist orthodoxy by
embracing Maoism.

Rudd took issue with that theory in a talk he gave at the New Mexico
Jewish Historical Society in 2005. Rudd contended that most of his
peers in SDS were nice Jewish kids from the suburbs who bought into
the American dream until they made it to elite universities, where
they realized that white Protestants still ruled.

Even Philip Roth, a generation older than the student radicals,
tackles the question in his classic novel "American Pastoral," in
which a Jewish daughter of privilege becomes a fugitive in a movement
much like the Weathermen.

The activists-turned-historians have not reached a consensus about
whether the Weathermen's violent tactics represented a complete
betrayal of what had begun as a nonviolent protest movement, or
whether they were an understandable ­ if ultimately unjustifiable
­response to the movement's failure to end the Vietnam War through
nonviolent means.

This dichotomy has played out in the current controversy over Bill
Ayers. More than 3,000 educators signed a petition recently in
support of Ayers, prompting an angry response on the Web site The
Daily Beast from Paul Berman, a onetime SDS member who has written
extensively about the 1960s.

Interestingly, though, several individuals contacted for comment on
this article seemed to have called a tacit moratorium on arguing
about the Weathermen. They declined to speak about the group ­ until
after the presidential election.

.

Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Saunders dies

[2 articles]

Merl Saunders dies at 74; keyboardist collaborated with Grateful
Dead's Jerry Garcia

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-saunders27-2008oct27,0,5811025.story

Merl Saunders earned recognition for his collaborations with Grateful
Dead front man Jerry Garcia.

Times Staff and Wire Reports
October 27, 2008

Merl Saunders, a keyboardist best known for his collaborations with
Grateful Dead front man Jerry Garcia, died Friday at Kaiser
Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco of complications from a
stroke he had several years ago. Saunders was 74.

A musician who worked in a variety of genres in a long and varied
career, Saunders played piano and keyboard but favored the Hammond B3
organ. He led his own bands and worked with an array of musicians,
including the blues-oriented Bonnie Raitt and B.B. King, jazz legend
Miles Davis and the jam band Phish.

He played on the Grateful Dead's 1971 album "Grateful Dead," but it
was his collaborations with Garcia away from the group that earned
him lasting notice. Starting in the 1970s, they worked on a variety
of projects and recorded several albums together, including "Heavy
Turbulence," "Fire Up" and "Live at the Keystone." Years later they
released the popular New Age album "Blues From the Rainforest."
Saunders later released a video chronicling his journey to the Amazon.

Garcia credited Saunders with teaching him the Great American
Songbook and expanding his knowledge of harmony.

"He taught me music," Garcia said.

Saunders said their association had a "charisma and chemistry you
couldn't question."

"We wouldn't play together for a couple of years, then we'd walk
onstage and sound like we'd been playing together every day,"
Saunders told the Los Angeles Times shortly after Garcia's death in
1995. "That's called knowing. Sometimes I still play off him; I hear
what he's doing, the notes he'd be playing, even though he's gone."

Born in San Mateo, Calif., on Feb. 14, 1934, Saunders went to high
school in San Francisco. Singer Johnny Mathis, a friend from those
days, played with Saunders in a high school band. Saunders served in
the Army for four years in the 1950s before working as musical
director for Oscar Brown Jr.

He is survived by his sons Anthony and Merl Jr. and a daughter, Susan.

A memorial service is scheduled to be held Wednesday at 11 a.m. at
First AME Zion Church, 2159 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco.

--------

Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Saunders dies

http://www.newsweek.com/id/165874

Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Merl Saunders dead at 74 from
complications of stroke

AP
Oct 26, 2008

(SAN FRANCISCO) Merl Saunders, a jazz and rock keyboardist who
collaborated with iconic acts including Miles Davis and the Grateful
Dead, has died. He was 74.

Saunders died Friday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San
Francisco of complications due to a stroke, said his son, Merl Saunders Jr.

"We loved him very much ­ and we know that you, his fans, did too,"
his family said in a statement posted on Saunders' Web site. "He was
a special man, a beautiful companion, father, grandfather, and family
patriarch, and the proof of that spirit is in the way you've reached
out to us at his passing."

Born in San Mateo, Calif., Saunders attended high school with Johnny
Mathis in San Francisco. One of Saunders' very first performances was
a high school event with Mathis, Saunders Jr. said.

Some of Saunders' most famous music was made in the 1960s and 1970s
when he teamed up with the Grateful Dead's lead guitarist and singer,
Jerry Garcia. The Saunders-Garcia Band recorded two records in the
1970s and the two would play together on an array of projects until
Garcia's death in 1995.

In 1990 Saunders and Garcia released the album "Blues from the
Rainforest" that achieved success on the new age music charts.

Saunders is survived by his longtime companion, his two sons and a daughter.

.

Hal Kant dies at 77; lawyer represented the Grateful Dead

Hal Kant dies at 77; lawyer represented the Grateful Dead

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-kant26-2008oct26,0,5755711.story

Hal Kant, principal lawyer for the Grateful Dead for more than 30
years, has died. He was 77.
By Dennis McLellan

October 26, 2008

Harold "Hal" Kant, the Grateful Dead's longtime principal lawyer and
corporate general counsel who spent more than three decades helping
protect the legendary rock band's lucrative musical legacy, has died.
He was 77.

Kant died of pancreatic cancer Oct. 19 at home in Reno, said his son, Jonas.

Once described in the National Law Journal as a "conservative,
Republican, poker-playing opera fan," the bearded, Bronx-born lawyer
launched his more than 35-year association with the Northern
California band in 1971.

Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir described Kant last week as a "dear
friend," who was "most instructive to us."

"The Grateful Dead was known for its revolutionary approach to the
music industry, and Hal was part and parcel of that," Weir said in a
statement. "We wanted a place for humanity in a business that more
resembled a nightmare circus than much else, and he helped us find it."

With tongue in cheek, Kant's Grateful Dead business cards showed his
title with the band, whose lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, died in
1995, simply as "Czar."

"He oversaw every aspect of their business, whether licensing,
touring, trademarks, merchandise or Garcia getting busted for drugs,"
said Jonas Kant, a music lawyer and a senior vice president at
Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

"They were known for being a free-loving, peace-loving band, but he
helped them run everything like a structured business," he said.

Kant, who accompanied the band on various tours, "did all of their
recording and music publishing agreements," his son said. "He was
renowned for being very much ahead of his time in terms of protecting
the artists' and songwriters' rights."

Kant ensured that the master recordings of the Grateful Dead's music
would be owned by the band, his son said. He also enlisted an Oakland
law firm to handle enforcement of the band's trademarks.

Dennis McNally, author of the 2002 biography "A Long Strange Trip:
The Inside History of the Grateful Dead," said Kant "was a
significant force in keeping them together by having the business
function well so that they could do what they wanted to do, which is
play music."

When Ben & Jerry's ice cream produced a new flavor, Cherry Garcia, in
the early 1990s, McNally wrote in his book, the company did so
without even discussing the idea with Garcia. Although Garcia was
unconcerned when it was first brought to his attention -- "At least
they're not naming a motor oil after me, man," he said -- Kant
convinced him that the issue should be addressed.

As recounted by McNally, Kant told Garcia: "They will name a motor
oil after you if you don't confront this, Jerry. You'll have no
control over your name at all."

Garcia finally told Kant, "If it bothers you, go ahead."

"In the next few years," McNally wrote, "Jerry would have no problems
in spending the large sum of money he'd earn thanks to the letter
Kant wrote" to Ben & Jerry's.

Kant remained the band's general counsel until around 2000, but he
continued to represent Ice-Nine, the band's music publishing company,
until his death.

He also was a lifelong poker player, who cut classes at DeWitt
Clinton High School in the Bronx to play penny poker with other kids
in a clubhouse in the cellar of a tenement house.

With a penchant for wearing a cowboy hat and boots and smoking Cuban
cigars, Kant began playing casino poker in 1984 and won the World
Series of Poker pot-limit Omaha event in 1987.

"One of the primary assets of poker is learning to pay attention,
studying what other players are doing," Kant told the National Law Journal.

At both the gaming table and the conference table, he said, the rule
he followed is "you have to be willing to go all-out. Bluffing is OK,
but you have to be willing to take the downside if you lose."

The son of eastern European immigrants who owned a dry-cleaning store
in the Bronx, Kant was born July 29, 1931. He received a bachelor's
degree in psychology from the University of Washington and a master's
degree in clinical psychology from Pennsylvania State University.

After a stint in the Army working as a psychologist at a military
hospital, he went to Harvard, where he received his law degree with
honors in 1958.

He was a clerk for Judge William Orr of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals in San Francisco before joining a Beverly Hills law firm in
1959. After a few years, he launched his own general business-law
practice and eventually began representing movie industry clients.

During that time, he told the Boston Globe in 2000, he noticed that
"the only attorneys in the music business were the attorneys for the
record companies, and their job was to get as much money as they
could for their company and leave as little as possible for the
artists. I decided maybe the other guys should have an attorney, too."

He began by handling the Association and in time represented artists
such as Sonny & Cher, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Big Brother and the Holding
Company, Hot Tuna, and Captain Beefheart.

The Grateful Dead made up only a small part of his work until 1987,
when, according to the National Law Journal article, the band's
revenues soared from $15 million a year to $100 million a year.

Kant then withdrew from the rest of his practice and devoted the
majority of his time to the band.

Kant, who was executive director of the Legal and Behavioral
Institute in Westwood in the '70s, also co-wrote the 1973 book
"Pornography and Sexual Deviance."

In addition to his son Jonas, Kant is survived by his wife, Jesse;
two other sons, Garth and Tony; his sisters, Charlotte Silverman and
Thelma Sameth; his stepchildren, Cameron Cassidy Sloane and Sean
Cassidy; and five grandchildren.

Donations in his name may be made to the Tower Cancer Research
Foundation in Los Angeles at www.towercancerfoundation.org/donations.html.
--

McLellan is a Times staff writer.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

.

Singer’s Album Brings Her Own Heritage Full Circle

Singer's Album Brings Her Own Heritage Full Circle

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/nyregion/long-island/26singli.html

By KARIN LIPSON
Published: October 24, 2008

BRIDGEHAMPTON

FOR the singer-songwriter Caroline Doctorow, making her newest album,
"Another Country: The Songs of Richard and Mimi Fariña," struck an
intensely personal note.

"Because of the way my life went when I was younger, it so happens
that Richard and Mimi Fariña are my muse," Ms. Doctorow, 50, said
recently in the kitchen of her home here, a few yards from the little
guest cottage where she recorded much of the album last summer.

The Fariñas were a charismatic couple on the 1960s folk scene: He was
the dashing counterculture writer and musician who composed most of
their songs; she, the ethereally beautiful younger sister of Joan
Baez who also sang and played the guitar.

For a while, Ms. Doctorow said, Richard Fariña gave another young
folkie named Bob Dylan, a friend and sometime rival, "a run for his
money." But in 1966, Mr. Fariña died in a motorcycle accident at the
age of 29, two days after the publication of his novel "Been Down So
Long It Looks Like Up to Me," which became something of a cult classic.

The Fariñas' modest musical output also attained iconic status for
many lovers of folk music, including Ms. Doctorow. But her first muse
was no doubt Joan Baez, whom she met as a child.

Ms. Doctorow's father, the writer E. L. Doctorow, was then in
publishing, and was working with Ms. Baez on an autobiography
("Daybreak," published in 1968); during the project, Ms. Baez would
visit the Doctorows' Westchester home, even showing Caroline some
chords on the guitar.

"You can imagine, when you're 8 and Joan Baez teaches you guitar
chords," Ms. Doctorow said, with a smile. "Your destiny is sealed."

Living in a literary home didn't hurt, either, for a future
songwriter. Reading was emphasized, and "a lot of poets and writers"
­ Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, to name two ­ "would come to the
house socially," she recalled.

In the 1970s, Ms. Doctorow and her high-school friends would often
hop a Greyhound bus to visit folk festivals. She also kept learning
the material of the performers she most admired.

The death in 2001 of Mimi Fariña (whom she had also met) led Ms.
Doctorow to produce "Carmel Valley Ride," a 2003 album inspired by
the Fariñas' life and work.

Then why revisit that with "Another Country"?

"The other record was mostly songs I wrote myself," Ms. Doctorow
said. And, to her surprise, no one had yet recorded a full
retrospective album of the Farinas' songs.

"Another Country" came together last August, when a team including
the multi-instrumentalist and producer Pete Kennedy, Eric Weissberg
(of "Dueling Banjos" fame), John Sebastian (the Lovin' Spoonful) and
the Grammy-winning singer Nanci Griffith joined the effort. (So did
Ms. Doctorow's husband, Grover Gatewood, who created the graphic
design; and her daughters, Graylen, 13, and Annabel, 11, who perform
the final, 31-second instrumental track.)

Produced on her own Narrow Lane Records label, "Another Country" is
scheduled for release on Sunday. On Nov. 2, Ms. Doctorow will perform
songs from "Another Country" as a guest at a concert by the
singer-songwriter Terence Martin at the University Cafe, Stony Brook
University. On Dec. 13, she will appear at the Eclectic Cafe, a
monthly concert series at the Unitarian Universalist Society of South
Suffolk in Bay Shore.

For Ms. Doctorow, making "Another Country" has closed a circle whose
tracing began in her girlhood. "It feels like my musical destiny
wouldn't be complete if I hadn't," she said.

.

The protest generation is doing it again

The protest generation of the 1950s and 1960s is now over-70 and
doing it again
-- teaching us how to rock

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/medb-ruane/the-protest-generation-of-the-1950s-and-1960s-is-now-over70-and-doing-it-again--teaching-us-how-to-rock-1510025.html

By Medb Ruane
Saturday October 25 2008

Washington, USA, 1963. Martin Luther King leads 300,000 people
towards the Lincoln Memorial to change the spirit of America.

Let's do it! Joan Baez, young, beautiful, takes a breath before she
soars into a song that became Ireland's anthem this week. "Deep in my
heart, I do believe/We shall overcome, some day."

What spirit shifted in St Andrew's Church on Westland Row when a
white-haired man prayed it from the altar? Some 1,800 people joined
in, men and women sick and tired of being preached at about
patriotism by corporate politicians who couldn't spell self-sacrifice
without lisping.

Leadership at last, thank Zeus, for the older generation.

Some day soon, a "where were you when . . . ?" will be asked of that
moment. An Ireland struggling to know who and what she is found the
start of an answer in the generation almost left behind.

Did they first hear it when Baez sang? Or when The Troubles in
Northern Ireland erupted after Burntollet Bridge? Think back 40 years
to Ireland 1968, when a gentle revolution stirred the air. Some
70-year-olds who sang at St Andrew's were turning 30, finding their
way into adulthood precisely between the 1916 anniversary
celebrations and Dana's 1970 Eurovision win.

Lemass's economic plan was growing, TK Whitaker was driving a sleepy
civil service towards real goals. Joe Dolan and Eileen Reed were the
sexiest people in the country, O Riada was transforming traditional
music -- and kids were wondering how to get the figs out of fig rolls
while searching for a moustachioed icon called Jim Figgerty.

A newspaper editorial found by Diarmaid Ferriter (in his RTE radio
series 'What If?') castigated UCD students for trying to ventilate
its musty halls. Pampered brats with rowdy antics -- how dare they
challenge the status quo?

It's a sign of time passing that until Wednesday's fee protests, the
big student news was when CIE halted night-time bus services after a
driver was assaulted on the Belfield line.

Back then, you had men and women such as Marian Finucane, Una
Claffey, Ruairi Quinn, Gerald Barry, Donal McCarthy, the late John
Feeney and more, insisting the young had a right to question the
wider society and engage it. Now, the biggest issues breaking through
are about whether your student card gets you a discount in designer
stores or if you've an automatic entitlement to park in TCD's front square.

Other brats then were joining housing action committees or working in
youth clubs where shiny new music made everyone rock. The age of
vinyl was far from plastic. They got involved, not in Chantelle from
Big Brother's way but in spaces of truth and commitment.

This amazing generation is doing it again, teaching us to rock. With
the weird serendipity of these times, they're operating in a
framework Bertie Ahern claimed he was encouraging when he invited
Robert Putnam to speak to political and economic leaders about
"social capital".

"Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic
triumph," Putnam writes in Bowling Alone. "In measurable and
well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference to our lives.

"Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms
that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social
interactions... social capital is not just the sum of the
institutions which underpin a society -- it is the glue that holds
them together," says the World Bank. A society of many virtuous but
isolated individuals is not necessarily rich, Putnam thinks -- and it
takes longer to get things done.

The World Bank sees three key factors that enable social capital knit
otherwise random economic and social threads.

Firstly, making it easier to resolve problems co-operatively so that
each citizen does her or his share (people tending to either give too
much or nothing, otherwise). Secondly, it greases the wheels that
help communities advance smoothly and, thirdly, it grows our
awareness of the many ways in which our fates are linked so that we
work and trade better together.

Putnam's quote says the more people co-operate, the less costly it is
to manage everyday business and social transactions. Evidence backs
him up. The question, then, is how institutions take on board the
message this Fifties and Sixties generation are sending. The easiest
response is denial and insult.

One commentator used the word "hobble" to characterise how people
walked into St Andrew's Church. In the wider cuts not being talked
about, there's a blunting of agencies with the potential to question
and dissent -- the Human Rights Commission, Equality Agency and
Crisis Pregnancy Agency are hardly the most expensive "quangos" in the land.

You can't call that white-haired man in St Andrew's a running dog,
lickspittle socialist lackey or a subject demented by Alzheimer's. He
was doing his own driving, with 1,799-plus new friends including
Eamon Timmons of Age Action and the fabulous Sylvia Meehan.

Hope, vision, community urged as a different version of the plastic
patriotism in that Budget speech. For now, this piece is in memory of
my father, Tom Ruane, Dublin and Mayo, died of old age (with MRSA) on
22 October, 2003. He'd be there.
--

mruane@independent.ie

.

Folk legend Joan Baez voices hope for tomorrow

Folk legend Joan Baez voices hope for tomorrow

http://www.mcall.com/entertainment/music/all-joanbaez.6642467oct25,0,418649.story

By Len Righi | Of The Morning Call
October 25, 2008

From the outset of her career a half-century ago, Joan Baez has
possessed a distinctive, spine-tingling three-octave voice.

A vessel of purity and a tower of strength, her soprano helped spark
the folk revival of the early 1960s and supported the decade's civil
rights and peace movements with transcendent versions of ''We Shall
Overcome'' and ''Amazing Grace.''

It enthralled at the Woodstock music festival in 1969; made pop hits
of ''The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'' and ''Diamonds & Rust'' (a
look back at her ill-fated affair with Bob Dylan) in the 1970s;
opened the U.S. segment of Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985, and
overcame a power outtage ordered by communist authorities at a music
festival in Czechoslovakia in 1989 because she dared to greet members
of a dissident human rights group.

Baez is now 67, and last month she released, ''Day After Tomorrow,''
the 24th studio album of her career and her first in five years. On
it, Baez applies her still-formidable instrument to 10 Spartanly
arranged songs by the likes of Tom Waits, Eliza Gilkyson, Patty
Griffin, Elvis Costello and Steve Earle, who produced and contributed
three tunes, two specifically written for the disc.

In a phone conversation from her home in Woodside, Calif., where she
lives with her 96-year-old mother, Baez says keeping her voice in
singing shape ''is a lot of work. Early in my career, nothing was
difficult. Then gravity moves in.''

Baez sounds a little embarrassed discussing the subject, but she
plows ahead. ''If I didn't have coaching, I couldn't do what I do,''
she says. ''I had a voice coach for 22 years. Then he died, so I
started to use tapes he had made. I thought that was enough, but I
realized it was impossible. I now work with a lovely woman. She's
friendly, and we have a very happy relationship. But some of the
exercises she makes me do ... I see her once every two weeks, and
when I can't, I have two mini-discs that I use and I drag in
something from my [deceased] teacher and a couple of others in
between that didn't last.''

Before she performs live, as she will on Sunday night at the Kimmel
Center in Philadelphia, Baez says she exercises for 20 or 30 minutes.
''It's always very humiliating,'' she adds sheepishly. ''I never used
to have to practice singing when I was young. I used to just open my
trap and out it came.''

Baez's voice is more than up to the challenge on ''Day After
Tomorrow,'' even though she admits having to work harder on some
songs than others. '''The Lower Road' [by British singer-songwriter
Thea Gilmore], I loved it the first time I heard it, even though I
still don't know what it means,'' says Baez. ''But there were a
couple of notes I had trouble with.''

Conversely, Baez notes, she was immediately attracted to the CD's
title track, written by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. ''I
knew it was right for me,'' she says of the touching ballad about a
young American soldier longing for home, ''and it was easy to sing.''

Asked how she came to work with Earle on ''Day After Tomorrow,'' Baez
says that about a year ago, the roots rocker and her manager ''had
dinner somewhere. He came back and asked, 'Do you two guys want to
work together on an album?' My answer was an immediate yes.''

Baez first met Earle when he opened a concert for her 10 years ago,
''and after that I got to know him in little bits and pieces.'' The
casual relationship changed when Baez started performing Earle's
''Christmas in Washington,'' which she recorded on her 2003 studio
album, ''Dark Chords on a Big Guitar.'' ''Of the songs in my concerts
that got the two or three strongest responses, 'Christmas' was one of
them, and it didn't matter which country,'' says Baez. ''And then I
started singing [Earle's] 'Jerusalem,''' which she included on her
2005 live album, ''Bowery Songs.''

In choosing which songs to record Baez says her manager, Mark
Spector, ''does the serious hunting. He goes through every single
thing. I've learned over the years to trust him.''

For ''Day After Tomorrow,'' Baez started with a list of about 20
songs. She recorded 13 tracks before deciding on the 10 that made the cut.

Baez identifies Gilkyson's haunting ''Rose of Sharon'' as ''possibly
my favorite song to sing. When we became conscious of what this album
was going to be about -- looking for something new that felt old --
that really fit the bill.''

Asked about Earle's ''God Is God,'' which declares ''I believe in
God, and God ain't me,'' Baez answers, ''At first I didn't understand
what he meant. Then Steve told me, 'It's recovery-speak, you know,
a-power-greater-than-myself.' ... He said, 'I don't have no problem
with God.' I found that refreshing. Some people think it's a touchy,
girly thing to believe in God.''

Baez calls ''Scarlet Tide,'' co-written by Costello and T-Bone
Burnett, ''this little gem. I don't remember how it found its way
into my life. It's very clearly an anti-administration song. We took
out a few words to make it less specific.''

Baez says she is relieved that Dubya and his cronies are finally on
the way out, and believes if Barack Obama is elected, ''there's a
possibility that compassion and sacrifice will find their way back
into our vocabulary.

''He gives younger people a chance to identify with someone in
politics, including my son [Gabe], who could care less about
politics. He's really intelligent and really eloquent, which may be
why he loses the election. He's a statesman. Plus, he gives me the
feeling I had when [Martin Luther] King spoke. I'm not comfortable
endorsing anyone, but I believe he's a person I could sit down with.
He has a picture of Gandhi in his office.''

Though not known for her sense of humor -- ''Saturday Night Live''
once ran a skit with a game show titled ''Make Joan Baez Laugh!'' --
Baez chuckles when asked if she has seen the folk-music mockumentary
''A Mighty Wind.'' ''I saw bits of it on the [tour] bus. It is very,
very funny, but it also pushed a lot of other [emotional] buttons at
the same time.''

Did she recognize anyone in the movie?

''Oh, yes,'' Baez replies, playfully and coyly.

But unfortunately, this time her voice remains silent.
--

len.righi@mcall.com
610-820-6626

.

Writing for Freedom

Writing for Freedom

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=19646

by John D'Emilio
2008-10-22

If I think back on the steps that brought me to embrace being gay,
they follow a path littered with books. First was Advise and Consent,
a wildly popular novel from the late 1950s that I read before
starting high school. The main character, a senator who had a gay
affair while in the army, commits suicide when he's threatened with
exposure. From there I moved on to Another Country by James Baldwin.
One gay character kills himself. Another finds happiness, but only by
moving to France. My life prospects had now improved to 50-50, but
how would I get to France?

In college, I read Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. It's an eloquent,
passionate, and strong-willed defense of love between men, but Wilde
wrote it while in jail, which is where, apparently, you end up if
you're gay. Books were letting me imagine that there were other
homosexuals in the world. They were even giving me the words to
defend my feelings and attractions. But jolly and hopeful they weren't.

Then, in 1973, Mimi, a friend who identified as bisexual and lived in
a group household, gave me a brand-new novel that, Mimi said, she
read in a single sitting. It was published by something called
Daughters Press, a feminist collective in Vermont; the author was a
lesbian activist named Rita Mae Brown; and the intriguing title was
Rubyfruit Jungle.

Sure enough, it was an irresistible page-turner. Brown seized upon
core American themes and shaped them into a completely lovable
lesbian coming-of-age story. Molly Bolt, the narrator, perfectly fit
the mold of a rugged individualist; she was determined to clear her
own path in life. Just like the heroes of 19th-century Horatio Alger
novels, with luck and pluck Molly was going to rise from her
dirt-poor origins until success was hers. She did all this with a
side-splitting, sassy humor that made me laugh out loud. Sure, as a
woman and a dyke she faced trials and tribulations. But you knew­I
knew­that nothing would stop her. I had never before read anything
like this, and I, too, stayed up all night to finish.

I don't think it was an accident that the author of Rubyfruit Jungle
had already cut her teeth in the lesbian, gay and women's liberation
movements. Rita Mae Brown created a ruckus in the National
Organization for Women when she raised lesbian issues. She helped
write "The Woman-Identified Woman," one of the classic radical
lesbian manifestos of the time ( its opening line: "What is a
lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of
explosion." ) . As part of the "Lavender Menace" contingent, she
disrupted a feminist conference in 1970 in order to make lesbian
issues visible. Brown was also in the collective that published The
Furies, an influential lesbian-feminist journal of that period.

Rubyfruit Jungle was a new kind of queer writing. It was writing
designed to set its readers free. Now that kind of political writing,
I know, can lead to some pretty dreadful books. But, in this case, it
produced a novel that, 35 years later, still thrills readers of every
sexual persuasion. Reading it in 1973 alerted me to something that
was going on among lesbian activists that I didn't yet see happening
much in my gay male circles. Lesbian feminists seemed to believe in
the power of culture to help remake the world.

One way of grasping this difference is to look at two of Chicago's
early queer newspapers: Lavender Woman ( LW ) , which ran from 1971
to 1976; and Gay Crusader, published between 1973 and 1976. At the
risk of a generalization that I know won't hold true for every page,
the Crusader tended to report on news and events. It was about the
activities of a movement­demonstrations, organizations, political
happenings. LW was about culture, consciousness, and ideas. It
covered at length the new world of women's music. It explored lesbian
literary history. It was as likely to have a centerfold of poems as
it was to include photos of a rally.

This emphasis on culture as a force for liberation shines through in
the annual lesbian writers conferences held in Chicago between 1974
and 1978. The conferences were the inspiration of Marie Kuda, whose
own history of community activism stretched back before Stonewall.
Valerie Taylor, who keynoted the first conference, remembered getting
a telephone call near the end of Chicago's winter. She heard Kuda
saying "What we need here is a lesbian writers' conference!" So
Taylor said "fine" and a few women gathered at her North Side
apartment to begin planning. According to Taylor, Kuda was "the
energy and the brain power" behind all five conferences.

The conferences took place on the South Side, initially at First
Unitarian Church in Hyde Park, and later at the Blue Gargoyle. Women
came from as far away as Boston, Florida and Colorado. Even though
some notable figures attended­Paula Christian who, besides Taylor,
was another icon of the lesbian-pulp era, spoke at one­Kuda meant the
conferences as "a meeting of equals."

Saturdays consisted of a series of workshops that, according to one
participant, filled "every nook and cranny of the First Unitarian
Church, from the loft to the crypts." Workshops ran the gamut from
the practical to the creative to the slightly ridiculous. Given the
strong homophobic bias among mainstream publishers, lesbian writers
worked hard to master the technicalities of self-publishing.
Independent lesbian presses were springing up around the country in
he 1970s, and these Chicago conferences helped lesbians teach each
other the mechanics of publication and distribution. Representatives
of women's presses and magazines came each year and generously shared
their mailing lists. By the third gathering in 1976, one attendee
commented that "slowly and methodically lesbians are beginning to
chip away at barriers that seemed impenetrable."

Many of the sessions focused on the creative process. There were
workshops on fiction, poetry, journalism, and theater. Women risked
the vulnerability of sharing their work with strangers. At one
workshop, lesbian feminist beliefs in collectivity led to the writing
of a short story together, with each participant contributing a
sentence at a time. This drove at least one of the women there to the
edge of distraction. But more often, women left workshops filled, as
one wrote, with "an intense and exhilarating energy."

The conferences also paid respect to lesbian literary history. "All
of us build on the lives of those who have gone before," Valerie
Taylor told those at the first conference. Keynote speakers described
the work of writers from Sappho through Virginia Woolf. Others
presented slide shows with images of writers and their books. Tee
Corinne gave a presentation on the visual history of lesbian
sexuality with a sampling of the 5,000 slides she had amassed in the
course of her research. These conferences were about the creative
process, for sure. But they also attempted to teach history at a time
when there weren't many queer courses in colleges and universities.

And there were moments of fun. I wish I could have been at the
Saturday night party in 1978 when many of the attendees came in
costume, dressed as their favorite lesbian literary hero.

Putting on these conferences was a massive amount of work. In 1978,
Kuda announced that the fifth was likely to be the last. But she
shared with those who were there her utopian fantasy of the future:
"My greatest dream is for a weeklong festival of lesbian arts with
music at one end, literature at the other. In between, all the visual
arts. Wouldn't it be great at McCormick Place­right after Illinois
passes the ERA?"

.

Dallas men gave voices to those working for peace and justice

Dallas men gave voices to those working for peace and justice

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-1968activists_26met.ART.Central.Edition1.4a5742f.html

October 26, 2008
By ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning News
rappleton@dallasnews.com

"Is this Stoney?" says the smiling man, crossing the threshold to hug
his guest. "Hey, brother."

"I bet you didn't expect the gray," says Stoney Burns.

"I got it, too," replies Ernest McMillan, leading the ponytailed
visitor into his East Dallas apartment and back to the past.

Living now less than a mile apart, they hadn't seen each other since
those restless times. Not since the days of war in Vietnam, protests
and assassinations, culture clashes and civil-rights struggles, of
Black Power, Flower Power and women's liberation. When something not
exactly clear was happening.

Tightly ruled, custom-numbed Dallas – still stung by the tragedy of
Nov. 22, 1963 – was relatively tame for a big city in the '60s. A
vigilant police force helped see to that.

But as the peace and justice movements gained momentum elsewhere,
they found voices here as well.

As in Ernie McMillan, passionate foe of prejudice and war.

And Stoney Burns, one playfully aggressive, seriously stimulated
newspaper editor.

On separate paths, they would rouse and rattle in ways their hometown
had never seen.

"Dallas was just outraged by Stoney," said David Richards, one of his
attorneys. "He represented everything they perceived to be evil."

While Mr. McMillan set a tempo for activism to come.

"We owe a priceless debt to him," said the Rev. Zan Holmes, a
longtime Dallas pastor and social activist. "He stood up and spoke
up. He called attention to the problems and became our inspiration."

The center of action

"Seems like there was a lot more life. This is depressing," says Mr.
McMillan, soaking up some South Dallas sights and sounds near Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X boulevards.

He has returned to a center of the action back when he led the local
front of the national Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

"We've got Freedom Fashions, not freedom and justice," he says,
driving through a land long waiting to bloom.

Mr. McMillan sees stability along Meadow Street and talks of Charles
Hunter and his Hope Presbyterian Church, home now to a service agency
for girls. "We had a lot of mass meetings, community meetings here."

Blocks away, at the corner of Pine Street and Malcolm X, he parks
outside an abandoned building, the long-ago home of an OK
Supermarket. "Looks a lot smaller than it did then," he chuckles.

He talks of his group's protests against and boycott of the
white-owned grocery chain, says it stocked inferior products at bloated prices.

"We would have people marching around the building with signs," Mr.
McMillan says. "People would get off the bus and join us."

He doesn't talk much about the night of July 1, 1968, when he and an
associate, Matthew Johnson, led a group into the store and left
behind $211 worth of destruction – "to send them a message," he says.

Within two months, the two black men had been arrested, tried, and
dealt 10-year prison terms by an all-white jury. The charge:
destroying private property worth more than $50.

The store owner's son testified that he saw Mr. McMillan drop a
gallon bottle of milk and Mr. Johnson smash bottles of grape juice
and a watermelon. Jurors heard a defense attorney liken them to the
American patriots who dumped English tea in Boston harbor. They also
heard a prosecutor call the pair "revolutionists" helping rush
civilization "to hell at a hundred miles an hour."

The rush was on Mr. McMillan, said Don Stafford, a retired Dallas
assistant police chief, at the time a police lieutenant in South
Dallas. "He was a thorn in their side, and they needed to get rid of him."

And they did, says Dr. Hunter, now visitation pastor at Oak Cliff
Presbyterian Church. "They were cutting the head off what they
thought was the beast."

For the budding Ernest McMillan, a 1963 honors graduate of Dallas'
Booker T. Washington High School, war and racism were the beasts.

After withdrawing from Morehouse College in Atlanta, he registered
voters and demonstrated in the South before bringing his passion and
training back to North Texas in 1965. After briefly enrolling and
protesting at Arlington State College (now the University of Texas at
Arlington), he established a Dallas chapter of SNCC as the group's
militancy was intensifying.

"It was the way I was raised, to not abide injustice, to not be quiet
in the face of wrongdoing," said the son of a family steeped in
ministry, medicine and teaching, reared near the Dallas Freedman's Cemetery.

The SNCC cadre was hardly the first or last to oppose racism and
discrimination in Dallas. The Progressive Voters League began
organizing black voters in the 1930s. Protesters challenged
segregation at the State Fair of Texas in 1955. Freedom rallies in
1961 called for boycotts of department stores and movie theaters.

Demonstrators picketed the whites-only Piccadilly Cafeteria in 1964
and marched for civil rights in 1965. It took a lawsuit and the
courts to establish the current city election system. The fight for
Dallas school desegregation lasted almost 50 years.

The efforts and influence of Felton Alexander, Juanita Craft, Richard
Dockery, Kathlyn Gilliam, Elsie Faye Heggins, J.B. Jackson Jr., Al
Lipscomb, Maceo Smith, the Revs. Peter Johnson and S.M. Wright and
other local black leaders have long been recognized.

But few local black leaders had a radical, confrontational edge in
the late '60s, Dr. Hunter and others say. "There was definitely a
sense that you stay in your place. You've got yours," he said.

That wasn't a concern for Mr. McMillan and his group of 30 or so. He,
Matthew Johnson, Edward Harris, Michael Dodd, Fred Bell and the
others would organize, mobilize and speak out with a fervor jolting
to some. Beholden to none.

And working outside the system, they drew the system's attention.

Mr. McMillan tells of traffic stops and searches. He smiles about the
police officer seen going through his trash, and the one found
eavesdropping in his back yard.

"They were trying to disrupt us, keep us off balance," he said,
recalling how his guys joined in, following officers and recording
their actions.

The young agitators were hassled – "no doubt about it," said Mr.
Stafford, the former police officer. "If you were against the
establishment, you were going to get harassed."

No, police just tried to "keep the peace" and contain troublemakers,
said Paul McCaghren, a patrol captain in 1968 and later the
department's intelligence director.

"We didn't want any problems, and we were really sensitive because of
President Kennedy being assassinated" here, he said.

In time, Mr. McMillan was gone and his group fractured. Three weeks
after his grocery conviction, he was indicted for draft evasion.
Authorities said he refused to take the induction oath, an allegation
he denies.

Freed after posting bond, he traveled to Connecticut in June 1969 to
address a church group. While he was there, his attorney told him
that he could be arrested for leaving North Texas. He fled, was
captured in Cincinnati in late 1971, and was returned to Dallas and
sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to
violating terms of his release.

The draft charge was dismissed. An appeal of the supermarket
conviction was rejected. And Mr. McMillan spent three years and two
weeks behind bars.

Eventful time

Dallas didn't have the riots, firebombings and mass arrests. Not a
single tank in the streets. Still, the late '60s were an eventful
time in the city.

Residents in 1968 began loosening the business community's grip at
City Hall. The Dallas Citizens Council had selected and successfully
backed City Council candidates for years. But voters changed the city
charter, adding two new council seats. Months later, George Allen
would fill one of them, representing South Dallas, as the first
elected black council member.

In 1968, marchers in South Dallas, including Mr. McMillan, supported
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. Downtown,
Ruth Jefferson, Mr. McMillan and other protesters occupied the state
welfare office demanding better benefits; others picketed the
selective service center.

Dallas police opened neighborhood police centers to promote racial
harmony, and the city's Block Partnership program began connecting
poor families and churches. A human relations commission would convene in 1969.

Groups such as the Dallas Committee for a Peaceful Solution in
Vietnam, sponsor of Saturday vigils at Dealey Plaza, kept speaking
out against the war. City leaders and police braced for rioting after
Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968.

"We were expecting trouble. We had a lot of people on the street, and
we didn't want them to get a jump," Mr. McCaghren recalled.

A log of police activity during those times records heightened alerts
throughout the city, anonymous calls about suspicious behavior and
unfounded threats to bomb Love Field and City Hall. It also tells of
two lighted beer bottles containing kerosene that were thrown at a
white-owned convenience store in South Dallas: "One started a small
fire. ... Both fell about 20 feet short of the building."

Concerned about decorum downtown, the City Council in 1967 restricted
gatherings at Stone Place, the walkway between Main and Elm streets –
home now to restaurants, then a hangout for street preachers and
those hippie types.

So the peace people and others began gathering at Lee Park, near the
counterculture's Oak Lawn center of gravity, for music, rallies, the
high life and perhaps a dip in Turtle Creek.

Their looks and outlooks drew scorn from the mainstream, including
the city's two daily newspapers' editorial pages. Their "pot parties"
and illicit economy made news, as in this January 1968 report in The
Dallas Morning News:

"Police raided a hippie pad in North Dallas shortly before midnight
Saturday, rounded up 13 booted and unbarbered boys and girls," and
"enough marijuana to make 140 cigarettes worth $1 apiece."

Other stories told of stiff prison sentences for drug convictions,
such as a Dallas man's 50-year term for selling $3 worth of marijuana.

And the News tried to help readers with a series of articles – "Drug
Peril in Big D" – "outlining the problem in all its startling aspects."

To 'tell the truth'

"Free Ernie." A poster in Ernest McMillan's apartment delivers those
words with a drawing of his smiling, bearded face.

"I believe I took the photograph that this was taken from," says
Stoney Burns, eyeing the memento as the reunion takes another turn.

He also splashed the drawing across the cover of Dallas Notes for his
newspaper's Sept. 18, 1968, issue. An accompanying story, headlined
"SNCC Members Shafted," told of the OK Supermarket convictions.

It wasn't the first or last article about Ernest McMillan or the
courts to appear in what brings Mr. Burns local celebrity and notoriety.

Launched in March 1967 to "tell the truth" about Southern Methodist
University, Notes from the Underground would mushroom into Dallas
Notes. And for almost four years, the biweekly paper's alternative
news and ever-evolving staff would tear into those swirling times
with a clear bias against war, intolerance and hypocrisy.

"Notes is the boss, the only fearless, wide awake, red-hot newspaper
in town," crowed an early advertisement for a publication that would
peak with street sales of about 12,000 copies per issue.

The paper's anti-war stories included "profit and loss" statements
listing area companies' war contracts and names of the local dead.
Its reports on politics and dissent often had an editorial ring.
"Elections Don't Mean [expletive]," headlined an elections issue.
"Our Power is in the Streets."

Notes also covered the area music scene and printed reviews, letters,
cartoons, short stories and poetry. It kept tabs on the local drug
trade, from arrests to user-friendly how-to's. And with a spicing of
four-letter words and porcine portrayals, it wrote about the men in
blue. Such as those who showed up at Stone Place on May 20, 1967:

"Over a hundred Dallas hippies tried to have a love-in last
Saturday," Mr. Burns wrote in his first bylined story.
"Unfortunately, about twenty paranoid cops had a hate-in and, baby,
they had the guns."

That article "plunged Dallas into the sixties," wrote James McEnteer
in his book Fighting Words: Independent Journalists in Texas.

A graduate of Hillcrest High School and the University of Arizona,
Mr. Burns – then known by his given name, Brent Stein – joined the
newspaper while working for his father's Dallas printing company and
advising an SMU fraternity.

Introductions to marijuana and LSD had engaged him. He offered to
help improve the paper's graphics. And while photographing a peace
vigil at Dealey Plaza, the obscene taunts of American Nazi Party
members moved him.

"I didn't like seeing people abused like that," he recalled, wiping a
watery eye. "I definitely wasn't an activist until then."

He wrote for the paper as Stoney Burns, the name he goes by today. "I
had a straight job and didn't want my customers to know," he said.

His battles with police began when he was removed from downtown for
selling the paper. SMU banned it in October 1967. He became editor
two months later. And as Notes turned up the heat, so did authorities.

An October 1968 cover story about Dallas' pornographic-movie industry
featured a photograph with bared breasts.

Twice the next month, police raided Mr. Burns' communal home and
Notes office at 3117 Live Oak St. (now a vacant lot), arresting him
and others while hauling away newspapers, typewriters, cameras,
telephones – everything used to produce the paper. With rented
equipment, the staff kept publishing.

"That was the ploy used to shut down his newspaper," said lawyer
David Richards, who sued the police chief and others on Mr. Burns' behalf.

Federal judges in Dallas decided that the state obscenity law used
against the newspaper was unconstitutional. On appeal, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that federal courts had no place in the dispute.
But by then the obscenity law had been rewritten and the charges
against Mr. Burns dismissed.

"We had a great day, sitting on his porch, watching these angry
police officers having to return his stuff," Mr. Richards said.

Mr. Burns was among those arrested at what Notes dubbed the Lee Park
Massacre, a melee involving police and "hundreds of boisterous
youngsters and hippies" (as The Dallas Morning News put it) on April 12, 1970.

Witnesses say a crackdown on swimmers in Turtle Creek started the
ruckus, and officers blamed Mr. Burns for inflaming passions with
obscenities and police death calls, a charge he did and does deny.

"Too bad they didn't kill you," a prosecutor reportedly told him in
court before his conviction for "interfering with a peace officer."
Sentenced to three years in prison, he was cleared on appeal.

Mr. Burns quit the paper in September 1970. It would fold early the next year.

He ran for Dallas County sheriff in 1972, but left the race after
being arrested for possession of marijuana. A jury gave him 10 years
and, at prosecutors' request, one day in prison for the almost
one-tenth of an ounce of pot police found after stopping his van.
That extra day made him ineligible for probation. But after changes
in state law made possession of small amounts of marijuana a
misdemeanor, his sentence was commuted.

Mr. Burns served 19 days and was freed in December 1974 – the same
week as Ernest McMillan.

No more outrage

Mr. Burns returned to the print shop and his music magazine, Buddy,
ditching the dissent but not his humor. He sold the magazine years
ago and now publishes a business advertising booklet.

Never married, 65 and approved for Medicare, he lives near Lower
Greenville Avenue, where his days include music (mostly bluegrass),
some television and friends. The wild, curly black hair of youth is
now a silvery gray, the once-scraggly beard trim and white. His
underwear-only Frederick's of Hollywood parties are long gone, but he
will hit a bar or concert or (as Notes would hail it) "that harmless,
non-addictive herb known as marijuana."

"When I do I always say, 'Why don't I do this more often,' " he says
with a smirk over a soft drink at a neighborhood dive.

Mr. Burns says he hasn't cast a ballot since weighing in for Lyndon
Johnson in 1964 and won't break his streak this year. He attended an
anti-war rally in Dallas before the Iraq invasion but has no interest
in firing up the outrage – or even messing with police.

"I just can't do what I could then. It's just too much trouble," he says.

Back then the rush of change and sense of possibility liberated some,
threatened others.

Notes tried to inform and energize the young, "get Dallas to loosen
up" and have a good time, the editor says.

And to those ends, the experience was an unregrettable success, he
says, shrugging off his part in it all.

"I was young and dumb and thought I was bulletproof. But I wasn't
that much different from a lot of people in the movement. I was just
the messenger."

'Still evolving'

After prison, Ernest McMillan became an aide to then-state, now U.S.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. He organized a prison-justice project
before moving to Houston, where he founded a program to empower young
inner-city men.

Back in Dallas, the 64-year-old grandfather remains an adviser to the
Houston program. He volunteers at his church, Munger Place United
Methodist, the Dallas Peace Center and with Pastors for Peace.

"I'm still evolving, trying to aim my arrow at the mark," he says
during a morning break.

He isn't bitter about his clashes with the law. And he gives his SNCC
days an OK– not a KO.

"We turned on some switches and lights, got some people off their
butts and into voting booths and off their knees praying and into the
City Hall chambers, fighting for justice," he said. "I'm not
regretting it, and I'm not beating my chest about it."

Mr. McMillan barely recognizes the neighborhood of his youth, now
Dallas' upscale Uptown. He sees some advances in southern Dallas but
much room for improvement.

Black families and neighborhoods are more fragmented, he said, but
"there's been no fundamental change from when I was around in 1968."

What's needed are organizations that "can sustain themselves and
carry on the struggle" – groups always drawing in youth, he says.

"I want young people to know they have tremendous power, tremendous
energy, tremendous resources within them, and they just have to flip
the switch on and use it."

.

Welcome to the '60s

Welcome to the '60s

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bal-al.sixties26oct26,0,94643.story

These uncertain times may be fueling a renewed interest in the
buttoned-up and boozy era

By Mary Carole McCauley
October 26, 2008

Think of 2008 as the new New Frontier.

The calendar might indicate that we're in the 21st century. But in
merchandise display windows, on stage and on the large and small
screen - and yes, even in politics - America seemingly is returning
to the early, buttoned-down 1960s.

Not long ago, society was enamored of the Greatest Generation. As the
50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor passed, we were bombarded with
television specials, movies and fashion trends all inspired by the
so-called "Last Good War."

Similarly, the immense tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s - the
decade of hippies, protests of the Vietnam War, civil rights and
women's liberation - continues to exert a profound influence on society.

So it's curious that in 2008, we seem irresistibly drawn to an era
known as being placid, boring and bland. Botox might not have been
around in the early '60s, but it should have been.

"It was a period of transition," says Ethan McSweeny, who is
directing a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, currently
in previews at Center Stage.

"I think that era appeals to us because we're also in flux. In the
early 1960s, there were a lot of tensions bubbling and churning
beneath the surface. It was the quiet before the upheaval."

It's difficult to deny that some of the hottest trends of the season
first were in style more than 45 years ago.

The most talked-about show of the past two seasons is the Emmy
Award-winning cable series Mad Men, about an advertising firm on
Madison Avenue. (The show, which concludes its second season tonight,
already has been renewed for a third year.)

American designer Michael Kors has credited Mad Men with inspiring
the clothes that he presented last month at Fall Fashion Week in New
York. And for most of 2008, boutiques have displayed the short, swing
jackets with three-quarter length sleeves popularized by former First
Lady Jackie Kennedy.

"We've known for the past three years that we'd be wearing the styles
of the early 1960s now," said Holly Alford, a fashion professor at
Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "That was the forecast.
Whatever is going on politically ends up being reflected in fashion."

Like 1960, 2008 is the era of the celebrity candidate. The current
Democratic nominee for U.S. president is being positioned by his
supporters as a modern-day version of John F. Kennedy.

"Given the Kennedy-esque feel of the Barack Obama phenomenon, it's no
surprise that the New Frontier style is re-emerging," says Robert
Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University. "As a culture on
the cusp, stuck somewhere between abject conformity and an appetite
for major change, 1960-'63 is a perfect model to investigate."

McSweeny is struck by the ramifications of opening Virginia Woolf -
Edward Albee's harrowing drama about a dysfunctional marriage steeped
in the mores of 1962 America - just six days before the presidential election.

"It's entirely possible to do a political reading of Virginia Woolf,"
McSweeny says. "It's probably no accident that the main characters
are named George and Martha, just like the founding couple."

In 1993 Albee elaborated on the broader themes of his most famous
work. His comments seem disturbingly prescient when viewed from the
perspective of 2008.

"We're a nation of conformists now," he said. "That self-deception
leads not only to personal trouble, but to political malaise and
social irresponsibility. The self-deception that this country has
been dealing in for many years is preferring to be lied to by
political leaders, preferring to be conned by short-term values. We
may find ourselves in a much greater state of decline than people realize now."

Other slices of the early 1960s are rife on stage and screen. Autumn
also will see the release of Doubt, a film set in 1964 about a charge
of pedophilia and starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

More benign portraits of the era are presented by Camelot, the 1960
musical that became a metaphor for Kennedy's administration, and the
sunnily optimistic Hairspray. (A national tour of Camelot stopped at
the Hippodrome last spring, while the film version of Hairspray
starring John Travolta is the third highest-grossing movie musical in
U.S. history.)

"It's interesting what part of the 1960s we're getting," says
Thompson, past president of the National Popular Culture Association.

"Most of the time, when you think of 'The '60s' you think of Flower
Power and love beads and Peter Max psychedelia. That is not the part
we're fixated on now."

The early 1960s were an extension socially and culturally of the
Eisenhower Era. In the popular imagination, those pre-women's lib,
pre-civil rights years are associated with repression and conformity.

For all its darkness, shows such as Mad Men remind us that the period
also was elegant, chic and sophisticated. It was a time when America
was flush. It was a time when materialistic pleasures were widely
available. It could be lots of fun to be alive.

"It was a very exuberant, very upbeat time," says Deb Vance, a
communications professor at McDaniel College in Westminster, who
teaches a course on American popular culture

"Manufacturing was strong, the schools were great, and kids could
play outside without their parents worrying if they were safe. It was
the space age, and there were exciting scientific advances. It
exemplified a time when we could look at our country and our leaders
and feel good about who we were."

It also was a time when there was an immense push to act in a manner
perceived as civilized, as evolved.

After the carnage of World War II and the atom bomb, Americans
yearned to put our destructive drives behind us. But progress meant
spurning unruly urges - including the impulse to think outside the box.

"Nineteen fifty-five to 1963 was the period of The Organization Man,
and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," says Thompson, citing two
landmark books.

"The American Dream was completely achievable, but the cost was that
we became automatons."

As Alford and others point out, nostalgia isn't an uncritical embrace
of the past. We appropriate the aspects of an era that fit our
lifestyle, and reject the parts that do not.

There are period details in Mad Men and Virginia Woolf that stop
modern audiences in their tracks - details that characters immersed
in the world take for granted.

At a recent rehearsal for Virginia Woolf, the set - meant to be a
living room - was littered with cigarette butts. The characters drink
so heavily and so often that bar glasses seem welded to their hands.

Director McSweeny spent several minutes showing actor Andrew Weems,
who plays George, which oddly-shaped bottle corresponds to which
brand of vintage liquor.

"In those days, there wasn't the choice that there is now," McSweeny
says. "Everyone drank the same brand of scotch, the same brand of
vodka. Drinking today is about showing off your expensive wine
cellar. It's about being a connoisseur. Drinking back then was about
getting drunk."

Leah Curney, who plays Honey, a young faculty wife, will wear
period-appropriate foundation garments. She's convinced it will make
her performance more authentic, even if the audience catches nary a
glimpse of a pinching garter belt.

"Foundation garments really do put you back in the period," she says.

"Not only does it give us the right shape visually, but clothing has
emotional connotations. These garments were very constraining.
Wearing these things really helps me dive into this world as a woman
and realize how much we take for granted today."

Thompson sees at least one major difference in the transition period
of the early 1960s and today: In 1960, we thought the U.S. was on the
way up. In 2008, we fear the country is on the way down.

"In the early '60s was the sense that we were going into a new era
that would be noble and glorious," he says.

"Today, I don't know anyone who has that Pollyannaish feeling. Now,
with what's happening with the economy, with our loss in standing as
a superpower, there's almost a sense of apocalyptic dread. At best,
Americans think we have reached the top of our trajectory, and hope
we can stay there. At worst, some people wonder how fast the slide will be."

But the early 1960s weren't merely the calm before the storm, but a
necessary precursor to it. Those years provided the fermentation that
made later advances possible.

"It was a transformative time," Thompson says. "In a few short years,
every single aspect of American life would change overnight."

Society is being altered right now - and in ways that aren't all bad.

When JFK became president, it made being Catholic a non-issue for
modern office-seekers. Similarly, Obama's candidacy, regardless of
who wins on Nov. 4, has the potential to make race irrelevant in
future contests.

"What we're transitioning into," Thompson says, "is anyone's guess."

It sounds contradictory. But perhaps the best way to charge ahead,
the best way to gain crucial momentum is to back up slightly first.
--

if you go

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? runs at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert
St., through Nov. 30. Show times: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays; 7 p.m.
Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 p.m., 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m., 7:30
p.m. Sundays. $10-$60. 410-332-0033 or centerstage.org

.

Alumnus resurrects ‘on-the-road’ journey of lesser-known Beat poet

Alumnus resurrects 'on-the-road' journey of lesser-known Beat poet

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/081023/beat.shtml

By Josh Schonwald
jschonwa@uchicago.edu
News Office
October 23, 2008

Gus Reininger said he blames Doc Films for "subverting" him.
Reininger (A.B.,'73) quit a successful career as a globe-trotting
investment banker because, he said, "I learned in talking with film
types in New York that, thanks to Doc, I know more about film-making
than film-school grads."

The economics major's Doc-derived film knowledge paid off, when he
impressed Miami Vice director Michael Mann and NBC executive Brandon
Tartikoff with a seemingly unusual pitch: "Let's do a version of
Rainer Maria Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz about the Chicago mob."

Reininger, perhaps best known for the fruit of the Fassbinder pitch,
the late-1980s NBC drama Crime Story, is returning to the place where
he became a cinephile to get feedback on his latest project­a
decade-in-the-making examination of the life of the Beat poet Gregory
Corso, who along with fellow writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs, changed social and literary history.

A free, private screening of Reininger's "Corso­The Last Beat" will
begin at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, in the Max Palevsky Cinema. After
the screening, Reininger will answer questions from the audience. The
film will not be publicly released until December 2009, after it has
toured international film festivals.

For Reininger, previewing "The Last Beat" at his alma mater is a
natural move. "This is not a film for baby boomers to relive their
glory days. It's for young people. It's to introduce the icons of the
Beat era to a generation that may not know them. I want to show young
people how the Beats changed American society, paved the way for
youth culture, the sexual revolution, even hip hop."

A longitudinal cinéma vérité-style documentary, "The Last Beat"
follows Corso after the death of Ginsberg, as he goes "on the road"
to discover his creative muse. Ethan Hawke, two-time Academy Award
nominee, guides the audience through Corso's odyssey. From Paris to
Venice, Rome and Greece, Corso retraces the early days of "Beats" and
his creative influence. Corso's journey also takes him back to his
old neighborhood Little Italy and New York's Clinton State Prison,
where he was imprisoned at 17 and read his way through his sentence
under the tutelage of Mafia inmates, mostly notably Paul "Lucky" Luciano.

Though best known as co-creator of the cop-mob drama Crime Story,
Reininger has nurtured a long interest in the poetry of Corso. His
interest started when a priest at his Jesuit high school in
Cincinnati named Corso as a "good Catholic writer." Though this was,
Reininger would soon conclude, a highly unusual characterization of
Corso, the tip spurred Reininger's interest in the Beats. "Corso was
my first beat," recalled Reininger, "then there was Ginsburg,
Kerouac, which led to (Bob) Dylan."

It wasn't until the '90s, though, that Reininger became interested in
the Corso project. He appreciated the contributions of all the Beats,
but Corso, the least-known figure, was his favorite. "He was the
ancient poet," he said. "He had this great preoccupation with ancient
Greece." Corso's poetry, for Reininger, provoked flashbacks to his
undergraduate days as a student of Herman Sinaiko, Professor in
Humanities and the College.

It wasn't easy persuading Corso to participate in the project, but
after successfully answering a series of questions from the erudite
Corso (such as "What is the first book ever written?" "Who is
Gilgamesh's best friend?"), Reininger earned his confidence.

Reininger calls the project more than just a film. "It's a bit of a
resurrection," he said. Unlike Ginsberg and Burroughs, Corso sold his
papers contemporaneously. As a result, they were scattered all around
the United States, Italy and France.

"Any Ph.D. student who might find Corso a great dissertation topic,
as he's so under curated, would have a very difficult financial time
traveling to so many libraries," said Reininger. "Hence, there's been
a dearth of serious scholarship."

With a research grant, Reininger and his collaborators hired a
librarian to travel to 30 universities to find Corso's papers and
letters. A bibliography was constructed. The first product of the
"The Corso Project" was a book titled, An Accidental Biography­the
Letters of Gregory Corso. The project also assisted author Deborah
Baker in her book, Blue Hand, The Beats in India. The project has
recovered unpublished manuscripts, artifacts and photos, and has
completed more than 300 hours of interviews.

But ultimately, Reininger's chief objective is beyond scholarship. He
is eager to introduce young people to the Beats, the role they have
had on the current zeitgeist, and he hopes to introduce the world to
the story of the most uncelebrated member of the group.

"Corso overcame abandonment, a life in the streets as a child of the
Depression," said Reininger. "He read his way through
maximum-security prison, ended up as a poet in residence at Harvard,
and ultimately met Alan Ginsberg and started the Beat movement. It's
a story of human triumph."

Earlier screenings of "The Last Beat" with youth audiences at Harvard
and Yale universities have been positive. "It's hard to describe what
it's like to see students reach for a tissue when they see this
story," said Reininger. "It's an enormously gratifying project."

For more information on "Corso: The Last Beat," please visit
www.corsothefilm.com.

.

Like a rolling stone

Like a rolling stone

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Oct262008/books2008102597227.asp

A charming novel for anyone remotely interested in cultural and
literary movements.

by Yamini Vijayan
10/26/08

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India,
Deborah Baker,
Penguin Viking, 2008, pp 242, Rs 499

It was on a hot summer afternoon in 1948, at the age of 22 that Allen
Ginsberg heard a voice outside his window while reading a William
Blake poem. "I saw god," he screamed ecstatically and from that
moment on, he wandered in his pursuit of God. Disillusioned and
repulsed by America's materialism and drawn towards the spirituality
of the East, Allen travelled across to a destination where he
believed he would ultimately find God. In India, Allen experimented
with several religious philosophies in his eternal hope of
discovering God and attaining enlightenment, not to forget his belief
that God could be found through drugs and love, under the guidance of
a spiritual guru.

But Allen wanted no long route to attaining 'Nirvana'. He wanted
instant enlightenment. Through Allen's search for an appropriate
spiritual teacher, Deborah Baker introduces different philosophies
that have found its place in India, not just a superficial view of
it, but a well researched account.

From Dalai Lama's philosophy to the modern ashram of the
Theosophical society in Madras to Aurobindo's ideas to Sri Ramana
Maharshi to pseudo babas to tantric practices to J Krishnamurti's
beliefs, she follows the Beats' spiritual journey and exploration.
The title of the book stems from Ginsberg's vision of God, when he
describes it as ­ "the sky was the living blue hand itself," the hand
that had placed the whole universe in front of him.

Writing in a non-linear style, Baker weaves together experiences of
various literary figures from the American beat generation. But
because of the book plunging into the lives of several of these
literary figures besides Allen Ginsberg and his romantic companion
Peter Orlovsky, after a certain point, I found myself turning back
the pages of the book to recall certain characters. Every time the
author brought in a new character, which was a bit too often ­
although initially welcomed with delight ­ the number of characters
making quick entry and exit at scattered points of the book certainly
tended to confuse the reader. Wait, now who was Ted Wilentz?

In the book, she includes an extract from the Time magazine, an
interesting description of the 'Beats' ­ "they prefer to wear beards
and blue jeans, avoid soap and water, live in dingy tenements or,
weather permitting, take the road as holy hoboes, pilgrims to
nowhere. Most of them adore Negroes, junkies, jazzmen and Zen. The
more extreme profess to smoke pot, eat peyote, sniff heroin and
practice perversion."

Drawing a sort of subtle parallel between two sets of poets, the
author also elaborates on the meeting of the American poets with the
Bengali Krittibas poets in Calcutta ­ a set of young intellectuals
"who hoped to break down the meter, rhyme and while they were at it,
conventional morality" of Bengali literature.

A Blue Hand is undoubtedly a charming read for anyone remotely
interested in different cultural and literary movements. Although, it
may evoke a smirk on your face as you read about typical foreign
tourists' superficial interest in India (particularly Ginsberg) ­ its
poverty, culture, easy availability of drugs and so on, the author's
beautiful way with words and subtle sense of humour and mockery (was
I imagining it?) makes it a wonderful read that takes you to places
you almost don't want to come out of.

.

Bill Ayers Audio Unearthed

Bill Ayers Audio Unearthed

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_102208/content/01125115.guest.html

October 22, 2008

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, we've got an audio sound bite from Bill Ayers coming up
from April 12th of 2002 on a FM radio station in California. We have
a 40-second bite here. It's actually a long, long bite that's loaded
with all kinds of stuff, but we have one bite here that will do. I
want to ask you a question. I'm sure you've heard Bill Ayers
mentioned, the Weather Underground terrorist who blew up the
Pentagon. You know, Obama and Osama bin Laden have one thing in
common, at least: They both have friends who bombed the
Pentagon. It's undeniable; it's a fact. It may sound funny to you;
it's not to me. But a lot of people don't want to take Ayers
seriously. "Oh, come on, Rush! He's a sixties guy." How many of you
see Bill Ayers and his ilk as just a bunch of harmless hippies who
never grew up?

You know, these harmless little tie-dyed crazy guys living in
Volkswagen buses with peace signs painted on them. You know, Arlo
Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant! We just laugh at them. Do you have the
image from Forrest Gump when he finds the love of his life, Jenny,
hanging out with a bumbling of long-haired maggot infested freaks in
a van doing assorted Timothy Leary drugs and flashing peace signs
saying, "Make love, not war"? You might have even dabbled in that
culture yourself back in the seventies. We all did a little, except
for me. I wanted no part of it. Ever. I, to this day, do not own a
pair of blue jeans because of that. You probably still even have a
tie-dyed T-shirt in the attic with a pair of bell bottoms. You
picture yourself with long hair saying, "Never trust anybody over 30."

But now your kids are over 30! We have Hanoi Jane smiling on that
anti-aircraft gun while McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton. And the
counterculture says, "Oh, that's the good old days!" Can we say
"counterculture" or is that racist now? I know we can't say
"socialist"; that's racist. Now, most of us grew out of this phase.
Well, most of you grew out of the stupid garbage. I never played in
it. Guess what? Not everybody did. Ayers and his hardcore ilk,
including a young Obama and Michelle (My Belle), simply went
incognito and underground. By the way, next week we're going to play
an interview. I've never done this. We interviewed Stanley Kurtz, I
did, of National Review Online, The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He's done the job the Drive-Bys used to do on people, looking into
Barack Obama.

We're going to play parts of that interview next week in advance of
the issue in which it will appear coming out. Some people ask, "How
can you cannibalize yourself?" It's important. And one of the
things he said that I was not fully aware of, I've been under the
impression that Obama arrived in Chicago a little innocent waif who
had some ideas about what he wanted to do, but somehow was discovered
by all these leftist radicals. When in fact it's the other way
around! Obama arrived in Chicago as a radical ideologue and set out
finding the people he needed to find and get to know, to move his
agenda and vision forward. It was Obama who found Ayers. Now, it
may well be that Ayers got his career going by hosting a fundraiser
in his house, but it was Obama who found these people. It was Obama
who found Jeremiah Wright. Obama's not the innocent little guy who's
been corrupted by these leftist radicals.

He is one of them, and you will hear it all as Stanley Kurtz explains
it brilliantly when we get into this next hour. A lot of these
radicals have blended and modified their outward appearance so that
they could go unseen but they held fast to their radical views:
unadulterated socialism, the overthrow of capitalism. Now, remember,
journalists and academics live in a world of zero quantitative
measurement. They spend their days contemplating their navels,
resenting the achievers. They teach each other this. It's a mantra
they keep saying to themselves. Bill Ayers is as radical as he ever
was! Obama, I don't care if he says he was only eight when Ayers did
this stuff, he's known Ayers all of his life! He shared an office
with Bill Ayers and ACORN, I think, for three years. Do you think
sharing an address, they might have run into each other in three
years? So here's the Ayers sound bite. The audio is not all that
hot, but you'll be able to hear it. Now, keep in mind: seven days
later, after this, Ayers appeared with Obama on a panel.

AYERS: I considered myself partly an anarchist then and I consider
myself partly an anarchist now. I mean, I am as much an anarchist as
I am a Marxist, um, which is to say I find a lot of the ideas in
anarchism, you know, appealing and I'm very open about what I think,
nobody here surprised by what I think. The struggle over various
religious fundamentalism it's jihad being, you know, the most
visible. But the religious fundamentalism of the Christians and of
the Jews is equally troubling. Is one of the regrets that I took
extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous
crisis? No, it's not. I don't regret that.

RUSH: Unrepentant. This is April 12th, 2002, and Obama served with
him on a panel just seven days later. Do I need to read the
transcript? Were you able to get all that? Were you able to hear it
all? I'm not going to play it again. I'm going to read the
transcript for those of you who were unable to hear it. He said, "I
considered myself partly an anarchist then and I consider myself
partly an anarchist now. I mean, I am as much an anarchist as I am a
Marxist, which is to say I find a lot of the ideas in anarchism, you
know, appealing and I'm very open about what I think. Nobody here
surprised by what I think. The struggle over various religious
fundamentalism it's jihad being, you know, the most visible. But the
religious fundamentalism of the Christians and of the Jews is equally
troubling. Is one of the regrets that I took extreme measures
against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No, it's
not. I don't regret that."

Obama claims he thought the guy was "rehabilitated." He's lying
through his teeth! He knows the guy hasn't been rehabilitated. He
knows that Michael Klonsky, an avowed communist and a good friend of
Obama's, has not been rehabilitated. He knows that Jeremiah Wright
has not been rehabilitated, despite being thrown under the bus. He
knows that all of his other associations are just out of the Ayers
book. He sought them out. He, Obama, found them. Obama is the
window dressing, and this is what is so frustrating about the
so-called intellectuals in the conservative media falling out now and
lining up with Obama, and they're doing it over style! These are
supposedly the smartest people in the conservative movement, and
they're falling prey to style: Obama's slickness, his communicative
skills. It has nothing to do with what he says, what his substance
is -- and they know it. They know it! They just don't think he'll
actually be this, what he actually is.

END TRANSCRIPT

.

Father of underground comics goes uptown

[2 articles]

Father of underground comics goes uptown

http://www.eveningsun.com/ci_10821956

By RON TODT Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 10/26/2008

PHILADELPHIA ­ As a lonely teenager, Robert Crumb vowed to use his
artistic talent to become famous to take revenge on those who had
rejected him.

But it was a tour through the drug-laced San Francisco of the 1960s
that brought him fame as the father of underground comics. His
satiric, surreal and sometimes sexually explicit images helped
illustrate the emerging counterculture and chronicled what he has
called the "seamy side of America's subconscious."

Compared to Brueghel and Goya and denounced as a pornographic
misogynist, Crumb finds his work popping up these days in fine art
museums throughout the world. Now the 65-year-old artist is having a
homecoming of sorts in Philadelphia in "R. Crumb's Underground," a
career-spanning exhibition of more than 100 works, on view at the
University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art through Dec. 7.

"It was just a matter of the art world actually catching up to him,"
said Todd Hignite, editor of Comic Art Magazine, who curated the show
for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year.
"He's been so influential not only to practically every cartoonist
following in his wake, but a lot of gallery artists are really
influenced by him as well."

The exhibition traces Crumb's trip from the psychedelic '60s to
recent collaborations with his wife, fellow cartoonist Aline
Kominsky-Crumb. Included are familiar images such as Fritz the Cat
and the "Keep on Truckin'" line of men with giant shoes strutting
across the landscape. But the exhibit also features comics Crumb drew
as a boy and offbeat efforts such as faces painted on spools and a
life-size contorted "Devil Girl" statue.

Other strips explore his own insecurities and obsessions, including a
fondness for strong, large-rumped women. Still others careen far past
political incorrectness, using ethnic stereotypes, sex and violence
to satirize the dark side of idealized American culture.

Born here on Aug. 30, 1943, Crumb began drawing at the urging of his
comic-obsessed brother, Charles. He moved to Cleveland as an adult
and worked as a commercial illustrator, drawing greeting cards.

In 1965, Crumb started experimenting with LSD, which immediately
helped him create some of his best-known characters. In January 1967,
he hitched a ride to San Francisco just in time for the full
flowering of the hippie movement. His images echoing old-time cartoon
styles, first in Philadelphia's Yarrowstalks and later in his own Zap
Comix, helped define the underground comic stew of sex- and
drug-themed surrealism and antiestablishment sentiment.

Flower Power faded, but Crumb kept working, steadily publishing in
such magazines as Weirdo and Self-Loathing Comics. He also
illustrated many of Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" accounts of
his mundane life in Cleveland, which were adapted for film in 2003.

Art critic Robert Hughes has called Crumb "the Brueghel of the last
half of the 20th century," casting him in a tradition of graphic arts
as social protest and seeing elements of Goya in his grotesqueness.

"Crumb's material comes out of a deep sense of the absurdity of human
life," Hughes said in "Crumb," a 1994 documentary. "At a certain
psychic level, there aren't any heroes, villains or heroines. Even
the victims are comic."

Others decry his satiric stereotypical portrayals of black
characters, and feminist writers have seen pornography and hostility
toward women. Former Mother Jones editor Diedre English has called
Crumb's work the product of an "arrested juvenile vision."

That such criticism came early is evidenced by a 1971 strip, "A Word
With You Feminist Women," in which Crumb acknowledges the brutality
against women in some of his comics but says he is portraying and not
advocating it. The strip, however, devolves into a rant in which he
tells his detractors that he will draw whatever he pleases. Another
commentary shows him throttling a comely TV interviewer who started
to psychoanalyze his work.

In 2005's "The R. Crumb Handbook," the artist said his black
characters "are not about black people but are more about pushing
these 'uncool' stereotypes in readers' faces, so suddenly they have
to deal with a very tacky part of our human nature." He acknowledged,
however, being occasionally embarrassed looking back on some of the work.

"That imagery is offensive, and it's imagery that exists in the
culture, and he's trying to get beneath that imagery ... and see what
sort of mind-set created that imagery," Hignite said. "Nothing he
does is ever done for superficial shock value; it's always part of a
larger project to get at the heart of what this is about in America."

Crumb, who declined to be interviewed, is as hard on himself as on
others, appearing frequently in his strips as a neurotic, sexually
obsessed misanthrope. A self-portrait in the exhibition shows him
with hair standing on end, eyes bulging, teeth bared in a grimace,
holding a sign saying, "My true inner self."

In some ways, his association with the '60s was something of a
mismatch. For example, he never had any use for rock music; he
collected early blues and jazz records since boyhood and played banjo
in such bands as the 1920s-style Cheap Suit Serenaders. The
exhibition includes a set of 36 watercolor trading cards of early
jazz greats and a biographical comic of Delta blues singer Charley Patton.

As many in the era pursued spiritual enlightenment, one of Crumb's
most famous characters was ornery, white-bearded guru-cum-rake Mr.
Natural, whose path to bliss seemed to involve more sex than contemplation.

Deep suspicion of commercial culture is one of the counterculture
values Crump retains, even if it involves his work. He turned down an
offer to do a Rolling Stones album cover­although he did the "Cheap
Thrills" cover of Janis Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding
Company­and so hated the movie version of his "Fritz the Cat" that he
killed off the character.

But Crumb's disaffection appears to go beyond politics or culture to
mere existence. In a 2005 essay called "The Litany of Hate," he
unloads on civilization, organized religion, governments, the human
psyche and even the processes of maintaining the body and creating new life.

"I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling
desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me
feel good," he writes. "For me to be human is, for the most part, to
hate what I am. When I suddenly realize I am one of them, I want to
scream in horror."

"That's what his art comes out of, dealing with his negativity," Hignite said.

But an occasional note of optimism emerges, as in his love for
old-time music and in a 1988 epilogue to 1979's "Short History of
America," which shows the transformation of a pastoral landscape to
urban bleakness. Of three possible futures depicted, one is an
eco-disaster, but the others are a futuristic 'techno-fix' ("the FUN
future") with flying vehicles whizzing by, and the other an
"ecotopian" forest with cyclists, domes and tree houses.

Crumb views his recent acceptance by the art establishment with a
typically jaundiced eye, saying he has been "kicked upstairs" more as
a matter of economics than aesthetics.

"I think he knows where his work fits in ... and I don't think he
needs any validation from anybody," Hignite said. "He really just
cares about doing the work."

Crumb's latest effort might surprise some of his counterculture-era
admirers. The artist, who now lives in the south of France, is
finishing up a long-term project illustrating the book of Genesis. He
told Time Magazine in 2005 that the biblical book was "full of all
kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people."
--

On the Net:

Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania:
http://www.icaphila.org/

Official R. Crumb site: http://www.crumbproducts.com/

--------

Digging 'Underground'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/24/AR2008102400877.html

In a Temple of High Art, the Lowbrow Work Of R. Crumb Certainly Rises
to the Occasion

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 26, 2008; Page M06

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- I don't know if the comic book is the lowest
form of art, but it's way down there.

This is central to its charm.

The comic that's worth remembering isn't fancy-schmancy. It's quick
and coarse and cheap. It doesn't seek admission to the higher realms
of art. It's closer to the pits.

Ah, the pits! Ah, the nostalgia! "The Vault of Horror" and "Tales
From the Crypt," two favorites of my childhood, were deliciously
disgusting. Those pulpy-paper booklets published by EC Comics were so
dank with rotting monsters (this was part of their attractiveness),
and so appalled my righteous parents (this was another), that I had
to keep them hidden, buried, under the mattress -- which brings me to
R. Crumb.

The old reprobate himself -- he of Mr. Natural, Zap Comix and
Meatball, and don't forget "Keep on Truckin' " -- is shamelessly
exhibiting 50 years of his comics at the University of Pennsylvania's
Institute of Contemporary Art.

The war upon the cute mounted in the '60s by the counterculture's
comics was a multi-front offense. The cartoonists who produced them
-- S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, Skip Williamson and others --
then seemed a sort of army, a scraggly one for sure, and Crumb was
the lewd leader of those stoned and savage warriors, commanding from
the front, Rapidograph in hand.

So many heroes met in comic books are muscular and handsome. Crumb
isn't. He's scrawny and geeky. He is not nice. Still, his drawing is
implacable, and his skills are undeniable (he's the captain of the
crosshatchers, perhaps the best since Thomas Nast). His museum
retrospective, precisely as intended, soaks you in a hose-pipe jet of
gags and hideosities, old-timey yearnings, nerdy sexuality and
eye-grabbing delight.

His exhibition in his birthplace, the city of brotherly love -- of
which he doesn't have much -- is titled "R. Crumb's Underground,"
which sounds exactly right. Underground is where you put the cesspits
and the secrets. The now-abandoned underground of counterculture fun,
of hairiness and head shops and San Francisco dreamin', of sex and
pot and rock-and-roll (or in Crumb's case, early blues), is where his
comic-corrosive vision first burst into view.

Its outrageousness is stunning. Most of us (and I include the hippest
and the freest) have walls around our thoughts, imagination
boundaries, established in our heads. Crumb dissolved his with LSD.
He breaks ours with his drawings. Few goaders of his period -- not
William S. Burroughs of "Naked Lunch," or savage Lenny Bruce, or
"Fear and Loathing's" Hunter S. Thompson -- were as assiduous as he
at liquefying decencies.

America is chockablock with rude people who draw comics, and most are
pretty awful. In some ways Crumb is awful, too, but he is also
excellent -- excellent at lettering and onrushing narrative, at
baseball caps and street clothes. He's also very good at telephone
poles; no one draws the wires that sag across the shoddy backways of
America more poignantly.

Measured by celebrity, by scholarly attention and by the quantity of
stuff that, erupting from his id, pours straight through his pen,
Crumb's the best we've got.

So the art world now agrees. Crumb has won them over. And he's come
at them from below.

Other artists more high-minded (Walt Disney, Roy Lichtenstein, even
Andy Warhol) sought to elevate the comics, but Crumb did no such
thing. The man is not high-minded. He went the other way. Down and
down, deeper and deeper, down under good manners, underneath
propriety and way below the belt.

The boot fetishes, the juvenile horniness ("I look, I see, I lust"),
the alienated bitterness, the decaying Catholic guilt -- one
encounters his effusions with odd, appalling glee. R. Crumb has a
troubled soul, which isn't rare in art. He also has within him a
large amount of funniness, which in the higher realms of art (one
does not laugh in church) is very rare indeed.

The brash big-footed beings encountered in his comics -- Flakey Foont
and Whiteman ("I've tried! God knows I've tried!"), Mr. Snoid and
Meatball, and the grossest of the gurus, bearded Mr. Natural, "the
man from Afghanistan" -- are aspects of the man himself. They
clambered from his depths. And then spread out through the world. His
"Keep on Truckin' " was at one time near-ubiquitous. Posters beyond
counting showed its shuffling male chorus line, as did car decals and
little paper squares of blotter LSD. And lots of us took notice.
Steve Martin, for example, said that "Keep on Truckin' " taught him
how to walk.

Crumb's art tends to get misread. True, he moved to San Francisco in
the psychedelic heyday of the Fillmore and the Dead, and sold his
comics on the Haight, but R. Crumb was no hippie. "I couldn't dress
like them," he has said. "I couldn't go dancing in the park, and I
couldn't stand the music."

Nor was he a lefty. In the bygone days of hippiedom, much
counterculture art, in America at least, leaned toward the
progressive, but Crumb's did no such thing. His Angelfood McSpade
savaged racial harmony. His "Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos"
did the same to women's liberation. He never wore the headband. Crumb
preferred the fedora. Had the man no shame? Nope, none at all. Crumb
just kept on drawin' and kept on diggin', down past the eight-pagers,
and the stick-figure graffiti, down as far as he could go.

And what did it get him? I'll tell you what it got him. It got him a
house in France, and perhaps a score of scholarly publications (not
by him, but about him), and shows around the world, and a memorable
movie ("Crumb" by Terry Zwigoff, in 1994) all about his life.

If you think that Crumb himself is weird, you should see his family.
His father was a tyrant, his mother was on speed, his brother Charles
a recluse, a depressive and a suicide. At one piercing moment in
Zwigoff's documentary, the artist's younger brother, Maxon, who is
living all alone in a San Francisco flophouse, pulls his bed-of-nails
out from underneath his bed.

And yet R. Crumb has prospered. His art has been displayed in a slew
of exhibitions in legitimate museums. (Crumb, who's 65, first
exhibited in Washington at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in
1969.) He has a gig at the New Yorker. His work attracts collectors.
In the highest, most demanding circles of the art world, no
contemporary cartoonist has had more success than he.

Once upon a time, all images were art. Not anymore. Now the art world
is a precious place, rigorously defended, and cartoonists aren't
admitted. A Nixon drawn by Herblock or a Churchill drawn by David
Low, a "Pogo" by Walt Kelly or a "Krazy Kat" by George Herriman, much
less a checkered demon by S. Clay Wilson, or, God forbid, a Disney
cel -- such images are seldom seen in shows of master drawings. The
art world has its boundaries. But somehow Crumb got in.

After being dunked in his show in Philadelphia, you begin to see the
reasons. Crumb's art is transgressive, and the art world loves
transgression. Crumb shocks his toughest viewers, and the art world
longs for shock. Crumb's drawing is superior, there is little doubt
of that, and his art is full of references -- to Mutt and Jeff, to
Kilroy and Walt Disney, and to Classic Comics, too. Also, one might
argue, it extends a great tradition: See how it takes you back
through Daumier and through Goya all the way to Giotto, whose famous
fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel (Padua, Italy, circa 1305) is as
graphic and sequential as a strip cartoon.

And although Crumb creates comics, his are never cute. The art world
gags on cuteness. Also, let's admit it, the art world thrives on
fame. And R. Crumb is a star.

It isn't just the movie, or the many exhibitions, or the coffee-table
books. Crumb's complex myopic stoop-shouldered persona -- his
obsession with big legs, his banjo-picking geekiness, his high school
days in Delaware (especially playing footsie with luscious Jeanette
Bates in their American history class), his early work in greeting
cards, his travels through the Rust Belt, his marriage to Aline, his
revulsion at pretension, his collection of 78s, his admiration for
the songs of Charley Patton and the blues of Bukka White -- all of
this, and more of him, pours out of his art.

When you look into Crumb's comics he is there, in person. "Y'know,"
the artist wrote in 2002, "I'm probably one of the few, maybe the
only human on this planet with no secrets. My deepest, bizarrest
thoughts and fantasies are known by millions of people! Between my
comics and published sketchbooks and the 'Crumb' documentary, and
various published interviews and articles about me, there's not a
corner or cranny of my life and psyche that hasn't been publicly
explored, put on display, held up for ridicule, for laughs, to ogle
at, as an example, as a freak show, or just out of my own
narcissistic compulsion to exhibit myself, like when Lyndon Johnson
pulled up his shirttail and showed his scar."

Flakey Foont and Mr. Snoid, the big-legged women with vulture heads,
the outrages, the orgies and instructive Mr. Natural -- all are
facets of the man.

Do they make you feel all icky? Do they fill you with revulsion,
expose your inner creepiness or elicit your guffaws?

Don't worry.

"Remember, it's only lines on paper, folks!" -- or so says R. Crumb.
--

R. Crumb's Underground includes more than 100 objects. Organized in
San Francisco by Todd Hignite for the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, it will remain in Philadelphia at the University of
Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St.,
through Dec. 7. For information call 215-898-7108. The ICA is open
from noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 5
p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free.

Independent Lens: Chicago 10

Independent Lens: Chicago 10

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/64697/independent-lens-chicago-10/

Regular airtime: Wednesday, 9pm ET (PBS)

Cast: Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, David Boat, David Dellinger, Debra
Eisenstadt, Dylan Baker, Hank Azaria, James Urbaniak, Jeffrey Wright,
Jerry Rubin, Leonard Weinglass, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Nick
Nolte, Roy Scheider, William Kunstler

US release date: 22 October 2008
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

Showtime

The first person on screen is Lyndon Johnson. Sober and old-TV gray,
leaning toward the camera, he rocks slightly as he announces the
decision to raise the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 75,000 to
125,000. This means, he adds, the monthly draft call will soon expand
from 17,000 to 35,000. The war's escalation in 1968 sparks widening
protests and organized efforts to stop it, including demonstrations
at the Democratic Convention, and, as captured in Brett Morgen's
excellent documentary Chicago 10, calls to action on multiple fronts.

Opening the Fall 2008 season of Independent Lens, the film itself
revises old ideas­about what constitutes history and documentary. The
title adds a couple of defendants to the case before Judge Hoffman,
including Bobby Seale, gagged in the courtroom but here granted
great, effective visibility. The film presents history in a manner at
once subjective and energizing: animated figures, voiced by actors,
act out the transcript from the trial, making available a history
initially enacted behind closed doors. History is here revealed as
limited and shifting, a story told and retold. As the defendants paid
for their defenses via speaking engagements throughout the trial,
jetting to college campuses and back to Chicago overnight, they were
well aware of the benefits of performance, appreciating if not
exactly enjoying the surreality of their situation.

Aside from the outrageous statistics of the war­numbers killed,
numbers of troops­Chicago 10 provides little historical context for
1968 (there is no mention, say, of Bobby Kennedy's assassination of
Hubert Humphrey's existence). Rather than taking the pronouncements
of either Judge Hoffman (voiced by Roy Scheider) or Seale (Jeffrey
Wright) as truth, the film questions the process by which truth is
determined. Even as it uses archival footage and images, the film
shows how these cannot possibly tell whole stories accurately. When
the demonstrators in Chicago '68 shouted "The whole world is
watching" for TV cameras, they named the moment "public," a
collective memory in the making. The declaration was also a warning
to the cops battering protestors' heads that their bad behavior was
becoming history.

The movie includes scenes of the "planning" for this spectacle, as
members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam (MOBE) propose to "put forth the kinds of values to create a
society in which a Vietnam war wouldn't even be possible." As the
camera reveals an apartment full of stock emblems of '60s
counterculture­reefer, sex, a framed portrait of Che­the incipient
media stars decide they need a name for their performance troupe.
"What rhymes with hippie?" they wonder, as "Yippie!" appears in
bubbly animated brilliance over Paul Krassner's (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) head.

Even as MOBE leader Rennie Davis (James Urbaniak) asserts their
desire to show the world "there are thousands of young people in this
country who do not want to see a rigged convention rubber-stamp
another four years of Lyndon Johnson's war," the Yippies prepare for
a "Festival of Life," featuring music, performance, and what Hoffman
called a "fuck-in." He describes it for a TV interview: "I mean, it's
all conceived as a total theater with everyone becoming an actor." As
their application for a license to assemble in Chicago is put off by
Mayor Daley's nervous staffers, the city adds 7,500 Army troops and
6,000 National Guardsmen to the 12,000 police officers who were put
on 12-hour shifts. As Walter Cronkite puts it, "The Democratic
Convention is about to begin, in a police state, there just doesn't
seem to be any other way to say it." The protestors anticipate a
showy showdown, and get it.

The trial is another sort of show. Defendant Abbie Hoffman (Hank
Azaria) denies the charges against MOBE members and Yippies (Youth
International Party), that they had "incited a riot." "It's a state
of mind trial," says the "real" Hoffman during a TV interview, "I
mean, we're being tried for our thoughts." In the courtroom, he and
fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin gesticulate, speak out of turn, and
generally cause a ruckus, infuriating Judge Hoffman, who slaps them
with more charges.

Defense attorney William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) adopts his own
theatrics, arguing, "This was not a riot caused by demonstrators, but
a riot engineered by the police of this city." (Kunstler and the
other defense counsel, Leonard Weinglass, were convicted of "criminal
contempt" by the end of the trial, thus becoming the extra two of
this film's title; like the convictions of their clients, theirs were
reversed on appeal.) The prosecution is as ostentatious as the
defense; Thomas Foran (Nick Nolte) declares, "These people made
unreasonable demands on the city of Chicago." Contradictory
testimonies create competing "histories." A police officer swears she
heard Hoffman urge protestors to "bring a lot of weapons" in order to
"take [Lincoln] Park," while Hoffman recalls saying, "If the cops
want the Park, we'll give 'em the Park. Who gives a shit?" Cartoon
flashbacks show hundreds of police in gas masks chasing demonstrators
over the grass.

Such different versions of "what happened" are thematic in Chicago
10. The cartoon Rubin (Mark Ruffalo) notes during a stage
appearance­college lecture as standup comedy­the addition of Seale to
the defendants was a stroke of perverse genius: "Bobby was only in
Chicago a couple hours," Rubin says, "But the government believes in
integration, equality, so if it indicts seven, it's got to add on a
black person to make eight. And what could be better than the
national chairman of the Black Panther Party. Beautiful."

It's alarming and not a little infuriating to see cops beating on
demonstrators during the film's climactic sequence of riot images. As
performers like Peter, Paul & Mary try to calm the crowd, the film
lurches into footage of brutal assaults with batons, dazed and bloody
faces. As these are lined up alongside the animated Seale asserting,
"I want to speak on behalf of my constitutional rights, you can't
deny me my constitutional rights," when Judge Hoffman consents for a
moment to have his gag removed, it's hard not to think of the many
other protestors, detainees, and U.S. citizens whose rights are being
stifled as we speak.

.

A little insight into the real Bill Ayers

A little insight into the real Bill Ayers

http://gazettextra.com/news/2008/oct/20/little-insight-real-bill-ayers/

By JOEL MCNALLY
Oct. 20, 2008

It's understandable how both presidential campaigns are handling the
phony issue of Sen. Barack Obama's connection with Bill Ayers, a
University of Illinois education professor who, 40 years ago, helped
found the militant anti-war group, the Weathermen.

McCain is blanketing Wisconsin and much of the rest of the nation
with a massive automated telephone campaign claiming Obama "has
worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization
bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans."

The reason McCain is spending so much money on deceptive charges that
have nothing to do with the real issues in the presidential race is
that McCain is on the wrong side of the real issues in the presidential race.

Obama, on the other hand, can only point out he was 8 years old when
the Weathermen engaged in radical anti-war activities. And that his
association with Ayers amounted to sitting on two boards distributing
funds to improve Chicago schools and to support worthwhile community projects.

What Obama is not free to say during the presidential campaign is
what anyone who knows the work of Bill Ayers over the past 25 years
knows to be true­that Bill Ayers is a good man doing good work and no
one running for president should ever have to apologize for
associating with him.

If Obama were to utter that truth, it would immediately appear in
another negative McCain ad, "Obama praises terrorist bomber!"

Since it's politically impossible for Obama to give Ayers the
accolades he deserves right now, allow me. I know Bill Ayers a little
bit. I don't pal around with him or anything, as the know-nothing
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claims about Obama.

But I interviewed Ayers in the late '90s when I was editor of
Shepherd Express alternative weekly, after he published a book, "A
Kind and Just Parent," about the need for reform in the juvenile
justice system.

Later, Ayers participated in a conference on criminal justice reform
at UW-Milwaukee organized by my wife, Kit, who is executive director
of the Benedict Center, an organization that advocates for fairness
in the criminal justice system and effective community alternatives.

Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, an honors graduate from
Whitefish Bay High School, know about criminal justice first hand.
They lived in hiding for 11 years to avoid federal charges connected
to the 1969 Days of Rage anti-war protest in Chicago.

As a Milwaukee Journal reporter, I covered the emergence of Ayers and
Dohrn from the underground in 1981 when they turned themselves in to
then States Attorney Richard Daley, the son of their '60s nemesis.

All charges against the two ended with a legal whimper after Dohrn
pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge and was fined $1,500.

How does all that square with McCain's inflammatory charge that Ayers
bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and killed Americans?

No such deaths were attributed to any bombs connected to Ayers. The
so-called bombing of the Pentagon amounted to a small bomb placed in
the drain of a restroom toilet. But in 1970, a townhouse in Greenwich
Village where bombs were being assembled exploded. The Americans
killed were three friends of Bill and Bernardine, idealists like
themselves whose passion against the Vietnam War somehow began
echoing the violence of the war makers.

That event, more than any other, helped shape the rest of Ayers's life.

"My deepest regret," Ayers told me in 1997, "is the townhouse
explosion where three very, very dear people were killed. I feel
culpable. I feel responsible. And I don't know what to do about that
responsibility except to live forward. To make a fairer, more just,
more humane world as they would have."

When McCain began demonizing Ayers, I checked to see what Ayers had
written in our copy of his memoir, "Fugitive Days." It says: "To Joel
and Kit, With admiration for all you do for social justice, and with
hope­wounded but alive­for a world at peace. Best wishes, Bill Ayers."

The same to you, pal.
--

Joel McNally is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is
jmcnally@wi.rr.com.

.

Terrorist Professor: Teaching Your Children?

[2 articles]

Terrorist Professor: Teaching Your Children?

http://www.kjzz.com/news/cafe/32345779.html

By Steve Baxter
Story Updated: Oct 22, 2008

William Charles Ayers better known as Bill Ayers is an American
college professor and former 1960s anti-war activist.

He is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and
1970s as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum,
and instruction.

In 1969 he cofounded the radical left organization the Weather
Underground, which conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings
during that time. Now, he's a professor at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of
Education and Senior University Scholar.
In 1997 Chicago awarded him its Citizen of the Year award for his
work on public education reform.

But how does an admitted terrorist become a professor and Chicago's
citizen of the year. Ayers became involved in the New Left and the
Students for a Democratic Society in 1968 and 69. He became a
prominent leader of the group.

In 1970 he "went underground" with several associates after the
Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, in which Weatherman member Ted
Gold, Ayers' close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers' girlfriend, Diana
Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb they were assembling exploded.

Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson survived the blast. Ayers was not
facing criminal charges at the time, but the federal government later
filed charges against him.

Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police
Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and
The Pentagon in 1972, as he noted in his 2001 book, Fugitive Days.
Because of a water leak caused by the Pentagon bombing, aerial
bombardments during the Vietnam War had to be halted for several days.

While underground, he and fellow member Bernardine Dohrn married, and
the two remained fugitives together, changing identities, jobs and
locations. By 1976 or 1977, with federal charges against both
fugitives dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct they later turned
themselves in.

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political
beliefs. He said
"I am a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist ... Maybe I'm the last
communist who is willing to admit it. The ethics of Communism still
appeal to me. I don't like Lenin as much as the early Marx.

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since 2000
stems from an interview he gave to The New York Times.

The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and
"I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all
again," as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility. Ayers
has not denied the quotes, but said he was misunderstood,
deliberately distorted.

--------

Radical Loon When Obama Was Only 47

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29164

by Ann Coulter
10/22/2008

The media are acting as if they completely and fully vetted Obama
during the Democratic primaries and that's why they are entitled to
send teams of researchers into Alaska to analyze Sarah Palin's every
expense report.

In fact, the mainstream media did no vetting. They seem to have all
agreed, "OK, none of us will get into this business with Jeremiah
Wright, 'Tony' Rezko, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and everyone's
impression of an angry Michelle Obama on 'The Jerry Springer Show.'"

During one of the Democratic primary debates, Hillary Clinton was
hissed for mentioning Syrian national Rezko, and during another, ABC
moderator George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking
Obama one question about William Ayers.

In the past week, TV anchors have taken to claiming that Obama
"refuted" John McCain's statement that Obama launched his political
career at the home of former Weather Underground leader Ayers.

No, Obama "denied" it; he didn't "refute" it. If "denying" something
is the same as "refuting" it, then maybe the establishment media can
quit harping on Palin's supposed lack of qualifications to be
president, since she too "refuted" that by denying it.

Back before the media realized it needed to lie about Obama launching
his political career at Ayers' house, the Los Angeles Times provided
an eyewitness account from a liberal who attended the event.

"When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous
little talk in the living room of those two
legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They
were launching him -- introducing him to the Hyde Park community as
the best thing since sliced bread."

The Times has now stripped this item from its Web page, but the great
blogger Patterico has preserved it for posterity on his Web page.

Obama's glib remark that "Bill Ayers is a professor of education in
Chicago; 40 years ago when I was 8 years old he engaged in despicable
acts with a domestic group. I have roundly denounced those attacks"
-- doesn't answer anything.

First of all, the fact that Ayers is a professor of education proves
only one thing: He is dumber than any person without an education degree.

Ayers is such an imbecile, we ought to be amazed that he's teaching
at a university -- even when you consider that it's an ed school --
except all former violent radicals end up teaching. Roughly 80
percent of former Weathermen are full college professors -- 99
percent if you don't include the ones killed in shoot-outs with the
police or in prison -- i.e., not yet pardoned by a Democratic president.

Any other profession would have banned a person like Ayers.
Universities not only accept former domestic terrorists, but also
move them to the front of the line. In addition to Ayers, among those
once on the FBI's most-wanted list who ended up in cushy college
teaching positions are Bernardine Dohrn (Northwestern University),
Mark Rudd (a junior college in New Mexico) and Angela Davis (History
of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz).

While others were hard at work on Ph.D.s, Susan Rosenberg was
conspiring to kill cops and blow up buildings, and was assembling
massive caches of explosives. This put her on the fast track for a
teaching position at Hamilton College!

Despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach, having earned
only a master's degree in "writing" through a correspondence course,
Rosenberg was offered a position at Hamilton within a few years of
President Clinton pardoning her in 2001, releasing her from a 58-year
prison sentence for participating in the murder of cops and
possessing more than 700 pounds of explosives.

But Obama thinks it's a selling point to say that Ayers is a college professor.

Hundreds of college professors have signed a letter vouching for
Ayers, which would be like Lester Maddox producing a letter from
George Wallace assuring us that Maddox is a respected member of the
community. No, really, I've got the letter right here!

The media keep citing the fact that the money Obama and Ayers
distributed to idiotic left-wing causes came -- as The New York Times
put it -- "from Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and
philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to the
United Kingdom."

Great Republican though he was, Walter Annenberg died in 2002. The
money came from the Annenberg Foundation, which, like all
foundations, distributes money to projects that its founder would
despise. John Kerry ran for president on the late John Heinz's money.
That didn't mean Republican Heinz was endorsing Kerry.

As John O'Sullivan says, any foundation that is not explicitly
right-wing will become a radical left-wing organization within a few
years. It could be the Association of University Women, the American
Association of Retired People, the American Rose Growers, the
Foundation for the Study of Railroad Engineers or the Choral Society
of Newport Beach.

Left-wing radicals swarm to free foundation money, where they can
give gigantic grants to one another and they will never have to do a
day's work. That's exactly what Obama and Ayers did with Annenberg's money.

None of the Annenberg money went to schoolchildren. It went to Ayers'
left-wing crank friends to write moronic papers that we hope no one
ever reads.

Instead of teaching students reading and writing, Ayers thinks they
should be taught to rebel against America's "imperialist" social
structure. In 2006, Ayers was in Venezuela praising communist
dictator Hugo Chavez, saying, "We share the belief that education is
the motor-force of revolution."

He has backed a line of schoolbooks such as one titled "Teaching
Science for Social Justice."

Forget about Ayers' domestic terrorism when Obama "was 8 years old."
Does he agree with Ayers' idiot ideas right now?

.

Bill Ayers, the Marxist Revolutionary in the 1960s

Bill Ayers, the Marxist Revolutionary in the 1960s

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/bill_ayers_the_marxist_revolut.html

October 25, 2008
By Peter Barry Chowka

Most of the recent attention on Barack Obama's radical associate and
friend Bill Ayers has focused on Ayers' history with the terrorist
Weather Underground (WU) group in the 1970s. But starting in the
mid-1960s, Ayers was an influential leader of the revolutionary
Marxist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), from which the WU evolved.

Kirkpatrick Sale's sympathetic, lengthy SDS: The Rise And Development
Of The Students For A Democratic Society, published in 1973 by
Vintage Books and long out of print, is the definitive history of the
organization. The book is a comprehensive, near contemporaneous
history written soon after the events it reports on and it is
thoroughly sourced and annotated. A complete copy of the book is
posted at the Internet Archive, and can be downloaded as a free PDF file.

After downloading the 2.5 MB file, using Adobe Acrobat Reader's
search function, one can easily locate all of the book's references
to Bill Ayers by keyword searching "Ayers," as well as the exploits
and role of another Obama friend, Ayers' wife and fellow SDS-er
Bernardine Dohrn. The excerpts that come up are very revealing about
Ayers, Dohrn, their allies, and their agenda in the 1960s.

Here are a few excerpts from SDS (page numbers are from the original
book; page numbers in the PDF file are a bit different).

"There's a whole new set on campus," wrote Terry Robbins and Bill
Ayers, the travelers for SDS in the Ohio-Michigan region at the start
of the 1968-69 school year. "The Movement is opening up all over the
place: the first generation of high-school SDS coming onto the
campus, the no-choice election-fraud bullshit, Columbia, and Chicago
all have contributed to a new atmosphere of optimism and
aggressiveness and the possibility for continued, prolonged action."
Both travelers, committed actionists, devoted themselves to pushing
SDS within that atmosphere for all they were worth. . . [SDS page 326
in original book]

Sales quoting a paper written by Bill Ayers and Jim Mellen:

"It is clear that SDS must begin to consciously transform itself from
a student movement into a working class youth movement ... by
emphasizing the commonality of the oppression and struggles of youth,
and by making these struggles class conscious." But to it were added
two crucial extensions, alliances with the black liberationists-"To
recognize the vanguard character of the black liberation struggle
means to recognize its importance to the 'white' movement"-and with
the Third World-"All our actions must flow from our identity as part
of an international struggle against U.S. imperialism." And to make
any of this serious, to transform SDS into something that really
could lead a revolutionary movement, what was necessary was a
commitment to discipline. [SDS page 353]

"The reactionary nature of pacifism, the need for armed struggle as
the only road to revolution [are] essential truths which were not
predominant within our movement in the past ... . We [must] recognize
the urgency of fighting white supremacy by building the material
strength of the white movement to be a conscious, organized,
mobilized fighting force capable of giving real support to the black
liberation struggle." [Ayers and Mellen, SDS page 354]

"We have one task," Bill Ayers was to say, "and that's to make
ourselves into tools of the revolution." Operating beneath their
quest was the wisdom of the insight, shared by many Weathermen though
not all, that the capitalist system operates not simply through
obvious material and military ways but infests daily lives and
thoughts with a million ideas and patterns which reinforce its power:
not just racism and sexism and elitism, but all the other elements of
socialization ingrained since childhood-attitudes to property,
privacy, material goods, family, competition, collectivization,
romantic love, homosexuality, power, status, and all the rest.

And though this insight did not always shine through in
practice-there was still a lot of arrogance and impatience in these
actionists-the attempt was made at every commune: "The fight to
destroy the shit in us," as one woman wrote, "is part of building a
new society." They threw themselves into Mao and Marx, they practiced
karate and survived on brown rice diets, they tried abstinence (off
and on) from drugs, alcohol, even pets. Accustomed property feelings
had to be rooted out, so that no one felt attached to "personal"
belongings, and in many cases Weathermen reduced themselves to a
single set of clothes. Individualism and selfishness had to give way
to a collective spirit, and this meant totally: nothing, including an
individual's desire to leave the apartment for a walk, was to be
decided without group discussion. The desire for privacy also had to
be uprooted, smacking as it did of individualism and
self-centeredness, and in several collectives no one was permitted to
be separated from another communard (this had its security
advantages, too, of course). Attitudes to wealth and materialism had
to be challenged, eventually to the point of requiring the Weathermen
to donate their personal savings to the collective, a step many found
difficult to take. Anything hinting of racism, national chauvinism,
or liberalism had to be confronted collectively, dissected, and
discarded. Male chauvinism, both in word and action, had to be
purged, again through collective sessions often resembling group
therapy more than anything else, and the Weatherwomen grew in
strength at most projects over the summer as they banded together to
oversee this purgation. And accustomed sexual relations were to be
scrapped in favor of a freewheeling partner-swapping that would allow
people to concentrate on their particular jobs in the revolution
rather than on the comforts or needs of any one other individual.
[SDS page 406]

Sales cites a speech by Ayers [SDS page 414] when the latter was the
SDS "Education Secretary:"

"There's a lot in white Americans that we do have to fight, and beat
out of them, and beat out of ourselves. And that part of it is
true-we have to be willing to fight people, and fight things in
ourselves, and fight things in all white Americans-white privilege,
racism, male supremacy-in order to build a revolutionary movement."

.

Ayers, Dohrn: 'White supremacy' responsible for America's troubles

Ayers, Dohrn: 'White supremacy' responsible for America's troubles

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78984

New book blames race for 'bigotry' in society

Posted: October 25, 2008

Unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and his wife, onetime federal
fugitive Bernardine Dohrn, are releasing a new book that blames
whites for the problems in the U.S. since its independence from Great
Britain more than two centuries ago.

According to Amazon.com, the soon-to-be released book, "Race Course
Against White Supremacy," includes personal essays "by two veteran
political activists" on "white supremacy and its troubling endurance
in American life."

"Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system
in the United States since its earliest days – and that it is still
very much with us – the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in
the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and
education," the Amazon posting states.

"The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities
during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war
are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives
today as parents, teachers, and reformers," it continues.

As WND reported this week, a former FBI informant who penetrated the
group claims he participated in a discussion in which members of the
group Ayers and Dohrn co-founded, the Weather Underground, discussed
a future communist takeover of the United States in which 25 million
"diehard capitalists" would need to be killed to prevent counterrevolution.

Republican John McCain's presidential campaign has made Ayers an
issue, charging Democrat Sen. Barack Obama has had a working
relationship with Ayers, including service together on two nonprofit
boards. Critics also maintain Obama's political career was launched
at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn, also a former Weather
Underground leader.

Ayers, now a college professor, has said in interviews over the past
decade he has no remorse for his 1970s terrorist activities, saying
he only wished he could have done more.

In a video from about 2002, he said, "I considered myself partly an
anarchist then and I consider myself partly an anarchist now. I find
a lot of the ideas in anarchism appealing."

On the Free Republic forum, a contributor wrote:

"Bill Ayers 'gets it.' Here's what he understands: One strategy to
undermine culture is to discredit its values and history. Of course,
reducing American history to a simplistic notion of 'white supremacy'
is absurd, but that's the point. The point is to slowly undermine the
confidence of people about the values and history of their own
culture so they'll be less willing to defend and protect it. Along
the way, you've also created a structure of 'them' (so-called 'white'
people, meaning, in this context, people from western and northern
Europe) and 'us' (everyone else). This creates internal conflict
based on simple, easy to understand qualities like skin color.

"Eventually, the culture becomes so disillusioned and split apart
that an organized cadre of leaders can take control and establish a
new kind of society – like the Bolsheviks did in 1917, or the
National Socialists in 1933, or the followers of Mao in 1949," the
forum participant wrote.

Matthew Vadum, on the Capital Research website, which researches
problems and government solutions and offers suggestions for private
substitutions, said, "The would-be mass murderers who led the
bomb-happy Weather Underground have put together 'Race Course Against
[White] Supremacy,' which promises to be an idiotic, politically
correct look at race in America."

At ProteinWisdom,com, a blogger wrote, "And by 'two veteran political
activists' ­ 'parents, teachers, and reformers' whose book draws on
their 'own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era' ­
what the product review really means is 'two unrepentant domestic
terrorists who continue to use divisive identity politics to poison
the liberal goal of privileging individualism ­ pushing the idea of
institutionalized white supremacy at a time when a black man is
leading in the race for president."

.

Cuba Aided Weather Underground

Cuba Aided Weather Underground

http://therightperspective.com/wordpress/?p=225

October 25th, 2008

The New York Times documented back in 1977 how Communist Cuba
influenced members of the anti-war Students for a Democrat Society
into forming the American terrorist group Weather Underground, and
then helped them conduct covert activities via its Embassies in New
York and Cuba.

Quoting a then-newly released report from the FBI, The Times writes
that North Vietnamese and Cuban officials began influencing S.D.S.
members in extreme antiwar strategy through foreign meetings held in
Communist countries, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia and North
Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, according to S.D.S. literature of the
time, had suggested that the antiwar movement needed not just
intellectual protesters but also physically rugged recruits.

The conduit for contact in the United States was a group of
intelligence agents assigned to the staff of the Cuban Mission to the
United Nations in New York. These agents arranged for American youths
to be inculcated with revolutionary fervor and, occasionally, to be
trained in practical weaponry by Cuban military officers through the
so-called Venceremos Brigades.

After the Weathermen went "underground" in 1970 and many of them were
being sought by the F.B.I. on criminal charges, Cuban intelligence
officers were in touch with them from both the New York mission and
the Cuban Embassy in Canada.

Cuban officials helped several Weather Underground adherents who
feared arrest in the United States to travel to Prague,
Czechoslovakia, and then to reenter the United Slates surreptitiously.

Four Weathermen who had been in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades
were sent back to the United States through Czechoslovakia rather
than through Canada with other brigade members to lessen their
chances of being arrested by American authorities. The four wanted to
get back to the United States safely after the explosion of a house
in Greenwich Village killed two members of the Weather group, Dianna
Oughton and Ted Gold, and the Cubans "obliged" them by making the
European travel arrangements, an FBI report quoted by the New York
Times, said. The report did not say if one of the four smuggled in
via Czechoslovakia was Bill Ayers.

"In February 1970, leading WUO member Bill Ayers told fellow
underground WUO member Larry Grathwohl that if communication could
not be made through these Canadian numbers, an individual should get
in touch with the Cuban Embassy in Canada in order to establish
contact with other members of the WUO," the report said.

"To do this an individual should use the code name 'Delgado' when
referring to himself and the person with whom he desired to make
contact," it said.

.

'Ears on a Beatle' plays around with history

'Ears on a Beatle' plays around with history

http://www.oxfordpress.com/hp/content/oh/story/entertainment/theater/2008/10/21/go102408beatle.html

Human Race production lacks focus

By Richard O Jones
Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 21, 2008

THEATER REVIEW ­ It is true that in the early 1970s, the FBI kept
surveillance on former Beatle John Lennon, presumably an effort to
build a case against him in order to ship his pot-smoking left-wing
hippie keister back to the U.K.

Likewise, much of the background on "Ears of a Beatle," now on the
boards in a Human Race Theatre production, is based on history,
beginning with the performance of "John Sinclair," the song that
helped free a man from an unjust conviction, to the former Beatle's
murder in 1980. The production uses photos, artwork and sound clips
to hammer home that basis in reality, which Beatle fans will
appreciate, but the story itself, of two FBI agents assigned to the
case, is pure fiction.

Human Race veteran Tim Lile is Howard Ballantine, the hard-core fed
heading up the case, and Ryan Wesley Gilreath (whom I last saw in New
Edgecliff Theatre's produciton of Neil LaBute's "Fat Pig" last
season) is the younger undercover partner, Daniel McClure, posing as
a weaver (the original assignment had him posing as a guitar player,
but he feared he would have to prove it somewhere along the way)
trying to work his way into Lennon's left-wing circle of friends,
which includes the likes of Abby Hoffman.

As the story transpires, the two begin to switch places. While
conducting surveillance in a phone company uniform, Howard finds
himself in Lennon's Dakota apartment, and his attitude toward the
Beatle starts to shift. On the other hand, Daniel's cover takes a
beating when he impregnates his source and finds himself on the verge
of becoming a family man.

While "Ears on a Beatle" has its funny moments, it's hard to say that
its a good comedy, and the dramatic parts just seem a little too pat
and contrived to summon up much of an emotional response.

It's all a little too easy and finally comes off more of a fan
tribute to Lennon than a thoughtful piece of theater.
--

how to go

WHAT: "Ears on a Beatle" by Mark St. Germain
WHERE: Human Race Theatre Company, Loft Theatre, 128 N. Main St., Dayton
WHEN: Through Nov. 2
COST: $36-$75
MORE INFO: (937) 228-3630; www.humanracetheatre.org

.

75 Years Later, Co-Ops Keep Up Spirit

75 Years Later, Co-Ops Keep Up Spirit

http://www.dailycal.org/article/103193/75_years_later_co-ops_keep_up_spirit

By Carol Yur
Contributing Writer
Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Abolition of the loyalty oath and the ROTC. Anti-discrimination in
housing and hiring. They were the bold challenges proposed by a young
co-op boarder running for ASUC executive committee in the
conservative years of the Cold War.

"I ran four times for ASUC executive committee ... and four times I
went down to a resounding defeat, despite the endorsement I received
from the UC Cooperative Association," the former co-oper said.

That co-oper is known today as Leon Litwack, a UC Berkeley professor
emeritus and Pulitzer Prize winner. During Saturday's 75th
anniversary gala of the Berkeley Student Cooperative, Litwack thanked
the co-ops for sustaining him not only with hearty meals, but with
stimulating debates that questioned convention.

"You know when I look at the platform today, that was a damn good
platform," Litwack said.

As a boarder at Cloyne Court, Oxford Hall and Ridge Hall from
1948-51, the co-ops offered a liberal, intellectual atmosphere
lacking and suppressed during his college years, he said.

Today the Berkeley Student Cooperative is the largest student co-op
in North America, made up of 17 houses and three apartment buildings
with about 1,250 members. Berkeley co-op members make up about 13
percent of the nearly 10,000 students who live in co-ops in North
America, according to Jim Jones, senior director of development and
property services of the North American Students of Cooperation.

Historically, the Berkeley co-ops have served students who are
looking for an economical place to live.

"The co-ops have provided an opportunity for people with low income
to have affordable housing," said Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates at the
gala. "It's been a wonderful blessing to have that resource for
people to be able to come to the university and have housing and not
pay for an arm or a leg."

Back in 1933, the annual co-op room and board rate was $171, compared
to the UC Berkeley dorm rate of $180. Now, 75 years later, it costs
$6,096 to live in a co-op annually, while a double room in Units 1, 2
and 3 costs $13,170.

From political activism in the early '60s for racial justice to the
recent tree-sitters in Memorial Stadium, the co-ops continue to
uphold the city's progressive spirit, said Steven Finacom, local
historian and board member of the Berkeley historical society.

For Guy Lillian, a co-op member from 1969-71, tear gas, police dogs
and national guards who shot into demonstrators are among his most
vivid memories as a Berkeley co-oper.

The co-ops were a place to exchange ideas, influencing him to join
causes that supported decency over brutality, he said.

When he stayed at Barrington Hall and Cloyne Court, controversial
political figures were invited to talk about the war and for
revolutionary change. One speaker was Tom Hayden, a member of the
Chicago Eight, charged for conspiracy when he led the 1968 peace
demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Lillian was tear-gassed for the first time at the 1969 Third World
Liberation Front strike at Berkeley, led by minority members calling
for an ethnic studies department on campus. The demonstrators were
aggressive and the protest soon turned ugly as helicopters dropped
tear gas on students, leaving many people sick, Lillian said.

"We were being accused and hurt just to make politicians look tough.
It was worthwhile, worth doing, you felt there was nothing
ideological about it, it was simply decent," Lillian said.

Several co-ops, most notably Barrington Hall, became leaders in
political activism on campus, Finacom said.

"I think every protest movement they had a role-in the Third World
strike in the late '60s, People's Park, and as you got into the '80s,
the anti-apartheid protest," he said.

But activism did not end with the '80s. For the past two years, many
co-opers backed the tree-sitters and their cause to save the oaks in
Memorial Stadium, said graduate student Felicia Becerra from Davis House.

The co-ops also pushed social boundaries during the '70s and '80s, a
time when the houses were notorious for their drug scenes.

During the 1970s, police would raid co-ops in search for drugs,
during which members would scatter from the house, said Wally
Trujillo, a former house manager for Oxford Hall, which closed in
1977 due to seismic reasons.

"It was my job to notify the rest of the members to go out the back
when the cops showed up," Trujillo said.

Berkeley residents complained about drug use at large co-ops in those
years, Finacom said, and Barrington Hall closed in 1989 as residents
brought legal suits against the co-op for violating fire safety codes
and claiming the co-op was involved in drug dealing.

During the '70s, the co-ops often butted heads with the Cal Greek
community, which has been around since the 1870s. The Greek community
was more conservative than co-ops in the '70s, and its popularity
declined while the co-ops grew, Finacom said.

"A lot of the Greek councils closed and several of the co-ops today
are located at fraternities and sororities that the co-ops bought in
the '70s," he said.But today, co-ops and Greek houses share a strong
academic focus, Finacom said. Still, the image of indulgent
debauchery sticks in the minds of some Berkeley students today.

"All I know about co-ops is for their wild parties, and they're
really hippie," said senior Danny Song.

Junior Gabriel Gordon-Harper, a member in Andres Castro Arms, said
the co-ops have adapted well with the times while retaining their
culture of love and community.

"I can't imagine a place you can get more bang for your buck, with a
loving family, organic five-course meal cooked for you, a stunning
view of the bay and surrounded by all your friends," he said.

.

Sarkozy meets daughter of Italian Red Brigades victim

Sarkozy meets daughter of Italian Red Brigades victim

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hQj9IkrM2q8Fkiou1DstqZdpRUwA

Oct 22, 2008

ROME (AFP) ­ The daughter of an Italian communist killed by the Red
Brigades on Wednesday met French President Nicolas Sarkozy to press
her case for justice.

Sabina Rossa, who met Sarkozy in Paris, earlier said the president
had sent a "bad message" on terrorism to the next generation by
refusing to extradite a former member of the group.

Rossa was referring to Marina Petrella, convicted in Italy in
absentia in 1992 of plotting the 1981 murder of a senior Rome police
officer and the kidnapping of a magistrate.

But Rossa said Sarkozy explained that he had refused Italy's request
to extradite Petrella, who had been hospitalised following a hunger
strike, on "humanitarian grounds."

Sarkozy "said he had to make this decision alone. The Italian
government did not send doctors to examen Ms Petrella like he had
asked them" and his letter seeking advice from the Italian president
went unanswered, said Rossa.

The French president defended his decision saying "Ms Petrella would
now be dead if she had been extradited," said Rossa, 45, who is also
a member of parliament from the opposition Democratic Party.

Before the meeting, Rossa said Sarkozy had to understand the impact
of "terrorism in Italy, with more than 400 deaths and thousands of wounded."

The Red Brigades was a Marxist-Leninist group formed in the 1970s
that sought to create a revolutionary state through armed struggle.

A group representing victims of a 1980 attack in Bologna sent a
letter to Sarkozy on Wednesday protesting his decision and saying it
was against his anti-terrorism policy.

"Your decision will be applauded by the terrorists... but it will be
totally disapproved by the victims," said Paolo Bolognesi, president
of the Italian association for victims of the Bologna bombing.

The French presidency said in a statement that Sarkozy had "assured
the families of his determination to pursue an active policy in terms
of judicial cooperation and of fighting terrorism".

Bolognesi condemned a shift in attitudes towards "political" violence
in recent history, including the October 1980 attack on the Bologna
train station that killed 85 people and left some 200 injured.

Sarkozy's decision "supports revisionism that in Italy and also in
Europe is trying to put the rags of romanticism" on those who sought
to dress "their sordid assassinations as political," said Bolognesi.

Earlier this year France had decided to extradite Petrella to serve
her sentence in Italy, but on October 12 Sarkozy suspended the
extradition after Petrella was hospitalised.

Rome has not yet responded to the decision not to extradite.

Rossa was in favour of the conditional release of one Red Brigade
member who shot at her father on January 24, 1979.

"I have no desire for vengeance, only for justice," said

.

Tommy Smothers gets due for censored show

Tommy Smothers gets due for censored show

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/22/DD5013G5AT.DTL

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Wednesday, October 22, 2008

"No comedian's wife thinks he's funny," Tommy Smothers says as he
surveys the panoramic vista from his hilltop home and vineyard in the
middle of Sonoma's Valley of the Moon. "The first few years of the
marriage, maybe. I was funny as hell the first couple of years."

Smothers first repaired to this peak 40 years ago to lick his wounds
after CBS abruptly pulled the rug out from under the top-rated
"Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on the eve of its fourth season, the
culmination of constant harassment and surveillance by the network's
censors during the show's three seasons.

At last month's Emmy Awards, Smothers accepted a belated trophy for
his contributions to the team that won the 1968 writing award for the
show's final season; Smothers left his name off at the time, fearing
the inclusion would draw controversy. When he accepted his Emmy last
month, he was typically plainspoken and eloquent at the same time, a
Smothers hallmark. (The speech is on YouTube.)

"Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really
important," he told the audience, "unless they're heard. The freedom
of hearing is as important as the freedom of speaking. It's hard for
me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable
through war. There's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in
action. So I dedicate this Emmy to all people who feel compelled to
speak out, not afraid to speak to power, won't shut up and refuse to
be silent."

September was a watershed moment for the Smothers Brothers in another
respect: The long-awaited release of the comedy show's third and
final season on DVD, this time including the portions of the show CBS
censored, including Harry Belafonte singing "Don't Stop the Carnival"
as footage of violence outside the 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago rolled behind him.

NPR television critic David Bianculli will publish his oral history
of the Smothers Brothers show next year. What started as a last-ditch
effort by the network to salvage TV's dying variety-show format
became a landmark series in television history.

Act of repression

The muzzling of the Smothers Brothers at the height of the Vietnam
War and the era of student protest was an emblematic act of political
repression three months after Richard Nixon was elected president.
But the firing of the Smothers Brothers has echoed through the years,
becoming a case study in mass media censorship. The brothers, who
arrived on the small screen as clean-cut, wholesome folk song
parodists, stumbled into the turbulent times.

"Instead of vacuous comedy, we thought, 'Let's do something with some
bite,' " Smothers, says. "There was the Vietnam War, voters' rights -
all sorts of issues that we thought we could reflect and develop a
point of view. We didn't even know it was important until they said
'You can't say this.' Forty years later, people are still talking
about it. Isn't that amazing?"

The Emmy sits on the top of a grand piano cluttered with family
photos. Smothers, 71, and his wife of 18 years, Marcy, have two
teenagers (Smothers also has a grown son from an earlier marriage).
Medical school skeletons, some wearing costumes, are stationed around
the spacious living room that looks out over the valley. Smothers
sits in a chair next to a table with a pair of lamps shaped like
giant kernels of candy corn.

"I had mixed feelings," he says about the award. "It's in the past -
what's the difference? Then my wife and kids got excited about it,
and I started to think maybe this is pretty cool. I started to think
about what am I going to say. Because we were silenced for it 40
years ago doesn't mean we have been converted. So I made my little
statement. Steve Martin introduced me. My brother thought it was
cool, pretty neat."

From the standpoint of today's TV fare, the old Smothers Brothers
shows look decidedly tame. One of the first bits that raised the
network's ire involved nothing more flagrant than comedian David
Steinberg saying Moses burned his feet on the bush, and "there are
many Old Testament scholars who to this day believe it was the first
mention of Christ in the Bible."

But it wasn't the lame anti-war jokes or comedian and presidential
candidate Pat Paulsen's editorials on gun control that earned the
"Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" its place in history. "The silencing
made it more important, the issue of being censored," Smothers says.
"If they had just not picked up the show, it wouldn't have been that
big an issue."

Government censorship isn't necessary in a free-enterprise system,
Smothers says, citing reasons that prove he hasn't mellowed a bit in
four decades. "The country doesn't have to stop people from saying
stuff. The corporations do it for them. Look at the Dixie Chicks. The
corporations are fighting things for other people. That's fascism in
action. Fascism is when private industry owns the government."

Developing the act

The two brothers (and a sister - Tom, Dick and Sherry) grew up in
Southern California. Tommy and Dickie began to develop an act while
students at San Jose State, an act they polished at North Beach
nightclubs in the '50s. Their 1961 album, "Live at the Purple Onion,"
established them as leading clowns on the folk-music scene. They are
celebrating their 50th anniversary in show business and perform as
many as 60 concerts a year.

"We were famous before we were good," Smothers says. "Now we're good,
not famous."

The act has changed little over the years. Tommy Smothers started
playing yo-yo about 25 years ago - when he does yo-yo tricks, they
are funny, and when they don't work, even funnier - and he usually
carries one in his pocket.

Tom and Dick Smothers not only mined the fascination of the day with
folk songs, but also the passive-aggressive relationship between
brothers - "Mom always liked you best" - a role that often spilled
over into their offstage life.

"We've been 2 feet apart for 50 years. He's always on my left. I'm
always on his right. Same with our baby pictures. We've been looking
at each other that far away. We'll get offstage and he'll look at me
and say, 'When are you going to have that cyst fixed?' "

Smothers says all that stopped after an 18-hour couples-counseling
session about 15 years ago.

The counselor "changed everything basically by saying, 'Stop the
nonsense - you're professionals, cut out all this brother s-,' "
Smothers says. "We could fight. We could clear a room."

Smothers replanted 45 acres on the hillsides surrounding his home
after phylloxera took the old grapevines. When he and Dick, 68, first
moved to Sonoma and bought property outside Kenwood, they started
producing Smothers Brothers Wine, but long ago changed the name to
Remick Ridge, after their grandfather.

"People would say Smothers Brothers is a good wine, but it has a
funny finish - things like that," says Smothers.

Dick left Sonoma long ago for Florida, but his older brother has
developed a keen appreciation of the role the straight man plays in
comedy teams.

"The straight man in vaudeville was paid more than the comic," he
says. "That was the skilled position. The straight man could
introduce acts, and you could put him with a funny guy and have him
control that. If you don't believe the straight man, you don't
believe the comic. Look at Bud Abbott, Dean Martin, Dan Rowan. I
learned this in 50 years in the business - the quality of the
straight man defines how good the act is."

When he first moved to the property, he lived in a cabana next to the
swimming pool and then slowly built a barn, garage and magnificent
home over the years. He has grapevines trained to grow along his
rooftop, a tomato plant sprawling onto his patio and rosebushes he
prunes himself.

The firing clobbered the Smothers Brothers, who spent years
recovering their careers and, in many ways, their lives as well.

"It took three years to get my sense of humor back," he says. "I
started taking everything seriously. I became the temporary poster
boy for the First Amendment, freedom of speech. Twenty years later,
there's Howard Stern."

Humor reclaimed

He and his brother went off separately, as Smothers struggled to find
himself. "Everything was so serious," he says. "Then I saw Jane Fonda
on the 'Tonight Show' one night talking about burning babies. I think
Cesar Chavez was on the same show. It was like an epiphany for me -
there was no joy, no sense of humor, no laughter. It just turned me around."

He leaves and returns with a calligraphic print he and his wife sent
out some years before as a Christmas card. It is a quote from
Alistair Cooke that reads:

"In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a
crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so
solemnly, that it put off enjoying those things for which we were
designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to
enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby."

With a playwright's timing, his wife arrives, fresh from working out,
a trim woman who hosts a radio talk show in Santa Rosa.

"OK, so she's 25 years younger," says Smothers. "If she dies, she dies."

"I didn't think that was funny the first time," says his wife.

In Tommy Smothers' life, everybody else is a straight man.
--

Reviews: The "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" final season DVD and a
documentary on the show's censoring. E3
--

E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.

.

Civil rights movement activist to speak [Judy Richardson]

Civil rights movement activist to speak Oct. 30

http://media-newswire.com/release_1076801.html

2008-10-24

Filmmaker Judy Richardson, an activist with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, will
speak on Oct. 30 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The free public talk will be at 7 p.m. in the theater of UNC's Sonja
Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on South Road.
During the program, the center will unveil a new commemorative quilt
that will be on permanent display in the center.

(Media-Newswire.com) - Filmmaker Judy Richardson, an activist with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) during the
civil rights movement, will speak on Oct. 30 at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The free public talk will be at 7 p.m. in the theater of UNC's Sonja
Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on South Road.
During the program, the center will unveil a new commemorative quilt
that will be on permanent display in the center.

Richardson's talk will be the 16th annual Sonja Haynes Stone Memorial
Lecture honoring the center's namesake, the late UNC faculty member
Sonja Haynes Stone.

She advocated for the center, directed the curriculum in African and
Afro-American studies and was an adviser to the Black Student
Movement in the late 1970s. Each year, the lecture is given by a
black woman whose work, scholarship and service epitomize the spirit of Stone.
The center commissioned creation of the quilt, "Follow the Path, Seek
the Dream," by UNC associate professor of history Heather Williams.
The quilt, 12 feet wide and 14 feet long, recognizes prominent blacks
of UNC and of the Stone Center.

Richardson, a senior producer with Northern Light Productions in
Boston, will discuss "Will the Circle be Unbroken: The Relevance of
the Civil Rights Movement." The talk will be part of the center's
reflection on the global significance of 1968-69.

Richardson produces documentaries about blacks for TV and museums.
She was senior associate producer and researcher for "Eyes on the
Prize," a PBS television series first aired in 1987. The series
traces the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott in
1954 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Richardson also produced "Malcolm X: Make It Plain," first aired on
PBS in 1994. She made the two-hour History Channel documentary
"Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters" and helped found the now-defunct
black bookstore Drum & Spear in Washington, D.C. in 1968.

Six women SNCC alumnae including Richardson edited "Hands on the
Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC," soon to be
published by the University of Illinois Press. The anthology collects
the stories of more than 50 women who were active in the civil rights
movement in the 1960s.

Previous Stone Memorial lecturers have included Angela Davis,
Congresswoman Eva Clayton, Kathleen Cleaver, Sonia Sanchez, Atallah
Shabazz and Alfre Woodard.

For more information on Richardson, visit
http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/
and search by her name. For more information on the Oct. 30 program,
contact the center at ( 919 ) 962-9001 or visit
http://www.unc.edu/depts/stonecenter.

Stone Center contact: Olympia Friday, ( 919 ) 962-7265,
ofriday@email.unc.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam
bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
News Services contact: LJ Toler, ( 919 ) 962-8589

.

Angela Davis, iconic activist, officially retires from UCSC

Angela Davis, iconic activist, officially retires from UCSC

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_10826719

J.M. BROWN - SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
Article Launched: 10/27/2008

SANTA CRUZ -- Angela Davis, the iconic social-justice activist who
has been arguably the most well-known UC Santa Cruz faculty member of
the past two decades, has officially retired as a full-time professor.

Davis, a 17-year professor in the History of Consciousness Department
and a former chair of Feminist Studies, has worked mostly with
graduate students in recent years as she traveled the globe speaking
on prison abolition and matters of oppression. She is a longtime
champion of civil liberties and a prolific author on the
intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

Davis began lecturing at UCSC in the mid-1980s, and her courses on
feminist theory, culture and ideology, and other topics in the
humanities field became magnets for students. Davis was a big feather
in the cap of a campus born during the civil rights era and already
renowned for drawing radical thinkers.

"She did marvelous work as a teacher," said professor Bettina F.
Aptheker, a leading feminist studies scholar at UCSC and Davis' close
friend of 50 years. "Her classes were always overflowing."

Davis was traveling and unavailable for an interview last week, but
Donna Haraway, chair of the History of Consciousness Department, said
Davis retired because she wanted to travel, work with graduate
students and find more balance in her life.

"Many people want something from Angela; she is a fundamentally
generous person," Haraway said. "It has been very difficult for her
to juggle all of the demands and her own priorities."

Davis, 64, who lives in the East Bay, officially -- and quietly ""
stepped down in the spring quarter. Like many retired professors,
however, Davis is expected to teach an occasional class, and even now
she is continuing to work with graduate students and keep an active,
activist presence on campus, colleagues said. She refused this spring
to appear at a UCSC commencement ceremony while the university was at
odds with union workers.

Last year, Davis spoke out against the suspension of a black student
involved in an October 2006 protest at a UC Regents meeting, during
which numerous students blocked exits to a building. Police used
pepper spray and batons to remove students, but Allete Kendrick, who
was charged with battering police, was the only student suspended.

Davis rallied with others outside the chancellor's office in June
2007, saying a recommendation for a three-year suspension stunk of racism.

Campus officials later reduced Kendrick's suspension to two academic
quarters and community service, and Kendrick pleaded guilty to two
misdemeanor counts in court.

Davis also championed the late Chancellor Denice Denton, applauding
Denton's efforts to diversify UCSC along gender, socioeconomic and
racial lines. At Denton's memorial service in 2006, Davis said Denton
had fought "unrelenting homophobia" while helping to raise the
profile of women and tackle diversity issues.

Davis has been an activist since her teenage years in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
where she grew up with Aptheker in "a circle of kids who were part of
the progressive and communist left," said Aptheker, whose father,
Herbert, was a leader in the party. After being educated at
universities in Europe and the U.S., Davis went on to teach
philosophy at UCLA, where she was fired in 1969 by the UC Regents for
being a member of the Communist Party.

Although then Gov. Ronald Reagan, who became the Cold War hero of
anti-communists as president a decade later, warned that Davis would
never teach in the UC system again, Davis was reinstated after an
outcry from academics and civil rights advocates. She first came to
UCSC as a lecturer in the History of Consciousness Department in 1984.

She was made a professor in 1991 and three years later was appointed
to the UC Presidential Chair in African-American and Feminist
Studies, one of many national and internatio