http://www.opednews.com/articles/If-I-can-t-laugh-and-If-I-by-Eileen-Fleming-100918-204.html
September 19, 2010
By Eileen Fleming
The night Jon Stewart announced a "Rally to Restore Sanity" and "The
Rev. Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert" joined in with a "March to Keep Fear
Alive" this American 'girl' was dancing to every song ZZ Top and Tom
Petty and the Heartbreakers performed at the St. Pete Forum.
I grew up on the promise that the U.S. was always the good guy and
that fear always closes ones mind and heart.
In the Colbert universe, "America, the Greatest Country God ever gave
Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And
Fear -- that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now,
there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear"They
want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget 'Reason' is
just one letter away from 'Treason.'"
On September 11, 2001, fear ran through the heartland of America and
The Media disseminated the White Houses' dictation instead of
questioning and investigating why some people in the world hated US
so much they would target and murder innocent people.
President G.W. Bush told US if we wanted to help, we should all go
shopping, but Neil Young and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers best
expressed the spirit that this Nation was founded upon:
Neil Young, Imagine, 9/11 Moments
Tom Petty, I Wont Back Down, 9/11 Moments
During the '60's the secular Jewish road warrior, Abbie Hoffman,
co-founded the Yippies/Youth International Party.
Abbie was known as the grandmaster of The Groucho Marxist's because
of his creative comical anarchy.
Abbie pulled off a mass media manipulation when he convinced them to
turn out at a demonstration at The Pentagon that promised 50,000
people using psychic energy would levitate The Pentagon, vibrate it
and rotate it until it turned orange and the War on Vietnam ended.
In 1968 Chicago, Abbie addressed the children of the '60's who had
planned on spending the night in a city park after their long day of
'lobbying' at the Democratic Convention.
Mayor Daly sent word to Abbie that the multitudes were not welcome in
his park and the cops were on the way in.
Before the Chicago mob with badges descended upon the heads of
America's youth, Abbie stood at a microphone and quoted Christ:
"I send you out like little lambs into a wolves den. Remain as
harmless as doves and cunning as snakes."
If the doves had consulted Webster's, they first would have had a
laugh at the two words cunning is sandwiched between.
Then they would have learned that cunning means one must be skillful,
clever, sly, crafty, and do things with skill and ingenuity.
To be cunning is to be attractive; cute and cleverly proficient.
The doves lacked cunning and thus got their heads clobbered in and
many hippies were baptized by Billy-clubs and became yippies.
In 1989, just prior to expiring from a fatal alcohol and
Phenobarbital combo, Abbie Hoffman told his sister he had a plan to
solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but he never got around to
filling her in.
Abbie did say, "We want everyone to control their own life and to
care for one another...We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions,
and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the
accumulation of profit." [1]
In November of 1986 Hoffman was arrested along with fourteen others,
for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts.
The charges stemmed from a protest against the Central Intelligence
Agency's recruitment on the campus.
As University policy limited campus recruitment to law-abiding
organizations, Hoffman, acting as his own attorney brought up the
issue of the CIA's lawbreaking activities.
The federal district court judge permitted expert witnesses,
including a former Attorney General and a former CIA agent who
testified about the CIA's illegal Contra war against the Sandinista
regime in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland Amendment.
"In three days of testimony, more than a dozen defense witnesses,
including Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey Clark, and former Contra leader
Edgar Chamorro, described the CIA's role in more than two decades of
covert, illegal and often violent activities. In his closing
argument, Hoffman, placed his actions within the best tradition of
American civil disobedience. He quoted from Thomas Paine, "the most
outspoken and farsighted of the leaders of the American Revolution":
"Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all
cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no
property in man; neither has any generation a property in the
generations which are to follow."
What America needs to rally for is to regain Common Sense, as Tom
Paine knew it:
"Soon after I had published the pamphlet "Common Sense" [on Feb. 14,
1776] in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution
in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the
system of religion... The world is my country, all mankind are my
brethren, and to do good is my religion."
--
1. The New Yippie Book Collective (eds.), Blacklisted News: Secret
Histories from Chicago to 1984, page 514. Bleecker Publishing.
.
1 comments:
A pity you didn't mention how Abbie died. In 1986 he was the first to bring to public attention (via a Playboy article) the "October Surprise" - a term coined to describe secret meetings between Reagan's campaign team and Iran's revolutionary government to delay the release of the American hostages until after the 1980 election. Abbie had his brake lines cut while delivering the article to Playboy and later that day was seriously injured in a car accident. A few months after that he allegedly committed suicide - something people who were close to him have always questioned. I write about my own close encounter with some nasty spooks in my recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (www.stuartbramhall.com). I currently live in exile in New Zealand.
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