Jonah Raskin :
FILM | Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’: An anti-imperialist perspective

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

Come on, Spike. You can do better than this.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | July 2, 2020

SONOMA COUNTY, California — Spike Lee has made a name for himself over the past 35 years as the preeminent African-American film director, with movies like She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X with Denzel Washington in the leading role and the BlackKkKlansman in 2018.

Lee’s new movie, Da 5 Bloods, has been praised and reviled, most notably by the Vietnamese-American author, Viet Thang Nguyen, who writes that while Lee “means well, he also does not know what to do with the Vietnamese except resort to guilty liberal feelings about them.”

Nguyen, who won a Pulitzer for his 2016 novel The Sympathizer, added, “as I watched the obligatory scene of Vietnamese soldiers getting shot and killed for the thousandth time. I felt the same hurt I did in watching Platoon and Rambo and Full Metal Jacket.
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Allen Young :
ANALYSIS | Obscure moment in 1951 recalls long history of racial injustice

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

The CPUSA was the only predominantly white organization to make anti-racism a major priority.

Paul Robeson presents “We Charge Genocide” by William Patterson to UN Secretariat in New York, December 17, 1951.

By Allen Young | The Rag Blog | July 2, 2020

ROYALSTON, Mass. — When I read the news a few weeks ago that Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd (the Black man killed by police in Minneapolis), went to the United Nations to call attention to racial injustice in the USA, a three-word memory from my childhood popped into my head: “We Charge Genocide.”

I was only 10 years old in 1951, when two Black men, William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson, presented a petition on the topic of racial injustice to the United Nations in both Paris and New York.

The petition was entitled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government Against the Negro People.” Patterson, credited as the author, was secretary of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), and presented the petition in Paris on behalf of his organization, while Robeson brought it to the UN headquarters in New York City.

The language of the petition is chilling and powerful. Consider this paragraph:
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Alice Embree :
REPORT | ‘Space City!’ lives online,
survives quarantine

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

Houston’s underground paper is now digitized; soon to be a book.

Space City! covers, clockwise from top left: Vol. 1, No. 1; Vol. 2, No. 10;
Vol. 2, No. 5; Vol. 3, No. 4.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | June 18, 2020

AUSTIN — On March 11, 2020, I shipped a near-complete collection of Space City! newspapers to Indiana to be scanned for preservation and display at the Internet Archive. Little did I know that the issues would arrive just days before the library shut down because of Covid19. For two and a half months, Space City! sat in quarantine.

On June 1, the library began to staff up again. Soon, the newspapers took on a digital life, a collection accessible to activists, academics (and the general public) interested in the transformative period chronicled on the pages of Houston’s historic underground paper. The work is now complete. Each of the 103 papers can be viewed in its entirety here.

Three issues are still missing. If you have any of them — or know of their whereabouts — please let us know.

  • Volume 3, Issue 3, November 11, 1971. Cover illustration: Mayor Louie Welch with money
  • Volume 3, Issue 32, January 10, 1972. Cover illustration: People dancing.
  • Volume 4, Issue 5, July 4, 1972. Cover image unknown.

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Lamar W. Hankins :
ANALYSIS |The crime of dark skin

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

There is little justice in the ‘criminal legal system’ for black people.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | June 18, 2020

SAN MARCOS, TX — I lived in Vidor, Texas, until I was four years old, with my mother, grandparents, and an aunt and uncle. Two other aunts had just married and moved nearby. Vidor has a richly-deserved reputation for being one of the most inhospitable places in Texas for black people. In 1967, my friends Bill and Loretta Oliver and I took a 10-minute drive from the north side of Beaumont to Vidor to try to find the Ku Klux Klan headquarters we had heard about. Much to my surprise, it was housed on Main Street in the same storefront space where I had attended day care in 1948.

For reasons I can’t explain, none of that part of my family ever made racist or derogatory remarks toward black people that I remember. Maybe it was because of their brand of religion, or maybe they were just nice people.

After my mother remarried, we moved from Vidor to Port Arthur, where I lived until going off to college. I’ve thought about, written about, and observed racism all of my life, at least since the age of 10 when I began learning about the pervasiveness of racism in America from a black woman who did housekeeping, cooking, and child care for my parents, both of whom worked full-time jobs in the refineries.

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Joshua Brown :
POLITICAL CARTOON | Trump and friend

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer
Previous installments are archived at
http://www.joshbrownnyc.com/ldw.htm
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Allen Young :
FILM | Two new films about Roy Cohn
review his decades of villainy

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

Roy Cohn is best known for being the right-hand man to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Film by Ivy Meeropol.

By Allen Young | The Rag Blog | June 11, 2020

NEW YORK, N.Y. — On June 19, Home Box Office (HBO) will release an informative well-crafted documentary film entitled Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, directed by Ivy Meeropol.

Another interesting movie, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, released in 2019 and directed by Matt Tyrnauer, is streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu.

Roy Cohn (1927-1986) is best known for being the right-hand man to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisc.) during the Red Scare of the mid-20th century, but he also had a long career as a New York-based attorney serving an array of clients, many of them lacking in morality and steeped in corruption and dishonesty that mirrored Cohn’s own behavior.

There is some overlapping of factual information by these films, but I want to urge readers of The Rag Blog — no matter how much you already know about the despicable Cohn — to view both of these documentaries. The details are fascinating, and even if you feel disgust as you watch the weasel-like Cohn on the screen, you’ll appreciate the insights into the dark side of this fellow human, because there are others like him, most notably Donald Trump. Neither film pretends to be “objective” and we don’t hear from anyone in either film who truly liked Cohn or thinks he was a great man.
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Jonah Raskin :
FEATURE | American teens and the
insurrection of 2020

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

Caught between passion and cool.

Colin. Photo by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog.

“People don’t ask us what we think about stuff.”
— Gabriel (Gabe) Gutierrez, 18-year-old Californian and member of Generation Z

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 10, 2020

SONOMA COUNTY, Calif — I took a stand the other day by taking a knee and kept it for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that Derek Chauvin pressed his white knee down on George Floyd’s black neck and ended his life. A bullet to his head or the heart would probably have killed him faster and been less painful. But Chauvin’s point seemed to be to make Floyd’s passing as painful as possible and with the least amount of effort on his part while Floyd struggled to breathe.

I was not the only person who took a knee outside the police department in the town where I live. Most of the other demonstrators were white adults over the age of 40, though some teenagers, and some people of color, participated. A young African-American woman who had shaved one side of her head, and arranged the hair on the other side in cornrows, told me, “I just moved to California from Utah where it feels more like a police state than it does here.”

Young African-Americans like the former Utah resident, seem to know how to make eloquent statements with their hair and their bodies with more ease than many of their white counterparts. On her face mask, in white letters on a black background, she had written George Floyd’s words, “I Can’t Breathe,” which struck me as more timely and more relevant than “Black Lives Matter.”

”I Can’t Breathe” is an urgent matter of life and death. It’s individual, universal and inclusive.

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Joshua Brown :
POLITICAL CARTOON | Photo op

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer
Previous installments are archived at
http://www.joshbrownnyc.com/ldw.htm
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Jonah Raskin :
BOOKS | The doctor is sick

Posted on June 6, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

A review of Susan Reverby’s new book about former leftist fugitive Dr. Alan Bergman.

Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Bergman by Susan M. Reverby (2020: University of North Carolina Press; $30)

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 6, 2020

SONOMA COUNTY, Calif — Marilyn Buck doesn’t show up in Susan Reverby’s biography of Dr. Alan Berkman (1945-2009) until about page 100 in a 300-page book, when she hooked up with members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). From that decisive moment in the 1970s, until her death from cancer in 2010, Buck played a vital role in Berkman’s life — they were briefly lovers — and also in the armed underground groups, including the BLA, to which they were affiliated.

Like her, Berkman died of cancer. Like her, he served time in prison, though not as long. Like her, he thought of himself as a revolutionary. Unlike her he was Jewish, Ivy League, and East Coast all the way.

Born in 1947 in Temple, Texas, and the daughter of a liberal Episcopal minister, Buck belonged to SDS, was a volunteer at the original Rag in Austin, wrote for New Left Notes, worked with Third World Newsreel, and in 1979 presumably helped BLA member, Assata Shakur, escape from prison.
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Alice Embree :
ANALYSIS | Vote by mail in Texas: Do it!

Posted on June 5, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

In the courts, the issue continues to be a roller
coaster ride.

The author, with Vote by Mail application.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | June 5, 2020

AUSTIN — In this ongoing pandemic and national uprising over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Black Lives Matter. And democracy matters. It matters that Rep. Steven King was defeated in Iowa and it matters that Ella Jones was elected as the first woman and first African American mayor of Ferguson, Missouri.

I want you to vote. And I want you to vote by mail if you can. Do it for the poll workers. Do it for your own safety. Do it because Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t want you to do it. Do it because the entire Republican Party hates the idea.

Just do it. And do it soon.

In Texas you need to mail in an application. Get it done if you want to vote in the Texas primary runoff July 14. I suggest you take a photo of yourself wearing a mask and holding your stamped envelope. Post the photo on social media. That will doubly disturb our disturbed president. And it might give our indicted Texas Attorney General heartburn as well.
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Jonah Raskin :
ANALYSIS | Rioting reflections, again

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’ — Martin Luther King

Photo courtesy of Jonah Raskin.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 1, 2020

SONOMA COUNTY, Calif — I have not actually been in the streets protesting over the past week or so, but I have followed the news of the rioting and also the news of the looting. I have been with the protesters in spirit, albeit not with the looters. A longtime New York friend of mine who is a journalist and magazine editor sent me a photo of some demonstrators in his neighborhood. One of them carried a sign that said, “A riot is the language of the unheard, MLK.” He nailed it.

Indeed, Dr. King understood that people go into the streets to riot when their voices are not heard, when the authorities don’t listen to them, and don’t change any of the egregious conditions that lead to riots.

Readers and contributors to The Rag Blog surely understand King’s statement. Some of them have probably rioted in the streets of Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin. I have protested in the streets many times in the nation’s capital, and from New York to California. I have also taken part in riots, trashed windows, and battled cops. I did this most dramatically on December 9, 1969, five days after two Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were shot and killed by law enforcement. I had to put my body on the line. Thousands of other men and women joined me.
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Thom Woodruff :
VERSE | Three poems

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Thorne Dreyer

Digital World. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTION

WE ARE RUNNING OUT
of hugs, kisses, cuddles (personal contact)
and our world has now turned virtual/digital
Like being told you can ONLY have online banking
or that your credit card has been hacked
The lack of personal community is a loss
How many hugs in an open mic?
How many eye to eye contacts
that cannot be replaced by ZOOM Meetups?
Pot lucks are gone-the sharing of food
can never be a FACEBOOK photo of a meal.
Neither a revolution, nor evolution-
more a retrograde flattening of the curve
so the virus does not steal all our lives
But part of our lives is strictly personal-
Parts of us are missing and will never return
Somewhere, in the Cloud, are our Real Lives
More than Smartphone SD cards, more than computer hard drives.
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