Wrens, male and female. Illustration by John Gerrard Keulemans, 1888 / Wikimedia Commons.
The Wrens of Consciousness
Fittingly and unfailingly
in flits and a flash
tiny and so brash
flirting with bright dusk
still time enough to busk
a spring wren couple
fly in and out and to
wisp branch tips
and alight each stop anew
on their silhouette trips
from one tree to another
one rising over the other
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Weimar Republic cartoon. Caricature from Simplicissimus.
Trump wants to turn Washington upside down — that was his first message and his winning message. We want the exact same thing. — House ‘Freedom Caucus’ co-founder Mick Mulvaney, 2016
SANFORD, FLA. — David P. Hamilton has written a critique of Joe Biden, presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee for president (“Opinion: Why I Won’t Vote for Joe Biden,” The Rag Blog, May 16, 2020). He argues that since Texas will invariably vote for Trump it makes more sense for progressives to vote for the Green Party than for Biden; if the Greens get enough votes, they’ll score federal matching funds. Hamilton’s critique of Biden is largely on target; there’s much to dislike about his record and candidacy. Similarly, there is appeal in garnering funds for progressive electoral politics.
In this regard, it’s too bad Hamilton spends so much time detailing what’s wrong with Biden while the only case he makes for the Greens is an opportunity to “assert your progressive principles.” Additionally, while it obviously makes some difference to Hamilton who the Democrats run for president, one is left to wonder if he’s advocating support for the Green candidate, regardless of who that turns out to be. That seems premature, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot more at stake than simply not voting for Biden or picking up matching funds. This coming November is truly a watershed election. Over seven years ago The Rag Blog published an article I wrote wondering when the U.S. might arrive at a “Weimar Moment.” This referred to the 1932-33 period in Germany when the Social Democrats and Communists were preoccupied with fighting each other rather than the Nazis.
SONOMA COUNTY, Cal. — To really get the most from this huge history about the City of the Angels in the 1960s, it helps to have been a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a part of the New Left, which reinvented American radicalism and redefined political protest in an era when the U.S. empire seemed to be on the ropes at home and overseas.
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, the two authors of Set the Night on Fire (Verso; $34.95) were both SDS members and stellar SDS organizers. Their two-page-long biographies at the back of the book offer in detail the kind of information that would have helped J. Edgar Hoover get his rocks off in 1965.
Davis says that he burned his draft card, and that with two other SDS members, Margaret Thorpe and Patty Lee Parmalee, he raised hell on L.A. college campuses. Wiener says that he helped organize Princeton SDS, brought Tom Hayden to campus and wrote for New Left Notes and Liberation News Service.
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Image from Needpix.com.
I signed a letter with Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer and 75 other founders and early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that appeared online in The Nation, April 16, 2020. The letter was directed at young activists of today. It argued for support of Biden to defeat Trump.
Biden was not my first, second, third, or fourth choice. I did not vote for him. But this fact was known by the time COVID-19 shut down open society: Biden had gotten more votes than Bernie by a decisive margin. More important now, Bernie has endorsed him and so has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I do not believe that electoral politics is the only path to change. I do believe, however, that we have a binary choice in November. We live in a winner-take-all electoral system, deformed by the Electoral College, warped by partisan gerrymandering, and made toxic by corporate campaign contributions. The other side in this fight believes that they must suppress the vote to win, and they are doing everything they can on that front. They are obstructing, among other things, the means of voting safely, by mail. These are the cards we are dealt in 2020.
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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr.
UPDATE: We have received substantial feedback about this opinion piece. We stand by our posting of the article but want to make one thing clear: It only reflects the views of one writer and not those of The Rag Blog or its editors. — Thorne Dreyer
First, he’s from Delaware. Delaware is the paradigm of corporate political hegemony. It is more a tax haven than a state. It has 0.3% of the U.S. population, but 64% of the Fortune 500 major corporations call it home. Typically, these corporate “headquarters” are no more than a post office box.
This fiction is maintained because of Delaware’s very corporate-friendly climate. “Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels and worse — all have turned up at Delaware addresses in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks.”
According to a 2019 Mother Jones article, “Delaware was less a democracy than a fiefdom, contorting its laws to meet the demands of its corporate lords.” Such is the corporate capitalist swamp from which Joe Biden emerged and that he represented in the Senate for 40 years.
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Seasonally adjusted miles traveled by month. Seasonally adjusted data are modeled by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, U.S. Department of Transportation. For additional seasonally adjusted travel data and information, go here:
http://www.transtats.bts.gov/OSEA/SeasonalAdjustment/
The whole global system of finance capital is so loaded down with unrepayable fiat currency debt that it has become like a bubble, like a fragile network of global supply chains. The system is now so burdened by interest due on the debt that a strong external shock like the pandemic can initiate an interactive global economic collapse.
The central banks like the Fed try to keep their economies pumped up with easy credit to maintain a population of consumers happy to keep spending themselves into debt, together with the consumerist spending inducement of mild inflation. The average American now dies in debt.
Now, the effect of the pandemic is to cause the lower income portion of the population to shelter in place and stop spending except on essential survival needs. This spending pattern is highly deflationary or conducive to stagflation. An economy which has a lot of discretionary spending like for travel and recreation and which hires a lot of service labor tends to contract in two ways, as both the customers and the service workers tend to stop spending.
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Michael McClure, 2004. Photo by Gloria Graham / Wikimedia Commons.
SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. — Along with a star-studded cast of Sixties personalities, among them Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Jerry Rubin, and Lenore Kandel, Michael McClure performed at the Human Be-In that was held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on January 14, 1967. That event, which preceded the Summer of Love, is said to have ushered in the era of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and rebellion.
But the Sixties really began in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, at an art gallery known as the Six. There were no psychedelic drugs, but there was plenty of inexpensive red wine, and there was, apparently, an orgy afterwards. The Six Gallery reading brought about a revolution in American poetry that shook the literary establishment.
Of the five poets who performed their work at the Six Gallery, only one of them — Gary Snyder — is still alive, and he’s 90. Michael McClure, who was born in Kansas in 1932, died in Oakland, California, on May 4, 2020. He was 87. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who attended the landmark cultural event at the Six, is still alive at 100, but he didn’t read any of his work. While he published the Beat Generation writers, he wasn’t really a Beat, but a bohemian, a painter, an anarchist and in a way petty bourgeois, as the owner of City Lights Books and City Lights Publishing. Too bad there aren’t more petty bourgeois individuals like him.
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Tiger King image from Netflix.
ROYALSTON, Mass.— Tiger King, an eight-episode documentary series, has caught the attention of millions of television viewers. This show is not for everyone, for reasons I’ll explain below, but I’m fascinated by it.
My commentary here is largely influenced by my identity as a gay man and by the fact that I write often on gay-related topics, but this is not a gay show any more than it is an animal rights show.
A straight friend of mine who is about half my age (I’m 78) suggested I might want to watch this unusual series. I don’t watch a lot of TV, and didn’t know a thing about this program, but I took his advice. (Spoiler alert: You could watch the series with the shock and awe that I experienced, but if you read this first, your experience will be different.)
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AUSTIN — It is said that senior citizens, as we are called, see our lives pass before us in the quiet hours. Fortunately this process has led to a memoir of a man whom many in the Rag/movement community will recall as an activist of the seventies in Austin. Ken Carpenter published his memoir, Borderlands Boy: Love, War and Peace in the Atomic Age (2019: Sunstone Press), a few months ago.
Ken’s whole adult life has been that of a man of unflinchingly high principle and one who has never been afraid to confront the consequences. Ken’s road led to a life in New Mexico and teaching at the college level. His strong convictions against war and violence led him to refuse induction into the military at the time of the War in Vietnam. He served a prison sentence for this.
But Ken’s conscience comes out in many ways.
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Graphic by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
The pandemic lockdown has unlocked my alter-ego, Dr. Dada. Free to roam the murky corners of his imagination, he began to create digital collages that respond to the White House’s coronavirus folly with a combination of mortification and good old-fashioned sarcasm. (See here, here, here, and here.)
Today Dr. Dada’s outlook takes a dark turn because scientists — who are not only very intelligent people but who also have dedicated their lives to understanding and implementing effective public health policy — report that to prematurely set aside social distancing and other health directives and reopen economic activity may thrust hundreds of thousands of fresh COVID-19 victims into the hands of the nation’s already exhausted health workers and cause tens of thousands of new fatalities.
Despite what these well-trained, trusted, and mostly nonpartisan voices say, Donald Trump sat down on his golden toilet — where he conjures up his most superior wisdom — and decided that what America really needs is NOT more test kits, ventilators, or competent leadership but rather four more years of Donald Trump! Here is enterprise truly worthy of his (very stable) genius — to be acknowledged as the greatest leader in the entire illustrated history of the whole wide frisbee-shaped world.
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Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
