Lamar W. Hankins :
Nineteen fifty-four: A fable

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Bobby raised his hand and asked his teacher, Mrs. Miller, ‘Is God the same as the sun?’

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | October 10, 2017

It was an unusual year, 1954. The U.S. Supreme Court held that separate schooling for blacks and whites was unequal for blacks, mostly because the quality of segregated education seriously disadvantaged black children. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was censured by the United States Senate for his Communist witch hunts. French colonialism in Vietnam was defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Elvis Presley cut his first commercial record.

But none of these things made much impact on 10-year old Bobby LeFlore Lewis, if he even heard about them. What did affect him was a small action by Congress that seemed just strange to him. Bobby’s teacher told his class that now there were two new words that he had to recite when saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Congress had added the words “under God” to the Pledge, placed between “one nation” and “indivisible.”
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Steve Russell :
Making peace between Rocket Man
and the Dotard

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Solving the North Korea problem requires our best understanding of everybody’s needs.

Rocket Man. Graphic art by DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy /
Creative Commons.

By Steve Russell | The Rag Blog | September 27, 2017

Two grown men are publicly calling each other names, a childish spat that rises from annoying to alarming because both Kim Jong Un and Donald J. Trump have nuclear weapons.

When I watch the news lately, I only have to close my eyes and I’m back in rural Oklahoma about the time the Korean War ended, fussing with my cousins.

My grandmother yells: You kids settle down!

She is met by a collective whine: He started it!
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Maxine Phillips :
BOOKS | ‘Johnny Appleseed: Green Spirit of the Frontier’

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver’s graphic history tells a tale very relevant to our time.

By Maxine Phillips | The Rag Blog | September 25, 2017

[Johnny Appleseed: Green Spirit of the Frontier, a graphic history written by Paul Buhle and illustrated by Noah Van Sciver (September 5, 2017: Fantagraphics Books); Hardcover; 112 pp; $19.99.]

Before there was organic farming, there was… organic farming. Before Rachel Carson, Bill McKibbon, or Michael Pollan, there was… Johnny Appleseed.

Appleseed, as he is known in myth, was born John Chapman in Leominster, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1774, and of all the figures of the U.S. frontier, real or imagined, from Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (real) to John Henry and Paul Bunyan (imagined), he is perhaps the most suited to our climate-imperiled times.
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Jonah Raskin :
Marijuana madness: From Harry Anslinger to Jeff Sessions

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Marijuana has been a heated political issue in the United States for more than 100 years.

Gustin Reichbach in the ’60s. Judge Reichbach, who died in 2012, was a proponent of medical marijuana. Image from Gustin L. Reichbach Papers / University at Buffalo Libraries.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | September 21, 2017

Three months before he died of pancreatic cancer in July 2012, Judge Gustin L. Reichbach published an op-ed piece in The New York Times in which he said that “marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep.” He added, “friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the substance.”

What Reichbach did not say in his op-ed piece, but that almost all of his friends and family members knew, was that he had smoked marijuana for decades, before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, and that he enjoyed getting “high” and getting “stoned,” to borrow the vernacular.
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Alice Embree :
Sex and socialism

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Is it time to consider what socialism can mean in the bedrooms as well as in the body politic?

Soviet Women’s Day Poster, 1960s.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | September 20, 2017

Is sex better under socialism? Apparently, according to an August 12, 2017 New York Times opinion piece. Did women from the United States find fulfillment in revolutionary Russia? Julia Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia makes that case. As socialism continues to gain traction with millennials, it may be time to consider what that can mean in the bedrooms as well as in the body politic.

“Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” was a theme of the ’60s rebellion. After all, the Baby Boomers came of age when birth control pills did. Then women’s liberation added an entirely new spin to sexual liberation.
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Jonah Raskin :
BOOKS | Blowing themselves up: Revisiting the Weather Underground

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Swords in the Hands of Children’ is Jonathan Lerner’s passionate tale of his adventures as a young, gay insurgent.

Jonathan Lerner gives a press conference for the Weathermen during the “Days of Rage,” October 9, 1969. Photo by Barbara Leckie. Image courtesy of OR Books.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | September 14, 2017

Jonathan Lerner, author of Swords in the Hands of Children, is Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 15, 2-3 p.m. (CT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live here.

[Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary by Jonathan Lerner (December 5, 2017: OR Books); Hardcover; 224 pp.]

Not that long ago, homegrown American bombers set off explosives in offices, schools, and ROTC buildings and then watched the fallout gleefully. Warren Hinckle published an entire issue of his short-lived magazine, Scanlan’s Monthly, on that very subject. Indeed, TNT or dynamite was then all the rage along with LSD. “Blasting caps for the Capricorns,” one bomber exclaimed. Another proclaimed, “Light ‘em and run.” She was referring to fuses.

That time in the 1970s now looks like the culmination of Sixties radicalism and also its death knell. Novelist Jonathan Lerner, now on the cusp of 70 and an environmentalist living near the Hudson River with his husband, Peter Frank, looks back at that era with fear and loathing and a sense of nostalgia, too. What a strange political and personal trip it has been.
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Allen Young :
BOOKS | Jonathan Lerner’s ‘Swords in the Hands of Children’

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Lerner, a closeted gay man active with the Weather Underground, tells a gripping story and reveals his authentic remorse.

By Allen Young | The Rag Blog | September 13, 2015

Jonathan Lerner, author of Swords in the Hands of Children, is Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 15, 2-3 p.m. (CT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live here.

[Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary by Jonathan Lerner (December 5, 2017: OR Books); Hardcover; 224 pp.]

The words “fear” and “frightened” pepper gay writer Jonathan Lerner’s intriguing account of how he, a young idealist with sincere interest in the 1960s political movements for civil rights and peace, became a committed member of the violence-prone Weather Underground Organization.

With an interest during his late teenage years in a possible career as an actor, and already aware of his homosexual desire, the closeted Lerner held back, noting “the ubiquitous and openness of gay people in theater frightened me.” A few pages later, recounting his experience at a major anti-war march on the Pentagon in October of 1968 where there was confrontation between demonstrators and police in riot gear, he mentions his “fear of… those swinging truncheons.” Once immersed himself as a soldier in the Weather Underground, whose leaders and their politics turned autocratic and cruel, Lerner becomes fearful of his comrades.
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Dave Zirin :
METRO | SPORT | Houston stadium grift comes home to roost as Harvey hits

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Preacher Joel Osteen’s megachurch was once a hoops hallowed ground called The Summit.

The faithful at Joel Osteen’s megachurch, nee The Summit. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

By Dave Zirin | The Rag Blog | September 5, 2017

HOUSTON — Joel Osteen, the moneychanger who runs his own Houston temple, was the subject of withering criticism after refusing to open his 16,800-seat Lakewood Megachurch to those seeking shelter from Hurricane Harvey. Now the doors are open, but it took several days of people wondering why this proponent of the “prosperity gospel” (aka “God loves you if you are rich”) was pulling up the drawbridge on his place of worship.

Less discussed — and Osteen must be relieved that this is the case — is how this televangelist got his hands on his megachurch arena in the first place. It’s a story that speaks to how our cities are unprepared for disasters like Harvey in part because of the way spending has been diverted into publicly funded stadiums; stadiums that become rotting carcasses or “white elephants” as soon as a billionaire wants a new one.
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James Retherford :
IMAGE | The New American Eagle

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

The New American Eagle. Digital image by James Retherford /
The Rag Blog.

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Steve Rossignol :
How close are we to doomsday?

Posted on August 29, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Some models predict a global firestorm apocalyptic-level event.

“Clouds of Doomsday” by Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería / Flickr.

By Steve Rossignol | The Rag Blog | August 29, 2017

Well, we appear to have survived the historic solar eclipse.

And it also appears that the potential nuclear crisis with North Korea may have abated for now. Donald Trump’s and Kim Jong-Un’s saber-rattling and sword fight over who has the largest, ah, missile seems to have come to a draw.

And we are weathering Hurricane Harvey.
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Lamar W. Hankins :
METRO | Harris County juvenile justice system: A case in point

Posted on August 29, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

This is a tale of dysfunction, mendacity,
and corruption.

Harris County Juvenile Justice Center.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | August 29, 2017

I graduated from law school over 41 years ago and am now retired. I’ve known of many disreputable, if not corrupt, occurrences in the legal system, but few worse than what happened in 1976, before I was admitted to the practice of law by the State Bar of Texas, when I was in my third year of law school and allowed to practice in court under the direct supervision of an attorney.

Professor Irene Merker Rosenberg had been an extraordinary lawyer and supervising attorney for the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society of New York for seven years before joining the faculty at the University of Houston law school in 1974. She had been the trial attorney in the landmark Winship decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that juveniles accused of a crime are entitled to have the charge proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” rather than by the lower standard of proof, “by a preponderance of the evidence.”
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Alan Waldman :
TELEVISION | ‘Deep Water’ is a gripping four-part Aussie police drama

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Yael Stone is excellent as a police detective cracking a string of 80 brutal gay killings.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | August 27, 2017

[In his Rag Blog column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. Most are available on DVD, Netflix and/or Netflix Instant Streaming, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

In Orange is the New Black, Yael Stone was very convincing as whiny-voiced, Italian-American prison van-driving inmate Lorna Morello, but in the outstanding 2016 Australian police drama Deep Water, it is shocking to hear her return to her normal accent from Down Under. Stone is actually an Aussie, the granddaughter of Czech Jewish holocaust survivors.
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