The Left and Barack Obama — T. Dreyer and D. Hamilton

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

There is much to like in Barack Obama

Most of the activists I work with in Austin, those of us in MDS/Austin (Movement for a Democratic Society) and other progressive groups, have chosen to support and, in many cases to actively participate in the campaign of Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, for a number of reasons. For this writer at least, those reasons include the following:

We find Barack Obama to be sincerely left-leaning and personally inspiring, and believe him worthy of trust, with the requisite reservations. We see the massive and enthusiatic and largely radical-leaning movement that his campaign has engendered to be a surprisingly positive sign in a largely lethargic times, and at the very least a fertile ground for future activism.

We consider the election of a progressive black man to the highest elective office in our country to be a quantum step forward in a nation with such a legacy of racism. (We will also consider the eventual election of a woman as president to be such a step.)

We believe the election of a progressive Democrat at this time in history would result in a quick end to the tragic War in Irag, the introduction of such progressive measures as universal (or virtually universal) health care, and would produce judicial and other governmental appointments that would make a very real difference in people’s lives.
This would result in real, tangible changes in the lives of struggling lower income citizens, of racial minorities, of those rotting in jail because of race or victimless crimes, and, significantly, of oppressed peoples in other parts of the world.

And, taking into account that both major parties, in the long haul, represent similar if not identical vested interests, we believe that the Republicans, with their corporate masters, with their oppressive and mean-spirited politics at times verging on the neo-fascist, must be stopped.

It is of critical importance that we never latch on to a political candidate in this electoral system and herald him or her as some kind of a savior. Bottom line, the problems in this country are not based in who runs the system. The system itself is the problem. The shameful disparity in distribution of wealth between the obscenely rich and those left to struggle for their daily needs.

The greatly disproportionate power of the corporate few. The grievous neglect of basic human needs, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy; the acceptance of torture and other sanctioned forms of inhumane treatment; doing virtually nothing to fight and a whole lot to accelerate the quickening environmental disaster. And the United States’ imperialist international policies fueled by greed.

All that taken into account, we believe that there is much to like about Barack Obama, and that there are substantial and valid reasons to work for his election.

Thorne Dreyer / March 23, 2008 / The Rag Blog


Purists who reject him offer no alternative

The Rag Blog’s David Hamilton wrote the following in response to those on the left who see supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama as being a “trick bag” for radicals. It was inspired in part by “US Presidential Candidates: Warmongers All,” posted to The Rag Blog on March 21, 2008. Participation in mainstream party politics always raises issues in the left community, and they are legitimate. Here’s David’s answer.

In 1936, the French Communist Party ended years of conflict with the French Socialist Party and established a united front that elected Leon Blum as the first socialist prime minister of France. That united front passed reforms that have characterized the socialist aspect of French society ever since.

I am not a Democrat. I have not voted for the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party since 1972 and have not participated in their primary process since the Jackson campaign of 1988.

I support Barack Obama enthusiastically. I do not do so because I don’t find things to criticize in what he says. I do so because, to a much greater degree than any other major party politician, I trust him. I trust him to do what he promises and talk to our supposed “enemies” instead of threaten them. In that, there is the kernel of the rejection of the militarism that is intrinsic to US imperialism.

Why do I trust him? There are many answers, many subjective and intangible. But what impressed me most was that he went from being president of the Harvard Law Review to being a community organizer working out of a store front on the south side of Chicago. He could have joined any prestigious law firm or clerked for any Supreme Court justice, but he instead chose to work with poor people, helping them meet their most basic needs.

I expect to be disappointed. I expect to have to criticize him and exert pressure on him from the left. I also expect him to make statements in order to get elected that I disagree with. But this time, I see a chance for a transformational figure who might just change the course of US history and I’m taking that chance.

In the process, we are supporting a “Plan for the Complete Withdrawal of all US Military Forces from Iraq in 2009” in the Democratic Party local convention as a way to push the eventual nominee toward that position. As Tom Hayden advised, either the antiwar movement can get involved in the process or it can stand sanctimoniously to the side.

Purists who reject him have no alternative other that “build an anti-imperialist movement.” That is a false dichotomy. In November, hopefully you will have the opportunity to vote for Barack Obama for president. The ideal anti-imperialist won’t be on the ballot. Relate to that reality. He may disappoint somewhere along the way, but he is by far the best major party candidate I’ve ever seen.

David Hamilton / March 23, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

White Folks Have a Hard Time Hearing the Truth

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise, March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn’t he say that America “got what it deserved” on 9/11? And didn’t he say that black people should be singing “God Damn America” because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn’t.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and “never batted an eye.” That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and “save American lives.”

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman’s own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we’re the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would “never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”

And Wright didn’t say blacks should be singing “God Damn America.” He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn’t happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don’t believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks–and I do, for instance–it is worth pointing out that Wright isn’t the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early ’90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed “undesirable” including gays and racial minorities.

So that’s the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America’s favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those “prosperity ministers” who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

Read the rest here.

From Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Nice Threads, Sean

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Sean Hannity of Fox News, as seen by the righteous.

Thanks to Telebob / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Fox News Goes Too Far For It’s Own Chris Wallace…

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Fox’s Chris Wallace takes Fox and Friends ‘to task’ for ‘two hours of Obama Bashing’

On Fox and Friends Friday morning, March 21, hosts Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Gretchen Carlson spent multiple segments sensationalizing a comment Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made the day before, in which he referred to his grandmother as “a typical white person” in some of her racial reactions. Obama made the comment while discussing his recent speech on race relations in America on a Philadelphia radio show.

When the trio welcomed Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace onto the show, instead of previewing his show this weekend, Wallace announced that he was going to take his fellow Fox hosts “to task” for their “excessive” and “somewhat distorting” coverage of what Obama said:

Hey listen, I love you guys but I want to take you to task if I may, respectfully, for a moment. I have been watching the show since 6:00 this morning when I got up, and it seems to me that two hours of Obama bashing on this typical white person remark is somewhat excessive and frankly I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say.

Wallace — who said that the issue “was a little more complicated than we’ve been portraying” — went on to chastise his very uncomfortable-looking colleagues for the next five minutes. Watch it:

Chris Wallace confronts hosts of Fox and Friends.

Trying to defend their coverage, Carlson said they played up Obama’s comment because she “felt that maybe the attention was being taken away from what people really wanted to hear Barack Obama speak about, which was his association and what he thought about the comments by his minister Jeremiah Wright.”

Noting Obama’s speeches this week on the economy and the war in Iraq, Wallace replied that “maybe it’s the media doing” the deflecting:

Far be it for me to be a spokesman for the Obama campaign, and I will tell you that they would laugh at that characterization, but you know, the fact is that after giving a speech on race earlier this week, on Tuesday, he gave a major speech on Iraq on Wednesday and a major speech on the economy yesterday.

And so, I think they would say that in terms of deflecting attention away from the issues people really want to hear about, maybe it’s the media doing it, not Barack Obama.

“I appreciate you respecting us enough to say it on camera as opposed to writing an email,” said Kilmeade sarcastically after hearing Wallace’s criticism.

Update:
Kilmeade storms off Fox and Friends set over co-hosts’ Obama-bashing.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted how Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace chastised his colleagues on the Fox and Friends morning show for their “excessive” and “somewhat distorting” coverage of Sen. Barack Obama’s comments about his grandmother. Earlier in the show, according to the Huffington Post, Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade “argued that the remark needed to be taken in context and eventually got so fed up with his co-hosts that he walked off set.” Watch it:

Fox News: Brian Kilmeade leaves set over Obama coverage

From Think Progress / The Rag Blog
Media Matters has a transcript from the show.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Kelly, The Onion / March 17, 2008

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

BushCo Lies and Dirty Tricks That Took Us to War

Posted on March 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Katherine Gun

The woman who nearly stopped the war
By Martin Bright

21/03/08 “The Nation” — – Of all the stories told on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, there is one important episode that took place during the build-up to the conflict that has gone largely unreported. It concerns a young woman who was a witness to something so outrageous, something so contrary to the principles of diplomacy and international law, that in revealing it she believed war could be averted. That woman was Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old Mandarin translator at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

On Friday 31 January 2003 she and many of her colleagues were forwarded a request from the US government for an intelligence “surge” at the United Nations (with hindsight, an interesting choice of words). In essence, the US was ordering the intensification of espionage at the UN headquarters in New York to help persuade the Security Council to authorise war in Iraq. The aim, according to the email, was to give the United States “the edge” in negotiations for a crucial resolution to give international authorisation for the war. Many believed that, without it, the war would be illegal.

The email was sent by a man with a name straight out of a Hollywood thriller, Frank Koza, who headed up the “regional targets” section of the National Security Agency, the US equivalent of GCHQ. It named six nations to be targeted in the operation: Chile, Pakistan, Guinea, Angola, Cameroon and Bulgaria. These six so-called “swing nations” were non-permanent members of the Security Council whose votes were crucial to getting the resolution through. It later emerged that Mexico was also targeted because of its influence with Chile and other countries in Latin America, though it was not mentioned in the memo. But the operation went far wider – in fact, only Britain was specifically named as a country to be exempt from the “surge”.

Koza insisted that he was looking for “insights” into how individual countries were reacting to the ongoing debate, “plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies etc”. In summary, he added: “The whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers the edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises.” The scope of the operation was vast: “Make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/debates/votes,” wrote Koza.

Gun was appalled by the email in two ways. First by the seediness of the operation: she believed the clear message was that GCHQ was being asked to find personal information that would allow Britain and America to blackmail diplomats in New York. But second and more importantly, she believed GCHQ was being asked to undermine the democratic pro cesses of the United Nations.

Secret email

Over the weekend after receiving the email, Gun decided to act. On returning to work on 3 February she printed out the document and took it home with her. She knew people involved with the anti-war movement and passed the email to a friend who was in contact with the media. This individual in turn passed it to the former Fleet Street journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had become famous as the reporter captured by the Taliban in 2001. By this time Ridley was a prominent opponent of the war. After first approaching the Mirror, which failed to verify the email, Ridley called me at the Observer, where I was working at the time, to ask if I would look at it.

The Koza memo presented me and my colleagues at the newspaper with a number of problems. For a start, the Observer supported the war in Iraq. Then there was the problem of verification. The Koza memo consisted of simply the body of the text, with all identifying information from the email header ripped from the top. In theory, anyone could have typed it. Koza’s name was written on the back along with other clues to its veracity, but it could easily have been a hoax. We were also hamstrung by the fact that Gun had not come directly to the newspaper, so there was no way of going back to the source of the leak to check the information.

Peter Beaumont, the Observer’s defence correspondent at the time, got his sources to confirm that the language used in the memo was consistent with the NSA and GCHQ.

But still there were doubts. One intelligence contact suggested it could be a sophisticated Russian forgery and another raised the possibility that British spy chiefs had written it to flush out anti-war elements at GCHQ. In the end, the paper’s then US correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, struck lucky. After a string of “no comment” responses from the NSA, a phone call to the organisation’s headquarters in Maryland was by chance put through to the office of Koza himself. This proved that he existed and we now felt confident that the email was genuine. Despite the paper’s pro-war stance, the then editor, Roger Alton, would not have rejected a good story and on 2 March 2003 the Observer splashed on the tale of US dirty tricks at the United Nations.

The story was followed up around the world and caused fury in Chile, which had known its fair share of US dirty tricks during the 1970s. Mexico was equally unhappy and both countries distanced themselves from a second resolution as a result of the revelations. Other countries were less bold in the face of cajoling and bullying from the US, but it became clear in the weeks that followed the leak that a fresh UN resolution was never going to happen.

This was precisely what Katharine Gun had hoped for when she walked out of GCHQ with the document a month earlier. What she could not have known, however, was that George W Bush was determined to go to war, with or without the support of the UN.

Within days of the Observer article, Gun was arrested under the Official Secrets Act and almost a year later she finally appeared at the Old Bailey to stand trial for leaking the NSA document. But, in a dramatic retreat, the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, dropped the case at the last minute and despite her prima facie breach of the secrecy laws, Gun walked free.

What did she gain? She failed to stop a war that has now cost thousands of lives. She gave up a secure career as an expert translator. But she was one of the first to reveal the truth about the lies and dirty tricks that took us to war in 2003.

Britain’s role

Questions still remain about Britain’s involvement in the spying operation, which was the ultimate responsibility of the then prime minister, Tony Blair. A full inquiry into the Iraq War has now been promised by the present Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and, among other things, this should force the government to disclose the full extent of its knowledge of the 2003 intelligence “surge”.

Those who doubt whether Gun’s actions had lasting his torical significance should refer to the statement issued by the Crown Prosecution Service when the case was dropped on 26 February 2004. There was speculation that Lord Goldsmith backed down because Gun’s defence requested disclosure of his legal opinion on the legitimacy of the war. As was later revealed, his legal opinion shifted as the prospects of a second UN resolution faded.

On this the CPS statement is clear: “This determination by the prosecution had nothing to do with advice given by the Attorney General to the government in connection with the legality of the Iraq War.”

Instead, the prosecution stated that “there was no longer a realistic prospect of convicting Katharine Gun”. The reasons for this remain a mystery, especially considering that Gun had admitted to the crime of leaking the document. Her only defence was the untried “defence of necessity”, under which her lawyers would have argued that her actions were designed to stop the imminent loss of human life.

The CPS statement contains the following intriguing paragraph: “The evidential deficiency related to the prosecution’s inability, with in the current statutory framework, to disprove the defence of necessity to be raised on the particular facts of this case.”

Read through the legalese, this is an astonishing admission from the government that Katharine Gun’s actions were entirely honourable. She really had tried to stop a war.

Source

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Manzanillo, And Memories of the Merry Prankster

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

In Mexico, on the Lam With Ken Kesey
By Lawrence Downes / New York Times / March 23, 2008

I am in the ocean, doing nothing, just bobbing.

I am facing a golden-sugar beach, a low pink hotel, a thatched palapa baking in the heat. To my left, a long crescent stretch of bay, a cradling arm around a basket of blue. To my right, a stone jetty. Beyond it, a port full of oceangoing tankers and the cliff-hugging city of Manzanillo. Behind me, the limitless Pacific. All around, pelicans loitering in the swells, which lift and gently drop me, my arms out, toes brushing velvet sand.

I said I was doing nothing, but I’m actually trying to summon somebody: Ken Kesey, novelist, psychedelic prophet, leader of the Merry Pranksters, hero of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

It was here, on this beach, that he took to the waves as I did, back in 1966. He was a hunted man then, on the run from the F.B.I. and Mexican federales, but even he, a man of great aplomb, found time for thoughtful bobbing.

“He’s working on his wave theory. This morning for breakfast he brewed and drank enough weed to put a horse in orbit. He’s been out there for three hours with his eyes closed … imagining that he’s a piece of kelp or a jellyfish.”

The observer is Mountain Girl, one of several Merry Pranksters who followed Kesey to Manzanillo. She watches from the beach while pondering his oracular musings.

“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world … by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”

Manzanillo now is not nearly as metaphysical as that account, from a trippy Kesey volume called “Over the Border,” would suggest. It’s a tourist town, a cruise destination, one gem in the resort strand of Mexico’s Pacific coast, cousin to Acapulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta. It’s a city of strip malls and cineplexes, dive shops and all-inclusive resorts where the help wears uniforms.

But Manzanillo then was jungle outpost, a nowhere port town on a two-lane road from Guadalajara. It was a place where a gringo — even a famous novelist gringo accompanied by family and friends, an abundant supply of drugs and an International Harvester school bus covered in Day-Glo paint and blaring music from a sophisticated loudspeaker system — could reasonably expect to hide out for a while.

You probably know most of the back story. Kesey is a promising writer at Stanford, publishes “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” his first novel, in 1962, and a huge deal is made of it. A circle forms in Palo Alto, bound by Kesey’s charisma and brightened by psychoactive chemicals and Day-Glo paint. It moves to the woods of La Honda, Calif., and roams the country in an old school bus. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stage a journey into life, art, rock-and-roll and experimental drug use that attracts hangers-on, Hell’s Angels, Tom Wolfe and, inevitably, cops.

Kesey is busted for marijuana possession once, twice. Now he faces real time: a bad trip he does not want to take. He parks a truck on a coastal bluff, writes a fake suicide note — Ocean, Ocean, I’ll beat you in the end — then slips into Mexico in a car trunk.

The headline: “LSD GURU SUICIDE!”

He hides in Puerto Vallarta, then Mazatlán, has B-movie escapes from undercover agents, and ends up in dead-end Manzanillo.

There the circle reconnects. Kesey is joined by his wife, Faye, their young children and a squad of Pranksters, including Mountain Girl, a k a Carolyn Adams; Ken Babbs; Mike Hagen; Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen; and the Beat legend Neal Cassady, with his parrot, Rubiaco.

Kesey and family and Mountain Girl take a little rented house on the beach. The others hang their hammocks across the road, in an abandoned pet-food factory they called La Casa Purina.

The sun pours off the mountains. The Pranksters soak in it, melting in heat so thick they call it Manzanillo mucus. They swim, they fish, they do laundry, they get stoned. They wait for family and lawyers to wire money. Mountain Girl gives birth to Sunshine, her daughter with Kesey, in the charity ward at the Hospital Civil.

The idyll lasted only into the fall. Kesey went home, did his five months in jail, and got right back to being an author and counterculture icon. His was a well-lived, well-loved, well-documented life, and it ended in rural Oregon in 2001.

I flew into Mexico at the end of August, a late arrival to the Kesey fan club, looking to unearth whatever traces remained of the Manzanillo episode.

I brought my 20-year-old stepson, Zak, who came well qualified because of his skill with a camera and fondness for the Grateful Dead, the Pranksters’ house band. I brought my battered undergraduate copy of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and “Mexico on 5 Dollars a Day,” the 1963-64 edition, which reported that Manzanillo’s “prettiest senorita” could be found, along with aspirin and diarrhea treatments, behind the counter of the Farmacia America on Avenida Mexico. I also brought a Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, at which I planned to sit and write in the heat and moonlight, with cold, sweaty beers.

I’m sorry, reader. I did not become a wave and did not find many physical traces of the Kesey interlude, though I came close, much closer than I thought I would.

You can, too, if you go as the Pranksters did, poor and open-minded, and look in the right places. Spend as little money as possible and stick to the far, far southern end of Manzanillo Bay, away from the high-end resorts and close to the jetty and pelicans.

Before I left New York, I had lucked upon Bart Varelmann, who had owned the little Hotel La Posada, one of Manzanillo’s only hotels back then. It’s still there, steps from the beach and that jetty, which borders a channel leading into Mexico’s biggest Pacific port.

Mr. Varelmann told me that the Pranksters had spent the summer next to his hotel, parking their bus beside a huge rock. Mr. Varelmann is now retired to Florida. He said he couldn’t remember Kesey very well, but he remembered the Pranksters and their kids, and the bus.

“The interior of Ken’s bus was a grab-bag cornucopia of strange pills, exotic herbs, magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers and of course marijuana,” Mr. Varelmann writes in his self-published memoir, “Innkeeper.” “On a windless day one could get stoned just strolling past the bus. A battery-powered tape machine enhanced the scene with a dreamy, pre-rock music by the likes of Mile Davis, Stan Kenton and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

We hung a lot at Ken’s magical bus that summer.”

There’s a problem with Mr. Varelmann’s tantalizing story. He insists that it all happened in 1963, which is impossible. Still, factoring in the memory-glazing effects of time and heavy drug use, it was the best lead I had, so I booked a room at La Posada for a week.

The first night, Zak and I walked through downtown Manzanillo, still bustling near midnight. Sidewalk food stands glowed under bare bulbs; it was a carnival of grease, of chorizo and chilies, roasted corn ears and ice pops. Looking up in the narrow streets, I saw thousands of swallows nestled for the night on telephone lines, evenly spaced, like zipper teeth. We had a late dinner, bistek tacos and pulpo gallego, octopus in olive oil and garlic, soft like butter.

The next morning, Zak sleeping, I slipped onto the beach to await the sunrise. The windy tumult of the day before was gone; it was still but not dark. Klieg lights from hotels cast a prison-camp glare, and development all along the bay cast a pallid wash of light into the sky. The most distant lights shimmered in the heat. The stifling, hushed air, the sand and thumping waves all seemed to be waiting for the sun to rise to ignite the conflagration of another stifling Manzanillo day.

MY other source of Kesey memories was Robert Stone, the novelist, who had been there.

Although he listened kindly when I called, he could not answer all my questions about addresses and landmarks. He confessed that it had been 40 years ago, and he too had been stoned a lot of the time. The buildings were already ruins in ’66, he said. “We weren’t much into infrastructure.”

Read all of it here.
Slideshow, narrated by author, with Kesey photos and audio.

From Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

US Presidential Candidates: Warmongers All

Posted on March 22, 2008 by RagBlog

Barack Obama as Jim Jones: The Kool-Aid that Kills
by Joshua Frank / March 19th, 2008

It could have been the defining moment of the campaign season. But last weekend’s Iraq Winter Solider Hearings were not only ignored by the corporate press, they were also snubbed by the mainstream candidates including alleged antiwar Democrat, Barack Obama.

None of this should come as much of a surprise if you’ve been watching Obama backpedal over the last few months. Somehow the Democratic frontrunner seems to believe Hillary’s defeat will only come about if he steers clear of a legitimate peace platform, merely paying lip-service to the conflicts in the Middle East instead.

While John McCain pronounces the US will be in Iraq for ten more bloody decades, Hillary and Obama aren’t raising any qualms in their policy papers. In fact, as author Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, Obama’s plan for Iraq not only includes continued funding for the gargantuan US Embassy in Baghdad, the senator also wants to leave at least 40,000 troops to roam about the country and allow mercenary forces like Blackwater to operate above the law indefinitely. Hillary Clinton, of course, seconds Obama’s thirst for more occupation and both senators aren’t the least bit hesitant to leave “all options on the table” in regard to Iran.

Warmongers all of them.

Read the rest of it here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To Prevent Totalitarianism, We Must Act Fast

Posted on March 22, 2008 by RagBlog

An Election Without Meaning
by Peter Phillips / March 22nd, 2008

Will November 2008 bring a meaningful change to America? Will getting rid of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney without impeachment or indictment really make a difference? Will a 600 billion dollar war/defense budget be cut in half and used for desperately needed domestic spending? Will the ninety-three billion dollars profits in the private health insurance companies­­—those parasitic intermediates between you and your doctor—be used instead for full health care coverage for all? Will Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus be restored to the people? Will torture stop and the US withdraw from Iraq immediately? Will all students in public universities be able to enroll for free? Will the US national security agencies stop mass spying on our personal communications? Will the neo-conservative agenda of total military domination of the world be reversed?

The answer to these questions in the context of the current billion dollar presidential campaign is an absolute no. Instead we have a campaign of personalities and platitudes. There is a race candidate, a gender candidate and a tortured veteran candidate, each talking about change in America, national security, freedom, and the American way. The candidates are running with support of political parties so deeply embedded with the military industrial complex, the health insurance companies, Wall Street, and corporate media that it is undeterminable where the board rooms separate from the state rooms.

The 2008 presidential race is a media entertainment spectacle with props, gossip, accusations, and public relations. It is impression management from a candidates’ perspective. How can we fool the most people into believing that we stand for something? It is billions of dollars of gravy for the media folks and continued profit maximunization for the war machine, Wall Street, and insurance companies no matter who is determined the winner in November.

We must face the fact that the US government’s primary mission is to protect the wealthy and insure capital expansion worldwide. The US military—spending more than the rest of the militaries of the world combined—is the muscle behind this protect-capital-at-all-costs agenda, and will be used against the American people if deemed necessary to support the mission.

Homeland Security, the North American Command, mass arrest practices with the FALCON raids, new detentions centers, and broadened “terrorism” laws to included interference with business profits are all now in place to insure domestic tranquility through extra judicial means if needed.

The two party corporate political system is having a HOMELAND presidential campaign—Hillary, Obama, McCain, Election, Lacking, Actual, National, Debate. It is time for real change, but it will only come with a social movement of reform in the tradition of the progressive, labor, civil rights, anti-war movements of the last century. We need to use all of our activist, legal, and political resources to reverse these threats to freedom. Naomi Wolf says it is not too late to prevent totalitarianism, but we have to act fast.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization.

Source

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Dicks Still Hate the Police : SXSW

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The Dicks : Time has not dimmed their power.
By Danny Eccleston / Mojo / The Rag Blog

It is hard to overstate the importance of this Texan outfit. Covered by Mudhoney, worshipped by David Yow and lauded by The Butthole Surfers (hear their homage to Dicks singer Gary Floyd on their 1985 debut album), The Dicks are part of US punk lore.

Their return over the years has been intermittent but tonight they prove that time has not dimmed their remarkable power. Tonight, the wonderfully rotund Floyd – whose post-Dicks’ outfits have included Sister Double Happiness – is his typically engaging self, sporting a minuscule pointed party hat which, cocked to one side, gives the impression of a single devil-horn. His fetching blue skirt is offset by a black T-shirt provocatively emblazoned with the slogan ‘Tell Your Wife’, while his southern-styled roar remains the defining element of a band unafraid to match classic rock sensibilities with their overtly politicised brand of hardcore thrash.

The Dicks’ unrelenting attitude is exemplified by bassist Buxf Parrot’s pronouncement following the rapacious No Fuckin’ War. “You like that one?” he sneers. “Fuck you! You don’t like that one? Fuck you!” The band’s closing salvo is the seminal Dicks Hate The Police – their very first single back in 1980. It solicits an outbreak of furious slam-dancing that leaves at least one ageing punk injured and several more clutching their noses. Away from the eye-of-the-stomp, it leaves MOJO grinning inanely before joining the rush at the T-shirt stall.

We leave the Elysium safe in the knowledge that we have just enjoyed a truly momentous performance. The time is 2.15am. Whether it’s the jetlag, the alcohol or The Dicks that have made our head spin with giddy glee, it’s hard to tell, although the Hyatt beckons invitingly. We will however be back tomorrow.

Source.

From Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

The Dicks : The Backstory

The Dicks, a Commie Faggot Band, emerged during the halcyon days of Austin, Texas punk. The scene centered around the local dive bar Raul’s frequented by local freaks, artists, and soon-to-be punk rockers. The band was the creation of Gary Floyd, a 26 year old from Palestine, Texas who had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and was openly, flamboyantly gay. Although he was advertising the Dicks before they were even an actual band, Floyd soon joined forces with three “terrorist thugs” to complete the group: guitarist Glen Taylor, bassist Buxf Parrot, and drummer Pat Deason.

They started writing burly, blues-drenched punk anthems and began playing raucous, shows with local heroes the Big Boys. Unlike that band’s funk-infused, high-production value drag show, the Dicks opted for a cruder but still spectacular approach. Gary Floyd would assault the audience with chocolate frosting pulled from his panties, inviting any rowdy audience members to suck his dick.

The band’s first single, the masterful Dicks Hate the Police was dropped onto the world in 1980 on MDC’s R Radical label. The title track to this EP is unlike anything else before or after – a total powerhouse of a song. The B-side found the band playing faster and harder than most other U.S. punk bands at the time.

Like most of their Texas peers, the Dicks had a sound that didn’t fit any one mold or genre. Sometimes punk, hardcore, blues, or free-form ranting, they were always playing music on the edge of insanity. Their next record is one of the ultimate documents of Texas punk – a split live LP with the Big Boys recorded at Raul’s. While the Big Boys don’t sound as great as their studio material, the Dicks really explode off the vinyl with a ripping live set that captures both the great songwriting and amazing energy they brought to the table.

Having caught the attention of punk producer Spot, the Dicks recorded their first full length for SST. Kill from the Heart finds the Dicks’ blues punk attacking conservatism and especially racism with unbridled fury. In 1982, before the album came out, Gary and the Dicks moved to San Francisco, followed by MDC and DRI who took up with them at a squatted beer plant known as the Vats.

Along with their new neighbors Crucifix and Michigan’s the Crucifucks, they embarked on the 1983 Rock Against Reagan tour: an exhausting 3 month extravaganza organized by the Yippies. The tour took a lot out of the band, and after its completion only Gary returned to the city by the bay. There he reformed the band with three new musicians: drummer Lynn Perko, guitarist Tim Carroll, and bassist Sebastian Fuchs.

This line-up recorded the PEACE? EP, a concept single attacking the injustices of war. While the record is powerful, especially the scorching “I Hope you Get Drafted,” it also demonstrated the cleaner, more rocking direction that the new band was taking. 1985’s These People LP, released on Alternative Tentacles, showcased a Dicks who were severing ties with “punk” sounds to play more straightforward, longer bluesy rock songs.

Nonplused by the reaction from punk audiences (“play faster!”), Gary decided to end the Dicks in 1986. He and Lynn Perko started Sister Double Happiness, who recorded for SST. Gary later went solo and has a new project called Black Kali Ma on A.T. Glen Taylor, unfortunately, passed away. Alternative Tentacles has reissued a collection CD of Dicks material that is a good starting point, and bootlegs of the LP (good quality) and first 7″ (bad quality) aren’t too hard to come by. Go get them now.

Here’s the sample referred to in the comment to this post. rdj

Source.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Junior and His Lying Lies, Again

Posted on March 22, 2008 by RagBlog

Once again, George W. Bush is trying to lie us into an illegal, immoral war against a nation that has no belligerent ambitions. Iran has never “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and, in fact, “[t]he Iranian leaders have consistently condemned nuclear weapons as inhumane and denounced them and said that they don’t want them and it would be illegal in Islamic law to use them.” (from Informed Comment, which I highly recommend you read for its depth and incisive analysis of the Iranian position).

We’d better start asking ourselves what is wrong with a man who will repeatedly, nay chronically lie in order to take the US to war for highly questionable reasons. There appears to be something pathological about our Emperor.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Bush Vows to Prevent Iran From Acquiring Nuclear Arms
By William Branigin, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 20, 2008; 12:46 PM

President Says Tehran Wants to ‘Destroy People;’ Cannot Be Trusted to Enrich Uranium

President Bush said the Iranian government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and vowed that the United States would be “firm” in preventing Tehran’s acquisition of such arms.

In interviews yesterday to mark the Iranian new year, Bush said Iran has a right to build civilian nuclear power plants but that the government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium, according to White House transcripts released today. Different types of enriched uranium can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors or as fissile material for atomic bombs.

“The Iranians should have a civilian nuclear power program. It’s in their right to have it,” Bush told Radio Farda, a U.S.-funded radio station that broadcasts to Iran in Farsi, the Iranian language.

“The problem is the government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they’ve hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now, who knows; and secondly, they’ve declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people — some in the Middle East,” Bush said. “And that’s unacceptable to the United States, and it’s unacceptable to the world.”

Washington has long suspected that Iran wants to use its civilian nuclear power program as cover for an effort to build nuclear weapons. But the Iranian government has not publicly declared a desire to obtain such weapons. In fact, Iranian leaders have said the opposite, repeatedly insisting that they do not want nuclear arms and asserting that their nuclear program is intended only to generate electricity.

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation specializing in nuclear policy, called Bush’s statement “uninformed” and “troubling.”

“Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason,” he said. “It’s just not true.”

Read all of it here.

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Austin Student Reports on Direct Action in Washington

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Students Serve Congress With “Stop-loss” Order
by Nora Hansel / The Rag Blog /March 21, 2008

This is a report from Austin’s Nora Hansel, a student at Wesleyan University who was arrested during direct action demonstrations at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on March 19, 2008. Nora is the daughter of Lori Jo Hansel,Austin attorney, MDS/Austin activist and former staffer at the underground newspaper, The Rag. The Rag Blog ran a story titled “Austin teen joins Iraq war protests in Washington” on the day of the demonstration. The post included a video of the activity in which she was involved. — The Rag Blog

Over spring break, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to join the protests against the War in Iraq scheduled for March 19 at the Capitol. I worked with Our Spring Break, a group created by students Ashley Casale of Wesleyan and Robby Diesu of D.C.’s Catholic University. Our protest was called a “Stop-loss” action.

Over the span of two weeks, more than 100 of us were trained in non-violent direct action by members of CodePink and were given legal counseling by activist lawyer Ann Wilcox. On Monday and Tuesday, joined by members of CodePink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, we delivered “Stop-loss Order” documents to the offices of all members of the Senate and Congress.

A “Stop-loss Order” is an order that involuntarily and illegally extends the soldiers’ service beyond the terms of their contracts. Soldiers have been “Stop-lossed” as many as five times during this war. These extensions have serious effects on the soldiers and their families and have resulted in a sky-rocketing rate of military divorce.

So, as a way of marking the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, we decided that the members of Congress — who were about to go into a long Easter break — needed to be “Stop- lossed.” We ordered the members of Congress to remain at their posts until all soldiers and military contractors have been removed from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our action was designed to block them from leaving their posts.
.
Code Pink created a diversion for the police while one group of students blocked the intersection of First and Independence, an intersection that representatives must travel through to get home. Meanwhile the other group of students (my group) blockaded the exit driveway to the senators’ parking garage.

We used banners, enlarged “Stop-loss order” posters, coffins and human knots for the blockade. While over a hundred participated in the overall action, about 30 of us were arrested, mostly students (for some of us, what may be the first of many arrests).

They arrested our group first, but we still managed to disrupt traffic. The others, who were at the intersection, blocked traffic for an hour.

I thought the action went very well though I was concerned by the lack of media coverage. We did create a lot of mayhem for those present, but, to put it in perspective, it was a very small action. A symbolic action. But I think it’s always important to make some noise, to call attention to the atrocities happening far away.

As Molly Ivins would have said, to “raise hell.”

I hope that, with the recent Winter Soldier Testimonies and the nonviolent direct actions and other protests surrounding the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, that we raised a little hell. And that the anti-war movement is finally gaining some momentum.

For previous article on The Rag Blog, go here.

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment