The Rag Blog

This was one of those remarkable photo opportunities that one is occasionally fortunate to find. The hummers loved the red hot pokers in the front yard in Shelton, and they were there frequently. This was near dusk which made the lighting very interesting. The downside is that I don’t know which species this is, Anna’s or rufous. It’s one of the two, and very busy, as hummingbirds typically are. The pic was taken on 1 June 2004.

George W. Bush has repeatedly warned, “Either you’re with us or you stand with the terrorists.” Now he has gotten through legislation that allows him to back it up. On Thursday, September 28, 2006, in a hastily drawn decision that will likely live in infamy, the Senate nodded assent to the Military Commissions Act (PDF).

According to this Act, an “unlawful enemy combatant” is to be defined as: “an individual engaged in hostilities against the United States who is not a lawful enemy combatant.”

This basically means that if a person is not a soldier in the service of a foreign government, but is nevertheless engaging in “hostilities” against the United States, then this person is an unlawful enemy combatant. Notice that this definition does not require that such a person be an “alien,” which accordingly leaves open the possibility that this designation could also be applied to an American citizen.

[snip]

According to the definition approved by the Senate, you don’t even have to be part of a terrorist organization. Nor does your “hostile” act have to be done to aid such a force; nor do you have to have supported such acts. Nor do you have to be in violation of the “law of war.” Nor is there anywhere in the act where the term “hostilities” has itself been defined. For example, is an anti-war activist an unlawful enemy combatant? What about an American journalist who publishes leaked information damaging to the Bush administration? What about an anti-Bush blogger? In short, the definition is broad (and vague) enough to include any American citizen who is acting in a way the President deems “hostile” to the United States. As such, it is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation with greater potential to undermine freedom and democracy in America. (emphasis added)

Eliot Cohen

Read the full article here.

Who are these people? Who are these useless hanks of bone and fat that call themselves Senators of the United States? Let’s call them what they really are, let’s speak the truth about what they’ve done today with their votes on the bill to enshrine Bush’s gulag of torture and endless detention into American law.

Who are they? The murderers of democracy.
Sold our liberty to keep their coddled, corrupt backsides squatting in the Beltway gravy a little longer.

Chris Floyd

Read more from this venerable Southern gentleman here. Or, if you would like to hear Chris read this piece himself, click here.

This was the first draft of Thorne’s story. The final version is here.

Max and the Mummy
By Thorne Dreyer

It’s half past chow and the guys in Pod 6F2 at 1200 Baker Street, Harris County Jail, are spread around the day room writing letters to their girlfriends or their moms, catching a sitcom rerun on the television or leaning against the back wall talking on one of the pay phones.

Delgado is standing by the phones, half heartedly kicking the wall. For the third straight night his girlfriend isn’t home and he wonders where she is. That, more than just about anything else, conveys the desolation and helplessness of being locked up: Where the Hell is she?

Otherwise, it’s a pretty mellow night. It’s an off-night for the Rockets, so the guys aren’t packed around the television, barking instructions at the screen, cheering or howling their displeasure. Tonight the artists are out. A short black guy, bald, his face sporting several days’ jailhouse growth, is hard at work on a high concept Mickey Mouse, blending together blues and browns and reds made from dyes he has extracted from the food coloring on M&Ms and skittles. Paco, a tattoo artist in “the world,” is creating a bouquet of finely detailed roses on an envelope addressed to his wife.

Stoney, meanwhile, is working on a portrait of the tattooed Paco. It’s a contract job, for which he will be paid in Ramen noodle soups, the jailhouse standard of exchange. The likeness is excellent. Stoney is good; he has no formal schooling in art, but he has an eye, and excellent technique considering the limited materials he has to work with. His canvas is a Commissary handkerchief which he has primed and stiffened in milk; then he works it with pencil and ballpoint pen.

Stoney, a friendly, intelligent fellow who fights weight and drug problems, lives on West Bell in Houston’s Montrose, traveling about the neighborhood on a bright red bicycle when he isn’t locked up. Stoney has been spending time in the clinic: his leg is severely swollen and a bandage covers a raw abscess the size of a silver dollar. The hole in his leg is the result of his shooting methamphetamine without taking the care needed to hit the vein correctly.

“My girl shoots up first, then she hurries me so we can have sex together while we’re both rushing.” It’s not the first time he’s hit it wrong, and he knows he could lose a leg or worse.

“I know the only way I can stop this shit is stay away from her,” he says. “But God I love her.”

As he speaks he feathers some finely textured shadows to the handkerchief portrait of Paco.

I see that my water is boiling so I remove the stinger from my tumbler and head back to the “house” – one of five eight-man cells that open off two sides of the day room. The cell doors remain open all day, shut only at rack time. I add coffee and chocolate to my hot water and sit on my bunk, taking it all in and jotting some of it down, when out of the blue wildly-bearded Max turns to me from the mattress which he chooses to keep on the floor, and says, “Pop, what time is it?”

Why Max – the sole resident of his own private universe, who hasn’t spoken a coherent sentence in hours – is suddenly in need of the time of day I do not know. But I respond with my best guess and he quickly jots this information on one of the hundreds of sheets of lined paper surrounding him on the floor. Pages – which we all freely give him when he runs short – filled with multitudes of words and symbols. Much of it appears to be gibberish, or at least is indecipherable to the layman. For pages it is neat and linear then suddenly swirls into postmodern typographical chaos.

Wild ravings or great wisdom in some highly sophisticated code? Even money, I’d say.

Max, a ruggedly handsome man with elegant salt-and-pepper hair and sweeping beard, has an almost regal look beneath his wildness. Probably Hispanic – maybe Castilian – he’d look quite comfortable in a Havana street café, sharing cigar and brandy and tales of women and other past glories with cronies of Fidel.

Max pores over his manuscript for hours on end, often working and reworking the same page, fine-tuning. When he’s not composing or editing, his art becomes verbal. Sometimes he mumbles, or carries on complex conversations with unseen (by us) comrades or adversaries and at other times he emotes, often with Shakespearean authority. He delivers his soliloquies while marching around the cell, punctuating the high points with graceful dramatic gestures. And sometimes at night he chants: soulful, calming, tribal incantations. “Uhm BAH hah lah. Uhm BAH hah lah.”

Though jailhouse culture can be thoughtless and cruel, it is also capable of surprising generosity and respect, and there is a protective attitude towards Max that is touching. We’ve got his back. For instance, if someone tries to cheat him – like pushing him into a bad trade at chow time (“Hey Max. My carrots for your chocolate moon pie!) — we rush to his defense. (Everybody trades, but nobody would accept that deal.)

Max isn’t stupid. He just has other things on his mind.

Watching Max, I think once more of the old man I met during booking. While Max has more life in him than two men, this fellow was virtually a ghost. A gaunt wisp of a once black man, easily in his 90’s, he wasn’t gnarled or pocked or wrinkled. He had simply become so pale, his features so softened, that there was hardly any outline left to him. He just seemed to be rescinding into nothingness.

Above each ear was an electrified tuft of white hair, as if someone had gently placed a stun gun to each temple, terrifying the unsuspecting follicles. His strange distant eyes darted around in deep sockets and when he took a step he did it in distinct increments, like he was climbing up and then down a ladder before his foot once more touched ground. His lips quivered as if continuously rehearsing his next word and when he spoke his voice was so soft and distant that the words fluttered from his lips like feathers.

We were held in this processing tank for several hours. It was a concrete room with cold concrete benches, if you were lucky enough to get one. It was a winter night and most of us were physically shaking from the chill. I watched as the old man took a roll of toilet paper and methodically – as if this were something he did every day of the year – wrapped tissue around and around his feet and ankles and up his legs until the white strips disappeared into the legs of his orange county jail pants. Then the took the tissue and carefully wrapped his neck up to his chin and ears and dropped strips like a straggly necktie into the v of his chest left bared by the flimsy orange top.

The old man simply stood there, his lips slightly quivering, looking for all the world like a mummy that had started to unravel…

I’m stirred from my reverie as Max comes to life beside me, rifling the pages of his manuscript, searching with a newfound urgency, seeking some precise passage. Apparently he finds what he’s looking for. He ceremoniously raises his hands until they freeze, palms down, fingers spread, three feet above his opus. His fingers begin to move, to roll, as if he’s playing a particularly expressive passage on the piano. Done, he folds them gently on his lap, clearly satisfied with his efforts.

This new calm is suddenly shattered by a high pitched crackle from the PA, as a deputy in the picket exclaims: “Roberts. Pack your stuff. You’re on the chain.”

My friend Shane is leaving. Like many of the men in this tank, Shane Roberts was incarcerated for a minor technical parole violation, and now he’s headed for a 45 day stint at an “Intermediate Sanction Facility.”

Shane quickly gets his stuff together and, rolled blanket under one arm, a brown bagful of his jailhouse possessions in the other, heads for the pod exit – one step closer to home.

And yes, we all follow after him, beseeching, “Shane. Shane. Come back Shane.”

But Shane’s gone and I’ve finished my coffee. And Max is peacefully curled up on his mattress, his manuscript now neatly stacked beside him.

So I pluck my ragged paperback from beneath my bunk and settle back, rolled blanket under my head, to find out if Chief Inspector Jack Oxley has finally managed to outmaneuver the Russian mafia and the treacherous yet breathtakingly beautiful Galina Lysenke to gain possession of Peter Faberge’s legendary and incredibly valuable final egg commissioned and cursed by the grand monk Rasputin just before his demise.

Whew! The plot alone tires me out. Think I’ll take a nap.

I’m dreaming of the breathtakingly beautiful Galina Lysenke when suddenly my bliss is shattered. The tank is awash with glaring light, the steel doors slam open and a phalange of deputies in riot gear comes rushing in.

“Shakedown!” somebody shouts.

“Everybody up. Down to your shorts. Single file in the day room,” they scream. Now!” We are searched, one by one. “Shoulders on the wall, eyes straight ahead. Open your mouth. Raise your tongue. Pull your ears forward. Lift your right foot. Left foot. Now drop your shorts. Bend over and spread your cheeks.”

While we’re being routinely humiliated, other guards enter the cells and rip everything apart. They tear off the sheets and throw the mattresses on the floor – as well as all the personal effects we keep under the mattresses. They are looking for weapons – homemade shanks – and contraband.

They paw through all of our stuff then kick most of it into the dayroom where trustees pack it into garbage bags and cart it away.

I hear what sounds like a flock of startled pigeons wildly taking flight. And the day room is suddenly swimming in white as hundreds of sheets of paper fill the air, flutter about the tank and fall to the grimy floor.

The steel doors to the pod crash shut and the guards are gone. And we return to the devastation of the cells.

Much of our stuff is history, including the stash of ratty paperbacks under my mattress, kind of a lending library I maintain for the guys. Books aren’t easy to come by in Harris County Jail.

Meanwhile, the scattered remains of Max’s manuscript are being swept with push brooms to one corner of the day room where they will be neatly disposed of. Max sits calmly on his mattress and begins to chant as we clean up the house and then crawl back into bed.

When I awake to the sounds of breakfast being served next door I see the floor in front of Max’s mattress is covered with tufts of black and gray and splashes of red. Max has taken a disposable razor and hacked away at his stately beard; his face is now covered with patches of hair and streams of blood from ragged gashes where he’s slashed more than beard.

As our breakfast – an orange, a small box of cereal and a pint of milk – is served, Max is led off to the infirmary. I won’t see him again.

Later that day it’s my turn to say goodbye. “Pack your stuff. You’re out of here. All the way.” That means I’m going home.

When I finally hit the street, I see the old black man from booking, a mummy no more. An ancient black woman as round as he is thin, her eyes full of tears, throws her arms around him.

He looks at me and winks.

I cross the street to McDonalds and wait for my ride.

########

I inadvertently found this the other day. I’d found Web things about it, but not ever a lovely little video. It’s a beautiful place and evokes very fond memories for me of young women, relaxed living, and youthful fun. Take a walk with me down into the bowl of Hamilton Pool.

Dear friends,

For those of you who don’t know what the AIDS Walk is, its a 5 kilometer walk that raises money for Aids Services of Austin (ASA), a nonprofit organization that helps people with AIDS. I first got involved in the AIDS walk and ASA when my mom worked at ASA. This is my seventh year participating in it and probably my last because I will be in college next year. I would love for you to sponsor me this year. Anything helps. People have donated anywhere from 1 dollar to 100, so I appreciate anything you can afford to give. There is still no cure, but our efforts can help feed, clothe, and give hope to those with AIDS!

Did you know that every minute – every sixty seconds – FIVE people around the world die with HIV/AIDS? Did you know that more than 60 million people across the globe are living with HIV/AIDS, and more than 20 million individuals have already died from the disease? These statistics are staggering, but you and I can HELP.

I recently accepted the challenge to raise funds to support AIDS Walk Austin in its efforts to raise critically needed funds for HIV/AIDS prevention, education and support services in Central Texas. As part of this program, I will also take part in a 5K walk. AIDS Walk Austin gives you the opportunity to help me and help our neighbors living with HIV/AIDS.

Please support me in this important project by contributing as much as you can afford to AIDS Walk Austin 2006. It is faster and easier than ever to support this great cause – you can make your donation online by simply clicking on the link at the bottom of this message. If you would prefer, you can also send your tax-deductible contribution to the address listed below. More information on AIDS Walk Austin and its beneficiaries can be found at this link.

Whatever you can give will help – it all adds up! I greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Thank you,

Nora Hansel

Click here to visit my personal page.

But, of course, there are reasons such that we don’t really have to take full responsibility for our lives: “Disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley said through his lawyer Tuesday that he was sexually abused by a clergyman as a teenager, …” (Associated Press) After all, the Repuglicans are ‘the party of God’ whose leader takes his guidance directly from The Big Man, right?

Sad to acknowledge that the first toon explains a fair part of the second …

Now Available! Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community, by Heather Coburn Flores. The premier guide for ecological living in the city through paradise gardening and shared resources by a co-founder of the original Food Not Lawns grassroots gardening project in Eugene, OR. (Chelsea Green, 2006, 334 p.) ISBN 1-933392-07-X

Order your author-signed first editions today by sending a check or money order for $25 plus $3.85 S&H ($28.85) to Heather Coburn Flores, 31139 Lanes Turn Road, Coburg, OR 97408. Estimate 5-8 business days for delivery.

See this for more information.

SDS meets in Chicago
Jenny Brown
September 2006

Chicago–Student organizers representing dozens of chapters around the country gathered here for the first national meeting of Students for a Democratic Society since 1969. The legendary student group was founded in 1960, and by the late 60’s its name became synonymous with the student movement and the New Left. That ‘first iteration SDS,’ as SDS northeast regional organizer Thomas Good called it, split and scattered in 1969. Local chapters continued to be active for a couple more years.

In 2006, 150 students from University of Central Florida in Orlando, Pace University in New York, Howard Community College near Baltimore, Loyola in Chicago, and many others from Washington State, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Connecticut and elsewhere spent three days, August 4-7, telling each other about their organizing and strategizing about where to go with a national radical student group.

The call for a national SDS meeting came in January from several chapters of student radicals that had formed under the name “SDS” more or less independently. Pat Korte, a high school student, noted in the January 16th announcement that “several fellow activists from across the country and myself decided to form a national SDS movement, only to discover that chapters already exist! Because of this we decided to hold a national conference.”

Why SDS in particular? Many students felt there needed to be a multi-issue radical student group that was about student power, there was a need on their campuses, and there was a need in the country. Korte said, “Although I have been an active participant in the anti-war and student activist movement, I have become frustrated with the groups collective inability to unify enough people under a common goal/vision to address the overall problems in our society. Historically, SDS was able to address many of these issues pertinent at the time through Tom Hayden’s Port Huron Statement.”

To read more, click here.

There is also additional information at the SDS and MDS Web sites (see the links in the right-hand sidebar), as well as here.

I watched “In the Realms of the Unreal,” Jessica Yu’s descriptive film of Henry Darger’s life, over the weekend. It’s left me in a strange, fanciful sort of mood. Perhaps Earl Gray tea and cherry, almond scones with this odd video ….