Friday, December 27, 2013

Precious Stones I

When Oliver Stone turned over the dozen parts of his documentary masterpiece Untold History of the United States to Showtime in the early fall of 2012, Showtime balked. They had contracted for only ten episodes -- the first to begin with World War II, the last ending with Obama's corporate totalitarian murder state. But Stone (with co-writer Peter Kuznick) had composed two "prequels" as well: prequel A covering the birth of US imperialism under McKinley through the end of World War I; prequel B continuing through the 1920s and 30s. The prequels were not broadcast. But they have been, alas, included in the just-released Blu-ray and they are -- like the rest of the series -- as beautiful and passionate as they are dark and despairing. Stone has found his place. He has become a great American filmmaker. Perhaps the only one we have, currently working.
"My goal is to make enough money so I can hire half of the American workforce to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould
Prequel A seeds the birth of the American war state in the ground of post-Reconstruction industrialization and the "end to frontiers." William McKinley found some: Cuba, Panama, the Phillipines. After his assassination by brave anarchist Leon Czolgosz, it was racist gangster Teddy Roosevelt's turn. Then devil iceman Woodrow Wilson. All done, all the wars and expansions and repressions and demonizations, to crush one thing: the nativist American socialism of the 1880s and 90s, and from the turn of the 20th Century. Yet out of worldwide carnage aided and abetted by Wilson and US capital, the Soviet State is born.

Precious Stones II

"The common man would now have to find his one-eyed way in the Kingdom of the Blind." -- Dos Passos
While literati such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller move their feasts to Paris and gaze at their navels -- helping to fill the gap caused by the WWI deaths of half of all French males between the ages of 15 and 30 -- the pygmies known as the American Oligarchy regain full control, flushing whatever remains of late-19th / early-20th Century humanism, and roar their way through the 1920s: the decade of Prohibition, massive coast-to-coast KKK rallies, eugenics, the birth of Organized Crime, and major financing by American bankers of fascist movements across Europe. When things fall apart at the turn of the 30s, FDR steps in and saves US capitalism from (and for) the capitalists. Who don't see it that way.



(The original ten episodes of Untold History can be found on this blog, for the months of November / December 2012 and January / February 2013.)

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Alex Cox

Has an old friend in Chris Floyd; and a terrific website and new book on what went down in Dallas, 50 years ago.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Onslaught


Pat Speer on the mass media's assault on truth, this autumn's 50th Anniversary of JFK's murder.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Supermen


Remarkable.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Little Match Girls

Jean Renoir's.



And my own.


Happy 9th Birthday
to the best daughter in the world!

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

The Conspirators


The names of those who plotted, directly or indirectly, the murder of John F. Kennedy; and the names of those with foreknowledge of the plot. (Not inclusive.)
Allen Dulles
James Jesus Angleton
William Harvey
Lee Oswald
David Atlee Phillips
David Morales
Ann Egerter
Richard Helms
Desmond FitzGerald
McGeorge Bundy
Robert Maheu
Lawrence Houston
Frank Wisner
Ferenc Nagy
William Pawley
Tracy Barnes
Bill Bright
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge
Ambassador Thomas Mann
Thomas Karamessines
Richard Cain
Colonel Boris Pash
J.C. King
Thomas Clines
I. Irving Davidson
Lt. Lucien Conien
Carl Jenkins
General Lyman Lemnizter
George Joannides
Sergeant Daniel Groth
E. Howard Hunt
Sheffield Edwards
General Thomas Power
Louis Bloomfield
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb
Hal Hendrix
Floyd Boring
Sam Halpern
Edward Lansdale
Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer
Sergio Arcacha Smith
Emilio Santana
Carlos Quiroga
William Sullivan
Ruth Paine
Henry Luce
Michael Paine
Cord Meyer
Eddie Bayo
Anne Goodpasture
Forrest Sorrels
John Rosselli
Eladio del Valle
Frank Sturgis
Mitch WerBell III
Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell
Richard Case Nagell
General Lucius Clay
Richard Bissell
Win Scott
Felix Rodgriguez
Elmer Moore
Jane Roman
Claire Booth Luce
John Martino
Rip Robertson
Jack Ruby
Thomas Eli Davis III
Emory Roberts
Jack Crichton
General Curtis Lemay
General Charles Cabell
Clint Murchison
Charles Willoughby
David Ferrie
Guy Banister
Ted Shackley
Cliff Carter
Lyndon Johnson

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Nightmare on Elm Street

The best and most stylish documentary yet on Dallas (like Errol Morris with a purpose): Terrence Raymond's Evidence of Revision.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Sunday, November 17, 2013

50 Reasons. . .


. . . for 50 Years is Len Osanic's masterful YouTube series memorializing the November 22nd, 1963 Dallas coup. Osanic's weekly show -- Black Op Radio -- is a must listen for all those who care about what's happened to America and to the world.

Here, Osanic and author Joe McBride expose the cover-up role of the Media Industrial Complex.

Lost

What was, that day, per Oliver Stone.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Something Has Happened in the Motorcade. . .

The best and most complete compilation I know following the trip from Dallas Love Field to Parkland Memorial Hospital, made from all known photographs and home movies.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Welcome



Dallasites celebrate Thanksgiving, 1963.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Oliver

With Amy Goodman, on Dallas 50 years later. Superb.



Part Two.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Husband and Wife

"Ray Murdock's X-Ray," one of the best episodes from The Dick Van Dyke Show. And what a beautiful series it is, maybe the best ever: kind, gracious, graceful, elegant, very funny, modest, super smart, humane -- with (like the time of the show itself) always the good speaking.

At the center of the series is the loveliest and most realistic of TV marriages. Rob and Laura Petrie truly are the "marrying kind" -- and both are taken, by each other. End of discussion.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Ghosts

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

The Murder Pimp

From Chris Floyd:
Just a reminder: this is the true nature of the bipartisan, militarized "security state" now headed by the progressive Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. When you support the Laureate -- however "savvily" and "critically" -- when you support the system -- hoping to "reform" it from within -- this is what you are supporting. From the Guardian:
The last time I saw my mother, Momina Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my children's clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a traditional sweet made of milk. … The next day, 24 October 2012, she was dead, killed by a US drone that rained fire down upon her as she tended her garden.

Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day. The media reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother's house. Several reported the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All reported that five militants were killed. Only one person was killed – a 67-year-old grandmother of nine.

My three children – 13-year-old Zubair, nine-year-old Nabila and five-year-old Asma – were playing nearby when their grandmother was killed. All of them were injured and rushed to hospitals. Were these children the "militants" the news reports spoke of? Or perhaps, it was my brother's children? They, too, were there. They are aged three, seven, 12, 14, 15 and 17 years old. The eldest four had just returned from a day at school, not long before the missile struck. ...

We want to understand why a 67-year-old grandmother posed a threat to one of the most powerful countries in the world. We want to understand how nine children, some playing in the field, some just returned from school, could possibly have threatened the safety of those living a continent and an ocean away.

Most importantly, we want to understand why President Obama, when asked whom drones are killing, says they are killing terrorists. My mother was not a terrorist. My children are not terrorists. Nobody in our family is a terrorist.

My mother was a midwife, the only midwife in our village. She delivered hundreds of babies in our community. Now families have no one to help them. And my father? He is a retired school principal. He spent his life educating children, something that my community needs far more than bombs. Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breeds more terrorism. But education – education can help a country prosper.

I, too, am a teacher. I was teaching in my local primary school on the day my mother was killed. I came home to find not the joys of Eid, but my children in the hospital and a coffin containing only pieces of my mother.

Our family has not been the same since that drone strike. Our home has turned into hell. The small children scream in the night and cannot sleep. They cry until dawn.
Drone strikes are not like other battles where innocent people are accidentally killed. Drone strikes target people before they kill them. The United States decides to kill someone, a person they only know from a video. A person who is not given a chance to say – I am not a terrorist. The US chose to kill my mother.
No, Barack Obama didn't physically push the button on this particular murder. That was done by some video-game jockey sitting in a padded chair somewhere, very safe, very protected. But the murder was a direct result of the decisions made by the "Commander-in-Chief" to set up a framework of state murder -- sorry, "extrajudicial assassination" -- sorry, "protection for the security of the American people" -- that allows any number of lower-level agents and officers to carry out these high-tech mob hits on their own authority, for their own reasons. (Though no doubt these decisions are processed through a complex and sophisticated "decision matrix" made up of multifarious determining factors -- like, "Dark-skinned bodies in an open field; could be terrorists; what the hell, rub 'em out.")

Of course, the Commander-Laureate does, like Stalin, personally sign off on death lists on a regular basis, giving the direct order for a rub-out. But as heinous as the White House death squad is, the murder program is actually far more widespread than that, with faceless bureaucrats -- military and civilian (if indeed these distinctions still have any real meaning in our militarised and paramilitarized security state) -- making the call to kill as they see fit. We have no idea who these people are, or how or why they make their choices to kill, or who they will target next.

This is the system we have now. This is what you must deal with -- not the hallucinatory fantasy where a good guy "progressive" battles heroically against the bad guy "teabaggers," and needs our help to keep him on the good path toward "reform." It's not a comic book, it's not a civics book, it's a not a movie with a happy ending. It's a brutal, murderous, lawless, dangerous, out-of-control engine of destruction, encompassing the entire political establishment and all those who support it, politically and financially.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Schooled


Toddler Maggie learns much in less than 5 minutes, for evil and for good.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Speak


James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable is not only the greatest book ever written on John F. Kennedy's execution, but on his life and Presidency as well. Out of the darkness, Douglass creates a hymn of faith, hope, and transcendence. In Kennedy's murder by the forces of the Unspeakable, a contemporary crucifixion, Douglass sees meaning beyond the resulting Vietnam genocide, beyond the takeover of our society by back-stabbers, soul-crushers and corporate ghouls, beyond the shifting of cultural meaning toward something hideously empty and narcissistic -- meaning in the symbol of a man willing to die for his beliefs, for his (in Douglass's term) "turning." One can argue with this, for at the heart of Douglass's profoundly spiritual argument, there is something anti-political. Rather than viewing Jack Kennedy's murder as a political and economic act by men who saw themselves only in those terms, we experience it through Douglass's writing as a modern day Stations of the Cross. First Station: Kennedy refuses war with Laos. Second Station: Kennedy refuses invasion and air attacks during the Bay of Pigs; Third Station: Berlin Wall goes up, Kennedy lets it stand. Etc. It is an agony, as we follow Kennedy's turning and his movement toward the Golgotha of Dallas.

The very talented Seth Jacobson and Oliver Hine have been preparing a graphic novel adaptation of the Douglass masterpiece, with little interest shown -- despite the original book's popularity upon Simon & Schuster's paperback release -- by American publishers. Jacobson & Hine need your help. If you can assist, please head over to Kickstarter.

Land without Grief

The great David Thomson on Parkland, the latest piece of reactionary mythomaniacal dreck from Tom Hanks.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

The Wicked


"To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted.’

Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: Germans 1933 - 45

Thursday, August 29, 2013

"He Did Not Bring a Rifle to Work That Morning"

Lee Harvey Oswald's driver, Buell Wesley Frazier, the morning of 11/22/63.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Démarche

Summer in ObamaLand.









Imagine this Death Squad Commander/War Criminal/House Nigger daring to stand in Dr. King's place, on the eve of attacking Syria.


(Click on the Lichtenstein, for the real thing.)

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

In Your Place

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Sugar

The #1 song of '63, featuring a person who embodies that magical year as well as anybody.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Beauties and Beasts

Abby Martin rips future press secretary in a Hillaroid Administration a new one.



And speaking of Hillaroid: ya gotta love Republicans! (And they're right -- none of the whiny little pwogs so upset now had any problems slappin' around the lovely Ms. Palin.) Slap that bass!

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Falling

Human Chris Floyd lost his dad earlier this year. Last week, his mom passed as well.

Out of sorrow, greatness.
United We Fall

It is a commonplace of our commentariat to say that American society is deeply divided -- indeed, perhaps more polarized than it's ever been before. Of course, this leaves out any number of emblematic events that might possibly undermine their blazing insight -- like, say, the Civil War, Haymarket, Selma, Little Rock, Watts or Kent State, to name but a very few historical instances of “polarization." But then, willful ignorance has always been the coin of our realm, the golden ticket to the circles of power -- or, for the commentariat, the fearful, bootlicking fringes of power. For these sages, history begins and ends with whatever is gurgling in the unflushed toilet of Beltway politics right here and now.

So it should come as no surprise to find that the truth about American society today is the opposite of what these cud-dripping masticators of conventional wisdom are wont to opine. Far from being a house divided, America is actually in the midst of an era characterized by remarkable unanimity. In fact, I would go so far as to say that American society has never been so united and uniform than it is today.

Yes, "hot button" issues -- centered, as always, around genital activity and gender roles -- remain heatedly contentious. Yes, the chronic, virulent racism on which our society was (literally) built continues to sicken the body politic. And yes, Tea Party trogs and NetRootsy progs still hurl insults across an ever-widening cultural abyss, each side increasingly regarding the other more as separate species than political opponents. Who can deny that our public discourse grows ever more harsh, frenzied, aggressive and stupid?

And yet, the fact remains that on those issues which truly concern our elites -- the issues on which their continued (and expanding) dominance and privilege depend -- here we find remarkable (not to say alarming) agreement across a depressingly broad swath of American society.

The Obama years have given us an America that looks something like a bad Kurt Russell movie from the 80s: a weird, garish dystopia, where the president runs a death squad out of the White House, wages robot wars in foreign lands, operates a techno-panopticon sucking up every message, musing and secret desire of the populace, and lets tens of millions of citizens sink into poverty and despair in their gutted communities and crumbling infrastructure while he doles out trillions of dollars to rapacious elites gleefully bleeding the country dry. Actually, if you tried to run this scenario past a few coked-up studio execs in those halcyon years, they would have rejected it out of hand as too unrealistic, even for a bad Kurt Russell movie. Yet this is our reality.

Add to this such things as the corporate-backed ALEC movement stifling the ability of the people’s elected representatives to pass measures on matters of vital importance to their communities, such as gun violence, pollution, collective bargaining, etc; the return of Jim Crow laws openly designed to rob the dusky races (and poor white trash) of access to the ballot box; the incarceration of a greater percentage of its own population than any regime in human history; the reckless sell-off of public services, public lands and the environment itself to frackers, venture cap vultures and other corporate profiteers; and the relentless persecution of any government employee who dares to inform the people of even a few of the sickening crimes being done in their name.

This hardly exhausts the litany of abuses, punishments and humiliations to which Americans are subjected daily. They live in a pestilent swelter of authoritarianism and militarism, of fear and insecurity, of ugliness and hopelessness that few if any generations of Americans before them have ever known. And yet …

Where are our Selmas, our Haymarkets, our Marches on Washington? Where is the anger, the outrage, the action? True, the Occupy movement blossomed for a season, and the seeds it sowed may yet bear good fruit. But for the most part, most sectors of American society have remained notably quiescent, when they have not been downright supportive. (This includes the African-American community, which today, as always, is bearing the brunt of our elites’ depredations. For more on this tragic development, see Glen Ford and his indispensible Black Agenda Report.) Congressional and media ‘liberals’ take to the airwaves to defend Obama’s Stasi-like spy ops, his death squads, his drone wars, his force-feeding torture of Guantanamo prisoners long cleared for release. They hotly condemn the ‘narcissistic’ Edward Snowden for revealing state crimes – yet happily revel in leaks that depict our noble, thoughtful president consulting Thomas Aquinas before ordering American citizens (and countless, nameless others) to be murdered without charge, trial or defense.

Every day, all across the world – and in the holy-moley Homeland itself – Obama commits and countenances crimes beyond the wildest dreams of LBJ and Richard Nixon. Every day he helps tighten the stranglehold of rampant militarism and corporate power on the lives of the people. Yet there are no riots, no uprisings, no public or institutional dissent that might trouble the complacency of our overlords.

A “divided society?” Would to god we had one. For beneath the gaudy spectacle of hot button-pushing and the scattering of a few crumbs of cultural change, a drab, grim conformity to the overarching agenda of elite power reigns supreme.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Light

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The Threat

Monday, July 22, 2013

"Obama is the Global George Zimmerman"

Dr. Cornel West says it. (Thank you, Paul)

And Helen, 2007

The wonderful Helen Thomas at the Media Reform Conference in Memphis, January 2007.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Midsummer's Dreams


Two tracks emerge. On July 1, 1963, the American Zip Code is born. On the 2nd, Juan Marichal of the San Francisco Giants and Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves each throw 16 innings of shutout ball in the longest pitchers' duel in baseball history. Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job as a coffee greaser on 7/19. John F. Kennedy goes on television July 25th announcing "a shaft of light has cut into the darkness": the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A compound near Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana is raided by local and federal agents who seize thousands of arms and ammunition on August 2nd. The arrested compound members are immediately released and will hover close to all things Dealey Plaza during the next several months. Phil Graham, owner and powerful publisher of the Washington Post and front man for the early-60s War Party, commits suicide on the 3rd. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is born prematurely on August 7th. The Kennedys' baby dies two days later. Also on the 9th, Lee Oswald is arrested for passing out "Fair Play for Cuba" flyers before Clay Shaw's New Orleans International Trade Mart. Strangely, this absolutely insignificant arrest is given local television news coverage. The Great Train Robbery of '63 occurs at a bridge in Buckinghamshire, England, with the thieves carrying away the current equivalent of over $55,000,000. August 14th, Lee Oswald is arrested again, for fighting with New Orleans anti-Castro Cubans. Oswald's one phone call is to the local FBI office. James Meredith becomes the first person-of-color to graduate the University of Mississippi on August 18th. Incredibly, "itinerant loner" Oswald appears on radio and TV the night of the 21st, debating others on the heroism of Fidel Castro. In late-August, JFK is deceived by plotters within his own government: a series of Saigon cables wildly distort South Vietnam reality in a conspiracy to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem's government. The summer ends with the dreamlike March on Washington. . .

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Helen

Great Americans are as rare as a desert rose this century and one of the greatest died today at the age of 92.

As a 12-year veteran of Hearst Magazines, I couldn't help be heartbroken by what would be Helen Thomas's last act of journalistic courage: her condemnation of Israel for the Marva Marmara massacre, leading to a Zionist attack on Hearst; leading to her forced public apology; leading to her forced resignation from Hearst (and from all newspapers). Daughter Vickie Hearst especially went off in her condemnation of Thomas and in her defense of the po' little besieged state of Israel, the week of the Marva Marmara massacre:

    "I urge Hearst Corporation CEO Frank Bennack to make a public apology to the Worldwide Jewish Community, assuring the Jewish people that the Hearst Corporation is not anti-Israel."

No, but it sure became anti-human. Hearst Magazines, under the cheeseball command of Cathie Black -- fully supported by the Family -- was on a 10-year slash-and-burn campaign against its own product by the time of the Thomas blackballing. Once upon a time, each Hearst title had its own cache -- different history, size, smell, paperweight, readership, cover style. Each magazine had its own turf and the EiCs would fight bloody battles to not let the scourge of advertorial ruin the day. Black & Bennack ended all diversity, and all concern with editorial corruption. As they ended Helen -- the diamond in the dungheap known as the White Press Corps.

One great American on another. Ralph Nader:
There will never be another Helen Thomas. She shattered forever one anti-woman journalistic barrier after another in the Washington press corps and rose to the top of her profession’s organizations.

Helen Thomas asked the toughest questions of Presidents and White House press secretaries and over her sixty-two year career took on sexism, racism and ageism. She endured prejudice against her ethnicity — Arab-American — and her breaking the taboo regarding the rights of dispossessed Palestinians.

She also made many friends in journalism and spoke to audiences all over the country about the responsibility of journalists to hold politicians responsible with tough, probing questions that are asked repeatedly until they are either answered or the politician is unmasked as an unaccountable coward. That is the example she set as a journalist and the recurrent theme in her three books.

Her free spirit, her courageous belief that injustice must be exposed by journalists, her congenial personality and her relentless focus (she asked former President George W. Bush and his press secretary Ari Fleischer dozens of times “Why are we in Iraq?”) will be long remembered.

Her tenacious, forthright approach to journalism stands as a stark contrast to the patsy journalism of too many of her former self-censoring White House press colleagues.

The remarkable combination of skills and perseverance will distinguish Helen Thomas as one of the giants of American journalistic history.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Sunday, July 14, 2013

A 148-pitch. . .

. . . .no-hitter??



And Timmy soon to be traded. . .

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Hyphenated Anti-Maiden

Gary Leupp on the most sickeningly precious of the ObamaBots.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Berlin

In Wagnerian Cold War mode.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Bestest Ever

Hated the results. But there it is.



(Beats suck, btw. Much better.)

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Stand-Up Zionist

Assuming you can take your eyes away from her legs, watch Abby Martin here slime everyone's least favorite mush-mouth -- Bill Maher.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Swoon


The sorrow begins. And the greatness. On June 3rd, 1963, Pope John XXIII -- Catholic history's most revolutionary pope -- dies of cancer at age 81. In an attempt to wrest control of the US money supply from the Federal Reserve Bank, John F. Kennedy announces June 4th the creation of Treasury Department Silver Certificates -- another brick in the wall for those counting. At a little-noticed June 5 meeting in Washington DC, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally convince the President to come to Dallas, probably sometime in the fall. At American University on the 10th, Kennedy makes the bravest presidential speech of the 20th Century, calling for an end to the Cold War and an end to dreams of a Pax Americana. Next day in Alabama, Governor George Wallace refuses entry to Vivian Malone and James Hood, two Negro students trying to enroll at the University of Alabama. After threatened with arrest by the Kennedy Justice Department and the federalizing of the Alabama National Guard, Wallace steps aside. That night JFK goes on TV calling for a "moral revolution" and announcing his intention to help lead the Civil Rights Movement instead of fighting it. Also on the 11th across the world, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death at the center of Saigon, protesting South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's persecution of Vietnamese non-Catholics. On the 12th, in the first domestic execution of the decade, Medgar Evers, NAACP's most powerful man, is assassinated on the front lawn of his home, shot in the back. (Evers would be buried at Arlington one week later.) The Moscow-Washington Hotline -- the "Red Phone" -- is installed in the White House June 20th. A new pope is chosen on the 21st: Pope Paul VI, friendly to long-established power, a man who would do much to end John XXIII's liberatory hopes. JFK in Berlin on the 26th. And the last few days of a miracle month, Ireland.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Wicked

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Happy Birthday, Zeke


At 75, a very nice tribute to Mr. Clutch by Chris Ryan.

And while we're at it -- Hooray for the Spurs!

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Twift Shoeblade

Mouse on Mars, Autoditacker, (1997)

Monday, May 20, 2013

Gone

"Behind Obama, and next to the financial aristocracy, stands a privileged middle class layer—approximately the top 90th to 99th percentile. Some within this layer maintain minor differences with the financial aristocrats on lifestyle, race, culture and identity issues. However, they depend on the existing setup for their privileged status, income and respectable positions in corporate management, university departments, law firms, the entertainment industry, the trade unions, NGOs, the media and so forth. On board for imperialist war and the defense of the capitalist system in general, this layer is prepared to go along with a police state if the alternative is a revolutionary overthrow of the system by the working class. The vast majority of the American population—the bottom 80 to 90 percent—is wholly excluded from the official political life of the country. Obama does not address himself to them. Their interests are not taken into account in any major political decision. They do not matter."
Tom Carter on the decomposition of American Democracy.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Not Coming to Town

Not. Not for 7 more months anyway. . .

But Jib-Jab put Saya, me, and a couple other chuckleheads to work getting ready.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Mayfair


As quiet as the months got, 50 years ago. Not so quiet. . . .

On May 2nd, thousands of Negro children march in Birmingham, Alabama – Project C (for Confrontation): challenging the segregation of lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, water fountains. By the end of the 2nd, over 1,000 children – bitten by dogs, clubbed by crackers, and water-cannoned by Police Commissioner Bull Connor’s finest -- are arrested. The biting, clubbing, arrests, and use of fire hoses continue for a whole week, until May 11th when Bull Connor – under tremendous pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department – is ordered to vacate his office. On May 8th, the first (and butchest) James Bond/Sean Connery movie opens in New York City, Dr. No, starring the impossible-to-believe Ursula Andress. Also on the 8th, the government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Din Diem fires guns and grenades into a crowd of Buddhist protestors, killing 9, igniting a countrywide religious war -- concocted by US Intelligence agencies -- between Catholic Diem forces and the overwhelming South Vietnamese Buddhist majority, leading to Diem’s overthrow and assassination the following November. On May 22nd, another assassination: anti-Fascist resistance leader Grigoris Lambrakis is murdered in Greece after rallying hundreds of thousands throughout March and April in opposition to the Greek military junta.

Yet on the 15th, Gordon “Gordo” Cooper pilots the longest and last of the American Mercury rockets, orbiting the earth 22 times throughout 35 hours among the stars. . . .

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

On May Day

Mr. Floyd:
Fuck Off And Die.

This is the lodestar guiding leaders of every political stripe across the breadth of western civilization. If you want to make your way through their billows of bullshit, hold fast to this phrase. It’s what they’re really saying to you.

Of course, elite attitudes toward the lower orders have never been exactly tender; but in times past, a rather large number of sufficiently quiescent peasants and proles were required to create the wealth for plutocratic plundering and maintain the machinery of power and privilege. Thus some attention had to be paid to the rabble’s basic needs and even -- occasionally – their pitiful aspirations for a more meaningful, more humane life for themselves, their families and their communities. But now the means of production (to borrow a phrase) are largely mechanized and digitized; you don’t need many warm bodies -- and certainly not skilled or experienced or well-paid ones – to keep the money rolling in. And perhaps more importantly, the means of control -- the technologies of violence and surveillance -- are now vastly more powerful and pervasive and efficient than ever.

To put it plainly, the elites don’t need us anymore -- or not many of us, anyway. And thanks to runaway population growth -- and the greasy mobility of global capital -- those few of us they do still need to keep the machinery going can be easily replaced, at any moment, by some other desperate chump trying to avoid destitution. So there is no longer any reason for elites to concern themselves with the wearisome creatures out there beyond the mansion gates and the penthouse glass. No need to worry about workers’ rights: if they get out of line, sack them, or even better, send the whole operation overseas, where sweatshop fodder is thick on the ground and comes dirt cheap. No need to worry about communities, the personal, social, economic and physical structures that gave a richer embodiment to ordinary life: just strip them, gut them and leave them to die -- and when the rot gets bad enough, as in Detroit, send in an unelected “manager” to pick the carcass clean.

And no need to worry about mass uprisings of the dispossessed, debt-ridden, insecure, angry, overwhelmed, isolated, media-dazed rabble. With hyper-militarized police forces, cameras on every corner, spies and provocateurs infesting every possible base of dissent, and gargantuan data-harvesters mining every public move and private click of the populace, repression is a piece of cake. And if by chance some pocket of protest does reach critical mass somewhere, your hi-tech, heavily armored goons can easily beat it, tase it and pepper-spray it into submission.

So the elites no longer need us or fear us. We are superfluous to their requirements. And their policies are now ever more nakedly geared to hammering this truth home.

The Great Crash of ’08 gave them the excuse to rip off the mask at last. For five years now, the iron hand of “austerity” has been pressed down hard upon ordinary people. We had no part in the criminal folly that caused the disaster -- yet we are the ones left paying for it, in lost jobs, lost homes, lost services, lost freedoms, lost opportunities, and cramped, crippled, diminished lives. From the "progressive" Obama to the Tory toff Cameron to the pseudo-Socialist Hollande to the dour centrist Merkel -- and all the other clowns, clerks and ciphers turning their self-proclaimed “great democracies” into cash cows for their cronies and controllers -- the infliction of pain on ordinary people is the only game in town. ‘O my gosh,’ our leaders cry, throwing up their soft, unblemished hands, ‘there's just no more money left, no money for your schools, your roads, your jobs, your pensions, your rights, your benefits, your elderly, your sick, your poor, your vulnerable. The money's all gone, what can we do?’

But of course the money is not gone, not at all. A new study -- by an inside man, James Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey -- shows that up to $32 trillion has been stashed away by the world’s elites in offshore accounts and other hidey-holes. Even a modest portion of this mountain of swag would completely alleviate the draconian “budget crises” and ludicrous “sequesters” that have been artificially imposed on nation after nation. All of the suffering, chaos, ruin and degradation being caused by these policies -- all the “skin in the game” that’s being flayed from the backs of ordinary people -- all of it is unnecessary. The money is there to solve these problems -- if our leaders wanted to solve them.

But they don’t. For “austerity” isn’t designed to fix our problems; it is instead meant to be a permanent condition, a new normal, the endless, changeless natural order. (Just as the “emergency” of the “War on Terror” has now morphed into a permanent way of life.) It’s all out in the open. Obama is eagerly offering to slash the social compact to ribbons. Cameron is driving the poor and sick to their knees. The IMF is breeding Nazis in Greece. They’re not even pretending to care about anyone outside the golden circle anymore.

Fuck off and die: that’s it, that’s all they’ve got to say. The rest is show-biz -- strip-tease and shell games -- to fleece us of our last few coins as they shove us out the exit.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Friday, April 26, 2013

Bloombergistan


Wee Mikey Bloomie:
"We live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change. We live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11. We have to understand that in the world going forward, we’re going to have more cameras and that kind of stuff. That’s good in some sense, but it’s different from what we are used to."
Arthur Silber has other ideas.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Ames and Abby on Boston



Abby Martin!

See -- a girl doesn't have to look like Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, or Rachel Maddow to be righteous. . . .

(Oh, yes: the great Mark Ames at 13:50. And thank you again, Paul!)

Friday, April 19, 2013

High Comedy

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Fear and Loathing

HST's -- felt and used the first time the night of 11/22/63.
November, 22, 1963, Woody Creek

I am tired enough to sleep here in this chair, but I have to be in town at 8:30 when Western Union opens so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today's murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic Sphinx - I want to kill because I can't talk.

I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the "real artist" in the "little magazines" are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the "little magazines" for the past 40 years. And the next 40, if we get that far.

We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. No more of that. You misunderstand it of course, peeling back the first and most obvious layer. Take your "realism" to the garbage dump. Or the "little magazines." They are like a man who goes into a phone booth to pull his pod. Nada, nada.

The killing has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is. Ignore it at your peril. I have written Semonin, that cheap book-store Marxist, that he had better tell his boys to buy bullets. And forget the dialectic. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time. I mean to come down from the hills and enter the fray. Tomorrow a cabled job request to "The Reporter." Failing that, the "Observer." Beyond that, God knows, but it will have to be something. From now until the 1964 elections every man with balls should be on the firing line. The vote will be the most critical in the history of man. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in - I feel ready for a dirty game.

Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. What, O what, does Eudora Welty have to say? Fuck that crowd. The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand, while hanging on to sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.

My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done, if indeed, any publishing houses survive the Nazi scramble that is sure to come. How could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to that point.

Send word if you still exist - Hunter

Friday, April 12, 2013

All Thumbs

"He’s up there with Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken and A.J. Liebling, and not too far short of Mark Twain, as one of the great plainspoken commentators on American culture and American life."
-- Andrew O’Hehir of Salon on Roger Ebert
"Let's put it bluntly. The health, and hence the future, of our culture is in the hands of hacks -- hacks of whom it may be said that, when they die, it will be as though, professionally, they never lived, as though their opinions were never expressed, as though the millions of words, the literally millions of words, which they committed to print during their lifetimes, failed to make the slightest impact on either their own posterity or on that of the medium to which their careers were dedicated. Given the stratification of our society, we have no choice but to entrust the management of its culture industry to these hacks, as we have no choice but to entrust our social and economic welfare to politicians. That, however, is no reason why we should regard the former as any more intelligent, any less obtuse, than most of us do the latter." -- the late great Gilbert Adair on Roger Ebert
And another great critic writes about a totally disposable one.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Escape Artist

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Surviving Capitalism

How to?

Noam Chomsky at University College Dublin, April 2nd, 2013.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

April

1963 was the greatest year of the American Century -- the only one in which the United States matched its military and economic strength with its moral restraint, purpose, and wisdom. Beginning this month, we'll be highlighting the many ecstasies of '63, and its Stations of the Cross, leading to the Golgotha of Dallas. (The day, as Norman Mailer wrote, the postmodern world was born.)

In April: the 4-month-old New York City newspaper strike ends on the 7th, with the Sunday edition of the Times coming in at over 700 pages, weighing almost 8 pounds. On the 10th, a United States nuclear submarine named Thresher sinks off the coast of Massachusetts killing all 129 men on board. Also on the 10th, an assassination attempt is made on the life of retired Army General Edwin Walker, at his home in Dallas, Texas. It fails. The Warren Commission later tries to frame Lee Harvey Oswald for this shooting. The most beautiful encyclical ever coming from the Vatican is released on April 11th -- Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris. Herbie Nichols, the greatest jazz pianist of his time, dies on the 12th, of leukemia at the age of 44. April 15th, the White House announces that Jacqueline Kennedy is pregnant. April 16th, Martin Luther King, Jr. releases his Letter from Birmingham Jail. On the 27th, Bob Hayes becomes the first human to run the 100 meter dash in less than 10 seconds.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Good Man

One of Chris Floyd's best, for Easter Week:
This is the age of loss, not the age of defeat.

Drone strikes, kill lists, murderers and torturers approved for high office. Austerity for the poor, record profits for the rich.  Truthtellers shackled, liars lauded, ignorance exalted, cruelty and callousness gilded with righteous piety. Everywhere, goodness is driven to its knees, and this brutality is not decried but celebrated.

As in that age of iron that lowered over our forbears during dark night of the Thirties, you see faces once thought kind and kindred turn suddenly feral. Fear is behind it, but not just fear: also a self-hatred for what fear has turned them into, a self-hatred that cannot be borne and so is turned outward, thrown outward, into harsh projections of hatefulness, violence and desolation.

The avid embrace of what was once denounced, or the sad but “savvy” acceptance of the “lesser evil”: this is what we see at every turn today among ourselves, among those we thought were our own, and sometimes, maybe – when the lowering is darkest, heaviest – in mirrors as we pass. When the lowering is darkest, when the soul is lost. In them. In us.

This is the age of loss – but it is not the age of defeat.

What do you think goodness is? Some commodity, a material substance that can be wasted utterly, atomized, made inert? Do you think it is a thing, that can be destroyed, organic matter that can die? Do you think it is an idea that can lose its force, its coherence, its context, can be rendered quaint or antiquated by time’s passing, or by any suppression or negation? What do you think goodness is? Goodness is like fire: it is a process not an entity, not even a mental entity: it is process, it is relation, it exists only in the moment of its enacting, in the moment of ignition, of relation, where matter and energy become one, become nothing, become all.

Goodness is like fire, but it is not fire, because the matter it feeds upon is existence itself: inexhaustible, in all of its uncountable coalescences of innumerable elements – right down to the quantum switchings in the invisible cores: rising, decaying, recombining, rising again, decaying, recombining, on and on, in every direction, at every level, until the end of whatever time is, if whatever time is has an end.

Fearful, damaged creatures rule us. It is because they are more fearful and damaged than we are that they want to rule, that they aren’t content with mere images of projected self-hatred (like so many of their sycophants and followers). No, they must have the viscera in their hands, smell the overpowering stench of death, hear the wail of suffering, see the damage, the destroyed body that is the image of their own soul. They think that in this way what is fearful and damaged inside them will be expelled. But of course, the opposite is true; the hateful damage is only increased, exponentially, the rot grows deeper and deeper inside them.

This is what our politics is, this is what power is: the maniacal attempt to overcome relation -- to blot it out, stop the endless process, put out the fire, and impose a deadened stasis on the reality that pains them so.

But this is impossible to do, because the flame of reality cannot be extinguished. Individual points of consciousness can be destroyed – an abysmal, irreplaceable, inconsolable loss – but not the always-changing, rising, falling, recombining process that is reality. What do you think goodness is? Goodness is reality, it is Being itself. Evil is the attempt to quell reality, to quell goodness, to stop it, arrest it, indefinitely detain it, to beat it, terrorize it into submission, to assassinate it, sequester it, to make it go away somehow and stop reflecting back to us the damaged thing we have become.

But this cannot be done. It cannot be done. Goodness can lose, but it cannot be defeated. It can be balked, but it cannot be quelled. In every single moment of existence, the choice for goodness is there. Every single moment – the choice. And you can make it at any point, you can begin the process of accepting, enacting, igniting goodness at any point, even the darkest and most degraded.

Sometimes we don’t have the strength, of course. Sometimes we don’t know what’s working on us, turning us away from reality, the process, the flame, drawing us down into hatefulness, into the dead world of projection. Sometimes we know, but can’t control these forces. As I once wrote elsewhere (nothing new under the sun), “moments will be lost, moments will be won; this is the imperishable way.” This is the endless task of consciousness, of being alive in reality. (And “goodness” here does not mean “goodiness” or righteousness or any kind of bloodless, lifeless thing. Goodness is the impulse or action that moves in relation, the impulse or action that does not abstract, exploit, dehumanize the other, does not solidify them, but moves, flows in empathetic relation to them. You can have a hell of a good time in that kind of flow.) In any given age, the lowering clouds can bear down more heavily than in others. Ours is indeed a very hard age, another age of iron. It is an age of loss, of grievous loss – but it is not the age of defeat. Reality remains, the process goes on, the choice for goodness is always – always – there, no matter what.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Violence and Dignity

Noam Chomsky at Friends House in London, March 18th, 2013.



The Q and A.

Glee