they talked of the acdc concert last week. they said they sounded better than ever. i just listened. they wouldn't have known who charles mcpherson is, nor would they care much about my discovery of "wayning moments." i honestly had never even heard of acdc, a feat for which even tilberg stood in awe over. kind of like when my dad auditioned for a group, and they asked him if he knew anything by the who. "the what?" he replied.

my humor and knowledge of sports gets me by. i think. i don't know if it really does, nor do i much care. it's just that we are forced to be around stiffs for much of our waking hours. they aren't that bad, i suppose. just ignorant and boring and shallow with poor tastes in music. other than that, they are a gas.

the guy on my gig mentioned miles. just what if he had said booker little, or louis smith? you know, just to shake things up. it doesn't happen that way, i guess. repetition rules, and mediocrity maintains its place in power. the gig gradually gets to us. man continues his search for meaning in a godless universe. he is alone in the cosmos, surrounded by over 6 billion others, each alone in his crowded corner. each day, its get up, and try again.

what would happen if we didn't set the alarm? if we just kept sleeping and walking and breathing and listening?

we would be homeless, that's what would happen.

millions without health insurance

millions starving.

bombs falling.

iraq a mess.

gaza and new orleans waiting for help.

women being raped, and then murdered by their families as a result.

rivers polluted.

forests being clear cut.

animals being killed for profit.

work a boring act of repetitive madness.

but all is well, for a mixed group of men sat down to a beer today.

sleep well.

i know the murdered and starved and poisoned will.

but what about us?

obama says the best things he has ever said on race. the result? his approval ratings go down. for america doesn't want truth on the subject. let me rephrase that: white america doesn't want truth on the subject. obama is walking a tight rope. if he had said the things i want to hear, he would not have been elected. no question about it. here, he says .0000001 of what i want to hear, and they knock him for it. obama, how dare you side with the black against the white, the civilian against the cop? how dare you stick your "elitist" nose where it doesn't belong? so the right cackles. he does a plethora of right wing things, expands the war in afghanistan, ignores the perils of pollution, fires drones over pakistan, lectures black men instead of creating jobs for them, continues regressive policies of spying and torture, but this is of no matter to those who will stop at nothing to get rid of him.

think of it; obama says racial profiling is a fact of life for black and latino men, and he loses popularity.

ugly folks don't like to be reminded of their looks. neither do ugly countries. the illusion must be maintained, the dominant group must be allowed a guilty free existence. if you shatter the illusion, they will come for you. you may think your offense was minor, but they will be the judge of its import.

so, today, a beer was shared at the white house. it was a kind of apology by obama, as he attempted to regain his role as uniter of disparate forces. "can't we all just get along?" the event seemed to shout. better to pretend at unity than to admit to injustice. the latter gains you few votes from the privileged, and there is an election in three years.

but, you know, the greats don't care who likes them. i wish all those who are riding around with obama bumper stickers would consider that. the greats tell the truth when it is unpopular. the greats risk their lives for a cause. they don't read opinion polls, they don't chase votes, they don't blow with the wind.

you don't become president with the truth, and you don't remain president with the truth. the big o has surely learned his lesson.

it was one he already knew, but just for a second, he remembered he was still a black man in america.

i doubt he will make the same mistake again.

.

“Skip” Gates
A Curious Martyr in the Struggle Against Racism
July 26, 2009 By Paul Street


Paul Street's ZSpace Page

Join ZSpace



The black-bourgeois Harvard professor and Cambridge, Massachusetts resident Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (who is certainly far into the six figure salary stratosphere at the nation's top university) is a curious martyr in the struggle against racism. He recently claimed that his now nationally sensationalized experience of being arrested in his own home - after being seen forcing his way (along with his cabdriver) into his residence upon returning from China (an action that elicited a neighbor's call to the police) and then launching into a tirade against the Cambridge police sent to investigate - has reminded him of the oppression that poor blacks face in the U.S. He is thinking, he says, of doing "a PBS special" about his confrontation with a "rogue racist police officer" in affluent, leafy Cambridge and how that experience connects him to the truly oppressed people down in Roxbury, Dorchester, Bedford Stuyvesant, South Central Los Angeles, Benton Harbor (Michigan), and the West Side of Chicago.



He's in the national spotlight thanks in no small part to President Barack Obama's politically ill-advised statement - made at the heavily distracting end of a prime-time press conference in which he was attempting to sell his watered-down, corporate-friendly "health care reform" - that Gates' arrest was a "stupid" action on the part of the Cambridge police. The president referred to Gates as a personal friend and admitted to not being particularly knowledgeable about the specifics involved in the Gates-Cambridge incident.





Blacks Have "No Excuse" for Not "Running MIT"



Another "PBS special" from Henry Louis Gates? White supremacists can be forgiven if they are not shaking in their boots. Five and a half years ago, the bourgeois professor fouled Black History Month by narrating an ambitious, four-part, and British-directed Public Broadcasting System television series titled "America Beyond the Color Line." Purportedly dedicated to providing a provocative new take on race, class, and black experience in the U.S., Gates' documentary spent an inordinate amount of time beating up on impoverished blacks for not having any, well, class. Accepting the dominant privilege-friendly and Euro-bourgeois notion that success, empowerment, and freedom are essentially available to all who exhibit proper individual initiative and "personal responsibility," Gates argued that poor African-Americans are largely to blame for the fact that blacks stand at the bottom of the nation's steep US socioeconomic pyramids. In "American Beyond the Color Line," Gates did not understand class in the radical way that the term has been used by leading black intellectuals and activists like W.E.B. DuBois, CLR James, Martin Luther King and Manning Marable: as an oppression structure that is intimately and inseparably (dare I say dialectically) bound up with race (today we must of course add gender) in the construction and preservation of American inequality. [1] He used "class" rather in the bourgeois and accommodationist Booker T. Washington [2] sense, arguing that lower-class blacks needed to work harder and smarter to acquire the middle- and upper-class skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by black elites. One of those elites Gates held up as a role model in "America Beyond the Color" was the leading imperialist figurehead Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, featured as an example of what blacks could accomplish when they work hard, study, save, and behave decently.



"Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people," Gates told Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Johnson as "America Beyond the Color Line" hit the airwaves, "unless [poor blacks] decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you're 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs...we're doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society," Gates said, "is mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What's happened to these values?... My father always said, and it's true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we'd be running MIT. It's true and there's no excuse." [3]



This was the key theme in a previous PBS special narrated by Gates. In that documentary, titled "Two Nations," Gates proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions: "deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding..." [4]





"A Wake-Up Call...More Especially to Black America"



Gates told the Chicago Tribune that "America Beyond" was "meant to be a wake-up call to America, but more especially to black America, saying ‘are we crazy? What are we doing here? We can't just keep saying,'" Gates argues, "‘the white man made me do it.'"



The Tribune's Johnson reporter found that "America Beyond's" "most striking" aspect was "the degree to which it pushes the idea of personal responsibility as the best solution to the black community's problems," which, the reporter says, "is perhaps not something you expect to hear from a man who identifies himself as politically ‘center-left.'" While knowing full well that larger, interrelated forces of capitalism and racism play a role in the creation of deep and disproportionate black poverty, (he is not stupid), Gates decided (perhaps I should say "decided, decided, decided") in "America Beyond" and in "Two Nation" to skip past structural-racism and get to the meat of the matter: the personal responsibility of poor blacks.



It' was a comforting message, no doubt, for much of white America, most of which has embraced the convenient notion that racism (structural or otherwise) no longer poses serious problems for blacks and that the real barriers to black success and equality are located in the African-American community itself. "As white America sees it," noted Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (New York: Plume, 2000), "every effort has been to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they're on their own." Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. "No place that I'm aware of," wrote the respondent, "makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections - get on with it."



The election of Gates' friend, Harvard graduate Barack Obama, to the White House, has of course pretty much closed the door on the chance that many American whites will understand that the "corrections" (an interesting word choice in a time when black prisoners account for nearly half of "freedom"-loving America's globally unmatched incarceration rate!) are only minimally underway if at all.





"Is it the System, the Man, Racism...Capitalism?"



Presented through the quintessentially Caucasian venue of the PBS documentary, much of "America Beyond" seemed like racially treasonous snitching. In one scene from Chicago's predominantly black South Side, Gates looked incredulous as a young woman offered him no rational reason for having a large number of children out of wedlock during her late teens and 20s. Another South Side scene in the special had Gates talking to a group of young black women who were enrolled in a program designed to help them escape ghetto life. Gates asked one young lady who or what she blamed for the desperate situation of so many of the city's African-Americans. "Is it the system, the man, racism," Gates asked her, "is it capitalism?" Failing to cite Marx, DuBois or Malcom X or the latest left-sociological research on the racially disparate impact of capitalist de-industrialization [5], the woman earned Gates' approval by emphasizing the poor choices made by ghetto residents she knew!



During one telling sequence in "America Beyond," Gates sat across from a black inmate at a notorious and giant racist holding pen - Chicago's Cook County Jail. After telling the inmate how much he himself loved attending school as a youth, Gates looked disturbed as his interview subject recalled alienation from the inadequate public school to which he was assigned by virtue of his boyhood address in a dangerous, poverty-ridden Chicago neighborhood. As the dialogue between the Harvard professor and the jail inmate concluded, both agreed on the basic wisdom of an uncontroversial conclusion: America's nearly one million black prison and jail inmates would be better off if they had hit the books and not joined gangs during their youth.



The point was shared in "America Beyond" by U.S. Secretary of State Powell, who told Gates that young blacks needed to...make better choices in life. (Gates did not ask Powell to elaborate on the moral character of the Secretary's choice to support the bloody, illegal, unjust, and thoroughly unnecessary invasion of Iraq by collaborating in the manufacture of spectacular high-state deceptions regarding the threat posed by the feeble regime of Saddam Hussein. There was no discussion of a younger Powell's role in the Pentagon's early attempts to cover-up the 1968My Lai massacres. )





Critical Omissions in the Call for Better Choices



There was nothing in "America Beyond the Color Line" about the need to make a "wake-up call" to the more structurally empowered and predominantly white business and government decision-makers who negatively affect black experience by "deciding, deciding, deciding" to, for example:



* deny blacks equal access to the nation's highest opportunity communities through a panoply of well-documented discriminatory real-estate, home-lending, and zoning practices and policies.



* target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans.



* maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under-funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts.



* divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites.



* disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adult males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs.



* sponsor and protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America's imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation's remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.



* permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents' limited economic choices.



* go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.



* subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated "winner-take-all" election system that makes it absurdly difficult for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate their vital needs and perspectives into policy.



* attack "affirmative action" college admissions practices that try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over "legacy" admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past.



There was no call in "America Beyond" for a new "personal responsibility" on the part of the very predominantly white agents and beneficiaries of the above, bullet-pointed bad decisions (a small share of the poor and dangerous choices that can be observed in the corridors of Caucasian power and privilege). There was no demand that these perpetrators "wake up" to their need to make better decisions more consistent with the supposed noble American Values of hard work, honesty, saving, deferred gratification, and non-reliance on public assistance - critical omissions!





Booker T. Obama



Obama's initial, off-the-cuff defense of his Harvard friend Gates' position on what(ever) recently happened in Cambridge is also somewhat ironic and yet appropriate. "America Beyond" portrayed racial inequality and its causes in much the same Booker T. Washingtonian terms as those used by Barack Obama on the rare occasions when he feels compelled to explicitly address the problem of race. The capitalism- and Wall Street-friendly/-captive and "black but not like Jesse" president has made a career - a rather spectacularly successful one to date - out of militant race-neutralism. Taking his cue from the movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), he has consistently respected majority-white race fears and denial by distancing himself from the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional notion that racism still poses serious barriers to black advancement and racial equality in the U.S. He has spent a significant amount of time and energy lecturing lower- and working-class blacks - most recently at the 100th anniversary dinner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) - on their need to take personal and cultural responsibility for their own position in a supposedly opportunity-filled and "magical place called America." As Obama "explained" in his instantly famous Race Speech in Philadelphia in March of 2008, black rage at white racial oppression made sense in the post-Word War II America in which his former spiritual mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (thrown under the bus by the Obama campaign because of the pastor's nasty habit of telling basic truths about living U.S. racism and imperialism) came of age. Such rage does not make quite so much sense in contemporary America, however, the president-to-be felt - not in a nation where blacks had come (as Obama explained to Civil Rights Movement veterans in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007) "nine-tenths of the way" to equality (a rather curious statement in a country where black unemployment and poverty rates are double those of whites and where black median household net worth comes to seven cents on the white dollar!).[6]



Likes Gates, Obama is far from stupid. He knows full well (as is clear from his recent NACCP address [7]) that structural discrimination and racial bias continue to be major factors in black experience and racial inequality. He has decided (and "decided and decided"), however - for reasons that make political sense in a nation whose white-majority electorate is in deep "post-Civil Rights" denial about how powerfully white supremacy has (in historian David Roediger's phrase) "survived U.S. history" - to take the Booker T. Washingtonian road and to place primary emphasis on sending a "wake up call" to black America, not to white America. We can expect (I am writing on the morning of Friday, July 24th) him and his handlers to backtrack from his support for Gates [8], which was foolishly and somewhat uncharacteristically issued prior to a thorough review of the facts involved in the specific case. Those facts and, far more importantly for the Obama/Axelrod administration, the public opinion data (reflecting the incident's likely reinforcement of white racism-denial) simply do not recommend a pro-Gates position. Ironically enough, being seen as allied with Gates works against Obama's carefully constructed "post-racial" image in this particular case. In the meantime, consistent with the master class's longstanding use of race to divide and divert, the corporate media and the right have seized on the Gates-Cambridge-Obama story in ways that are helping distract attention from the health care issue. And we can do without yet another PBS Special from "Skip" Gates.



Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

climb every hillary

hillary tells us it was reckless for zelaya to return to honduras! that's his country, and he's the president. the man was kidnapped in a coup, but he is the reckless one? how would hillary feel if she were forced out of her position by armed thugs? i'm not saying how i would feel, but rather, how she would feel! i would be celebrating, for what it's worth.

"reckless?" wow. all the man wants to do is return to his country, and continue his work. reckless things have occurred in honduras, like the coup that overthrew zelaya. surely, it was reckless of the u.s to train members of the honduran military. it was reckless of the u.s. to support and arm the contras on honduran soil. it was reckless of the honduran military, armed by the u.s., to kill and torture hundreds of progressives in the 80's. of these matters, hillary has had nothing to say.

i give you the democrats.

you asked for them, and now you've got them.

obama invites gates, cop, to dc, for a beer.

sadly, he can't do this with sean bell and the cops who shot him, and he can't do this with oscar grant and the cop who who shot him. there are many poor black and latino men who can't be invited to the white house to share a beer with the police who murdered them. i find it interesting that obama was silent in the aftermath of the bell murder, silent in the face of jena 6, and silent after the murder of grant, but actually had something to say about the arrest of gates. now, i don't make light of what happened to gates. nobody should be arrested for trying to "break into their own home." it is clear to me that race and racism played a part in how the situation unfolded. but, no one was killed or beaten, circumstances that all too often occur against poor and unknown blacks at the hands of the cops.

so, why the words from the big o? well, gates is a peer. a harvard man, a respected scholar, a man of import. he is also a personal friend, and a member of the upper middle class. like obama, he is in that rarified "talented 10th." obama identified with gates. gates, you see, is not the sort of man who should be getting fucked with by the police. which means, by inference, that there are people who should be getting fucked with by the police. such men obviously include bell, grant, and the jena 6, since obama had nothing to say about their deaths and imprisonment. for, these men were poor, black, and unknown. they were not the big o's peers. they did not go to harvard, and they never appeared on oprah.

thousands and thousands of blacks have been killed in this country because of racism. of this history, which sadly, includes the present, obama has had little to say. but a friend being inconvenienced as a part of this racist history? no fair!

how else to explain obama's remarks in this case, and silence in the others? and even now, he retreats. as does gates. gates tells us it is time for both sides to move on. perhaps that can happen in this case, but sean bell can not move on. oscar grant can not move on. amadou diallo can not move on. those who hung from trees and were drowned in rivers can not move on. of course, none of them were biracial harvard professors, nor friends of obama and oprah.

so, now obama wants to share a beer with gates and crowley. he fears that he said too much, that perhaps his mentioning of racism may have angered those "moderate" whites he will need in 2012. thinking it over, it hits him that both sides may have been at fault. perhaps, it was all just a misunderstanding. yeah, a cold one should clear things up.

but not for bell and grant and diallo.

nor mumia, george jackson, and fred hampton.

nor malcolm, martin, and medger.

nor for thousands of others, too poor and unknown to reference.

obama will not speak for them.

he will be too busy drinking.

cronkite, rip.

Walter Cronkite
The Vietnam “Stalemate,” and the Propaganda System
July 24, 2009 By Paul Street


Paul Street's ZSpace Page

Join ZSpace


Walter Cronkite died one week ago at the age of 92. He was the nation's leading news anchor in the 1960s and 1970s. Like millions of other Americans who grew up in those decades, my earliest political memories carry the sound and image of "Uncle Walter." I can still hear his nightly sign-off: "And that's the way it is" [1].



Right wing media watchdogs have never forgiven Cronkite for daring to state on air one night (February 27, 1968) - at the end of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front's Tet Offensive during January and February of 1968 - that the Vietnam War had become "a bloody stalemate."



It was a jarring thing for many Americans to hear. For years prior to Tet, U.S. media (Cronkite included) had regularly created the impression that everything was going just fine with that little "police action" over in Southeast Asia. Delivered almost like football scores on the national television news in 1966 and 1967 (7 U.S. GIs dead vs. 21 for "the enemy" today), the body-count numbers from Vietnam were always in "our" favor. Back to your TV dinner and the next episode of "Gunsmoke," "My Three Sons," or "Hogan's Heroes."



Cronkite's "defeatist" and pessimistic statement has long held a special place in the American right's claim that U.S. media has a "liberal" and even "leftist" bias against U.S.military power. It is a centerpiece example in "conservative" media watchdogs' neo-McCarthyite argument that the "left-wing media" works to stab the noble American armed forces in the back.



Interestingly enough, as the watchdogs never noticed, much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment sensed a brutal impasse in Vietnam in the wake of Tet. This was the feeling of the "Wise Men" - the top military, corporate, and military elites President Lyndon Baines Johnson assembled to advise him on how to proceed with his increasingly unpopular "crucifixion of South East Asia" (as Noam Chomsky described the United States' assault on Indochina during the late 1960s) in early 1968. The recently deceased Kennedy-Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (the official "architect of the Vietnam War") developed his own pessimistic perspective on the colonial war early on. He determined that military victory was an unattainable U.S. goal well before the Tet offensive. After Tet, the "Wise Men" advised Johnson "to" - in Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's words - "abandon hope and to de-escalate the conflict," causing Johnson to complain bitterly that "the establishment bastards have bailed out." [2]



Before we get too crazy about the supposed "heroic" courage of Cronkite's 1968 "stalemate" statement (posted in full and in a positive light on Antiwar.com on the day of his death), we should recall that he never once publicly questioned the morality or legality of the criminal, mass-murderous Vietnam War. He and his CBS News crew never publicly criticized the false premises on which the U.S. assault on Vietnam was conducted. They advanced the Empire's sham pretexts. They stayed firmly within the framework of the U.S.propaganda system by advancing Washington's deceptive portrayal of the Vietnamese national independence and social revolutionary movement as part of the Soviet-Sino "communist" threat to Western "democracy." They disseminated the White House's ridiculous "domino theory" of "communist" advance. They helped spread the false notion of the war as a conflict between a "communist" North Vietnam and a "democratic" South Vietnam, ignoring the critical fact that the U.S. intervened in Vietnam to block independent national development and egalitarian, indigenously developed social and political revolution against a corrupt dictatorship in the second country. The real and biggest threat to U.S.foreign policy in Vietnam was that the Vietnamese revolution might succeed in showing others within and beyond Southeast Asia that impoverished Third World nations could defy Uncle Sam to develop their economies and societies without a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and without serving the needs of the imperial metropolis [3].



In March of 1966, Cronkite called the left political opposition to South Vietnam's corrupt, U.S.-sponsored dictatorship "forces of anarchy on the march." The year before, he congratulated Washington for "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia." [4] In the same 1968 broadcast in which he made his famous/infamous "bloody stalemate" comment (and called for a "negotiated solution" in Vietnam), he called Americans "an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could" in Vietnam. [5]



Cronkite never publicly described the war (accurately) as a U.S. invasion of Vietnam (South Vietnam mainly). He never noted (truthfully) that the Vietnamese were engaged in legitimate self-defense against that invasion. He never spoke about the monstrous atrocity that was the one-sided Vietnam War: history's most powerful military state killing, burning, and poisoning vast swaths of a poor and small peasant nation's human, animal, and plant life. He never acknowledged the deep racism that informed the U.S. assault. He never noted the telling death-count disparity between the two national sides of the "stalemate," which killed 58, 000 American soldiers but more than 2 million Vietnamese, mostly civilians. ("Operation Phoenix," the CIA's torture and assassination program in Vietnam, alone killed at least 20,000 civilians - more than a third of the total U.S. GI body count in Vietnam!) And, of course, Cronkite never dared to observe that Washington was in fact achieving the key bottom-line imperial objective in Vietnam - preventing Vietnam from becoming a viable model of social-revolutionary development and national independence outside U.S. supervision - by bombing the country (including especially much of the South) "back into the stone age."[6]



Such honest reporting would have gone far beyond the narrow parameters of "thinkable thoughts" (Chomsky's term) in America's leading cultural and ideological institutions. For Cronkite as for the rest of the United States' heavily indoctrinated political class, "controversy" over Vietnam was "limited," in Herman and Chomsky's words, "to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States."[7]



Listen to one of Cronkite's "pessimistic" comments during his "bloody stalemate" broadcast: "Khe Sanh [a leading South Vietnamese battle site] could well fall [to the Vietnamese, P.S.], with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there." Following standard U.S. communications doctrine and procedure before, during, and since the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese themselves did not merit mention as victims of U.S. policy. What was at stake was U.S. power, status, and "morale," not the lives of people on the wrong side of America's supposedly virtuous, freedom-loving guns. His 1968 "stalemate" commentary referred to those fighting (heroically) to repel the foreign invader (from the other side of the Pacific Ocean) as "the enemy."



Cronkite's commentary stood well to the power-worshipping right of Dr. Martin Luther King's truly antiwar observations ten months before. The people of Indochina, King mused in 1967, "must find Americans to be strange liberators" as we "destroy their families, villages, land" and send them "wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them - mostly children." Further:



"They languish under our bombs and consider us - not their fellow Vietnamese - the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs...they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees...They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers."



King noted the contradiction between (a) "our" claim to be advancing democracy in Vietnam and (b) "our" longstanding opposition to democratic national elections in Vietnam and "our" alliance with South Vietnam's vicious dictatorship and landlord class. Observing that the U.S. government had become the world's "leading purveyor of violence," King asked Americans to develop the maturity to "learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the [Vietnamese] brothers who are called the opposition." [8]





King's honest and genuinely antiwar sentiments remain beyond the boundaries of acceptable debate in "mainstream" media today. The Cronkitian limits continue intact in a time when a supposedly "antiwar" and "liberal" U.S. president sustains one illegal petro-imperial invasion (Iraq) and escalates another ("Af-Pak") in the name of "democracy." The invasion of Iraq, he has repeatedly said, was launched with the best (if an excess) of democratic intentions. Serious discussion of these wars' immoral, imperial, racist, and illegal natures - and their devastating consequences for civilians on the wrong ends of our inherently benevolent, "democracy"-promoting missile, bomb, and artillery systems - are (like single-payer health insurance in the "homeland") simply off the table of honest or serious discussion in the "mainstream" media.



In the official U.S. mainstream, from the White House through the corridors of corporate media's "reality"-shaping power, acceptable debate over America's colonial wars remains "limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States." The current president "opposed the war" (once and briefly) purely on tactical-imperial grounds, not on a principled moral or legal basis. [9] The millions of predominantly non-white others who die prematurely because of our "strange liberator" efforts of U.S. "global force projection" remain "unworthy victims" of "our" benevolent mission to do "good." It is considered a shame that our efforts to act as "an enormous force for good in the world" [10] are occasionally scarred by "strategic mistakes" (they can never be called imperial crimes) like the crucifixions of Vietnam and Iraq.





For media-focused right-wingers, of course, Cronkite's basic acceptance and dissemination of imperial ideology wasn't good enough. They think that a good anchor man's job is to sanitize American wars and to cheer-lead for them. It is to tell the masses that "Big Brother is doing great over there in Vietnam [or Iraq or Afghanistan or...fill in the blank]. No problem - Go Team!"



It would be nice to think that such chilling authoritarian sentiments have been relegated to the historical dustbin of crackpot neo-McCarthyism. But the "stab-in-the-back" thesis is still alive and in-play, ready for right-wing use to absurdly portray the imperial and centrist Obama and the dominant corporate war and entertainment media as "leftist" enemies of American greatness and power.



Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

mumia on mckinney

Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, recently got out of jail.

Yeah. That's right. Jail.

It's possible that you had no idea she was in jail.

That's because she was in detention for almost a week in Israel.

Her offense? She accompanied a group from the Free Gaza Movement bringing medical supplies, olive trees, cement and children's toys to the beleaguered and occupied Palestinians in Gaza.

McKinney and 21 other people were blocked from landing on the Gazan coastline, and seized by the Israeli Navy, in what she called "an outrageous violation of international law."

McKinney was part of an international humanitarian mission to support an oppressed population -- not with weapons-- but with toys and medicines -- and was thrown into jail!

In a recent cal, when I was told about this, I was quite surprised, for I hadn't heard or read a thing about it.

A major U.S. ally, which receives more U.S. military aid than any other nation on earth, blithely tosses a former U.S. congressperson, a past presidential candidate, and a Back civil rights activist into a jail cell, and few major media sources deem it worthy of reportage!

Was the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage too impenetrable?

According to a later published account (aired first on her MySpace page) McKinney wrote the following, shortly after her release:

We were in international waters on a boat delivering humanitarian aid to people in Gaza when the Israeli Navy ships surrounded us and illegally threatened us, dismantled our navigation equipment boarded and confiscated the ship.... . All of us on board were then taken off the ship and into custody, and brought into Israel and imprisoned {Source: Phila. Tribune, 7/7/09

Umph! Cynthia McKinney in jail -- in Israel -- for bringing medicine to the sick; for bringing toys to children; for bringing succor to the oppressed and occupied!

(Oh! By the way, the name of that ship? It was the "Spirit of Humanity.")

And it ain't news?

with that outward bound feeling

it's been three weeks on the summer gig without getting paid. today, i emailed townhall and said i was going up there. when i got there, they were closed, despite it being 3:30. when i got home, my supervisor called, saying we should be getting our money next week. the thing is, this is a 6 week gig. we are half way through, without a buck. in fact, i have lost money, on stray vending machine and lunch purchases that i wouldn't have made if i were home. i'll give them next week, based on this semi promise from the boss man. what a deal. 5 hours a day with people who bite themselves, piss on themselves, stand around naked after swimming, and endlessly repeat themselves. and they're the best part of the job.

on the bright side, the weather has been cloudy, and strangely cool. perhaps this is not a good thing, but it does feel nice.

manny ramirez is back from his suspension, and is actually doing better than he did before. recently, he was hit on the hand by a pitch, and taken out of the game. the next day he wasn't in the lineup. no matter. with the game tied at 2 in the sixth inning, manager joe torre summoned manny to pinch hit. without having taken batting practice, he faced a 96 mph fastball from a pitcher he had never faced before. he drove that first pitch for a grand slam, the 21st of his career, two behind the all time record of 23, set by lou gehrig, who, honestly, was not the luckiest man on the face of the earth. manny, at 37, is still doing his thing. he is simply the best right handed hitter i have ever seen, and, in my opinion, with bonds, one of the two greatest hitters since 1970. let the racists and egghead experts try to bring them down. i'll trust my eyes, thank you.

oh yeah, some dick head i work with had on a shirt saying "manny being fired" followed by "fuck manny" but with a shamrock in place of the "u." i have been working with this shit brained nimrod for years, but never in such close proximity. manny, of course, was a fine fellow when he helped the sox to two rings. but, he left us, so he must be an evil man. for, he makes too much money, unlike jd drew, that upstanding cracker in right field, in the middle of a 5 year, 70 million dollar deal that the townies never seem to mention. today, we spoke of the old yankee teams of a decade ago. he mentioned several fine players, all pale. finally, for my own sanity, i said "jeter." "yeah," he said, "jeter." he stopped the name game after that. i had broken the unspoken agreement, that only caucasians merit conversation. what a traitor i turned out to be.

the dude next door is playing some mean soprano, which is weirdly going well with some out jazz i'm playing. usually this guy bugs me, as he often just runs scales. then again, he is practicing. what was i looking for, soul station, note for note? and if he did do that, i would nail him for being unoriginal. neighbor, you can't win.

couple a days ago, my boss asked me what music i liked. i hesitated, for i hate this question. "jazz" i muttered. he was driving at the time, taking us on a field trip half way across the state, despite the best trips being 10 minute t rides from brookline high. whatever. in any case, he paused for a second, and serenely, pretending profound understanding, simply said "miles davis." a david brent moment. i said, simply, "yeah." then he dropped a few more names. brubeck, of course, came next. i just nodded, not sure if my support of brubeck warranted a vocalization. sorry dave. i do dig desmond, but, what of it. he ripped off a few more...gerry mulligan, pat metheny, keith jarrett. i noticed that other than davis, a name automatically dropped, all the cats he mentioned were crackers. later, the same dude asked me if i had problems with gangs growing up in dorchester (note to self; stop telling charlie that i grew up in dorchester) and went on to say how bad it is in east somerville (note to self, 2; stop telling whitey that i moved to east somerville after leaving dorchester.) at this point, i thought he might throw me out the van for fear of what my white trash ass may do to him. we passed a trailer park, and i half expected him to ask me if i ever spent time in one. the ignorance of whitey, even "liberal," whitey, is often quite shocking to those who are attempting to think in anti-racist ways. but they are just making conversation. they assume i am in the club. if only i weren't. but, it seems that no matter how hard i try to get myself thrown of the cracker crew, my membership gets renewed, and i once again attain the privilege of hearing ignorant musings from my pale peers. and i repeat, these are the "liberal" ones, whatever that means.

hope is the thing with feathers.

if only i could fly away.

To assist the corporate bottom line, the Obama Administration is peddling the worst sort of wares abroad.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just concluded a visit to India in which she acted as a shill for U.S. arms and nuclear companies. The United States and India signed an agreement that will pave the way for the possible sale of more than 100 fighter planes to India, the largest pending weapons deal globally (Lockheed Martin and Boeing are in the running for the contract). And India announced that two civilian nuclear reactors—most likely to be constructed by General Electric and Westinghouse—will be set up in the country as part of the U.S.-India nuclear deal signed a couple of years ago.

The Indian elite was nervous about the new Administration in Washington, uncertain whether India would receive the same warm embrace it had from Dubya’s people. It needn’t have worried (though differences did crop up during the Clinton trip on issues like climate change).

In a recent interview with me (available in the July issue), Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, expressed apprehension about how the Indian political leadership has veered away from the ideals of his grandfather. He bemoaned its enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, its desire to cultivate a strategic relationship with the United States, and its muted tone as a moral authority on the global stage. The Bush Administration encouraged these tendencies, and the Obama folks seem to be heading down the same path.

The fighter jet deal has been in the works for years now, but that doesn’t make it any less repugnant. Presumably, it is meant as a counterbalance to the billions in military aid that the Bush Administration showered Pakistan with over the years, and to the Obama Administration’s announcement a few months ago of a $3 billion, five-year military aid package to Pakistan (much of which will be transferred back to the coffers of U.S. arms companies).

As a result, both nations are spending their scarce resources on shiny new military hardware. And if they still feel insecure, there's plenty more where that came from.

Like the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration is using Pakistan in the "war on terrorism," and flattering India as a junior global partner, a role India is willing to be employed in as long as the United States assuages its ego (as Clinton did by referring to it as “a global leader for the 21st century”). The United States fulfills its geostrategic aims, while U.S. arms manufacturers rake in the moolah. The losers in this scenario are the Indian and Pakistani people.

The nuclear deal is also very problematic. By agreeing to supply fuel, reactors and other technology to India’s civilian nuclear sector, the Bush Administration legitimized a nuclear weapons project that India conceived in dishonesty. India, in return, gave up any pretense of pressing for global nuclear disarmament, and signaled that it would open up its vast civilian nuclear sector to U.S. corporations. The pact “will present a major opportunity for U.S. and Indian companies,” Ron Somers, president of the U.S-India Business Council, said in 2007. He was so right.

But the really interesting thing here is what the United States is demanding: that the Indian Parliament pass a law releasing the U.S. companies from legal responsibility if there’s an accident. Since the worst industrial disaster in history, with a toll of tens of thousands of lives, was caused by a U.S. corporation in India, some Indians are not too happy and are promising a tough fight against any such measure.

“With what happened in Bhopal in view, we will oppose any move to bring in legislation to shield U.S. suppliers from liability in the event of a nuclear accident,” says S.P. Udayakumar, convenor of the National Alliance of Anti-nuclear Movements.

This is not the first time that a U.S. company has sought immunity from the consequences of a disaster in India. DuPont asked to be released from all such responsibility when it was negotiating with the Indian government in the 1990s to set up a nylon plant, but the people of the state of Goa, where the plant was slated to be located, mobilized to nix the venture.

The deals that the Obama Administration is pushing will be worth $20 billion to U.S. corporations if they go through. The damage that they cause could be incalculable, however.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikolas Kozloff, you’ve been following the coup very closely right now. Talk about the latest developments and who you feel is behind it. And what exactly is the US role here? If the US cut off aid, economic and military aid, do you feel that would end the coup?


NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: I don’t think so. I think there’s this revolving door of Washington insiders that are supporting companies like Chiquita banana. I just wrote an article about Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company. And, you know, throughout history, Chiquita banana has had enormous sway and power over Central American nations.


And we know that prior to the coup d’état in Honduras, Chiquita was very unhappy about President Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, because they said that this would cut into their profits and make it more expensive for them to export bananas and pineapple. And we know that they appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage provisions.


And we also—and what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte, who your previous guest mentioned in regards to the rampant human rights abuses that went on in Honduras throughout the 1980s. So I think that’s a really interesting connection.


AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the money and the support, Chiquita, then and now. It’s interesting, this is so reminiscent of the coup against the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He wasn’t in office but a year, 1990, 1991, when he was ousted, and one of his first acts when he became president was to increase the minimum wage, as Zelaya has done.


NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Well, right, and this is nothing new, as I point out in a recent article. Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit, was associated with some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia. And we know that United Fruit Company played a very prominent role in the coup d’état against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. And, you know, after that, that ushered in a very turbulent period in Guatemalan history, rampant human rights abuses, genocide against the indigenous people of Guatemala. And so, Guatemala is only now recovering from that.


But, you know, Chiquita has played a role in such countries as Guatemala and also Colombia, and now it maintains these ties to Covington, this law firm in Washington, to this day. And there is this revolving door, as I say before, of these Washington insiders. Covington, in turn, is tied to McLarty and Kissinger Associates, McLarty being President Clinton’s former Chief of Staff and envoy to Latin America, who was pushing the free trade agenda in Latin America, and Kissinger, who doesn’t even need an introduction. His ties to the coup in Chile in 1973 are well known. And so, it’s disturbing that there is this history of abuses in Central America throughout the twentieth century with Chiquita and the fruit companies, which continues to this day.


AMY GOODMAN: And then you have—well, we played Lanny Davis’s testimony before Congress, Lanny Davis, who we were speaking to Ken Silverstein about last week, the superb investigative reporter, about his representing the Chamber of Commerce, which is very much on the side of the coup regime right now. Lanny Davis is the former White House counsel for President Clinton.


NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Right, and there’s these—there’s the circle of Clintonites that are still around. And as I mentioned before, you have Mack McLarty, who’s now associated with a law firm which is defending Chiquita. Also, as I point out in my recent article, you have the current Attorney General, Eric Holder, who was also Deputy Attorney General under Clinton, who defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia, when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s, was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. And Eric Holder, the current Attorney General, who was also in the Clinton administration, was the lead counsel for Chiquita.


AMY GOODMAN: And explain the significance of what he was representing Chiquita around. I mean, we know the story of the Cincinnati Enquirer that did this remarkable exposé of Chiquita, which they were forced to apologize for, not because they were wrong, but because the reporter had gotten access to voicemail system within Chiquita, and they said that it was illegal how he had gained access to that voicemail system. But what he exposed was quite astounding.


NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Right. Well, Chiquita claimed that it was merely paying protection money to the paramilitaries in Colombia. But the victims of the paramilitary violence in Colombia claim otherwise. They say that Chiquita was engaged in this systematic campaign to control banana production in Colombia and terrorize the population. And Chiquita was the only company in US history to be found guilty of paying bribes to a terrorist organization, as defined by the United States.


Eric Holder was the lead counsel defending Chiquita. He’s the top justice official in the United States with ties to this fruit company that was complicit in right-wing paramilitary violence.


AMY GOODMAN: So, the latest right now—the developments of the EU dropping support for Honduras, the talks with Oscar Arias breaking down. Though the elected president, Zelaya, has fully accepted what he proposed, the coup regime has said no. What’s going to happen? Oscar Arias said there could be a civil war, the President of Costa Rica and the Nobel Prize winner.


NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Well, I don’t really—I don’t see how this is going to be resolved, because he’s already tried to come back militarily—I mean, not militarily, but force his way back into the country.


And I think that the problem is that, you know, up until recently, Honduras was a very—had very traditional right-wing politics, was one of the most reliable countries, most compliant regimes in Central America towards the United States. And now you see the resurgence of these right-wing forces. And so, there is this vibrant—these vibrant social movements in Honduras—for example, the Garifuna people, the Afro-Honduran, the indigenous people, and labor. But I think perhaps this could be the resurgence of these right-wing forces that really haven’t gone away, that it seemed for a while that we had the pink tide from South America, the rise of the left spreading into Central America. This could be, perhaps, a disturbing sign that those old retrograde forces are now trying to prove that they can stage a comeback. And I think that’s disturbing for other countries that are, say, allied to Venezuela, you know, such as small nations in the Caribbean, and this could be a very disturbing message to other countries that are following and trying to cultivate ties to Venezuela.


AMY GOODMAN: Nikolas Kozloff, I want to thank you for being with us, author of the book Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left. His latest piece, “From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America.”

still racial tension?

they tell us that despite the election of the big o, there is still racial tension in america. i never would have guessed. the proof, according to a local free paper? not housing discrimination. not police brutality. not prisons filled with young black men. not racial disparities in health care. not segregated schools. no, none of these things. rather, ongoing racial tension is proved by how whites and blacks responded to michael jackson's death. blacks were more likely to celebrate him, while whites were more likely to bemoan his weirdness. sadly, though i try my best to be a "blue eyed soul brother" (i have brown eyes, but whatever) i too tended to focus on the latter category. in fact, i do believe that race (and racism) played out in the responses to his death, but race and racism play out all the time in this society, often with life and death consequences. however, when it is a matter of life and death, we don't hear about it. that way, racism can be marginalized, and its victims can be portrayed as "too sensitive," or worse, as playing the "race card." (which, by the way, beats a full house, but loses to four of a kind) in fact, whites are often the real victims of racism, to hear whites tell it. reverse racism has whites in a bind, they say. strangely, they still have most of the money and power. funny thing, this reverse racism. in fact, it seems like the reverse of racism.

so yeah, racial tension continues. you can see it in how we respond to mj's death, but only in how we respond to his death. i thought we could see it in the shooting of oscar grant and the rebellion that shook oakland in its aftermath. i thought we could see it in the case of the jena 6. i thought we could see it in the indifference shown to the victims of katrina, and to the white vigilantes who murdered innocent blacks afterward, and who, by the way, have still not been charged with a crime, despite openly laughing and gloating over their deeds. i though we could see it in rampant immigrant bashing. i thought we could see it in the "english only movement." i though we could see it in those who speak of poor white neighborhoods as "working class," and "blue collar," but who speak of poor black and latino areas as "ghettoes."

i though we could see racial tension in a lot of places, places far removed from mj's rotting corpse. but, it seems i was wrong.

yet again, i was wrong.

we will not apologize for our way of life, nor waiver in its defense.

obama said this in his inaugural speech. did it need to be said? would the right wing have pounced on him if he didn't say it? "hey, he didn't say that we will not apologize for our way of life! commie!!" it's like a tick, an automatic, generic rhetorical flourish that lets us know that all is well. for, why should a guy who has just become pres apologize? man, this country must rock. now, for the chaps under the cruise missiles? perhaps they are singing a different tune, maybe the gap band's "you dropped the bomb on me." i always say, build party trains, don't bomb them, but then again, i am a chubby loner. if only chubby checker were a chubby loner. that would have been a twist.

i remember wearing a shirt with a target on it as a form of protest. yeah man, bomb me, i'm a target too. sadly, no one killed me, meaning the rent is still due in 10 days. in any case, a bloke (sorry, been on a british office kick lately) asked if there were any targets in the area. i thought, yeah, him, but he meant the store. of course, there are now many targets in the area, but hopefully, he's not around to "enjoy" them.

i also remember protesting the war with yugoslavia at the boston marathon. the pink one was there to piss off the red ones, who were there by the thousands. i recall an old woman with the mind of a dead woman, and the body of one as well. it was insane. no one cared. except when we got in their way. how could it be any different, in this land of ours?

i hate it when the phone rings. not once, but all day. it's as if all the people who have nothing to say have all decided to say it at the same time. how about the ones who keep calling until you pick up? or the ones who switch from home phone, to cell phone, and back again, until you give up the fight, and answer? and then, when they do get through, it's your fault! "i've been trying to reach you, where were you? i even tried the cell!" and they never have anything to talk about. just wanted to kill time, bitch about the gig, complain about a partner. can a guy just relax after working all week? am i allowed a shell of sanity? of course, it's not that big a deal, but ain't it one?

they tell us we lost more troops in afghanistan over the last month than we have since the war began over a month's period. well, i got to tell you, i didn't lose a thing. those troops weren't mine to lose. as far as i'm concerned, they were lost the moment they enlisted. i suppose it's thoughts like these that have kept the really good jobs just out of my grasp.

obama tells us that he will move on health care. i may move on health care all the way to canada.

from the complete clifford brown on emarcy, dig the long jam cuts "coronado" and "you go to my head." besides crazy clifford, two mean west coast cats, herb geller and joe maini (both heroin chums of dirty lenny) blow their brains out. other than the double suicide, it's a fine record.

it seems that i have shot my load, which is quite a feat, considering i have been blogging the entire time.

stay thirsty my friends.

i have been a rover,
i have walked alone.
hiked a thousand highways,
never found a home.
still and all i'm happy,
the reason is you see
once in a while along the way,
love's been good to me.

i remember these lines from a terrible thing that sinatra sang when he was over the hill, but still decent. "i have been a rover?" fuck you!

pinko, there were two albums that art farmer made with gigi gryce on prestige in the mid 50's. one is called "when farmer met gryce" and the other is called art farmer quintet featuring gigi gryce. they are both great, and capture both horn players at their best.

chiquita banana was pissed off when zelaya raised the honduran minimum wage. does anyone remember the central role played by the united fruit company in the arbenz/guatemalan coup of 54? today, the same company likely is pulling more strings. anyone with even a surface knowledge of how power works in the u.s. (about 40 people) understands that the economic, political, and military wings (the power elite) work so closely together as to be one and the same. it works that way here and in other countries, often thanks to our domination of their economies, and our training of their militaries.

i am told that a student i am working with this summer would get so horrified when it was time for him to go swimming that he would shit his pants. i would like to comment on this, but it's hard, ain't it? i will say this; after ordering the number 2, said student got to skip the swim every time.

today, this same student asked the only female member of our staff to "open her legs." yes, the lucky lady was wearing a skirt. she laughed it off, which i guess is easy to do when your admirer is 21 going on 4. the rest of us have to act appropriate.

darn.

they are calling it slam-gate

word is, lebron james was dunked on by a college player at a summer league basketball clinic. to a sane human, it's no big deal, but lebron, and the folks from nike filming, are far from sane. word is, lebron had the tapes destroyed, or nike big wigs had it destroyed, or something. what a punk this lebron is turning out to be. what, he can't even be dunked on? what's the big deal? i remember in school, the guys used to go crazy when someone got dunked on. they would say that player a "shit on" player b. well, i was always more of an r. kelly guy myself. anyway, everybody would mock the guy that got dunked on. it was as if his entire life had been reduced, and now he was nothing more than a worthless shell of his former self. and lebron is 5 years younger than me, so his high school days must have been even more extreme in this regard, especially with him dunking on everyone, and i'm sure, letting them know about it. well, guess what lb, now it's your turn, and between me, it doesn't rank up there with world hunger. but, of course, this is the world of make believe, of untold profits made, but only when the illusion of perfection wins the day. getting dunked on? hey, that's something i could do, and i only make 5 figures! but, there are fortunes in fantasy. in the world, where one only dunks on, but is never dunked on, multitudes spend millions on mediocrities. for you see, we would all like to be perfect.

we don't want to get dunked on. for shame!

but only a few of us have the power to destroy the tapes. in fact, only a few of us have the power to be filmed getting dunked on in the first place.

poor lebron, he's only a mortal after all.

just like us, only taller, faster, and stronger.

and richer.

and dunked on, destroyed film or not.

good stuff

AMY GOODMAN: The US contract with Ecuador over one of the largest US military bases in Latin America, Manta, expires later this year. You will not renew it. Why?

PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] Why renew it? Now, if you'd like, I would renew it with one condition: that they allow me to set up an Ecuadorian military base here in New York. If there's no problem with foreign bases, then let's reach an agreement on that. I think that everybody listening is going to find that impossible. And for us Ecuadorians, it also seems impossible, based on our outlook informed by sovereignty, at least with the current government, to have a foreign military base on our soil.

one of the sick, demented coup leaders (don't coup leaders tend to be sick and demented?) in honduras recently called obama the "little black man." perhaps that will piss the big biracial man off, and influence him to push for zelaya's return.

hey, i can hope, right?

michael jackson's funeral cost los angeles 1.4 million dollars. there must not be any poor and hungry people there. of course, the war in iraq has cost more than a trillion dollars. there must not be any poor and hungry people there either. for surely, in a world of poor and hungry people, money would be spent to eliminate their poverty and hunger.

no one swings like zoot sims. for a taste, i recommend the first four tracks from "jazz in paris. zoot sims and henri renaud." also, dig the first part of charlie parker's album boston 1952. the first several tunes feature bird at the hi hat with a group that includes underrated monster joe gordon on trumpet, as well as mingus and roy haynes! yes, symphony sid does do his best to bother you, but there is no stopping this music. these lines are for the pink man specifically, but anyone reading can dig these albums. and if you haven't gotten hip to lala.com, get to it right now.

i wonder if there is someone out there who has heard of tommy potter, but not harry potter?

45 more dead in pakistan, thanks to us. bombs for peace made no sense when i yelled the phrase at alarmed passerby in the boston common more than a decade ago, and it makes no sense now. i've read my chomsky and blum and parenti, and i think i know a thing or two, but just what the fuck are we doing in pakistan? it's mad, which was short for nixon's "mutually assured distruction." not a word of criticism has been spoken by the obama ball sucks, who are so thrilled that "their team" is winning that they have lost whatever intellectual integrity they may have had. all i know is it ain't good folks.

went into the local cuban restaurant a couple of days ago. the food is good, it's a happening joint. i figured the politics were suspect, but they had never made an issue of it, so i gave them the benefit of the doubt. but, on this day, i found an obscure reference that i couldn't avoid. long ago, there was a film called "i am cuba." quite a classic, though a little dramatic at times. in any case, behind the counter, there was a banner which read "i was cuba." oh yeah? well, you ain't anymore! fuck you and your restaurant.

that is, until i get hungry.

for hunger, you see, makes fascists of us all.

we get to choose between time and newsweek

A Normal, Minimal-Choice Election
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer
By ALLAN NAIRN

The International Herald Tribune headlined it "A Proudly Normal Election" in Indonesia, and it was -- a minimal-choice election, as normally happens in most countries (Jacob Ramsay, "A Proudly Normal Election, " International Herald Tribune, July 8, 2009).

This election was a de facto choice among three mass-killing Suharto generals -- each of them old US proteges -- one of whom actually embodied the specter of something like fascist dictatorship, and people voted for the smoothest, least frightening general, the incumbent, Gen. Susilo.

But it was impossible on the ballot to vote for the poor or to vote against killing civilians, because none of the candidates, pre-screened by the establishment, stood for anything like that: these were candidates of the rich, and of murder.

Gen. Susilo had most of the army and most of the rich people behind him, so he had most of the media propaganda and also most of the campaign money.

In Indonesia a lot of poor people like the election season because they get direct cash bribes. Party messengers come to their homes and give each family several dollars, and this time everyone I met said Gen. Susilo's footmen gave the most money.

Beyond that, his two rivals were repulsive to many people. They selected as their running mates the two most hated generals in the country. One, Gen. Prabowo, has a neo-fascist style and made his name as a hands-on torturer and as Suharto's son-in-law, and the other, Gen. Wiranto, saved the army in 1998 when he threatened a Tienanmen-style massacre of demonstrators if they challenged the army after toppling Suharto.

So compared to those two, Gen. Susilo seemed less bloodthirsty, even though he's been high in the chain of command for some of the country's most famous massacres, including Jakarta '96, occupied East Timor '99, Aceh in the early 2000s, and as President he's backed nationwide police torture and army torture and murder in sealed-off Papua, and has a practice of arresting people who insult him or who hoist local independence flags. Economically, Gen. Susilo broke the law and canceled severance pay for workers, and hunger and diarrhea have been increasing nationwide, especially in Nusatenggara in eastern Indonesia.

But he's done all that smoothly. He's seen as smart, and he gets lots of foreign money. The US and investors like him because he does the necessary killing and holds down wages discreetly -- without bragging about it -- and he lets them take minerals and forests and labor while demanding smaller bribes than Suharto.

And at the same time he's made life better for city elites, lots of condos and spectacular malls. If you have money, life in Jakarta can be Valhalla. That gets him good press coverage.

But if you're poor, police thugs will come and bulldoze your home to put up those fancy condos, and your chances of working, eating, or putting your kid through primary school are the same or worse than before Susilo.

So the Herald Tribune is right, this was a normal election. There was voting but there wasn't much choice.

Allan Nairn writes the blog News and Comment at www.newsc.blogspot.com.

millions cried

millions cried for the dead black man with white skin. the sharp one told mj's kids "there was nothing strange about their father." well, there was something strange about that comment. mariah carey sounded as if it was her funeral. they told us, by way of excuse, that she didn't rehearse, but i don't rehearse either before belting it out in the shower, and i even hit a correct note or two. jermaine jackson sang smile, which made me laugh. lionel ritchie again confirmed why i call him lionel bitchie. berry gordy once again demonstrated the biggest ego in the western world. at least he mentioned jackie wilson. queen latifah (hey, this isn't a monarchy!) read a poem by maya angelou, but i suspected it was written by a seven year old. brooke shields told us that michael is "undoubtedly smiling down on us from some crescent moon." perhaps, but i think there is some room for doubt about that.

and then, at the end, the daughter came to the mike. sadly, it wasn't mike jackson. she cried, and told us he was the greatest dad in the world, but at her age, it's hard to imagine that she has met every dad in the world. this display made us care and cry. it humanized mj. yes, a child losing her father is indeed a sad story. unless the child is afghani or iraqi or pakistani. if the child is made an orphan by our bombs, it is no concern. if a parent dies who didn't invent the moonwalk, then fuck their children. for you see, those tens of thousands of iraqi orphans had parents who wore two gloves, who never sold 26 million records, and weren't constantly grabbing their crotch. (at least not on stage.) these dead parents died the same color as they were born, and most were never charged with child molestation. and unlike mj, the u.s. government told them to beat it.

so, you see, this whole concern for cute children crap is rather selective. for, as we cry for blanket, many children go to bed without one, because they don't have the peanuts required to get one. selective compassion for the children of the famous doesn't impress me. and where will that compassion be next week? truth is, we don't give a shit about this child.

it just makes us feel good to think that we do. meanwhile, the orphans pile up, thanks to our wars and economic policies.

makes you think. at least until the ballgame comes on.

or until the next celebrity dies.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Congress member McKinney, we only have ten seconds. But, you’ve just been deported. What are your plans right now?

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Well, I would like to see the children of Gaza have the coloring books and crayons that we had on board with us. I would like to see the houses that have been destroyed rebuilt. I would like to see the lives rebuilt for the people of Gaza and I would like to see the people of Palestine have, and enjoy their human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think president Obama is headed in that direction?

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: I think you can probably answer that as well as we can, because while we were in detention, the Foreign Ministry of Ireland made protests and asked the government of Israel to release its nationals, several Members of Parliament

AMY GOODMAN: …We have 5 seconds….

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: from the United Kingdom…

AMY GOODMAN: … 5 seconds….

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: …also wanted to censure Israel. Nothing from the United States.

long live long showers

Published on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Orion Magazine
Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change
by Derrick Jensen

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

© 2009 Orion
Derrick Jensen is an activist and the author of many books, most recently What We Leave Behind and Songs of the Dead.

The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?
July 07, 2009 By Michael Parenti
Source: www.michelcollon.info

Michael Parenti's ZSpace Page

Join ZSpace

Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas (known to many of us as "School of the Assassins"). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.

Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama's people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.

Third, immediately after the coup, Obama stated that he was against using violence to effect change and that it was up to the various parties in Honduras to resolve their differences. His remarks were a rather tepid and muted response to a gangster putsch.

Fourth, Obama never expected there would be an enormous uproar over the Honduras coup. He hastily joined the outcry against the perpetrators only when it became evident that opposition to the putschists was nearly universal throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Fifth, Obama still has had nothing to say about the many other acts of repression attendant with the coup perpetrated by Honduran military and police: kidnappings, beatings, disappearances, attacks on demonstrators, shutting down the internet and suppressing the few small critical media outlets that exist in Honduras.

Sixth, as James Petras reminded me, Obama has refused to meet with President Zelaya. He dislikes Zelaya mostly for his close and unexpected affiliation with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. And because of his egalitarian reformist efforts Zelaya is hated by the Honduran oligarchs, the same oligarchs who for many years have been close to and splendidly served by the US empire builders.

Seventh, under a law passed by the US Congress, any democratic government that is the victim of a military takeover is to be denied US military and economic aid. Obama still has not cut off the economic and military aid to Honduras as he is required to do under this law. This is perhaps the most telling datum regarding whose side he is on.

As president, Obama has considerable influence and immense resources that might well have thwarted the perpetrators and perhaps could still be applied against them with real effect. As of now his stance on Honduras is too little too late, as is the case with too many other things he does.


Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions (City Lights); and God and His Demons (Prometheus, forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

it's independence day, and yet, i don't feel free. the rent is due the first of each month, my summer gig starts on monday, and the humidity is kicking in after a month of rain. yeah, there is the mingus sextet of 1964, but what happens after the disc ends? i must say there is not a single american flag on my street, but the street only has three houses. it is 2:20 pm, and for now, all is quiet. the dickheads are gathered by the charles river, ready for the pseudo bombs to drop. and i, i still don't see a damn thing to cheer about. let kool and the gang celebrate. for me, this is a day to at best, ignore, and at worst, mourn.

we kicked the british out, but who is gonna kick us out? what does a tax on tea have on drones over pakistan? as carlin said, why don't you ask an indian about that great american spirit of freedom and generosity, if you can find one." we are all about celebrating 230 year old revolutions, as we do our best to put down the revolts of today. i would call it hypocrisy, but that would mean that the people were thinking enough to be hypocritical, and that they don't do. rather, they are after a good time, and they truly believe, the pale ones especially, that they live in the greatest country in the world. it is an honest stupidity, rather than a dishonest intelligence, that seems to be driving our society over the edge.

and those of us in the back seat can only cover our eyes, for we surely know that the landing will be anything but smooth.

happy 4th.

Gray Panthers
July 2009 By Eric Laursen
printer friendly version Laursen's ZSpace page
By Roger Sanjek; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 298 pp.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second Bush administration had just begun and the American war in the Middle East was grinding along in its deadly, directionless way when I was contacted by an organizer with a New York City group called Grandmothers Against the War. Eighteen of her comrades had been arrested at the Times Square Recruiting Center the previous fall when they tried to enlist to replace the young people serving in Bush's occupation of Iraq. They were about to go on trial for allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.

Over the next year and a half, I helped write and circulate many press releases for the Grandmothers. I sometimes took part in antiwar actions with them and other groups they worked with. I also started to learn more about these elder activists. They had a shrewd way of going against people's stereotypes about older people, while using those preconceptions creatively to connect with the public. It was fun, it got attention, and it fostered a more decentralized, inclusive activist culture.

That approach had its roots—as did some of the Grandmothers—with the Gray Panthers, one of the more remarkable movements to emerge from the 1960s. Superficially, the Panthers were a pressure group for the rights and dignity of the aged. But like other emblematic 1960s movements, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, they built their activism on a vision of a new society in which elderly people could achieve greater control of their lives by working through a model of community partly based on mutual aid. They challenged every social assumption about how and where the elderly should live, how they interact with younger people, and even how they should conduct their sex lives.

If that put them beyond the pale of much conventional politics, it also made them one of the most recognizable activist groups of the time. That's partly because the Gray Panthers wanted more than simply to secure more rights and resources for their "interest group." They sought to change the way the public viewed the elderly and, beyond that, the social role people were expected to play at every stage of life. They launched a nationwide Media Watch that spotted and called out stereotypical portrayals of the aged. Yet they also took full advantage in the early 1970s when the media became enchanted with the image of little old ladies and gentlemen forming picket lines and borrowing the name of a black revolutionary movement.

They returned the favor in 1973 when Bobby Seale was running for mayor of Oakland and the Black Panthers in that city were enduring intense pressure from police, FBI, and other agencies. As part of their Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), the Oakland Gray Panthers arranged for Black Panther teams to escort seniors who lived in dangerous neighborhoods. An obvious and practical response to an everyday problem, it also emphasized the Gray Panthers' solidarity with the movements of other excluded and disadvantaged groups. It was part of an endlessly creative effort to muddle society's expectations and open up new possibilities for how groups like the elderly and inner-city African Americans could interact with each other.

The Gray Panthers have also persisted. Despite a period of decline and identity crisis, the organization survived and began to revitalize itself in the new century, meanwhile spreading its unique activist approach through groups like Grandmothers Against War. But the Panthers' social vision—which included intergenerational housing, community-run clinics emphasizing preventive care, and a linkage between social services and economic democracy—may be the most intriguing thing about them today. In the early years of the movement, that vision was built on the presumption that an affluent society should be able to perfect itself. But it also offers at least some partial answers to our current dilemma, namely, how to collectively define and fulfill our social needs at a time when government is retreating from the provision of social services and an increasingly rapacious economic elite fights to maintain its grip on power.

"Gray Panthers are out to make old a beautiful thing, not something to be hidden but something to be declared and affirmed," founder Maggie Kuhn said, explaining the Panthers' project. "The thing that we're up to is that life is a continuum and age is a period of fulfillment, of continued growth and creativity where the inputs, the experience of a lifetime can be related to the group of people who are coming into their creative productive years, and to our young people."

This conception of life has clear practical implications today, when more and more working families find themselves simultaneously raising children and caring for aging relatives. A fruitful place to start exploring such connections is the new book Gray Panthers, a long needed history of the movement, by Roger Sanjek, a sociologist who has also been an on-and-off participant for more than 30 years. His book is concise and slightly breathless as it crams a great deal of struggle, accomplishment, and personal drama into just under 300 pages.

The Gray Panthers conceived of themselves as a multigenerational movement and they worked on an astonishingly wide range of issues at once, including social justice and antiwar causes not directly related to aging. This is part of what continues to make them of interest to contemporary activists trying to forge connections between different but related struggles, and Sanjek was right to encompass as much of their story as possible in his book.

By far the highest-profile Gray Panther was Kuhn, a career activist, organizer, and program coordinator for the Young Women's Christian Association—and later the United Presbyterian Church—who began putting the idea together for a broad-based movement of socially conscious elderly when she herself faced mandatory retirement at 65. Sanjek does his best not to let Kuhn dominate his book, giving plenty of space to other important Gray Panthers, including Lillian Rabinowitz, who founded the Berkeley network, Frances Klafter, Elma Griesel, and New York organizers Lillian Sarno and Sylvia Wexler.

But the center of gravity keeps shifting back to Kuhn who emerges as a remarkable activist and visionary, as well as a media magnet who made the Panthers a pop cultural presence as well as an effective movement. Partly this was because she was an eloquent speaker and conversationalist and a deeply appealing presence. Her appearances with Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson were memorable and she was constantly in the news and in print media during the 1970s and 1980s. Another reason, however, was that she insisted, both within the Gray Panthers and in public, on centering elder activism around a broader social vision, not just the issue of the moment.

Kuhn lived in an intergenerational household in Philadelphia that served as a prefiguration of the kind of community she wanted the Panthers to help build. At a time when it was still considered unseemly, she insisted on talking about sex as an important part of life for the elderly, including her longtime relationship with a married man and later her involvement with a 21-year-old male Black Panther. Breaking taboos was her way of broadening the discussion of what life could be for the elderly and keeping the movement focused on possibility rather than on the next strategic compromise.

Elderly people were one of the last and, superficially, the least likely identity group to come to consciousness in the 1960s. But they had every reason. At the time, a far higher percentage of older Americans lived in poverty than the general population. Social Security was not yet fully indexed to inflation and Medicare was just getting started. Many of the elderly were warehoused in nursing homes, often in deplorable conditions. If they wanted to keep leading active lives, the cards were stacked against them. Big employers generally enforced mandatory retirement rules and nowhere were workplaces or public facilities required to accommodate their special needs.

The term "ageism" was coined in 1968, the year of uprisings, by gerontologist Robert Butler as a catch-all for the host of demeaning prejudices heaped on the old, ranging from the nasty (doddering, "senile," crotchety) to the patronizing (passive, old-fashioned, cute). Older people were starting to complain, get active, and form groups to fight for their rights. The American Association of Retired People (AARP) was launched in the late 1950s. The following decade other large advocacy organizations appeared, including the labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens and the National Caucus on the Black Aged.

They quickly began to make progress. In 1965, Congress passed Medicare as well as the Older Americans Act, which funded a collection of new service and employment programs for the elderly. A year later came the first iteration of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which started the move to abolish compulsory retirement.

The Gray Panthers, who coalesced in 1972, were different, however. They didn't aim to be a mass organization directed by a Washington staff that mobilized its members from the top down. Instead, they organized through locals or "networks" loosely joined to a national office. At their peak in the early 1980s, the Panthers had only 5,000 to 6,000 members and 122 networks, whereas AARP's rolls topped 30 million. But the Panthers were hard-core, committed activists, many of them veterans of the old left and the radical wing of the labor movement, who joined because they wanted to give significant time and creativity to the cause.

As such, they helped push other elder activists in a more aggressive direction. Kuhn described the Gray Panthers as "gadflies to keep older, more established...organizations moving toward ever more radical goals." In this they weren't always successful. To give one instance, they fought against, but failed to prevent, a restructuring of Social Security in 1983 that raised payroll taxes, cut benefits, and boosted the retirement age.

Attempting to testify before the Greenspan commission, which set out the main elements of the restructuring, Kuhn was hauled away and arrested, making headlines. Other advocacy groups for the aged went along, however, because they felt it was the best deal they could get. Their willingness to compromise marked the end of more than 40 years of expansion and improvement for America's support system for the aged. Soon after, the movement against Social Security would start to spread its caricature of the elderly as "greedy geezers" devouring the resources of the young.

But the Gray Panthers were influential beyond their numbers in pushing for nursing home reform, an end to age discrimination in hiring, long-term care insurance, and better services that would help the elderly to lead more independent lives. They fought hard for a national health care system and forged strong alliances with influential figures such as Representatives Ron Dellums and Claude Pepper, Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader. They participated just as actively in the campaigns for a nuclear freeze and an end to U.S. intervention in Central America and its support for apartheid South Africa.

From the beginning, the Gray Panthers regarded these other causes as integral to their mission. This had fundamentally radical implications, tying the Panthers philosophically to other groups that understood the need to establish a degree of autonomy and control of their environment if they wanted to improve and achieve respect for their lives. For instance, the innovative Over 60 Health Center, which the Gray Panthers opened in Berkeley in 1977, was the product of their desire not just for a clinic that specialized in their needs, but one that emphasized preventive care and was run by the community of users, not just professionals who provided the service.

Shared housing—"congregate living arrangements" in which people from a span of generations came together to form a household or family of choice—was one of the Gray Panthers' most ambitious concepts. Networks in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Denver, and Boston explored the idea. A group of Gray Panthers in Boston actually secured a grant to open a Shared Living Project residence, and the practice continues to spread modestly in some neighborhoods.

What the Over 60 Clinic, shared housing, and some other Panther projects had in common was an underlying, if not always conscious, critique of the New Deal-Great Society model for social progress. That model put the definition and fulfillment of social needs into the hands of technocrats: those schooled, trained, and indoctrinated to provide a professional "service." While it accomplished quite a bit in the decades before Reagan and the "Great Reversal," it provided very little voice for the people who participated in government social programs and received government assistance. Besides a name, one of the things the Gray Panthers shared with the Black Panther Party was a desire to bring social assets back under community control.

"Planning in an economic democracy must be under the control of elected representatives of the people while utilizing the expertise of scientists, technicians, economists, workers, [and] consumers," a Gray Panther manifesto from 1977 said. "Some planning [should be done] on the federal level, but much can be by regional and community bodies [with] as much local control as possible."

The Gray Panthers, like most social democratic-leaning movements in the 1970s, advocated a kind of decentralized mixed economy that firmly subordinated private enterprise to public need. But that kind of synthesis became less tenable after Reagan, when the continuing conservative dominance in Washington persuaded many grassroots progressive groups that they had to move to a more top-down model to defend their gains and survive.

The Gray Panthers experimented with such a structure, which meant investing more control in a Washington office that would mobilize the local networks when an issue or a bill came up that required "turnout" or contact with an elected official. They were also trying to cope with a decline in the movement itself. Panther membership fell in the 1980s, with the passing of some activists and, more importantly, the failure of many younger members to stick with the group, undermining the lifecycle model Kuhn and other early organizers had hoped would sustain it. However, the movement survived and in recent years has attempted to move back to the original network model.

But why the decline? The Gray Panthers were in part victims of their own success. Many of the large and small initiatives they pursued in the early decades—annual indexation of Social Security benefits, an end to mandatory unemployment, kneeling buses—became reality. Others, such as nursing home reform, national health care, and the mainstreaming of the disabled have been tougher slogs, but now claim much broader support. Meanwhile, the Gray Panther model of activism has been diffused: in the U.S. with groups like Grandmothers Against the War and in other countries through organizations that directly copied it (Graue Panther in Germany, Les Panthères Grises in France, and more).

All of which points to the effectiveness of the simple but shrewd frame the Gray Panthers presented: a group of elderly women and men adopting a militant style of organizing that people had previously assumed was reserved for the young. But the movement's survival also suggests that they have benefited—may, ultimately, depend on—Kuhn's insistent focus on a radical vision: in housing, health care provision, sexual relationships. This aspect of the movement is where, if the Gray Panthers persist, they could play an important role, not only in pushing against social and economic barriers, but in creating new ways to live beyond them.

"Until rigor mortis sets in," Kuhn said, "do one outrageous thing every week," and she meant it.