Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
*****
IN THE SPIRIT OF LEONARD PELTIER VISIONS OF US PRISONER #89637-132
Date: Thursday January 31st, 7:00 pm
Location: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe,
1615 B Paseo de Peralta,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
phone: 505-992-0591
info@ElMuseoCultural.org
Directions and info for El Museo: http://elmuseocultural.org/
Date: Saturday February 2nd, 7:00 pm
Location:Railyard Performance Center
1611 B Paseo de Peralta,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Phone: 505-982-8309
Author/Editor/Spoken-Word Performer Harvey Arden along with guest performers.
Mark Holtzman [ aka. Silent Bear ] will honor the gathering with his music on the Jan 31 venue only.
These and other dedicated and talented people will offer their personal thoughts of Leonard Peltier. Harvey Arden with the passion and spirit in the words of Leonard Peltier will make the event something not to be missed.
This passionate spoken word performance is based on the Leonard Peltier book-Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.
Prison Writings was written in 1999 by the Native American political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, whose words were adapted into a powerful stage-play by his editor, Harvey Arden. Leonard's words are just as poignant today as when the book first appeared and deserves the attention of the entire nation.
Prison Writings is a collection of Peltier's essays and poems, reflecting his life and his work from within the prison walls. Defending his People and being Indian is his only crime. The cultural traditions of his people connect Leonard and each of us to the Great Mystery [ Wakan Tanka ]. This spirit connection and his personal sacrifice to the Creator keeps him strong and unbroken. His life is connected to each of us. Each day this innocent man suffers for his people; in fact ,now that you know his truth, he also suffers for you.
What will you do now?
During the horrific early 1970's Reign of Terror on the Lakota (Sioux)reservation at Pine Ridge South Dakota, an infamous time of violence and corruption existed. Complicit tribal officials hired local thugs known as ' GOONS --'Guardians of the Oglala Nation', who--with the blessing of the U.S. Government--carried out an unprovoked series of assaults on the traditional people on the Pine Ridge reservation. SD. Behind these attacks was Big Energy's desire for uranium under Sioux lands, then being secretly negotiated between the U.S. government and compliant Tribal officials.
Two FBI agents were killed on June 26, 1975 during a gun battle on The Jumping Bull Property. Leonard Peltier was falsely framed for the murder of the two FBI agents. The other defendants charged with the same crime had been acquitted by a jury. They were defending their people from an unprovoked attack. Self defense a basic right was denied Leonard Peltier and his legal team.
Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Mr. Peltier demanded a new trial. The Eighth Circuit court ruled, "There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been made available to him." Yet, the court denied Mr.Peltier a new trial. The jury sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms.
Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier's release, stating that:
" The FBI used improper tactics to convict Mr. Peltier".
Judge Heaney also stated that:" The FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out, and that Mr. Peltier's release would promote healing with Native Americans ".
So why is this story of Judicial Racism hidden from the public eye ?
The late Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Amnesty International,International Indian Treaty Council, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gloria Steinem, Wilma Mankiller, Robert Redford, the European Parliament, and a host of other notables all have worked, petitioned,and pleaded for his release.
For the American Indian Nations as well as the world at large, the continued imprisonment of Leonard Peltier is Americas Judicial embarrassment.
The spirit of the Sun- dancer who is Leonard Peltier confronted with the treachery and ugliness of life has transcended and Has become the message, of hope, courage, and integrity for his People for his family and each of us.
Peltier has been behind prison bars for more than half of his life (he turned 63 this past September). He remains a model prisoner,establishing numerous humanitarian projects within the prison system as well as back on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Petitions will be available at both performances appealing for Leonard's release in his upcoming parole hearing. If Mr. Peltier is denied release at this hearing -he will not receive another
opportunity for freedom until the 2017 parole hearing. His official release date is 2041.
Leonards voice from inside the cage asks you,
" What will you do now ."
Be the change, question everything, its your duty as a citizen.
Be one voice if in your heart you can stand in support.
Join your voice with our's and together we can create change.
For further information or to become part of the healing....
Please contact:
Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (LPDC)- http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
The Oglala Commemoration can be reached at http://www.oglalacommemoration.com/
holding events each June 26th and following Leonards requests to implement many projects on the Rez.
Information about Harvey Arden or to order his books-
http://www.haveyouthought.com/.
Locally, Prison Writings may be found at Hotel Santa Fe's Picuris Art Shop- 505-982-1200
(and will be available along with other titles by Mr. Arden at the above events).
http://www.mylifeismysundance.com/
to learn more about these and other upcoming Peltier events-including the screen play being produced in Santa Fe this Summer, " My Life is My Sun dance" or contact Keith Rabin at keith@mylifeismysundance.com
Respectfully,
Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
Note:
Some excerpts were furnished by: Stephanie M. Schwartz (SilvrDrach@Gmail.com) from the article,"Transcendent Magic," March 2007 issue of Namaste Magazine. Please read the entire article compiled by Stephanie M Schwartz. See the hand outs at the event.
We thank her greatly.
In Peace
posted by Leonard @ 9:06 PM
Monday, August 02, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "End Us War. Org." Website-Troops Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan Now!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
I think that we need to "speak" a little more Bolshevik on this issue than what is offered here by this group but at this point in the anti-war struggle every point of opposition accrues to our benefit. Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal From Afghanistan and Iraq!
Friday, July 30, 2010
House approves $37 billion war-funding bill, 308-114.
War Is A Crime: SIGN THE END US WARS PLEDGE!
Please add your name and district by writing to sign [at] enduswars.org to be published on the Pledge page.
For All Voters:
I will actively oppose any candidate who has, during the current 111th Congress (2009-2011), voted for (or otherwise facilitated) appropriations to fund the criminal and illegal US military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or Georgia; for kidnappings, assassinations, and other acts of war carried out by the US government on foreign territory; or for any bill or measure intended to support military actions and/or covert operations against Iran. I will make every effort to identify, recruit, fund, publicize, and support anti-war candidates of any party whatsoever. To earn my support, these candidates must pledge in public and in writing that they will vote and speak out against, and oppose by all available means any bill which includes funding for the policies and acts of aggression enumerated above.
For All Congressional Candidates:
I hereby pledge that if elected I will vote, speak out against, and oppose by all available means any bill which includes funding for all policies and acts of aggression including the criminal and illegal US military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or Georgia; for kidnappings, assassinations, and other acts of war carried out by the US government on foreign territory; or for any bill or measure intended to support military actions and/or covert operations against Iran.
Markin comment:
I think that we need to "speak" a little more Bolshevik on this issue than what is offered here by this group but at this point in the anti-war struggle every point of opposition accrues to our benefit. Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal From Afghanistan and Iraq!
Friday, July 30, 2010
House approves $37 billion war-funding bill, 308-114.
War Is A Crime: SIGN THE END US WARS PLEDGE!
Please add your name and district by writing to sign [at] enduswars.org to be published on the Pledge page.
For All Voters:
I will actively oppose any candidate who has, during the current 111th Congress (2009-2011), voted for (or otherwise facilitated) appropriations to fund the criminal and illegal US military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or Georgia; for kidnappings, assassinations, and other acts of war carried out by the US government on foreign territory; or for any bill or measure intended to support military actions and/or covert operations against Iran. I will make every effort to identify, recruit, fund, publicize, and support anti-war candidates of any party whatsoever. To earn my support, these candidates must pledge in public and in writing that they will vote and speak out against, and oppose by all available means any bill which includes funding for the policies and acts of aggression enumerated above.
For All Congressional Candidates:
I hereby pledge that if elected I will vote, speak out against, and oppose by all available means any bill which includes funding for all policies and acts of aggression including the criminal and illegal US military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or Georgia; for kidnappings, assassinations, and other acts of war carried out by the US government on foreign territory; or for any bill or measure intended to support military actions and/or covert operations against Iran.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
*From Cyberspace-"The Max Shachtman Internet Archives"-Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s "Problems of the Chinese Revolution"(1931)
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
The article below is prima facie evidence that when Max Shachtman was a revolutionary in his younger days he could "speak" Marxism with the best of them. Right, Leon Trotsky and Jim Cannon?
****************
Max Shachtman (1931)
Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
There is hardly an event of greater world historical significance since the proletarian revolution in Russia than the awakening of the cruelly exploited and oppressed Orient, which found its most dramatic and most tragic expression in the great Chinese revolutionary movement of 1925-1927. For the first time in history, the capitalist countries of Europe, long ago matured for the socialist overthrow, gave way in revolutionary precedence to an Eastern land which bid fair to condense the experiences of capitalist evolution, under the titanic blows of the social revolution, into a brief span of time and, unlike the Occidental countries, enter boldly upon the path of socialist development. A more audacious enterprise, history could not imagine. Even the Russian working class was compelled to pass through a long period of capitalist development before it was peremptorily confronted with the opportunity and the need of breaking down the last barrier to the emancipation and free development of humanity. The Chinese proletariat, reaching a virile manhood at the crossroads of a revolutionary epoch, armed also with the strength of uncounted millions of insurgent peasants, was given the rare opportunity to choose between capitalist enslavement under its “own” bourgeoisie or socialist growth in alliance with the Soviet Union and the revolutionary working class of the West.
There is no point here in arguing the academic question as to whether China has matured economically for the establishment or construction of a socialist society. It is not a question to be settled statistically or statically in China—any more than it could have been established for Russia in 1917. This problem is solved primarily on an international scale, in the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist sectors of world economy. What has, however, been demonstrated since the day of the successful counter-revolution in China, if theoretical consideration and forecast were still inadequate, was that the basic problems of China, its. democratic tasks of national unification and independence, self- determination for its various peoples, and the agrarian revolution included, could be solved in no other way than by the victory of the workers acting independently as a class. In other words, all the problems and antagonisms arising out of the struggle against imperialist subjection, against the remnants of feudal relationships, which could have been but were not solved by the revolution of 1925-1927 or by the regime which succeeded it, will find a solution only with the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. It is in the opportunity offered for the attainment of this goal that lies the great importance of the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927.
But it is precisely in examining this opportunity that we encounter a monstrous historical anomaly. The revolution ended not with a victory, but with a horribly sanguinary defeat for the proletariat and the peasantry. How was this possible? In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the young proletariat and the peasantry were the fighting troops for the equally youthful bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie triumphed over feudalism, and also over the proletariat. The latter still lived in the period of the rise of capitalism; it had not yet learned how to act independently as a class; it did not have at its head a conscious revolutionary leadership. Even the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 is not difficult to understand, nor could anybody have expected that this first faint dawn of the proletarian revolution could, under the circumstances of time and place, see the full daylight of life. One can even go farther ahead in history, to the very end of the world war. The German proletariat overthrew the kaiser in 1918, but it did not come to power because its social democratic leadership, corrupted by the bourgeoisie, ran to the head of the marching column of mutinous workers for the purpose of turning them off to the road of bourgeois democracy.
But in China we had a partly armed proletariat. Even the peasantry was armed to a certain extent. A Communist party was in the field and had every opportunity to develop. The prestige of the Soviet Union was incalculable—every Chinese worker knew that Bolshevism had rid Russia of the imperialists and of the bankers and exploiters, every Chinese peasant knew that the Soviets had given the Russian peasant the land. The official political counsellor to the nationalist government was the Russian Communist, Borodin, just as one of its principal military directors was the Russian Communist, Galen. On every occasion, the workers and the peasants showed their desire to emulate the Russians—the former by their struggles against their own bourgeoisie, the latter by their constant attempts to carry out the first real steps of the agrarian revolution. In the Communist party itself, there was a strong current that favored breaking away from the domination of the bourgeoisie and its Kuo Min Tang and taking the path of independent class action. Yet, with all these and other favorable conditions, the proletariat not only did not come within reach of taking power, but was made the last object crushed under the heel of the bourgeois counter-revolution which did take and hold the power.
Where does the most active cause for this truly monstrous catastrophe lie? It was not so much objective difficulties that stood in the way. It was not the classic interference of the socialist agents of capital in the labor movement. The Chinese proletariat was prohibited by the policies and instructions of the leadership of the Communist International, the organizing center of the world revolution, from fulfilling the role imposed upon it by history! There is the source that must be sought to explain the bitter tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
No greater indictment can be presented against the faction of Stalin and Bucharin than this: invested with all the formal authority of the Soviet Union, of the Communist International, holding to so great an extent the destiny of China—one might say, of the whole East—in their hands, entrusted with the awful responsibility of guiding an unprecedentedly huge revolutionary movement, all they did was to translate the theories and practises of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics, palm them off as Bolshevism, and, in the name of Lenin, pursue a course against which Lenin had fought throughout his whole political life.
All through the revolutionary period, the official leadership of the Communist International staked its cards upon the national bourgeoisie instead of upon the worker and the peasant, upon Chiang Kai-Shek, and then upon Wang Chin Wei, but not upon the Shanghai proletarian. Worse yet, the latter was told in no uncertain terms that the national bourgeoisie was the leader of the revolution, figuring as the main partner in the ill-conceived “bloc of the four classes”. The Chinese Communist Party was driven into the bourgeois Kuo Min Tang with the Stalinist whip, and there it was compelled to swear allegiance to the petty bourgeois philosophy of Sun Yat Senism. The policy of class struggle was liquidated in the interests of the “united national front”. Strikes were prohibited or else settled by “arbitration commissions” in the best class collaborationist style, for how could the worker have a conflict of interests with the Chinese employer who was his leader in the “united national front” of the Kuo Min Tang? So as not to irritate the bourgeoisie, Stalin sent telegrams to the Chinese Communist Party, instructing it to restrain the peasants from taking the land. On pain of denunciation as “Trotskyists”, the equivalent among the Stalinist churchmen to excommunication, the Chinese Communists were prohibited from forming Soviets, first under the Chiang Kai-Shek regime and later under the Wuhan government because, you see, the latter was already the revolutionary center. Even though the caliber of the man was known—he had already attempted a reactionary coup d’État early in 1926—a veritable cult was built up for Chiang Kai-Shek by the international Communist press. What more striking condemnation of the official course is needed than the fact—characteristic of the whole policy—that on the eve of Chiang Kai-Shek’s march into Shanghai to establish the counter-revolutionary regime and to massacre the militant workers, the French Communist Party and its central organ L’HumanitÉ, sent him a solemn message of greetings, hailing the establishment of the Shanghai … Commune. Such “mistakes” are not accidental. They flowed from the whole past course. By the policy of Stalin and Bucharin, not only the Chinese Communists, but the international revolutionary movement was obliged to make the mistake of confusing a Gallifet with a Communard, the counter-revolution with the Commune.
For how many years, and how heavily has the Chinese proletarian and the Chinese peasant paid for this mistake in identity!
It would, however, be wrong to believe that this mistake was made by the whole Communist movement. No. The responsibility lies entirely upon the factions of Stalin and Bucharin, and lies doubly heavy because the Bolshevik wing of the party was wiser than they and did not trample upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin, or turn its back upon the revolutionary experiences and traditions of the past. It analyzed correctly that which was at the moment, it used Marxism not to spit at but as an instrument for probing into and preparing for the future, it warned against the consequences of the prevailing policy, and at every stage of the struggle it advanced the essentially correct course. In every important particular, it was as correct in its prospect as it has been justified a thousand times over in retrospect.
There is no possible justification, however, for the line of the officialdom. What the lessons of the past and the events of the moment might have failed to teach them, the Bolshevik-Leninists of Russia pointed out to them day in and day out. They were rewarded for this work by having abuse heaped upon them, by having their views deliberately distorted and misrepresented, by having their speeches hushed up and their writings suppressed, and, when the facts of life had accumulated into mountainous evidence of their correctness, they were finally expelled from the party, imprisoned, exiled or banished from the borders of the Soviet Union. The latter fate was reserved for the greatest living Bolshevik because he, more than anyone else, refused to regard the Gallifets of the Chinese revolution as its leaders, as its Communards.
But the bureaucratic, small-minded method of solving political and theoretical disputes solves nothing but a temporary consolidation of the power of the usurpers. Marx and his followers in the labor movement spent years, decades, in studying every phase of the ill-starred Paris Commune. In the discussion of the Commune and the defeated Russian revolution of 1905, Bolshevism became the dominant current in the movement and was finally able to lead the proletariat to power. In the same sense, it can be said today that without a thorough, all-sided study and assimilation of the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik regiments of tomorrow will not be assembled and trained to measure up to their tasks. For the lessons of the Chinese revolution have a living, timely application to the problems of the revolutionary movement in every country in the world. They relate to the fundamental principle questions of Marxism.
But such a study is today forbidden in the official Communist movement. This makes it all the more imperative that it be undertaken, for a real beginning has hardly been made. It is with this in mind that the following contributions by comrade Trotsky have been assembled and presented to American readers. With the exception of a few pages, none of them has even been published in the English language. As has unfortunately been the case with most of the serious Marxian writings of recent times, the works presented here have for the most part had to be sent out of the Soviet Union secretly. Their distribution has been made illegal by the Stalinist regime, and even when they were first presented to the Russian party and to the Communist International, those who listened to them or read them were confined to a select few hardened bureaucrats upon whom logic, arguments and facts made no impression. At the very height of the revolutionary events in China, the masses of the Communist workers were prevented from hearing the standpoint of the Left Opposition.
So overcome with the fear of the Apposition’s arguments were the bureaucrats, that they not only prevented the publication of the former’s documents, but even their own writings and speeches, which events proceeded so rapidly to deride, had to be kept concealed. Thus, Stalin’s speech in defense of Chiang Kai-Shek, made a few days before the coup d’État in Shanghai, has never been made public. The whole Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, at which the discussion of the Chinese question occupied the main point on the agenda, met under the conditions of a complete censorship. For the first time in the history of the Communist International, the proceedings of so signal a Plenum were not made public, in full or in part, in the party press of any country. The Communist world knew about its sessions only from the official resolution finally adopted and from a scant article in Pravda, reprinted in the International Press Correspondence. The censorship was not, it seems, completely air-tight. Some of the Opposition’s documents and a speech or two, made their way to Germany soon after the Plenum, and they were issued in pamphlet form, first by the German Left Oppositionists and later by the French. Only for the purpose of counteracting the effect of these documents did the official publishing house of the Comintern finally print, one year after the Plenum, a slim brochure containing the speeches delivered by Bucharin, Stalin, Manuilsky, Smeral, Pepper, Ferdi, Petrov, and a number of other apparatus men, plus one of Trotsky’s speeches and one of Vuyovitch’s. Aside from this, and an odd pamphlet here and there by Tang Ping Shan—the official spokesman for Stalin and Bucharin in China who later turned renegade from Communism—by Heller, and a few others, the literary contributions of the Communist International on the problems of the Chinese revolution, in modern non-Russian languages, are confined to journalistic dispatches from China which distinguished themselves in every case by the fact that a week later the events robbed them of any pretension to truth or analytical importance. In English, the official literature is more limited and more worthless: a pamphlet by Earl Browder, another by R. Doonping—kindness and mercy dictate that nothing more be said about them.
These facts, as well as the intrinsic value of the material presented in this book, make a study of it one of the main duties of the revolutionary worker today. That it deals so largely “with the past” does not rob it of one iota of its value. The present cannot be understood unless the past in which it is rooted is understood. The criminal opportunism of yesterday is being paid for by the light-hearted adventurism of the Comintern in China today. The idea of the Soviets as the instruments of the proletarian insurrection and later the dictatorship, is being abused by Stalinism today, in the period of counter-revolution, as it was in 1927, in the period of the revolutionary ascent. Yesterday, the bourgeois regime of Wuhan was passed off as a substitute for arming the workers and peasants independently and forming their Soviets. Today, the struggles of isolated, desperate peasant bands, aroused by the belated echo in the village of the revolutionary clashes of four years ago, and doomed to degeneration without the leadership of a strong, well-knit, thoroughly restored movement of proletarian revolutionists in the cities—are this time passed off by the Stalinists as the Soviet regime. And above all, the “super-historical” formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” continues to be set up against the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution so as to guarantee in advance that the coming Chinese revolution will be strangled just as fatally as the last one.
There remain three other points which require comment before these remarks are brought to an end.
Among the conceptions, or rather the misconceptions, concerning the standpoint of the Opposition in the Chinese question, as contrasted to that defended by the official spokesmen, is that the divergences were confined to an issue which is now “outlived”: the establishment of Soviets in the 1927 period. It would be more accurate to say that the differences of the kernel of the Opposition with the Stalinist standpoint were and remain concerned with all the fundamental principal questions of the Chinese revolution in all its phases and at every stage. Even in the ranks of the Opposition, particularly among the ultra-Leftists, the idea took shape that the Opposition’s struggle was confined to views which excluded any “democratic” development for China, or the imperative need for advancing in China the most resolute and extreme slogans of democracy. Especially at the present stage of the counter-revolution, the need for putting forward the slogans of democracy in China becomes unpostponable. The Communists will lead the masses of workers and peasants on to the socialist path by demonstrations in life that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve for the people all the democratic tasks which stand on the order of the day for China. In this respect, there is no conflict between the emphasis placed by the Opposition in 1925-1927 and the emphasis it places on the slogans necessary for today. The conflict really arises in the ranks of Stalinism which, while putting forward the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”, categorically rejects the advancement of the most necessary democratic slogans!
Further, in connection with the question of the “democratic dictatorship”, an apparent conflict may be perceived in the documents which make up this book. In the later articles, comrade Trotsky counterposes the permanent revolution to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, whereas the early articles do not make such a contrast; indeed, the 1927 Platform of the Opposition speaks for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict is more apparent than real and is derived from two sources. The first is that in the bloc established in 1926 between the “Trotsky” and the “Zinoviev” Oppositions (the Moscow Opposition of 1923 and the Leningrad Opposition of 1925), formal concessions of this kind were made by the former to the Left Centrists of Leningrad in the interests of maintaining the bloc against the Menshevik policy of Stalin and Bucharin. The second is that in 1925-1927, the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship”, borrowed literally and purely formally from Lenin’s pre-1917 writings, had not yet so clearly been filled with the reactionary content which the epigones poured into it. The Opposition, as proceeds plainly even from the early articles of comrade Trotsky, construed the slogan in the same sense that Lenin construed it in and after 1917, that is, that the “democratic dictatorship” was realized in the “democratic period” (the first six months) of the October revolution, but realized under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long before the revolution, Lenin had written that the slogan had a past and a future. For China, the epigones, looking backward only to the past—and even there with a distorted vision—filled the slogan with a reactionary content, which they still seek to apply not only to “backward China”, but to about four-fifths of the whole world … including modern Spain. One of the greatest contributions to the movement made by the Opposition, and in the first place, by comrade Trotsky, is the setting of the old Leninist slogan in its proper historical perspective, the frank—and not slavish—examination of the value of the slogan in the light of revolutionary experiences, and the restoration to its rightful place of the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution, expressed by Lenin for the East in particular, in those sections of the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International which speak of the non-capitalist path of development of the backward colonial and semi- colonial countries.
A third point which may interest readers, or arouse a certain amount of confusion, is another apparent contradiction in the standpoint of the Opposition. It is only in the later documents that comrade Trotsky speaks about the Opposition having stood against the integration of the proletarian party, the Communist Party of China, into the party of the bourgeoisie, the Kuo Min Tang. Any misunderstanding that may arise will be eliminated by reproducing part of a letter written by comrade Trotsky to the present writer on December 10, 1930, which I take the liberty of quoting.
”You are quite right when you point out that the Russian Opposition, as late as the first half of 1927, did not demand openly the withdrawal from the Kuo Min Tang. I believe, however, that I have already commented on this fact publicly somewhere. I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang, as well as against the acceptance of the Kuo Min Tang into the `Kuomintern’. Radek was always with Zinoviev against me. The younger members of the Opposition of 1923 were with me almost to a man. Rakovsky was in Paris and not sufficiently informed. Up to 1926, I always voted independently in the Political Bureau on this question, against all the others. In 1925, simultaneously with the theses on the Eastern Chinese Railway which I have quoted in the Opposition press, I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist party leave the Kuo Min Tang instantly. This was unanimously rejected and contributed a great deal to the baiting later on. In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question. Two or three times, the matter stood at the breaking point. Our center consisted of approximately equal numbers from both of the allied tendencies, for it was after all only a bloc. At the voting, the position of the 1923 Opposition was betrayed by Radek, out of principle, and by Piatakov, out of unprincipledness. Our faction (1923) was furious about it, demanded that Radek and Piatakov be recalled from the center. But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late, in spite of the fact that the Political Bureau and the Plenum of the Central Committee always contrasted my view with the official view of the Opposition. Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally in this question. In any case, this mistake became quite clear only by the further evolution of the Zinovievists. At that time, the split with them appeared to the overwhelming majority of our faction as absolutely fatal. Thus, the manifesto [of the International Left Opposition on the Chinese question, issued late in 1930] in no way contradicts the facts when it contends that the Russian Opposition, the real one, was against the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang. Out of the thousands of imprisoned, exiled, etc., hardly a single one was with Radek in this question. This fact too I have referred to in many letters, namely, that the great majority of the capitulators were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic! …”
The documents which follow are arranged more or less in chronological order. As a whole, they present a fairly thorough picture of the course of the Chinese revolution and the struggle for Bolshevism which the Opposition carried on in all the periods of its development, up to the present day. How brilliantly they demonstrate the indispensability of Marxism— which serves the revolutionist to foresee the coming day and to prepare for it—can be left to the reader to judge. As appendices, we have included articles and speeches by other comrades. The suppressed theses of Zinoviev present invaluable facts and documents, even though they present the relations between the Communist party and the Kuo Min Tang in a confused manner. The Shanghai letter by three Russian comrades, all of them opponents of “Trotskyism”, shows that the leadership of the Comintern was well aware of the real state of affairs in China. The letter is presented here for the first time. It suffered the same fate of suppression as so much other important material. Indeed, one of its authors, the youth comrade Nassonov, together with the party comrade, Mandalyan, were recalled in disgrace from China by Stalin. As punishment, Nassonov was “exiled” to the United States as representative of the Young Communist International, and I still recall how he would tell me that in spite of everything, Stalin had been “compelled in the end to carry out” his viewpoint….
In conclusion, the writer wishes to express his gratitude, and the appreciation of the publishers, to his comrades, Sam Gordon and Morris Lewit, who gave such indispensable assistance in the final checking of the translations.
NEW YORK, August 7,
1931
Max Shachtman.
Markin comment:
The article below is prima facie evidence that when Max Shachtman was a revolutionary in his younger days he could "speak" Marxism with the best of them. Right, Leon Trotsky and Jim Cannon?
****************
Max Shachtman (1931)
Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
There is hardly an event of greater world historical significance since the proletarian revolution in Russia than the awakening of the cruelly exploited and oppressed Orient, which found its most dramatic and most tragic expression in the great Chinese revolutionary movement of 1925-1927. For the first time in history, the capitalist countries of Europe, long ago matured for the socialist overthrow, gave way in revolutionary precedence to an Eastern land which bid fair to condense the experiences of capitalist evolution, under the titanic blows of the social revolution, into a brief span of time and, unlike the Occidental countries, enter boldly upon the path of socialist development. A more audacious enterprise, history could not imagine. Even the Russian working class was compelled to pass through a long period of capitalist development before it was peremptorily confronted with the opportunity and the need of breaking down the last barrier to the emancipation and free development of humanity. The Chinese proletariat, reaching a virile manhood at the crossroads of a revolutionary epoch, armed also with the strength of uncounted millions of insurgent peasants, was given the rare opportunity to choose between capitalist enslavement under its “own” bourgeoisie or socialist growth in alliance with the Soviet Union and the revolutionary working class of the West.
There is no point here in arguing the academic question as to whether China has matured economically for the establishment or construction of a socialist society. It is not a question to be settled statistically or statically in China—any more than it could have been established for Russia in 1917. This problem is solved primarily on an international scale, in the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist sectors of world economy. What has, however, been demonstrated since the day of the successful counter-revolution in China, if theoretical consideration and forecast were still inadequate, was that the basic problems of China, its. democratic tasks of national unification and independence, self- determination for its various peoples, and the agrarian revolution included, could be solved in no other way than by the victory of the workers acting independently as a class. In other words, all the problems and antagonisms arising out of the struggle against imperialist subjection, against the remnants of feudal relationships, which could have been but were not solved by the revolution of 1925-1927 or by the regime which succeeded it, will find a solution only with the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. It is in the opportunity offered for the attainment of this goal that lies the great importance of the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927.
But it is precisely in examining this opportunity that we encounter a monstrous historical anomaly. The revolution ended not with a victory, but with a horribly sanguinary defeat for the proletariat and the peasantry. How was this possible? In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the young proletariat and the peasantry were the fighting troops for the equally youthful bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie triumphed over feudalism, and also over the proletariat. The latter still lived in the period of the rise of capitalism; it had not yet learned how to act independently as a class; it did not have at its head a conscious revolutionary leadership. Even the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 is not difficult to understand, nor could anybody have expected that this first faint dawn of the proletarian revolution could, under the circumstances of time and place, see the full daylight of life. One can even go farther ahead in history, to the very end of the world war. The German proletariat overthrew the kaiser in 1918, but it did not come to power because its social democratic leadership, corrupted by the bourgeoisie, ran to the head of the marching column of mutinous workers for the purpose of turning them off to the road of bourgeois democracy.
But in China we had a partly armed proletariat. Even the peasantry was armed to a certain extent. A Communist party was in the field and had every opportunity to develop. The prestige of the Soviet Union was incalculable—every Chinese worker knew that Bolshevism had rid Russia of the imperialists and of the bankers and exploiters, every Chinese peasant knew that the Soviets had given the Russian peasant the land. The official political counsellor to the nationalist government was the Russian Communist, Borodin, just as one of its principal military directors was the Russian Communist, Galen. On every occasion, the workers and the peasants showed their desire to emulate the Russians—the former by their struggles against their own bourgeoisie, the latter by their constant attempts to carry out the first real steps of the agrarian revolution. In the Communist party itself, there was a strong current that favored breaking away from the domination of the bourgeoisie and its Kuo Min Tang and taking the path of independent class action. Yet, with all these and other favorable conditions, the proletariat not only did not come within reach of taking power, but was made the last object crushed under the heel of the bourgeois counter-revolution which did take and hold the power.
Where does the most active cause for this truly monstrous catastrophe lie? It was not so much objective difficulties that stood in the way. It was not the classic interference of the socialist agents of capital in the labor movement. The Chinese proletariat was prohibited by the policies and instructions of the leadership of the Communist International, the organizing center of the world revolution, from fulfilling the role imposed upon it by history! There is the source that must be sought to explain the bitter tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
No greater indictment can be presented against the faction of Stalin and Bucharin than this: invested with all the formal authority of the Soviet Union, of the Communist International, holding to so great an extent the destiny of China—one might say, of the whole East—in their hands, entrusted with the awful responsibility of guiding an unprecedentedly huge revolutionary movement, all they did was to translate the theories and practises of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics, palm them off as Bolshevism, and, in the name of Lenin, pursue a course against which Lenin had fought throughout his whole political life.
All through the revolutionary period, the official leadership of the Communist International staked its cards upon the national bourgeoisie instead of upon the worker and the peasant, upon Chiang Kai-Shek, and then upon Wang Chin Wei, but not upon the Shanghai proletarian. Worse yet, the latter was told in no uncertain terms that the national bourgeoisie was the leader of the revolution, figuring as the main partner in the ill-conceived “bloc of the four classes”. The Chinese Communist Party was driven into the bourgeois Kuo Min Tang with the Stalinist whip, and there it was compelled to swear allegiance to the petty bourgeois philosophy of Sun Yat Senism. The policy of class struggle was liquidated in the interests of the “united national front”. Strikes were prohibited or else settled by “arbitration commissions” in the best class collaborationist style, for how could the worker have a conflict of interests with the Chinese employer who was his leader in the “united national front” of the Kuo Min Tang? So as not to irritate the bourgeoisie, Stalin sent telegrams to the Chinese Communist Party, instructing it to restrain the peasants from taking the land. On pain of denunciation as “Trotskyists”, the equivalent among the Stalinist churchmen to excommunication, the Chinese Communists were prohibited from forming Soviets, first under the Chiang Kai-Shek regime and later under the Wuhan government because, you see, the latter was already the revolutionary center. Even though the caliber of the man was known—he had already attempted a reactionary coup d’État early in 1926—a veritable cult was built up for Chiang Kai-Shek by the international Communist press. What more striking condemnation of the official course is needed than the fact—characteristic of the whole policy—that on the eve of Chiang Kai-Shek’s march into Shanghai to establish the counter-revolutionary regime and to massacre the militant workers, the French Communist Party and its central organ L’HumanitÉ, sent him a solemn message of greetings, hailing the establishment of the Shanghai … Commune. Such “mistakes” are not accidental. They flowed from the whole past course. By the policy of Stalin and Bucharin, not only the Chinese Communists, but the international revolutionary movement was obliged to make the mistake of confusing a Gallifet with a Communard, the counter-revolution with the Commune.
For how many years, and how heavily has the Chinese proletarian and the Chinese peasant paid for this mistake in identity!
It would, however, be wrong to believe that this mistake was made by the whole Communist movement. No. The responsibility lies entirely upon the factions of Stalin and Bucharin, and lies doubly heavy because the Bolshevik wing of the party was wiser than they and did not trample upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin, or turn its back upon the revolutionary experiences and traditions of the past. It analyzed correctly that which was at the moment, it used Marxism not to spit at but as an instrument for probing into and preparing for the future, it warned against the consequences of the prevailing policy, and at every stage of the struggle it advanced the essentially correct course. In every important particular, it was as correct in its prospect as it has been justified a thousand times over in retrospect.
There is no possible justification, however, for the line of the officialdom. What the lessons of the past and the events of the moment might have failed to teach them, the Bolshevik-Leninists of Russia pointed out to them day in and day out. They were rewarded for this work by having abuse heaped upon them, by having their views deliberately distorted and misrepresented, by having their speeches hushed up and their writings suppressed, and, when the facts of life had accumulated into mountainous evidence of their correctness, they were finally expelled from the party, imprisoned, exiled or banished from the borders of the Soviet Union. The latter fate was reserved for the greatest living Bolshevik because he, more than anyone else, refused to regard the Gallifets of the Chinese revolution as its leaders, as its Communards.
But the bureaucratic, small-minded method of solving political and theoretical disputes solves nothing but a temporary consolidation of the power of the usurpers. Marx and his followers in the labor movement spent years, decades, in studying every phase of the ill-starred Paris Commune. In the discussion of the Commune and the defeated Russian revolution of 1905, Bolshevism became the dominant current in the movement and was finally able to lead the proletariat to power. In the same sense, it can be said today that without a thorough, all-sided study and assimilation of the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik regiments of tomorrow will not be assembled and trained to measure up to their tasks. For the lessons of the Chinese revolution have a living, timely application to the problems of the revolutionary movement in every country in the world. They relate to the fundamental principle questions of Marxism.
But such a study is today forbidden in the official Communist movement. This makes it all the more imperative that it be undertaken, for a real beginning has hardly been made. It is with this in mind that the following contributions by comrade Trotsky have been assembled and presented to American readers. With the exception of a few pages, none of them has even been published in the English language. As has unfortunately been the case with most of the serious Marxian writings of recent times, the works presented here have for the most part had to be sent out of the Soviet Union secretly. Their distribution has been made illegal by the Stalinist regime, and even when they were first presented to the Russian party and to the Communist International, those who listened to them or read them were confined to a select few hardened bureaucrats upon whom logic, arguments and facts made no impression. At the very height of the revolutionary events in China, the masses of the Communist workers were prevented from hearing the standpoint of the Left Opposition.
So overcome with the fear of the Apposition’s arguments were the bureaucrats, that they not only prevented the publication of the former’s documents, but even their own writings and speeches, which events proceeded so rapidly to deride, had to be kept concealed. Thus, Stalin’s speech in defense of Chiang Kai-Shek, made a few days before the coup d’État in Shanghai, has never been made public. The whole Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, at which the discussion of the Chinese question occupied the main point on the agenda, met under the conditions of a complete censorship. For the first time in the history of the Communist International, the proceedings of so signal a Plenum were not made public, in full or in part, in the party press of any country. The Communist world knew about its sessions only from the official resolution finally adopted and from a scant article in Pravda, reprinted in the International Press Correspondence. The censorship was not, it seems, completely air-tight. Some of the Opposition’s documents and a speech or two, made their way to Germany soon after the Plenum, and they were issued in pamphlet form, first by the German Left Oppositionists and later by the French. Only for the purpose of counteracting the effect of these documents did the official publishing house of the Comintern finally print, one year after the Plenum, a slim brochure containing the speeches delivered by Bucharin, Stalin, Manuilsky, Smeral, Pepper, Ferdi, Petrov, and a number of other apparatus men, plus one of Trotsky’s speeches and one of Vuyovitch’s. Aside from this, and an odd pamphlet here and there by Tang Ping Shan—the official spokesman for Stalin and Bucharin in China who later turned renegade from Communism—by Heller, and a few others, the literary contributions of the Communist International on the problems of the Chinese revolution, in modern non-Russian languages, are confined to journalistic dispatches from China which distinguished themselves in every case by the fact that a week later the events robbed them of any pretension to truth or analytical importance. In English, the official literature is more limited and more worthless: a pamphlet by Earl Browder, another by R. Doonping—kindness and mercy dictate that nothing more be said about them.
These facts, as well as the intrinsic value of the material presented in this book, make a study of it one of the main duties of the revolutionary worker today. That it deals so largely “with the past” does not rob it of one iota of its value. The present cannot be understood unless the past in which it is rooted is understood. The criminal opportunism of yesterday is being paid for by the light-hearted adventurism of the Comintern in China today. The idea of the Soviets as the instruments of the proletarian insurrection and later the dictatorship, is being abused by Stalinism today, in the period of counter-revolution, as it was in 1927, in the period of the revolutionary ascent. Yesterday, the bourgeois regime of Wuhan was passed off as a substitute for arming the workers and peasants independently and forming their Soviets. Today, the struggles of isolated, desperate peasant bands, aroused by the belated echo in the village of the revolutionary clashes of four years ago, and doomed to degeneration without the leadership of a strong, well-knit, thoroughly restored movement of proletarian revolutionists in the cities—are this time passed off by the Stalinists as the Soviet regime. And above all, the “super-historical” formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” continues to be set up against the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution so as to guarantee in advance that the coming Chinese revolution will be strangled just as fatally as the last one.
There remain three other points which require comment before these remarks are brought to an end.
Among the conceptions, or rather the misconceptions, concerning the standpoint of the Opposition in the Chinese question, as contrasted to that defended by the official spokesmen, is that the divergences were confined to an issue which is now “outlived”: the establishment of Soviets in the 1927 period. It would be more accurate to say that the differences of the kernel of the Opposition with the Stalinist standpoint were and remain concerned with all the fundamental principal questions of the Chinese revolution in all its phases and at every stage. Even in the ranks of the Opposition, particularly among the ultra-Leftists, the idea took shape that the Opposition’s struggle was confined to views which excluded any “democratic” development for China, or the imperative need for advancing in China the most resolute and extreme slogans of democracy. Especially at the present stage of the counter-revolution, the need for putting forward the slogans of democracy in China becomes unpostponable. The Communists will lead the masses of workers and peasants on to the socialist path by demonstrations in life that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve for the people all the democratic tasks which stand on the order of the day for China. In this respect, there is no conflict between the emphasis placed by the Opposition in 1925-1927 and the emphasis it places on the slogans necessary for today. The conflict really arises in the ranks of Stalinism which, while putting forward the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”, categorically rejects the advancement of the most necessary democratic slogans!
Further, in connection with the question of the “democratic dictatorship”, an apparent conflict may be perceived in the documents which make up this book. In the later articles, comrade Trotsky counterposes the permanent revolution to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, whereas the early articles do not make such a contrast; indeed, the 1927 Platform of the Opposition speaks for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict is more apparent than real and is derived from two sources. The first is that in the bloc established in 1926 between the “Trotsky” and the “Zinoviev” Oppositions (the Moscow Opposition of 1923 and the Leningrad Opposition of 1925), formal concessions of this kind were made by the former to the Left Centrists of Leningrad in the interests of maintaining the bloc against the Menshevik policy of Stalin and Bucharin. The second is that in 1925-1927, the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship”, borrowed literally and purely formally from Lenin’s pre-1917 writings, had not yet so clearly been filled with the reactionary content which the epigones poured into it. The Opposition, as proceeds plainly even from the early articles of comrade Trotsky, construed the slogan in the same sense that Lenin construed it in and after 1917, that is, that the “democratic dictatorship” was realized in the “democratic period” (the first six months) of the October revolution, but realized under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long before the revolution, Lenin had written that the slogan had a past and a future. For China, the epigones, looking backward only to the past—and even there with a distorted vision—filled the slogan with a reactionary content, which they still seek to apply not only to “backward China”, but to about four-fifths of the whole world … including modern Spain. One of the greatest contributions to the movement made by the Opposition, and in the first place, by comrade Trotsky, is the setting of the old Leninist slogan in its proper historical perspective, the frank—and not slavish—examination of the value of the slogan in the light of revolutionary experiences, and the restoration to its rightful place of the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution, expressed by Lenin for the East in particular, in those sections of the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International which speak of the non-capitalist path of development of the backward colonial and semi- colonial countries.
A third point which may interest readers, or arouse a certain amount of confusion, is another apparent contradiction in the standpoint of the Opposition. It is only in the later documents that comrade Trotsky speaks about the Opposition having stood against the integration of the proletarian party, the Communist Party of China, into the party of the bourgeoisie, the Kuo Min Tang. Any misunderstanding that may arise will be eliminated by reproducing part of a letter written by comrade Trotsky to the present writer on December 10, 1930, which I take the liberty of quoting.
”You are quite right when you point out that the Russian Opposition, as late as the first half of 1927, did not demand openly the withdrawal from the Kuo Min Tang. I believe, however, that I have already commented on this fact publicly somewhere. I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang, as well as against the acceptance of the Kuo Min Tang into the `Kuomintern’. Radek was always with Zinoviev against me. The younger members of the Opposition of 1923 were with me almost to a man. Rakovsky was in Paris and not sufficiently informed. Up to 1926, I always voted independently in the Political Bureau on this question, against all the others. In 1925, simultaneously with the theses on the Eastern Chinese Railway which I have quoted in the Opposition press, I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist party leave the Kuo Min Tang instantly. This was unanimously rejected and contributed a great deal to the baiting later on. In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question. Two or three times, the matter stood at the breaking point. Our center consisted of approximately equal numbers from both of the allied tendencies, for it was after all only a bloc. At the voting, the position of the 1923 Opposition was betrayed by Radek, out of principle, and by Piatakov, out of unprincipledness. Our faction (1923) was furious about it, demanded that Radek and Piatakov be recalled from the center. But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late, in spite of the fact that the Political Bureau and the Plenum of the Central Committee always contrasted my view with the official view of the Opposition. Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally in this question. In any case, this mistake became quite clear only by the further evolution of the Zinovievists. At that time, the split with them appeared to the overwhelming majority of our faction as absolutely fatal. Thus, the manifesto [of the International Left Opposition on the Chinese question, issued late in 1930] in no way contradicts the facts when it contends that the Russian Opposition, the real one, was against the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang. Out of the thousands of imprisoned, exiled, etc., hardly a single one was with Radek in this question. This fact too I have referred to in many letters, namely, that the great majority of the capitulators were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic! …”
The documents which follow are arranged more or less in chronological order. As a whole, they present a fairly thorough picture of the course of the Chinese revolution and the struggle for Bolshevism which the Opposition carried on in all the periods of its development, up to the present day. How brilliantly they demonstrate the indispensability of Marxism— which serves the revolutionist to foresee the coming day and to prepare for it—can be left to the reader to judge. As appendices, we have included articles and speeches by other comrades. The suppressed theses of Zinoviev present invaluable facts and documents, even though they present the relations between the Communist party and the Kuo Min Tang in a confused manner. The Shanghai letter by three Russian comrades, all of them opponents of “Trotskyism”, shows that the leadership of the Comintern was well aware of the real state of affairs in China. The letter is presented here for the first time. It suffered the same fate of suppression as so much other important material. Indeed, one of its authors, the youth comrade Nassonov, together with the party comrade, Mandalyan, were recalled in disgrace from China by Stalin. As punishment, Nassonov was “exiled” to the United States as representative of the Young Communist International, and I still recall how he would tell me that in spite of everything, Stalin had been “compelled in the end to carry out” his viewpoint….
In conclusion, the writer wishes to express his gratitude, and the appreciation of the publishers, to his comrades, Sam Gordon and Morris Lewit, who gave such indispensable assistance in the final checking of the translations.
NEW YORK, August 7,
1931
Max Shachtman.
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Free The San Francisco Eight Committee" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
As I have written before- Enough Is Enough- Drop The Charges Against Francisco Torres
**********
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Waiting for more discovery in last SF8 case
Numerous supporters of the San Francisco 8 came to the San Francisco courthouse at the beginning of the month (July 1) even though the only issue to be decided was the scheduling of future court dates. This was an important show of support for Francisco Torres, the last of the SF 8 still facing charges, since the prosecution may have hoped that the summer doldrums and long gaps between court appearances would erode solidarity.
The judge set September 17 for the next status appearance and for establishing the briefing schedule for the motion to dismiss the remaining charges.
Defense attorney Chuck Bourdon explained that the FBI has still not provided all the evidence in the discovery process, claiming that they are still looking for it. In the meantime it only becomes more apparent that the long delays in the thirty-nine-year old case are prejudicial to the cause of justice.
So mark your calendars: September 17 at 850 Bryant Street, San Francisco.
Markin comment:
As I have written before- Enough Is Enough- Drop The Charges Against Francisco Torres
**********
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Waiting for more discovery in last SF8 case
Numerous supporters of the San Francisco 8 came to the San Francisco courthouse at the beginning of the month (July 1) even though the only issue to be decided was the scheduling of future court dates. This was an important show of support for Francisco Torres, the last of the SF 8 still facing charges, since the prosecution may have hoped that the summer doldrums and long gaps between court appearances would erode solidarity.
The judge set September 17 for the next status appearance and for establishing the briefing schedule for the motion to dismiss the remaining charges.
Defense attorney Chuck Bourdon explained that the FBI has still not provided all the evidence in the discovery process, claiming that they are still looking for it. In the meantime it only becomes more apparent that the long delays in the thirty-nine-year old case are prejudicial to the cause of justice.
So mark your calendars: September 17 at 850 Bryant Street, San Francisco.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
*Free The Black Panthers Omaha Two- Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter - Free All Class-War Prisoners! -An Online Article
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indy Media post on the class-war prisoners, Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter , the Omaha Two Black liberation fighters.
Markin comment:
This comment is easy- Free Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter- The Omaha Two!- Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Markin comment:
This comment is easy- Free Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter- The Omaha Two!- Free All Class-War Prisoners!
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "G.I. Voice (Fort Lewis)" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Soldier who refused Afghan tour released
Submitted by mgibbs on Sat, 04/03/2010 - 9:03pm. Scott Fontaine;
Tacoma News-Tribune
April 2, 2010
Pvt. Travis Bishop left his jail cell at Joint Base Lewis-McChord last week with no job, a criminal conviction and just one regret.
“I wish I had known about applying for a conscientious objector status a lot sooner,” said Bishop, a 26-year-old Louisville, Ky., native.
The former sergeant made headlines when he went absent without leave and refused to deploy to Afghanistan with his Fort Hood unit last year. Bishop cited his Christian beliefs in making the decision – a move that ultimately cost him 71/2 months of freedom and led international human-rights group Amnesty International to label him a prisoner of conscience.
He also became a rallying point for the local peace movement, with calls for his release increasing after Fort Lewis Lt. Ehren Watada – who refused to deploy to Iraq – was discharged last fall. Bishop spoke to supporters last weekend at Coffee Strong, a Lakewood resource center for war resisters and disaffected soldiers.
Bishop was released three months early after Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, granted Bishop’s request for clemency in February. Bishop is now effectively out of the Army. He retains the rank of private while an appeal to overturn his conviction and reverse the military’s plan for a bad-conduct discharge works its way through the military judicial system.
He now finds himself in the same place as countless others who left the military under less controversial circumstances: looking for a job, planning to enroll in college and adjusting to life without morning formations and buzz-cut requirements.
“I’m just trying to feel normal again,” Bishop said Tuesday in an interview with The News Tribune.
Bishop didn’t hold the same reservations about war when he enlisted in April 2004 or when he deployed to Iraq in 2006-07.
But as his unit prepared for an Afghanistan deployment early last year, he began asking himself tough questions.
“I had to get right with God in case I died or in case I had to kill someone,” he said.
He found answers in the Bible. Bishop, who was raised Baptist and considers himself a nondenominational Christian, came to believe Jesus preached a strict pacifist philosophy.
He felt trapped between his belief in the immorality of war and the duty to his friends to deploy with them. Some peace activists in Texas told him he could apply for conscientious-objector status. It was the first he’d heard of it outside the context of the Vietnam War, he said.
Bishop eventually made contact with James Branum, an Oklahoma-based lawyer, a day before the soldier was scheduled to fly to Afghanistan. Branum couldn’t advise him whether to go AWOL but did tell him the potential consequences, including jail time.
A sleepless night followed, and Bishop still struggled with the decision the morning before he was scheduled to leave.
“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m not going,’” he said. “But really, it’s hard – my best friend was going to go in my stead if I left.”
Bishop went AWOL hours before his flight left. He stayed with a friend while he filled out the conscientious-objector application. He turned himself into his company building a week later.
He was assigned a job with the company rear detachment. Almost everyone in his unit treated him professionally, he said, though small talk stopped with some people he once considered friends.
Authorities at Fort Hood turned down his request. He appealed to the Pentagon and was denied on that level as well.
Bishop blamed the timing of it, objecting as his unit prepared to go to war.
“I understand it hurt the validity of my claim,” he said. “I get that. But I didn’t know about CO status before then, and most of the military doesn’t know.”
His court-martial began in August, and he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in detention after a two-day trial. He arrived at the Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility in September.
He was held at Lewis-McChord’s 190-bed, medium-security facility because Fort Hood doesn’t have a detention center. Where a prisoner serves his sentence is based on the length of the sentence and the space available at various military lockups.
Branum alleged mistreatment of Bishop and other detainees at the facility during an October news conference – charges Lewis-McChord public affairs officials have denied.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/04/02/1132402/soldier-who-refused-afghan-tour.html|
Soldier who refused Afghan tour released
Submitted by mgibbs on Sat, 04/03/2010 - 9:03pm. Scott Fontaine;
Tacoma News-Tribune
April 2, 2010
Pvt. Travis Bishop left his jail cell at Joint Base Lewis-McChord last week with no job, a criminal conviction and just one regret.
“I wish I had known about applying for a conscientious objector status a lot sooner,” said Bishop, a 26-year-old Louisville, Ky., native.
The former sergeant made headlines when he went absent without leave and refused to deploy to Afghanistan with his Fort Hood unit last year. Bishop cited his Christian beliefs in making the decision – a move that ultimately cost him 71/2 months of freedom and led international human-rights group Amnesty International to label him a prisoner of conscience.
He also became a rallying point for the local peace movement, with calls for his release increasing after Fort Lewis Lt. Ehren Watada – who refused to deploy to Iraq – was discharged last fall. Bishop spoke to supporters last weekend at Coffee Strong, a Lakewood resource center for war resisters and disaffected soldiers.
Bishop was released three months early after Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, granted Bishop’s request for clemency in February. Bishop is now effectively out of the Army. He retains the rank of private while an appeal to overturn his conviction and reverse the military’s plan for a bad-conduct discharge works its way through the military judicial system.
He now finds himself in the same place as countless others who left the military under less controversial circumstances: looking for a job, planning to enroll in college and adjusting to life without morning formations and buzz-cut requirements.
“I’m just trying to feel normal again,” Bishop said Tuesday in an interview with The News Tribune.
Bishop didn’t hold the same reservations about war when he enlisted in April 2004 or when he deployed to Iraq in 2006-07.
But as his unit prepared for an Afghanistan deployment early last year, he began asking himself tough questions.
“I had to get right with God in case I died or in case I had to kill someone,” he said.
He found answers in the Bible. Bishop, who was raised Baptist and considers himself a nondenominational Christian, came to believe Jesus preached a strict pacifist philosophy.
He felt trapped between his belief in the immorality of war and the duty to his friends to deploy with them. Some peace activists in Texas told him he could apply for conscientious-objector status. It was the first he’d heard of it outside the context of the Vietnam War, he said.
Bishop eventually made contact with James Branum, an Oklahoma-based lawyer, a day before the soldier was scheduled to fly to Afghanistan. Branum couldn’t advise him whether to go AWOL but did tell him the potential consequences, including jail time.
A sleepless night followed, and Bishop still struggled with the decision the morning before he was scheduled to leave.
“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m not going,’” he said. “But really, it’s hard – my best friend was going to go in my stead if I left.”
Bishop went AWOL hours before his flight left. He stayed with a friend while he filled out the conscientious-objector application. He turned himself into his company building a week later.
He was assigned a job with the company rear detachment. Almost everyone in his unit treated him professionally, he said, though small talk stopped with some people he once considered friends.
Authorities at Fort Hood turned down his request. He appealed to the Pentagon and was denied on that level as well.
Bishop blamed the timing of it, objecting as his unit prepared to go to war.
“I understand it hurt the validity of my claim,” he said. “I get that. But I didn’t know about CO status before then, and most of the military doesn’t know.”
His court-martial began in August, and he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in detention after a two-day trial. He arrived at the Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility in September.
He was held at Lewis-McChord’s 190-bed, medium-security facility because Fort Hood doesn’t have a detention center. Where a prisoner serves his sentence is based on the length of the sentence and the space available at various military lockups.
Branum alleged mistreatment of Bishop and other detainees at the facility during an October news conference – charges Lewis-McChord public affairs officials have denied.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/04/02/1132402/soldier-who-refused-afghan-tour.html|
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Under The Hood G.I. Support" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
*********
Injured Hearts, Injured Minds
by Forrest Wilder Font Size decrease font size increase font size Print Facebook Twitter Share Published on: Monday, August 03, 2009
In March, Army Spc. Michael Kern, 22, returned to Fort Hood after a year and a day in Iraq.
Shaken by his experience and disgusted with the war, Kern, a native of Riverside, Calif., tried to readjust by getting as hammered as possible. "Put it this way: For the first month, I was drunk at work, I was drunk 24/7."
In Iraq the violence had been fast and furious. "We were going through all sorts of bad shit: mortars, IEDs, indirect fire. Anything you can think of we experienced the first day."
On his second mission, Kern drew the short straw to drive the lead vehicle—a "mine resistant ambush protected" vehicle—in a convoy looking for a weapons cache near Baghdad. An IED exploded next to his vehicle, damaging his door. The platoon pulled back to base. The next day, April 7, on an identical mission, insurgents came after his unit with AK-47s, machine guns and IEDs. During the nine-hour firefight, a sniper killed Kern's buddy, Sgt. Richard A. Vaughn. Two others, including Kern's lieutenant, were seriously injured.
Kern tells me his story over two days in July at Under the Hood Café, a new GI coffeehouse and soldier-outreach center that opened in February. Since mid-May, when a drunken Kern first dropped in, Under the Hood has become his second home. While awaiting a medical discharge for PTSD and traumatic brain injury, he's here almost every day, working out what happened to him in Iraq, planning anti-war events and helping other soldiers come to terms with their combat experiences. The coffeehouse provides a support network, friends who've helped him quit drinking, people he can call on day or night, and provides what Kern appreciated most about the military: a sense of camaraderie.
"If it wasn't for this place, it's sad to say, I feel like I would be dead. I feel like I would have killed myself," Kern says.
Under the Hood is a rifle shot from the east gates of Fort Hood in a grim commercial zone of tattoo parlors, pawnshops, car lots, payday lenders, bars, strip clubs, and a place advertising "gold grillz" for teeth—establishments eager to drain young soldiers of their earnings. In this garrison town, the café has become a gathering place for dissident GIs, peace activists, veterans and active-duty soldiers who need help.
Inside, the walls are decorated with peace propaganda, including a map of the world pinpointing U.S. military interventions and a poster that reads, "You Can't Be All that You Can Be if You're Dead." A bookcase is stocked with anti-war literature. For entertainment, there's a dartboard, a foosball table and a big-screen TV with PlayStation. No alcohol is allowed, but there's no shortage of cigarette smoke.
Under the Hood is a gathering place for Ft. Hood soldiers, veterans and military spouses who are against the war or in need of help. Meet some of the patrons and organizers in this short documentary film by Matthew Gossage.
I came here to suss out efforts to build an anti-war movement within the Army. Fort Hood, the largest military installation in the country, has produced a smattering of war resisters in recent years. I met some of them at the coffeehouse, including Victor Agosto, an Iraq War veteran who refuses to deploy to Afghanistan, and Casey Porter, a mechanic who did two tours in Iraq. Porter, preparing to attend film school in Florida, recorded local life in Iraq, posting interviews with military personnel, battle footage and unvarnished street scenes.
Over the past four years, I've come into contact with scores of military personnel through my involvement with the Austin GI Rights Hotline, a group of volunteers trained to counsel service members about their rights.
Once a week, I sit on my couch and talk on the phone to soldiers, Marines and airmen who call with a dizzying array of issues, from the mundane to the impossibly complex. Many are stationed at Fort Hood. We get AWOL cases, people with untreated PTSD, 18-year-old enlistees who've found out their recruiter lied to them, middle-aged soldiers who've been stop-lossed, moms and dads calling on behalf of their kids, gay officers who've been outed—you name it. Some have made poor decisions; others are victims of a sometimes capricious, even cruel military system.
I got into it through my girlfriend. Katherine was in the news some years ago for being the first female conscientious objector to emerge from the war in Afghanistan. The military refused to recognize her as a conscientious objector, and after a long and painful process she was court-martialed and sentenced to 120 days in the brig. She ate lunch every day with Lynndie England, the young West Virginia woman best known for holding the leash in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos.
Joeie Michaels, Michael Kern's roommate and an Under the Hood regular, used to dance at Babes, a Killeen strip club popular with GIs. Performing there, she made sure the troops left with a flier for the coffeehouse.
Under the Hood's signal event was a Memorial Day peace march in the streets of Killeen, the city's first since Vietnam. The Killeen newspaper reported about 70 participants. Cindy Thomas, the military spouse who manages the coffeehouse and plays den mother to the young, often-raucous soldiers, estimates about 10 to 15 were locals, including veterans and active-duty soldiers.
"It's like a mother with a child," Thomas says. "It's unconditional love, and we help them any way we can."
The building housing Under the Hood's local antecedent, the Killeen coffeehouse Oleo Strut, is a few blocks away; it now houses an office complex. The Oleo Strut had a four-year run from 1968 to 1972, according to a history on Under the Hood's Web site. Run by civilians and veterans, the Oleo Strut plugged Fort Hood soldiers into the Vietnam anti-war movement and spread their ideas in the barracks. An underground newspaper circulated from the coffeehouse, and the crowd there organized demonstrations and teach-ins. Musicians passed through, purportedly including a young Stevie Ray Vaughan.
"The tinder was very dry," says Tom Cleaver, an Oleo Strut alum, Vietnam veteran and Hollywood screenwriter who helped raise money to start Under the Hood. "They ended up in '69 and '70 having big demonstrations there, a thousand guys marching in Killeen against the war."
Fort Hood at that time was a holding station for soldiers returning from Vietnam with less than six months left on their enlistments. Before being discharged, many were deployed to suppress domestic riots and protests, including those at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
"Here they come back to America, and what does the Army want them to do?" Cleaver asks. "Fight a war in America. That radicalized a lot of guys. They came back with bad feelings about the war, and now they were supposed to go defend the war."
There's no draft now, nor is there a broader social counterculture, to tap into. Given that, Thomas says, one of Under the Hood's primary functions is giving soldiers a place to speak openly.
"The military, they don't want you to think for yourself," Thomas says. "They don't want you to be informed; they don't want you to know that you have support because they function by fear and intimidation over these soldiers. So when you have a space where you can talk freely and find out what your rights are, you have that support, you have that kindness. It is a threat to them."
One coffeehouse regular, Spc. Ben Fugate, told me that after his commander spotted his name in a Killeen Daily Herald article about the Memorial Day peace march, his unit was lectured for two hours on the dangers of protesting.
Fugate, who describes himself as "very conservative," had been quoted in the paper saying, "I lost three buddies in my platoon in Iraq, and for what? Why lose more when we don't have to?"
Kern, seated on a couch in a cozy back room at Under the Hood, explains how he became a coffeehouse fixture. It's a Thursday in July, and he's wearing a T-shirt that asks, "Got Rights?" He's pale and swallowing tranquilizers to suppress panic attacks.
"I'm fucked up," he says. "I know it." Later, he says, "You know how they say a teenage boy thinks about sex every eight seconds. Every eight seconds I think about Iraq."
Kern, a tanker, says his unit averaged about two and a half missions per day.
At first, Kern says, he was gung ho: "I was an excellent soldier. I took joy out of killing people in Iraq. It was such an adrenaline rush. I craved it."
Over time, bravado faded into depression, guilt and a strong feeling that the war was wrong. When Kern deployed to Iraq he took a small handheld digital video camera and a laptop with editing software. He fixed the camera to his vehicle's turret and captured hours of patrol footage.
Some of that raw video has been distilled to a 10-minute film called Fire Mission that's available online.
In the film's last minutes, Spc. Steven Pesicka, a soldier in Kern's unit, narrates what he calls a "mortar mission for shock and awe" near an Iraqi village. The first mortar lands near a house, and the forward observer calls for the next one to be targeted 200 meters farther from the village. The mortar team thought that was too far away, Pesicka says. The film shows the second mortar hitting the town. "Oh fuck," the forward observer is heard to say. "They did not drop 200 [meters], over. They hit the town."
Minutes after the explosion, the soldier describes dead bodies being loaded into the back of trucks.
Such experiences led Kern to a radical form of empathy.
"If you just take a step back and you think, I mean, I'd be doing the same thing if Iraqis were in the United States," Kern, dressed in battle fatigues, says in Fire Mission. "I'd be the dude trying to plant a bomb under the road. I'd be trying to kill them. Oh, hell yeah, get the fuck out of my country."
Beginning in May or June, Kern started having nightmares, sometimes while he was awake. On several occasions he hallucinated an Iraqi child with half his skull missing, as real to him as the desert heat. His psychiatrist says the child might represent guilt, but all Kern knows is that it scared the shit out of him. In January, on his birthday, while his unit was on patrol, he told a commander—in confidence—that he was going to see a mental health specialist. The doctor prescribed Zoloft and sent him on his way. Back with his platoon, Kern discovered that the commander had ratted him out to his platoon sergeant.
"I was called out in front of the entire platoon, was made an example of, saying why are you going to mental health. This isn't a war. This isn't bad." The next day, on a mission, Kern talked openly of suicide. "Still to this day, my buddy doesn't know he talked me down, but I really wanted to kill myself on that mission. I had three loaded weapons sitting right next to me. I could have done it real easy."
Back home, Kern avoided his demons, drowning them in drink. Thomas and Michaels encouraged Kern to open up.
"They'd be like, 'How was Iraq?' I'd say 'Oh, it was just Iraq.' I kept brushing it aside and stuff. They kept telling me, 'You're gonna break, you're gonna break. You need to get help.' " Kern relented.
Michaels found a psychiatrist in Austin whom Kern has been seeing twice a week for free. In May he visited Fort Hood's mental health services office, but was told he'd have to wait six weeks to see a doctor.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi child had followed Kern back to Texas. On the first of June, Kern was in the bathroom at Under the Hood when the child made an appearance. Afterward, Thomas and Michaels found Kern sitting outside under a tree. "The look on his face was just empty. His eyes were hollow," Thomas says. Kern entered the 12-bed psychiatric ward at Fort Hood's military hospital. He spent the next week there, emerging with a diagnosis of PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Doctors put him on five medications, including tranquilizers, antidepressants and antipsychotics, which he carries in a small orange pillbox.
A week after being released, Kern started a blog, "Expendable Soldier." In his first post he wrote, "I still hate myself and everything I do. No matter what I am doing any day of the week I some how am still reminded of the things I did while I was in Iraq, and sometimes it gets so bad that I believe I am still in Iraq. ... Sometimes I wish I never came back."
Still, Kern reports for duty at the coffeehouse every day. He's working on restarting an Iraq Veterans Against the War chapter in Killeen and talking to other soldiers about the coffeehouse. Does he feel like he's become part of an anti-war movement? "I am part of an anti-war movement," he says. "There's no 'feeling' about it."
*********
Injured Hearts, Injured Minds
by Forrest Wilder Font Size decrease font size increase font size Print Facebook Twitter Share Published on: Monday, August 03, 2009
In March, Army Spc. Michael Kern, 22, returned to Fort Hood after a year and a day in Iraq.
Shaken by his experience and disgusted with the war, Kern, a native of Riverside, Calif., tried to readjust by getting as hammered as possible. "Put it this way: For the first month, I was drunk at work, I was drunk 24/7."
In Iraq the violence had been fast and furious. "We were going through all sorts of bad shit: mortars, IEDs, indirect fire. Anything you can think of we experienced the first day."
On his second mission, Kern drew the short straw to drive the lead vehicle—a "mine resistant ambush protected" vehicle—in a convoy looking for a weapons cache near Baghdad. An IED exploded next to his vehicle, damaging his door. The platoon pulled back to base. The next day, April 7, on an identical mission, insurgents came after his unit with AK-47s, machine guns and IEDs. During the nine-hour firefight, a sniper killed Kern's buddy, Sgt. Richard A. Vaughn. Two others, including Kern's lieutenant, were seriously injured.
Kern tells me his story over two days in July at Under the Hood Café, a new GI coffeehouse and soldier-outreach center that opened in February. Since mid-May, when a drunken Kern first dropped in, Under the Hood has become his second home. While awaiting a medical discharge for PTSD and traumatic brain injury, he's here almost every day, working out what happened to him in Iraq, planning anti-war events and helping other soldiers come to terms with their combat experiences. The coffeehouse provides a support network, friends who've helped him quit drinking, people he can call on day or night, and provides what Kern appreciated most about the military: a sense of camaraderie.
"If it wasn't for this place, it's sad to say, I feel like I would be dead. I feel like I would have killed myself," Kern says.
Under the Hood is a rifle shot from the east gates of Fort Hood in a grim commercial zone of tattoo parlors, pawnshops, car lots, payday lenders, bars, strip clubs, and a place advertising "gold grillz" for teeth—establishments eager to drain young soldiers of their earnings. In this garrison town, the café has become a gathering place for dissident GIs, peace activists, veterans and active-duty soldiers who need help.
Inside, the walls are decorated with peace propaganda, including a map of the world pinpointing U.S. military interventions and a poster that reads, "You Can't Be All that You Can Be if You're Dead." A bookcase is stocked with anti-war literature. For entertainment, there's a dartboard, a foosball table and a big-screen TV with PlayStation. No alcohol is allowed, but there's no shortage of cigarette smoke.
Under the Hood is a gathering place for Ft. Hood soldiers, veterans and military spouses who are against the war or in need of help. Meet some of the patrons and organizers in this short documentary film by Matthew Gossage.
I came here to suss out efforts to build an anti-war movement within the Army. Fort Hood, the largest military installation in the country, has produced a smattering of war resisters in recent years. I met some of them at the coffeehouse, including Victor Agosto, an Iraq War veteran who refuses to deploy to Afghanistan, and Casey Porter, a mechanic who did two tours in Iraq. Porter, preparing to attend film school in Florida, recorded local life in Iraq, posting interviews with military personnel, battle footage and unvarnished street scenes.
Over the past four years, I've come into contact with scores of military personnel through my involvement with the Austin GI Rights Hotline, a group of volunteers trained to counsel service members about their rights.
Once a week, I sit on my couch and talk on the phone to soldiers, Marines and airmen who call with a dizzying array of issues, from the mundane to the impossibly complex. Many are stationed at Fort Hood. We get AWOL cases, people with untreated PTSD, 18-year-old enlistees who've found out their recruiter lied to them, middle-aged soldiers who've been stop-lossed, moms and dads calling on behalf of their kids, gay officers who've been outed—you name it. Some have made poor decisions; others are victims of a sometimes capricious, even cruel military system.
I got into it through my girlfriend. Katherine was in the news some years ago for being the first female conscientious objector to emerge from the war in Afghanistan. The military refused to recognize her as a conscientious objector, and after a long and painful process she was court-martialed and sentenced to 120 days in the brig. She ate lunch every day with Lynndie England, the young West Virginia woman best known for holding the leash in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos.
Joeie Michaels, Michael Kern's roommate and an Under the Hood regular, used to dance at Babes, a Killeen strip club popular with GIs. Performing there, she made sure the troops left with a flier for the coffeehouse.
Under the Hood's signal event was a Memorial Day peace march in the streets of Killeen, the city's first since Vietnam. The Killeen newspaper reported about 70 participants. Cindy Thomas, the military spouse who manages the coffeehouse and plays den mother to the young, often-raucous soldiers, estimates about 10 to 15 were locals, including veterans and active-duty soldiers.
"It's like a mother with a child," Thomas says. "It's unconditional love, and we help them any way we can."
The building housing Under the Hood's local antecedent, the Killeen coffeehouse Oleo Strut, is a few blocks away; it now houses an office complex. The Oleo Strut had a four-year run from 1968 to 1972, according to a history on Under the Hood's Web site. Run by civilians and veterans, the Oleo Strut plugged Fort Hood soldiers into the Vietnam anti-war movement and spread their ideas in the barracks. An underground newspaper circulated from the coffeehouse, and the crowd there organized demonstrations and teach-ins. Musicians passed through, purportedly including a young Stevie Ray Vaughan.
"The tinder was very dry," says Tom Cleaver, an Oleo Strut alum, Vietnam veteran and Hollywood screenwriter who helped raise money to start Under the Hood. "They ended up in '69 and '70 having big demonstrations there, a thousand guys marching in Killeen against the war."
Fort Hood at that time was a holding station for soldiers returning from Vietnam with less than six months left on their enlistments. Before being discharged, many were deployed to suppress domestic riots and protests, including those at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
"Here they come back to America, and what does the Army want them to do?" Cleaver asks. "Fight a war in America. That radicalized a lot of guys. They came back with bad feelings about the war, and now they were supposed to go defend the war."
There's no draft now, nor is there a broader social counterculture, to tap into. Given that, Thomas says, one of Under the Hood's primary functions is giving soldiers a place to speak openly.
"The military, they don't want you to think for yourself," Thomas says. "They don't want you to be informed; they don't want you to know that you have support because they function by fear and intimidation over these soldiers. So when you have a space where you can talk freely and find out what your rights are, you have that support, you have that kindness. It is a threat to them."
One coffeehouse regular, Spc. Ben Fugate, told me that after his commander spotted his name in a Killeen Daily Herald article about the Memorial Day peace march, his unit was lectured for two hours on the dangers of protesting.
Fugate, who describes himself as "very conservative," had been quoted in the paper saying, "I lost three buddies in my platoon in Iraq, and for what? Why lose more when we don't have to?"
Kern, seated on a couch in a cozy back room at Under the Hood, explains how he became a coffeehouse fixture. It's a Thursday in July, and he's wearing a T-shirt that asks, "Got Rights?" He's pale and swallowing tranquilizers to suppress panic attacks.
"I'm fucked up," he says. "I know it." Later, he says, "You know how they say a teenage boy thinks about sex every eight seconds. Every eight seconds I think about Iraq."
Kern, a tanker, says his unit averaged about two and a half missions per day.
At first, Kern says, he was gung ho: "I was an excellent soldier. I took joy out of killing people in Iraq. It was such an adrenaline rush. I craved it."
Over time, bravado faded into depression, guilt and a strong feeling that the war was wrong. When Kern deployed to Iraq he took a small handheld digital video camera and a laptop with editing software. He fixed the camera to his vehicle's turret and captured hours of patrol footage.
Some of that raw video has been distilled to a 10-minute film called Fire Mission that's available online.
In the film's last minutes, Spc. Steven Pesicka, a soldier in Kern's unit, narrates what he calls a "mortar mission for shock and awe" near an Iraqi village. The first mortar lands near a house, and the forward observer calls for the next one to be targeted 200 meters farther from the village. The mortar team thought that was too far away, Pesicka says. The film shows the second mortar hitting the town. "Oh fuck," the forward observer is heard to say. "They did not drop 200 [meters], over. They hit the town."
Minutes after the explosion, the soldier describes dead bodies being loaded into the back of trucks.
Such experiences led Kern to a radical form of empathy.
"If you just take a step back and you think, I mean, I'd be doing the same thing if Iraqis were in the United States," Kern, dressed in battle fatigues, says in Fire Mission. "I'd be the dude trying to plant a bomb under the road. I'd be trying to kill them. Oh, hell yeah, get the fuck out of my country."
Beginning in May or June, Kern started having nightmares, sometimes while he was awake. On several occasions he hallucinated an Iraqi child with half his skull missing, as real to him as the desert heat. His psychiatrist says the child might represent guilt, but all Kern knows is that it scared the shit out of him. In January, on his birthday, while his unit was on patrol, he told a commander—in confidence—that he was going to see a mental health specialist. The doctor prescribed Zoloft and sent him on his way. Back with his platoon, Kern discovered that the commander had ratted him out to his platoon sergeant.
"I was called out in front of the entire platoon, was made an example of, saying why are you going to mental health. This isn't a war. This isn't bad." The next day, on a mission, Kern talked openly of suicide. "Still to this day, my buddy doesn't know he talked me down, but I really wanted to kill myself on that mission. I had three loaded weapons sitting right next to me. I could have done it real easy."
Back home, Kern avoided his demons, drowning them in drink. Thomas and Michaels encouraged Kern to open up.
"They'd be like, 'How was Iraq?' I'd say 'Oh, it was just Iraq.' I kept brushing it aside and stuff. They kept telling me, 'You're gonna break, you're gonna break. You need to get help.' " Kern relented.
Michaels found a psychiatrist in Austin whom Kern has been seeing twice a week for free. In May he visited Fort Hood's mental health services office, but was told he'd have to wait six weeks to see a doctor.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi child had followed Kern back to Texas. On the first of June, Kern was in the bathroom at Under the Hood when the child made an appearance. Afterward, Thomas and Michaels found Kern sitting outside under a tree. "The look on his face was just empty. His eyes were hollow," Thomas says. Kern entered the 12-bed psychiatric ward at Fort Hood's military hospital. He spent the next week there, emerging with a diagnosis of PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Doctors put him on five medications, including tranquilizers, antidepressants and antipsychotics, which he carries in a small orange pillbox.
A week after being released, Kern started a blog, "Expendable Soldier." In his first post he wrote, "I still hate myself and everything I do. No matter what I am doing any day of the week I some how am still reminded of the things I did while I was in Iraq, and sometimes it gets so bad that I believe I am still in Iraq. ... Sometimes I wish I never came back."
Still, Kern reports for duty at the coffeehouse every day. He's working on restarting an Iraq Veterans Against the War chapter in Killeen and talking to other soldiers about the coffeehouse. Does he feel like he's become part of an anti-war movement? "I am part of an anti-war movement," he says. "There's no 'feeling' about it."
Friday, July 30, 2010
*The Last Waltz- The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies-And Good Night All
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Shangri-las performing The Leader Of The Pack. Wow!
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Fifteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1990
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the Dionne Warwick’s Walk On By fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful, snappy timing and voice intonation. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
****************
Leader Of The Pack Lyrics
[Spoken:]
Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let's ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where'd you meet him?
I met him at the candy store
He turned around and smiled at me
You get the picture? (yes, we see)
That's when I fell for (the leader of the pack)
My folks were always putting him down (down, down)
They said he came from the wrong side of town
(whatcha mean when ya say that he came from the wrong side of town?)
They told me he was bad
But I knew he was sad
That's why I fell for (the leader of the pack)
One day my dad said, "Find someone new"
I had to tell my Jimmy we're through
(whatcha mean when ya say that ya better go find somebody new?)
He stood there and asked me why
But all I could do was cry
I'm sorry I hurt you (the leader of the pack)
[Spoken:]
He sort of smiled and kissed me goodbye
The tears were beginning to show
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow
But whether he heard, I'll never know
Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!
I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
[Fade]
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Fifteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1990
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the Dionne Warwick’s Walk On By fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful, snappy timing and voice intonation. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
****************
Leader Of The Pack Lyrics
[Spoken:]
Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let's ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where'd you meet him?
I met him at the candy store
He turned around and smiled at me
You get the picture? (yes, we see)
That's when I fell for (the leader of the pack)
My folks were always putting him down (down, down)
They said he came from the wrong side of town
(whatcha mean when ya say that he came from the wrong side of town?)
They told me he was bad
But I knew he was sad
That's why I fell for (the leader of the pack)
One day my dad said, "Find someone new"
I had to tell my Jimmy we're through
(whatcha mean when ya say that ya better go find somebody new?)
He stood there and asked me why
But all I could do was cry
I'm sorry I hurt you (the leader of the pack)
[Spoken:]
He sort of smiled and kissed me goodbye
The tears were beginning to show
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow
But whether he heard, I'll never know
Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!
I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him (the leader of the pack)
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
The leader of the pack - now he's gone
[Fade]
*The Last Waltz- The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies-Yet Again
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Haley and the Comets performing their classic Rock Around The Clock.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Fourteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1990
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Brenda Lee weepy tune I’m Sorry fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful timing. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*******
Rock Around The Clock-Song Lyrics from Bill Haley
One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock,
Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock,
Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.
Put your glad rags on and join me, hon,
We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the clock strikes two, three and four,
If the band slows down we'll yell for more,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the chimes ring five, six and seven,
We'll be right in seventh heaven.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When it's eight, nine, ten, eleven too,
I'll be goin' strong and so will you.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the clock strikes twelve, we'll cool off then,
Start a rockin' round the clock again.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Fourteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1990
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Brenda Lee weepy tune I’m Sorry fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful timing. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*******
Rock Around The Clock-Song Lyrics from Bill Haley
One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock,
Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock,
Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.
Put your glad rags on and join me, hon,
We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the clock strikes two, three and four,
If the band slows down we'll yell for more,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the chimes ring five, six and seven,
We'll be right in seventh heaven.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When it's eight, nine, ten, eleven too,
I'll be goin' strong and so will you.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
When the clock strikes twelve, we'll cool off then,
Start a rockin' round the clock again.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
*The Last Waltz- The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies- An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Aretha Franklin performing her classic Chain Of Fools.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Thirteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1993
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic There Goes My Baby fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful timing. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**********
Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools lyrics
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Five long years I thought you were my man
But I found out I'm just a link in your chain
You got me where you want me
I ain't nothing but your fool
You treated me mean oh you treated me cruel
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Every chain has got a weak link
I might be weak child, but I'll give you strength
You told me to leave you alone
My father said come on home
My doctor said take it easy
Whole bunch of lovin is much too strong
I'm added to your chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain,
Chain, chain of fools
One of these mornings the chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah, I'm gonna take all I can take
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Thirteen, Original Sound Record Co., 1993
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic There Goes My Baby fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful timing. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**********
Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools lyrics
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Five long years I thought you were my man
But I found out I'm just a link in your chain
You got me where you want me
I ain't nothing but your fool
You treated me mean oh you treated me cruel
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Every chain has got a weak link
I might be weak child, but I'll give you strength
You told me to leave you alone
My father said come on home
My doctor said take it easy
Whole bunch of lovin is much too strong
I'm added to your chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain,
Chain, chain of fools
One of these mornings the chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah, I'm gonna take all I can take
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
*The Last Waltz- The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Dixie Cups performing the classic Chapel Of Love.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eleven, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, the Maurice Evans click-clack Little Darlin’. The Kingmen’s early rock anthem Louie, Louie. The knife-twisty My Boyfriend’s Back. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, The Everly Brothers When Will I Be Loved? (and about half a dozen of their songs).
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Dixie Cups tune, Chapel Of Love, fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the harmonies (by the way they stopped the show at the Newport Folk Festival about 15 years with that beauty). And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**********
Chapel Of Love Lyrics
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Spring is here, th-e-e sky is blue, whoa-oh-oh
Birds all sing as if they knew
Today's the day we'll say "I do"
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Bells will ring, the-e-e sun will shine, whoa-oh-oh
I'll be his and he'll be mine
We'll love until the end of time
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
FADE
Goin' to
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eleven, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
Note: The term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. Just when I thought I had completed this “Oldies But Goodies” series at Volume Ten I now find that this is a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. Therefore I am whipping off these last five in one day and be done with it. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in these compilations. How many times can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
******
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, the Maurice Evans click-clack Little Darlin’. The Kingmen’s early rock anthem Louie, Louie. The knife-twisty My Boyfriend’s Back. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, The Everly Brothers When Will I Be Loved? (and about half a dozen of their songs).
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Dixie Cups tune, Chapel Of Love, fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the harmonies (by the way they stopped the show at the Newport Folk Festival about 15 years with that beauty). And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**********
Chapel Of Love Lyrics
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Spring is here, th-e-e sky is blue, whoa-oh-oh
Birds all sing as if they knew
Today's the day we'll say "I do"
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Bells will ring, the-e-e sun will shine, whoa-oh-oh
I'll be his and he'll be mine
We'll love until the end of time
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Gee, I really love you
And we're gonna get ma-a-arried
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
FADE
Goin' to
Thursday, July 29, 2010
*The Latest From The "Lynne Stewart Defense Committee" Website- Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee Website.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart Now!- She Must Not Die In Prison!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart Now!- She Must Not Die In Prison!
*Once Again-The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bo Diddley performing his classic Bo Diddley.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Ten, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, the late Bo Diddley’s monster guitar riffs on Bo Diddley (and about ten other of his mad man songs from this period). Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven (and about twenty of his songs from this period). And also naturally Fats Domino’s My Blue Heaven (ditto).
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Jerry Butler and Betty Everett Let It Be Me fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six and Eight reviews. Does this mean we are going “steady”?) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**************
Bo Diddley Lyrics
(Ellas McDaniel) 1955
Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring,
If that diamond ring don't shine,
He gonna take it to a private eye,
If that private eye can't see
He'd better not take the ring from me.
Bo Diddley caught a nanny goat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday coat,
Bo Diddley caught a bear cat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday hat.
Mojo come to my house, ya black cat bone,
Take my baby away from home,
Ugly ole mojo, where ya bin,
Up your house, and gone again.
Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley have you heard?
My pretty baby said she wasn't for it.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Ten, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, the late Bo Diddley’s monster guitar riffs on Bo Diddley (and about ten other of his mad man songs from this period). Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven (and about twenty of his songs from this period). And also naturally Fats Domino’s My Blue Heaven (ditto).
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Jerry Butler and Betty Everett Let It Be Me fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six and Eight reviews. Does this mean we are going “steady”?) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
**************
Bo Diddley Lyrics
(Ellas McDaniel) 1955
Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring,
If that diamond ring don't shine,
He gonna take it to a private eye,
If that private eye can't see
He'd better not take the ring from me.
Bo Diddley caught a nanny goat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday coat,
Bo Diddley caught a bear cat,
To make his pretty baby a Sunday hat.
Mojo come to my house, ya black cat bone,
Take my baby away from home,
Ugly ole mojo, where ya bin,
Up your house, and gone again.
Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley have you heard?
My pretty baby said she wasn't for it.
*The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies-An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Eddie Cochran rocking on his classic Summertime Blues.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eight, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Little Richards’ Rip It Up (and about twenty other of his mad man songs from this period). Too short-lived Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Eddie Cochran’s monster guitar beat Summertime Blues. And also naturally Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here The Drifters classic On Broadway fills the bill. Hey, I did like this, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six review, for those keeping score) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*************
Summertime Blues- Eddie Cochran
I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well my mom and pop told me, "Son you gotta make some money,
If you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday"
Well I didn't go to work, told the boss I was sick
"Well you can't use the car 'cause you didn't work a lick"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Eight, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Little Richards’ Rip It Up (and about twenty other of his mad man songs from this period). Too short-lived Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Eddie Cochran’s monster guitar beat Summertime Blues. And also naturally Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here The Drifters classic On Broadway fills the bill. Hey, I did like this, especially the harmonies, and moreover that certain she (the same certain she of the Volume Six review, for those keeping score) said yes and this was what you waited for and made it all worthwhile. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*************
Summertime Blues- Eddie Cochran
I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well my mom and pop told me, "Son you gotta make some money,
If you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday"
Well I didn't go to work, told the boss I was sick
"Well you can't use the car 'cause you didn't work a lick"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
*The Never-Ending Review Tour-Coming Of Age, Period- Oldies But Goodies
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Gene Chandler performing his classic Duke Of Earl
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Six, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Breathless (and about twenty other of his songs from this period). The Isley Brothers’ classic Twist And Shout. Dion and The Belmonts Teenager In Love (the battle cry of our, and every, generation). Naturally, in a period of classic doo wop numbers, Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Little Caesar’s Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me Of You fills the bill. Hey, I didn’t even like the song that much, or the singing, but that certain she (a different certain she than in earlier reviews, oh fickle youth) said yes and this was what you waited for so don’t be so choosey. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
Duke Of Earl Lyrics-Gene Chandler
Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And-a you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yea yea yeah
And when I hold you
You'll be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And a paradise we will share
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Well, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Six, Original Sound Record Co., 1986
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer, and perhaps to some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s-oriented compilation “speaks” to. Of course, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Breathless (and about twenty other of his songs from this period). The Isley Brothers’ classic Twist And Shout. Dion and The Belmonts Teenager In Love (the battle cry of our, and every, generation). Naturally, in a period of classic doo wop numbers, Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl.
But what about the now, seeming mandatory to ask, inevitable end of the night high school dance song (or maybe even middle school) that seems to be included in each CD compilation? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here the classic Little Caesar’s Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me Of You fills the bill. Hey, I didn’t even like the song that much, or the singing, but that certain she (a different certain she than in earlier reviews, oh fickle youth) said yes and this was what you waited for so don’t be so choosey. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
Duke Of Earl Lyrics-Gene Chandler
Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And-a you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yea yea yeah
And when I hold you
You'll be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And a paradise we will share
Yes-a, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Well, I, oh I'm gonna love you, oh oh
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl
So hey yeah yeah yeah
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
*A Tip Of The Hat To "Wikileaks"- Blessed Are The Whistleblowers- Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!
Click on the headline to link to a Wikileaks entry for the some 75,000 2004-2009 Afghan War documents that were laid at their doorstep.
Markin comment:
No bourgeois government, liberal, conservative, centrist or what not likes whistleblowers, in any shape, size or form, period, although we of the extra-parliamentary left certainly do if for no other reason that to see just how grimy and bad the inner workings of the governments we oppose propagandistically day in and day out really are. The Stalinists, as we also know were, and in places like China and Cuba today, are just slightly behind in their scornful attitude toward the species. Nevertheless more knowledge is always a good thing. As 19th century revolutionary, Karl Marx, was fond of saying, “ignorance never did anybody any good.” A very worthy tip of the hat to Wikileaks and to their whistleblowers.
Of course, that is not the end of the matter. The material provided here, unlike the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War, is not an expose of the Bush and Obama administrations' high inner-circle deliberations about the direction of the Afghan War. But, we will take what we can get. On the surface, at least, this material gives us plenty of ammunition to expose the duplicity of the Americans, the Pakistanis, and all factions of the Afghanis (including the Taliban) and, when the deal is finished, who knows who else. But here is the clincher- None of that material does us any good, or little good, if we don’t get a massive opposition organized (something coming off of last spring’s anti-war drive in Washington, D.C. on March 20th we have not done yet) to the Obama/Allied Afghan War policies. Thus- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan (And Iraq)!
Markin comment:
No bourgeois government, liberal, conservative, centrist or what not likes whistleblowers, in any shape, size or form, period, although we of the extra-parliamentary left certainly do if for no other reason that to see just how grimy and bad the inner workings of the governments we oppose propagandistically day in and day out really are. The Stalinists, as we also know were, and in places like China and Cuba today, are just slightly behind in their scornful attitude toward the species. Nevertheless more knowledge is always a good thing. As 19th century revolutionary, Karl Marx, was fond of saying, “ignorance never did anybody any good.” A very worthy tip of the hat to Wikileaks and to their whistleblowers.
Of course, that is not the end of the matter. The material provided here, unlike the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War, is not an expose of the Bush and Obama administrations' high inner-circle deliberations about the direction of the Afghan War. But, we will take what we can get. On the surface, at least, this material gives us plenty of ammunition to expose the duplicity of the Americans, the Pakistanis, and all factions of the Afghanis (including the Taliban) and, when the deal is finished, who knows who else. But here is the clincher- None of that material does us any good, or little good, if we don’t get a massive opposition organized (something coming off of last spring’s anti-war drive in Washington, D.C. on March 20th we have not done yet) to the Obama/Allied Afghan War policies. Thus- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan (And Iraq)!
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace- The Latest From The "Courage To Resist" G.I. Anti-War Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
I thought the winds of change were coming...
US Army Private. July 21, 2010
I would just like to say this website is a safe-haven for me when i thought there was none. I recently joined the National Guard because i was looking to serve the people in my community, state, and country. After President Obama's campaign two years ago in which he criticized supporters of these illegal wars I thought the winds of change were coming. I was naive to think so. I was lied to. We were all lied to. Now I'm facing the possibility of having to go all the way overseas to kill and destroy another country. This is wrong and it makes me physically sick at night. It also makes me sick knowing that there are people out there who still support these wars. I would just like to thank you for listening and for giving people like me a safe-haven to come to.
Published with permission by the author.
I thought the winds of change were coming...
US Army Private. July 21, 2010
I would just like to say this website is a safe-haven for me when i thought there was none. I recently joined the National Guard because i was looking to serve the people in my community, state, and country. After President Obama's campaign two years ago in which he criticized supporters of these illegal wars I thought the winds of change were coming. I was naive to think so. I was lied to. We were all lied to. Now I'm facing the possibility of having to go all the way overseas to kill and destroy another country. This is wrong and it makes me physically sick at night. It also makes me sick knowing that there are people out there who still support these wars. I would just like to thank you for listening and for giving people like me a safe-haven to come to.
Published with permission by the author.
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Black Panther Alumni" Website- Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment: Free Sundiata Now!
****
This is sick. Sundiata is 73. Come back when you're 83 and maybe????!!!! He's one of the best of our freedom fighters (which the government calls "domestic terrorists."). For more info on our righteous brother, go to http://www.sundiataacoli.org/ where you can find his address as well. Send him some love.
July 14, 2010
Greetings All,
Received a letter today from the Board advising that the 3-Member Panel gave me a 10 year "hit." The basis for the hit will be explained in the Notice of Decision which will be forwarded to me upon its completion. I'll forward copies of the Decision to the Attys and SAFC when I receive it.
Stay strong, I will too.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
Markin comment: Free Sundiata Now!
****
This is sick. Sundiata is 73. Come back when you're 83 and maybe????!!!! He's one of the best of our freedom fighters (which the government calls "domestic terrorists."). For more info on our righteous brother, go to http://www.sundiataacoli.org/ where you can find his address as well. Send him some love.
July 14, 2010
Greetings All,
Received a letter today from the Board advising that the 3-Member Panel gave me a 10 year "hit." The basis for the hit will be explained in the Notice of Decision which will be forwarded to me upon its completion. I'll forward copies of the Decision to the Attys and SAFC when I receive it.
Stay strong, I will too.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "Different Drummer (Fort Drum)" Website-Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
************
THE NEW GULF WAR SYNDROME
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks
By Nora Eisenberg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 11 2008 14.00 GMT
What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerised limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems – the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.
As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.
Unfortunately, the dangers of modern war extend far beyond weapons. As Iraqis know only too well, areas of Iraq today are among the most polluted on the planet – so toxic that merely to live, eat and sleep (never mind to fight) in these zones is to risk death. Thousands of soldiers coming home from the war may have been exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancers and neurological problems. What's most tragic is that the veterans themselves do not always realise that they are in danger from chemical poisoning. Right now, there is no clear way for Iraq war veterans to find out what they've been exposed to and where to get help.
In October, the Military Times reported on the open-air pits on US bases in Iraq, where troops incinerate tons of waste. Because of such pits, tens of thousands of soldiers may be breathing air contaminated with burning Freon, jet fuel and other carcinogens. According to reports, soldiers are coughing up blood or the black goop that has been nicknamed "plume crud".
In other cases, soldiers may have been exposed to poisons spread during efforts to restore Iraq's infrastructure. In 2003, for instance, members of the Indiana national guard were put in charge of protecting a water-treatment plant. They were told not to worry about the bright orange dust lying in piles around the plant, swirling in the air and gathering in the folds of their uniforms. In fact, Indiana soldiers spent weeks or months in a wasteland contaminated with sodium dichromate. The chemical, made famous after its role as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich, is used to peel corrosion off of water pipes. It is a carcinogen that attacks the lungs and sinuses.
Today, a decade and a half after the first Gulf war, we know that such exposure may lead to widespread suffering. In 1991, veterans began to exhibit fatigue, fevers, rashes, joint pain, intestinal problems, memory loss, mood swings and even cancers, a cluster of symptoms and conditions referred to now as Gulf war syndrome (or illness). For years, the US department of defence maintained that stress caused the veterans' symptoms. Veterans groups blamed war-related toxins. This year, the National Academy of Sciences published an extensive review of years of scientific study of Gulf war illness that concluded a cause and effect relationship existed between the widespread illnesses among veterans and exposure to powerful neurotoxins. Complementing the US studies is an emerging body of epidemiological data linking increased incidence of Iraqi cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and multi-system diseases to toxic exposure.
Strangely enough, though, there has been almost no discussion of whether today's soldiers – those fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan – have also been injured by wartime poisons. We don't have a word yet for the constellation of cancers, psychological ills and systemic diseases that may be caused by toxins in today's wars.
In order to care for our veterans, we must do more than offer state-of-the-art hospitals and high-tech prosthetics. Veterans will need information about what poisons they have breathed or touched or drunk and when.
What would such an effort look like? First the military would need to disclose all known incidents of toxic exposure. Then it would have to reach out to veterans and give them information about how to receive care for conditions that arise from this exposure.
This summer, senator Evan Bayh made a first stab at such a system. Bayh pushed the national guard to track down hundreds of those Indiana soldiers who may have breathed orange dust back in 2003. Most of the soldiers are now civilians scattered across the US, unaware that they are at high risk for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Some of them may already be struggling with illness. The national guard is making an effort to search for these veterans and provide them with a phone number to call in order to seek medical help.
That's a good first step. But what about all the other veterans who believe that they have returned home from the war healthy? Without knowing it, they may be carrying a small bomb inside them. And they have a right to know.
************
THE NEW GULF WAR SYNDROME
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks
By Nora Eisenberg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 11 2008 14.00 GMT
What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerised limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems – the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.
As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.
Unfortunately, the dangers of modern war extend far beyond weapons. As Iraqis know only too well, areas of Iraq today are among the most polluted on the planet – so toxic that merely to live, eat and sleep (never mind to fight) in these zones is to risk death. Thousands of soldiers coming home from the war may have been exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancers and neurological problems. What's most tragic is that the veterans themselves do not always realise that they are in danger from chemical poisoning. Right now, there is no clear way for Iraq war veterans to find out what they've been exposed to and where to get help.
In October, the Military Times reported on the open-air pits on US bases in Iraq, where troops incinerate tons of waste. Because of such pits, tens of thousands of soldiers may be breathing air contaminated with burning Freon, jet fuel and other carcinogens. According to reports, soldiers are coughing up blood or the black goop that has been nicknamed "plume crud".
In other cases, soldiers may have been exposed to poisons spread during efforts to restore Iraq's infrastructure. In 2003, for instance, members of the Indiana national guard were put in charge of protecting a water-treatment plant. They were told not to worry about the bright orange dust lying in piles around the plant, swirling in the air and gathering in the folds of their uniforms. In fact, Indiana soldiers spent weeks or months in a wasteland contaminated with sodium dichromate. The chemical, made famous after its role as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich, is used to peel corrosion off of water pipes. It is a carcinogen that attacks the lungs and sinuses.
Today, a decade and a half after the first Gulf war, we know that such exposure may lead to widespread suffering. In 1991, veterans began to exhibit fatigue, fevers, rashes, joint pain, intestinal problems, memory loss, mood swings and even cancers, a cluster of symptoms and conditions referred to now as Gulf war syndrome (or illness). For years, the US department of defence maintained that stress caused the veterans' symptoms. Veterans groups blamed war-related toxins. This year, the National Academy of Sciences published an extensive review of years of scientific study of Gulf war illness that concluded a cause and effect relationship existed between the widespread illnesses among veterans and exposure to powerful neurotoxins. Complementing the US studies is an emerging body of epidemiological data linking increased incidence of Iraqi cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and multi-system diseases to toxic exposure.
Strangely enough, though, there has been almost no discussion of whether today's soldiers – those fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan – have also been injured by wartime poisons. We don't have a word yet for the constellation of cancers, psychological ills and systemic diseases that may be caused by toxins in today's wars.
In order to care for our veterans, we must do more than offer state-of-the-art hospitals and high-tech prosthetics. Veterans will need information about what poisons they have breathed or touched or drunk and when.
What would such an effort look like? First the military would need to disclose all known incidents of toxic exposure. Then it would have to reach out to veterans and give them information about how to receive care for conditions that arise from this exposure.
This summer, senator Evan Bayh made a first stab at such a system. Bayh pushed the national guard to track down hundreds of those Indiana soldiers who may have breathed orange dust back in 2003. Most of the soldiers are now civilians scattered across the US, unaware that they are at high risk for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Some of them may already be struggling with illness. The national guard is making an effort to search for these veterans and provide them with a phone number to call in order to seek medical help.
That's a good first step. But what about all the other veterans who believe that they have returned home from the war healthy? Without knowing it, they may be carrying a small bomb inside them. And they have a right to know.
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