BOOKS / Mike Davis : The Reds Under Romney's Bed

24 October 2012

BOOKS / Mike Davis : The Reds Under Romney's Bed

The reds under Romney's bed

The image of the Red Cavalry going into battle with the Book of Mormon in their saddlebags is quite a stretch; most of us, on the contrary, would probably vote for Mormon 'socialism' as the ultimate oxymoron.

By Mike Davis / The Rag Blog / October 24, 2012

Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, by John G. Turner (2012: Belknap Press, Harvard Univ); Hardcover; 512 pp; $35.
History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary, by John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito (2011: Utah State University Press); Hardcover; 456 pp; $39.95.

In 1884 the journalist Edward Bellamy, struggling with an idea for a utopian novel, visited the only actually-existing communist society on earth: Utah. More precisely he spent a week in Brigham City, seat of Box Elder County, where Apostle Lorenzo Snow, who would later become the fifth LDS president (and the last to have personally known Joseph Smith), showed him the workings of a dynamic community based on pooled wealth, producer and consumer cooperatives, and the use of labor scrip instead of money.

Bellamy, like many previous Gentile visitors, was greatly impressed by the Mormon gift for disciplined cooperation. A decade earlier the celebrated explorer-scientist, John Wesley Powell, had championed the Mormon principle of communal water-management in his landmark but controversial Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. But Bellamy -- like Lincoln Steffens returning from Russia in 1921 -- was even more enthusiastic: he had seen the future and it worked.

Looking Backward (1888), Bellamy’s portrait of a prosperous but authoritarian socialist America in the year 2000, became a bestseller and seeded the "Nationalist" club movement that was an immediate precursor of the Socialist Party of America. (The iconic Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles was built by a wealthy Bellamy supporter as an anticipation of the architecture of that socialist future.)

The similarities between Bellamy’s collective commonwealth and the Mormon ideal of "consecrated" community, as well his "Industrial Army" and the semi-military organization of Young’s Deseret, have ignited controversy for more than a century. Indeed one rabidly anti-Mormon website currently makes the claim that as Brigham City influenced Looking Backward, so did Bellamy’s novel influence Bolshevism, thus implicating the Romneys through their church in "the horrors of communism."

But the image of the Red Cavalry going into battle with the Book of Mormon in their saddlebags is quite a stretch; most of us, on the contrary, would probably vote for Mormon "socialism" as the ultimate oxymoron. But millenarian ideologies -- whether the Sermon on the Mound, the revelations of Joseph Smith, or the ideas of Karl Marx -- have an unfortunate tendency to be coopted by advocates of antithetical values.

John G. Turner’s new biography of Brigham Young -- a scholarly and judicious book that is unlikely to be burned in Temple Square -- portrays a social experiment, the most ambitious in American history, that until Young’s death in 1877 explicitly rejected the core values of Victorian capitalism: possessive individualism and Darwinian competition.

He emphasizes, for instance, that while “the nexus of American evangelicalism was individual salvation, Young’s theology, like that of Joseph Smith, centered around extended families.” “For Brigham Young, like Joseph Smith, the chief end of humankind was eternal fellowship and familial glory. ‘[If] men are not saved together, they cannot be saved at all.’” And Smith famously vowed that he would rather go to hell with the Saints than to heaven without them. [161]

Moreover classical Mormonism, like Pentecostalism in the twentieth century, was a religion of the poor and the ruined: hard-scrabble farmers, rural laborers, artisans and downwardly mobile craftsmen, failed small businessmen, and, most strikingly, an army of refugees from England’s Satanic mills that Young and others led to America.

Dickensian England was the major target of early Mormon proselytism. Young arrived in Manchester, capital of the Industrial Revolution, in 1840 in time to witness the formation of the National Charter Association, the first working-class political party, amidst epic social turmoil.

Like Friedrich Engels two years later, Young was appalled by the living and working conditions of the factory working class as well as the servility of the poor. Lancashire, Turner tells us, was already over-run with itinerant preachers and tiny sects broken from Methodism, but Young and his companions were more eloquent egalitarians, offering economic as well as spiritual solutions to proletarian misery.

"Mormon missionaries focused on evangelicalism rather than on politics or socioeconomic analysis, but with no ties to British elites or the established order they unflinchingly lamented the poverty of the labouring, classes, denounced the monarchy’s conspicuous consumption, and promised their converts land and employment in Illinois.” [70]

After the exodus to the Great Basin and the establishment of the briefly independent state of Deseret, Young tirelessly preached the impossibility of coexistence between the communitarian values of Zion and the greed-driven capitalism of Babylon (the United States). Indeed even before the Saints’ wagons had reached Salt Lake City he had repulsed mutineers who wanted to keep going to fat valleys and gold fields of California, straight into the open maw of Mammon.

The driving of the Golden Spike in 1869, however, flooded Utah with cheap Eastern goods as well as outlaws, mineral prospectors, and Gentile immigrants. A few years later the Crash of 1873 demonstrated that Utah was no long insulated from what Young denounced as “the oppression of monied monopolies.”

“The sooty misery of working-class England,” Turner explains,” had left Young with a lingering belief that capitalism could produce an existence worse than chattel slavery.” Convinced that the Kingdom of Saints was now threatened with moral and economic absorption into a society run by Robber Barons and stock jobbers, Young launched a Mormon Cultural Revolution: the United Order of Enoch.

Under the Order, “the Latter-Day Saints would consecrate their property and resources to common management, divide labor according to specialized ability, and eliminate disparities of wealth.” (399) Young, although old, fat, and in declining health, spent most of 1874 and 1875 passionately -- and sometimes threateningly -- shepherding his people into lives of deeper generosity and unity. The original template was Brigham City, but some of the poorer frontier Mormons “attempted to fully live out Young’s communitarian vision." (399)

The most complete embodiment was Orderville, east of Zion National Park, where private property had been abolished, members ate in a common hall, and there was no trade with the Gentile world. Turner quotes Wallace Stegner’s estimation of Orderville as a "communism of goods, labor, religion, and recreation such as the world has seen only in a few places and for very short times." [400]

Although Orderville, Brigham City, and a handful of other Mormon kibbutzes survived through 1880s, the United Order encountered intractable resistance from an emerging upper class of Saints, some of them in lucrative business partnerships with Gentiles. A mining boom, meanwhile, diverted the loyalties of many working-class Mormons. Despite Young’s ceaseless campaigning, public enthusiasm for the United Order died within a few years.

This was the major political and spiritual defeat of Young’s reign. At the dedication of a new temple in St. George, the same southern Utah town where he had launched the United Order only three years earlier, the LDS President gave a fierce speech against the corruption of the Morman soul by capitalism, railroads, and mines. He warned his People that they would “go to Hell” unless they repented materialism and greed. For emphasis he pounded the pulpit with his gnarled hickory cane. Six months later, in August 1877, he died.

MacCormick and Sillito’s fascinating history of the Utah Socialist Party in the early twentieth century (it won 115 state and local elections ) includes a detailed account of the Church’s eventual embrace, after Young’s death, of the capitalist civilization and rule of money that he and Smith had so abhorred. This great U-turn was partly driven by heightened inequality, even class conflict within late-Victorian Mormon society. It was also compelled by the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 which confiscated the Church’s assets, as well as disenfranchising women in the territory (they had won the vote in 1870) and disinheriting the children of plural marriages.

Washington’s message to the LDS was simple and implacable: abandon polygamy and open the doors to eastern capital or face destruction. Brigham Young doubtlessly would have defied the Republicans in Congress, taking his people into the mountains or moving to Mexico, but his successors capitulated: abolishing plural marriage in 1890 and sending church leader Heber J. Grant to Wall Street to establish a credit line for the Church. After statehood, moreover, they moved the LDS hierarchy into the ranks of its former archenemy, the Republican Party.

“Thereafter,” write MacCormick and Sillito, “Church leaders would not only feel increasingly at ease with the ways of American capitalists, but they would be beholden -- at least in the short run -- for their services. Within another decade these influences would go so far that muckraking journalists would begin to cast the Church in the role of a Wall Street plutocrat.” [383]

After three generations of persecution, migration, and backbreaking labor to achieve an egalitarian Zion, the conservative reformation in Salt Lake City was deeply disorienting to many Mormons. As original research for Utah Radicalism has established, at least 40 percent of the Socialist Party membership in Utah before 1920 were Mormons, most of them devout.

Many were the children of the United Order, like Lillie Engle who grew up in Orderville and became a Socialist candidate in Emery County in 1912. (In a poignant reminiscence, she equated the “sorrows that only the domestic servant, the widow, the ‘Mormon,’ the unpopular socialist, and the poor oppressed workers of the world know.”)

Despite increasing attacks by the Church on "satanic" socialism, a number of well-known Socialists were able to play prominent roles in both of their faiths, like Bishop Alexander Matheson in Cedar City or Gottlieb Berger, a Socialist who served on the Murray City commission from 1911 to 1932 while president of his ward’s High Priest Quorum. But the most potent individual link between repressed Mormon communism and Debsian socialism was Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of Lorenzo Snow of Brigham City fame, who campaigned to save the life of Joe Hill in 1915.

Gentiles, especially evangelical Christians, have obsessed for 175 years about the occult internal doctrines and practices of the Mormons. But secret handshakes and passwords can be found in any Moose Lodge, weird underwear is widely en vogue, and washings, annoitings, and sealings are just so much boilerplate religious mumbo jumbo. The real scandal of the modern Church is that its so-called Prophets refuse to hear Brigham Young, hammering on the ceiling of his tomb with his hickory cane and demanding the overthrow of Babylon.

A version of this article will be published by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist, historian, and social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire. Read more articles by Mike Davis on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Alice Embree / Terry DuBose : Defend the Soldiers' Right to Heal

15 November 2012

Alice Embree / Terry DuBose : Defend the Soldiers' Right to Heal

Under the Hood contingent at Veterans Day Parade, Killeen, Texas, Saturday, November 10, 2012. Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
Defend the right to heal:
Veterans’ Day parade in Killeen

As the deployments wind down from this decade of combat, service members are finding that their access to medical care is restricted, denied, delayed, and stigmatized.

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2012

See story by Terry J. DuBose and photos by Alice Embree and Susan Van Haitsma, Below.

Malachi Muncy’s vision was obscured, but he could hear a boy’s voice saying:“It’s a soldier in a pill bottle. Break out! Break out!”
The boy, a spectator along the Veterans Day parade route in Killeen, Texas, got it. So did most of those who saw Under the Hood’s message on Saturday, November 10.

Under the Hood (UtH) is a GI coffeehouse that opened in 2009 in Killeen, a mile from Fort Hood, the largest U.S. military post in the world. The UtH contingent marched for the second time in Killeen’s Veterans’ Day event. Three veterans led the march with this banner: “Honor All Who Served: Defend Service Members’ and Veterans’ Right to Heal.”

Behind the banner, on the bed of a pickup truck, was Malachi Muncy, a veteran of two Iraq deployments, a writer and an artist. Malachi had produced the pill bottle image as a print on paper made of combat uniforms. For the parade he took his art large, constructing a six-foot tall orange pill bottle with a white cap. Malachi, in uniform, stood inside the bottle, occasionally reaching his hands above him into the air. The prescription read: “RX: We Deserve Better.”

Although Malachi’s vision was somewhat limited by the orange acetate he was behind, he could hear the crowd’s response. Those seated along the parade route would begin asking each other what was on the truck, then talk amongst themselves as they realized it was a soldier in a pill bottle. There was occasional laughter, even applause. Some spectators made comments about the medicines they were on.

Along the route, UtH supporters handed out leaflets supporting soldiers’ right to heal -- for real treatment beyond pills for the hidden injuries that are now so prevalent -- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Military Sexual Trauma, and Traumatic Brain Injury.

Supporters also carried signs with the grim markers of this decade of war.“A veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes. Stop the cycle!” “There were 154 service member suicides in the first 155 days of this year. 154 suicides vs. 134 combat deaths.”

In an October 23 article, the Austin American-Statesman dug deep into the Texas face of these statistics: “Special Report: Uncounted Casualties,” reporting on the recent Texas veterans who have died of overdoses, suicide, and vehicle crashes.

As the deployments wind down from this decade of combat, service members are finding that their access to medical care is restricted, denied, delayed, and stigmatized. An appeal to Congress for redress for service members’ and Veterans’ right to heal can be found at www.RighttoHeal.org. You are urged to sign this petition and to continue to support Under the Hood -- a space for free speech, peer support, and decompression.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of underground papers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

"Trapped." Print by Malachi Muncy on paper made from old combat uniform.

Malachi Muncy:A veteran artist

Malachi Muncy, a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, uses art and theater to express his frustration, situation, and anger. Two of his prints, “Trapped” and “Escape,” carry strong messages in this era of record suicide rates among troops and veterans.

Malachi prints on paper made from his combat uniforms. As guerrilla theater for the Veterans’ Day Parade in Killeen, Malachi designed and built a giant pill bottle. Standing in uniform in the bottle on the back of a pickup truck his art reached hundreds along the parade route.

Malachi served in the Texas Army National Guard as a motor vehicle operator from 2003 to 2009, with service in Iraq from 2004-2005 and 2006-2007. He has a BA in journalism form Texas State University (TSU) and is currently pursuing a BA in English.

Malachi’s writing has appeared in the Copperas Cove Leader Press, SKUNK Magazine, and at RawStory.com. His poetry and prose have been included in the Warrior Writers anthologies. Malachi’s print and papermaking artwork has been exhibited at The National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

Malachi has volunteered as arts coordinator at Under the Hood Café, a GI Outreach Center in Killeen. He has conducted workshops there on making “combat paper” from uniforms -- transforming war experiences into art. In December he will become the new manager of Under the Hood.

-- Terry J. DuBose / The Rag Blog

[Terry J. DuBose, who was an organizer for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Texas, is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Diagnostic Medical Sonography at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.]

"Escape." Print by Malachi Muncy.

Photo Gallery: Under the Hood at Veterans Day Parade

Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.

Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
Find more photos of Under the Hood and the Veterans Day parade by Alice Embree and Susan Van Haitsma.

The Rag Blog

BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Daniel Coshnear's 'Occupy' Stories Are as Contemporary as the Latest Tweet

23 November 2012

BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Daniel Coshnear's 'Occupy' Stories Are as Contemporary as the Latest Tweet

Daniel Coshnear's
'Occupy and Other Love Stories'

As contemporary as the latest tweet, Coshnear’s men, women, and children cry out for the lost soul of America itself.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 23, 2012

[Occupy and Other Love Stories by Daniel Coshnear; art by Squeak Carnwath (October 2012: Kelly’s Cove Press); Paperback; 135 pp; $20.]

The characters in Daniel Coshnear’s political short stories read Stephen King and Raymond Carver. They smoke Camels and marijuana, drive Sentras, work at Safeways, and as school janitors. Preoccupied and in denial, they’ve survived trauma and now they’re suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a host of social and psychological ills.

As contemporary as the latest tweet, Coshnear’s men, women, and children cry out for the lost soul of America itself.

The 12 stories in Occupy and Other Love Stories take place in Santa Rosa, California, and along the Russian River in Sonoma County, though one is set in New York, and the very last conjures up Berkeley during the Occupy Wall Street Movement last spring. It’s an overtly polemical tale and might well be called revolutionary romanticism.

Coshnear’s heart is with the rebels and the in-your-face citizens who refuse to be silenced or sit still. For the most part, however, his characters don’t give speeches or march in the streets. They’re part of the 99% and too busy dealing with death, divorce, depression, and suicide to be distracted by leaflets, posters, and slogans.

Years from now a Ph.D. student writing about the culture of the Occupy Movement will surely point to Occupy and Other Love Stories as an example of the fiction that emerged from the protests against Wall Street immorality and criminality. It’s also fiction that stands on its own merits without ties to Occupy or any social movement.

Coshnear’s stories are compact with vivid descriptions of people and places, and with crisp dialogue that’s practically audible. Reading them is like watching a series of video clips that depict domestic life with images of Iraq on TV, and real cops lurking on the sidewalk outside the front door.

Parents and children inhabit “Early Onset” and “Custodian” in which a father and his son disconnect and then reconnect. Love, sex, and relationships animate “Avulsion,” “Borscht on the Ceiling,” which takes place in New York, and “Occupy” -- the title story -- in which a professor finds romance with a student.

The characters play their own roles, and speak their minds independently of the author, though sometimes he analyzes them and even describes the medications they take, as in “You Can Put Your Name on It, If You Want to.”

Pills help the characters, though they long for more than legal and illegal drugs. They want to know the answers to all the big questions, such as “if bad things happen to bad people,” and if their own children might one day inhabit “a better world.”

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is an author and a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Fran Clark : Keeping Watch on the 'School of Assassins'

28 November 2012

Fran Clark : Keeping Watch on the 'School of Assassins'

One at a time, marchers place their crosses in the chain link fence outside Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Photos by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
By any other name:
Protesters keep watch at
the 'School of Assassins'

Each cross has the name of one of the thousands murdered or disappeared throughout Latin America during decades of violence and oppression.

By Fran Clark / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2012

FORT BENNING -- In the chilly morning air of Columbus, Georgia, on Sunday, November 18, outside the gates of Fort Benning, people gather early. Most hold crosses, either made before arriving or picked up from the pile made for years past.

Each cross has the name (or other identification, such as "infant girl") of one of the thousands murdered or disappeared throughout Latin America during decades of violence and oppression, sometimes referred to as “the dirty wars.”

From Bolivia to Panama to Guatemala and El Salvador, religious workers, labor organizers, student groups, or anyone working in sympathy with the poor, were targets of assassination, mass killings, and torture.

Many of those responsible for these acts received training at the School of the Americas, located behind the gates outside which we are gathered. Originally established in Panama in 1946, the SOA moved to Fort Benning in 1984. It has trained over 60,000 members of Latin American militaries, and has been widely criticized for the human rights abuses of its graduates.

Documented atrocities include the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the rape and murders of four U.S. church women in El Salvador. Priests, nuns, labor leaders, women, children, and entire communities have been massacred at the hands of SOA-trained military forces.

Among the most notorious graduates are Manuel Noriega of Panama, Rios Montt of Guatemala, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. SOA trained soldiers in Mexico have been implicated in the murders and disappearances of over 50,000 people since 2006. In Honduras, SOA graduates carried out the 2009 coup and continue a campaign of violence and murder against the resistance.

In 1996 the Pentagon admitted that the school’s training manuals advocated torture, execution, and blackmail. But, despite these admissions, not a single U.S. official has been held accountable. In 2000, after another close vote in the U.S. House on whether to close the school failed, the school’s name was changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). But, the atrocities continue, as does the work of the SOA Watch to close the "School of Assassins.”

SOA Watch has held vigils at Fort Benning each year since its founding in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois. The weekend-long series of events include outstanding music, workshops, auctions, and profound testimonies from those directly affected by the violence carried out in their home countries.

The crowds have varied in size, but, there is always an eclectic mix of young and old, nuns and college students. (One college group sleeps on the stage each night to watch over it!)

The spirit is always the same. Mourners with white painted faces and red tears carry coffins. The names of the dead are read in liturgical style; marchers in the procession raise their crosses and sing “presente” as each name is read. Each marcher approaches the fence which denies access to the fort, stabs her cross through the chain links, and leaves it as a memorial, along with hundreds of others.

Some leave flowers, photos, and banners. Some sit down to cry, some meditate, and each year at least one is called to commit an act of civil disobedience by "crossing the line." In years past, this meant simply stepping onto military property. Now, it means scaling a tall fence topped with barbed wire and dropping down on the other side to face an almost certain six-month sentence in federal prison.

As the procession ends and all marchers have placed their crosses, the mourners are called to “return to life” as the uplifting music begins, and the Puppetistas perform their pageant. Many dance joyously as they prepare to return to their communities and rededicate themselves to the work for justice in the Americas and beyond.

[Fran Clark is a community health nurse who is active with CodePink Austin and the Texas Jail Project. She has also been involved with the GI Rights Hotline, Under the Hood Cafe, and the Hutto Visitation Program.]

The Rag Blog

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Searching for Sugar Man'

06 December 2012

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Searching for Sugar Man'

Searching for Sugar Man:
The Sixties surface, again

Rodriquez is himself a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2012

When the musician known simply as Rodriguez appeared on the David Letterman Show in August 2012, dressed in a black hat, black shirt, and dark glasses, he sang just one of his poignant songs, “Crucify Your Mind.” The only words he spoke were, “Thank you.”

Viewers might well have wondered who he was, though Letterman explained that Rodriguez was the subject of a film by Malik Bendjelloul, Searching for Sugar Man, the sleeper documentary of the year distributed by Sony Pictures.

Increasingly, audiences around the world know who he is, especially if they’ve seen the movie about him and have listened to his CD that offers 14 songs he originally recorded more than 40 years ago and that never reached the bottom let alone the top of any music chart.

Sixto Rodriguez is one of the strangest singer/songwriters in the annals of twentieth-century American music, as the film about him makes abundantly clear.

He even talks in the movie and says more than “thank you,” though the images of him, such as one in which he walks alone through the snow, say as much about him as any words he utters. His story is unique; indeed, there’s no one remotely like him. At the same time, his story, which touches on the fickleness of fame, success, and failure, appeals to a wide audience and not only to survivors of the Sixties, a time when Rodriguez first appeared out of nowhere on the music scene.

Rodriquez himself is a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era. To listen to the soundtrack (Searching for Sugar Man 2012, the original motion picture soundtrack with songs by Rodriguez, published on the Sony Legacy label), is to be transported back to that time and place, especially on songs such as “Inner City Blues,” and “This is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues.”

Part bluesman, part rock ‘n’ roller, and part folk musician, Rodriguez recorded two albums in 1970 and 1971 when he was 28 and 29 years old and living in Detroit. While the albums went nowhere in the States, they became big hits among anti-apartheid whites in South Africa and it’s easy to understand why. The lyrics are clear and concise; they’re anti-establishment -- any and every establishment -- and they’re also playful and even humorous. Moreover, the music, which has a lyrical beat, is an open invitation to get up and dance.

Still, the lyrics alone would not make Rodriguez a memorable artist worth knowing about 40 years after the beginning and nearly simultaneous end of his own abortive career. It’s the story of his life that matters: how he never became bitter or resentful and just kept on keeping on.

Rodriquez would never have appeared on the Letterman Show and he’d be as unknown today as ever if it were not for Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a South African rock journalist turned detective, who tracked him down, in part by using the lyrics to his songs.

Sixties survivor Rodriguez.

The movie, Searching for Sugar Man, tells the fascinating story of Bartholomew-Strydom’s relentless search that led him from Johannesburg to Detroit where he found Rodriguez and his two daughters -- who explain that they were raised without wealth and material goods, but with a rich appreciation for culture.

Rodriguez comes across as a good father, a humble workingman, and a countercultural icon. His CD is a time capsule of hippie culture circa 1970. Looking for sad love songs? They’re here. Want visionary and prophetic lyrics? You’ll find them here. Eager to hear political invective? It’s also here.

Rodriquez is a very sharp observer of human fakery, foibles, and flaws. Perhaps to satirize fakery, as Rodriguez does, you have to understand it from the inside out and even indulge in it. There’s a fine line between the real and the parody and Rodriquez adheres to it. He’s all heart and sentiment and at the same time he can be ironical and a kind of put-on artist.

On the first track, “Sugar Man,” he longs for the arrival of the “Silver majik ships” that carry “Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.” On the second, “Crucify Your Mind,” he tells an unnamed other, “I've seen your self-pity showing/And the tears rolled down your cheeks.” On the third track, “Cause,” he’s full of self-pity and then on the fourth track, “I Wonder,” he’s sassy, irreverent, and timeless. “I wonder how many times you had sex,” he sings. “I wonder do you know who’ll be next.”

“Can’t Get Away” -- number seven -- is about the longing to escape and the impossibility of really escaping. “Inner City Blues” takes on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “King died/ Drinking from a Judas cup,” Rodriguez sings. The same song addresses the gap between the generations. “Papa don't allow no new ideas here,” he wails.

n the ironical “Sandrevan Lullaby,” he addresses the nation itself: “America gains another pound/ Only time will bring some people around.” The third song from the end, “I’ll Slip Away,” is perhaps the most personal. “You can keep your symbols of success,” he sings. “I'll pursue my own happiness/
And you can keep your clocks and routines.”


Rodriquez did exactly what he said he’d do. By the early 1970s, he was done with the world and perhaps sick of the world. “For too long I just put you on,” he sings in “I’ll Slip Away.” He adds, “Now I'm tired of lying and I'm sick of trying.”

But the world was not done with him or sick of him. In the movie and on the CD Searching for Sugar Man, he’s back bigger than ever before, and the Sixties are back, too, with poetry and with whimsy.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, and For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. A regular contributor to The Rag Blo, he’s a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Searching for Sugar Man'

06 December 2012

FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Searching for Sugar Man'

Searching for Sugar Man:
The Sixties surface, again

Rodriquez is himself a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2012

When the musician known simply as Rodriguez appeared on the David Letterman Show in August 2012, dressed in a black hat, black shirt, and dark glasses, he sang just one of his poignant songs, “Crucify Your Mind.” The only words he spoke were, “Thank you.”

Viewers might well have wondered who he was, though Letterman explained that Rodriguez was the subject of a film by Malik Bendjelloul, Searching for Sugar Man, the sleeper documentary of the year distributed by Sony Pictures.

Increasingly, audiences around the world know who he is, especially if they’ve seen the movie about him and have listened to his CD that offers 14 songs he originally recorded more than 40 years ago and that never reached the bottom let alone the top of any music chart.

Sixto Rodriguez is one of the strangest singer/songwriters in the annals of twentieth-century American music, as the film about him makes abundantly clear.

He even talks in the movie and says more than “thank you,” though the images of him, such as one in which he walks alone through the snow, say as much about him as any words he utters. His story is unique; indeed, there’s no one remotely like him. At the same time, his story, which touches on the fickleness of fame, success, and failure, appeals to a wide audience and not only to survivors of the Sixties, a time when Rodriguez first appeared out of nowhere on the music scene.

Rodriquez himself is a Sixties survivor. His songs capture the mood of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. They reflect the anger, the aspirations, and the despair of the era. To listen to the soundtrack (Searching for Sugar Man 2012, the original motion picture soundtrack with songs by Rodriguez, published on the Sony Legacy label), is to be transported back to that time and place, especially on songs such as “Inner City Blues,” and “This is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues.”

Part bluesman, part rock ‘n’ roller, and part folk musician, Rodriguez recorded two albums in 1970 and 1971 when he was 28 and 29 years old and living in Detroit. While the albums went nowhere in the States, they became big hits among anti-apartheid whites in South Africa and it’s easy to understand why. The lyrics are clear and concise; they’re anti-establishment -- any and every establishment -- and they’re also playful and even humorous. Moreover, the music, which has a lyrical beat, is an open invitation to get up and dance.

Still, the lyrics alone would not make Rodriguez a memorable artist worth knowing about 40 years after the beginning and nearly simultaneous end of his own abortive career. It’s the story of his life that matters: how he never became bitter or resentful and just kept on keeping on.

Rodriquez would never have appeared on the Letterman Show and he’d be as unknown today as ever if it were not for Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a South African rock journalist turned detective, who tracked him down, in part by using the lyrics to his songs.

Sixties survivor Rodriguez.

The movie, Searching for Sugar Man, tells the fascinating story of Bartholomew-Strydom’s relentless search that led him from Johannesburg to Detroit where he found Rodriguez and his two daughters -- who explain that they were raised without wealth and material goods, but with a rich appreciation for culture.

Rodriguez comes across as a good father, a humble workingman, and a countercultural icon. His CD is a time capsule of hippie culture circa 1970. Looking for sad love songs? They’re here. Want visionary and prophetic lyrics? You’ll find them here. Eager to hear political invective? It’s also here.

Rodriquez is a very sharp observer of human fakery, foibles, and flaws. Perhaps to satirize fakery, as Rodriguez does, you have to understand it from the inside out and even indulge in it. There’s a fine line between the real and the parody and Rodriquez adheres to it. He’s all heart and sentiment and at the same time he can be ironical and a kind of put-on artist.

On the first track, “Sugar Man,” he longs for the arrival of the “Silver majik ships” that carry “Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.” On the second, “Crucify Your Mind,” he tells an unnamed other, “I've seen your self-pity showing/And the tears rolled down your cheeks.” On the third track, “Cause,” he’s full of self-pity and then on the fourth track, “I Wonder,” he’s sassy, irreverent, and timeless. “I wonder how many times you had sex,” he sings. “I wonder do you know who’ll be next.”

“Can’t Get Away” -- number seven -- is about the longing to escape and the impossibility of really escaping. “Inner City Blues” takes on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “King died/ Drinking from a Judas cup,” Rodriguez sings. The same song addresses the gap between the generations. “Papa don't allow no new ideas here,” he wails.

n the ironical “Sandrevan Lullaby,” he addresses the nation itself: “America gains another pound/ Only time will bring some people around.” The third song from the end, “I’ll Slip Away,” is perhaps the most personal. “You can keep your symbols of success,” he sings. “I'll pursue my own happiness/
And you can keep your clocks and routines.”


Rodriquez did exactly what he said he’d do. By the early 1970s, he was done with the world and perhaps sick of the world. “For too long I just put you on,” he sings in “I’ll Slip Away.” He adds, “Now I'm tired of lying and I'm sick of trying.”

But the world was not done with him or sick of him. In the movie and on the CD Searching for Sugar Man, he’s back bigger than ever before, and the Sixties are back, too, with poetry and with whimsy.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, and For The Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. A regular contributor to The Rag Blo, he’s a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'We Are Many' Offers Thoughtful Analysis of Occupy Movement

11 December 2012

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'We Are Many' Offers Thoughtful Analysis of Occupy Movement

From occupation to liberation:
A review of 'We Are Many'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2012

This aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

[We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy, edited by Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire; Afterword by David Graeber (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 355 pp; $21.]

Despite a myriad of obituaries for the movement that began in Manhattan in September 2011, the people of Occupy refuse to let it die.

There are hundreds involved in the Occupy Sandy effort in the New York City region following the devastation of Tropical Storm Sandy. Individuals and groups connected to Occupy Wall Street have organized relief efforts that are feeding and caring for thousands of people left without power, work, and homes.

Those being helped are primarily the working poor and folks on assistance. They are also those traditional relief efforts tend to ignore, precisely because of their income status and, in the USA, also perhaps because of their skin tone or ethnic origin.

The vastness of the Occupy Sandy effort is testament to the Occupy movement's most obvious strength: its ability to organize rapidly and from the ground up.

Since the advent of Occupy and the demise of its encampments, there have been millions of words written about the movement. From Fox News to the Revolutionary Communist Party's journal Revolution; from Le Monde to the Jerusalem Post; and numerous journals, websites, blogs and television networks, Occupy Wall Street and the movement it spawned provoked a storm of commentary.

Some of it was sensationalist and some of it perhaps overly academic. It was occasionally overly laudatory and often overly critical. Overall, however, the press coverage did something that one could argue no left-leaning movement since the 1960s and 1970s had done. It changed the nature of the national conversation.

Like the black liberation and antiwar movement of those decades long past changed the way mainstream America thought about the treatment of African Americans and the nature of its foreign policy, Occupy changed the way mainstream America thought about its economic system. Or, maybe it just vocalized thoughts people had held but did not know how to vocalize in a way that would draw some attention.

A year later there have been a number of column inches written about Occupy and its meaning. The articles written in the mainstream press tend to acknowledge Occupy's influence in the national conversation. At the same time, these articles tend to diminish its long term role. Perhaps because it is too early to tell. Perhaps because they hope it doesn't have one.

Occupy was the greatest manifestation of anti-authoritarian organizing in the United States in recent history. It proved that spontaneity can work. The taking of property and occupying it is a radical act in itself and obviously one the powers that be find threatening.

The involvement of the houseless was and is important. Their presence and involvement not only made the gross shortcomings of monopoly capitalism real, they also provided food and a reaffirmation of value to those on the streets and an experience at self organizing for all. Yet, it suffered from some of the same ills present in the larger society: racism, sexis, and questions around violence and leadership.

Occupy was/is not a movement that began with highly defined politics. This was its strength and its weakness. Many different philosophies set up camp under its banner. Anarchists, socialists, libertarians, and liberals. Even the occasional tea partier and Democrat.

Yet, despite this multitude of philosophies that came to share the Occupy camps, the one that was its impetus remains a generally defined type of left anarchism. Somewhat situationist like the poster artists of Paris in May 1968 while also derivative of the squatters' movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, Occupy also drew from the anarchism of the Yippies, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the punk culture that came later. Therefore, it would seem that the best analysis of Occupy would come from folks that had similar roots.

Guess what? The best analysis of Occupy does come from such folks. Titled from Occupation to Liberation and published by AK Press, this aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

Never shortchanging the arguments within the movement, the writers collected in We Are Many take on the questions of racism, sexism, the Black Bloc, and the cops, and they do so in an intelligent and lively manner. No other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement from within its ranks. In fact, no other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement, period.

Unlike earlier books about Occupy, most of which were published either during the life of the encampments or immediately after, We Are Many has the perspective a little time often provides. Away from the intensity of battles with police and the day-to-day reality of camping in the middle of some urban space, this book presents the reader with thoughtful essays designed to raise questions about strategy and politics that might have been pushed aside in the aforementioned day-to-day reality.

Earlier writings about Occupy were often chronicles of organizing; sometimes those chronicles were objective attempts to describe the daily life of the writer and those around them; other times they were impressionistic attempts to do the same thing.

We Are Many has its share of these essays, yet even those indicate a deeper reflection and understanding of Occupy's historical meaning and the potential it unleashed for the future of oppositional and extra-parliamentary movements, especially in the United States.

Writers who appear in this volume include some names fairly well known in anti-authoritarian and left circles: Cindy Milstein, Vijay Prashad, Frances Fox Piven, Andy Cornell, David Graeber, George Cicciariello-Maher, and the Crimethinc Collective, to name just a few. This list is a small representation of the more than 50 writers and artists collected here.

AK Press has done a great service by publishing them together in this volume. Like so many of the publications released by this collective, not only is this book filled with good, thoughtful writing and great art, it is attractively presented. These writers take a hard look at manifestations of racism and sexism in the movement; they discuss the nature of violence and its role in popular movements; and they discuss these and other questions from a perspective that represents the grassroots democratic and anti-capitalist philosophy that motivated the movement.

We do not know what will happen next with the movement awakened by that first presence in lower Manhattan back in the autumn of 2011. In Europe, general strikes and daily protests continue to occur as neoliberal capitalism takes its ransom from governments across the continent. In the Middle East and Central Asia, wars continue to flare and military occupations continue to be challenged.

In North America, the corporate and financial elites continue to ravish the economy and politicians conspire to destroy the remaining social welfare and retirement systems previous generations fought hard to build. WalMart workers are organizing unions and Quebec students fought against university privatization moves and won.

It is not the end of the battle, but the beginning. Onward.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Paul Buhle : Comix Artist Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

12 December 2012

Paul Buhle : Comix Artist Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

Spain Rodriguez's Trashman. Image from Dissent.
The passing of a comix pioneer:
Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

By Paul Buhle / Dissent / December 12, 2012

In Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International, the signature saga of his early years, Rodriguez's revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class.

We are now so far from the 1960s and ’70s that the crucial locations, personalities, and moments of one very popular art form’s transformation have been largely forgotten. Spain Rodriguez, with a handful of others (the best remembered are happily still with us: Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Sharon Rudahl, to name a few), pushed the comics agenda so far forward that no return to the limitations of superheroes and banal daily newspaper strips would ever be possible.

Comic art, belatedly recognized in The New York Times (and assorted museums) as a real art and not a corrupting children’s literature, owes much to them.

Spain (his birth name was Manuel, his father a Spanish immigrant, his mother an Italian-American artist) grew up in Buffalo, New York, a rebellious working-class kid who wore long sideburns and was impressed by the civil rights movement. He dropped out of art school in Connecticut and, after returning to Buffalo and working a factory job with a motorcycle gang engagement, landed in New York in time for the efflorescence of Underground Comix (styled with an “x” to distinguish itself) in a comic tabloid offshoot of the East Village Other.

His colleagues were a strangely mixed crew, all of them old enough to have been influenced by EC Comics, the most politically liberal and artistically accomplished of the old comics industry, and the one hardest hit by the congressional hearings of the McCarthy era. (As with attacks on the Left, every charge of subversion and perversion hid Middle-American outrage: these were Jews corrupting innocent American youth.)

In a sense, every “underground” artist of these early days sought revenge in the name of comic art, and realized it through the depiction of sex, violence, and anti-war and anti-racist sentiment unthinkable in what remained of the mainstream. Sex and violence, lamentably, became chief attractions to many readers, recalling the “headlights” (aka “sweater girl”) crime and horror comics of the late 1940s, albeit with a left-wing or libertarian ambience.

The whole comix artistic crowd moved to San Francisco around 1970, joining Robert Crumb and a few others already there, part of the acid-rock, post–Summer of Love setting. Underground comix, replicating the old kids-comics format but now in black and white, grew up alongside the underground press, whose reprinting of comix created the market for the books.

Crumb was the artist whose work sold the best, in the hundreds of thousands, but Spain was widely regarded as the most political. He was heavily influenced by the most bohemian of the EC comics world, wild man Wallace Wood, whose sci-fi adventures depicted civilizations recovering from atomic war and whose Mad Comics stories assaulted the 1950s commercialization of popular culture. Wood’s dames were also extremely sexy, too overtly sexy for the diluted satire of the later Mad Magazine.

Spain Rodriguez. Photo by Sean Stewart / Babylon Falling.
Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International was Rodriguez’s signature saga in these early years, serialized in underground papers, comix anthologies, and eventually collected in comic book form as Subvert Comics. These revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class in assorted ways, many of them violent, but they also had fun and sex, and were subject to many self-satirizing gags, in the process.

By the middle 1970s, his work had broadened into more social and historical themes, often with class, sex, and violence highlighting his points. Histories of revolutions and anti-fascist actions (and all their complexities) inspired some of his closest reading of real events, but he had no fixed point on the left-wing scale.

He admired and drew about anti-Bolshevist anarchist leader Nestor Makhno and also anti-Stalinist Spanish anarchist Durruti, but he also drew about Red Army members facing death fighting the Germans, and so on. (Several of these pieces are now reprinted in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, an anthology from that 1980s series, just published by PM Press.)

In recollections of the internal conflicts among comix artists, sometimes pitting feminists against male-dominated circles, Rodriguez is remembered as having been unusually helpful and egalitarian, a memory that contrasts curiously with his sometimes sado-masochistic plot lines but not so curiously with the gender-equality of the sybarites (“Big Bitch” was Trashman’s female counterpart, the tough working-class broad with sex cravings for weaker men).

He poked and prodded San Francisco’s self-image as a haven of liberated sex, sometimes making his younger self a player on the scene. He also helped set in motion the vital murals movement in San Francisco’s Mission District, but was likely best known on the West Coast for his many posters of San Francisco Mime Troupe openings.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead.

The validation of comic art from near the end of the century onward -- Spiegelman’s Maus and left-wing lesbian Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home high among the evidence of artistic achievement -- found Rodriguez with a Salon series, “The Dark Hotel,” and several books of his own. Devil Dog, a biography of disillusioned Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, and Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of the classic noir novel, are easily among the best. Che, his graphic biography of Che Guevara, reached the furthest, with editions published everywhere from Latin America to Europe, Japan, and Malaysia.

At the time of his death, Rodriguez was amid “Yiddish Bohemians,” a strip about Jewish-American puppeteers during the 1920s and ’30s, in what would be the last in a stunning series of collaborations with playwright-professor Joel Schechter. Rodriguez had started a Woody Guthrie poster for an upcoming Bay Area concert and, had he lived, would have drawn a history of the 2003 San Francisco hotel strike.

After more than 40 years (and the disappearance of well over 90 percent of many little-remembered artists’ work in yellowing pulp), the impact of the Underground Comix world remains more a matter of style than substance, daring more than narrative and artistic content. This is unfortunate, because so many artists had particular contributions worthy of note, worthy of reprinting for the sake of comic art alone.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead. That he never lost his political vision or his sense of humor should go without saying, but those of us lucky enough to see him teach or to be taught by him felt the deep impact of his humanism as well.

Rodriguez died at home in San Francisco, with his wife, Susan Stern, a documentary filmmaker, and his daughter, Nora Rodriguez, by his side. A retrospect of his work, including a short documentary film made by his wife, is now in place at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo, the second exhibit in Buffalo to honor this improbable local hero.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhl is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels. Buhle was the editor of Che and is co-editor of the anthology Bohemians, to appear in 2013, with two strips by Rodriguez. Read more articles by Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog