Harry Targ : Brute Facts and Political Choices, 2012

Protesters at the State Capitol building in Madison, WI., demonstrating against Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. Photo by Mark Hirsch / Getty Images.
Brute facts and political choices:
Thinking about 2012

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2012

The year 2011 was truly an exciting year for progressives. Arab spring sent shock waves across the Middle East, launching a campaign for democratization that will ultimately impact every regime in the region. Also Arab spring confirmed to the rest of the world, including the United States, and particularly those engaged in Occupy movements, that mass mobilization, challenging economic control and military might with people power, can affect history.

The spirit of grassroots anger, activism, a growing sense of solidarity across races, gender, class, and national boundaries, planted the seeds for the rise of a new age out of the old. As the young people in Tahrir Square knew from the beginning of their protest, the struggle will be long, sometimes bloody, but the 99 per cent, in the end, will win.

But 2011 also showed the world that politics can be ruthless. Masses of people died in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and in various locations in Africa, Europe, and North America. The United States shifted priorities from sending the military everywhere to supporting private armies and high tech drone warfare. Secret intelligence agencies now define the threats to the United States who are targeted for assassination.

Meanwhile the mass media has celebrated executions abroad and at home and the deaths of ostracized leaders. In many ways 21st century global culture has become a “death culture,” in its entertainment as well as its politics. Killing has become fun.

Within the United States, political forces have been unleashed that are trying to return politics to the Dark Ages:

• escalating the shift in wealth and power from the many to the few
• destroying the historic right of workers to organize to better articulate their interests
• privatizing education, health care, and basic concern for the environment
• transferring control of women’s bodies from themselves to various churches and private interest groups
• increasing the power of police to control people’s lives, using pepper spray, SWAT teams, covert operations, and spying to serve the status quo
• eliminating longstanding legal procedures that have given some protection to people, particularly minorities, who have been accused of crimes
• using, abusing, and disposing of immigrant workers.

Protests against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, February 2011. Image from News4Europe.
So at the dawn of the 2012 the world continues its contradictory path. And as the forces of light and darkness contend, progressives once again are confronted with political choices. As the debates escalate, particularly in the electoral arena, some of the summary data I accumulated just after the 2010 election remains relevant:

From data reported in the media between November 3rd and 10th, 2010 the new United States Senate will be comprised of 51 Democratic Senators and two Independents and 47 Republicans. The Republicans experienced their biggest gains in the House of Representatives winning 239 seats to 189 for the Democrats... The 2011 distribution of the governorships will include at least 29 Republicans and 18 Democrats. In sum, the elections brought Republican control to the House of Representatives and significant shifts in gubernatorial contests which will impact on the redistricting of House of Representative districts for the next decade.

At the state level, Republican candidates won 650 seats in legislative assemblies, taking control of 19 legislative bodies from Democrats. For example, Republicans gained both state houses in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. They won an additional house to take control of both houses in Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Through gubernatorial and legislative victories at the state level Republicans will control the designation of 170 congressional districts while Democrats will control 70. The rest, about 200, will be determined by bipartisan bodies.

Republicans won three state legislatures in the Northeast, eight in the South, nine in the Midwest, and five in the West. Looking at a USA map of red and blue states, 27 states will be red in the next period.

As I write, Indiana workers are marching inside and outside the state capital protesting the backroom passage of a new right-to-work law. Indiana has not been a right-to-work state since the 1960s. In 2008, the Indiana House of Representatives consisted of 52 Democrats and 47 Republicans. Today the House has 60 Republicans and 40 Democrats.

And as a result of the 2010 election, not only is it likely that right-to-work legislation will become a reality in Indiana but education and resources for women’s reproductive health will be even more vulnerable.

There are similar stories to be told in each and every state, as well as in the national political arena. And, at the same time, there are differences in politics and history in each state and locale. And make note: none of this has much to do with the selection of nominees for president of the United States. That story is the circus, the Super Bowl -- Romney or Santorum, the “moderate” Republican or the “social conservative.”

So progressives have a lot to think about in 2012: how to protect the people, the 99 percent, from all the hurt that they increasingly will experience in the short run while at the same time moving “inch by inch, row by row” to the vision that animated Arab Spring, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Nancy Miller Saunders : Jane Fonda and the 'Home of the Brave'

Jane Fonda at the Oleo Strut GI Coffee House, Killeen, Texas, circa May 1970. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / Space City!
Jane Fonda and the 'home of the brave'

By Nancy Miller Saunders / The Rag Blog / August 11, 2011

"I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences." -- Jane Fonda

The same day Obama and the Democrats caved in to Republican Tea Party extremists on the deficit, I learned that the cable channel QVC canceled an appearance by Jane Fonda because of angry calls from extremists objecting to her anti-Vietnam War activities. It has been nearly 40 years since that war ended yet these Swiftboater-types still cling to hatred of her, much of which is based on lies and distortions.

Yes, the picture of her sitting and laughing on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun damned her in many people's eyes. But appearances can be misleading, which they are in this case as she explains in a recent piece, “The Truth About My Trip To Hanoi," posted on her blog.

Although one picture may be worth a thousand words, those words can be misleading as easily as they can be revealing. But rather than risk letting go of their hatred by listening to her explanations of what happened and why she went to North Vietnam, these Swiftboaters have clamped their minds shut around their hatred. One mistake in an otherwise exemplary campaign to stop an increasingly unpopular war and Fonda is condemned forever and always.

We claim in our national anthem that ours is “the home of the brave.” Is it, when our president and Congress knuckle under to extremists' threats to bankrupt the country? Is it, when cable channels let bullies frighten them out of letting a movie star peddle her latest book on an entirely different topic?

Where is the bravery in these cave-ins? Where is the bravery in our docile acceptance of such hateful extremism? We recently saw true bravery in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where people fed up with corruption nonviolently withstood fierce attacks and toppled Hosnei Mubarak's regime. We are seeing it again in the streets of Syria where people are being gunned down for their nonviolent protests.

Jane Fonda is a brave woman who looked beyond her instinctive feelings that would not let her imagine the United States could ever fight an unjust war. But then she met and listened to active duty GIs and Vietnam veterans. She began to study that war and discovered what it was doing to the men being sent to fight it. She worked to find them help they needed.

When they asked, she spoke for them, using her celebrity to amplify their voices in an effort to get the American people to listen to what they had to say about what was being done in our name and to our sons, brothers, and neighbors. Only with knowledge -- not emotional assumptions, no matter how treasured -- can we correct our mistakes and maybe, just maybe, avoid making them again in the future. But, sadly, we have repeated them in Iraq.

Fonda also campaigned for an organization that was unprecedented in our history: Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Never before had U.S. combat veterans massed together to protest the continuation of the war in which they fought, but Vietnam veterans did just that, beginning in 1968.[1]

Two years later Fonda was working with VVAW and I found myself listening to the war's veterans after VVAW asked a group of us filmmakers to film their first two major demonstrations. They pointed out that they had the message and we had the means to broadcast it.

We put together four film crews to accompany VVAW and document the first demonstration, a RAW March over Labor Day weekend, 1970, from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2] (RAW stood for Rapid American Withdrawal from Vietnam.) Those of you old enough to remember that day may know that we risked being busted for crossing a state line to foment a riot, even though starting a riot was definitely not our intention.

Whenever possible VVAW used paradigms from the American Revolution to emphasize their patriotism and dedication to our founding principles. The route they chose was one some of George Washington's troops took to Valley Forge that memorable winter. In towns along the way, the veterans performed guerrilla theater in which they used volunteers acting as Vietnamese civilians to demonstrate their sanctioned brutality during the many search and destroy missions they had been sent on.

Image from the 1972 documentary film, Winter Soldier. Photo from Winterfilm Collective.
We filmmakers were with VVAW the entire weekend, even camping on the ground next to the veterans' encampment all three nights. We interviewed them, waded into the middle of their guerrilla theater to film it, and watched with growing admiration as they resisted provocation after provocation. They knew what violence is like and the damage it can do. They did not want to yield to it here at home.

At Valley Forge on Labor Day, VVAW staged a rally that began with more than 200 veterans making a moving entrance. Fonda was one of the speakers, again using her celebrity to amplify what the veterans had to tell their fellow citizens. She then left on a nationwide tour of campuses, introducing veterans to VVAW and recruiting volunteers for the next major action.

That second action was the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) in Detroit, Michigan, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, when more than 100 Vietnam veterans gave “straightforward testimony -- direct testimony -- about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy.”[3]

Contrary to extremists' accusations, VVAW carefully vetted the men it let testify. All had to have their discharge papers and IDs with them. Their testimony was checked against what other veterans knew, against documented evidence and whatever else the organizers could lay their hands on. We filmed the entire three days of testimony as well as related events and interviews with men who testified. Fonda financed us and attended the investigation, though she did not speak at it.[4]

The memories I brought away from the WSI are of haunted eyes of old men who had seen too much grief in already long lives -- as they looked at me from youthful faces. The contrast was proof of their stories. I remember seeing tough, war-hardened men break down and weep. I remember them hugging each other for mutual support. I remember listening to gut-wrenching testimony hour after hour for the full three days.

And I remember a love that spread from the veterans to include all of us who took the time to listen, to really listen, to what they had to say. This was a love far more powerful than any romantic love. It was the love of shared commitment.

Working on those two films with VVAW changed my life, much as I imagine listening to GIs and veterans changed Fonda's. Neither of us had to do what we did, but our hearts and souls had been touched. We knew, as few civilians did, why the war had to be ended. Its destruction had come home in the bodies and minds of those sent to fight it. Sadly there are people still trapped with the hatred necessary for war, necessary to make rational human beings kill other human beings.

I was so moved that I vowed to write the truths I learned about the war, about our national policy, and about the terrible toll it had taken on its veterans, and about the Nixon administration's efforts to silence and discredit VVAW. A number of veterans entrusted their stories to me to tell, much as others had trusted Fonda to speak for them.

In far subtler ways than the blatant lies and hatred used to vilify Fonda, I was hounded, intimidated, pressured, and threatened -- in attempts to make me shut up. The pressure was subtle, and friends to whom I turned for help told me to “stop being so paranoid” -- but some of the veterans stood by me. The first two people not directly involved with VVAW to believe me both had connections in the CIA, which suggests that I was not being paranoid. At times I was so terrified that I did stop... for a while.

The cumulative result of this harassment is that it took me nearly 40 years to finally keep my vow. Unable to find a publisher brave enough to work with me, I had to self-publish Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers.[5] All that interference would make another good book.

In a second book I would include the lessons I learned from the veterans about overcoming one's fears, about reaching down inside oneself to find the courage needed to continue, about the value of humor and laughter. And I would write about a man I met, Budd Saunders, a combat veteran who believed me -- although he was not a VVAW member or even a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Budd protected me, loved me, married me, and encouraged me to finish Combat by Trial. On our living room wall is a photograph of two of the veterans who most influenced me during those difficult years. One of them, Scott Camil, was hounded far worse than I was. He was framed several times, once for a capital offense (kidnapping), and he was shot in the back (the bullet barely missing his heart) by DEA agents when he refused to let them set him up on a drug deal.

Underneath their photograph I have pasted a quote from Scott: “If you let them demoralize you, then they're effective. If you don't, they aren't. That's up to you, not them.”

If enough of us keep such thoughts in mind, instead of clinging to our fears and wishful beliefs, we can rebuild our “home of the brave.” But it will take all of us finding the strength and courage that dwells within each of us to speak out against lies, distortions, and intimidation; to stand up to the corporate bosses who would squeeze us dry for their profit. And, above all, to stop letting hatred destroy us personally and as a nation.

References:

[1] Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have joined together in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).
[2] Different Sons , Bowling Green Films, New York, NY.
[3] Excerpt from the transcript of the opening statement to the Winter Soldier Investigation, January 31, 1971.
[4] Winter Soldier, Winterfilm, New York, NY; reissued by Millarium Zero, Harrington Park, NJ.
[5] Nancy Miller Saunders, Combat by Trial: An Odyssey with 20th Century Winter Soldiers, iUniverse, Bloomington, IN, 2008.

[Nancy Miller Saunders was a member of Winterfilm Collective which documented activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She is the author of Combat by Trial and is a freelance writer living in the Arkansas Ozarks with her husband Budd Saunders.]

Also see:

• BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard: The Odyssey of Our Winter Soldiers / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

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VERSE / Felix Shafer : hey, marilyn

hey, marilyn


From august
through Black august
the drum beat us
all black and blue
and back again
where we live
inside shadows
with you

*

Here on the sad
fuming planet
comes a laughing ghost
beloved fugitive
our first anniversary
spun from these burning strands
our sensitive memory
of the afterlife without you
oh marilyn
a toast to your year
a salute to our tears
for the shadow of the panthers
cetewayo, shasha
smitty, dc and g (eronimo)*
now passing by

*

Here in my heart
a branch of middle summer
intermingles the past
with life's juggly light
flowing like fire
over the river wide
your red kite
tangled, unescaped
high among
the maple trees

We are your family
the red blood cells
in & out of prison cells
the red resistance cells
grouped by transience
side by side
overcoming
great misfortune
in the lonely outside

*

Last night I dreamed
of walking down storied halls
a familiar house
after the typhoon
people known by their resemblances
returned, some drained of smiles
some doing yoga
some replacing mislayed objects
overcome in bedrooms
A daring girl led me closer to the last window
beyond where I can see
There where the backyard
ought to be
was the outdoor visiting patio
of FCI Dublin

*

We come to recollect your absence
with ourselves
to feel your palm
resting on each hand
To receive your
loving encouragment
and your example:
That to live we must risk ourselves
for the uncertain future
with dignity

*

Marilyn because
you were charming
and unb0wed
because you had
miles of style and acres of smiles
because you were a generous
citizen of earth
sister and god mother
I am throwing open the door
to release the bars
to forget the cancer and the tears
so that I can see
your shining face

*

When it's quiet
when i lay deep down to sleep
i whisper kindness and
when I rise up
i sing of how
you wanted us to be happy and strong
when we were with you

Now a year after you have gone
I will We will


felix shafer 8.3.11

* Michael Cetewayo Tabor, Henry ShaSha Brown, Marc Smitty Smith, Don Cox and geronimo ji Jaga pratt are freedom fighters associated with the Black Panther Party & some with the Black Liberation Army who passed in the year since Marilyn died


Marilyn Buck -- political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer -- was paroled last August after spending 30 years in federal prisons. But, after only 20 days of freedom, on August 3, 2010, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com. Read Felix Shafer's three-part Rag Blog series, "Mourning for Marilyn Buck."





Why We Sing


By Mario Benedetti

If every hour comes with its death

if time is a den of thieves

the wind is no longer a good

and life is nothing more than a moving target
you might ask, why do we sing?
if our bravos are left without support

our homeland dies from sorrow

and the heart of man is smashed to pieces

even before the shame explodes
you might ask, why do we sing?

if we’re as far away as the horizon

and if over there were left the trees and the sky

if every night is always some sort of absence

and if every waking is a missed encounter
you might ask, why do we sing?
We sing because the river is calling

and when the river calls, the river calls

we sing because cruelty has no name

and destiny does have a name

we sing because the child and because all

and because someday and because the people

we sing because the survivors

and our dead want us to sing
we sing because to shout is not enough

and the crying and the cursing is not enough

we sing because we believe in people

and because we will defeat failure
we sing because the sun recognizes us

and because the fields smell of spring

and because in this stalk in that fruit

every question has its answer
we sing because it rains over the furrows

and we are the militants of life

and because we neither want nor can

allow the song to be turned to ashes.


Mario Benedetti (Sept. 14, 1920 - May 17, 2009) a Uruguayan poet, journalist, and novelist, was considered one of Latin America's most significant authors. Active in radical movements, he went into exile in 1973 when the military, backed by the U.S. CIA, took power. For 10 years, Benedetti lived in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and post-Franco Spain. Mario Benedetti returned to Uruguay in 1983, yet lived for long periods in Madrid, Spain. Exile marked his life profoundly and one of his most important works is El Desexilio y Otras Conjeturas (Dis-exile And Other Conjectures, 1984). Marilyn Buck, who wrote about the internal exile of imprisonment, considered Mario Benedetti one of her favorite writers.

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VIDEO / Jeff Zavala and Thorne Dreyer : Educator and Activist Robert Jensen on Rag Radio

Educator, author, and activist
Robert Jensen on Rag Radio

Video by Jeff Zavala / Interview by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2011

Robert Jensen -- University of Texas journalism professor, widely-published author, Austin-based political activist, and leading radical thinker -- was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 8, 2011. And Austin documentary videographer Jeff Zavala produced a video of the interesting and enlightening interview. (Watch it above.) On the show, Jensen discusses his recent essay, “The Anguish in the American Dream,” posted on The Rag Blog, as well as the current ecological crisis and the key role he believes it must play in our political thinking.

Robert Jensen teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. He is also a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional journalist for a decade. His most recent books are All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege. Jensen also writes for popular media, both alternative and mainstream.

Jeff Zavala also produced an exciting video of Dreyer's June 24, 2011 interview with Texas shrimper, environmental activist, and "Eco-Outlaw" Diane Wilson. Zavala is the creator of ZGraphix Productions and posts videos at zgraphix.blip.tv and at Austin Indymedia. Zavala is also the founder of the Austin Activist Archive, a virtual collective dedicated to broadcasting citizen journalism.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio this Friday, July 15, 2-3 p.m. (CDT), will be Linda Stout. Stout is the founder and director of Spirit in Action and was the winner of the National Grassroots Peace Award. Her new book is Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future.

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Jonah Raskin : Interviewing Journalist and Gay Activist Allen Young

Allen Young, 2009. Photo by Diane Keijzer.
In and out of the closets:
An interview with journalist Allen Young

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2011

A week before Allen Young celebrated his 70th birthday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill legalizing same sex-marriage. The sexual revolution that had begun in the 1960s reached a crescendo, and there was much to celebrate at Young’s birthday bash.

Born in Liberty, New York six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he’s been a life-long advocate of personal and political liberty, and all his life he’s been opposed to war. Since 1970, Young has been active in gay liberation and has written extensively about the oppression and the liberation of gay men and lesbian women.

In addition to books such as Gays Under the Cuban Revolution and anthologies he has edited with Karla Jay, such as Out of the Closets, he has written about his own region in Make Hay While the Sun Shines.

Once a reporter for The Washington Post, and, at the height of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a mainstay at Liberation News Service (LNS), where he was a colleague of Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Young lives now in Massachusetts, writes a regular column for the Athol Daily News, and is an active citizen in his community.

In this interview with long-time Rag Blog contributor Jonah Raskin, he looks back at his life in journalism, the New Left, and Gay Liberation, and offers his reflections on the United States today: the mass media, right-wing politicians, and small towns.


Jonah Raskin: You’ve been a journalist most of your life. What’s the single most important change you’ve seen in your lifetime?

Allen Young: When I was growing up, the word homosexual rarely appeared in print. I never saw anything in print about gay people that was positive. That’s changed. There’s an often-repeated joke now that “the love that dare not speak its name won’t shut up.”

If there’s one story you’re proudest of writing what story is it?

It took courage to write about the persecution of gay men and lesbians in “revolutionary” Cuba. I’m particularly proud because I did not make excuses for this persecution, as others did, by blaming it on machismo and the Roman Catholic heritage in Cuba. Rather, I focused on the fact that this was ideology imported by Cuba from the international communist movement, going back to Stalinism, and enforced by a police state.

There has been a lot of attention recently to the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s. What would you say was your major contribution to the underground papers?

Although leadership was starting to become a dirty word in the late 1960s, often a synonym for elitism, I played a leadership role at Liberation News Service (LNS). I helped to mold the organization in the late 1960s into a well-organized collective with a stipend for its staff and a commitment to sending out news reliably.

Do you feel oppressed as a gay man in American society today?

I have great joy in my life, being partnered for 31 years, and with many supportive friends both gay and straight. But feelings of oppression linger because millions of Americans still regard people like me as inhuman, immoral, disgusting, and even monstrous. What also weighs heavily on me is the oppression experienced by gays and lesbians in nations around the world, especially Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

You’ve been active in the gay liberation movement over the past 40 years or so. Was life hell before gay liberation?

Despite many outward signs of personal success, such as winning scholarships, becoming editor-in-chief of my college’s daily newspaper, having articles published in The New York Times, and later becoming respected in the New Left, I lived daily with a powerful feeling that I could never tell anyone who loved me (much less strangers) about my true nature. That kind of self-loathing and hiding is indeed hellish.

What would you say changed for you most of all after the arrival of gay liberation?

I could feel good about myself and I could be honest. That was huge. Leftwing ideology did nothing to liberate me as a gay person and this realization led me first to question dogma and then to reject it and all forms of zealotry.

When you see gay men these days who don’t know their history what might you say to them?

Don’t take for granted the freedoms you have and be aware that many people, even those around you, are living in fear. The lives of gay people were very restricted in the past, and a political movement was needed to bring about change. In more than half the states in the U.S., it’s still legal for employers to fire gay workers just because they are gay, for example. A movement is still needed.

Who would you say are the unsung heroes of gay liberation?

The Stonewall Rebellion took place in 1969. There were no more than 1,000 gay men and lesbians (as well as bisexuals and transgendered people) active nationwide in the post-Stonewall gay movement. In New York, there were only a few dozen people who attended meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and who demonstrated against the police, the media, and psychiatrists. To name a few names of heroes from those days: Ron Auerbacher, Bob Bland, Pat Maxwell, Step May, Roni Schnitzer, Ron Ballard, Jerry Hoose, Dana Gillespie, Marty Steffens, Suzanne Bevier, Mark Silber.

You’ve lived in rural Massachusetts for decades? What do you like about rural life?

The challenge of finding a way to relate to people with different worldviews and experiences. In urban environments, and in college towns, it’s too easy to conform and relate exclusively to people who agree with you. Life here is more “real.”

Allen Young, then with LNS, at an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. in 1969. Photo by David Fenton.

Do you think you’ve been shaped by one decade, say the 1960s or the 1970s, more than any other decade?

Every decade of my life shaped me. I think of myself as an aging hippie and a Sixties person. I feel a special affinity with the many people who drastically altered their lives in the 1960s to combat the Vietnam War and “the establishment,” and who enjoyed marijuana and LSD, but much of this continued into the 1970s.

What do you miss about urban life?

Not a thing.

What were the worst aspects of the New Left?

I have negative feeling, even shame, about the fascination with and glamorizing of armed struggle that was common in the New Left. I feel particularly bad about our insistence on displaying the flag of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. While opposing the war, we might have acknowledged that the NLF’s vision for Vietnam did not include civil liberties and democracy. New Leftists did a good job of expanding the ranks, but we did not do a great job of communicating with the rest of America.

And what about the best aspects?

The New Left emerged from the repressive McCarthy era and rejected the rigid and often dishonest dogma of the Old Left. Influenced by the beatniks, New Leftists challenged repressive American culture, including repressive drug laws, while celebrating the joyous and mind-expanding aspects of cannabis and psychedelics. The New Left presented a vision that would end racism, militarism, jingoism, and the exploitation of workers. There were hints of a loving community, though male chauvinism was a barrier.

What has surprised you the most about American life in, say, the last decade or so?

The widespread support for right-wing media, especially Fox News and stars such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I’m also surprised at the extent to which people have embraced political figures I find extremely unattractive and witless such as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. I’m surprised how few people are outraged about the excesses of the rich and powerful.

What if anything would you do differently if you could go back and redo your own life?

I would have come out as gay in my teenage years so I could have enjoyable sex and romance in my life when I was my most youthful. Fortunately, I did have an important and exciting physical and emotional relationship with a college classmate, but it was characterized by a lot of fear and I could not make it endure despite efforts to do so.

Are you hopeful about the future and if so why?

I have mixed feelings about the future. I’m hopeful because I see many young people acquiring an interest in sustainable agriculture. I’m pessimistic because I see powerful forces throughout the world promoting violent solutions to problems and doing nothing to stop global warning and environmental degradation.

What do you look forward to in your own life?

I look forward to remaining active and healthy and enjoying the companionship of my long-term partner, and facing death with dignity. I hope that I won’t suffer from a debilitating disease and die a slow death. I would like to have physician-assisted suicide available to me if I need it.

You have friends and neighbors in your neck of the woods. What do you like most about them?

They make me laugh and appreciate my sense of humor. They share my appreciation of small-town life, the concept of community and respect and love for the natural world. It’s rare, around here, to find people motivated by greed or hatred, or who use violence to solve problems.

What’s best about small town America?

The small towns in New England, at least the ones I know best, accept nonconformity and have a strong sense of community. I like the quiet of country living and the opportunity to grow my own food.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Thorne Dreyer / James McEnteer : Dallas Underground Icon Stoney Burns Dead at 68

Stoney Burns is arrested by Dallas Police officers at Lee Park on April 12, 1970, after what The Dallas Morning News called "a clash between law officers and young people" that "occurred when police tried to arrest several hippie-types" at the park. Image from The Dallas Morning News.
Stoney Burns dies at 68:
Crusading underground journalist
was incessantly harassed by Dallas officials

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011

See "Stoney Burns used a gentle wit to fight injustice in Dallas," by James McEnteer, Below.

Sixties icon Stoney Burns passed away Thursday morning, April 28, 2011, in Dallas. Our mutual friend, Angus Wynne, informed us that Stoney died at Baylor Medical Center “of a sudden, massive heart attack.” Burns, 68, was buried on Sunday at the Shearith Israel Cemetery on Dolphin Road in Dallas.

Stoney, who was born Brent LaSalle Stein, was a Sixties activist/journalist and pioneer of the underground press in Texas. When we were publishing The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, he edited a series of publications in Dallas, including Dallas Notes and the Iconoclast -- and later the music magazine, Buddy. In its notice about Burns' death, Pegasus News referred to Stoney as the "King of the Hippies."

In an April 29 article, The Dallas Morning News said that Burns' Dallas Notes "decried war, intolerance and hypocrisy with a playful aggression and a cutting edge."

In his 1992 book Fighting Words, in which he profiled five independent Texas journalists, James McEnteer wrote, "Powered by an anarchic energy and a highly developed sense of the absurd, Stoney personified everything official Dallas loathed." [See McEnteer's reflections on Stoney Burns, written for The Rag Blog, below.]

Stoney was incessantly harassed by the Dallas authorities, who charged him with obscenity, beat him mercilessly, tore up his offices, and confiscated his equipment.

Burns' obscenity case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice William O. Douglas commented on the cops' ransacking of the Dallas Notes offices: “It would be difficult to find in our books a more lawless search-and-destroy raid.”

Stoney had trouble finding anyone in Dallas to print his newspapers, and, according to Austin's Steve Speir, a potential printer in Fort Worth backed out after someone threatened to burn down his shop. So Steve set Stoney up with a printer in Waco, “and on the way back to Dallas we’d be stopped by the cops and harassed. They’d throw all the papers on the ground and search the truck.”

According to The Rag Blog’s David P. Hamilton, four Dallas police cars followed him for several miles after one visit to Stoney’s home.

In 1974, Time Magazine wrote, "The law in Dallas, from all appearances, had been bent on getting Stoney Burns for years" when they "found in the glove compartment a tiny stash of marijuana. It was barely enough for one or two joints." But it was enough to get Stoney a sentence of 10 years and one day -- time he never served thanks to Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe who commuted the sentence.

Angus Wynne told the Dallas Observer that Stoney Burns had "gone through so much, between his public battles and private ones, and turned into a sweetheart. He'd had [an earlier] heart attack and cancer and whipped all those... He was just a great guy, one of the generalissimos of the so-called revolution back then. There was something real special about Stoney..."

[Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer was a colleague of Stoney Burns in the Sixties underground press.]

Stoney Burns. Photo courtesy of Angus Wynne.
Fighting words:
Stoney Burns used a gentle wit
to fight injustice in Dallas

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011

“Maybe that’s why we’re hated. We tell the truth; we’ve got nothing to lose. We do have something to gain, however. It’s our self-respect. Yeah, we tell the truth. It’s about time some newspaper did.”

-- Stoney Burns, Dallas Notes [From James McEnteer: Fighting Words, Independent Journalists in Texas, UT Press, 1992.]

Stoney was not just a brave man -- facing down the rigid Dallas Establishment in large part all by his lonesome -- but a funny one. He used his gentle wit and sense of the ridiculous as effective weapons for social justice in 1960s Dallas, just about the unfriendliest territory imaginable for stoned longhairs looking to have a good time.

Stoney loved a good time -- good music, friends, and laughter. But his easy-going sense of the absurd enraged the humorless conservatives in the Dallas Police Department who considered his satire of local laws and his criticism of usually unmentioned overbearing police tactics as unacceptable threats to their sense of law and order.

Stoney became a cause and a crusader almost by accident, as the sole occupant of the void left by jackboot censorship of all but the most orthodox right-wing cant in the Dallas media.

Stoney Burns in the Iconoclast office, 1972. Photo courtesy of Stoney Burns from Fighting Words: Independent Journalists in Texas, by James McEnteer, University of Texas Press, 1992.
His Notes from Underground started on the SMU campus and was quickly banned. He was the only journalist to describe and photograph police harassment of peaceful long-haired young people in Dallas parks. His various newspapers took different names over the years, but were always an eclectic mix of music reviews, social commentary, and jokes at the expense of local officials, reflecting Stoney's own sensibilities.

His papers featured outrageous cartoons, guaranteed to offend the white bread, church-bred Folks who Mattered in Dallas. Stoney always professed bewilderment at the passionate hatred his dopey humor aroused among otherwise rather staid, affectless citizens. The brief, final incarnation of Stoney's journalistic ambitions was a paper he called The Iconoclast, in homage to the Waco rabblerouser, William Brann.

The police harassed Stoney Burns for years, wrecked his newspaper offices, stole his equipment, planted dope on him, and tried every which way to shut him up, finally hounding him into prison for 10 years and a day on a trumped-up charge of marijuana possession, which the governor later quietly dismissed.

But Stoney's abbreviated prison term ended up accomplishing its goal of silencing a genuine independent voice of Dallas journalism. Stoney went on to publish Buddy, about the local music scene, but made only occasional, rather vague political comments in subsequent years.

Stoney Burns brought light and fresh air into Dallas public discourse of the 1960s. Despite the strange (to him) resistance his journalism conjured in the authorities, Stoney had the courage to continue telling the truth as he saw it for seven years.

He served as an inspiration to many in his own community and beyond, revealing the cowardice of a system ruled by intimidation, not by public assent. He opened up the acceptable limits of free speech in 1960s Dallas. And he paid a price for it.

Dallas and Texas and the country are in Stoney's debt, now as then. Stoney's courage and humor are needed today as much as ever. His spirit will always be worth remembering.

[Rag Blog contributor James McEnteer is the author of Fighting Words: Independent journalists in Texas, published by the University of Texas Press. He lives near Durban, South Africa.]

Also see:

• Stoney Burns, Co-Founder of Underground Paper Dallas Notes and Buddy, Has Died by Robert Wilonsky / Dallas Observer / April 29, 2011
• Ernest McMillan and Stoney Burns : Dallas 60s Activists Revisited by Roy Appleton / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2008

Brent Stein (aka Stoney Burns) in the 1962 Hillcrest High yearbook, Dallas. Image from Dallas Observer Blogs.
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Felix Shafer : Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part III

Mourning for activist, poet, and political prisoner Marilyn Buck, shown at three stages of her life.
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part III

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011

Part three of three

[Marilyn Buck -- political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer -- was paroled last August after spending 30 years in federal prisons. But, after only 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

In the first part of this essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and artistic collaborator to cancer, and his determination to mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.

In part two Felix discussed the specific criminal charges for which Marilyn Buck served nearly 30 years in federal prisons, demonstrating that her acts were actually specific responses to the repression of Black and anti-imperialist activists across the country.

While many today dismiss such acts as adventuristic and self-defeating, the consensus among Black activists, especially members of the Black Panther Party and others who have themselves been victims of government repression, is that Marilyn Buck was a principled freedom fighter. While Marilyn’s thinking on tactics certainly changed over time, her commitment to human rights and equal justice never wavered.

Facing an 80 year sentence, Marilyn had to come to grips with life inside the walls. Until the end of her life, she refused all attempts to treat her case as special, but identified with and walked the same paths as thousands of other incarcerated women. Their daily struggles for simple dignity became her field of endeavor, and fodder for her creativity.

Shafer recalled Marilyn’s emergence as a poet, fighting to maintain her own humanity in the spirit-crushing prison environment. As the so-called “free world” hurtled onward to the distressing present, for a growing community of friends and supporters on the outside, Marilyn Buck, from a steel cell, became increasingly “our breath of fresh air.”

-- Mariann G Wizard / The Rag Blog]


keywords: a revolutionary who dreams like a poet

The 21st century opened up and Marilyn was finding her own way towards a style in which humor, theory, art and the ironic began to dance with her politically radical common sense. From this dynamic a momentum grew within her, which allowed for tremendous personal change.

For the long-term imprisoned revolutionary this can be an agonizing process. It is incredibly difficult to risk overturning dogmas, re-examining cherished beliefs, while taking responsibility for how your actions -- for better and worse -- define you.

There is the repressive State power, not as an abstraction but an everyday presence, which studies each political prisoner's psychology -- emotions, vulnerabilities, moods, doubts, questions -- in order to determine pressure points to exploit.[1]

The continuing goal, long after any hope of getting politicals to give up "actionable intelligence" (to further repression) was gone, becomes to break the resister so s/he will repent and discredit human principles of liberation. To have broken the imprisoned revolutionary's soul is a key objective of the authorities because any healthy counter-example to their total power is threatening.

On this battlefield, and make no mistake it is a battlefield -- a last ditch of significance -- political prisoners, like Marilyn and her comrades, must be on the alert against psychological destabilization. Deeply questioning ideology, strategy and tactics in conditions of isolation (and political prisoners are often kept isolated from each other) and, in periods when the struggle is at very low ebb, is a risky and painful journey.

This long excerpt from Marilyn's incisive and raw essay, On Self Censorship[2], reveals some of the way she thinks -- with feeling.

Women are subject to censorship in a very distinct way from men prisoners. There is a disapproval of who we are as women and as human beings. We are viewed as having challenged gender definitions and sex roles of passivity and obedience. We have transgressed much more than written laws. We are judged even before trial as immoral and contemptible -- fallen women. For a woman to be imprisoned casts her beyond the boundaries of what little human dignity and personal right to self-determination we already have...

It becomes difficult to maintain personal relations because all forms of communication are subject to total intervention -- all under the guise of security. We have no privacy -- our phone conversations are recorded, every word we write or that is written to us is scrutinized, especially as "high profile prisoners."

Being locked up is physically and psychically invasive. All body parts are subject to physical surveillance and possible "inspection." Never ending strip searches... one must dissociate oneself psychically, step outside that naked body under scrutiny by some guard who really knows nothing about us, but who fears us because we are prisoners, and therefore dangerous; political prisoners, and therefore "terrorists."

The guard stands before the prisoner, violating the privacy of her body, observing with dispassionate contempt. It affects each of us. There is a profound sense of violation, humiliation, anger. It takes an enormous amount of self control not to erupt in rage at the degradation of the non-ending assault. I do not think I will ever get used to it. However, being conscious political women enables us to understand and articulate the experience in terms of the very real psychic censorship.

Every time I talk on the phone I have to decide what I will say. I refuse to let the government know how I really am; but I do not want to cut myself off emotionally either. How can I keep saying, "Everything is fine"? It is not believable; and, it would promote the official position that these high-tech prisons are fine places, especially these maximum security prisons with their veneer of civility. It would be a declaration that no, there are no violations of human rights here. It is a dilemma.

I express my interior life in poetry when I have the wherewithal to put the lines down... I write a letter and reread it. I clench. I have a crisis of judgment about whether to send it as is. Should I say this? I do not mail the letter that day. By the time morning arrives again I decide to rewrite it. To couch my thoughts in vaguer terms. Will my vagueness and abstractions frustrate the reader?

I feel like I am diffusing, becoming abstract. I am censoring myself. Like a painter who disguises her statement in an abstract play of colors and forms on canvas... Only she is certain of the voice that is speaking and what she is conveying. And if the observer misses what is being said?

Self-censorship is an oppressive, but necessary part of my life now. For more than six years it has infringed upon my soul, limiting, constraining self-expression. Yet, it is a studied response -- a self-defense -- against the ubiquitous, insistent, directive to destroy our political identities, and therefore us.

Mural of Marilyn Buck on storefront in Mission District, San Francisco. Photo by Gary Soup.

keyword: artist

Marilyn is one for whom the word revolutionary is truly earned and, yet, it's also far short of encompassing. She was a woman with probing interests in the arts, culture, and natural sciences. She was a wordsmith who loved to sink her hands into the clay, making ceramic art that she sent out to people all over the country.

Marilyn was a prolific writer: well over 300 poems along with scores of essays and articles, which were widely published both inside the U.S. and abroad. Her master's thesis became the translation of Christina Peri Rossi's, State of Exile, published by City Lights in 2008. She won prizes from the international writer's organization PEN and published the chapbook, Rescue the Word, and the CD, "Wild Poppies," in which she (via phone recording) joined celebrated poets reading her work.[3]

In late 1999, together with Miranda Bergman and Jane Norling, artists and comrades she'd known since 1969, Marilyn formed surreal sisters -- a trio to explore art-making and surrealism. This informal group continued doing art, studying, and occasionally writing, for nearly 10 years. In an unpublished (collective) 2003 essay, "Coincidence in Three Voices," Marilyn writes:

Three of us had been sister political activists, friends, housemates in the late 1960s and early 70s. Miranda and Jane were artists and activists. I was a political activist who had not yet discovered artistry, at least for myself. By the time the three of us convened in the visiting room of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin CA I had my artist self, though it had taken me half my lifetime to realize that I was and needed to be an artist.

Three women, I behind steel gates and triple barbed wire, Jane and Miranda outside, both painters and muralists. What could we achieve as women dedicated to creating new visions, a new world through collective imagination?

As a prisoner, I feel flattened, forever categorized as only a prisoner -- nothing more. I want to scream I am not one dimension of a box, a box inside of a box! What shall I draw to express this?

When I think about Marilyn Buck, I see a revolutionary who dreams like a poet.

One paradoxical feature of the "obvious" is that not everyone takes the time to see it. We nod our heads at some outline, then say, oh I already knew that, and move on. So, at the risk of stating the obvious: under the most restrictive of circumstances, Marilyn continued to throw herself into processes of human transformation.

Becoming an artist -- and being an artist is always a process of becoming -- was very much part of her destiny. She was neither a propagandist nor a left wing copywriter -- though she could fulfill these functions when she felt called to do so. Her art making was valuable in, of and for itself.

Art is a particular area of freedom: a disciplined work/living space of engaged feeling, thinking, and doing. Arts come to be created and live in a transitional space between self and others that is at the heart of all human cultures.

Confined in prison, Marilyn was able to use art-making to express a full range of feelings, desires and relationships that became her powerful, alive response to the death-driven system in which she was forced to exist. Her great capacity for hard work was channeled into highly productive and creative pathways.

She loved this part of her life and had plans to continue the creative work of writing and translation after she was released from captivity. There was the novella she'd begun writing. Skilled in the arts of translation-a bridge building art par excellence-she was working on a translation of Christina Peri Rossi's work: Desastres Intimos.


When you think of Marilyn Buck: the revolutionary
I hope you also discover Marilyn Buck: the artist

From late 2007 to a month before her death Marilyn was involved, with a few of us on the outside, preparing her selected poems for publication. The idea for the book began in conversation with Raul Salinas, a great advocate of Chicano and Native American resistance, a former long-term federal prisoner, poet, and writer who passed away in Austin in February 2008.

The volume, tentatively titled: Inside Shadows[4] is a collective labor of love that we all believed would widen her readership beyond the label, "prisoner poet." Together we daydreamed plans for a public launch and readings. The last letter I received from Marilyn came about a month before she died when she was very ill with little energy left for work. It was pure Marilyn: an engagingly lucid three pages of comments and revisions to the book's table of contents.


keyword: She who links us

Beneath the distorted balance sheets of credit card, mortgage and International Monetary Fund debt, after the loan sharks and the default dreads have been (momentarily) cleared from our mindset, there remains a debt between Marilyn and her communities that isn't about money at all. It's my belief that Marilyn's commitment to human solidarity with freedom struggles of Black and other (neo-) colonized peoples on the global plantation, with women and all who are oppressed, was her genuine effort to help balance the scales of justice in a world thrown terribly out of joint by empire.

Over the years and, it seems especially these last months, some people have compared Marilyn to the anti-slavery warrior John Brown. The first person I ever heard say this was Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) who visited Marilyn in FCI Dublin and corresponded with her. At her Bay Area Memorial on November 7, 2010, former Black Panther and member of the San Francisco 8 Hank Jones spoke movingly of her as a John Brown of our time. At her memorial in Harlem, a number of Black revolutionaries honored her with this comparison.

The essence of their point is not whether she played a comparable historic role but that she was one of the all-too-few who fought shoulder to shoulder with the Black movement. In speaking about white allies in the freedom struggle, Malcolm X called on people to fight like John Brown. It is in the historic context of what was the largest upsurge for Black liberation since the Civil War, that veterans of the Black struggle honor her today.

Along with John Brown, there is another older, historic personage who comes to my mind when I think of our sister Marilyn. This is a near mythic figure of someone we, in the left, don't talk much about: The woman Antigone, whose story was dramatized thousands of years ago in ancient, classical Greece.

Briefly, Antigone was a young woman of privilege who was part of the royal court. Her two brothers slew each other in a conflict over the fate of the kingdom. The king decreed that the body of one brother, who had opposed him, must lie in the dust to rot and not be given decent funeral rites. Antigone -- following an older just tradition -- defied the king's command and buried him -- thus providing him entry into the afterworld. She dared to act and broke what she considered the patriarch's unjust law.

Under interrogation her sister begged her to lie and deny the act in order to save herself. This she would not do. Antigone's punishment was to be entombed/buried alive in a cave without food or water until she starved to death. The citizens had great sympathy for Antigone and the king's son loved her. Fearing for the legitimacy of his rule, the king had his soldiers open the crypt but it was too late. Antigone had chosen to take her own life rather than die by starvation.

Through the ages, Antigone has been a symbol of women's resistance. I believe that by representing collective struggle with thought-through programs for liberation, Marilyn stood on the shoulders of Antigone.

If Marilyn links you in your own way, as she does me, with time's rich legacy of freedom struggle -- she also links us with our losses.

Questions of who she was for/with each of us, how she lived, what she tried to accomplish and what commitments were willingly shared, must neither be quickly resolved nor stubbornly avoided. The work of mourning involves, along with other things, how each person finds meaningful answers, individually and with others, to the question of what Marilyn's memory and spirit calls us to do and be. I feel that this is what honoring her legacy means.

For now, the traumatic circumstances of Marilyn Buck's final year make all this exceedingly difficult.

When she died, some months before her 63rd birthday, she had served a total of nearly 30 years behind bars. The last 25 years were a continuous long march from arrest/capture in 1985 to her release in mid July 2010. Severely weakened by cancer, she finally left the prison camps and was able to live among us, outside the wire, for 20 days.

During this time Marilyn visited with a lot of dear friends, supporters and family. She got to embrace some of her co-defendants who'd been released years earlier. She spoke on the phone, corresponded by email with more, and was cared for by deeply loving people among whom were my daughters, Ona and Gemma. As she has been for the past quarter century, her close comrade and attorney, Soffiyah Elijah, was a constant protecting presence.

There's just no getting around the great misfortune of her life's ending only 20 days after she left that federal prison system which had held her continuously under the gun since 1985. Her will power was enormous and to remain vitally alive it had to be.

Can we even allow an hour to extend our imagination towards all the wonderful everyday things that she hoped to be able to do? What it would mean to be able to eat a good salad, to sit in the park, to spend as much time as she wanted with whomever she wanted, to walk outside in moonlight, to go dancing?

She could stretch out in her own home; one that wasn't controlled by heavily armed state authorities. She was thinking about what kind of j-o-b might work out. Marilyn's family, people in the Bay Area and around the country, political prisoners and social prisoners with whom she'd spent much of her life, all expected her long internal exile to end in celebration and happiness. Above all. Above all this. Marilyn wanted to live.

She'd been thinking about how to heal herself from the chronic, complex stress of prison and what she wanted to accomplish with her life. In other words: during the early part of the last year and a half, Marilyn had begun allowing herself to really believe that she was finally getting out.

Marilyn Buck with Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) at Dublin FCI, 1994.
I think sometimes that even those of us who do prison work and have visited political prisoners over many years may not always consider how difficult it can be, for people enduring very, very long sentences in hardened institutions, to dwell on their past and/or the future. No matter how many visiting rooms I enter, there is a real gap between people who live inside the wall and those of us outside. The weight of what has been lost and will never come to be can build melancholy and despair in the healthiest of hearts.

So when Marilyn could finally dare to consider what taking her dreams towards a real future outside might mean -- many of us felt her exhilarating gust. As political supporters and friends we had an emotional stake in her freedom and in her victory over the FBI and Bureau of Prisons. This national political police-prison regime, so central to the deep, permanent state structure of Empire, has never stopped trying to break her and the more than 100 other U.S. political prisoners down.

I can feel Marilyn resisting the hint of any effort to make her heartbreak and suffering special by reminding us that

what's happening to me is what happens to thousands of imprisoned women and men who get sick in the system... remember that there are 2 million people caught somewhere in the prison-industrial complex -- if you're going to write about me, remember I stand and fall with them.

Even as a release date of August 8, 2010 came into range, Marilyn's medical symptoms were emerging with force. She was acutely aware that other political prisoners with legally sound parole dates had, at the last minute, been denied release due to political pressure and legal trickery.

One of the well-known agonies of imprisonment is that medical care -- as it is for millions of the non-insured -- is often atrocious. I live in California where the state prison system, which holds nearly 200,000 people, has been under a court appointed special receiver for years because of woefully inadequate medical facilities.

Political prisoners with life threatening illness have faced foot dragging, neglect, and worse from their jailers. Lolita Lebron spoke about the severe medical abuse and radiation burns suffered by Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, when he was held in U.S. prisons more than a half century ago. My dear comrade, Black Panther/BLA political prisoner Bashir Hameed, who died of cancer in 2008 was, at one point, assaulted by police in his hospital room.

From her own experience, and knowledgeable of the cruel battles other political prisoners have waged for treatment, Marilyn was constantly forced to weigh how to effectively advance her health care needs before a totalitarian administration adept at both routine and calculated neglect.[5]

After MANY months of worsening symptoms during which she regularly requested and insisted on evaluation/treatment AND WAS DENIED, she finally received a cancer diagnosis around New Year 2010. Major surgery followed about three weeks later and Marilyn reported that she was told the doctors were optimistic that they'd removed the malignancy.

To my limited knowledge she had no follow up scans or any professional post surgical care by her doctors for well over a month. It's difficult to see how this can be said to meet any standard of acceptable medical practice. She received help changing her postoperative dressing from fellow prisoners. The Bureau of Prisons was very slow to diagnose her. They were slow to move and treat her. On March 12th she was informed the cancer had metastasized to her lungs.

Very early on the morning of March 13, 2010 -- the day of the Spark's Fly gathering in Oakland (an annual event organized by women to support women political prisoners) which drew nearly 500 supporters from around the country to celebrate her impending release and the dawn of a new life -- I was one of the friends she called to tell the devastating news. In only six months time, plans for life after prison turned into a last ditch battle to survive and get out at all.

Soon thereafter, Marilyn went to the Carswell federal medical facility in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. She would be transported from this medical prison to a local hospital for cancer treatment. Two women who she knew well were also being held at Carswell and they helped her very much.

Miranda and I were able to visit Marilyn in Texas on May 1, 2010. We spent time together on Mayday and the next. Marilyn said, "if it was up to my will, I'd have this thing beat." Gaunt and fatigued she used oxygen to help with breathing. She held herself with that incredible dignity and steadiness all who know her have experienced.

Marilyn said, "so many women here are medicalized into the role of patient and the setup here is about making us this way. I do not want to become this. I think about how my mother kept herself out of the hospital until nearly the end because she didn't want to become like that." She went on to confirm that, "In the eight weeks after surgery in Stanford (Stanford University in California) when I had no follow up tests -- the cancer ran wild."

She was very very sick and we could see with our untrained eyes that this was a battle our elegant sister was unlikely to survive.

The question of government's role in Marilyn's death is in the air. It merits a real discussion about whether and how we might hold the state responsible for its (mis)treatment of her. This stark tragedy and rupture of hope has led some to believe she was killed by the government. Others dismiss this way of looking at it as conspiracy theorizing and paranoia. I have heard people, including former political prisoners, express either of these opposing viewpoints.

In a way this process parallels the anger and sadness I feel. Saying "they did it" mobilizes rage against the system, honestly recognizing the very difficult prognosis of people with leiomyosarcoma, even under the best treatment situations, brings me to powerlessness and great sorrow. Ultimately, while this polarized way of looking and feeling is not so helpful, grieving -- for me -- involves allowing myself to go through all of it.

We do know that living for long periods in hostile institutional environments of deprivation and stress degrades the immune system, damages emotional well-being and can shorten the lifespan. Marilyn respected her doctor in Texas, felt that she had her best interests at heart and was giving her the right chemotherapy treatment. We do know that a stress-free, loving environment, excellent diet and adjunctive treatments were not available. We do know that personnel at Carswell made cruel comments to her expressing "surprise" that she was still alive.

Last year, during the many months prior to her diagnosis, when she was working through her own channels to get the administration to act, Marilyn didn't want her supporters to launch a public pressure campaign. I know that during the summer and fall of 2009 when this possibility was raised, her response was to tell us to wait. She was concerned that such a mode of action could be counterproductive.

Throughout her life Marilyn took responsibility for her choices. And although I have kicked myself for not struggling with her more about this, it was her decision. In the face of our real powerlessness to reverse the outcome, her traumatic reality needs to be suffered, held, and borne.

But what we can refuse to accept -- and work to change -- is the incarceration of the remaining political prisoners. We can come together to free them and to try our best to make sure that no more die behind the walls. We can hold the repressive apparatus responsible. By doing so we contribute to a political and ethical environment that will help the untold resisters of today and the future who will undoubtedly rise and be jailed by our government. By holding the state responsible we challenge their vast, malignant system of social control that holds more than 2 million people: the majority of whom are poor and people of color.


keyword: She put her foot down and lived

Marilyn was out of prison for 20 days and in this time she lived to the loving limits of the possible. Miranda and I were honored to be able to visit her as I know others were. We brought the glorious quilt, Marilyn Freedom, made by women in the Bay Area, and presented it to her. I said, Marilyn you always were my John Brown. It pleased her when I thanked her for getting our comrades and me out of a Junction, Texas, jail in March 1969 (with a lawyer and bail) where we'd been held for a week.

We were on our way to the SDS national council meeting in Austin and were busted at a roadblock. Things looked like they might turn violent in a small town Texas way. She laughed in that knowing, sly way of hers. Miranda gave her a long massage and the three of us held each other in silence, sharing a deep recognition of love and farewell.

Now, months later, on fog-glistened evenings like this in San Francisco when I can only bear to be alone -- and when solitude too is unbearable -- great rip tides of grief keep on coming in as though pulled by the pull of the weeping moon.

The moon is water. A sob throws open windows to the monsoon. Fragments of breath drift off. A house of living spaces falls into silence; memories of Marilyn's last year hurling past into that unforeseen horizon. Her-eyes-on us. I spray-paint the wall red: she deserved more.

From the websites and the blogs I feel the many who are weeping and honoring yet, in this same moment, can't those who knew or met her even once hear her voice speaking directly without panic, as though she has not fallen?

If I could I would organize a demo of we small earthlings against her death and we'd storm heaven to return her to live among us.

Yesterday, the sky over the city was enormous. A woman in a wheelchair was shopping for marigolds at the farmer's market. Open my eyes. The mirage builds itself; it is weightless and real.

Marilyn's articulate face turns from a wheelchair backlit by the sun of freedom in Brooklyn.

I want to impress her face into the great wall of the universe so that she can be seen from all points, accessible deep into tomorrow.


In 2004, Marilyn wrote an essay, The Freedom to Breathe[6]

I am skinny-dipping. Stripping off my clothes, running into the water, diving down naked to disappear for a few breaths from the shouts and sounds of the world. Shedding clothes, embarrassments, care. The surface breaks as I return for air. For a few moments, I am free, opened, beyond place, beyond space...

Deepening my breath, lengthening my spine, I learn to discard my preconceptions and expectations – all the many hopes and fears and attachments that have given shape to my life. I learn to lay aside anxiety about what I am missing, what I do not have, what might happen to me in here. I confront the fact that I am, in truth, uncertain about whether I really want to release my fears, my anger. I am conflicted. Without the armor of my anger and self-righteousness, I become intimate with the many forms of suffering in this prison world – and so I feel vulnerable, exposed.

Each day presents a new confrontation with reality. I want to run; instead, I breathe. One breath – the freedom to choose my response in that moment. In sitting, I encounter joy; I know that through this practice I can arrive at a place of genuine peace. The path is before me. It is my choice to follow.

In the "everywhen," which comes late at night when I cannot sleep, I see Marilyn walking under a wide canopy of amiable stars. She's not in this world, but I can see her very clearly from here in San Francisco.

A woman of 62 years, whole, restored, vigorous, and trembling with excitement. She's talking with other animated souls of the big-hearted revolutionary dead from all the ages that have come and gone on earth. They're wondering together about how they might assist us.

I'm still running with her chimes of freedom.

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]

• See "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part I" / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011
• and "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part II / The Rag Blog / January 26, 2011
• Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

Footnotes

[1]Two of Marilyn's comrades, Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini together with Puerto Rican Independence fighter and teacher Alejandrina Torres, were held in the underground Lexington (Control) High Security Unit, which was condemned by Amnesty International and denounced as a psychological torture center by the campaign which eventually forced its closure of in 1988. As this unit was being forced to close, the Bureau of Prisons was building many more control unit prisons. See the 1990 documentary film, Through the Wire, by Nina Rosenblum, on PBS.

[2]On Self-censorship, by Marilyn Buck. Published by Parenthesis Writing Series. ISBN 1-879342-06-5. 1991. Currently out of print.

[3]See her CD: Wild Poppies available from Freedom Archives & chapbook: Rescue the Word available from Friends of Marilyn Buck at marilynbuck.com

[4]Her poetic collaborators intend to see Inside Shadows published by a major poetry press sometime in 2011. This is one aspect of our continuing collaboration with Marilyn. Check www.marilynbuck.com for this and other important ongoing information.

[5]A growing number of U.S. political prisoners have died of cancer and other illnesses in prison. An incomplete list: Albert Nuh Washington, Kuwasi Balagoon, Merle Africa, Teddy 'Jah' Heath, Richard Williams, and Bashir Hameed. Others have faced and are facing life-threatening challenges both inside and after release on parole.

[6]Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,
Vol. XIII, No.3, page 84, Spring 2004

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