RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Sociologist Todd Gitlin on the State of American Mass Media

Todd Gitlin. Image from Pew Forum.

Rag Radio podcast:
Sociologist and author Todd Gitlin on 
the state of mass media in America

We discuss the so-called 'Golden Age' of journalism highlighted by the distinguished coverage of the Watergate scandal, as well as American journalism's more recent major failures.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / August 26, 2013

Noted sociologist, author, and mass media scholar Todd Gitlin joined host Thorne Dreyer, Friday, August 16, 2013, for the second of two Rag Radio interviews.

Our conversation with Gitlin centered on the history of American mass media, including the so-called "Golden Age" of journalism highlighted by the distinguished coverage of the Watergate scandal, as well as American journalism's more recent major failures in its handling of Bush's War in Iraq, the financial crisis, and the continuing issue of climate change.

We also discussed the recent purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, and the projected effect of the Internet on journalism's future.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our August 16 interview with Todd Gitlin here:


Todd Gitlin played a pioneering role in the '60s student and anti-war movements, and in our first interview, originally broadcast on July 19, 2013, we focused on the lasting legacy of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Port Huron Statement -- including Gitlin's critique of the late '60s New Left -- and on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You can listen to the earlier show here:


Todd Gitlin is the author of 15 books, including the recent Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. He is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University.

Gitlin is on the editorial board of Dissent and is a contributing writer to Mother Jones. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and countless other mainstream and alternative publications.

In 1963-64, Todd Gitlin was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, and he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Gitlin was an editor and writer for the underground newspaper, the San Francisco Express Times, and wrote widely for the underground press in the late '60s. In 2003-06, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.

Gitlin's other books, several of which have won major awards, include the novel, Undying; The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (with Liel Leibovitz); The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; and The Intellectuals and the Flag.

He is also the author of Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; and The Whole World Is Watching.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired and streamed on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
Friday, August 30, 2013: Educator and "Small Schools" advocate Michael Klonsky, former National Secretary of SDS.
Friday, September 6, 2013: Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and Challenger Park.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Alan Wieder : Thai Jones Draws 'A Radical Line'

Generations in the struggle:
A 'retro-review' of 
Thai Jones' A Radical Line

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War.

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2013

[A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience by Thai Jones (2004: Free Press); Hardcover; 336 pp; $26.]

Reading Neil Gordon’s novel and then viewing Robert Redford’s film, The Company You Keep, a fictitious portrayal of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), led me to re-read Thai Jones’ book on his family -- his mom and dad, WUO people Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their parents, Albert Jones a Quaker and WWII conscientious objector and Annie and Arthur Stein, labor movement people and both members of the Communist Party.

While I actually liked Redford’s film, and the book even more, A Radical Line is much more encompassing as it portrays generations and real lives in the continuing struggle for a democratic, socialist America -- yes, Eleanor and Jeff and I think Thai, as well as many of their WUO comrades and their children, continue the fight today.

I had no intention of writing a review as I began to re-read A Radical Line. The story, though, is so engrossing, and Thai Jones’ combination of detail, thoughtfulness, and drama pull you in as words bring depth to his extended family as well as the collective, progressive struggle in the United States.

Jones’ craft as a writer shows in the book's poignant beginning, as Jones describes his parents being arrested -- reflecting on his own memories of the event as a four year old child.

There had to be something I could do to help my parents. I made a fast survey of my possessions: a cowboy outfit, a coloring book, a stuffed Tyrannosaurus. I opened the drawer of my little desk and picked up my child’s scissors. The ends were rounded, and the blades were covered by blue plastic guards. Bouncing them in my hand and snipping at the air, I considered putting on the cowboy hat and charging into the hallway with scissors blazing to defeat these men who had come to hurt our family. Even then, I knew it was a battle against long odds. But I didn’t realize it was a question that many in my family had already faced. They had chosen to fight.

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War. Jeff Jones was raised in Southern California and his father worked for Walt Disney Corporation. But as already noted, Albert Jones was a pacifist, and his experience working as a conscientious objector at Civilian Public Service Camp #37 in Coleville, California, during WWII is itself a story.

 His path was not easy as his father disapproved and church people at the Methodist congregation that nurtured his views abandoned him -- Camp #37 became home:

He was surrounded by pacifists. Each Sunday they held a silent Quaker meeting, and that was the only time in the week that the men were not in heated discussions about their faith. Coming here, Albert finally felt welcome.

Jeff Jones’ early lessons were pacifism and peace and not a long leap to the civil rights movement and opposing the Viet Nam War.

Eleanor Stein’s parents were much more political. Annie was introduced to socialism in high school and was politicized even further as a student at Hunter College. Thai Jones describes her early participation in the National Student League and the Communist Party.

It was Annie who politicized Arthur. Initially she was disheartened because her husband was apolitical, but she began leaving copies of The Daily Worker around their apartment and soon Arthur was attending meetings and demonstrations.

Like Albert Jones’s lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Annie and Arthur Stein never stopped fighting class disparity and racism. In the book, Thai remembers Albert’s assertion to Jeff before the Days of Rage: “Son, I believe very strongly in your goals. But if you set out to hurt somebody, I would hope and pray that you are hurt first.”

Concurrently, Eleanor was clearly nurtured by Annie’s work with civil rights stalwart Mary Church Terrell and her political work on education in New York City. She was also nurtured by her father’s labor activism, his founding of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter in Brooklyn, and his appearance before HUAC, where he was represented by Victor Rabinowitz, the attorney who also represented Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.

Annie and Arthur sent Eleanor to Camp Lakeside, a "red diaper" summer camp. Eleanor recalled her mother’s expulsion from the CP over China and mother continued to lecture daughter throughout Eleanor’s WUO years:

“Look,” Annie would tell Eleanor, “I lived through the 1930s when the capitalist system was on the ropes. Labor unions were strong and men were out of work, on breadlines.” Pausing for effect, she would light a cigarette, sip her scotch and soda, and go to the bookshelf for her copy of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? "It was obvious in 1917,” she would say, waving the book in her daughter’s face. “The workers were in the streets. Who is going to run the means of production in your revolution? The hippies? You’ve got to be kidding.”

The heart of A Radical Line, however, is Jeff and Eleanor’s lives in SDS and the Weather Underground and their coming together as a couple. There are rich photographs in the center of the book -- especially one of Eleanor wearing her lambswool jacket with a raised fist salute in front of Columbia University Law School. Most endearing is a page with portraits of both Thai, as a very young child, and Jeff in running gear.

We learn about Eleanor quitting law school after participating in the Columbia University student takeover in 1968 and of Jeff joining SDS while a student at Antioch. There are other events that have been written about by Mark Rudd, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, and others; but Thai Jones presents a different take, new insights, and of course issues that still leave us with questions about the Weather Underground and the struggle in general.

We learn a great deal about WUO life underground but for the purpose of this review I would like to address one particular issue.

It begins in early July 1969, when Eleanor was part of a delegation that went to Cuba to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front and of the North Vietnamese government. Others on the trip included Bernardine Dohrn and Diana Oughton.

The North Vietnamese had invited Eleanor and her comrades so that they could interact and learn how the anti-war movement in the United States might help to end the War in Vietnam. One of the first lessons was on the lack of focus of American activism. The teacher pointed out that day that anti-war slogans and chants, like

"No More Vietnams" vs. "Two, Three, Many Vietnams"
"No More Wars" vs "Bring the War Home"
"Long Live the Victory of the People’s War" vs. "Make Love not War"

were contradictory. What was the goal?

The Americans traveled Cuba with their Vietnamese mentors and one man, Nguyen Thai, stood out -- the man from whom Thai Jones inherited his name. There were hours and hours of discussions and Eleanor and the other Americans became focused on taking one message to the masses back home: “End the War Now.”

When they returned to the U.S., however, they were informed that their leadership had decided to form small collectives; their job was not to organize the masses. Thai Jones writes, “Before Eleanor had even clanked down the gangway to the shore, Nguyen Thai’s plan for an all-encompassing mass movement was sunk.”

And I would argue, that it was at this point, before the forming of the Weather Underground, before the Townhouse bombing, before the manifestos and armed propaganda, before freeing and then being betrayed by Timothy Leary, and before the breakup of WUO, the youth movement for social justice and equality in the United States was doomed. That is, doomed as a movement.

While the Vietnamese spoke of -- and represented -- a people’s movement, people on the ground weren’t included in the United States. The people of WUO and the anti-war movement in general were young -- we didn’t take the lessons that others taught us. We didn’t pay attention to how different Fidel and Che’s revolution in Cuba was from Che’s adventurist foray into Bolivia. We didn’t know how to organize a people’s war.

My analysis, of course, is only about a small part of Thai Jones’s book. And the people that he writes about, particularly his parents Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their WUO comrades, have continued, maybe not as a movement, but nevertheless continued, the fight to end class disparity and racism in the United States and throughout the World.

Their mistakes as well as their continuing commitment and passion offer important lessons. As does Thai Jones’ book, A Radical Line.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His new book, from Monthly Review Books is titled Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

VIDEO / Jeff Zavala and Thorne Dreyer : 'Eco Outlaw' Diane Wilson on Rag Radio

Environmental activist Diane Wilson on Rag Radio

Video by Jeff Zavala / Interview by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2011

Environmental activist Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from Seadrift, Texas, and the author of Diary of an Eco-Activist: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on the June 24, 2011 episode of Rag Radio. It was a lively, informative, and entertaining affair and Austin documentary videographer Jeff Zavala captured it on videotape. (Watch it above.)

Diane Wilson -- a mother of five -- has earned the wrath of industrial polluters everywhere. She has been arrested 50 times, has held numerous hunger strikes, and has participated in disruptions of U.S. Senate hearings and corporate shareholder gatherings in Houston, Taipei, and London.

She was Mother Jones magazine's "Hell-Raiser of the Month," and was one of Grist's "13 Badass Greens." She was a founder of CodePink, the Texas Jail Project, and Injured Workers United. She is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, was featured in the award-winning PBS documentary, Texas Gold, and received a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship for 2010.

Jeff Zavala is a native Austin documentarian and activist whose work covers immigrant rights, native peoples’ rights, anti-war protests, and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He created 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, direct action, civil disobedience, social activism, community organizing, lectures, and music in and around Austin, Texas. Jeff also works as a volunteer for the Workers Defense Project, and the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition.

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. It is produced in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that publishes The Rag Blog. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is co-producer of Rag Radio, and the show’s engineer.

Host Dreyer is an Austin writer, editor, broadcaster, and activist who for years ran a prominent Houston public relations and political consulting firm. An influential underground journalist in the Sixties, Dreyer was the original editor of The Rag, Austin’s legendary underground newspaper, was a founding editor of Space City! in Houston, and was an editor at Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York. Dreyer was also general manager of KPFT-FM, the Pacifica radio station in Houston.

Thorne Dreyer’s guest this Friday on Rag Radio will be University of Texas journalism professor, widely-published author, Austin-based political activist, and leading radical thinker Robert Jensen. Jensen, who is also a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, will discuss 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. Jeff Zavala will also be taping this show, and we will post the video on The Rag Blog next week.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jeff Biggers : Thousands Honor Environmental Visionary Judy Bonds

Julia 'Judy' Bonds. Painting by Robert Shetterly from his Americans Who Tell the Truth series.
Coalfield visionary:
Thousands pay tribute to Judy Bonds

She has been to the mountaintop, and now we must fight harder to save it.

By Jeff Biggers / CommonDreams / January 4, 2011

She was a tireless, funny, and inspiring orator, and a savvy and brilliant community organizer. She was fearless in the face of threats. As the godmother of the anti-mountaintop removal movement, she gave birth to a new generation of clean energy and human rights activists across the nation. In a year of mining disasters and climate change setbacks, she challenged activists to redouble their efforts.

As one of the great visionaries to emerge out of the coalfields, Julia "Judy" Bonds reminded the nation that her beloved Appalachians had been to the mountaintop -- and in her passing last night, thousands of anti-mountaintop removal mining and New Power activists from around the country are reminding the Obama administration and the country's environmental justice movement of Bonds' powerful legacy and parting words to "don't let up, fight harder and finish off" the outlaw ranks of Big Coal and end the egregious crime of mountaintop removal.

In a special email message last night, Coal River Mountain Watch director Vernon Haltom announced the passing of Bonds, the Goldman Prize winner and Executive Director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Bonds, 58, had battled advanced stage cancer over the past several months. "One of Judy's last acts was to go on a speaking trip, even though she was not feeling well, shortly before her diagnosis," Haltom wrote.

"I believe, as others do, that Judy's years in Marfork holler, where she remained in her ancestral home as long as she could, subjected her to Massey Energy's airborne toxic dust and led to the cancer that wasted no time in taking its toll. Judy will be missed by all in this movement, as an icon, a leader, an inspiration, and a friend."

Here's a clip from a special tribute to Judy by On Coal River filmmakers Adams Wood and Francine Cavanaugh:

Judy Bonds from On Coal River on Vimeo.

Judy Bonds from On Coal River on Vimeo.

A little more than a decade ago, sitting on the coal dust-swept front porch with her grandson -- the ninth generation of their family to reside in Marfork Hollow in West Virginia -- Bonds was outraged to hear her 7-year-old grandson describe an escape route should a nearby massive coal waste dam break and flood their valley. "I knew in my heart there was really no escape," Bonds told an interviewer in 2003. "How do you tell a child that his life is a sacrifice for corporate greed? You can't tell him that, you don't tell him that, but of course he understands that now."

Forced by an encroaching strip mine to move from her family's ancestral land, Bonds spent the next decade as a full-time crusader (and coal miner's daughter) to bring her grandson's message of central Appalachia's role as a national sacrifice zone from the devastating impact of mountaintop removal strip mining to millions of Americans across the country.

Judy Bonds delivering a speech in Washington, D.C. 2002
calling for the end to mountaintop removal. Photo by Deana Steiner Smith / Living on Earth.
For fellow activist Bo Webb, who went to jail and organized side-by-side with Bonds for years in the Coal River Valley, Judy was one of the better angels of our nature:

Judy was one of God's most loyal and dedicated Angels in the battle of good vs. evil. I will miss her, we will all miss her. After much suffering, she now stands before God, without doubt holding a very special place in His heart. May God bless and comfort those that love and adore Judy. May God bless and comfort her wonderful family, and may God give us the unity and conviction to fight on in her honor and His name.

"Judy Bonds was our Hillbilly Moses," added Bob Kincaid, president of the Coal River Mountain Watch board. "She knew better than anyone that we WILL make it to the Promised Land: out of the poisonous bondage of coal companies. She will not cross over with us on that great day, but her spirit will join us, and inform the freedom that sings from our hearts. Mother Jones, meet Judy. Judy, Mother."

In a special Living on Earth radio interview with Jeff Young in 2003, Bonds recalled her grandson holding a handul of dead fish contaminated by coal waste. "And I looked around him and there were dead fish laying all over the stream. And that was a slap in the face."

From the United Nations to the halls of Congress, and at universities and conferences from Maine to California, Bonds testified to the ravages of strip mining on her community's waterways, economy and culture. Her riveting speeches galvanized activists from the hollers to the urban neighborhoods, and among national environmental organizations.

"Judy was a strong, powerful voice that always sang wisdom, inspiration, passion and determination to my soul," wrote Chris Hill, the National Field Organizer for the Hip Hop Caucus in Washington, DC. "She was a voice that will forever speak volumes to the reasons why I fight for justice from the mountains to the inner cities."

"Judy often remarked how she proudly stood shoulder to shoulder with outside groups like Rainforest Action Network," added Scott Parkin, Senior Campaigner for RAN's Coal Campaign.

"During an E.P.A. action last March, I saw her beaming with a big smile and much excitement as we worked together to make mountaintop removal a national issue and take the fight to end it out of the hills and hollers of Appalachia into offices of the power-holders in Washington D.C."

"She inspired thousands in the movement to end mountaintop removal and was a driving force in making it what it has become," Haltom wrote in his email message to national activists.

"I can't count the number of times someone told me they got involved because they heard Judy speak, either at their university, at a rally, or in a documentary. Judy endured much personal suffering for her leadership. While people of lesser courage would candy-coat their words or simply shut up and sit down, Judy called it as she saw it. She endured physical assault, verbal abuse, and death threats because she stood up for justice for her community."

"One of the happiest days of my life was when we announced the funding for a new school to replace Marsh Fork Elementary," said filmmaker and activist Jerry Cope, who worked with Coal River Valley residents to move a school imperiled by coal dust and a dangerous coal slurry impoundment. "Without Judy's inspiration, I would have never become involved and she will forever be a source of inspiration to me."

In a special tribute to Judy by filmmakers Jordan Freeman and Mari-Lynn Evans, Judy asked for the right to go home. "I miss my home," she pleaded. "I want to go home."



Like generations before her, Judy Bonds has finally gone home to her Marfolk Holler.

And thousands of coalfield residents, activists and leaders will continue the battle to ensure that Coal River Mountain -- the last mountain -- remains in her view, and mountaintop removal is abolished once and for all.

[Jeff Biggers is an award-winning journalist and cultural historian. He is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, winner of the 2010 David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting and the Delta Award for Literature. This article was published and distributed by CommonDreams.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Paul Buhle : Pekar and Kupferberg were Oblique Jewish Intellectuals

Harvey Pekar (left) in 2003, and Tuli Kupferberg in 1968. Photos from Getty Images / Forward.
Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg:
They looked at the world from an oblique angle

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2010

See "On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar," Below.

Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg died on the same day, July 12, and shared much, including peacenik politics, a strong sense of humor, and a passion to carve art out of the fragments of popular culture. But they were almost an American Jewish generation apart, a detail that now seems difficult to grasp entirely, but is still crucial.

Kupferberg, born in 1923, was a real bohemian of the pre-beatnik era, a hipster whose leap off a New York bridge in an attempted suicide famously appeared, without his name, in Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem “Howl.” He once told me that he had become an anarchist in the mini-boom of postwar anti-bomb, anti-government sentiment among intellectuals and artists on both coasts.

He recalled being a young man bitterly opposed, from the left, to Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate of 1948. Meanwhile, Pekar, then 9, was following his mother’s lead, passing out Wallace leaflets in his Cleveland Jewish neighborhood. He shared his Bialystok-raised parents’ joy at the birth of Israel.

The two future artists were both shaped by the Depression and by Franklin Roosevelt, two key influences upon practically any American Jew of those years. But Kupferberg had briefly become a Trotskyist even before Roosevelt died, while Harvey remained, till the end of his life, at one with his family memory that the great leader had saved them all personally, as well as the country, from disaster.

Kupferberg and Pekar were both college dropouts -- but with a difference. Bright and focused, born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Kupferberg graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1944 (psychology and English), and hit the wall only as he began working on an advanced degree in sociology, at The New School. After that, as he recalled, he faced with equanimity a long and productive life as a luftmensch, a person who makes his living, as it were, “from the air.”

By contrast, in one of Pekar’s several autobiographical comic art books, “The Quitter,” he bitterly regrets dropping out of college after only two semesters in his native Cleveland. He couldn’t get his head around schoolwork, and slipped into bohemianism almost by accident. The two were evidently major jokesters as schoolchildren, which may have marked them out as a particular Jewish type, prepared to look at the world from an oblique angle when offered the possibility of getting friendly laughs.

Despite these differences, Kupferberg and Pekar were deeply interested intellectually, and even more deeply involved personally, in urbanism, the decay and sometime revival of the neighborhood for good or ill. Through his life’s work there, Kupferberg made himself into an iconic figure of the Lower East Side, latterly fighting gentrification, just as Pekar was forever in Cleveland, actually moving to one neighborhood from another across several decades, ahead of the bulldozers and the urban renewal that never renewed much of anything.

Their work -- in Kupferberg’s case, words, drawings and music -- was full of neighborhood people, all types, storefronts, crowds, friends (in Harvey’s case, his own first two wives, who were often not so friendly) and a sensibility all their own.

They hit upon art forms whose uniqueness will remain, long after their deaths, the signature of a time and place, hinting always, but in highly curious ways, at something larger.

Drawing by Tuli Kupferberg.

Kupferberg began writing poetry early and, if he had agreed to the definition, would be rightly classified as a Beat Poet in what might be called the Ferlinghetti or City Lights school: humane, free form, and uncensored, above all raging against the madness of the Cold War arms race. In 1958, with his future wife, Sylvia Topp, he brought out Birth, a literary magazine that would publish the likes of LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, among others. Living off B Street, selling 1001 Ways To Live Without Working, a beatnik humor book of his own, on the street, he ran into another poet, Ed Sanders.

The two of them opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in 1964, and were the most famous of The Fugs, one of the delightfully outrageous rock groups of the coming era. The Fugs performed endlessly at peace demonstrations and other venues. Paul McCartney foiled autograph hounds by signing himself “Tuli Kupferberg.” The Fugs wore themselves out by 1970, but Kupferberg went on and on, performing in many ways, often as inauspiciously as sending out packets of his photocopied cartoons to friends (I was one of them). Peace and resistance never failed as themes.

Pekar famously met cartoonist R. Crumb in the early 1960s, and gradually came to the conclusion that anything, even the Russian novels he loved so much, could be done in comic form. His long-running series of comics, “American Splendor,” was launched in 1976 (he, too, began as a self-publisher) and continued on almost until his death, in one format or another.

Pekar went through dozens of artists, giving them dialogue and precise directions (in the form of comic panels with stick figures). He couldn’t pay them much: Making his own living never ceased to be a struggle. But the award-winning, 2003 film American Splendor rendered him a public personality, especially on campus, where lecture fees and book sales finally gave him a modicum of financial security. It was long overdue.

One of Kupferberg’s own favorite strips (I received it several times) showed a grandmother with Kupferberg as a child. In one panel he is whistling; in the next, Granny warns, “Yidishe kinder fayfn nit!” [“Jewish children don’t whistle!”] It was obviously a fond, oddball memory of another time. Pekar also had his connection to the culture of the mameloshn, or mother tongue.

In the months before his death, Pekar was working (with me and a handful of artists) on “Yiddishland,” a book that begins with him and his Yiddish-speaking grandfather in Cleveland around 1944. He still wanted to tell his vanished relatives that he had become a Yidishe shrayber, a continuator of Yiddishkeit, and he had, in his own way, reached that goal before the end came. Neither of these deeply Jewish artists is likely to be forgotten soon.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhle is professor emeritus at Brown University. He edited several comics in collaboration with Harvey Pekar, including The Beats. They collaborated on Yiddishland, to be published next Spring by Abrams ComicArts. Contact Paul Buhle at feedback@forward.com. This article was also published in the Jewish weekly Forward.]


Above, from the American Splendor series, cover art by R Crumb. Below, Harvey Pekar by Jeff Smith / The Pekar Project.

On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar

[Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar collaborated on five books. Karen Winkler of The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Buhle about working with Pekar.]

You worked with Harvey Pekar on several projects, including books on the Beats, SDS, the Wobblies, and the New Deal. How did your collaboration come about?

I was working on my second historical comic, about the Students for a Democratic Society, and I could gather (in some cases writing about my own life) local stories that worked as scripts, but the big narrative was terribly difficult for me, probably because the collapse of SDS was such a huge disappointment in my younger life. Harvey happened to call me and he needed money. I offered him my advance if he would write the narrative. We started there and went on til the end.

Pekar was known for his sometimes irascible commentary. What was it like to work with him?

He pretended to be grumpy. He was grumpy about making very little money for his work, and also about the rightward drift of America after his earliest years, in a family that admired FDR and hoped for a more egalitarian society. But he was truly sweet, generous, and supportive of young artists.

How was his viewpoint on life reflected in his work?

Harvey was able to conceive of his work as his life and vice versa. He may have borrowed the idea from his 1960s close friend, Robert Crumb, but he took it in a different direction, to deeply ethnic, blue collar Cleveland. Many of his early stories were about his own personal relationships but also about his neighborhoods, his job (work at the VA hospital for 36 years) and his interests, such as jazz.

You're a historian. How did Pekar's perspective inform your interpretation of history?

I like to think that I broadened his vistas in his published work, in the sense that in our five books, he read very widely about large historical questions and developed scripts that tell the story differently from a scholarly study, but just as well and in many cases, much better. You didn't need to agree with Harvey's take on SDS or the Beat Generation, for instance, to see that he had strong opinions and a distinct aesthetic.

He was deeply interested in history, as he was in literature and art. If I were describing some Cleveland setting, I would start with demography. He would start by describing a local Serbian restaurant he liked whose owner was actually a Croat, and so on: that was his way of explaining and exploring history.

What do you think will be his legacy in the world of comics and graphic novels?

There were not many artists and writers (he never drew comics, but he gave artists very specific directions, along with dialogue) in the U.S. whose work, before the turn of the new century, shaped the emergence of comics as an accepted, serious art form. Along with Harvey, I count Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, and Alison Bechdel. These were also practically the only artists of "alternative comics" who made a living.

He expanded what comics can do. When I worked with him on the adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working, I realized -- as an oral historian and teacher of oral history -- that he was also to comics what Studs was to the interview. He knew how to listen to people. He raised the level of comic art.

Did you have another project in the works with him?

Yiddishkayt or Yiddishland (we are still debating the title) will, I hope, appear next year. It meant a lot to Harvey, a native Yiddish speaker. It's the story of secular Jewish-Americans who carried on the centuries-old legacy of Yiddishkayt, and did wonderful things with the language and culture until time ran out. His scripts for this book, to be published by Abrams ComicArt, are more than masterful, and he knew it.

Also see:

• "Paul Krassner: Remembering Tuli Kupferberg" by Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2010.
• "Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs: Rock's Inner City Shaman" by Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2010.
• "COMICS / Paul Buhle: Beyond the Superhero" by Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Warrior-Poet Marilyn Buck : No Wall Too Tall

In prison but clearly in bloom. Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog.

Supporters call for release:
Free Austin's Marilyn Buck!

For her acts of selfless courage on behalf of victims of American criminal behavior, Marilyn has spent 25 years as a political prisoner of the United States government.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 19, 2010

AUSTIN, Texas -- Marilyn Buck and I have been friends since 1966, a world or so ago. For the two and a half decades that her life has been narrowly circumscribed by a prison cell, our friendship has remained strong through all too few visits, many letters, phone calls, books shared, other friends met, and poems critiqued.

But before that, there were her fabulous boots, working together on The Rag (Austin's pioneering underground paper), Students for a Democratic Society, my husband George Vizard, our well-meant matchmaking, George's death, GI organizing, hippie dancing, every visit I ever made to San Francisco, and unconditional love.

For all its state-imposed limits, Marilyn is one of my closest and dearest friends, one of those, for me, of whom The Who sang, "You can count 'em on your one hand." I mention this only to let you know up front that mine is not an unbiased report. And there are hundreds of people around the world who love her as much as I do. She has earned every bit of our affection.

Marilyn Buck dared to dream of a world without racism, without American imperialism. More important, for those who dream this dream today, she dared to act. She dared to try to make this dream a reality. For her acts of selfless courage on behalf of victims of American criminal behavior, Marilyn has spent 25 years as a political prisoner of the United States government.

A year ago, it looked as if Marilyn’s long exile from the free world was coming to an end. After uncounted rejections, a new hearing brought a positive decision: she would be released on parole in August 2010! Supporters in the Bay Area began to raise funds for her expected transition.

She’d never talked about what she would do when -- or if -- she was released. When you're doing an 80-year sentence, you do it, as they say, "one day at a time." Suddenly she was full of questions: "What kind of computer should I get, a laptop or a desk top?" Like most prison inmates, she's never been in cyberspace. (I told her to get a smart phone for the first six months and see if she even needs a computer.)

The Rag Blog's Mariann Wizard (left) with Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI in 1996.
Unconvinced that digital cameras are now as good as film, the gifted photographer talked about how she might find work in a darkroom. Although she’s tried hard to stay in touch with social and technological changes, it’s hard to do so behind the bricks and razor wire fence, with your legs in shackles any time you’re moved, restricted in every daily choice.

But she was coming out. Nothing else mattered.

Then, last December, right around her 62nd birthday, she was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer, a sarcoma, dangerous as a rattlesnake, potentially lethal. Another friend sent me a clinical description of the disease, but I couldn’t bear to read it all the way through.

Marilyn had symptoms for months before diagnostic tests were made, but not wanting any "fuss" over herself, not wanting to worry her friends, she kept her “health issues” vague and low-key with most people she spoke to or corresponded with, while she and her lawyer tried to get medical tests done.

Health care in the federal Bureau of Prisons is not renowned for its excellence. But, as her friend Penny Schoner reminded me gently, “This is a woman who wakes up every morning thinking about the plight of women in Afghanistan and Palestine, not about herself.”

Marilyn had surgery in the Bay Area pretty quickly after the diagnosis was made and should have started chemotherapy six weeks later, when the surgical wounds had healed. But when she was finally admitted in mid-March to Carswell Federal Medical Center in Ft. Worth, where thousands of seriously ill federal prisoners are treated, the tests performed revealed new tumors and growths outside the original cancer site.

Now at last, the chemo has started, and she is full of hope. She has so much pent-up energy, so many dreams, desires, abilities, concerns -- so much life to live! Her experiences in America's prisons have illuminated a hundred worthwhile projects and pressing needs to which she wants to contribute, as well as a whole new world of experiences that so far she has been denied.

Marilyn Buck with "Resistance Conspiracy" codefendant Susan Rosenberg circa 1985.


Marilyn was accused of sensational acts of insurrection -- including jail break, bombings, and a robbery attempt in which two police officers were shot and died. Many otherwise liberal-minded Americans are unable to get past the violence of the confrontations between the police and the small groups of Black and white revolutionaries with whom Buck was linked. Many committed leftists criticized the militants as foolhardy adventurists.

Neither give due weight to the extraordinary repressive measures undertaken by the U.S. government to crush lawful dissent against unjust policies at home and abroad. Behind the shadow of COINTELPRO (the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program), law enforcement agencies operated outside the rule of law against Movement activists.

To be an African-American dissident, especially, meant walking around with a “shoot-to-kill” sign pinned on your chest. Being Black or Brown or Red, or even white and "hippie-looking," was to face hatred and brutality (and possible death) day and night at the hands of racist white police and their allies in the U.S. Justice Department.

Marilyn Buck saw her friends being hunted down like dogs on the streets of Oakland. It may be that the murder of her friend (and my husband) George Vizard, in the summer of 1967 in Austin, by person or persons then unknown, also led to her belief that right action lay in helping victims of oppression defend themselves, as the saying went, "by any means necessary."

Marilyn Buck in 1971. Photo by Jeff Blankfort.
Part of Marilyn’s story is told on a website, Friends of Marilyn Buck, created by friends and supporters. There is a lot more to her story of activism, self-sacrifice, and achievement. But it is her story to tell, and she's not yet able to tell it -- and, until she is free, perhaps not yet able to see it whole.

Meanwhile, the simple facts, and a few errors (e.g., she was born in Temple, Texas, not Jasper, as Wikipedia reports), are scattered in bits and pieces through Wikipedia entries, New York Times archives, and websites or various organizations supporting the rights of political prisoners in the U.S. and abroad.

After a 1973 arrest for buying two boxes of ammunition under a false name, Marilyn Buck was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. It was a harsh sentence for the actual crime, but those were harsh times.

It’s not unreasonable, given the circumstances, to suspect that the real accusation against Buck was that a middle-class, educated white woman had acted as quartermaster for the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. She was charged and convicted for the same reason that University of California professor Angela Davis had been arrested: she gave material support to Black people to defend themselves against white supremacist attacks and the racist police who allowed and, in some cases, even enabled them.

After four years at Alderson (West Virginia) Federal Women's Prison -- and after being denied parole for, I think, the third time -- Marilyn was given a furlough to consult with her lawyers. She didn't come back.

During the next few years Marilyn allegedly participated in the prison escape of BLA leader Assata Shakur, a bank robbery to assist the New Afrikan independence movement, and, with other militant activists, was involved in a concussion-bombing of the U.S. Capitol to protest the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Lebanon by U.S. warships.

When she was captured in 1985 and charged in what became known as the “Resistance Conspiracy case," she and three women co-defendants took a plea to secure the release of a male co-defendant, a physician whose non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had recurred in prison. Marilyn received a total sentence of 80 years.

Marilyn Buck.

As a prisoner, Marilyn has always embodied the old-school principle, "Don't mourn, organize!" Ever since her first arrest, she has steadfastly resisted diverting "movement resources" to her defense or benefit. In her interactions, she directs attention away from her personal inconveniences as a high-security prisoner (she is considered a "terrorist" by the government) to social and political issues -- or at least to the personal lives of her friends and correspondents with whom she unfailingly empathizes, even when pointing out occasionally that I’m being whiny.

Her character is like the finest steel: it resists corrosion, shakes off the grime of daily use, and shines forth. Her level-headedness alone is enough to make her a valued friend!

Despite her selflessness, an active support group has grown up with members all over the world. It is centered in San Francisco, across the bay from Dublin Federal Correctional Center where Marilyn was sent after human-rights lawsuits forced the closure of a brand-new “supermax” prison in Marianna, Florida, where she began her second incarceration.

She has been upheld throughout her captivity by a multicultural, multi-gendered group of working class supporters, poets, former prisoners, prison reform activists and others, enabled to buy postage stamps, prepaid phone minutes, paper and pens, and kept in books and periodicals (she's a daily reader of the New York Times).


During those years, Marilyn became an accomplished, highly acclaimed poet and translator, the result, she says, of being “a censored person. In defiance, I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.” Marilyn’s poems can be found in many collections, in her chapbook, Rescue the Word, and on her CD Wild Poppies. She was awarded the P.E.N. American Center poetry award in 2001.

Marilyn has developed a significant artistic talent as a sculptor; organized prisoners to raise funds for AIDS education through a pledge walk-a-thon; and taught untold hundreds of other women how to read, how to think things through, and how to survive and even transcend their prison sentences. She has mentored and inspired scores of poets inside and outside the walls.

All along, her principled conduct has brought many new friends and supporters along with the old. She had a steady stream of visitors at Dublin FCI, including Sixties radical icons and the now-grown children of friends and former neighbors. She corresponds with poets and artists around the world. Thirty or more poets participated in making Wild Poppies, including South Africa's liberation laureate Dennis Brutus and Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones), who introduces the compilation.

1966 UT-Austin police surveillance photo from anti-war rally. From left, Liz Jacobsen (Liz Helenchild), Terry Dyke, and Marilyn Buck.

Both of Marilyn’s parents passed away during her incarceration, and she could neither see them before their deaths nor attend their funeral services. There have been other serious personal hardships, but that was, I think, the most difficult for her to bear. Even the shock of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when Marilyn -- along with scores of other prisoners in many facilities around the country, completely uninvolved in the attacks -- was suddenly removed from her cell and placed in solitary confinement, without access to her attorneys for many days, didn't really compare with not being able to properly mourn her parents.

Marilyn's Episcopal minister father, Louis Buck, was a noted Austin civil rights activist when I first got involved in that cause as a college freshman in 1965. I heard about Dr. Buck, and met him once or twice, before I ever met his daughter. Marilyn had an upper-middle-class private school education, but crosses had been burned on the family lawn north of the University of Texas campus. When her father's denomination defrocked him because he started an integrated congregation that still exists today, Austin’s St. James Episcopal, he became a veterinarian to support his family.

Early on, Marilyn saw that racism was wrong, that she needed to oppose it, and that those with the political power to make changes could not be counted upon to do the right thing. Ironically, her dad sent her to college at the University of California at Berkeley to keep her away from the crazy radicals (SDS and others) at UT Austin. Smart as a whip and curious about everything, the innocent young lady who went to "Berzerkly" soon discovered psychedelics, rock music, and "high” society.

Despite the protection the elder Bucks attempted to provide their daughter, there was no hiding place for anyone with a minimal curiosity about national and world affairs on the college campuses of 1965-66. When she returned to Austin the following summer, she and I, and George, became fast friends. We were fascinated with her West Coast sophistication; she with our close-knit and eclectic community of activists, artists, musicians, and dopers. It was in Austin that she joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), worked on The Rag, and met a national SDS organizer on his way out of town. She went with him.

In Chicago, she worked in the SDS National Office and edited New Left Notes, the group's national news organ, then returned alone to the Bay Area, with a sharply honed and newly militant outlook on the state of the world and what needed to be done to change it.

There she worked with Third World Newsreel; this was back when video cameras weighed 30-plus pounds and needed two people to operate, running in tandem through the tear gas-choked streets, taping demonstrations as the San Francisco TAC Squad closed in! It wasn’t long before she met and became friends with members of Bay Area Black liberation groups.

Nor was it long before she emerged as a target of special interest in FBI COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers and other anti-imperialist organizations.

Marilyn Buck with Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) at Dublin FCI, 1994.


So why, now, with parole already scheduled and her serious illness, is she still imprisoned at all? She's been incarcerated longer than most other political prisoners of the Sixties. Former Chicago Black Panther, working class artist, and Houston's "Mayor of da 5th Ward" Robert al-Walee says, "If Marilyn was a Black woman, she would be free by now; there would have been a public outcry for her release."

Lee compares Buck to famed abolitionist leader John Brown, demonized in the American historical record. Whites who stand steadfastly against racism and discrimination become "race traitors," and the label of "terrorist" -- by which Brown was also known -- drives away liberal support.

Assata Shakur, who has lived in exile in Havana, Cuba, for many years, agrees. She wrote,

When I think of Marilyn as a preacher's daughter, I think of her as someone who wrestled with the moral problems of our times and who was not afraid to take principled positions around those issues.

Marilyn had a choice. She could have remained silent; she could have reaped the benefits of white-skin privilege. But instead she chose the path of righteousness. She has defended the have-nots, the powerless, and as a woman she has struggled for the liberation of all women. The only reason that she remains incarcerated is because of her political activism.

She needs and deserves the support of all those who are committed to freedom and the abolition of pain and suffering on this earth. She deserves to be supported, she deserves to be respected, and she deserves to be free.

Austin author and “candyman” Robert King, a former prisoner and Panther activist at Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison, where his two comrades from the Angola 3, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, remain imprisoned, expressed his wishes for Buck's recovery and remarked on her "indomitable spirit." He says,

Marilyn's self-directed commitment shows her evolution towards the ideal of the revolutionary 'New Wo/Man' of whom George Jackson spoke. This is what enables her to weather the storms of life. She has given so much and has asked for nothing. She has kept the faith and continues to fight the good fight. She will always have my love and respect.

Kathleen Cleaver, professor of law at both Yale and Emory Universities and a veteran of both the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), states that "Marilyn has always been stalwart and devoted in her dedication to the liberation of Black and all oppressed peoples. Unlike some, she never withdrew from that struggle."

Marilyn Buck with Kathleen Cleaver at Dublin FCI cica 2007.
Akwasi Evans, editor and publisher of Austin's NOKOA: The Observer, is another long-time admirer. He says,

Marilyn Buck is a truly courageous woman who sacrificed her liberty in the struggle for the liberation of all of America's oppressed. She has paid a great price for her crimes against capitalist exploitation and ought to be released from prison now so she can fight her cancer in freedom instead of incarceration!

Marilyn's support has always been strong in the Black community and among "minorities" in general. But some of us, her white sisters and brothers, may have let her slip from mindfulness. She dared to support with deeds what we only said we supported: the right of oppressed people to defend themselves.

Her experience underground, after her 1977 escape from prison, is of special relevance today. Marilyn has had a long time to meditate upon the mutually reinforcing beliefs, held then by some, that armed revolution was imminent and that the duty of the revolutionary was to make a revolution. Reading her letters, poems, and essays over all these years, I've seen her extraordinary evolution, witnessed the maturation of an articulate, responsible, disciplined, ethical mind.

In her 1999 master's thesis in fine arts (she's earned undergraduate and graduate degrees by correspondence while incarcerated), she wrote,

The artist creates the concept and framework for a different cultural paradigm. Political speeches, leaflets, and pamphlets that exhort and condemn the old oppressive order rarely do that. Without the imagination, there is little daring to confront the old.

We need her out here in the world; need her insight, her experience, and her creative imagination. I can’t wait to hear her speak freely.

James Retherford and Sarito Carol Neiman contributed to this article.

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Marilyn Buck in her trademark boots, at offices of the San Francisco Express-Times, 1968. Photo by Jeff Blankfort.

Free Marilyn Now!

There will be a “Free Marilyn Now!” benefit in Austin on Friday, June 25, from 7 – 11 p.m., at 3105 E. Cesar Chavez Street, with a suggested donation of $10 at the door, and all proceeds from food, refreshments, an art sale, and other events going to Marilyn’s freedom fund.

Bands are still being confirmed at this time, but a diverse lineup is planned, along with healing meditation exercises and special guests.

Marilyn will need medical monitoring and care while she convalesces, and for a good while to come, and her plans for working right away will need to be put on hold. She needs some good nutrition, too, after 25 years of prison chow, and for crying out loud, this woman is going to need some good new boots!

Sponsors are quickly coming on board for the event, but include The Rag Blog, NOKOA News, Resistencia Bookstore/Red Salmon Arts, OneLove Kitchen, Ex-pinta Support Alliance (ESA), Texas Jail Project, Austin Cab, and Youth Emergency Service/Phogg Phoundation -- that I know of so far.

Save the date and start saving your pennies! Have something cool to donate? Willing to volunteer? Watch The Rag Blog for more details!

-- MGW

M. Buck, Poet. Photo taken at Dublin FCI, 1998.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Apocalypse 2010 : Meltdown Under the American Bubble

Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams.
Remembering 2010 (if we must):
Mass amnesia, the Rapture,
and the Palin-Bachmann nuptials

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Book-ended by mass amnesia under the American bubble, 2010 was yet another year to erase from living memory. Although Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams with the usual volcanoes blowing their stacks, earthquakes rearranging the landscape, flood and drought rampaging from one continent to the next, nuclear war raging in the Middle East, and serial economic calamities inducting a billion more sentient human beings into the starvation army, First World elites navigated through daily disaster delusionally convinced that everything was honky dory.

Children played happily with their Chinese mechanical hamsters until the batteries went dead and families gathered around home entertainment centers, even the millions of families who had been evicted from their homes. Neighbors exchanged pleasantries as they cruised empty super market aisles (most brand-name products were recalled because of suspect Chinese-induced E Coli contamination), oblivious of the unseen poor parboiled in their own sweat and tears far beyond American shores. Scientists attributed this massive indifference to the plight of the planet to the presence of toxic amounts of Ambien in the water systems of major U.S. cities.

The majority of U.S. citizens were not even aware of their failing memories and did not know what was missing. Still mass forgetfulness had grave political downsides. One example: no one could remember the name of the U.S. president when just a year ago, it was on the tips of everyone's tongue. Indeed, no one could recall much of anything anymore. Even after the physical environment collapsed and the faithful were taken up in the Rapture, no one seemed to miss them.

The faithful were taken up in the rapture, but weren't missed. Artist reconstruction.
The following month-by-month capsule of how the Apocalypse impaled Planet Earth on the Cross of Catastrophe was scraped together from the author's pitiful scraps of memory before he slipped into total dementia.

JANUARY - The failure of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (they will reconvene in December 2010 in Mexico City, the most monstrous megalopolis in the Americas) and the formation of a cartel of the world's pollution leaders had immediate repercussions when Somali pirates captured an iceberg floating in the Red Sea.

In accordance with the U.S. Zero Tolerance For Pirates protocol, President What's His Name stealth-bombed the dusky buccaneers who were towing the huge block of ice into port and so-called depleted uranium radiation liquefied it, triggering monumental flooding -- all of Yemen and parts of east Africa remain underwater and the quat crop has been decimated for years to come, causing wide-spread depression on the Dark Continent.

Further north, global warming had a more fortuitous fallout when the melt-down of a thermo-nuclear power plant in the capital city of Nuuk converted the Greenland Ice Cap to boiling water and the Inuit Riviera caught fire as a hot tourist attraction

Back under the American Bubble, on the first year anniversary of his hope-saturated inauguration on the Capital Mall, 78% of those polled by the Pew Institute On Domestic Dementia could no longer remember the President's name -- 72% referred to him simply as "you know, that black guy." Another 16% still had the President confused with Osama Bin Laden but 9% could correctly remember his first and last name although not at the same time.

On the other side of the political ledger, the words "Republican Party" had no name recognition for 81% of those who responded to the Pew poll. Alarmed pollsters hypothesized that the results were symptomatic of mass brainwashing, probably due to "something in the water."

FEBRUARY - Whatever his name was, The President of the United States was confronted with his umpteenth international terrorist crisis when Taliban technicians, employing Sky Grabber technology on sale at Radio Shack for $26 Americano, seized control of an unmanned and unwomanned drone over North Waziristan and redirected it to Kabul where the rebels launched missile attacks against the seat of the puppet government, flattening President Karsai and his entire cabinet, which included three of the world's most influential heroin dealers.

The obliteration of central authority quickly splintered the Afghan Crusade into a series of local mini-wars. Caught in the crossfire between feuding warlords, the U.S. death toll climbed to 502 for the month, topping even Iraq at the nadir of the illegal American invasion and occupation. Both the Nobel Peace Prize winning president and his Commander-in-Chief Stanley McChrystal extolled the high death toll as proof that the U.S. was winning the war and vowed to dispatch 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

When Taliban Sky Grabber gear hijacked two more drones and targeted Blackwater/Xe training facilities in the Great North Carolina swamp, Obama or Osama or whatever his name was closed down all Radio Shacks in the continental U.S.

Also under the bubble, cheap Chinese pork chops were deemed responsible for an outbreak of an inscrutable strain of Swine flu ("Swinear flu") that convulsed the breadbasket of the country.

The majority of citizens weren't aware of their failing memories. Image from TheTugboatComplex.
MARCH - A post-midnight coup March 11 in Quito, Ecuador, in which a junta of generals and admirals trained at the former School of the Americas overthrew and subsequently dismembered that tiny Andean country's elected president, the economist Rafael Correa, was the latest violent "regime change" in Latin America.

Since the White House greenlighted the overthrow of right-wing leftist Mel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009, 11 Latin countries have suffered "golpes de estado," 10 of them this year (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The wave of coup d'etats is almost certainly being orchestrated by the U.S. South Command operating out of seven state-of-the art bases recently installed in Colombia.

In Paraguay, the U.S. 4th Fleet parked itself off the coast while military gorillas dethroned former liberationist bishop and father of 14, Fernando Lugo. Up until January 2010 Paraguay had no coastline but global warming has brought the Atlantic Ocean to that impoverished majority Indian nation's doorstep.

Meanwhile in Mexico, scattered rebellion has broken out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. In early January, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation occupied sacred sites throughout the country including Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, Palenque in Chiapas, and Teotihuacan near Mexico City, calling upon ancient Mayan and Mexica deities to join their uprising.

Panicked by the prospect of declining tourist dollars, fraudulently elected president Felipe Calderon pulled 50,000 troops out of his failed war with the drug cartels that has now taken 25,000 Mexican lives, to dislodge the Zapatistas. The strategy backfired when the cartels seized statehouses in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

On March 18th, the 72nd anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico's petroleum from the transnational Seven Sisters, President Calderon was found dangling from the rafters at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, an apparent suicide -- however, an autopsy turned up a note apparently pinned to the inside of his tie with a single Mexican expletive inscribed: "RATERO!"

Further scandal erupted when photographs emerged of Calderon's corpse, clad only in jockey shorts and plastered with bloody Mexican and U.S. bills, amulets, crucifixes, and rosaries in classic narco fashion, raising questions about the dead president's cartel affiliations.

APRIL - Global warming was deemed responsible for the near-biblical migration of small, undocumented mammals abandoning a disintegrating Mexico for El Norte -- badgers, gophers, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and bats had little trouble burrowing under the 1,000 kilometer-long Separation Wall between the two distant neighbor countries or flying over it. Hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwest were destroyed by the marauding illegals.

Rabid bat of the type that devoured a Minuteman in Lubbock.
When an anti-immigration Minuteman was devoured by rabid bats in Lubbock, Texas, crusading Mexican killer Lou Dobbs flew to the scene of the crime where he was confronted by several hundred indignant skunks that rendered his campaign for the White House permanently unviable. The stench caused frontrunner Sarah Palin to replace Dobbs on the ticket with hysterical TV paranoid Alex Jones of Austin, Texas.

Passions in the Middle East boiled over in April when Iranian patrol boats sunk a Liberian-flagged tanker carrying 176,000 gallons of Chinese-made flan to Spain. The sinking cargo soon gummed up the Straits of Hormuz through which the bulk of oil destined for Europe, the Americas, and China passes each day. Oil prices immediately shot up from a seasonal low of $50 USD to $250, deflating the dementia-driven euphoria on Wall Street. Acting on the self-interest of his Goldman Sachs advisors, the President floated multi-billion dollar bailouts.

MAY - After five months of testy reconciliation conferences between the House and the Senate during which Dennis Kucinich challenged Michelle Bachman to a duel and was shot dead on the House floor, the U.S. Congress announced that it had reached agreement on a compromise version of all but forgotten health care reform. Indeed all the health care reform provisions in the John Doe Omnibus Health Care Reform bill (named for a bus driver who had to sell both his kidneys in order to feed a starving puppy) had been stripped from the measure before it arrived at the White House for the first Afro-American president's John Hancock.

Among the provisions of "John Doe": renewed funding for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kerghizstan, and Uzbekistan (two Stans will be added every year though 2018); the criminalization of abortion; and the restitution of the universal mandatory death penalty.

A new Pew poll prepared by the Institute for Domestic Dementia indicated that many Americans (a whopping 77%) had forgotten all about health care reform by May.

Sabotaged by the flan crisis, the economy was again in freefall despite White House lies that the 2009 depression was officially over and the country was growing again. As jobless benefits dried up, many families in the lower socio-economic brackets were forced to reduce their daily caloric intake and unemployed carnivores threatened to eat the rich.

Fortunately, rolling black- and brown-outs as river flows slowed to a trickle due to global warming and shut down hydro-electric power plants, caused widespread refrigeration meltdowns and millions of tons of spoiled meat, fruit, and dairy products poured into dumps and landfills where hungry garbage pickers were eager to harvest the putrefying bonanza.

Also in May, the last U.S. daily print newspaper, Rudolf Murdoch's New York Wall Street Times Journal Sporting News, closed up shop.

JUNE - Food riots became generalized in such depression-wracked formerly industrial cities as Detroit and Houston and Fox News Chief Albino Glenn Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots to arm themselves for self-defense -- the average white North American family now owns 12 to 15 automatic weapons to hold off their equally heavily armed neighbors, according to the Pew Institute On Domestic Violence.

Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots coagulated around a doddering George H.W. Bush in Texas and Dick Cheney in the Wyoming-Colorado Theater to seize state armories and hold nominating conventions. With armed insurrection being urged on cable news channels, the first Afro-American President of the United States retreated to a hollowed-out mountain in Virginia to watch the NBA Finals.

The Finals themselves generated alarming news when it was reported that Kobe Bryant had been genetically engineered on a farm in Kansas once owned by assassinated late term abortionist George Tiller -- it was not known if embryonic cells were employed in Kobe's modifications. A federal raid on the "farm" led by General Jeff Novitsky (he won his stripes in the Barry Bonds genocide campaign) uncovered thousands of Kobe clones in various stages of assemblage.

In other sporting news, the World Cup Matches in South Africa had to be called off when starving rioters set stadiums aflame, roasting tens of thousands of first world hooligans.

Flood and drought raged from one continent to the next. Image from Worth1000.com.
JULY - Prodded by global broiling, temperatures all across the northern regions of the planet jumped three degrees Celsius in July, one degree higher than the acceptable limits imposed by the polluting nations at the Copenhagen conference. The summer heat was so intense that roadways buckled and bridge struts melted and infrastructure in the U.S. midwest collapsed. The overload on the electricity grid shut down air conditioning units in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and sweltering senior citizens dropped like flies. So many old people expired during the month (123,000 according to the Pew Institute On One-Time Senior Citizens) that morgues overflowed and bodies were put out on the street each morning for the dead wagons to collect and carry off to common graves.

By mid-summer with the doomed president's jobless recovery in full flower, 36% of all American families were living in their cars, according to the Pew Institute On Vehicular Gridlock, transforming the nation's highway system into a coast-to-coast parking lot. Then cars began to commit suicide, blowing sky-high with no warning. Homeland Security blamed explosives sewn into drivers' underwear for the plague of car bombings although some experts speculated that the automobile industry was just depressed.

AUGUST - The dog days extended into August with no relief in sight. Despite the intense heat, the Tea Bag Patriots were on the move, traveling mostly at night towards Washington D.C. for the much ballyhooed Palin-Bachman same sex nuptials set for later in the month despite Michelle's pending indictment for gunning down a liberal congressperson on the House floor.

Sarah Palin announced her engagement to Michelle Bachman who had killed Dennis Kucinich in a duel on the floor of the House. Photo from jezebel.
As U.S. troops abandoned Iraq to its own explosive devices, the summer doldrums were punctured when a terrorist commando, the Universal Unitarian Salvation Squadron (UU'SS) thought to be affiliated with the Al Qaeda-Taliban Axis of Evil overran Pakistan's nuclear arsenal near Islamabad demanding, among other items, that the United States get out of the Islamic world, Africa, and South and North America. Holed up in his Virginia mountain bunker, President Osama/Obama called for a diplomatic solution. The Palin-Bachman nuptials were called off, reportedly due to domestic dispute.

Diplomats shuttled in and out of Islamabad seeking solutions to this latest geo-political crisis. One no-show: Osama Bin Laden who had passed away many years before trundling his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass. A proposal offered by Tuvalo's ambassador that Washington change places with his low-laying Pacific island nation was rejected by the United Nations Security Council on the grounds that moving the U.S. Capital would be an extravagance a bankrupt world could ill afford.

Feeling excluded from the international spotlight, Israel, with a go-ahead from the White House-in-exile, launched a nuclear attack on the Iranian holy city of Qum where the Ayatollahs were putting the finishing touches on their own minaret-tipped nuclear missiles. Mamoud Ahmadinejad, hanging on to power by the skin of his wolf-like teeth, ordered retaliation against the Zionists but his delivery system fell short of Tel Aviv and obliterated Syria and Jordan instead.

SEPTEMBER - By Labor Day weekend, the Tea Party Patriots were encamped on the White House lawn and demanding that the first Afro American President turn over the keys to the executive mansion for the on-again off-again Palin-Bachman nuptials.

The serial catastrophes that now included the incineration of vast swaths of the Middle East had an upside -- Americans no longer worried much about global warming. Although world temperature readings had jumped another point, the calamity was no longer an issue on the 24-Hour news cycle or the Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the fact that humpback whales were beaching themselves in record numbers on whatever dry land they could find and birds had begun to fly backwards, a sign that the Apocalypse was in the pipeline, the general public seemed more preoccupied by Palin's and Bachman's never-ending domestic disputes.

Finally, fed up with the first Afro-American President's stonewalling, the Tea Party Patriots broke into the White House and a troika -- Sarah Palin, her sometimes lover Michelle Bachman, Dennis Kucinich's assassin, and George H.W. Bush, now suffering terminal Alzheimer's Disease -- was sworn in. Glenn Beck was appointed Secretary of Defense and Alex Jones got State. Mel Gibson bought the movie rights.

OCTOBER - While the right-wing fanatics squabbled over power in Washington, most of the planet was either underwater or so radioactive that the land could no longer sustain life. Slowly falling ash blotted out the sun and in the feeble light no one could tell if it was dawn or dusk anymore. Water, although there was plenty of it, was undrinkable and the food chain tainted. Cannibals roamed the roads in packs. Indeed, outside of the Washington bubble, the earth had become a road show of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Inside his Virginia mountain, the former president tried to watch the World Series but he was too depressed.

NOVEMBER - All was not lost yet. Vulture Capitalists saw profit in the new holocaust and took steps to bolster their failing fortunes. Murdoch bought up what news was left and changed the channel. A new television season kicked in and sponsors returned. The slate was wiped clean: no more nuclear war, world hunger, mindless terrorism, and global warming. Ambian dosage was increased for all citizens.

The new shows looked a lot like the old shows but since no one could remember the old shows, reruns became the real thing. New generations were enchanted by Lucy and Desi and Ed Sullivan's "Toast Of The Town" ("Gilligan's Island" was submerged deep beneath the graying sea.)

Outside of the bubble, of course, the rainforest was on fire and 39% of all children were born with multiple deformities (the Pew Institute On Monstrous Deformations.) The cities of the world had been abandoned.

Here in Mexico City where 23 million people had once lived cheek by jowl you could spend a whole day without speaking to anyone. On the Day of the Dead, I walked out to where Chapultepec Park lay in ruins behind a curtain of toxic smoke. It was then that I saw my neighbors tramping north towards Mictlan, the direction of the dead, and I tried to stop them. "Wait!" I urged, "Stay! The U.N. Climate Conference will convene here in December and surely, the leaders will fix things up..." But my neighbors just kept marching towards Mictlan.

DECEMBER - Inside the bubble, the Holiday Season was in full swing. Americans went shopping for mechanical hamsters again, not remembering that it was last year's toy to die for. They went to Church forgetting that God was dead and wagered on the Stock Market as if the bottom had not fallen out of the Big Board long ago. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny led parades and made patriotic, optimistic speeches and Santa promised to visit every home.

So the families went home, those who still had one, and set fire to their furniture and hung their stockings by a roaring hearth. They wrote letters to Santa and left out cookies and cocoa for the jolly old fruitcake but although he had promised, Santa Claus never showed up.

Indeed, he would never show up again. Late-breaking film from the Arctic Circle showed the old gentleman and his eight reindeer keeled over in their North Pole sweat lodge.

[John Ross will launch a three-month, coast-to-coast book tour with his latest and much-buzzed cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City in Fresno, California, this February 4. For further info and suggested venues (Chicago area and east coast dates are solicited) consult johnross@igc.org.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...