RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Musician/Author Bobby Bridger & 'Lost Gonzo' Guitarist John Inmon

Musician and author Bobby Bridger with guitarist John Inmon at the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, August 23, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Singer-songwriter and author Bobby Bridger
with 'Lost Gonzo' guitarist John Inmon

Houston-based musician Bobby Bridger, also a chronicler of the old west and American indigenous culture, was joined by signature Austin guitarist John Inman.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2013

Bobby Bridger, singer-songwriter, author, and noted historian of the old west, and virtuoso guitarist John Inman, original member of the Lost Gonzo Band, joined host Thorne Dreyer, Friday, August 23, 2013, in discussion and live performance on Rag Radio.

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 24 interview show with Bobby Bridger and John Inmon here:


Legendary Texas musician Bobby Bridger, who is also a noted historian of the old west and of indigenous American culture, was our guest for the third time on Rag Radio. Virtuoso guitarist and original 'Lost Gonzo' John Inmon joined Bridger on the show. Bridger and Inmon have worked together for over 40 years and are currently co-producing an album which they are developing through Kickstarter. It is Bridger’s first studio album in 12 years.

Houston-based singer-songwriter Bobby Bridger is also an author, playwright, painter, and historian. He has recorded numerous albums and is the author of four books including A Ballad of the West, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, and Where the Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West, and the epic theatrical trilogy, A Ballad of the West. Bobby has appeared on PBS’s Austin City Limits, PBS’s American Experience, and CBS' Good Morning America.

Also listen to our November 18, 2011 and September 3, 2012 Rag Radio shows with Bobby Bridger at the Internet Archive.

From left, Bobby Bridger and John Inmon with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer and Tracey Schulz. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Austin musician John Inmon is considered one of Texas’ signature guitarists. He was an original member of the famed Lost Gonzo Band, founded in 1973, which toured with Jerry Jeff Walker and appeared three times on Austin City Limits. He also toured with Michael Murphey (now known as Michael Martin Murphey) as part of  the Cosmic Cowboy Orchestra. Inmon has also played with Townes van Zandt, Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Delbert Mcclinton, Marcia Ball, Omar and the Howlers, and many more.

John Inmon was honored as the 2012 Texas Music Awards Producer of the Year.

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, September 6, 2013: Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and Challenger Park.
Friday, September 13, 2013: Populist author and commentator Jim Hightower.
Friday, September 20, 2013: Long-time activist Michael James, founder of Rising Up Angry and Chicago's Heartland Cafe.

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Jonah Raskin : Historian Eric Foner: A Contemporary View of America's Past

Historian Eric Foner. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
A Rag Blog interview:
Lincoln biographer Eric Foner
tells history from the bottom up

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2010

The award-winning American historian, Eric Foner, has often written about the Republican Party -- its origins, icon leaders, and tipping points -- but Foner himself is not now nor has he ever been a front man for the Republicans.

A popular professor of history at Columbia University since 1981, he is the author most recently of The Fiery Trial: American Lincoln and American Slavery, in which he charts both the strengths and weaknesses of our 16th-president, and depicts him as an original thinker and as an adept politician in near-constant evolution.

Revered by students and fellow historians -- a past president of the American Historical Association -- and reviled by right-wing ideologies, Eric Foner seems to have been destined to write history. His father, Jack Foner, was an American historian who was blacklisted for years; his uncle Phil Foner was also a historian who wrote about nearly everything and everyone in American history -- from 19th-century New York merchants to Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the Black Panthers.

Like his father and his uncle, he is thoroughly immersed in the American past, and yet attuned to contemporary history as it unfolds today.

I met Eric Foner at Columbia in 1960 when we were both freshman, and members of Action -- a student-run organization and a forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- that protested nuclear testing, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the policies of a paternalist administration.

Even in 1960, at the age of 17, he already knew he would go on to teach and to write about American history, to see it from the bottom up and from the point of view of the underdog: the slave, the worker, the immigrant.

Fifty years on, and at the start of the 50th anniversary of the 1960s -- an era that shaped his own view of history -- Foner continues to teach, write, and speak out on controversial political issues of the day. This interview was conducted over the long Thanksgiving holiday and ranged over a wide variety of topics -- from Lincoln to Obama and Karl Marx to revolution.


Almost every day I go on line there's another piece about Lincoln? Why is this?

Lincoln is so iconic a figure in American culture -- the self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of the slaves -- that everyone wants to claim him as their own. Also, because the issues of his day still resonate with ours, he somehow seems to be our contemporary in ways other figures of our past do not.

If you could channel Lincoln what do you think he'd say about Obama?

Historians don't like to answer questions like this. Lincoln would no doubt be pleased and surprised that a black man was elected president but on bailouts, gay marriage, Afghanistan -- who knows?

And about Sarah Palin?

All that I’ll say on that subject is that Lincoln had great respect for learning and expertise.

You have a new book out on Lincoln and slavery. Why did it take so long for someone to write a book about a subject that seems to obvious?

There are previous books on Lincoln and slavery but they tend to be either hagiographies -- he was born ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation -- or prosecutorial briefs -- he was an inveterate racist. I think it requires someone from outside what a friend of mine calls the Lincoln-industrial complex to try to show the man in all his strengths and weaknesses, and how his views changed over time.

What does the reception to your book tell you about the state of our country today?

To the extent that people relate the book to the present it may reflect a longing for political leadership in which one can take pride and have confidence.

Was Lincoln a prophetic president? Did he see into the future and see the way U.S. society was developing?

Lincoln looked back more than forward. He thought of himself as fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution. He did not foresee the rise of the industrial state of the late 19th-century, which undermined many of his deep assumptions about the dignity of labor.

You became an historian in the 1960s. What do you see now as the impact of the 1960s as an historical era on the writing and the teaching of history?

The 1960s put on the agenda of historians, issues that had been very marginalized before then -- the history of race and racism; women's history; the history more generally of ordinary people, neglected groups. We are still trying to create a persuasive new overall view of U.S. history incorporating this expansion of the historical cast of characters.

You teach U.S. history to students now. Could you characterize how this generation views history and the past?

Like previous generations, they look to history for a sense of their own identity as individuals and Americans. Because students are today so much more diverse than in the past, so must history be.

American history is continually rewritten. Only recently I read a piece about the ways that the Boston Tea Party has been viewed through the ages. Which historical periods are rewritten and revised and rethought more than others?

Reconstruction after the Civil War has been revised most thoroughly by historians, although the general public has not really caught up. The role of slavery in American life has been completely rewritten. But every period is open to reinterpretation -- that's what historians do.

What do you think is the single most important thing we ought to learn from Lincoln?

Open-mindedness, willingness to listen to critics and not surround one's self with yes men, willingness to abandon ideas and policies that are not working and move to new ones, while maintaining one's core principles.

Karl Marx wrote about the U.S. in the 1850s; how astute was he about the U.S.?

Marx was a shrewd observer of the Civil War, understanding the revolutionary implications for the society of the emancipation of the slaves.

And on Lincoln?

Marx saw Lincoln as a man willing to take radical steps to achieve his goals, but to couch them in mundane language like a lawyer. He also saw freeing the slaves as an essential step toward liberating labor more generally.

Do you think it's impossible for there to be another civil war in the U.S. -- a third American Revolution?

Probably not. A third Reconstruction (the second being the civil rights movement) would be a good idea, however.

Are all the major events of our society behind us?

I doubt it. The most important things in history come as complete surprises. More surprises will come in the future.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.]

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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.

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on 'The Bomb' : Howard Zinn Speaks From the Dead

The Bomb:
Howard Zinn's last call
To rebel against war

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2010

The Bomb by Howard Zinn (City Lights Open Media, San Francisco, August 2010); paperback, 100 pp; $8.95.

In his lifetime, Howard Zinn wrote and edited nearly two dozen books, and altered radically the way Americans view their own history with his best selling A Peoples’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. He was compassionate, dynamic, and an unrelenting seeker after justice, and when he died in January 2010, he was mourned by friends and family, students and activists, fellow historians and makers of history like himself.

Zinn seemed to do it all: think, act, organize, and agitate for more than half a century. A G.I., he was also a professor and an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as a critic of the Vietnam War.

In The Bomb, a new book forthcoming from City Lights, he tells the little-known story of his own experience as a bomber in the U. S. Air Force and his role in dropping bombs on Germany during World War II. Zinn also explains that he initially applauded the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“So I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good,” he thought when he saw a headline that read “Atom Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Part history, part memoir, part sermon, The Bomb is meant to wake up citizens, to rouse them to reject “the abstractions of duty and obedience” and to refuse to heed the call of war.

It’s as though Zinn speaks from the dead one last time -- to plead for individual responsibility. Perhaps in writing the book, which he finished just before his own death, he also laid to rest ghosts in his own life. The publication of the book coincides with the 65th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are two parts to The Bomb. One of them has to do with Zinn’s own experiences bombing -- and destroying -- the French town of Royen in April 1945 three weeks before the end of the war in Europe, that resulted in the deaths of more than one thousand people. Zinn was a bombardier with the 490th Bomb Group and flying in a B-17 with the crew. “I remember distinctly seeing, from our great height, the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches stuck in fog,” he writes. “I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.”

Twenty-one years later, Zinn returned to Royen to do research about the destruction of the seaside French town. And in 2010, 65 years later he was still haunted by the bombing, and his own role as a bombardier. What Zinn learned from his research was that in the bombing of Royan, napalm or “liquid fire” was used for the first time. He concludes that it was “an unnecessary military operation” and that Royan was bombed to fulfill “pride, military ambition, glory and honor.”

He also argues that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary to win the war against the Japanese. He presents evidence to show that the war was already won, and that the argument that the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives was misleading at best.

For Zinn, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism, which he defines as “the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose.” The Japanese cities were bombed, he says, because the United States wanted to “show the world -- especially the Soviet Union -- its atomic weaponry.”

Zinn has collected an array of powerful quotations from U.S. presidents and generals that explode like bombshells in the pages of this book. “This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman boasted of the A bomb. General Curtis LeMay said during World War II, “There is no such thing as an innocent civilian.” During the Vietnam War, and speaking of the Vietnamese he said, “We will bomb them back to the Stone Age.”

Zinn has also included stories from Americans who were involved in the bombings of Japan, either directly or indirectly. Father George Zabelka, the chaplain to the crews that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said, years later, “I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians…I was brainwashed.”

The Bomb is Zinn’s last confession. It’s his last sermon, and an account of the ways that he too was brainwashed during World War II. It’s a horrific story that he tells. He brings out the little known fact that American prisoners in Japan also died in the bombing of Hiroshima. A Japanese doctor saw their bodies a day later and said, “They had no faces! Their eyes, noses, and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted.”

The City Lights editor for this book, Greg Ruggiero, says that Zinn “loved small acts of rebellion.” The Bomb is his final act of rebellion. Zinn observes in The Bomb that, “rebellion is a rare phenomenon.” But he doesn’t leave it at that. He urges citizens “to interfere” both with the war machine and the “odd perversion of the natural that we call society” and to save human lives.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor at Sonoma State University and the author of The Mythology of Imperialism and Field Days.]

• Preorder The Bomb at Amazon.com.

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Redefining History : Howard Zinn Challenged the Paradigm

The "Domino Theory" was a prevailing historical paradigm at the time of the Vietnam War. Image from A People’s History of American Empire, by Howard Zinn, Paul Buhle and Mike Konopacki.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Rejecting the dominant paradigm:
How Howard Zinn helped us redefine history

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 6, 2010

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggesting that the development of scientific research was grounded in social structures. A set of scientific ideas, what he called a “paradigm,” become established in disciplines -- chemistry, physics, biology -- and this set of ideas, if they explain significant features of the field, become dominant. Most chemists, physicists, or biologists do scientific research from the standpoint of the fundamental ideas of the paradigm.

Kuhn said that newer generations of researchers and educators then work from within the paradigm. They do what he labeled “normal science.” Their publications, their theories, maintenance of their jobs, depend on them doing science from within the framework of the paradigm.

Kuhn then suggested that occasionally the dominant paradigm raises so many questions that it gets challenged. There is a “revolution” in the science and a new paradigm begins to dominate the discipline.

To me this view of science was fascinating. Studying any discipline, Kuhn seemed to be saying, involved the institutionalization of a way of thinking about a subject, making sure that way of thinking becomes part of the “power structure” of the discipline and only gets changed by “revolutions” in the field. The development of ideas, he implied, parallels domination and subordination in societies and stability challenged by radical change.

Some scholar/activists in the 1960s and beyond began to look at other fields, such as the social sciences and humanities, through the lens of Kuhn, whether or not it was his intention. These scholar/activists began to see that in virtually every field of study dominant paradigms were created that enshrined certain ideas including economics, history, politics, and culture.

For the most part, these paradigms celebrated capitalism, the United States in the world, American democratic institutions, and artistic works that ignored social problems and concentrated on the personal. However, increasing numbers of a new generation began to argue that key ideas were left out of these paradigms. Prominent among these suggestions was that understanding the United States and the world required considering the roles of class, race, and gender.

As a result of the turmoil on and off campuses in the 1960s, these scholar/activists were emboldened to critically revisit the dominant paradigms in their fields. They began to do research that looked at the underside of capitalism; the U.S. role in the world from an anti-imperialist lens; the connection between class, race, and U.S. political institutions; and the one-sidedness of excluding certain writers and artists for their political subjects from the study of literature and the visual arts.

Perhaps no paradigm was more enduring and institutionally self-serving than the consensus view of United States history. Students from K-12, college, and graduate school were educated to believe that American history was driven by the quest for assimilation, democratization, economic growth, and global leadership. That historic evolution was shaped by wise elites who were white, male, and wealthy; educated at the finest institutions of higher learning; and inspired by various humane religious faiths. It was a history of the rise to the top of expertise, compassion, wisdom, and the perfectibility of a people.

In Kuhn’s terms, young scholar/activists began to reflect more on the “anomalies” in the paradigm. Millions of indigenous people who had established vibrant and stable societies were massacred as Europeans and their descendants moved across the North American continent. The development of modern capitalism was based on hundreds of years of the accumulation of wealth produced by peoples kidnapped from Africa.

After slavery, racism continued to influence political and economic life throughout the United States. And, despite traditional claims, reforms in the work process, guarantees of health and welfare, and political rights resulted not from the benevolence of elites but through class struggle.

As anomalies in all the social sciences and humanities were uncovered, activists, students, young scholars, and even some older scholars realized that all knowledge reflects economic and political interests. There is no such thing as “academic objectivity.”

They discovered that the dominant ideas that were disseminated in elementary and high schools, college, graduate programs, and media punditry, reflected the paradigms that served the interests of the United States, particularly in the context of a struggle against ideas, movements, and nations that represented different paradigms and interests.

Those coming to newer perspectives also realized that the development of knowledge required not a distancing of the “scholar” from the people but the embedding of the research in political activity. Many realized that “theory and practice” were intimately connected.

Why all this discussion? Well Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most important, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Howard Zinn : Why We Must Not Be Discouraged

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.
On commitment,
And believing in Saints

By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / February 1, 2010

See 'Against discouragement: Howard Zinn at Spelman' by Howard Zinn, Below.

I met many memorable individuals who stopped by the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen to see for themselves what was going on with the GI antiwar movement. One such was Professor Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States, who stopped by one weekend in November 1968. I was fortunate to meet him a few other times over the following years.

While I am not particularly religious, I do believe in Saints -- not the kind that get sanctified by priests, but the kind of people one meets whose life example you use forever after as a measuring stick for your own moral progress. Howard Zinn was one of those people, and his writing allows us to remember others who went before us in the struggle for true justice.

Learning of his death this past Wednesday, January 27, I was reminded of a commencement speech he gave at Spelman College in 2005, which speaks very directly to what it takes to be a Committed Person.

Historian Howard Zinn, who died January 27 at 87, is shown being arrested at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the 1960s. Image from Telegraph, U.K.
Against discouragement:
Howard Zinn at Spelman

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you.

By Howard Zinn

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College in Atlanta GA, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. In 2005, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after 42 years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war -- still another war, war after war -- and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings.

There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, 50 years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while Black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote.

So Black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do -- enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That's when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to stop the war.

But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies.

I know you have practical things to do -- to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Illych." A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States.

This was horrifying to me -- the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

But if you know some history you know that's not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty.

We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history -- more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the Black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and "democracy," their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext.
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows.

Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war -- in which children are always the greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the Black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this -- that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson.

I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us -- of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and should cherish one another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted By The Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967.

One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below."

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, Black and white, who are models.

I don't mean African-Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin, and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:

It is true --
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the Black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can -- you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what Black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap My hope for you is a good life.

Copyright © 2005, Howard Zinn

Thanks to Alice Embree / The Rag Blog

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Book Ends : Writers Salinger and Zinn Made a Difference

"The Man in the Books," by Andre Martins de Barros / Found Shit.
Two writers who changed us:
J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / January 29, 2010

It is impossible to predict whose writing will become successful. For J. D. Salinger, it was the fact that his stories, especially Catcher in the Rye, were so perfectly poised between Huckleberry Finn and On the Road. Jack Kerouac safe for English class, without the profanity, drugs, homophilia. Samuel Clemens writing in a kid’s vernacular from the modern alienated age. In fact who but J.D Salinger created the niche for alienation to begin with?

(Disclaimer) I was Holden Caulfield. I was expelled from Prep School in 1966, and with no one willing to come get me, bussed back and dallied in Boston with my skis and everything. A few months later I ran off to San Franscisco, getting as far as Concord, Mass. To say that I lived and breathed The Catcher in the Rye would be another one of those big understatements. I even spend most of my remaining imaginary life trying to save mythical children from growing up. Peter Pan, Huck Finn, Dean Moriarty, Ken Kesey.... Holden Caulfield.

But J.D. Salinger gave up on fame, preferring to live in seclusion in New Hampshire. So I’m still following the leader somehow, though I confess some of Salinger’s writing, especially Franny and Zooey, was just a little too New York precious for my taste. Closer to the Woody Allen problem. J. D. Salinger lived to be 91 years old because he walked away from fame and fortune. Another lesson perhaps?

Another writer who defied the odds to become popular and -- better than that -- influential was Howard Zinn. Mr. Zinn once gave a lecture that I attended while I was at Cambridge School of Weston (after my Holden Caulfield period). The subject of the informal talk was the Vietnam War. I had never before heard an adult deliver such a scathing indictment of the American “authorities.” What a subtle rabble rouser this gentle looking Jewish man really was.

Howard Zinn worked hard to get to college and once he graduated he got a job at a black woman’s college, Spelman. He joined SNCC, the radical black civil rights group, and got fired from Spelman. At Boston University he goaded conservative president John Silber constantly. He went to Hanoi in Vietnam with Reverend Daniel Berrigan during the war. He published as an academic historian but nothing ever matched the effect he had when he put out a book for popular consumption: A People’s History of the United States, in 1980.

Basically everything the official history books left out, or glossed over, A People’s History of the United States became an unofficial textbook for radical families, radical kids and home schoolers all over the USA. Scathing in its attacks on formerly iconic figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, A People’s History sold over two million copies. How valuable was this analysis of American history, unflinchingly critical of the U.S. elites, yet not obviously ideological? Ask ourselves that question nowadays while tea party clowns seem able to float any kind of fantasy accusations into the public discourse. They need to go back and read their Howard Zinn if they want to be radical and rational.

Two writers who managed to move millions. Books, minds, hearts, people. Both in their way accidental successes. Neither particularly ambitious or celebrity minded. J. D. Salinger romanticized the loneliness created by our modern society and Howard Zinn gave us the facts and concepts to reenvision American history from the point of view of it’s victims. Together they gave us the some of the wherewithal to survive the 1960s and the 1980s.

J.D. Salinger passed away in New Hampshire and Howard Zinn passed away in nearby Massachusetts just a little over a year after the passing of his wife Roslyn.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, gentlemen.

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

Also see:

• New Years Day : J. D. Salinger Turns 90 By Charles McGrath / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2008
• People's Historian : The Singular Legacy of Howard Zinn by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2010
• Other material by and about Howard Zinn on The Rag Blog.

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People's Historian : The Singular Legacy of Howard Zinn

Historian and activist Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.
How the great Howard Zinn
Made all our lives better

No American historian has had a more lasting positive impact on our understanding of the true nature of our country...

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn was above all a gentleman of unflagging grace, humility, and compassion.

No American historian has had a more lasting positive impact on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth.

Howard’s People's History of the United States will not be surpassed. As time goes on new chapters will be written in its spirit to extend its reach.

But his timeless masterpiece broke astonishing new ground both in its point of view and its comprehensive nature. The very idea of presenting the American story from the point of view of the common citizen was itself revolutionary. That he pulled it off with such apparent ease and readability borders on the miraculous. That at least a million Americans have bought and read it means that its on-going influence is immense. It is truly a history book that has and will continue to change history for the better.

But that doesn’t begin to account for Howard’s personal influence. He was a warm, unfailingly friendly compadre. He shared a beautiful partnership with his wonderful wife Roz, a brilliant, thoroughly committed social worker about whom he once said: “You and I just talk about changing the world. She actually does it.”

But Howard was no ivory tower academic. His lectures were engaging, exciting, and inspirational. But they took on an added dimension because he was personally engaged, committed, and effective. He chose to write books and articles in ways that could impact the world in which they were published. He showed up when he was needed, and always had a sixth sense about exactly what to say, and how.

Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to pay this amazing man is to say how he affected us directly. Here are two stories I know intimately:

In 1974, my organic commune-mate Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower as a protest against the coming of a nuclear power plant. When Sam needed someone to testify on how this act of civil disobedience fit into the fabric of our nation’s history, Howard did not hesitate. His testimony in that Springfield, Massachusetts courtroom (see Lovejoy’s Nuclear War) remains a classic discourse on the sanctity of non-violent direct action and its place in our national soul. (Sam was acquitted, and we stopped that nuke!)

Three years earlier I sent Howard a rambling 300-page manuscript under the absurdly presumptuous title A People's History of the United States, 1860-1920. Written in a drafty communal garage in the Massachusetts hills by a long-haired 20-something graduate school dropout, the manuscript had been rejected by virtually every publisher in America, often accompanied with nasty notes to the tune of: “NEVER send us anything like this again.”

But I sent a copy to Howard, whom I had never met. He replied with a cordial note typed on a single sheet of yellow paper, which I still treasure. I showed it to Hugh Van Dusen at Harper & Row, who basically said Harper had no idea why anyone would ever read such a book, but that if Howard Zinn would write an introduction, they’d publish it (though under a more appropriate title).

He did, and they did…and my life was changed forever.

Thankfully, Hugh then had the good sense to ask Howard to write a REAL people’s history by someone -- the ONLY one -- who could handle the job. He did… and ALL our lives have been changed forever.

Howard labored long and hard on his masterpiece, always retaining that astonishing mixture of humor and humility that made him such a unique and irreplaceable treasure. No one ever wrote or spoke with a greater instinct for the True and Vital. His unfailing instinct for what is just and important never failed him -- or us. The gentle, lilting sound of his voice put it all to unforgettable music that will resonate through the ages.

A few days ago I wrote Howard asking if he’d consider working on a film about the great Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, whose story Howard's books have uniquely illuminated.

Eugene V. Debs was beloved by millions of Americans who treasured not only his clarity of a shared vision for this nation, but his unshakable honesty and unquestioned integrity.

Debs ran five times for president. He conducted his last campaign from a federal prison cell in Atlanta, where he was locked up by Woodrow Wilson. He got a million votes (that we know of). “While there is a soul in prison,” he said, unforgettably, “I am not free.”

Debs had deeply shaken Wilson with his brilliant, immeasurably powerful opposition to America’s foolish and unjust entry into World War I, and his demands for a society in which all fairly shared. In the course of his magnificent decades as our preeminent labor leader, Debs established a clear vision of where this nation could and should go for a just, sustainable future. Enshrined in Howard’s histories, it remains a shining beacon of what remains to be done.

Through his decades as our preeminent people’s historian, through his activism, his clarity, and his warm genius, Howard Zinn was also an American Mahatma, a truly great soul, capable of affecting us all.

Like Eugene V. Debs, it is no cliché to say that Howard Zinn truly lives uniquely on at the core of our national soul. His People's History and the gift of his being just who he was, remains an immeasurable, irreplaceable treasure.

Thanks, Howard, for more than we can begin to say.

[Harvey Wasserman is senior editor at www.freepress.org, where this article also appears.]

Find:

• A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn at Amazon.com.
• Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States by Harvey Wasserman at Amazon.com.

The following excellent videos were posted by The Nation:






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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Eduardo Galeano's 'Mirrors'

From Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama and to you, too...

Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors:
A reflection on Uruguay’s preeminent author

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2009

He doesn’t have a full beard like Che, doesn’t smoke big cigars like Fidel, or write novels as popular as A Hundred Years of Solitude, but Eduardo Galeano is an icon in Latin America, beloved by readers from Venezuela and Peru to Chile and his own native Uruguay where he was born in 1940, and from where he was exiled for a time because of his radical politics.

There’s no real mystery about the romance that exists between the author and the continent that he has claimed as his own literary territory -- without being possessive about it, of course. Galeano speaks and writes in Spanish. He’s a native speaker and native speakers usually win hands down. He knows the gory history of Latin America from the 16th century to the present day to which many other historians have turned a blind eye, and he sees the world from a Latin American point of view, which is all to rare in the profession of history. In Caracas, Buenos Aires, Lima, and all over South America, Galeano is the sort of anti-Yankee imperialist that Latin Americans have loved since the days of Simon Bolivar, and perhaps before that.

No, he’s not as iconic as Che; there are not yet Eduardo Galeano t-shirts that depict the author with his balding head -- which is often so shiny it looks polished -- and his whimsical smile that makes him so endearing. But there might be t-shirts one day. After all in May, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez handed Obama a copy of Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, which has a kicker of a subtitle -- “Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

Almost overnight the book, which first appeared in 1973, became a bestseller in the United States, and made Monthly Review Press, the small, leftwing publishing house that put it into print in English very happy, indeed. “We are delighted that the book will be bought and read by new readers,” Monthly Review’s Michael Yates told me. “Galeano’s book shines the light of day on the hidden history of Latin America, revealing truths that we need to know.” In the three weeks after Chavez gave Obama a copy of the book it sold about 1,500 copies a day -- a small miracle because Open Veins offers a scalding account of the pillage of the continent that might even shock Obama, who is no slouch when it comes to history.

Galeano’s new book, Mirrors, which is a collection of very short -- none more than a page long -- essays and vignettes -- is published by Nation Books, and parts of Mirrors were published in The Nation this spring. It’s a Nation-kind of book: a book for readers who are disgruntled with the current political and economic mess (or is it a crisis?) who want seismographic changes. The Nation is a good niche for Galeano; he was an editor and journalist in Uruguay and in Argentina, too, after he was forced into exile. He’d be a most reliable Latin American correspondent for The Nation today. Like most Nation readers that I know, he detests dictators, lies, prisons, and torturers, and like most Nation readers he’s not ready to take up arms himself and storm the barricades right now, though he might have done so in his youth. A humanist through and through, he believes in old-fashioned things like human dignity, human rights and the majesty of the human imagination.

Recently, Amy Goodman feted Galeano on her radio show Democracy Now, and sounded in fact like a Galleano groupie, if not a sycophant. But what the heck, every renowned Latin American author deserves his or her fervid fans, and if Goodman wants to shower him with adoration I say let her. On his coast-to-coast tour from New York to Berkeley Galeano was also feted by enthusiastic audiences, which shows, I suppose, that there are many North Americans who see the world through Latin eyes, and who want more of their fellow citizens to understand the toll that those five centuries of pillage has taken on human beings.

Reviewers in national magazines like Harpers have found Mirrors too ideological for their taste, and have largely dismissed it as a left-wing screed. That only makes Latin American readers hug it even more closely to their hearts than they might otherwise have done. One San Francisco Latina journalist, and host on a Spanish-speaking radio station -- whom I interviewed -- couldn’t hold back her enthusiasm. “I love Eduardo,” she said. “He gives voice to those who are hardly heard, and he illuminates those who have been living in darkness. I feel that we must do something to persuade English speakers to hear him and to see his point of view.”

Galeano’s most enthusiastic fans in the U.S. literary world tend to be Latin Americans, such as Isabel Allende, who was born in Chile and who has lived in California since 1987. “There is a mysterious power in Galeano’s story telling,” she says. “He uses his craft to invade the privacy of the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to read and to continue reading to the very end, to surrender to the charm of his writing and the power of his idealism.” The word “invade” sounds awfully loaded to me. Knowing Allende, and her work I’m sure that she meant it to be. The word “invade” cannot help but stir up memories of the armed invasion of a whole continent that did not ask to be invaded by the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the Portuguese, the English and the Yankees to the North who thought of Latin America as their rightful property and ripe for despoiling.

Where Allende, and other Latina authors such as Sandra Cisneros, find charm, gringo critics sometimes feel threatened. That is understandable. Mirrors is at times an angry book that aims to invade the mind of the complacent reader and to overturn his or her fundamental assumptions about North and South, power and powerlessness, Anglos and Latinos. Yes, Mirrors points an accusatory finger at social and racial injustice. It denounces the United States for the War in Iraq. But it is not anti-American. It is a lyrical book with loving tributes to American jazz, Mark Twain, Sitting Bull, Emily Dickinson, and Rosa Parks. Latin Americans, like Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende, have often had a way of seeing the best of North America, and the best in North Americans, and Galeano belongs to this tradition.

Moreover, Mirrors is at its beating heart an exhilarating book about the origin of things -- beauty, fire, the postal service, hell, sugar, and the loving embrace between men and women that seems to make mere mortals feel like gods and goddesses. Using words sparingly, and with maximum power, Galeano gathers his subject matter from around the world, and from prehistoric times to the present. Again and again, he goes back to the beginnings of things -- not the endings -- and his emphasis on beginnings makes this a hopeful book. It is also a kind of literary olive branch extended from South to North. It is a peace offering from a world that has existed largely in darkness and in silence to a world of blinding brightness and deafening noise that sometimes seems determined to drown out the sounds of other cultures. Perhaps if readers in the United States were to embrace Galeano’s generous new book that does not beg or entreat, but asks resolutely for equal treatment, it might open the way to a new age, and lead to an era of mutual respect.

It might be that that is precisely what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela had in mind when he handed a copy of Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America to Barack Obama. In person, as well as in print, Galeano tends to be hopeful about the possibilities for social change. When I asked him for his view of the future he said, “I have written my books, especially my last one, Mirrors, to try to show that no place is more important than any other place, and that no person is more important than another person. Our collective memory has been mutilated by the controllers of the world who day-after-day mutilate our present reality. For real change, the dominant countries have to begin to learn to substitute the word friendship for the word leadership.”

[Jonah Raskin is the author most recently of Field Days: A Year of
Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.]

Find 'Mirrors: Stories of Almost Anyone,' by Eduardo Galeano at Amazon.com

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Bob Simmons on Austin's Jack Jackson : History's Cartoonist

Jack Jackson. Painting by Scout Stormcloud / The Rag Blog.

Jackson left a large body of work behind that will assure that people will be reading and looking at his handiwork for as long as we have a world that cares about history, Native Americans, Texas, Mexico, or flights of graphic fantasy.

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2009

See 'Jaxon, Drawn to the Task,' Video by Bob Simmons, Below.

Jack Jackson, aka “Jaxon,” the famous Austin underground cartoonist and historian died back in August of 2006 by his own hand. He had been diagnosed some months earlier with cancer and some other nasty conditions to go with it. As for taking his own life, he might have decided that going through a prolonged battle to preserve what would be a tedious, at best, old age wasn’t worth the trouble or expense. I would not presume to second-guess Jack on this issue. It is something each of us may have to deal with in our own good time.

The obituaries rolled in. Much tribute was paid, and more importantly, many true tears were shed. Jack had made a lot of friends over the years. If we lived in a fair and just world, then Jack should have left a valuable estate behind, for he was an enormously talented and hard-working artist, but he was never paid anything close to what he was worth. Call it the luck of the draw, combined with the fact that Jack was not one to compromise. He had a vision, and he was true to it. He worked alone in rooms, late at night, guided only by a sense of trying to honor some of history’s semi-forgotten underdogs like Juan Seguin, Quanah Parker, and the countless nameless native Americans who died in the North American holocaust, our own ethnic cleansing of the West.

One can go to many sites, starting with Wikipedia for the full bibliography of his works. [Also see Jack Jackson on the Rag Author’s Page.] Suffice to say, he left a large body of work behind that will assure that people will be reading and looking at his handiwork for as long as we have a world that cares about history, Native Americans, Texas, Mexico, or flights of graphic fantasy.

In 2008, the Texas State Historical Association held its annual meeting in Corpus Christi, TX, and I had the opportunity to speak about Jack, since we had been housemates and had both worked with Chet Helms and the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco during the hippie heyday of the 1960’s. We had also both worked together on the Texas Ranger humor magazine in the early 60’s and had walked other similar paths. I prepared a little video presentation for the gathered historians, so that they would know him better.

The room was full of academics and historians. Their interest in Jack was that he had come from such an unusual background, and was a classic autodidact or self-taught historian. My job was to show something of the ‘other’ world from which he had sprung.

Of course I couldn’t get the video projector to work, so I got to talk about Jack for the assembled group. I managed to get through the event without notes, but who knows what I said, or if it was worth anyone’s time. So, now, after a lot of messing with various YouTube and Vimeo nonsense, I have managed to get the short video I prepared up on the Net.

I want to share it with you, because everyone should know more about Jaxon, a real artist and hero of his time.

The interview footage comes from Scott Conn’s “A Dirt Road to Psychedelia” and from an interview I did with Jack shortly before he died. Most of the artwork can be found in the Jaxon Collection at the Barker Texas History Museum at The University of Texas’ Center for American History under the care of our friend John Wheat. I'll take credit for most of the still photos, along with Bill Helmer, Burton Wilson, and a couple stills stolen off the web...call it 'fair use'.


Jaxon - drawn to the task from Telebob on Vimeo.

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