First American Looters

December 16, 1773.  Sons of Liberty protested unfair taxes imposed by the British .gov in the Tea Act of 1773. Armed renegades, many of them disguised as indigenous natives,  destroyed an entire shipment of tea by dumping the tea kegs in Boston Harbor. 

As days turned into weeks, months and years, revolution-minded Colonials wrangled their upstart rage into a Revolution. 

227 years pass.

May 26, 2020.  Citizens of Minneapolis gathered in the dusk hours to protest the police asphyxiation of unarmed local resident, George Floyd. 

As news of the gentle giant’s death was reported nationally through mainstream and social media, widespread protests were rapidly organized in cities across the USA. Irate Americans, many of them masked as Covid-resisters, marched through streets all across the continent and beyond.

As days turned into weeks, a viral-video of Big Floyd’s  cop-inflicted murder propelled thousands of  Americans to become more and more infuriated. They marched in vehement protest against the obvious injustice of Officer Derek Chauvin’s smothering his gently-pleading victim. 

As protesters gathered across the nation, their  intentions became more difficult for police and other law enforcement personnel to identify. Joined by multiple interests groups and, in some cases, extremist instigators, protestors in some places descended into rioting and looting. Unpredictable crowds became unmanageable in some cities. 

Law enforcement officers across the nation faced very difficult decisions. Protecting private property and restoring law and order became no easy matter, no walk in the park, and certainly no walk in Lafayette Park. 

In the midst of nationwide mayhem, the chief executiive expressed adamant resolve to protect private property, while voicing no sympathy for the deceased citizen whose unjust death had sparked the protests. Our temporary chief executive  demonstrated no awareness of the injustice in that original offense—the murder of an innocent American.

Rather, he seemed preoccupied with using the news development to foment political division among his people in pursuance of his own obsession with power.

 Lines of ideological and political association became blurred in the fog of teargas and an insidious fog of class war.

As public law and order deteriorated, the President’s stubborn insensitivity silently implied his approval of police overreaction, as law enforcers were convincing themselves further and further that protection of private property would be their highest property.

“Don’t tread on me,” enraged American Colonials had said after the Tea Party ignited their wrath in 1773.

“Don’t tread on me,” enraged Americans are saying now, after one lethal-weapon knee  treading on George Floyd’s lifeless neck.

In American history, the upstarts who instigated the Boston Tea Party are lionized as heroes. 

They were mad about taxes, so they destroyed British property.

In our third century as a nation, enraged protesters have regrettably provoked some destructive overreaction.

They were mad about the murder of their brethren; then some property got destroyed along the way.

Will the judgements of history render our present dissidents as heroes?

Or will the dissidents of 2020 go down as rioting looters?

I tell you what. When I get to heaven, I’m going to ask those Boston TeaParty protesters what they think about it. 

Which is the greater offense to spark protest in a free society—Unfair Taxes by King, or Murder by Cop?

And just how pertinent is some lunatic-fringe  looting when compared to the ongoing crime. . . killing of American citizens ( George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Ahmed Arbery, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray . . . Emmett Till, Dread Scott, 3/5ths of a person here, 3/5 of a person there . . .) killing by their own appointed protectors?

 

Glass half-Full

Thanks to Esper and the 3 M's

Many thanks to you:

~ General Jim Mattis, former Secretary of Defense
~ Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
~ Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
~ Mark T. Esper, US Secretary of Defense

Thank you for speaking on behalf of the citizens of these United States of America.

Thank you for standing up for our Constitutional right  to peaceably assemble, even during this time of  confusion and disruption.  

Even while intrepid extremists act stealthily in the midst of some protesting groups—these provocateurs  who illegally instigate violence in the midst of lawful protest—these anarchists have no power to derail the legitimate assembly of law-abiding citizens to petition our Government  for the redress of grievances. . .

. . .these trouble-makers have no power to usurp our Rights, because you, our military leaders, stand on our behalf in defense of our Constitutional rights . . . most assuredly, our right to assemble.
With the vigilance and courage that you have shown in standing against unrestrained power, we are enabled in retaining assurance--as President Abraham Lincoln assured us at Gettysburg--that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.



Thank you.

Glass half-Full

Time for Covidic Database

Just looking around, I notice we’re in an information age.
Everywhere you look there’s info.



The info gets stored and horded and whored in e-bundles to be harvested by humans and their bot-slaves. Then the info becomes digitally transformed into  a magic thing called data.
Now everywhere you go online, or off, there’s  a data trail that is tucked away somewhere in vast e-storage bins. Those gigabytes reside interminably in quiet isolation, until the gigs and megs are retrieved  by a dutifully wonkish  techie or faceless bot for various purposes:
Some purposes good, some bad. It’s all out there somewhere.

The system wants to serve you; the system wants to screw you. Its two sides of a digital coin or crypto coin or a capitalist dream or a socialist nightmare. Maybe its your best friend and maybe its your worst enemy.

We’ve learned that the powers-that-be open some mystical flood gates of that Big River of Idolic Desire. The powers  dangle desirable stuff and images of desirable people in front of your eyes so you’ll buy stuff you think you need to be like them, and by so doing you make yourself contented while  keeping the corporate ogres fat n happy as you become fat n happy like them.
Now many of us have begun to to discern that the data mining environment that we’ve surrounded ourselves with is corruptive.
Then Whammo!

Suddenly we have a worldwide disease that corners us into making judgements about what we must or should do to collectively  strike the disease down, or permit it to continue running rampant across our nation and the world.
Some data you know about; you can figure out what the social media operators are doing behind the scenes; other data is hidden. They say data is being gathered about you all the time in everything you do, and it is controversial because you don’t even know what it is that the wizards of data are putting together right now as we speak about you and yours and your habits and your travels and your social interactions and your blah blah blah and who cares about your stuff anyway. Maybe your mother cares about your stuff, or your boss or your partner or Boomchokka Analytica.

I don’t care about your data, although I am writing about it now in a matter-of-fact way because it does constitute a chunk of megabytes somewhere on that mega database in the sky or wherever the hell it is. You may get a call about it some time from Big Brother, although I doubt that because he likes to keep a low profile.
But I regress. As I was sayin’. . .everywhere you look, data this and data that. Database this and database that. Who cares?
Well now we’ve just found out that everybody needs to know about your stuff because of the damned coronavirus.
I mean, they don’t actually need to know about all your data stuff just . . .
whether you test positive for the COVID-19.

It’s just that simple, but now it happens to be a matter of life and death, not just a question of how much money some corporate entity can make off you.
We need to put together a database, you see, about the coronavirus so the professional health people and the doctors and the epidemiologists and the patholgists and the DHHS can make informed decisions about the best way to drive this damned disease back into the ground, instead of it floating around in droplets and vapors amongst the shoppers and the meat-cutters and the hair stylists and the movie ticket-takers and whoever else is trying to keep you satisfied while themselves  making a living in a public place in this here United States of America.

And furthermore, as it turns out now in this life and death situation of Covidic ruin, that mega database in the sky needs to get some real facts about how many deceased have actually met their demise because of Covid—not because of some other disease.
I just hope that the data-geeks can pull all this stuff together in a useful way without generating a hornet’s nest of privacy doowop flipflops.
We need to get some of these statistics straightened out so that discontented folks with gun-totin’ public tantrums can’t get out there in the public square and confuse uninformed citizens about how many folks actually died of  Covid and how many died of some other causes.
Just the facts—that’s what we need now. Read ‘em and weep.

Therefore we could theoretically make good use a Covid-infection database, so statisticians can project accurately and responsibly about how many people will likely catch the disease in the days and months ahead. . .
and to what extent public and commercial spaces ought to be opened up and made available again for common use so we can move  reasonably, safely beyond the socially-distanced construct under which we presently strain.
You see, just now when we are, as a human race, aspiring to survive and prosper on this planet in spite of the Covid destruction, we now hear reports of protests bustin’ out in the town squares and on the net, exerting pressure on whoever’s in charge to renew the openings and operation of this, that, or the other business, because so-and-so is fed up with the lockdown and Billy Jo is tired of the social distancing and Peggy Sue wants to get her hair done and Arnold wants to go work out in the gym and blah blah blah and mainly . . .

People want to get back to work.
We can understand that.
But We find ourselves in a nationwide conundrum because so many folk are getting  stir-crazy and they wanna push the envelope while others are goody-to-shoes politically correct and wanna play by the rules when we don’t have any rules yet about whether the covid numbers are political hype to impose political control on the clueless masses, or. . .
prudent practice for the defeating of Covid. . .
 whichever the case may be.

But really, this whole big baileywick comes down to answering this very important question:
Who has the Covid-19 inside of them? and
Who has not?

So it makes sense (does it not?) to test everybody.
A testing campaign on a national scale and beyond, on a world scale, would not only provide a workable database for informed decision-making by medical doctors and pandemic-preventers but also
such a project as this would generate a whole lot of new employment opportunities for a lot of people. . . especially
Good training for new trainees in the profession of public health. They may be battling this disease for a long time. . . long after I'm dead and gone after 68 years of watching this amazing world cruise by.
Public health becomes more and more of a problem to-be-solved, as covid creeps through the mire of our excessive abuses and misuses.
A reliable Covid database would become an expanding industry during this time of suddenly massive unemployment.
It would require lots of people to be hired to gather information about who got infected and who did not. . . who died of the covid disease and who died of some other dysfunction.

We need to know.
So Get tested today.
It’s your patriotic duty.
It’s that simple: get tested for Covid. Then we can get on with our lives.

Glass half-Full

COvid Confusion

COVID conveys
Confusion, by intrusion,
Contending against our
Contemporary illusions. This damned
Corona thing prevents people from
Congregating, cuz social distancing
Cockamamie
Constricts us to
Collaborating in
Convoluted ways. So we must let ourselves
Commiserate over the loss of
Conventional
Collaboration. But hey!
Coincidentally, we can
Conclude:
Connecting online
Can take the place of the old face-to-face
Conversing like we used to do before this
Cockamamie commotion
Came along, to
Collide with our former
Conductions of
Community-oriented
Cooperation. But this
Collapse of our real
Convening capabilities
Compels us to somehow find new solutions to old
Conundrums. I know this seems a little
Convoluted, but maybe we
Could please try a little harder to
Coordinate our
Collective tactics for the
Continuation of life under these
Confounded
Conflummucks! these
Constrictive
Conditions! Dam! hey we’ll just have to
Conjure up some
Confidence in our public health officials who
Could contrive some strategy and
Concoct some solutions, hopefully better than
Chloroquine, cuz too much of this
Cockamamie
Cwuarantine
Confinement gets them
Contrarian
Confederates all
Conflagrated and
Coiled up like friggin'
Cobras with a
Conniption fit, like, like
Contending, like:

Could we please get this
Cockamamie Covid Contusion
Concluded?! like the
Ckid in the
Car-seat who
Cried out about
COVID Conclusion:
Are we there yet?
but hey I say
Nolo Contendera with
CDC's strategy of
COvid agendera. Just please
Conclude. You
Copy that? If not,
Elude!

Glass half-Full

The Underground

Half a century before the Russians mustered enough rebellion to  depose the Czar, a deep current of discontent had begun oozing up from somewhere deep down in those thawing Russian steppes.
Since that era, we have come to call what that discontent represents: The Underground.
Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevksy caught and early wind of it. In his 1864 novel, Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky identified and fictionalized an uncomfortable alienation that (he noticed) was mounting up among certain attentive and sensitive citizens of that restive country.
This alienation has, since then, become a characteristic of modern life.

In our day and time, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson points out that Dostoevsky and other writers (most notably Friedrich Nietzsche) detected this early alienation and wrote extensively about it.
There was, you see,  a deep, dark void in the European soul.
It was there. . . deep down in there, somewhere in the metamorphizing life of the 1800's . . .  a sense that something was missing . . . something important, something—it must be something— essential.
Where some spiritual or soulful entity had, through many ages, carried European civilization along a certain path of cultural development, now there was nothing.
“Nihilism” is a word that was brought in to identify that void.

In our day and time, Jordan Peterson explains the development of nihilism—how it is related to the lapse  the Church, which had formerly evolved as a religious matrix around which the framework of European civilization and culture had manifested across almost two millennia of time.
Dr. Peterson attributes the identifying of this nihilism primarily to those two 19th-century writers, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. In his lectures, Dr. Peterson often mentions that these two prescient thinkers predicted—or one could almost say “prophecied”—the horrible carnage of our 20th-century wars.  Our two modernized hyper-mechanized destructive wars broke out as modern men desperately strove—through futile attempts at communist and fascist totalitarianism—to establish a meaningful State, or Society.
Instead of—let’s just say— the Church. Comprenez-vous?

Denizens of “the Underground” are those misplaced souls who have searched elsewhere—apart from the Society or Culture at large—for their own meaning or identity.  Even further than that, they will likely work collectively with other fellow travelers, striving for some collective opus that enables us—if not now, in the future— to live and thrive together.
When I was a young man, I composed a song about some of these deep urges toward meaning and liberty.
   Underground Railroad Rides Again

I have empathy for the Undergrounders of this world, although some of them have, from time to time, carried their discontents too far, beyond the rightful constraints of decently civilized life. The Weather Underground of the 1960's, for instance,  crossed that line of acceptable protest when they began making home-bombs,  one of which enabled one Undergrounder to blow up himself and his whole dam NYC apartment building, in spring of 1970.
But hey! Life goes on, in spite of all the abuse and injustices people pile on one another. In spite of all our myriad societal dysfunctions. The world persists in its predictable revolutions, whether you approve the changes or not.  Nations change. Seasons come and go. Our winters of discontent always as mellow out as . . .

a new wind, a fair breeze, and this year's equinox a day early!
Now in 2020 A.D., about midday on this first spring day, 19  March, I was strolling along our local greenway, here in our little town of the Blue Ridge, observing obligatory social distancing protocols mandated by the COVID-19. When my walk began, the weather was dreary, misty and chilly. But as I neared the turnaround point of my 3-mile path, the sun was peeping out from behind the clouds, the air turned amazingly warm and dry, and suddenly! spring has sprung!
'T'was then I encountered an Underground of different sort:



This springtime sprung-up version of the Underground has been popping up with alarming regularity for a very long time. . . far longer than we homo sapiens have been struggling to find meaningful identity in our civilizations.
As I beheld these silly-pilly little dirt mounds, I disclosed the discovery to myself . . .  (as they say on the video spy dramas) what we have here is mole!

King of Soul

Those Two Brave Men

Once, but maybe never again,

two men

standing in the cold

one young and one old;

they meet

but decline to greet

in the middle of a confrontation

on hallowed ground of a dividing nation.

They do not speak,

for all around them arise a peak

of anger and resentment—

a country devoid of contentment

in the cauldron of history.

Seems now it’s become a mystery

what has become of our unity,

as now we’re obsessed with impunity—

blame the younger, not the older one

as the chieftain wordlessly beats his drum;

but while the young man struggles to maintain a smile

the world wide web spews a viral pile

of all the blame that’s fit to hint

as talking head trolls make their dent

in the warp and woof of the data tide

in which we slavishly slouch to hide

the downing of civility

and the haughty thrusting of hostility.

We ride the wave of accusative gestalt—

let us assign a verdict who’s at fault.

But whose fault it is I think i know;

let’s blame it on the undertow

of madmen on the right

pulling young men into the fight,

or maybe let’s blame it on the leftist cadres

who would depose those maga padres,

while all the while the widening gyre

spins up in streaming twitter fire.

Hourly it whirls higher higher

while all the while it was nothing more

than a clueless kid who for one moment tore

our torrent stream of data angst asunder,

generating for a moment some online thunder.

So what once was our peace and tranquility

slips beneath the dearth of our virility.

’Twas on a cold gray day, I say,

we beheld it— but  for never again—

those two brave men

standing in the cold,

one young and the other old.

Glass half-Full 

Change Is Gonna Come

Some wise person said a fish wouldn’t know (s)he was out of water until it actually happened. When the angler yanked the critter up the into air, the fish would immediately know that something had gone terribly wrong.

I think our situation in modern life is a little bit like that. In our present media-engulfed life, we humans are so totally immersed in electronic media that we would feel disoriented and panicky if we were suddenly jerked out of it—like a fish out of water.

Some might even suffer withdrawals.

Nowadays some social critics among us complain about the dumming-down effects of twitter and facebook, and all that other blahblah googlifief also-ran flimflam that’s floating around in the datafied air of 2018.

Back in the day, during the adolescent phases of my baby boomer generation, people romanticized about the fact that we were the first generation to get raised up with a tv in the living room and therefore a boob-tube mindset. Whoopdee doo that we had pop-culture and instant gratification on the brain instead of the traditional 1-2-3 and a-b-c worldview of previous generations. No wonder we fantasized that we could change the world. We were walking around in the first-ever TV-generated dream world.

Actually, some of us did change the world. Those guys who were mastering their calculus and fortran instead of doping up—they managed to hatch out a totally electronic data tsunami that has since commandeered our attention and maximized our compulsive fascination with constant entertainment distractions and rampant twitt-faced narcissism.

Along with some real information, of course. There's always both bad and good in any changes that are gonna come.

A  generation before us in the timeline, it was another set of emergent media wonders that were transforming the world of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. Our parents’ generation also grew up with a revolutionary media box in the living room and the dashboard—radio. They had Roosevelt’s fireside chats, Glenn Miller, Amos n’ Andy,  and Orson Wells’ terribly realistic radio depiction of us being invaded by extraterrestrial aliens.

But radio was no TV. Radio was about hearing. TV was like a whole new, artificial world of hearing AND seeing.

The rate of change, accelerating in the TV age, has exponentially accelerated and intensified with the coming of the electr(on)ic internet, 21st-century version.

A few years ago, I undertook a writing project to express some of the angst of the boomer generation that I grew up in.

Because I had graduated from high school and then entered college in 1969, my novel, King of Soul,  turned out to be mainly about the elephant-in-the-room issue of my g -generation's historical  era—the Vietnam war.

But that war was far from being the only issue that we Americans had to deal with.

In struggling to depict—and even to somehow reconcile—the great divide between them that went and us who did not go to Vietnam, I embarked on a research project to learn how the Vietnam war had started and how it escalated to become such an overarching generational crisis. My g-generation was torn apart because of what all took place over there as a result of our tragic illusion.  We thought we could, with our high-tech way of doing things, show a country of undeveloped farmers how to expel the communists.

We learned a very hard lesson. It was tragic, what happened. 

While the world had worked a certain way during the Big War, when we ran the Nazis back into their holes, something had sure as hell changed by the 1960’s.

The old tactics of massive military push against jungle guerrillas did not work.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the kids didn’t wanna have to go over there and do Lyndon’s dirty work.

The anti-war movement’s seemingly sudden organizational strength in 1967 was no mere happenstance. Those activists who devised a widespread effective resistance against the war had learned the hard facts of life from a previous protest movement—the Civil Rights movement.

It took a while for the anti-war movement to get its act together. But when they finally did, it was because of a hard lesson that had been learned by black folks down in dixie.

In the Freedom Summer of 1964, a widespread collection of honky activist youth suddenly showed up down in the Segregated South to help the black folk get organized for voting and organizing real societal change. There in the historical shadow of the old defeated, slave-slappin’ South, wide-eyed yankee students got a fierce reality check. Their rose-colored glasses were left broken on the blood-stained grounds of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, when they saw what violence and oppression the racist Establishment was inflicting on people of color.

Right here in Amerika, it was. Land of the free? and home of the brave!

A wake-up call it was. Based on what them wide-eyed college kids from up Nawth encountered when they got down here, they got a severe reality check. Stopping the war in Vietnam  would be no walk in the park. There was bad shit going down right here in the good ole USA, just like in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

If the peaceniks wanted to get us out of Vietnam, they would have to get organized, and maybe even pick up some heavier-duty tactics . . . civil disobedience.

Meanwhile, there were a few blacks who were doing alright. Sam Cooke was one of them.

During the early 1960’s, Sam was a very successful singer-songwriter. Most of his tunes were soulishly romantic and swingy. He had a knack of finding the best in everything he wrote about. With an admirable optimism that shone forth in all his song-work, Sam managed somehow to spread good will and positive attitude everywhere he went, in spite of all the tough changes that were going down.

Some may have thought Sam to be an uncle tom, because he didn’t get angry.

But Sam Cooke—even though he celebrated optimism and good attitude—was no uncle tom.

He was not a “house nigga.”

Here’s a song that expresses Sam’s feeling about the societal changes that he felt needed to happen in the USA in the mid-1960’s.  After his death in 1964, this composition was released posthumously on the B-side of a single record called Shake, and also on an album by the same name.

Here’s the tune, A Change Is Gonna Come:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEBlaMOmKV4

And here’s my version:

Sam's Change Is Gonna Come

As we geezers have seen in our lifetime, change did indeed come.

But some things will remain the same.

Here’s a truth that always remains: Change is gonna come, like it or not.

When it does, may the change be with you, and . . . may you be with the change, if it is good.

If it’s not good, go listen to some of Sam’s old hit songs and get an attitude adjustment. Maybe you can learn to deal with it as he did—with a good attitude.

King of Soul

Alt-this and Alt-that

When Alt-Right and Alt-Left clash in furious altercation it’s time for all parties concerned to alter their attitudes.

And I’m tired of all these Alt-whackos vying for attention; aren’t you?

Although I may be operating in an alternative universe to even suggest that all these rampant extremists could ever allow themselves to agree on anything, I nevertheless assert that anything can happen and occasionally does.

I mean, we almost split up about a hundred and fifty year ago, but the advocates of American unity prevailed and we managed to overcome the great divide that almost split us asunder.

So really, to split up now after all we’ve been through would be asinine.

Also, it would be un-American.

So I’m hoping we can assemble any alliance we can assimilate to alleviate this awful divisiveness. I mean, even Alt-Center would be better than what we got now. And a little altruism wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Can we find some agreement here? I mean, my daddy used to say it’s hard to remember when you’re ass-deep in alligators our objective was to drain the swamp. The Alt-Right politicians said they wanted to drain the swamp. And I know that idea has a  lot of allure for folks who want to stir up the pot, but you gotta remember in a free country some folks would rather smoke the pot than stir it up.

We all just gotta get along here. You hear what I’m sayin’? We gotta find the allowable limits of all this alternating Alt-ism, Alt-this and Alt-that and then we gotta adjust our attitudes so as to  lower the  altitudes of aggression before it’s all over.

I mean, in ancient time when things got this bad God allowed an alluvial disaster to alleviate all the alleged bad stuff that was going down at that time. So lets’s not forget that a rising tide lifts all boats. Yeah, and I say unto thee: all aboard that’s goin’ aboard. And if you believe that I’ve got some alluvial deposits in Arizona I’ll sell ya.

Let's make a deal; it's the American way. We're always dealin'! Dont' let yer deal go down.

Are you trackin’ with me here? The climes they are a-changin’! I’m a-tellin’ ya, And things are gonna heat up real quick if’n we don’t align ourselves with the planetary potentiary powers of of political Alt-centrism. And not only that, let's allocate some good ole fashion common sense, y’all; send it to the Appropriations committee.

Just sayin’.

So let’s adjust these attitudes, what’dya say?

Think about it this way.  If’n you get the alt-extremist notion to call somebody an alt-asshole just check it at the door because them’s fightin’ words, and also because everybody has one so why call it to everybody’s attention!. Instead, you could allay the fears of all parties and both so-called Parties  by just, instead of inciting to riot, advancing toward  some kind of advantageous alliance instead of  a big all-out alt-ercation that degenerates into some freak goin’ bonkers and drivin’ a car into a crowd of Alt-leftists, even if they are Antifa.

Doh ray me fa. Anti-Doh, Anti-ray, Anti-me, Anti-you, Anti-fatherhood, Anti-motherhood, Anti-apple pie, baseball and even Anti-Chevrolet!

I mean I’m from Ford country. On a quiet night you can hear the Chevys a-rustin’. Nevetheless, I love all you Chevy-idiots out there? Come on, now! Group hug. Stop and smell the Anti-roses.

Serially, though, What’s it all coming to? What’s it all about Alfie?

I mean, these days seems like everybody and their brother is anti- something, but I am posing the question here and now—just what are for? What the hell are you for? Are you FOR anything? Motherhood and apple pie?

On the other hand, now that I think about it, I ascertain that even Motherhood is on the choppin’ block now, with all this trans-this and trans-that, trans-he and trans-her, trans-he-she-it.

And if you wonder what I’m alluding to, think again. I appeal to our better angels. But if you can’t attest to all that, just  fuhgeddabowdit. We’re done here. Maybe it’s just me.

I prob’ly need to see my analyst.

I’m just upset because I’m over-reacting because I’m allergic to Altism of any kind, left or right, liberal or conservative,  fascist or communist; and I think if the Chileans could get past the Allende v. Pinochet debacle then we can overcome this whatever-we-got now ascent toward Alt-assininity.

What we the need around here is some dam prayer. But if you can’t allow that, if it’s against your constitutional sensitivities and asininities, just let the cards fall as they may; we’ll play politics awhile till the altercation blows over.

We’ll let the cards fall as they may, if that’s the way it must be. Let the prize go to the highest bidder.

I bid four hearts.

And your bid is what?

Four no-trump, you say?  For no-trump?

Well ok then. We’ll see how this plays out.

But wait! What light through yonder window breaks?, methinks I hear the strains of a faraway refrain:

“Through the Altists’ red glare,

with taunts bursting in air--,

it gave proof through the night

that our freedom was still there!

Oh say! that star-spangled banner does yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lCmBvYMRs





King of Soul

Good Square Wenceslas

At Prague's big square called Wenceslas

in a feast of freedom

the people gathered roundabout

to end their socialist grieving.

Brightly shone their bold intent

to form a new collusion.

Hither came brave Havel, sent

to guide their revolution.

Gather, people, stand today,

if freedom be your calling!

Yonder Soviets, who are they?

We're done with their cruel mauling.

Sure, they've been in charge out here,

acting like they own us.

But now it's time to cast out fear

and strive for freedom's onus.

 

Bring us liberty to speak what's true,

and tell it like it is--

There's more in this life for us to do

than perish in their communism.

From high and low they did assemble;

So bold, in unity were they staying.

In Solidarity they did resemble

their Polish brethren who were praying.

 

People! Oh, the day is bright'ning

and a mighty wind of freedom blows,

Behold! Despite their Soviet tightening,

the depravity of their gulag shows.

Collapse of their system is now imminent.

We here resolve to accept our fate

while we apply a democratic liniment,

to this demising socialist State.



From Soviet rubble these Czechs have trodden

in the wake of tyranny's destined fall,

Czech and Slovak Republics  plodding

to rise from detritus of fallen Soviet wall.

Now proletariat, artist and bourgeois too

can think and work and overcome their loss,

because the wind of liberty blew through

Prague's great square called Wenceslas.

King of Soul

The Calling of Anarchy

The calling of anarchy says:

Tear down, tear down the Old way, for when it is destroyed, the New way will be brought in, and when the New way is set in place. . . when the New Order is instituted, then all things will be made right and wise people such as yourself will be in charge of things, and your troubles will be over.

But that surely is gobblydeegoop. I mean, isn't it?

I myself have, in my life, encountered the power of this deception. I have heard that Siren call of anarchy. It is a cry familiar to me. It arises not so much in me as in the world out there somewhere, with some instigator's persistent call to rage, rage against the machine. Somewhere in between my ears, it beats a drum of discontent that would compel me, if I were to follow that terrible summons, to do terrible, destructive things.

Although I have never succumbed to it, I know its voice. It is the insidious voice of rebellion that would compel men into the abyss of anarchy, and women into the chasms of despair.

Harken not to it, my brother. Heed it not, my soul. For it leadeth not where thou wouldst want to go.

I'm not making this up; this is a very real thing in the world today. But it is nothing new.

In the final chapter of his 1971 journalistic book, Kent State, James A Michener describes the strange experience of a troubled young woman. She's a runaway teenager; she had forsaken the comfort of middle-class life to wander the streets and cities of America in search of something, possibly a magical place called "California." But during her journey to the elusive place, the girl found herself one brisk Friday night in Ohio, kicking around in Kent, looking for some excitement, or some meaning in life, or just something to do, when, about midnight, she came across some "trouble on the street." As Michener describes the scene in which rioters were protesting Nixon's bombing of Cambodia:

" 'Cambodia,' she says, 'Cambodia did it. They built a fire out there (on a downtown street, ed.) and were circling around, chanting'. . . (She) joined them, dancing about the trash fire in the street. It was what was happening and she wanted in."

And so the young women was caught up in that moment, and caught up in the excitement and the gravitas of the protest, having answered the call to meaningful action, which can, in the heat of human manipulations, sometimes slide into the calling of anarchy, and so one thing did lead to another and then a couple of days later, the young woman found herself suddenly fallen upon a parking lot, with shots ringing in the air around her and when she looked up there was a young man lying next to here with his head down but blood flowing out of it because of the fatal gunshot. But then she dragged herself up. In the misery and tragedy of that moment, she cried out. . .

Also in that moment, the photographer who happened to be nearby quickly snapped a picture. A little while later, through a series of electronic wonders beginning with the photographer's pic as published in his paper's next issue, the mournful, confused face of the wandering teenaged girl was flashed around the world for all the world to see.

The look on the young woman's face documents the utter dismay of a generation, my generation. Millions of people around the world have seen, and wondered about, that picture. James Michener calls her the woman with the "Delacroix face."

Her face does resemble the face of Lady Liberty, as rendered in "Liberty leading the People," a famous painting by Eugene Delacroix that depicts an idealized image of the French Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix

I guess there is a fine line somewhere between Liberty and anarchy. Only those who have suffered in the fog of war or in the great Struggle for justice can know the difference.

The poet W.B. Yeats mentions this dangerous tendency of our world in his poem, The Second Coming:

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned"

The "ceremony of innocence," is, in our present American culture and this historic time, the ritual of going to college or university. In our case study above, Kent State, the "ceremony" was not drowned, but rather, mortally wounded. This happened when duty-bound Guardsmen, who were generally the same young age as the students, were pressured, in the midst of frantic, anarchic circumstances to fire into a wildly unpredictable, rock-hurling crowd. Historic research reveals that "somebody" had fired a first shot, the fatal result of which that anarchy was suddenly catapulted into tragedy.

Tragedy. Life is tragic. This is one outcome of anarchy.

It makes me wonder, and I find myself thinking of that old Moody Blues tune, Melancholy Man. . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO3IG-oRpis

In our present day and time, anarchy could--and already has--generated tragedy. . .in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, Paris, San Bernadino, Riyadh and its aftermath, and in many other places. I am reminded of the prophet whose words still ring true after after twenty centuries:

"Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another which will not be torn down."

His words were spoken about a religious building, but it seems that the anarchic spirit of our age is bent on terrorizing and destroying many diverse persons, many places near and far, and a multitude of buildings and things.

It's the calling of anarchy. Don't get sucked in.

Here's a better response: Do what is right, and pray.



Glass half-Full

Walking into a Maelstrom, 1969

I graduated from high school in May of 1969. Then I left home and went to college. What a change that was. There was a lot going on at the university.

I think most kids who leave home at the tender age of 17 find out that there's a whole 'nother world going on out there, and it seems quite different from what they grew up in. It's exciting, like turning over a new leaf, or starting a new chapter of life.

Now that I'm past sixty, I've gained some perspective that I didn't have then. And since reading and doing historical research are pursuits I enjoy, I've decided to study that decade in which I lived as a teenager--the 1960's.

I have a feeling I'm not the only boomer who is doing this, which is why the stuff of my research will eventually be written as a novel, my fourth. It is named King of Soul.

Back in September '68, when my senior year in high school had just begun, I addressed our student body as the incoming President of the Student Council. I remember telling them something about there was a lot going on out there in the world, and that our generation seemed to be discontented. But we, as responsible young adults at a Catholic high school, could certainly change the world by acting reasonably and playing by the rules. The students rewarded my innocent positivism with a standing ovation at the end.

About a year later, when I was a freshman at LSU, I began to see (although not necessarily understand) that my well-received idea of playing by the rules was not so simple as I had presented it.

There was, indeed, a lot going on in in 1969, and a lot of that change was being propelled by kids, not much older than I, who were working against the system with organized resistance, rather than "playing by rules." There was an authentic reason for this.

The Vietnam War.

One of the things that happened to me while I was discovering all this angst and protest in my g-generation was the draft lottery. My number came up 349, so I didn't have to worry about being drafted. I would be able to stay in school without being called to go fight the Viet Cong.

Nevertheless, all that '60's stuff was not just about the war. There was something happening here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5M_Ttstbgs

Among the war-protesters, there was a wide array of strategies being implemented to end the war--everything from pacifist Episcopalians, to SDS "bring the war home" agitators, to outright Weatherman revolutionaries.

In the research I am now doing, here is something I have come to understand clearly:

The seeds of antiwar, anti-establishment resistance tactics were sown into the American experience during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's-60's.

Oppression breeds Resistance, which leads to Tactics.

You know what I'm talking about--Little Rock Schools, Rosa on the bus, Dr. King's courageous, nonviolent leadership, Selma, Greensboro Woolworth's sit-in, voter registrations in the deep South, etc. It was mostly black folks getting organized.

Medgar Evers had fought in the Great War, in Europe. He was a hero, like all them Americans and others who had run the Nazis into the ground back in '45. But when Medgar got back to Mississippi (where I was in the 1950's a clueless white kid living in suburban Jackson), he got on a bus to ride back to his hometown, and the driver told this war hero-- who had risked his life for our freedom-- to go the the back of the bus!

Say what?

Medgar, being a man of peace, a Christian--well, he got through that humiliating incident--but he quietly went about his bid'ness. But he got to thinking he might try to help his people make some changes (and he was playing by the rules) so he started working with the NAACP to get black folks registered to vote in his home state.

But in June, 1963, brother Medgar was shot dead, near midnight, in his own front yard.

Now that--along with all the other injustices being brought into the light of day-- got the attention of a lot of Americans.

So some of us honkys started to see the light and get involved.

The next year, 1964, saw a flood of white folks headed from up Nawth, going down South, to help black folks get organized and register. The whole movement was called the Mississippi Freedom Summer. It was a great event in American history, except for when Andrew Freedman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner got murdered.

During that sweltering summer in Mississippi, the seeds of American antiwar, antiestablishment resistance were sown. White kids from Boston, Philly, Santa Monica and Sausalito and everywhere in between went down south to help black folks.

And the black folks taught 'em how its done--civil disobedience to resist injustice, in the streets of America.

There were hundreds of white kids who went. To name just one: Mario Savio, who went down South to do civil rights work, then returned to his home in California. Later that fall, 1964 he climbed on top of a car so he could be heard while making a speech about a local issue to his fellow protesters.

And the Free Speech Movement was born in Berkeley.

Now, go back to the future--the year I was telling you about when I started this piece--1969:

While the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley was still rattling the ivys at colleges all across the nation, including the campus at LSU were I was a clueless freshman . . .

The administrators of the University of California at Berkeley had bought a vacant lot very close to campus. It was, according to David Obst, in his book, Too Good To Be Forgotten, a "three-acre field the school had bought a couple of years before."

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Good-To-Be-Forgotten/dp/0471295388

David writes:

"In mid-April a number of street people decided the field would make a groovy park. They decided to reclaim the land from the university and give it back to the people. All this was to be done under the doctrine of squatters's rights.

For the next few weeks, hundreds of students and street people, folks who wouldn't work if their parents or employers begged or paid them, worked for free at the park. They transformed the mud-splattered field into a grass-covered park by bringing together a weird collection of sod, shrub, and seedlings. A grove of apple trees was planted and and a brick walkway was laid. Swings and a sandbox for kids were put up; there was even a fishpond, and a . . .'revolutionary cornfield.' "

Now, I, reading this, thought that was a pretty productive, creative way to make good use of a vacant lot.

But of course the Berkeley admins didn't think so, so the chancellor called Governor Reagan, who called in the National Guard, and things got ugly, kind of like, you know, Selma, or you know--but this was a bunch of white kids.

By 'n by, I later came to appreciate Ronald Reagan, when he was President. But this was not one of his shining moments.

Which gets to my point: there are two sides to every story. Confusion is the order of the day when you're a freshman.

When I walked into the college maelstrom of 1969, I was entering a storm of controversies. . . with both sides right and both sides wrong. How was I to make sense of it all?

As I later learned from Scriptures: "There is not one right, no, not one."

The long, collegial tradition of free thought and orderly discourse was being challenged from both sides--left and right--during those tempestuous days. On the left, the "Movement" was being split. A huge rift was tearing the violent-prone revolutionaries apart from the "play by the rules" nonviolent protesters.

David Horowitz, years ahead of me, had been, along with David Obst (quoted above) in the very thick of the antiwar, antiestablishment resistance during those days. But later, in the 1970's, he changed his tune and his political affiliations. In his book, Radical Son, Horowitz wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-A-Generational-Odyssey/dp/0684840057

"Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small . . .its leaders were able to rob and kill without incurring the penalty of the law. They were able to do so, because the Left made the Panthers a law unto themselves. The same way the Left had made Stalin a law unto himself. The same way the Left makes Fidel Castro and the Sandinista comandates laws unto themselves."

". . .the best intentions can lead to the worst ends. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised; I had learned to judge it by the evil it had done."

Such is the electrifying commotion of ideologies and tactics that I walked into while starting college in 1969. And I am still trying to figure it all out--who is right, who is wrong.

More about all this later. Film at 11. Book in, probably, about three years.



Glass half-Full

Kent State 1970

While doing research for the novel I now am writing, King of Soul, I read James A. Michener's non-fiction book entitled

Kent State: What happened and why. (Random House, 1971)

http://www.amazon.com/Kent-State-What-Happened-Why/dp/0449202739

Toward the end of it, here are some thoughts that came to me:



Oh, the insanity of those days,

shrouded in tear gas haze:

our dutiful young Guards, slogging in sweat-drenched gear,

moved against fellow-students erupting in fear.

They eyed each other across grassy knolls

while the crowd mocks and the clanging bell tolls.

Our ragged nation was ripping apart at the seams,

as confusion conspired to assassinate our dreams.

Sandy and Allison, Bill and Jeff didn't know;

they never looked back when the bullets laid them low.

The shock and the awe, the plan and its flaw

could offer no reason to explain which law

had judged them worthy of martyrdom, sentenced to death:

a sinnish twist of fate fired right, but hit on the left.

Things were never the same after that.

The movement waned thin; the bitter got fat;

America was laid low when those four lives got spent

on that deadly tragic Mayday at Kent.



Smoke

Happy to be a Radical Centrist

Thank God, the autumn years of my life have landed me in position of being a radical centrist.

The Democrats are fixated on entitlements, victimhood and income inequality; the Republicans are obsessed with guns, selfishness and romanticizing what this country used to be.

Here's news for you Democrats: Roosevelt (may peace be upon him) died, a long time ago.

And news for the Republicans: Reagan (God bless him) also died, a little while back.

Lately, the residues of these two legacies have polarized toward two extremes: wild-eyed progressives on one end, chubby conservatives on the other. But what the world needs now is, as Dionne Warwick sang, love, sweet love, whhich means, politically: people in the middle like me, lest the whole dam American experiment fall apart. Blessed are the peacemakers.

As a 63-year-old boomer, I identify with the protest that was raised by young whippersnappers in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention of 1968. I would love to have been there, but I was a student doing a summer job. Even so, I also appreciate the protest that Tea Party people have raised, in recent decades, against our debilitating welfare state. I probably shoulda been there too, at the tea party, but I had to work that day.

Both Movements have their legitimate, appreciable place in the history of this great free nation. And both have their respective bowel movements to dispose.

There's a lot of work that needs to be done, regardless of who pays or doesn't pay for it. We gotta keep the planet clean, while keeping things together on the home front.

It's time now for both sides to acknowledge that the other side has a right to be here too, because, you know, none of us are just going to "go away."

Although each of us will, in due time, go away from this life.

I find myself, as a maturing centrist, continuously fascinated with and appreciating the legitimate talking points of both extremes, left and right. So I offer some advice for you all you extremists out there, all ye SDSers and John Birchers, all ye libertines and libertarians:

To you Occupy activists, and all ye who are so progressively inclined: I feel your pain, but its probably best that you just find a job instead of hanging out in the street with a sign. If you can't find a job that suits you, get a part-time gig and then start creating, on the side, a job of your very own design. Maybe it's a garden on a vacant lot or in your back yard. Maybe it's just helping old folks and kids cross the street, or collecting sunshine. That would be better than waiting for the government or the dreaded corporatacracy to generate the right job for you. Your mission to improve the world begins with providing for, and managing, your own household.

To you Libertarian preppers, and all ye who are conservatively inclined: Don't be dogmatic. Dismantling the federal behemoth too abruptly would put thousands or millions of workers on the street who are probably not prepared to pull their own weight, and then we would have a real mess on our hands. I know that you yourself are self-sufficient, or wannabe. You think you can do it all on their own and you do understand that you didn't build that road and all that, but the days are coming when you will find it expedient to share a little of what you've got with others who are less fortunate. And it just may turn out that it's not the tyrannical feds, but rather God himself ,requiring this benevolence of thee.

Come ye, all Americans.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus. Find your center and say: Om ready to be the best that I can be today, and the world will be a better place as a result of it.

Glass half-Full

Zeitgeists and the King of Soul

People talk about "the zeitgeist" of an historical period as if it were one spirit. But in reality, the events of any particular epoch reflect several spiritual compulsions or visions that hover amongst the human hearts and minds of that age.

With that in mind, I have begun writing a new novel, my fourth, which is named King of Soul. The story will examine the teen years and coming-of-age of a young man,Donnie, who is growing up in the South during the 1960s. The novel is only mildly autobiographical.

Donnie's personal development is of course shaped by the familial, political, philosophical, economic and spiritual condition of that era. Within these influences, I Identify four zeitgeists that are especially potent during the turbulent 1960s. They are what might be called "spirits of the age", or what Gordon Lightfoot called the "visions of their days." But I like to think of these historical forces, each one, as collective "Souls. " For the decade in which I was a teenager, they are:

~Soul of Bounty

~Soul of Discontent

~Soul of Escape

~Soul of Anarchy

So that you can better understand my "Souls" concept, here are some earlier "Souls" that were dominant in former ages of the American Experience:

Soul of Exploration, Soul of Liberty, Soul of Slavery, Soul of Industry, Soul of Reform, Soul of Progress, Soul of Labor, Soul of Consumption, Soul of Entertainment.

As the story develops in my novel, King of Soul, the reader will detect in Donnie's experience:

~The Soul of Bounty, which thrives on security and wellness. It favors the individual, rather than a collective, although its community aspect is based on abundance: plenty for everybody. The Soul of Bounty values Family, Faith, and Work for Gain. Religion is beneficial. Heaven is a good ending. Hierarchy and authority contribute to Law & Order, sometimes at the expense of equality. Self-discipline and smart work are admirable.

It is a conservative attitude. Leave well-enough alone. Soul of Bounty manifestations for the 1960s may be: Republicans, the "Establishment", the "Powers that Be, Young Americans for Freedom. On its fringe are the John Birchers and the Ayn Rand group. Prominent movers in the Soul of Bounty during that time were: Nixon, Buckley, Reagan, Mayor Daley, Gov.Rhodes of Ohio, most suburbanites.

~The Soul of Discontent, which struggles toward justice and rightness. The collective will is higher than the individual; society is based on ideology, not religion. Activists within the Soul of Discontent are forever striving toward progress. Utopia is a real possibility.The Marxian version includes a dictatorship of the proletariat. Equality of all will be achieved at the expense of Order. These people are purposeful, existential in their motivation. Disruption of the established order is necessary for societal correction to be imposed. Organizations of the period include: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Free Speech Movement and the generally widespread Antiwar movement. Leaders of the 1960s manifestation include, among many others: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Joan Baez, the Berrigans, Daniel Ellsberg, Betty Friedan. The Soul of Discontent was most clearly expressed in: Civil Rights movement, Feminism, Berkeley, Chicago protests at 1968 Democratic convention, lethal uprisings at Kent State and Jackson State, student movements at San Francisco State U, Yale, Columbia, and eventually the Democratic party and 4th estate of 1970s-200. . .s

~Soul of Escape, which craves pleasure, ecstasy and distraction. Expressions of this Soul are both collective and individual. Community is hoped for to afford leisure, pleasure, celebration, art and expression. Minimal work is tolerated for the sake of these fulfillments. Utopia is cool, and Love-in is even better Serendipity is prized, at the expense of structure. Enjoy. In the '60s, these people were known as hippies, who followed in footsteps of their 1950s predecessors, the Beats. You know who they are, even if you were not one of them for awhile, because you read about them in Time and Life: Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, most rock musicians, but most notably Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead. They sought a trippy kind of stoned-out degenerative sensuality that occasionally masqueraded as spirituality. Summer of Love in '67 and Woodstock in '69 were their high points.

~Soul of Anarchy, which struggles to tear down the old order so that a new something can arise. Destruction is not only necessary, but cool and glorified. These people were the epitome of Shiva Rage: Panthers. Weathermen, Yippies on a bad day. The catch-all was "Revolutionary." John Lennon sang about them but only skirted along their fringes. ". . .but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." (They didn't make it.) Their flash in the pan came late, in '69 and the '70s. Heroes were Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael after he got tired of moderation, Rudd/Dohrn/Ayers. They were violent revolutionaries who might have done much more damage if the Establishment, personified by Richard Nixon, had not decided to wind the Vietnam War down and follow through with some serious programs to fulfill Johnson's Great Society before going down in a blaze of humiliating presidential glory.

In a turbid decade called "the '60s", my young protagonist Donnie attends middle school and high school, enters college in 1969, avoids the draft, checks out a few antiwar happenings and tries to make sense of it all, in a nation being torn apart by the interference patterns generated when these four (Bounty, Discontent, Escape, Anarchy) encountered each other. That's the scenario of King of Soul.

I should have it ready for you to read in a year or three.



Smoke

Jackson Mississippi 1962

In 1954, I was three years old. In that year, my parents moved from Louisiana to Jackson Mississippi. Our family of four, soon to be six souls, stayed in Jackson until I was in the sixth grade, 1962. Then we moved back to Louisiana.

All around us at that time the world was changing big time. I was, of course, clueless, being just a kid. Living in a humble, GI-bill enabled suburb, l and my whitey neighborhood playmates were quite insulated from the maelstrom of civil rights-fueled social change that was gathering momentum in Jackson and in the whole state of Mississippi and the South, and later the North.

I was in a Catholic school; it was nice enough, and I had some good friends there. Although the US Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had established a legal path toward school desegregation in 1954, I never saw a black classmate until I was in junior high school in Baton Rouge a few years later.

My first impressions of black folk in Jackson came mostly through our maid, Aleen. She was a very nice lady. Many an afternoon, my sister and I would accompany my mother as she drove Aleen home from her day-job at our home. Aleen's home was what we would politely call the "other side of town," although it wasn't really in town, but seemed to me to be out in the country somewhere nearby. The vivid image in my child's mind was of a dirt road lined by houses that I later learned are called "shotgun shacks."

In 2011, Dreamworks released a movie about what was developing in Jackson at that time. You've probably seen it: The Help. It is an excellent film, based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett and it absolutely confirms all my juvenile impressions and memories of Jackson in the 1950s. But of course, as I said before, being a kid I had no idea of what was really going on behind all that docile southern comfort status quo.

Recently, I have decided to write a fictional historiography about growing up in the South during that time, and about how being a born-n-bred southerner interfaced with what the rest of our country was becoming. This novel, my fourth, is tentatively named King of Soul. (Preview: I am not "the King.") The book being written follows the novel Smoke, which I have just published.
I do a lot of historical research. Learning about history is what propels me as a writer. I turn the research into fiction that, I feel represents a certain time period or zeitgeist. Finally I am doing one now on the actual time and place of my growing up.
My daughter Katie, who nobly attempts to be my editor, tells me that my protagonist's depth suffers in the midst of all my fictionalized history. She is of course correct in this critique. Certainly I will learn the lesson of satisfactory protagonist development in this next project, instead of obsessing with making the history itself the main character.

To begin research I have picked up several books at the Belk library, Appalachian State University, here in Boone NC where I live, where Pat and I have raised our three grown young'uns. This researching will be my modus operandi. Before King of Soul is finished in a few years, I probably will have consulted with a hundred or more sources from that library, as well as our local Watauga County library.

The Kindle, and Wikipedia, and real historians posting online, and so forth are also major components of my publishing projects.

To get into the King of Soul, I am reading, among other things, Michael Vinson Williams' opus of history research, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr, and also A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg.

So, by doing, I am finally getting the back-story of what was really going on while I was growing up in Jackson Mississippi in the 1950s and Baton Rouge Louisiana in the 1960s.

I graduated from high school in 1969. What does that tell ya? Should be a fascinating period to reflect upon.

All of this to say: at the present moment I am here to share with you three of the most interesting historical facts I have learned in preparation to writing the fictional historiography.

1. From Williams' book on Medgar Evers: When Medgar returned to the USA after soldiering to defending our country and Europe in 1946, he had to "go to the back of the bus."! What kind of a welcome was that for a man who had survived D-Day and World War II in Europe? Mr. Evers went on to do very persistent, determined work in voter registrations in Mississippi in the '50s and '60s, and became a great leader in the civil rights movement before he was shot down in the dark of night by a white supremacist in his own front yard in Jackson in 1963. That was just a few months before they got Kennedy.

2. From Greenburg's book on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): Through volunteering in the civil rights movement in the South, empathetic activists from other areas of the country learned how it's done. For instance: after working with the blacks down south, Mario Savio took his SNCC experience back to Berkeley, where he lead the Free Speech Movement that soon initiated protest against the Vietnam war. Also, after working with blacks down south, Tom Hayden returned to Michigan and authored, with his SDS comrades, the Port Huron Statement which was the beginning of Students for a Democratic Society.

3.What I am seeing now about the time period is this: As the civil rights movement gathered steam in the mid-'60s, a rift developed between the moderates (such as Medgar Evers, the NAACP, Dr. King, SCLC, John Lewis, Julian Bond, etc.) and the radicals (such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, SNCC, Panthers, Malcolm X, etc.) This parting of ways is similar to what happened among the anti-Fascists and also among the anti-Communists in Europe of the 1930s, a subject of my new novel, Smoke. The peaceful v. violent disagreement is also, I believe, indicative of protest movements generally, such as the two biggies: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Probably the next revolution, too, whatever becomes of that.

As for me, the kid growing up in the '50s and '60s, well. . . shut my mouth, I'm a child of the South. But I'm a commencin' to write about it. Thank ye for your time.
Glass half-Full

Not your father's parade, booby

Americans do love a parade. We revel gloriously, don't we, in their ambient festivity. We get excited, turning into regular yankee doodle dandies, when we hear the brass band Sousa strains wafting on a summer breeze from the other end of Main Street.

It's Labor Day! Surely that's what this parade was all about today in Charlotte.

Not exactly. Absent from this Labor Day parade were the marching bands with their brass flashing in the sunshine. No Sousa phrases of Stars and Stripes Forever were floating on this uptown Charlotte breeze. We heard no clarinets proclaiming harmonies to complement their sassy trumpet cousins; we felt no sultry saxes. Gone were the young girls spinning their batons and tossing them high into the air to celebrate Americanity, as sequins sparkle and children harken.

No. That Main Street thing was so old school. It was like, Ozzie and Harriet, for crying out loud. I'm here to tell ya that somewhere between Ozzie and Harriet and Ozzy Osborne we got all turned around. Everything now is whoop-fizz, wooby-shooby hip-flip city, not to mention protest. Well, I just did mention it: protest.

That's why today's parade in Charlotte was a horse of a different color, or flag of a different color. What used to be red, white, and blue flapping on the summer breeze is now a kind of shredded rag of tattered and torn ideological fabric, flapping on the sound-bite hot air. What we got now is what the talking media heads have termed fragmentation.

Down there in Tampa you had the red stripes. Now, here in Charlotte, just before the Democrats meet, all the blue stripes have come out in full force.

But this new color-coding of political stripes is backwards. You know that don't you? I mean, back in the day, communists were "reds," and American patriots were true "blue." How did this get turned around?

If you don't believe me, check out that old '70s movie, Reds, starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton as a couple of yankee Soviet-sympathizers supporting the Bolsheviks when the revolutionaries killed the czar and his family in Russia in 1917. Now them was reds, the kind of reds that the John Birchers used to dis when they grumbled, back in the '50s, better dead than red!

But here we are now, in 2012, in Charlotte, across the street from Bank of America corporate headquarters, for crying out loud, in this so-called (in the new newspeak) redstate because of it bein' in the bible belt, and in this red city because of all the republican bankers, and here comes this band of rag-tag bunch of occupiers from every blue state and blue neighborhood in this here nation.

But them's reds if I ever saw one. I mean, the first sign I saw said: Capitalism is holding back the human race.!

I fear this is not your father's parade, booby. I'm thoroughly confused. Furthermore, the Code Pink contingent passing by has totally intensified my redwhiteandblue colors schizoshmizz.

Actually, that Capitalism is sign was the second sign I saw. The first one said: Vote now Jail bank execs Jail oil execs.

And these are definitely signs of the times. They were preceded by no traditional drum and bugle corps. Instead we had a lone drummer at the fore (behind the myriad of police escorts, of course.) He looked like ZZTop. They made him stop beating the drum when the ragtag Occupy Wall Street South ensemble stopped in from of Bank of America headquarters to let the world know exactly why they had come here, by making speeeches and flashing their signs and strutting their stuff.

These days, we fragmented Americans are like birds of a different feather, strutting the stuff. These here are the wispy-wing'ed fringes of the blue flock. I suppose if you went to a Tea Party gathering a while back, you'd have gotten a view of what they're calling the red flock. Tea Partiers don't strut, however; they tend to sit in lawn chairs that they themselves brought from their back porches at home.

These Occupiers, I don't think they have back porches, but more likely, fire escapes.

The last time I saw a parade like this was in the streets of Florence, Italy, several years ago.

There were some similarities with that Italian procession and what we see today approaching the DNC arena. You could just feel, back in the old country, that those old ideological lines had been drawn long ago. The onlookers just kind of yawn, like oh here comes another socialist parade; it must be Friday. The paraders themselves were very organized, not like this bunch I'm looking at now. And those Europeans are more obviously labor-centered, not like here where the unions are just kind of hovering around the perimeter, waiting for their opportunity to organize the occupiers when they run out of steam.

And these fledgeling protest movements in the USA, they're like only a hundred and twenty years old or so, still young and whippersnappin', not like those European ones that seem so mature and classifiable and with their own political parties and stuff.

And I need to mention before I go that the ratio of protesters to police to onlookers was, from my sidewalk perch, something like 1:1:1. Not very efficient, from a banking city's spreadsheet standpoint.

The long, steady stream of fire trucks at the end made it seem a little like the old days-style parade, with hints of orderly garnish, and an official finish, as the coffee-slurpers might say here at Starbucks where I'm now knocking this little ditty out.

And guess what, Labor Day is tomorrow, not today. What was I thinking?



Glass half-Full

Organizing the 9%

As much as the Occupy movement would aspire to represent 99% of the people, they can claim to persuasively echo the opinions and active strategies of...maybe 9%.

Although far more than nine percent of people have become disgruntled because Congress bails out the corporate cronies, and although far more than nine percent of folks are frustrated with ecological disasters and abuses that have been mismanaged through gov/corp collusion, and although far more than 9.1% of the people feel as if their labor and resources are being jerked around by the soulless machinations of greedy, outsourcing corporations, there are really only about nine percent of We the People who are willing to be associated with and directed by Occupation activists.

However, if the Occupyers could manage somehow to effectively represent, say, a mere 9% of the people, that is nine times as many as the 1% whose bank accounts they are trying to siphon. But their first major hurdle in that wealth redistribution quasi-socialist quest would be to get organized. That is no simple task, as I recently witnessed firsthand. In fact this whole movement will be a marathon of dedicated organizing if it is ever going to amount to anything besides a series of sign-wielding collective walks in the park.

At the stone staircase of the Vancouver Art Museum on Saturday and Sunday, I watched as a core group of intense activists initiated in their city what has become the Occupy movement's "achieving consensus" process. It is a tedious sequence of speaker/crowd interactivity that appears, from my observer perspective, laboious and perhaps somewhat self-defeating.

Nevertheless, the agenda-writing nucleus of organizers seemed quite intent on building consensus from their small activist cadre outward amongst the gathering legion of discontents. They wanted it done a certain way, at the risk of appearing, to an instant-breakfast world, disorganized.

The use of amplified sound through use of a microphone was a point of subtle contention among two factions of the the leader group. It took a few hours on Saturday morning as well as Sunday to work out the kinks. A speaker-call / crowd-repeat procedure that must have originated with the wallstreet cadre had already become dogma for some of the agenda-setting core, while other initiators among them obviously preferred the pragmatically loud use of the microphone. Technological enhancement uncovers undesirable bourgeois luxuries. Such subtle concessions to capitalist convenience can easily lead to domination of the gathered crowd by gifted orators, or "showboaters" as one humble speaker referred to them. Amplified rhetoric can enable, theoretically, opportunitstic demogogs to manipulate the assembled masses. Thus can the ideal of egalitarian democracy be undermined by silver-tongued soapboxers. Not good.

I observed with interest as a purist group within the agenda-setting core labored tediously to lay a foundation of simple unamplified call/response democratic consensus building. It was, let's face it, primitive, although I could surmise the solid ideologic basis for it. Over the course of two disjointed hours, however, the pragmatic faction was able to procedurally insert selective use of the microphone into the nascent consensus process. This distant listener thought the microphone use lent a definite improvement to their presentations.

By and by, the Vancouver Occupy agenda-setters were able to establish a sequence of procedures by which their two-hundred-or-so core of gathered faithful (while hundreds more of curious bystanders watched) could voice some procedural decisions about where this thing was headed. Past mid-afternoon on Sunday, I don't know what Occupy Vancouver did, but their inception was fascination for this detached observer.

I departed the scene several hours later, thinking it would be a long time before this movement accomplishes anything substantial. Leaderless democracy, which appears to be the gold standard among this movement's initiators, initially produces apparent chaos. At least that's the way it seemed to me as I witnessed the Occupy Vancouver public inception. What fundamental organization may have been established beneath that irresolute exterior, only time will tell.

After a dusky train ride with wife and son back to Seattle, I returned on nippy Monday morning, with journalistic curiosity, to the Occupy site in Westlake Park, downtown. Previously, I had witnessed parts of the Wednesday and Thursday daytime sessions there. The Seattle crowd seemed, to me, much scruffier and streetish than the intense Vancouverites. A rag-tag band of pierced, tattood occupyers hung out where the podium had been last week. They were meagerly holding on to this public square, insofar as it was possible amidst the gently ominous peripheral police presence. While most lingerers were milling around in apparent aimless expectation, an ameobic bundle of them languished near the low stone platform that had been the focal site of last week's rallying excitement. A pervasive attitude of don't let this magic moment slip away hung in the air like contraband smoke.

A plethora of handmade signs was constant, hundreds of them, in both Vancouver and Seattle, many of them quite clever. By mid-afternoon on Monday, I saw from my Starbucks perch a bearded Seattle protester with a large, neatly lettered green on white that read: PROSECUTE BANKSTERS. It was a distilled message that indicated what might become an actual judgemental plank of the emerging Occupy platform. This was the goal that I had heard a week or two ago, spoken by Michael Moore in an NPR interview.

Such an indictment would materialize only through a very long, drawn out campaign by the Occupyers.

Canadian columnist Conrad Black wrote insightfully in last Saturday's National Post:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/15/conrad-black-why-theyre-occupying-wall-street/
"Assessing blame is complicated. This (the wallstreet meltdown of '08 and its economic fallout) was not a case where an easily identifiable group committed monstrously illegal acts in the manner of Bernard Madoff....financiers cannot be prosecuted for mere acts of stupidity. There have been prosecutions, most of them unsuccessful, and the whole retrubitive effort has been mired in the name-calling between the financial and political communities."

My present uptake from all this observation is that the derivatives-wielding wallstreet 1% better clean up their act before the radical rabble 9%, claiming to speak for the 99, decides to ditch the consensus process and take matters into their own revolutionary hands.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress