Occupy DC -- April-May 1971

Amazing what you can find on the internet.  This video is from the first national peace march I went to on April 24, 1971. I was fifteen -- I went on a bus from Philadelphia organized by the Student Mobilization Committee with a 16-year-old girl I really liked (more than she liked me) and her very cool parents, leaving Philly very early in the morning and coming back that night.
I vividly remember Peter, Paul, & Mary taking the stage that day (I didn't know from my vantage point that they had been joined by the less cool John Denver) and singing Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" and Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance". They brought a connection to a famous earlier march in 1963 that made a very strong impression on this young peacenik.

This mass march on the weekend was only part of a much bigger couple of weeks in late April and early May that bore more than a passing resemblance to the current Occupy movement. In the days before the mass march, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War  conducted their "limited incursion into the country of Congress" that included camping, demonstrations, throwing medals back over the walls around the Capitol, and Lt. John Kerry's famous testimony in front of the Winter Soldier Investigations -- "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" -- that announced this young veteran as a political figure on the national stage.
The days after the mass march saw planned acts of civil disobedience around the Capitol by the Mayday Tribe that led to the arrest of over 13,000 people between May 1 and May 4 (one year after four were killed by the National Guard at Kent State). These events deserve a larger space in our collective memory.  The public reaction against the mass arrests is one of the many events in the late sixties and early seventies that helped turn the mass of the American people against the war in Vietnam.  I wanted to be one of those Mayday demonstrators blocking avenues, running from tear gas, and being penned up with my fellow radicals behind fences around RFK Stadium. I guess I understand now why my parents didn't let a high school sophomore take that extra step.  I'm glad they let me take the bus for the one-day demonstration. It was one of the highlights of my life.
Thanks for sharing this moment of nostalgia with me.

"... there'll always be someone with the same button on as you ..."

Sorry to break the mood here, because you're about to watch one of the most beautiful songs and singers (I hope you haven't seen this before, so you can experience Melanie for the first time), but I have to rant for a minute, because I just watched this for the first time in decades and I was struck by the loss of our innocence. Fuck the Republicans and the businessmen and the 'serious' volk everywhere who have tried to tell us for the last forty years that the sixties and hippiedom and love and peace and beads and buttons and Woodstock were anything other than a high point in American civilization. We've been on a long slide from that zenith into a nadir of materialism and militarism and an endless parade of men in dark suits (their lapel-pin flags do NOT count as "buttons".)

Enough ranting. Please watch, and be transported back to 1971:

Beautiful people
You look like friends of mine
And it's about time
That someone said it here and now
I make a vow that some time, somehow
I'll have a meeting
Invite everyone you know
I'll pass out buttons for the ones who come to show
Beautiful people never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you

This is the best thing about the Occupy movement. It has nothing to do with policies and politics. It has to do with the drum circles and the new sense of community and the beautiful people recognizing each other by the buttons they're wearing. Moving back to a beautiful time we've seen belittled for most of our adult lives.

I hope Melanie's song is stuck in your head.

It's stuck in mine (that may be all you really need to know about me).

Peace.

The Word of the Week is "Draconian" for the performers in America's favorite clown circus

Yesterday, Newt Gingrich brought this word to our attention when we read about his infatuation with Singapore's "draconian" (and deadly) approach to the drug war. (Information Liberation)

We then stumbled upon an article posted yesterday about Michele Bachmann's draconian plan to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants at a cost to our economy of 2.6 trillion dollars. (ThinkProgress Justice)

So then we had to do a search for "Draconian" in connection with all the other performers in the circus.

Rick Santorum was quoted back in mid-November as saying that he would support “the most draconian sanctions that I could think of” against Iran, even if they hurt the United States. (Des Moines Register)

Back in late October, Ron Paul explained to David Gregory that "Draconian cuts after World War II ... stimulated the economy" (transcript on Project Vote Smart)

Here's an article from October 25: "Why Mitt Romney's Medicaid Cuts Are Even More Draconian than Paul Ryan's" (ThinkProgress Health)

From early September we have Amanda Marcotte's "Pushback on Draconian Rick: Stay Out of Women's Sex Lives" about Rick Perry and radical anti-abortion laws in Texas. (AlterNet)

Herman Cain, who may be leaving the circus soon, opening up a spot for Sarah or Donald, was asked the meaning of "Draconian" for this article and he thought we were concerned with the secondary definition, "resembling a dragon, dragon-like". He adamantly denied that he had ever been a follower of Sauron.

Jon Huntsman only seems to use the word when he is disparaging the more radical clowns in this circus. He's still trying to paint himself as the more cultured and quiet -- and boring -- Marcel Marceau in this troupe of Bozos.

President Newt Gingrich will be coming after your Doublemint gum next

From my trip to Asia's friendliest police state in 2010.

When liberals point to the more humane and equitable healthcare systems in other nations we're accused of all kinds of unpatriotic sins and politely asked (or told) to leave the country if we like someplace else better than we love the U.S.of A. But Newt Gingrich has no problems telling us that we need to be more like the autocratic city-state of Singapore in his doubling down in the so-called "war" on drugs.

Q: "In 1996, you introduced a bill that would have given the death penalty to drug smugglers. Do you still stand by that?"
Newt: "I think if you are, for example, the leader of a cartel, sure. Look at the level of violence they've done to society. You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.' If you're serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we're going to have drugs in this country.
Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They've been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country."

In this same interview with Yahoo from last Saturday, he talks about mandatory drug tests before collecting unemployment insurance or food stamps, "aggressively" undermining the Cuban government (using the word aggressive 4 times), undermining Social Security with private accounts for young workers, and flip-flopping on his pro medical marijuana stance of 1981, having decided now that it is wrong to be "compassionate toward a small group at the risk of telling a much larger group that it was okay to use the drug."
In short, he's trying hard to outflank his opponents on the right (or at least prevent them from outflanking him by pandering more effectively to the nutjob base). If necessary, he'll extend the Singapore model to all illicit substances and start ranting about the dangers of gum chewing soon.

The Quote of the Day ... from a GOP candidate for President

TrueBlueLiberal dot org has given five inches of "fame" to a number of the clowns running for the GOP nomination for President, so why not do the same for the man who was first to announce his candidacy, but is being widely ignored.

"In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn't fit into a Norman Rockwell painting."

--Gary Johnson

It could be taken as his assessment of the rest of the Republican field, but that's Gary Johnson's statement about the Family Leader's Marriage Vow signed by Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum (Newt  Gingrich is waiting for it to be amended to allow serial monogamy). Click on the link and read the fine print to see what some of our "serious" GOP candidates are willing to commit themselves to.
Other candidates have declined to sign the pledge that desires to become the social conservatives' version of Grover Norquist's tax pledge. But Johnson was the only notable deletion from the Iowa debate in August. And when the time came for the CNN/TeaParty debate in September,  the former two-term Governor of New Mexico was still polling higher than Huntsman and Santorum. They were invited to debate, but he wasn't.
I just read this article about him in GQ that was forwarded to me a little while ago. I recommend it. Even if I might not vote for Gary Johnson, he seems like I guy I'd like to know and hang out with -- not something I'd say about any other GOP contender (and not just because he's more widely known as the Legalize Pot candidate).

Your #OWS Soundtrack for the Night comes from 1967

Here are the Buffalo Springfield singing (or at least lip syncing) "For What It's Worth":
  

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Good Night. And Good Luck to everyone sleeping outside tonight in Occupy encampments.

The Biggest Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives in 140 Characters

On this Thanksgiving weekend I was thinking about an uncle who's been gone for a while. He was the first person who gave me my archetype of how a conservative person's mind works. Over a Thanksgiving dinner table, his biggest complaint (before he had kids) was: "Why am I paying school taxes? I don't have any kids!"

Remembering that statement reminded me of a tweet I made a month or two ago. I think I remembered it word for word and just tweeted it again: "The biggest fear of liberals is that someone might starve.The biggest fear of conservatives is that someone might get something for nothing." It was a spur of the moment statement, and it still feels very true to me. When the first draft of a tweet turns out to be exactly 140 characters long, it also seems to me to have a special quality of 'truthiness.'

But we see the conservative's dislike of paying for other people's needs in more than Uncle X's hatred of paying for the education of other people's children. We see it in the predictable GOP opposition to paying for any health or welfare program, or extension of unemployment benefits, or infrastructure, or investments in mass transit, or green energy, or even giving disaster aid without taking that money out of some other social program.

But there is more than just greed at work. There is resentment of anyone who gets a government "handout" or "free lunch". The resentment is summed up in Ronald Reagan's fictional 1976 caricature of the "welfare queen" that made him a hero among the conservative uncles of this nation:

"She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

Of course their resentment of "getting something for nothing" does not extend to resentment of those who get a free ride by being born a Trump or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy or a Bush. That's the only way that money for nothing is acceptable in their world view, and they are doing everything they can to make the passing of wealth between generations easier and tax-free.

But why don't they feel the same resentment about the money that gets poured down the rathole of military waste? Why the cheering of wars and the death penalty and military tribunals and police brutality and almost any other form of state violence? I think they see this violence protecting their property rights, but it's still the part of American conservatism I have the hardest time understanding.

Happy Sunday. Imagine your world without Republicans.

It's a beautiful Sunday morning in November in Woodstock, New York, and I'm about to go outside again.

Even though the song in this Jefferson Airplane segment from Woodstock (the movie, not the town) is "Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon," I always think of it as a Sunday morning song, hanging out in the park on a beautiful Sunday morning (even without your fellow hippies, and with or without acid, incense, and balloons), because the Airplane opened the Sunday portion of the Woodstock concert very early with this "morning maniac music".

Please go outside today and imagine your world without Republicans for a few hours.

Saturday afternoon
Yellow clouds rising in the noon
Acid, incense, and balloons
Saturday afternoon
People dancing everywhere, loudly shouting I don't care
It's a time for growing and a time for knowing love
Saturday afternoon

I sense some of this joy in the Occupy movement that I haven't seen in politics for a long time. And I also can't watch this video without falling in love with Grace Slick all over again.

"If Woody Guthrie were alive today, he'd have a lot to write about..."

"... high times on Wall Street and hard times on main street." These words are spoken by Bruce Springsteen in the intro to this version of "The Ghost of Tom Joad". He's joined by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and The Nightwatchman with his guitar that reads "Arm the Homeless" (the 21st century version of Woody's legendary "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitars).

I was just watching this performance on Palladia, and I was thrilled to be able to find it on YouTube so I could share it here:

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

Tom Joad and his creator John Steinbeck would understand the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Fracking and the Delaware River Basin Commission

I know this video is from a few days ago, but I just stumbled on it now. This segment from Keith Olbermann's Countdown with Josh Fox (Gasland) and Debra Winger (playing Eeyore in this clip) does a great job of summarizing the recent victory of anti-fracking activists in the Delaware River basin:

It's worth listening to Josh Fox's explanation of where hydraulic fracturing for shale gas falls in the larger context of "extreme fossil fuel development" where more and more harmful means of extraction -- mountaintop removal, tar sands, deepwater drilling, fracking and more -- are being used because we delayed our switch to renewables and alternatives and have run low on the easily accessible fossil fuels.

(Of course, if you're a right winger who has stumbled on this blog, you can dismiss all these arguments because some of them are being made by successful Hollywood actress.)