Me and the Chairman, Part 2

That's what I get for taking Facebook quizzes.

If you missed it, Part 1

Anti-American Art: More Babykillers

Another gory painting from the Sinchon Museum on American War Crimes in North Korea: American GIs apparently prepare to execute a small child after dispatching her father. The face of the GI in the center is positively mirthful. It's interesting to me to compare this North Korean propaganda to Chinese propaganda. The "enemy" in Chinese propaganda is dehumanized through its absence, and the "good guys" are always shown on the winning side, if not triumphant and least resolute. Korean propaganda seems to specialize in portrayals of the "bad guys" as either simpering weak-looking caricatures or brutal strong-looking monsters; the "good guys" are often shown as victims.

Murderer's Eye View: "It's Their Fault for Bringing Their Kids To a Battle"

Please watch this disturbing film leaked by Wikileaks of an American helicopter executing a group of Iraqi civilians from the sky in 2007, including two journalists, and then blasting at the van--which carried two children--which came to try to rescue the wounded Iraqis lying bloody in the street.

I can't seem to go directly to the Wikileaks site--collateralmurder.com--so I've linked to the Gawker post containing this incredibly disturbing film. The Gawker point of view on this event is somewhat disappointing.

The tape was filmed by the American helicopter crew; and their loathesome chatter is really hard to listen to, but crystal clear. I want to make a cogent condemnation of the American war against Iraq and its ripples and aftermath but after watching this video I find most of the words sucked out of me.

Be a total fag!

Gay pride season will soon be upon us. What to wear???

Consider the Total Fag Shoppe for teeshirts and other items with the probiotic look of delicious Greek yogurt. Okay, it's a cheap attempt at graphic appropriation and irony displaying a questionable word that you're only allowed to use if you're on the right team (which I am, thankyou). A girl has to earn money somehow. But really, buy one! Be the envy of your friends. Featuring the same quality products as the Scarlet Menace propaganda art store.

Anti-American Art: Red Dawn

While this 1960s Chinese poster doesn't directly mention the United States, the message is clear. The people of Asia, Africa and Latin America are rising up to a new day free of imperialism. It's a classic Chinese-style socialist realist tableaux: all eyes are raised upward; the sweeping arrangement of the figures almost ballet-like; the unity of races and genders, and even though these aspirants are civilians, they're still packing heat to fight off any oppressors; the rising sun and pink sky speaking of a new beginning. This is the kind of propaganda art I like best with its almost religious quality: each component of the tableaux is laden with meaning and significance.

In review of HBO's "Pacific": No More Great Wars!

I've been watching the new HBO TV miniseries "Pacific." Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also produced the series "Band of Brothers," it aims to tell the story of the Pacific theater of the Second World War using the same combination of ultra-violent realistic action sequences combined with small-scale intimate character development that made that earlier series such a compelling watch. "Band of Brothers" largely avoided discussion of the larger issues raised by the war: it followed the story of a paratroop company in the last year of the war, from the Allied invasion of Normandy through various ill-fated attempts to invade Germany through the liberation of the concentration camps and the surrender of German forces. Although it portrays its characters as brave and heroic, and they were, it doesn't glamorize what being at war was about. It looks hellish. It makes occasional attempts to humanize the foot soldiers of the "enemy," but as one would expect doesn't step away from the standard narrative of what the war was about.

I'm not finding "Pacific" quite as compelling. Something about the story-telling isn't as successful. The expensively-filmed action sequences are that convincing combination of violence-voyeurism and dangerous excitement that most of us who were once little boys find irresistible; but so far the characters seem undeveloped and confusing to me. Nevermind that, of course, I'll keep watching it through. But if the traditional narrative of the WW2 and a miniseries like "Band of Brothers" is able to claim a sort of moral high ground by focusing on the forces that fought the embodiment of evil Hitler and the Nazis, fer crissakes, and touches on the liberation of the concentration camps, it seems to me that the same moral high ground is missing in a depiction of the Pacific war.

The photo above (taken by me) is from the massive Soviet war memorial at Treptow, outside Berlin. Built on the scene of Soviet triumph against the Nazis, and hosted for decades by the now obsolete satellite regime of the German Democratic Republic, the memorial glorifies the Russian military machine. Surrounding an eternal flame there are many concrete panels like the one shown, all with depictions of heroically unstoppable Soviet legions, with occasional hovering Communist icons like the floating head of Lenin shown here. The memorial is stirring to visit: and it's true that millions of Soviet citizens were killed in the Nazi onslaught; and millions heroically braved incredible hardship to push the fascist forces back and liberate eastern Europe and the Russian homeland. I'm well aware of the various historical positions on the left about this conflict: my own pacifism and anti-imperialism is certainly challenged by the nihilistic brutality of Nazism. I suppose we're let off the hook by history and what actually happened. I think it would require a certain amount of pretzel logic to suggest it didn't matter that Nazism was defeated.

But I'm left with much less certainty about the war between Japan and the various European and American colonial powers. It's true that Japan was allied with the European fascists. And it's true that in China and Korea Japan acted with brutality and a colonial mentality. But in much of South East Japan bolstered anti-colonial independence forces. In the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, India, and other places the Japanese were throwing off American, English or Dutch rule for Japanese sponsorship of supposedly local independent governments. Japanese imperialism, as a new player on the stage that was making up for lost time with aggressive military force, but was, say, Japanese occupation of the Philippines so much worse than Spanish or American occupation of the Philippines?

I read one reviewer of "The Pacific" say that watching war movies once made him feel patriotic, causing him to entertain fantasies of running off to join the army, even now so many years later. But to me the miniseries emphasizes not the heroism of the fight, but the futility, the utter waste of human life. Here young Americans fight young Japanese on islands they had never previously heard of so that Japan could dislodge England and America as master of the East and exploiter of the region's resources. Was what Japan was doing so much worse than the self-entitlement exercised by the western colonialists? When you consider the role of Europe and America in destabilizing China in the first half of the 20th-century, it may have been less militarily brutal than Japan's attacks on China, but it was not occupying any better moral place. The righteousness of the Chinese struggle against foreign domination ultimately needed to vanquish the Western powers as well as Japan; and the fighting there was not over til the end of the forties as the war of liberation against Japan was transformed into a war of liberation against the Kuomintang.

Indeed it's hard to separate American fury against Japan from American racism. The Japanese were demonized and dehumanized in American consciousness in a way that the Germans were not. And many have speculated that experimental weapons of mass destruction, the atomic bombs, would not have been used against European civilians as readily as they were used against Japanese ones. If the destruction of Japanese militarism was ultimately a good thing for the Japanese nation, it's hard not to think it would be better still if all those Japanese who died...hadn't.

From the heyday of Soviet propaganda and socialist graphic art in the 1930s come these Russian stamps marking the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, then just called "Great." Showing bombs falling on a city; the flight of refugees, and ranks of strong young men turned into cripples these images get at some of the stupidity and futility of that war. It was popular rejection of the vast human waste of that war that sparked the waves of social transformation that marked much of the twentieth century. Both the good changes and the bad can be laid at the feet of that war, from the revolutionaries who rid Europe of a handful of repressive monarchies to the reactionaries and revanchists who were invigorated to a new level of military adventurism. If as historians we can now look back at the Second World War and see similar transformative events, I for one can not forget about the terrible cost in human life. And I refuse to quantify the loss of American life as more tragic than the loss of Japanese life.

Are we beyond all this now? Or how many smaller-scale local but brutal wars does it take to add up to a new global conflict? In today's post-ideological world, aren't we back to the sort of mindless brutality of self-interest exemplified by the First World War? Where is the new egalitarian or pacifist consciousness that will prevent the next global conflagration? Does war porn like HBO's "Pacific" turn people into pacifists or turn them into willing cannon fodder for the next American military adventure? Perhaps the reason this TV series isn't as compelling as the previous one is that stripped of the veneer of fighting the inhuman Nazi war machine, the paroxysm of violence in the islands of the Pacific is revealed to be pointless.

There's a message in the past; we ignore it at our own risk.

Anti-American Art: Urban Crossbows

Here's a cultural-revolution-era poster from China, another marking Chairman Mao's statement in support of the African-American people. While well-meaning, the cluelessness in its depiction of American black people is a little mind-blowing. The only thing that can be said is that you can tell it's about American black people because Chinese posters about people in Africa tended to also feature half-naked people playing drums. I just really don't know what to say about the crossbow.

What do the teabaggers want?

I spent some time looking over the photos on "Look At This Fucking Teabagger dot com," (concept loosely based on the less disturbing site "Look At This Fucking Hipster") which mockuments the signs and people at various rightist "tea party" rallies. I suppose it's cheap to deride these people for their crazy ideas, bad spelling, and questionable taste in attire, but it stops being so amusing after a couple minutes. As I've argued before, I think these people are all about their subtext.

I remember when Bush decided to channel American anger over 9/11 against Iraq. In those days of big-lie-spreading before the U.S. attacked the country it had already been blockading for a decade, there were a handful of very large anti-war rallies in New York. I was surprised at the turnout of many of them: people at work were discussing these rallies and going to them; and I'm not just talking the handful of personal friends who I knew had lefty tendencies. People thought attacking another country, thought war, was wrong. Once the bombs started falling and the tanks started rolling the momentum was lost. It was clear that no amount of popular sentiment was going to stop Bush's juggernaut. Later rallies I witnessed were pretty much all hardcore left sects and a handful of independent people.

So who are these people going out in the streets over what, government spending? In a country where the socialist left is microscopic and disregarded, who are these people who seem to actually believe that the country is being taken over by a new red menace? What is actually motivating these people to get politically involved? Because I don't believe for one moment that these demonstrations are about what they say they are about.

I think these people get closest to honesty when they say that they "want their country back." But what is their country and who is it who has taken it away from them? These are the questions that are seldom articulated, only shouted. Their enemies are called liberals, socialists, communists, fascists; but these accusations sound like so many synonyms for "bad guys."

What I think these people want is White America. They want their English-only society; they want to be deferred to by black people. They want the gays to stop being in their face. They want their picturesque image of the way it should be (please see the source of the image at the top of this post below). They want to not be afraid that they are no longer in control.

How long before the mispelled signs and crazy ideas stop being funny? Ironically new media seems to get what these people really mean, while old media doesn't.

(Art note: I'm not sure I realized, before I saw this 100-bill from the Confederacy, that the Southern side in the civil war actually bragged about slavery. It's hard to infer anything different from the engraving front and center.)

Anti-American Art: Babykillers

Another gruesome painting from a museum in North Korea: US GIs shovel dirt over a mass grave of massacred Korean civilians while a still-living baby clutches its mother's scarf. One massacre of South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in 1950 came to light about ten years ago; hundreds of children, women and men were killed. This and a few other paintings I'll be showing are from the "US War Crimes Museum" in Sinchon, DPRK.

I heard a fascinating report on NPR's program "On the media" in the wake of that Republican congressman yelling out "Babykiller!" during the recent healthcare reform debate. It seems that "Babykiller" has a long history of being one of those sensational accusations that always gets attention. The radio program analyzed several historical uses of the term, including, most fascinating to me, how the term "babykiller" was flung at Saddam Hussein back before the first Gulf War. It plays a tearful excerpt from an alleged nurse recounting how the Iraqis, upon occupying Kuwait, heartlessly threw babies out of incubators so they could take the incubators back to Iraq for spare parts. It turns out the weeping nurse was a shill, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family making up atrocity stories out of whole cloth to gain Western sympathy. A fascinating segment worth a listen. I'm not saying US forces in Korea didn't kill any babies, sadly they surely did. Just sayin', hey, now that's effective propaganda.

Evolve!

This is the brilliant new Erykah Badu video, Window Seat, from her brand-new album. Yes, this is filmed at the site of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

Update: the Universal Music Company's Sales Prevention team seems to have pulled many copies of this videos from Youtube. Which is too bad cause watching one of these caused me to buy this album. Anyway, if the replaced link above goes away again, you can watch a weird backwards version of this video at an official Erykah Badu site; worth it for the clearer narration and the word "groupthink" graffiti sort of running out of Badu's head.

Book Review: Freedom Rhythm & Sound

I picked up a wonderful new jazz coffee-table book. "Freedom Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83," compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker; published by Soul Jazz Records UK's publishing arm, SJR Publishing. It's available also at Dustygroove. Gilles Peterson of course is the English crate-digging jazz dance dj who spearheaded the acid jazz movement and who today specializes in finding stellar and fresh sounding material in the stacks of lost LPs from small independent spiritual jazz labels in America and Europe. Issued with a companion 2-cd set of super rare tracks, "Freedom Rhythm & Sound" shows the covers, including some back covers, of hundreds of rare LPs. Covering the labels treasured by spiritual jazz fans like Strata-East and Tribe records, it goes even deeper covering super-rare records from labels that released LPs in editions as small as a few hundred. An introductory essay puts "spiritual jazz" and small independent record labels in context, discussing the civil rights movement in the United States and the growing political and cultural black nationalist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s that became fertile ground for challenging, innovative, spiritually- and socially-conscious jazz. Interspersed with the glorious artwork, much of it reproduced close to full size, are shorter essays about some of the musicians and music labels.

For a graphic designer like me this book is a treat. Most of the LPs shown here had a low-budget, DIY quality, and are incredibly evocative of the times they bore witness to. They're strikingly direct statements of the artists' intents, free of marketing department perversion. In this day of digital downloads and miniature CD-sized booklets it's a treat to see how impactful these original album designs were in a larger size.

As a music lover, especially one who has already discussed my love of a good freaky album cover, this glossy book is like a candy store catalogue. Gilles Peterson has excellent taste in music and many of the artists I know and love are featured repeatedly herein. I have to say I would be writing a different review of this book a couple years ago: once upon a time most of the rarities shown here were known only to dedicated collectors willing to fork out hundred of dollars for these rare slabs of vinyl issued in such small quantities; assuming they could be found at all. Now, a few years into digital music sharing blogs--the ones run by music lovers and collectors sharing out-of-print music, not the pirates trying to make a buck at the expense of music labels--I'm amazed at how many of these rare albums I've been able to hear. Labels like Soul Jazz Records in the UK who put out this book or P-Vine in Japan are also reissuing many of these recordings on CD or even on new vinyl; if global CD sales are down in the mass market, real music fanatics continue to buy quality stuff that has stood the test of time.

This volume has a bit of a hefty price tag -- it is a coffee table book after all -- but it really communicates the music's aesthetic. Recommended!

Anti-American Propaganda: If Going to the Dentist Is Torture, Then This Is Ridiculous

From a series of paintings from a North Korean museum accusing the American forces of commiting atrocities against Korean civilians during the Korean war comes this depiction of diabolical GIs inflicing dental torture on a Korean civilian, presumably to "make her talk." I love the depiction of the smoking GI on the right providing a kind of deliciously fay mad-scientist leer at the proceedings. I have never studied the Korean war in detail, and I don't know what the relationship of this painting is to reality, but all sides in this conflict seem to have committed plenty of well-documented massacres in its three-years of back-and-forth routes up-and-down the Korean peninsula. This is clearly the flipside of the Hollywood propaganda film image of the slant-eyed evil Chinese communist administering water torture to the hapless captured GI.

The Return of The East! Pharoah Sanders Came Back to Brooklyn

Back in the seventies, Pharoah Sanders recorded a classic live album at a long-gone cultural center called The East in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, which I am proud to call my own home, has always been a home to a particularly fertile brand of African-American culture. Cross-pollinated by waves of immigrants from the southern U.S., from the English-, French- and Spanish-speaking islands of the Caribbean, and even from African countries; and sharing space with communities routed in other, different immigrant waves from Europe and the Middle East, Brooklyn's African-American community has been self-conscious, politically aware, and culturally ground-breaking for decades. The East seems to have been a showcase for Afro-centric, progressive, and independent jazz musicians; among the other ground-breaking albums recorded there is Mtume's legendary Strata-East label rarity, "Alkebu-Lan, Land of the Blacks."

The organizers of last night's concert wanted to recreate the vibe of The East in 2010, and so the 11th Annual Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival presented "Pharoah Sanders Returns To Brooklyn" at the Boys & Girls High School in Bed-Stuy. The concert opened with a performance from the Yoruba folkloric ensemble Omi Yesa. Lead by akpwon Amma McKen, the group of singers and drummers (on bata and cajon) played some of the liturgical songs of the Yoruba/Lucumi/Santeria religion. (Amma McKenn can be heard on her excellent album "Alaako Oso.") It was a little odd for me to hear this music--indeed these singers--outside of a ritual setting: one of the singers, Ola Dejean, in fact sang at my own initiation into the religion back in 1996. Maferefun Obatala. Anyway they had two excellent dancers and a narrator explained the context of the music nicely.

Omi Yesa was followed by some recitations by the poet Louis Reyes Rivera. His closing poem, "Place I Never Been" about the assassination of Malcolm X was devastating. (You can see him reciting this poem a few years ago on Youtube.)

Longtime activist, and one of the original founders of The East, Jitu Weusi spoke about continuing efforts to keep Brooklyn and African-American educational institutions meaningful to the community they serve.

After the intermission, out came Pharoah Sanders. He was joined by his longtime bassist Alex Blake and longtime keyboard player William Henderson; and by three drummers: Greg Bandy on traps, Abdul Sabor on hand drums and percussion, and Neil Clarke (also, by the way, a Yoruba priest) on congas and percussion. As a previously unannounced guest, legend and fellow seventies ground-breaker Gary Bartz joined the band on alto sax for about half the show. (Bartz was a veteran of The East as well; he's featured on the "Alkebu-Lan" album).

As I mentioned yesterday, despite my long affection for Pharoah's music, I had never seen him perform. My favorite of his albums are his run of Impulse! albums from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, and while his albums of more traditionally jazz-focused standards of more recent years are pleasing, I really wanted to see him perform in a setting outside that of a quartet. Last night I got my wish.

It was an incredible evening. The band opened with the slow strains of John Coltrane's "Welcome," and moved into a terrific version of a Broadway show tune that John Coltrane first forever transformed, "My Favorite Things," which segued into another chestnut "Clear Out of this World." My fear of Pharoah playing standards was completely unjustified. The percussionists added color and depth and groove, and all of the musicians were in fine form. "My Favorite Things" was Coltrane-esque, yet taken to a still newer place by the presence of congas and Afro-Latin percussion. Pharoah let out a couple of his trademark screeches, and did something I'd heard about but couldn't previously imagine: He keeps playing his tenor sax after he takes it out of his mouth, pushing every bit of wind and breath dawdling inside that horn out. When the air is finally gone his fingers turn the keys of the sax into tiny percussion instruments. It was unspeakably amazing; joyous.

The band played non-stop. Solos and melodies came and went. Pharoah wandered around and occasionally off the stage. While at some point the band focused in on Pharoah's "Save Our Children," from one of his later albums, the set list became amorphous and irrelevant. I think there was a bit of something like "Stairway to the Stars." There were a couple bars of "The Creator Has a Master Plan." But it just became music. There were a lot of bass solos from Alex Blake. There were rounds and rounds of band introductions. Pharoah sang, and chanted, and led the audience in calls-and-response. He played air-guitar on his sax. He deferred to the talents of his partners and then he soloed and showed off his trademark quirks and distinctions. I mean this in a completely good way: the music became a kind of blur, ebbing and flowing; it stopped mattering which song was being played; it was just something to experience. His years of playing Nigerian highlifes and playing with the Gnawa musicians of Morocco were all evident. "Save Our Children," which I was once a little unimpressed by, has stepped up in my list of favorite modern Pharoah tunes.

I think what I found most unexpected was how playful the concert was. The musicians seemed to be having a great time, and especially after being joined by Gary Bartz, Pharoah seemed to relish his role in the collective magic taking place on stage. I loved the audience. All the energy sent into the room by the band was sent right back by the audience. It clapped when it was time to clap, but it sang when it was time to sing, and people called out when something amazing or wonderful happened, which was often. Perhaps it was because I was lucky enough to be in the front row (off to the side), it didn't feel like a large impersonal venue; it felt incredibly present and intimate.

It was a great homecoming; I feel lucky and blessed to have been able to attend.

(Both photos are from last night's event; the top one by me and the one of Sanders and Bartz together taken by Jesse. P.S. I assume this was being recorded; if anybody knows of the availability of that recording, drop me a note in the comments)

Pharoah Sanders Returns to Brooklyn

Cosmic Jazz superstar Pharoah Sanders is returning to Brooklyn tonight, and I get to see him. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never seen him perform before: I'm just too young to have seen him when he performed regularly in the early 1970s, and I've passed up more recent club dates where he seemed to be doing the "old freaky jazz guy rediscovers the standards" shtick that he and so many other seventies players have done in the past few years. Guests at the concert tonight include a poet and a Yoruba music ensemble, so I'm imagining this will not be Pharoah plays "Stardust" and "Misty." Above is a performance from a couple years ago of Pharoah appearing on David Sanborn's TV show. It's a little shocking seeing Pharoah play with somebody so completely at the opposite end of the spectrum, but it's a completely enjoyable clip. They're playing "Thembi," originally on a Pharoah album of that title from way back in the day.

Anti-American Art: Shave and a Haircut

These laughing GIs are doing something unspeakable to a bound Korean prisoner. This and a few other paintings I'll be showing are from the "US War Crimes Museum" in Sinchon, DPRK. They depict scenes from the Korean war but I don't know when the paintings date from. The museum remains today a de rigeur tourist stop for foreign visitors to the world's most isolated state. The Korean War of 1950-1953, still technically unresolved, seems to have left some deep psychic wounds on that nation, perhaps as well it should. Korea was the first nation to fall victim to Japanese expansionism: it was occupied by Japan from 1905 to 1945. It became the first hot conflict in the cold war between the two post-war superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets were not directly involved in the fighting, unlike their then-allies in the new People's Republic of China who sent hundreds of thouands of troops to drive out American and United Nations forces. It was a brutal war (my late uncle Quentin fought in it) which neither side was able to decisively win.

The torture committed by US forces in the aftermath of its invasion of Iraq puts this depiction of torture in a fresh light.

Now thats' what I call money

A republican congressman from North Carolina has called for the replacement of General Ulysses S. Grant's portrait on the US $50 bill with an image of President Ronald Reagan. I'm horrified in general at how Ronald Reagan is treated in popular memory. He was a doddering senile fool, his administration responsible for a sea change in American attitudes toward government that we're still trying to dig our way out of. As far as I'm concerned his support of dictators, of apartheid, of CIA meddling around the world is unforgivable. And his neglect of the AIDS crisis while thousands died was truly criminal.

But I was having hard time in my mind defending Grant's presence on the $50. Sure, he defeated the racist confederacy in the civil war--the real reason this reprobate congressman wants to erase his likeness--but he also presided over the genocide of native Americans in the west.



Which is when I remembered the money from my stay in Nicaragua in the 1980s. On th 10 cordoba note was an image of a stone-throwing revolutionary on the front, and an image of mine workers on the back.



On the fifty cordoba note was an image of the triumph of the revolution in the main plaza of Managua in, and an image of martyred FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca Amador on the front.



On the front of the 1000 cordoba note was an image of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the anti-American revolutionary from the 1930s who was the inspiration for the Sandinista revolution.



So who should be on our money? Here's my modest proposal.

Lincoln can stay on the five. Never forget the civil war and the emancipation. Get rid of that $1 bill, it's not worth anything anyway. On the ten dollar bill let's replace Hamilton with somebody like Rosa Parks. We're gonna need a ten to pay for a bus or subway ride before long so it's fitting. The twenty should go to Sequoyah or Tecumseh, payback for Andrew Jackson. The fifty goes to radical emancipationist John Brown, who would give new meaning to the "In God We Trust" motto. The hundred should go to Martin Luther King: doesn't a bundle of Kings sound better than a bundle of Benjamins? All those bigger bills, well, somebody give me a sample of them and I'll tell you who should go on them.

Anybody got a better proposal? How about for small change?

Head of Church of Child Rape Implicated in Coverup

"The pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest who had molested as many as 200 deaf boys. But church leaders chose to protect the church instead of the children." (NY Times editorial)

Really is anyone surprised that the right-wing, anti-gay, former Hitler Youth member Pope Benedict joined his church's establishment in protecting a serial rapist in his clergy from prosecution? The jewel-encrusted corrupt entity that is the Catholic Church has long considered that its clergy have a God-given right to rape children without fear of legal retribution: to rape their minds, abuse them as slave labor, and in many many thousands of cases, literally sexually rape or abuse them. It's sad commentary on this power hungry organization that it's not shocking that the pope himself is directly implicated in the coverups. An excellent summary of the case in question is here. The rapist priest in question was disciplined by being moved to a different parish where he continued to work around children.

Jesus, as they say, wept.

Anti-American Art: Forgive us our trespasses

This stamp from North Korea is part of a series issued in 1971 noting worldwide resistance to the US. This stamp shows the EC 121 spy plane shot down by North Korea and the USS Pueblo captured by North Korea, both in waters claimed by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the late 1960s. The crew of the Pueblo are seen surrendering, as a resolute Korean soldier brandishes his bayonet. The crew of the American spy plane died in the incident; the crew of the Pueblo spy ship spent almost a year imprisoned in Korea. The Pueblo is today a tourist attraction in Pyongyang.

The New "Jim Crow Terrorism"

A thought provoking article by Melissa Harris-Lacewell on The Nation's blog entitled "Is this the Birth of a Nation" about the teabaggers:

To the extent that a state is challenged as the sole, legitimate owner of the tools of violence, force, and coercion, it is challenged at its core. This is why "state's rights" led to secession and Civil War. The legitimacy of the central state was challenged, then reestablished. It is also why the Civil Rights Movement was so powerful. The overt abuse of state power evidenced by the violence of Southern police called into question their foundational legitimacy. The federal government had to act or risk losing its authority as a state altogether.

Which leads us to March 2010.

The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state. When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that this government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of Congress this weekend. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy.

...We must now guard against the end of our new Reconstruction and the descent of a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism.

Professor Harris-Lacewell argues that the teabagger movement is not just idly racist but purposefully seditious. It's worth reading the whole thing, and it's refreshing to read a perspective on the so-called tea party movement that correctly nails its purported populism as racist revanchism not some kind of neo-progressive anticapitalism. Avoid the frightening comments.

East Village, 1980s

I found this, taped to an East Village lamppost, in the 1980s. Words from an anonymous poet/crazy person. It's hand-written on the back of someone else's class notes, on lined three-ring paper.

TO CYANiDE.
I LiKE LACH. AND SINCE
HIS ANAL POGOSTICK
BOUNCES HIM AROUND,
WHEN HE FUCKS ME,
iTS BOUND TO ADD
MOMENTUM TO HIS THRUSTS
OF COURSE HE'LL HAVE TO
TiLT HiS HEAD BACK, SO
HIS NASAL CRUTCH WON'T
POKE MY FACE.
MOViE BLOND.