What will happen?

I took these pictures of Bayou country on a visit to New Orleans in the 1990s. What will happen to this incredibly beautiful natural landscape should a hurricane sweep through the oily Gulf of Mexico on its way to shore?

As of this writing, though slightly reduced by a cap (with vents), the crude oil continues to gush into the Gulf's waters, and the massive quantities of polluted water are starting to reach Florda.

Somewhere I read the best common sense logic: if you can't fix a drilling leak at the bottom of the ocean, you shouldn't be allowed to drill there.

Anti-American Art: Beware Strangers Bearing Gifts

"He who plunders others always lives in terror" reads the Palestinian proverb atop this complicated poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL. Modelled using toys, it refers to the cozy US-Israel relationship by depicting a Trojan horse bearing American colors having apparenty delivered a belly full of Israeli soldiers. It dates from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and is a call to solidarity with the Lebanese people and the Palestinian refugees targeted by the American-backed Israeli forces. The Israelis were successful in forcing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of Lebanon, though of course hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain there.

Echoes of a Past Life - Listening to Alice Coltrane

I started writing The Cahokian blog on a lark back in 2006. I was intrigued with the medium of the blog: on the one hand it could be the inappropriate over-sharer's narcissistic fantasy, on the other it could be a vehicle for self expression, for creativity, for exercising one's own tiny share of the vox populi. For the first year or so I put things up randomly here without presuming anyone else would ever notice. It became a sounding board for my political frustrations, and the intermittent diary of life's milestones. And then I discovered music blogs. A friend steered me to all these amazing blogs where people were just giving away hard to find obscure and lost music I had spent years and years trying to find myself.

In the beginning of 2008 I jumped into the music blog fray and launched Ile Oxumare, and started sharing rarities from my own collection. Wanting neither legal nor moral complication, I made a clear decision not to do anything that could deprive an artist of compensation for his or her work: I posted only items that were out of print and unavailable anywhere else. At first I didn't have much to say about the music I shared: I was humbled by other bloggers I saw whose crate-digging credibility was far deeper than my own. But as the author of the Jazz Supreme web site, there were some things I did know about, and eventually I realized I had a point of view about the music I loved and Ile Oxumare became the place where I not only got to share things with friends, but got the fun of reviewing the music and advocating for my taste and perspective. Also, I got to explore something crucial to me, the notion that there is a message in the music, that music is not just entertainment but a vehicle for spiritual uplift.

Ile Oxumare really took off. Today it has had nearly 500,000 visitors with 1,200,000 page views and a steady daily visits count of about 450. While most of the visitors are looking for free music -- can you blame them? -- I've established friendships with many and found myself part of an international community of jazz music lovers. I post things on Ile Oxumare relatively rarely now, once or twice a month as opposed to many times a week when I started: the music blogging world has so thrived that my well of out-of-print discoveries has grown very shallow. I'm focusing more energy on The Cahokian now, with daily posts, but my music blogs continue.

So for this entry of "Echoes of a Past Life" I'm reposting three essays that first appeared on Ile Oxumare. These were all posted under my blogland identity "ish."

Alice Coltrane died in 2007. She had first recorded as Alice McLeod playing piano with Terry Gibbs. Eventually she met and married saxophonist John Coltrane, and wound up replacing McCoy Tyner as his band's pianist during its last, most exploratory and "out" period. Upon John's death, she pursued twin careers of preserving and deepening the reputation of her late husband developing his catalog of recordings, and following her own spiritual and musical muse through a solo recording career. Her albums on Impulse! and Warner Brothers from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s playing piano, organ and harp with a long line of brilliant jazz coplayers, while not exactly fixtures on the shelves of most jazz lovers, are well respected and acknowledged for their art and innovation. But when she stopped recording jazz for major labels it was almost as though she had fallen off the edge of the earth. Until the release of her final Impulse! album "Translinear Light" in 2004, Alice Coltrane had moved to the realm of myth.

But in truth she had continued to record. A year after her passing Ile Oxumare shared her extremely rare devotional cassette from 1982 "Turiya Sings" (cover shown above); all I said was "Not much to say about this music, which is not really jazz, except that Alice Coltrane loved God." "Turiya Sings" was the first of four devotional albums she recorded in the 1980s and 1990s. She added synthesizers to her musical arsenal, as well as, quite surprisingly to me anyway, her own voice. While her devotional albums feature a chanting gospel chorus and expert solo vocalists, many of them also feature her own singing of the sacred Sanskrit hymns; and her voice reveals a window into her spirituality even more directly than her instrumental playing. I reviewed her other three devotional albums more thoroughly, and those are the essays now reposted below. Writing these reviews was revelatory to me: in listening over and over again to these albums I learned something about the music and the spirituality contained within. These reviews helped me to develop my own writing voice and I'm happy to re-present them not as an excuse to give away music but because I had something to say about Alice Coltrane's vision and art.

-----


Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, Divine Songs, 1987
(Originally posted on Ile Oxumare 6/14/2009)

"Chanting is a devotional engagement, one that allows the chanter to soar to higher realms of spiritual consciousness. Chanting is a healing force for good in our world, and also in the astral worlds. Chanting can bring the person closer to God because that person is calling on the Lord. When one calls to even a friend, a mother, or any other relative in a kindly way, he gets the response, also in a reciprocal way." --Alice Coltrane/Swamini Turiyasangitananda in the original liner notes

Thus Alice Coltrane matter-of-factly states it: when you call out to a friend, you get a response; and so when you call out to God, you get a response as well. This extremely rare cassette recording is one of Alice Coltrane's calls to God. In the lyrics to "Om Supreme" on her first Warner Brothers album "Eternity," she was similarly up front, and I'm paraphrasing slightly: "When I call you to come to California, you know I will meet you in California. When I call you to the Divine realms, you know I will meet you there as well."

The first Alice Coltrane album I ever bought was her eye-opening 2-LP Impulse! anthology "Reflections on Creation and Space" back in the 1970s. My mind was blown by the music, and I didn't quite know what to make of the bits of what seemed at the very least a highly eccentric philosophy contained in her notes and titles. I was a young college student and not particularly spiritual at the time, and while I found her music irresistibly compelling I set aside its reference points. The cover portraits on this and the rest of her catalogue which I subsequently devoured always unnerved me: She seemed in those pictures unbelievably serene, almost like an iconic saint, if also distant, uncomfortably otherworldly, and frankly, a little kooky.

Now many years after my first encounter with her music, and, sadly now, a couple years after her passing, I have come to understand her a little better. Even though her Hindu spiritual path has not been a specific religious calling for me, the universality of her spirituality is clearly self-evident. I set aside my skepticism about her eccentricities and have come to understand that she was the real deal. Her consciousness indeed spanned the planes of being, and the music was a kind of teaching, not only another way of saying "if you call out to a friend you will get a response" but the actual shout out itself to both God and us, her listeners, her friends, seeking that response.

The music here is not jazz, though it is deeply soulful. Like her other devotional recordings it is mostly Alice Coltrane singing Sanskrit chants against various instrumental backgrounds. As with her later recording "Glorious Chants" also featured here at Ile Oxumare, there is a raw synthesizer whine on a few tracks but unlike that record it's less dominant overall. And her singing, still almost heartbreakingly soulful, is less tentative than it was on "Turiya Sings," also an Ile Oxumare first. On one song she plays her trademark harp. There are strings on many tracks; although the label doesn't credit live strings only synthesizers, they sound in places too sensitive to my ears to be entirely electronic.

The background vocals are mostly sparse and tasteful; there's a couple more rousing chorus-and-Indian percussion numbers that might make the casual listener a little more sympathetic to the robed Hare Krishnas still found occasionally here in NYC.

Take this music as it was meant: not as an artistic statement or bit of entertainment (though it is both), but as the evidence that Alice Coltrane was in fact some kind of sainted holy woman. It's not that this music will cure your aches and pains, protect you against swine flu, nor give you an "e-ticket" into the religious paradise of your choice; and nor should it convince you to give away your belongings and linger about in airports dressed in pastel robes, but let it be your proof that if you call out to the spirits of peace, and wisdom, and serenity, you will be answered.


Alice Coltrane - Turiyasangitananda
The Vedantic Center Ashram's Infinite Chants, 1990
(Originally posted on Ile Oxumare 5/12/2010)

The late Alice Coltrane's least known works are the series of devotional cassettes recorded for her California ashram in the 1980s and 1990s. Between her last Warner Brothers album released in 1978 and her comeback album "Translinear Light" released a few years before her passing, she had largely disappeared from the jazz world. I've tried to feature everything I could find by her from that period on this blog, and here is the last piece I know of, "Infinite Chants."

Very much in the style of "Glorious Chants" this is far from a jazz recording; and unlike "Turiya Sings" and "Divine Songs," Alice Coltrane does not sing here. She is heard in the background as an instrumental presence, her whooshing synthesizers and noodling organ setting a spacey mood for the exuberant choral chanting. Again the material is all Sanskrit Hindu devotional songs. But I hesitate to call these traditional songs. There are some wonderful new albums of kirtans, sing-along chant albums by American Hindus such as David Newman that meld accessible pop-folk to the religious songs that actually feel somehow more traditional, at least as in the chant-along do-it-yourself-Hinduism new-age bookstore tradition. But the energy of this album is very different than that.

The songs here are flavored more by a gospel sensibility: the massed anonymous voices give way to some remarkable solo moments, and the spiritual fervor communicated is, at least to me, quite affecting. Repeatedly on this album the combination of vocal harmony, percussion, spacey synths, and one of the singers standing out from the mix creates an absolutely sublime moment inside songs that are otherwise, as they are meant to be, repetitious and not particularly melodic or hook-laden. And of course there's the visionary presence of the Swamini Turiyasangitananda, as Mrs. Coltrane came to be called, with its completely off-center, ecstatic, man-overboard commitment to sharing her spiritual quest.

The only thing the All-Music Guide has to say about this album is that some of this music is from a television program called "Eternity's Pillar." I used to have a short VHS clip from that program: it had a bizarre low-budget, public-access flavor, featuring Turiyasangitananda doing her best Sun Ra impersonation, seemingly broadcast from another plane of reality where most of her consciousness was otherwise engaged. Sort of a mesmerizing culty trainwreck at first glance. But as with this album, if you can suspend your disbelief long enough to realize how deeply heartfelt all this stuff is, you can connect not just with its blissful spiritual energy if you're so inclined, but with its musical beauty.


Alice Coltrane - Turiyasangitananda, Glorious Chants, 1995
(Originally posted on Ile Oxumare 5/31/2008)

"these chants are humbly commended into the lotus hands of bhagawan sri satya sai baba to his praise and glory."

if you're looking for alice coltrane's late period hidden jazz masterpiece, you won't find it here. in the mid-1990s she was deep into her life as a religious teacher, light years away from her musical explorations as john coltrane's widow; and she had sworn off secular recordings, not as yet ready for her brief and glorious comeback shortly before her passing. instead, this is a meditative album of devotional songs.

but just like alice coltrane went to far out planes of being to bring back amazing jazz--or literally communed with stravinsky's ghost to learn the art of arrangements for strings--here she goes to some far out plane to bring a distinctive presence to these chants.

i've heard some really nice kirtan albums recently: albums of peppy hindu chants that you can't help but sing along to; the bells and drums irresistibly pulling you in just like pop music does, but joyous and filled with spirit. but here turiyasangitanda, for that is what she went by then, mostly omits the bells and the drums for weird synthesizer noodling, sometimes almost soporific or cheesy, like a cheap sci-fi movie soundtrack, and sometimes howling like an air-raid siren, while the members of her ashram peacefully sing chanted devotional songs, sometimes joined in solo by a pair of singers from india. the songs are slow and long: this is not about musical virtuosity, and these are not jams and certainly no kind of jazz. this is about a state of being: there are highs and lows, some glorious peaks and some valleys where not much happens, like slow slow intakes and outtakes of rarified air. the production is seemingly amateur, which is oddly effecting, as though emphasizing not the presence of musicians but the diaphonous presence of spirit in the silent spaces between the almost muffled sounds.

this is certainly not the best music that alice coltrane ever recorded. but i take it as living proof that she had one foot in this world and one in another, bringing back some wordless secret message for us mere mortals. by the last number on this record, i hope you find, as i do everytime i listen to it, your heart filled with some profound and otherworldly joy.

Anti-American Art: Bombers Bursting in Air

Chinese poster from the 1960s honoring the Vietnamese anti-aircraft defenses warding off American bombing missions over Vietnam. Be sure to click on this one to enlarge and see all the detail. There are camouflaged gun teams, armed gunboats, and even female militia shooting down the jets with rifles. Practice makes perfect, and these heroic defenders clearly had lots of it.

During his 2000 campaign, US Senator and war criminal John McCain, downed by one of these heroic teams in 1967, said "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." For those of us on the side of the Vietnamese defenders, John, the feeling is mutual.

Things Everybody Knows

I find myself a little at a loss for words over the Israeli act of war against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and its aftermath. It's not that Israel has not done many brutal things before: as body counts go this one pales before Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza in the past few years. There's just something so shameless about the rationalizations offered up by Israel's defenders, the horrifying lies and justifications of murder offered up by Israel's mouthpieces, and the utter complicity of the American press and worse, the American government. Everybody knows that Israel will rationalize its actions, Everybody knows that Israel will claim anyone it has killed is a terrorist.

I'm not one for stoking the fires of international conflict among the den of thieves known as NATO, but shouldn't it be a scandal that Israel attacked a NATO member's civilian vessel and the other NATO members are standing around whistling in a corner? I'm not one for the arbitrary valuing of American life above foreign life, but shouldn't it be a scandal that Israel murdered a completely innocent born-in-America Turkish/American young man -- Furkan Dogan, shown above -- with four bullets to the head and one to the chest, and the U.S. is equivocating? Everybody knows that there's no real justice; that Israel and the U.S. determine how so-called international law is applied.

I listened to NPR radio last night to the most vile propaganda imaginable, and the Israeli ambassador to the US basically admitted
Israel's premeditated assault on the Turkish ship where so many were killed and wounded: "The particular ship that did encounter the violent incident was simply too large to stop by nonviolent means. The others ships were not and that is one of the reasons they were towed safely to port," Oren said on the program that aired today.

Worst of all is this ridiculous American notion that there must be some truth to both sides, that sure, Israel has done some bad things, but HAMAS are TERRORISTS! ROCKETS! MISSILES! ROCKETS! SELF-DEFENSE! Let me say that unequivocally here: there are not two sides to this story, and anybody who says there are is complicit in the racist and inhuman demonization of the Palestinian people. All those rockets Hamas is supposed to have fired have killed fewer people than Israel just did this week in its attack on the Freedom Flotilla. As I have written before, if you are for separation of church and state, if you are for equal civil rights for all people, if you are for peace, you must recognize Israel for the murderous monstrosity that it is. Everybody knows that to listen to the lies of the Israelis you must shut your mind to the truths of the Palestinians.

This is denial on a massive scale. Everybody knows that the twin evils of the war on drugs and the narco-trafficking criminal empire which waste so much life, so much money, strand so many people in prisons, cause such pain, plunge entire nations into the depths of corruption, all these things, would just go away if drugs were legalized. Well here's the news: the violence in the middle east? The rise of fundamentalism and terrorism? The corruption of undemocratic regimes? The waste of so much life, human suffering on a grand scale? The solution for these problems is before us as well, and everybody knows it. The white people of South Africa have lived with majority rule for almost two decades now. There are challenges, to be sure. But the arrival of justice did not bring genocide. The Jewish people living in Palestine can adjust to being equal citizens with their Arab neighbors. A future of justice and decency demands it. The time is coming for the end of Israel as we know it.

Here are some more links of value about the Flotilla massacre. I will not link to any of the Israeli propaganda videos justifying their murder of innocents.

Eyewitness account from Mary Hughes, cofounder of Free Gaza movement.

Another survivor's account here.

Putting Names to the Faces of those Murdered by Israel

Evidence of digital fakery in Israel's so-called proof

Naomi Klein on the shooting of an American art student during a protest of the flotilla massacre on the West Bank.

Glenn Greenwald speaking truth to the corrupt media/political establishment.

The AngryArab puts narcissist NYT columnist Thomas Friedman in his place

Finally thanks to Jews Sans Frontieres for publicizing the graphic below:



Update: Required reading, a detailed refutation of Israeli talking points.

Anti-American Art: Stovepipe Hat, Lightnin' Why Don't Ya Hear Me Cryin'

A 1980 poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL entitled "World Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution." It shows a lightning bolt zapping through Uncle Sam's head, and a large Cuban flag.

According to wikipedia, Uncle Sam dates back to the War of 1812, and this most classic visual imagination of him dates to a World War 1 recruiting poster from 1917.

The Massacre Monument

When I was a boy in the 1960s, I used to linger at this statue in front of the Chicago Historical Society. It's huge--certainly in my memory--these figures are larger than life. It shows the Potawatomi Chief Black Partridge rescuing the white settler woman Margaret Helm from being killed during what is remembered as the Fort Dearborn Massacre, when Indian tribes allied with the British during the war of 1812 successfully destroyed the Chicago-area settlement of Fort Dearborn. It's an evocative statue in a sort of heroic realist style. The "hostile" warrior raises his tomahawk to strike, the "friendly" chief's hand raised to stop him; the lithe Ms. Helm writhes dramatically, indeed erotically, between them. A white baby raises his teeny hand out for aid at their feet. I don't remember the other side clearly, though I remember further mayhem: I think another Indian crouches over his fallen victim. There's a visceral quality to it all: the rippling muscles, the violent instant eternalized in bronze.

Sometime after my departure from Chicago in the 1970s this statue was removed to a warehouse, a victim of changing sensibilities, and protests from Native Americans have prevented its planned re-installation in a memorial park for Fort Dearborn. Indeed the term "Fort Dearborn Massacre" seems to be falling out of favor, replaced by the Battle of Fort Dearborn.

I'm sure the railroad robber baron who commissioned this statue in 1893--interestingly enough a few short years after the final defeat of the Sioux nation at Wounded Knee--intended it to strike fear into the hearts of little white boys and virginal white maidens. It's surely some kind of triumphant monument to the final defeat of the fearsome savages, and proof that the industrious white race deserved its victory, so recently having proved its mastery of the continent. It's a justification for everything that happened between 1812 and 1893 as the United States moved west, pushing the indigenous residents onto smaller and smaller patches of land at bayonet point.

Oh it's clear that in the battle/massacre of Fort Dearborn, the Indians killed about half of those hapless settlers, soldiers and civilian alike, about 45 of them, and the half who survived were sold to the British allies. But in the ocean of blood spilt by the new republic as it pushed into Indian lands, this massacre was but a drop.

I don't remember feeling fear when I looked at this statue as a little boy. What I remember feeling was a kind of admiration. I wanted to meet those fearsome Indians, and it didn't matter whether it was the "bad" one about to deprive Ms. Helm of her scalp, or the "good" one nobly intervening. Those weren't savages, those were people; mysterious and compelling people, but people nevertheless. When me and my little friends played settlers and Indians I knew from this statue I always wanted to be the Indian. In my own play fantasies with my little toy figures I remember that the Indians always won the battle of the bedroom floor. My poor little cowboy and pioneer figures; half the time I was content to leave them in the toybox and just play with plastic Indians. Is this the way the world works among children? Do we choose sides so early?

Today America's bugaboo is no longer wild Indians, it's Muslims and terrorists, though in the popular imagination those two words mean the same thing anyway. A community board in New York City has just given permission for the construction of an Islamic mosque and community center, Cordoba House, near the "ground zero" site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, and predictably there's no end to the outrage. The imam of this center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has plainly condemned terrorism; numerous victims of the 911 attacks were Muslims, and yet somehow, in typically bigoted American fashion, because the 911 hijackers were Muslim extremists this mosque is being called an insensitive insult to the memory of the fallen. Well, to the memory of the fallen non-Muslims apparently, since they're the only ones who count. Somehow the presence of an Islamic center near the eventual 911 memorial is just too much for these people to bear.

Even on the gay blog I read frequently, Joe.My.God., this mosque has engendered a fierce debate, with numerous gay men repeating ridiculous canards against Islam, basically suggesting that all Muslims want nothing more than to behead gay men on sight.

I am struck by how the tomahawking Indian savage of past American imagination has been replaced by the bomb-throwing, sword-bearing Muslim savage of present American imagination: both are charging fearlessly toward our heads, their goal expanded from just our scalps to our entire heads. This is rich with metaphor. Americans are nothing if not consistent. I suppose we are lucky that artistic sensibilities have changed: I'm trying to picture the bronze statue showing fiendish Muslims ravaging a modern Ms. Margaret Helm.

There's just something so arrogant about American intolerance. 911 was a terrible tragedy. I witnessed it. I lived with it. I walked home across the bridge with thousands of other frightened, saddened people. Every morning for weeks after the attack I saw the pillar of fire and smoke from my bathroom window. The nearly three thousand innocent people who died that day deserve to be honored and remembered. But we have no monopoly on tragedy. Our suffering as Americans doesn't make us superior beings. How many 911s has the United States inflicted on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in its almost ten-year quest for vengeance? If you're a family in the rugged borderlands of Pakistan murdered by a predator drone that's mistaken you for a band of terrorists, is your death less tragic than an investment trader doomed at his or her desk? In the ocean of blood spilt during this misbegotten war between the US and "terror," what drops reflect the innocents of 911? Are those redder drops than all the people killed by "shock and awe" and its aftermath?

Whatever monument is built at the site of 911, I hope there are directions from there to Cordoba House. The monument to those lost that day needs to humanize people not demonize them. Oh I'm not saying it needs to rehabilitate the criminals who carried out the 911 attacks, nor am I offering sympathy for the perverse fundamentalists of Al-Qaeda. But as long as Americans fail to see themselves reflected in the faces of others, it will just be a matter of time before we have to build yet another monument to another massacre.

By way of humanizing the Potowatomi nation who won the Battle of Fort Dearborn--or committed the massacre of Fort Dearborn, your choice--check out The Pokagon Times for a video of the Pokagon band of Potawatomi performing at the rededication of a park at the site of Fort Dearbon in Chicago in 2009. A detailed history of the Potawatomi nations can be found at Tolatsga.org. Also recommended is the First Nations site index.

Top postcard photo from Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia. Bottom image of the statue at its original location on the south side of Chicago from Wikipedia.

Anti-American Art: Anniversary Party

From a series of stamps issued by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1975 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the ruling Korean Workers Party in the North: this one focuses on the "fatherland liberation war" of 1950-1953. In the top half of the vignette jubilant Korean soldiers on the battlefield of victory. In the bottom half of the vignette a bleak cemetery of crosses and smashed up American military hardware.

According to Wikipedia, American casualties in the Korean war amounted to 36,940 killed. Chinese and Korean soldiers from both sides, over a million killed. Korean civilians, two million killed.

Piracy on the High Seas

Well-armed pirates in international waters attacked and seized a flotilla of relief vessels bringing humanitarian aid to a beseiged community this weekend. Using attack helicopters, the pirates boarded these unarmed civilian vessels and killed as many as 19 innocent civilians. As many as sixty civilians have been wounded. Incredibly, spokespersons for the pirates claim that after they had boarded the ships uninvited from the air, "they were attacked and acted in self defense." The pirates, armed with sophisticated modern weaponry, were met with limited resistance by civilians wielding metal poles. Previous pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia from different pirate gangs have been far less violent and bloody. These pirates are known to be cruel and merciless, with a history of shelling on-shore civilian areas.

The pirate terrorists have been tracked to their sanctuaries in the so-called State of Israel. They are currently holding hundreds of their innocent victims as hostages in detention camps. It is believed that the pirates have been armed by the United States.

The freedom-loving people of the world must unite to put an end to these terrorist pirate havens in the region and establish democratic and secular rule.

PS Excellent analysis from English Socialist blog Lenin's Tomb: The Reason for the Slaughter of the Free Gaza Activists

34, El Soldado

From the Loteria, card 34, The Soldier. It's Memorial Day in the United States, originally the post-Civil War holiday called "Decoration Day." It's considered the beginning of summer; a good excuse for a short vacation. I detest sanctimonious celebrations of those "who have served" and "those who have given their lives for their country" offered up by politicians who think of soldiers as pawns and expendable currency. If I'm not a fan of the armed forces and I think enlisting is a poor career choice even in a wretched economy, I recognize the humanity of all those soldiers killed in wars led by politicians united in their disregard for life.

Anti-American Art: Anti-Imperialist Circus Act

Showing an American jet crashing through the hoops formed by the number 1000, this stamp was issued by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1966 to mark the 1,000th US aircraft shot down over Vietnam.

This past May 19 was also the 120th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Vietnam in its war against French colonialism in the 1940s and 1950s and against American aggression in the 1960s. Although Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the defeat of the US--he died in 1969--he led his small nation in a valiant fight against the most powerful military machine on the face of the planet.

Here's an excerpt from his 1967 letter to US President Lyndon Johnson:

"On February 10, 1967, I received your message. This is my reply. Vietnam is thousands of miles away from the United States. The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States. But contrary to the pledges made by its representative at the 1954 Geneva conference, the U.S. has ceaselessly intervened in Vietnam, it has unleashed and intensified the war of aggression in North Vietnam with a view to prolonging the partition of Vietnam and turning South Vietnam into a neocolony and a military base of the United States. For over two years now, the U.S. government has, with its air and naval forces, carried the war to the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam, an independent and sovereign country.

The U.S. government has committed war crimes, crimes against peace and against mankind. In South Vietnam, half a million U.S. and satellite troops have resorted to the most inhuman weapons and most barbarous methods of warfare, such as napalm, toxic chemicals and gases, to massacre our compatriots, destroy crops, and raze villages to the ground. In North Vietnam, thousands of U.S. aircraft have dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, destroying towns, villages, factories, schools. In your message, hyou apparently deplore the sufferings and destruction in Vietnam. May I ask you: Who has perpetrated these monstrous crimes? It is the United States and satellite troops. The U.S. government is entirely responsible for the extremely serious situation in Vietnam....The U.S. government has unleashed the war of aggression in Vietnam. It must cease this aggression. This is the only way to restoration of peace."

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid

Speaking of Apartheid in Israel, the Toronto Gay Pride committee has decided to exclude Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from its upcoming Gay Pride events. From QuAIA: "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) is a Toronto-based organization that was formed to work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestinian resistance movements around the world. We support the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law. As queers, we recognize that homophobia exists in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders, but queer Palestinians face the additional challenge of living under occupation, subject to Israeli state violence and control. We also recognize that as part of its Rebranding Campaign, Israel is cultivating an image of itself as an oasis of gay tolerance in the Middle East. QuAIA works to out this ‘pinkwashing’ of Israeli apartheid." The City of Toronto apparently threatened to cut funding to the parade if QuAIA was not banned, and the official pride committee knuckled under.

Again from QuAIA: "This follows a year of intense pressure from Toronto City Hall (one of Pride’s main funders) and Israel lobbyists, who claim that criticisms of the Israeli government amount to hate and discrimination. By caving to their demands, Pride Toronto has not only silenced the voices of queer Palestinians and human rights activists — they have set a dangerous precedent for free expression in our community."

It's disturbing to me how many gay people are duped by Israel's claim to be both the only middle-east democracy and some kind of beacon of gay rights. Gay rights cannot be divided from overall human rights: whatever legal protections lesbians and gays have in Israel are deeply compromised by Israel's overall policies and by its deprivations of the rights of all (non-Israeli) people--gay and straight--on the West Bank and in Gaza. Gay people, acutely sensitive to injustices against us, should be standing on the right side of history and welcome groups like QuAIA that carry forward the banner of interconnected social justice.

While at my age I'm not so interested in marching in pride parades anymore--I put in my time--I think it's really key that political issues not be excluded from what started out as a political celebration of gay identity.

I recommend this interview with a Queer Palestinian activist in the Haaretz newspaper: "It´s really pathetic that the Israeli state has nothing besides gay rights to promote their liberal image," says [Haneen] Maikey. "Ridiculous, and in a sense hilarious, because there are no gay rights in Israel....Stop speaking in my name and using me for a cause you never supported in the first place. If you want to do me a favour, then stop bombing my friends, end your occupation, and leave me to rebuild my community. I'm aware that my society has a long way to go in terms of human rights and social issues, but it's my responsibility, not yours."

Anti-American Art: Power to the People

This 1971 poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL marks the muder of Black Panther Party activist George Jackson in San Quentin prison. The blood from the fallen hero forms the pattern of an American flag.

“To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t `cool’ or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred!” from George Jackson's "Blood in My Eye" quoted here.

Don't Forget This Axis of Evil: USA, Israel & Apartheid South Africa

This is an interview from the RT network with Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the Council on Foreign Relations discussing his revelation that Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons to the white racist apartheid regime of South Africa in 1975. Polakow-Suransky details the relationship that began under the Peres-Rabin Labor government in Israel and deepened during the subsequent Likud government. His information is detailed and fairly nuanced; he does not suggest that in the end South Africa purchased the nukes. Of course Israel is denying these reports.

But something needs to be said that seems forgotten these days. At the height of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa had two main allies and defenders, and they were the State of Israel...and the United States of America.

I found this 1986 column from Carl Rowan: "The more President Reagan talks about South Africa, the clearer it becomes that his heart and mind are with the white minority that is holding power through brutal oppressions. During his Tuesday press conference in Chicago, it became obvious that Mr. Reagan could not have been a blinder ally of the Afrikaners if he had been a puppet with Pretoria's President Pier Botha pulling the strings. There was Both Tuesday afternoon telling the congress of his ruling National Party that communism is at the root of all the evils and woes of South Africa. Then came Mr. Reagan that same evening asserting that the Communist Party of South Africa 'joined with and just moved into, the African National Congress...And right now...the ones we're hearing from and that are making the statements, are the members of the African Communist Party." President Reagan tried to veto sanctions against apartheid South Africa; basically called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and spent millions backing South Africa's proxy wars against Cuban/Soviet backed governments in Mozambique and Angola. Meanwhile South Africa became the star client of Israel's armaments industry, purchasing billions of dollars worth of hightech weapons and fighter jets. In return South Africa supplied uranium to Israel's nuclear power plant.

The United States sacrificed the black majority in South Africa to its cold-war strategy. Ironic, of course, since apartheid was US-style Jim Crow segregationism taken to dramatic new levels. All the separation laws of the American south and its defacto deprivation of rights for black people were made government policy in South Africa. It was racial separation writ large and legal. Eventually the South African regime set up puppet black microstates in tribal areas as showcases of plausible deniability that everything they did was motivated by racism. The truth is that the spirit of Apartheid is kept alive today in one place and that place is Israel. The Arabs in the so-called occupied territories are subject to separation and deprivation of rights...and once again, despite its occasional protestations, the main backer of the new apartheid regime is the USA.

Anti-American Art: Weapons of Mass Destruction

This crudely executed stamp from the last years of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq is part of a series issued in 2001 condemning "The Crime of Using Depleted Uranium Against Iraqi People by USA." It's a stylized depiction of an Iraqi family defying a falling US bomb. While this stamp refers to the fallout from the US bombing campaign during the so-called first Gulf War, the effects of modern American weapons of mass and less-mass destruction on the civilians of Iraq in the aftermath of the second US attack and invasion continue to be noted.

Recent reports of birth defects in Fallujah noted on Alternet documented massive increases in the number of "central nervous system anomalies" and physical deformities among newborn babies, and incidences of cancers is way up across the board. Among the suspected causes are white phosphorus explosives and shells made of depleted uranium. But hey, the Iraqi people are free(tm)!

Rethinking America Before Columbus

Of all that could be said of the erased cultures of the indigenous first Americans, perhaps the greatest lamentation is that most of them did not, or could not, leave behind a written record of the days before the European explorers and immigrants, leaving their stories to be endlessly mangled and distorted, the subject of both endless fantasy and speculation. Of course there are modern Native writers like the late Vine Deloria attempting to add a sense of perspective, and the historical record of nations captured in their moment of confrontation with the new, second Americans, but outside Central America and Mexico the voices of the pre-Columbian Americans can only be interpolated from relics and ruins not from written testaments.

Much writing on Native history suffers from twin distortions: on the one hand those anxious to ultimately excuse the genocide of the Indians as an act of historical progress, or those looking to objectify Indians as dreamily lost environmentalist naifs, too spiritual and too innocent to survive the confrontation with Europeans. That image of the weeping Indian from that 1970s TV pollution ad twins so perfectly with the whooping, scalping savages of a thousand Westerns.

One of the best books I have read recently on American Indians avoids these pitfalls. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann discusses the state of North and South America before the arrival of the Europeans. Based on archeological, geological, anthropological and historical evidence, Mann radically reinterprets the clues left behind to come up with a fairly revolutionary, and apparently controversial, comprehensive view of Native American civilization at odds with most of the myths of popular imagination.

One of the most exciting of Mann's arguments is his debunking of the notion that the America the early European explorers arrived at was some kind of pristine, near-empty natural paradise. Mann sees the massive herds of buffalo, the incredible overabundance of animal life as evidence not of ecological balance, but of a sudden ecological imbalance brought on by the collapse of local human population. He shows how Indians shaped their environment through well-developed agricultural practices including forestry management using controlled burnoffs. He suggests that North America was filled with vibrant permanent settlements--cities like Cahokia!--home to millions of people at a much higher level of development than that of nomadic hunter gatherers. He suggests that a sudden die-off of native populations happened out of sight of Europeans due to the spread of disease from the early limited 15th- and 16th-century incursions long before the 17th-century wave of European immigration and settlement. Thus the "pristine" forests and huge animal populations were the boomerang of human catastrophe as the human population suddenly plummeted.

Mann also similarly argues that the vast Amazon forests are the legacy of previous civilization. He looks at the ground itself and sees evidence not of mere human subsistence agriculture but of radical terracing and irrigation practices that reshaped the landscape and harnessed its fertility.

Again and again he reinterprets the evidence in North, Central and South America and challenges convential history. The resulting view of Indian cultures, of American Indian civilization, is far more nuanced, far more complex, and far more respectful of its achievements. Ultimately it humanizes the original Native Americans by de-mythologizing them, turning them into people of historical achievement rather than people of myth.

Anti-American Art: Look, Up in the Sky....Down on the Ground

Two of a series of stamps issued by North Vietnam in 1969 to honor the nation's air defenses, then heavily engaged in fending off massive attacks by the world's largest military machine. The Soviet Union supplied MiG fighter jets to Vietnam, shown on the left, which helped shoot down many of the thousands of intruding US aircraft downed on their missions to destroy the infrastructure of the nation. The stamp on the right shows a wounded American POW being escorted from the wreckage of his plane.

Click on the image to see the details enlarged.

30, El Camaron

For mother's day I took my 78-year old mom out to Brooklyn's Chinatown. We ate a tasty meal at a Vietnamese pho restaurant. Looking for a complement to our bowls of soup and noodles I asked my mother if she'd enjoy an order of shrimp. "Oh yes, we should have some while we can still get it."

It's now a month since the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. In the interim an incredible volume of crude oil has spilled out onto the fertile gulf waters, so much that it is visible from space. We've been treated to the spectacle of the BP oil company, the sinister Halliburton corporation, and the Swiss company that actually owned the destroyed rig all pointing fingers of blame elsewhere, except at themselves, while testifying before congessional inquiry. We've seen BP offer estimates of how much oil and gas are leaking into the waters of the gulf that are a tiny fraction of what non-oil company sources estimate. We've seen politicians and infotainers deny that the spill is much of a deal--"accidents happen" says idiot/racist Senatorial candidate (Ayn) Rand Paul. And we've seen the US government seemingly place all its trust in the dubious ability of BP to clean up its own mess. Unbelievably, it's not yet about clean-up of this spill, it's still about turning off the out of control spigot on the ocean floor which BP has lackadaisically failed to figure out how to do. I suppose not surprisingly President Obama is talking about a commission of inquiry; what he should be doing is seizing all the assets of these companies.

I would like to know what will happen when the inevitable hurricane hits this oil slick?



Meanwhile the oil is beginning to wash up on the shores of the gulf, and commercial fishing has been curtailed in large areas. The wildlife of the area: birds, sea turtles, dolphins, whales, fish, shrimp and oysters face imminent catastrophe. The livelihoods of the local fishing industry (ironically including thousands of immigrant Vietnamese shrimpers) are deeply challenged, and the population of the region, already complaining about an unpleasant smell in the air, face unknown health risks.

So yes, 30, El Camaron, the shrimp. An ugly, insect-like creepy-crawling, scavenging little crustacean that God hates, yet sweet, plump and delicious. Soon to be endangered on these shores. But it turns out 90% of shrimp consumed in the United States is imported. So everything's okay, right?

Anti-American Art: Anti-imperialist Torture Porn

Yes that does seem to be a fiendish GI driving a spike into a Korean woman's head with an axe. It's another in the gruesome series of torture paintings at the Museum of American War Crimes in Sinchon, North Korea. I'm not sure what the piece of paper being nailed to this poor woman is. It certainly makes Abu Ghraib look like a fraternity prank. I wonder what the truth is behind these depictions.

East Village, 1990s

"Recent Unsafe Sex...If I Get AIDS in 1995 I Guess It's My Fault," random crazy-person art poster found on a lamppost in the East Village, mid-1990s. From the collection of a friend.