Anti-American Art: Passive-Aggressive Neighbor

"No Al Bloqueo Economico a Cuba!" "No to the Economic Blockade of Cuba!" reads this 1991 poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL. It shows a map of Cuba breaking through the bars of Uncle Sam's top hat.

It's the American argument against Castro's Cuba that makes me furious. "Oh after fifty years of revolution the country is still so poor! Look they have nothing!" Because the real story is that the United States has spent fifty years trying to isolate Cuba into submission. Cuba's pre-revolution economy was intimately connected to the U.S. economy; its agricultural products from sugar to fruit to cigars had a market beginning just across a few miles of water. Tourism, even though it was tainted with organized crime and prostitution, further channelled money back and forth between the island and the U.S. And then Cuba dared to kick out its corrupt politicians and exploitative landowners and dared to break free of the U.S. sphere of influence. This country has never forgiven them; never forgiven its embrace by the Soviet bloc in the cold war.

The economic survival of Cuba, rather than being seen as a condemnation of its socialist government should be held aloft as a miracle of determination in the face of unbelievable odds.

Happy Fake Labor Day

The 1880s aren't usually remembered as a decade of revolutionary ferment. Well, actually the 1880s aren't usually remembered. But on May 1, 1886, a wave of working class militancy brought hundreds of thousands of workers out on the streets to defend their right to organize. In Chicago, the protests continued for days, culminating in a bombing that killed a police officer. While most people believed right-wing provocateurs were responsible for the bombing, seven anarchist labor leaders were tried and executed for the killing. These working-class heroes became known as the Haymarket Martyrs. May 1 soon became a workers' holiday world-wide, when people walked away from their jobs to celebrate their rights to organize themselves for social and economic justice. May 1 became the occasion for working people to think of themselves as a class with pride and with power. However when labor day was established as a national holiday in the United States, the day chosen was not May 1 but a day in September, now marked as the first September Monday.

Labor Day in the U.S. thus became something separate from May Day, from the real Labor Day. If May Day was a celebration of working class autonomy, class consciousness and solidarity, American Labor Day as a sort of gift from the government, a celebration of patriotic platitudes. Conciliationist labor bureaucracies and politicians alike could make earnest and meaningless speeches about the importance of organized labor in the fabric of American society, steering cleer of anything too red, too militant, too confrontational, too likely to subvert the American lie that class divisions don't exist, that millionaires and working people are all one big happy family. In a stroke of genius, labor day was thus completely depoliticized, laying the groundwork for the isolation of workers organizations from political struggle.

Now Labor Day is likely to mean something like a "rest from your labor" which suits me fine in that I like a day off work, but it's devoid of any intrinsic celebratory meaning. As I, like so many people, find my pay and benefits much reduced over an earlier time, I am painfully reminded that this holiday now also means a holiday from getting paid for a day's work.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not gonna rush out on the street today with a red flag shouting at people that this isn't the real Labor Day. I'm not going to spend my whole day focused on the need for regular folks to engage in autonomous collective solidarity. But I'm not gonna be saying any pledges of allegiance or waving any stars and stripes either. I'm gonna be lazy, I'm gonna enjoy the balmy late summer weather.

One day we're gonna get our groove back, remember that it really is us against them, and then we'll really have something to celebrate.

P.S. As a santero I wholeheartedly endorse wearing white after labor day. Let your freak flag fly!

Anti-American Art: Don't Forgive, Don't Forget

Lest we think that anti-American propaganda is a relic of an earlier time, here's a brand-new pair of stamps from North Korea, just issued this year. One is a miniature poster against Japanese imperialism, and the other a familiar vignette against U.S. imperialism. It's not a flattering juxtaposition.

And if you think all this Korean hostility to Japan is an old grudge, think again. The New York Times just reported on a wave of anti-Korean activism among the far right in Japan, home to many Korean immigrants. The armband at left is from these fascist activists: the red characters read "Volunteer Corps Against Lawless Koreans," and the black ones read "Expel Barbarians." Photo snagged from The Times.

A little musical melancholia...

I heard this song on Harry Shearer's radio program Le Show on NPR last week and promptly bought it on Amazon. I found this youtube clip, sadly without real video. It's "Water" by Judith Owen, who apparently is Mrs. Harry Shearer. He used the song to punctuate a melancholic report about the state of New Orleans -- where they maintain a home -- five years after Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic failure of the levees. "The water will rise up in our lives."

It's an exquisite song, with piano and strings and Ms. Owen's haunting voice. Funny to listen to this on a day when Hurricane Earl passed us by here in New York City with just a wash of tropic humidity and a few drops of rain.

Urban Idyll

The cars were moved away. The fire hydrants opened up, creating twin streams of cooling water. I let my cat out to nibble on the grass growing up through the cracked cement in my front yard. Neighbors came out on the street to sweep away the detritus: dead lives, candy wrappers, grocery store flyers. In the end the sky opened up and poured all day -- the first real downpour in weeks and weeks -- so the block party didn't really happen, though you could almost hear the trees on the block sighing with relief. Later there was salsa music and old-school hiphop in the rain. There were laughing kids playing stickball, drenched to the skin. And for a moment, there was tranquil bliss. Welcome to Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

(Click on the photo to see it larger)

Anti-American Art: Armed and Extremely Dangerous

Here's more late-1960s Cultural Revolution-era clip art from the People's Republic of China. The caption is anti-American, and as usual it's the people of the world rising up against them. Unlike the people of the world united tableaus on many of these compositions, this one is strictly military, with armed Latin American, Vietnamese and African guerrillas under the leaderhip of the Chinese People's Liberation Army and a whole lot of red flags. The first guy in red to the right of the main quartet is the requisite armed Albanian in peasant vest and fez. It's worth noting that this is kind of a fantasy tableau: Chinese influence in world guerrilla movements was shortly to be subsumed by the Sino-Soviet split: in Africa, particularly, the Chinese-backed guerrilla factions like UNITA in Angola wound up on the same side as U.S. neo-colonialism fighting Soviet and Cuban-backed guerrilla factions in post-independence civil wars.

It's Not Over Until It's Actually Over

President Obama got on TV last night to announce the fulfillment, more or less, of his campaign promise to bring the war in Iraq to an end. Something more than half of all U.S. troops have been pulled out of Iraq, and those remaining, those 50,000 remaining, are supposedly to refrain from war-like things like actual combat. Of course this war hasn't really looked like a war with battles and combat for a number of years, but I guess these soldiers will just not go out looking to get blown up by IEDs. Most of these remaining occupation forces are supposed to come home next year, leaving some unspecified number of private mercenaries and military forces to protect the massive American embassy and various American interests.

Meanwhile a debatable number running somewhere between a hundred thousand and a couple million Iraqis are dead, including the dictator Saddam Hussein. Americans haven't really come to terms with this fact (many of them don't actually seem to care even slightly), but all these Iraqis are dead because of the terrible terrible lies told by the Bush administration, and acquiesced to by a majority of Republican and Democratic politicians. It's like the unbelievable plot of an "Onion" article: President Bush actually used the attack by one tiny group of people on the U.S. to invade another sovereign nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with that attack, and a majority of the population egged him on. The sole achievements of this war were the creation of an unstable, barely governable, terrorist-filled state in Iraq and the bankruptcy of the U.S. economy. The deaths of a few thousand American volunteer soldiers -- and the mauling of many thousand more -- don't seem to be something Americans are willing to dwell on. It is to Obama's credit, and more importantly the American people's credit, that in the last election the anti-Iraq war candidate won. Given what we have seen since that election domestically, that vote was some kind of miraculous flash in the pan. I wish that all the American soldiers in Iraq had now left, but it does seem that the travesty of the American invasion is on its way to ending, even as the wake of tragedy in its path is unerasable.

Unfortunately, Obama should not have been described as an actual anti-war candidate in that he also promised to escalate the American war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a campaign promise he has sadly also fulfilled. I've written at great length here about how the American war in Afghanistan now also needs to come to an end. Last night Obama continued to project winding down U.S. involvement there next year as well. What the next year of occupation at the side of a corrupt puppet government will actually achieve is anyone's guess. Needless to say there will be plenty of work in the undertaking business.

And there are few grounds for optimism about the near future. There is so much evidence that the unleashed monster of war will not be so easily put back in its cage. War-mongers like former U.N. representative Bolton are literally shrieking for an attack against Iran. The blood-drenched Republicans are set for a comeback in midterm congressional elections in the fall, and these are Republicans lurching to the right to appease the teabagger lynch mob.

Obama and his government itself are engaged in a number of troubling efforts: an upcoming "peace" negotation meant to be the effective surrender of the Palestinians to Israel; an effort to assassinate without trial people around the world it deems criminal terrorists -- including American citizens; and covert efforts to militarily engage in Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. has not shown that it is done with the corrupting use of extralegal murderous mercenaries (the so-called "contractors").

So I wish I could say the "war" was over. But it's not. It's gonna sputter on a little longer, wasting a few more lives, shedding a few more buckets of tears, and solving absolutely nothing at all.

(The photo above showing a grieving mother is from the Soviet War Memorial at Treptow, outside Berlin, in the former East Germany; photographed by me ca. 1995)

Anti-American Art: Spy Cruise

Here's a 2008 stamp from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea marking the anniversary of the 1968 capture of the "U.S. Armed Spy Ship Pueblo." It's also been featured on North Korean stamps here and here.

There's a very pro-USA site on the Pueblo incident with photos of the Pueblo today; it's docked in Pyongyang as a museum. More interesting photos of that here. Of course the U.S. denies that the Pueblo was conducting its surveillance of North Korea from Korean waters and the DPRK claims it was not in international waters. As shown with the recent sinking of the Cheonan, the waters off the Korean peninsula are no place for a pleasure cruise.

My Gay Genes

More from my treasure trove of family photos. Flying up in the air here is my great aunt Fran, full name Frances Scott, one of my grandmother's younger sisters. These two photos probably date from the early 1960s, as they appear to be taken in the A-Frame house my grandmother had built in Mill Valley, California, on a chunk of land she bought from Aunt Fran. Fran had moved to the area in the late 1950s; she was a photographer by trade. She built her own house as well as the third house on this chunk of property, a modern cottage called The Kite. I met her on several occasions as a child; she was very private and didn't really join me or my parents on our visits to gramma.

I don't remember when I was "told" about Aunt Fran, but she was a lesbian, and lived for years with a female partner right there next to gramma Dorothy.



I like these photos because the people in them are having so much fun: and I presume one of the two women here is Fran's partner. The top photo is inscribed by my grandmother on the reverse "that kid sister" and the bottom one "Ann, Fran, Kenny, Eral [Eval?]." There's a couple more in this series that involve dancing and one that involves something improper with a lampshade. While my Grandmother was most definitely heterosexual, this party seems evidently something not so strictly so, and its before-Stonewall vintage speaks to me of a sort of prehistoric time.

I wish I had known Aunt Fran better; but I'm glad that one of the family legacies I shared with her were a set of gay genes.

Anti-American Art: What Flies Over Must Come Down

"4000 American planes shot down" over Vietnam celebrates these stamps issued by North Vietnam in 1972. The special cancellation has a clever iconic interpretation of flames and a falling plane. The stamps show Vietnamese defence fighters using anti-aircraft guns and missiles. Two months after these stamps were issued came the notorious Christmas bombings, when Nixon ordered B-52s over North Vietnam to wage a campaign of terror bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnamese cities. "In Hanoi and the northern port city of Haiphong, the bombing was staggering. More than 1,600 civilians died, 70 U.S. airmen were killed or captured and many Americans were left to wonder what price Nixon was willing to pay for 'peace with honor'," from an AP article on the 25th anniversary of the bombings.

If I Had Only Left Two Shots Earlier...

I'm tickled pink to present my favorite drag queen Candy Samples' brand-new video "If I Had Only Left (Two Shots Earlier)," just up on You-tube in preparation for the gay street orgy "Southern Decadence" held in New Orleans over Labor Day weekend. Candy Samples is a regular in Astoria, Queens, performing at local bars, clubs, the Queens Pride rally, and local marriage-equality events. She performs elsewhere in New York City, and makes regular appearances down at Decadence each year. I'm proud to call her my friend, and my boyfriend Jesse has cowritten many of her songs, including this one. Both Jesse and I can be seen in this video, which is a complete hoot. The song is seventies-disco styled fun; and the video shows some qualitative growth in production values and conceptual storytelling.

Earlier Candy Samples videos have been featured here on The Cahokian: "Promise of a New Year," "Boy Crazy," and "Tap Tap." I didn't feature her very first video here, but it can be seen on Youtube, "Candy's Christmas Gift." I've been in all of them; and it's been a great experience to be a part of something so creative and fun. Watching Candy's friends and collaborators put these things together is inspiring. Candy is a real talent; a drag queen who doesn't cast shade but makes you happy.

This song also coincides with the release of her new EP, "Sample That," which can be downloaded from iTunes, Amazon and Rhapsody. Amazon also sells the CD. The EP is a lovely blend of uptempo numbers and ballads; I heartily recommend it; it's the follow up to last year's "Sample This."

Anti-American Art: We Finally Really Did It! You Maniacs, You Blew It Up!*

"He Who Provokes Us Shall Be Punished" reads this undated revenge-fantasy poster from the DPRK. It shows a North Korean missile wreaking havoc on the Statue of Liberty, shredding American flags as it goes. It's another poster from the amazing "North Korean Posters: The David Heather Collection" with Koen de Ceuster, and published by Prestel.

Heather and de Ceuster's book is a beautifully-printed compilation with almost 300 pages of full-color reproductions of North Korean propaganda posters, all with English translations of the Korean slogans. The posters are amazingly bright and energetic; and in addition to the extensive selection of anti-American posters there're posters on everything from combatting sexual violence against women to saving tap water. The total effect is like some fantastic totalitarian graphic novel. Taken together the images present a mythic, idealized (and idolized) view of the North Korean population as a cheerfully determined, proudly resolute, and defiantly fierce people. There's no failure here, no doubt, no opposition and no food shortages. Curiously left out are any posters of the vast personality cult around Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, and the omission of such images reinforces a sort of egalitarian mythos. I know that there is a vast iconography of these two, and I suspect the book would have a different, more alien feeling if such obsessively leader-worshipping subjects were included. It's an interesting choice on the part of the editors. Surely the picture it paints of North Korea is not more realistic than the picture painted by American automotive and feminine hygiene advertising, but if you're a fan of all the Anti-Americana here at The Cahokian, or just interested in propaganda art or dynamic graphic design, you'll want to check out this book.

* Extra Credit

Family Ghosts

My grandmother Dorothy Scott passed on in the early 1990s. While her last few years were spent in a demented Alzheimer's fog, she he had lived a good long life, born in southern Michigan and died after thirty years in Mill Valley, California. I belatedly inherited a box of family photos from her just a couple years ago, passed on to a friend and set aside for those many years before they finally got to me. It's an odd collection of photos; many of them older than any visual evidence of my family I'd ever seen before. They range from 19th-century tintypes through 1970s snapshots. Most of them are not labelled, and I have no idea who many of the people in these photos are; many are my ancestors, many lost distant cousins, many I have no idea whatsoever. I met several of my grandmother's sisters when I was a child so there is some familiarity: but she came from a very large family, even though the genes she passed down to my father seem not to have included that trait. There's a magic quality to these pictures, and yet also, something vaguely sad. Although I hope that other forks of the Scott and Kimble and Decker families have revered and remembered their ancestors better than mine has, it makes me melancholic to consider these faces and figures so full of life in these photos to be now so randomly anonymous.

The beautiful photo above shows my grandmother's older sisters Ruth and Flo Scott wading in Lake Michigan, probably with their father--my great grandfather--probably about 1900.


This one shows my grandmother's grandfather William Scott with his sister Clara Scott, his wife, nee Decker, and his mother in law "great grandmother Decker" and a cousin whose name I can't read, sitting around their dining room table in Michigan, Marcellus or Vicksburg; it's not dated but it's probably the 1880s or 1890s. He's the hero of the family who served in the Union Army.


This is the Kimble house in Vicksburg, Michigan, undated but probably from the 1870s. These are the Kimble women; the child is my grandmother's mother Eudora Kimble, later Scott. It's Dora's mother, grandmother and great grandmother in the photo with her. This one really needs to be seen larger; click on it to see these people in better detail.

I feel like I owe these people some immortality, especially since I'm not passing on my genepool to anybody. It seems impossible but without all of them I wouldn't be here; and these are only a handful of my ancestors, the ones from my father's mother's line. They're like ghosts now, long gone to their rest, but they're also, well, still here, peering out from these photos.

Welcome, ancestors, to the internet.

Anti-American Art: Childhood Lessons

"Paper tiger, paper tiger.
U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger.
We are not afraid of it.
Look! We crush it at one blow!"

Page from a Cultural Revolution-era children's book, I'm not sure if designed as an English-language export or to teach a certain kind of English to Chinese children (snagged from MFinChina's flickr). But man they are doing terrible things to that cat!

Hallowed Ground?

I think it was the summer before I graduated high school, which makes it 1975. My mom and I drove southward from where we lived in Connecticut to visit a dizzying chain of historical sites and memorials. I was big into history, and we, like many at the time, had a distracting light case of bicentennial fever as we tried not to look too hard at the utter idiot then occupying the White House. We went to all sorts of Revolutionary War and Civil War sites: battlefields, museums, you name it. I think this snapshot was taken at Gettysburg. I haven't been back there in the 35 years since, but I remember an endless expanse of fields, hot and humid and buzzing with insects, punctuated with stone walls and corn. There was a huge indoor mural and a scale model of the battlefield, and cannons were set up at various spots, as though the soldiers manning them had just that moment wandered away from their posts.

It really brought Gettysburg home to me; to picture the humanity rushing at each other with lethal intent; the bullets and cannonballs and limbs and blood flying, and on such a vast scale. They don't fight wars like that anymore. As much as I hate war, and hate the culture that excuses it as some kind of ugly necessity, I have to say of all the murderous exercises in wasting life that I have studied, the American Civil War comes closest to being the exception to prove the rule. How lucky we are to live in an America where the side that won were the ones who wore blue and not gray.

I'm glad Gettysburg is still there. It's important to remember what was defended there. It's not the unity of this country that resonates emotionally to me, but the destruction of that confederate nation built on the backs of slaves. Now that was a worthy cause, and I hope they keep Gettysburg like it is as testament to the thousands and thousands of men who died fighting for that victory.

I lived in New York City in 2001. I saw what happened on that beautiful September morning. I didn't see planes crash or bodies falling, but I saw smoke and flames, and witnessed the world we live in change forever. I went downtown to peer at the smoking ruins once a week or two later when they started letting people go back down there. For weeks and weeks you could see the plume of smoke from my bathroom window where previously you could see the towers, but this was while actual standing ruins were still there and I wanted to get closer. There were barricades and fences and black-clad soldiers or police or something with machine guns everywhere...I'm not sure who the guns were meant for; I didn't see any terrorists about. My friend had brought along a coworker in from out of state. "I'm so proud of Our Military and Our President," she pronounced. I wanted to vomit. And having just spent a week crying I realized I didn't actually want to look at the ruins too closely. I felt like I was looking at something I shouldn't be seeing.

When I went back to that neighborhood for other reasons in the months and years that followed, I would avert my eyes from the pit and the fence around it. I didn't want to see what wasn't there. To my disgust I would see tourists posing for snapshots in front of the pit. A young couple, smiling, posing. Families. And you could buy bizarre souvenirs, ranging from full color atrocity porn to little snowglobes with tiny firetrucks surrounding little model burning towers, with sprinkles like ash floating around in the water inside the glass domes. And eventually I listened and watched as Bush used the occasion...to attack a country that had nothing to do with that place and the tragedy there, emotionally manipulating an entire nation and profaning that spot forever.

While this is a big city, it's not so big that we can rope it all off leave it like Gettysburg. Life goes on here. There's a really comfy movie theater a half block from the pit and the discount department store right across the street from it still has great cheap shoes. We New Yorkers we just walk by, doing what we have to do to live our lives here, averting our eyes when necessary. The subway line I take to work runs right by the site, and for years now there have always been clusters of tourists heading there on my train. To see nothing, no more smoking ruin, no crumpled bodies or piles of ash, just a big hole in the ground. They would puzzle over the subway maps and ask stupid questions like "Does this train go to 911?" I guess I'm immune to them now but for years I wanted to shout at them. "It's not there any more!" I wanted to shake each one of them and demand to know if they had voted for Bush. Go away! This is not the place for you.

I haven't been by it in some months but I understand that there are now, nine years later, visible structures rising from the pit. While I sure wouldn't ever want to work in the new World Trade Center building, I guess I'm happy that something's being done. There should be a memorial there, there was a terrible tragedy and the friends and relatives of 2,700 or so people deserve a place to mourn. And I'm glad they've dispensed with the abomination of a name "freedom tower" for the new building. The greedy real estate developers are all still trying to figure out how that pit's going to keep them rich: for them it's a money pit, not hallowed ground.

And now so many years later so many other people have died. So much about our way of life has changed and gone. I still see black clad uniformed men with machine guns in the subways. Seven stupid years of war in Iraq, and nine stupid years of war in Afghanistan; millions of innocent Iraqis and Afghans mourning just like millions of New Yorkers and just as psychically damaged; millions of Iraqis and Afghans associating "terrorist bombing" with the United States and its callously murdering contractor hordes and silent inhuman predator drones and its shock and awe and manipulative self-righteousness. And a whole lot more than 2,700 lives cut short. If you listen you can hear them shout: "Go away! This is not the place for you!"

This past Sunday, in a rain storm, the site was again profaned. Not by Muslims who want to go ahead with their lives and build a community center at the abandoned storefront a couple blocks away that they've been using for years, but by monstrous bigots protesting that center. I heard a radio report: the woman interviewed was described as waving an Israeli flag. She was, and I am careful to rarely use this word, hysterical. Practically weeping she was ranting about how horrible it was that the Muslims were coming to bring Shariah law and a terrorist recruiting center to lower Manhattan and such a hallowed place. She was so filled with hatred and fear you could hear her body shaking at the terrible lies that filled her head. I saw a video of the event: a dark-skinned Puerto Rican man wearing an apparently un-American looking hat is threatened and bullied out of the rally by a lot of menacing white people. Three women in sunglasses make sure to stay in camera shot with signs saying the Mosque Supports Hamas. These are the people who voted for Bush. These are the ones who are prostituting the memory of a tragedy for a corrupt political cause. These are the hate-filled ignorant bigots, brothers under the skin with a bunch of terrorists who flew planes into buildings.

Again, I'm remembering it all. I want to rush up to these people and say, Go Away. This place is not for you.

Anti-American Art: Chinese American Friendship Society (not)

Well this poster has an awful lot to say, and sad to say I can't read enough Chinese to report what it's specifically about. However the second sentence in the top line of text says something "Down with America"-ish. Look for Mei-Guo, "美国". Visually it's not hard to make a few guesses about this Cultural Revolution-era poster. He's dressed like a worker in overalls, he's got a bayonet-fixed rifle slung over his shoulder, a Mao button discreetly pinned to his jacket, and a banner saying something about American something. Judging from his expression it ain't pretty.

The relationship between the U.S. and People's Republic of China is quite a study in evolution. From war in the early 1950s through two decades of unbridled hostility, to Nixon's visit to the aging Mao in the early 1970s, and the repudiation of Maoism in the years after Mao's death in 1976, and the transformation of China into an economic powerhouse with a symbiotic relationship with the U.S. in the past two decades. It will be interesting to see, to say the least, how the tension between China's privatized industry, growing working-class militancy, socialist planned economy and one-party Communist rule will play out. Its economy seems to have weathered the recent international economic crisis better than the U.S. Everybody's getting along famously now. How long will that last?

New York City Chinatown, 1990

I found this plastic baggie on a sidewalk in New York's Chinatown in the early 1990s. It's one of my most prized possessions: so beautifully poignant. It's pretty much what you see, an inscribed photo of a Chinese immigrant couple, dressed for travel, and less than a dollar's worth of small change from Hong Kong and the PRC. The reverse inscription clearly begins with names, but I don't know what the words mean.

Anti-American Art: A Beautiful Day at the Beach

With a design similar to a Cuban stamp of the early 1960s, the cover of this Cuban pamphlet entitled "Playa Giron: Derrota del Imperialismo" (Playa Giron: Defeat of Imperialism) possesses its own Anti-American charm. Playa Giron, of course, is better known here as the Bay of Pigs, and the defeat of imperialism refers to the spiked 1961 attempt by CIA-backed exiles to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. In the illustration Cuban resistance fighters watch as one of the CIA's planes is downed and their ships is sunk. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of this crucial victory.

Here is slide show I found on youtube of the victory at Giron set to the music and lyrics of Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodriguez's powerfully metaphorical and poetic song "Playa Giron."

A Nation of Racist Morons?

Coming soon, a combination all-purpose item of headwear!

According to a recent poll, 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. According to the same poll, 43% of Americans don't know what religion he is. Worse, these numbers are sharply up over previous polls. Other polls suggest that a quarter or the American population believes he was born outside the United States.

In the midst of serial manufactured cable-television and internet outrage where the liars of the right-wing propaganda channels (I love that The Field Negro blog calls Fox News "Radio Rwanda") spout utter nonsense, and even allegedly centrist or liberal media routinely feature complete know-nothings and bigoted fabulists as "opposing voices" to add readers, ratings and pageviews, these statistics seem more than a little troubling. And what does it mean that these numbers change toward the wholely fantastic? Who thinks these things? And worse, who changes their mind to think these things?

Though few are willing to say it, it's really clear that to a large number of people "Muslim" is pretty much a form of the "N" word that doesn't require self-censorship. For an overlapping number of people "Muslim" is identical to "terrorist," holding the same demonizing purpose as "communist" used to.

In the ongoing controversy over Cordoba House in New York City, the remarks of those opposed to the so-called Ground Zero mosque say so much more about what these people actually think. We all know Newt Gingrich probably really does think all Muslims are terrorist nazis (setting aside for the moment his problem with terrorist nazis is the "who" not the "what"). But when even professed liberals like the New York State governor Paterson say that the location of Cordoba House is painful to some or controversial they are fundamentally acceding to the belief that all Muslims share in the guilt of 9/11. Here's more polling data: According to the Economist, 53% of Republicans believe that Muslims have no constitutional right to build a mosque where the Cordoba Center is planned, and 14% of Americans believe mosques should not be permitted in the U.S. at all.

There have always been stupid and gullible people. But stupid and gullible people, especially when they are afraid, are so easily manipulated; this is where the danger lies. Alex Kane wrote an excellent piece on his blog lately
about the genesis of the "ground zero mosque" controversy. He compares it to another manufactured controversy, the one over what was to be New York City's first Arabic-bilingual public school. He neatly reminds us that these are anything but groundswells of stupidity: these are issues being manipulated into a froth by far less stupid political forces, chief among them the political supporters of Israel. Again and again the facts about Cordoba House, about Muslims, about Muslim Americans, are set aside in favor of "gut" feelings and prejudices. For some this is ignorance, but for others it is something else.

In the recent lawsuit in California overturning the anti-gay Prop 8 ban on marriage equality there's an interesting parallel. The pro-gay plaintiffs, and the judge ruling in their favor, structured their arguments brilliantly and factually. They explicitly debunked any factual notion that same-sex marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. They showed that the only hand the anti-marriage equality forces are holding is one of prejudice and emotional belief out of step with secular constitutional law. The judgment makes fascinating reading. Yet in the anti-gay forces' rebuttals to the ruling, and in the reporting on the decision by the allegedly neutral media, both these parties do nothing but repeat the arguments that are clearly already anticipated and rebuked in step-by-step fashion by the judge in siding with the marriage equality proponents. There are knee-jerk bigots acting out of ignorance, but there's also something else going on.

Behind that aggressive and increasing stupidity of so many Americans over Obama's birth and religion are forces actively manipulating ignorance into something else altogether. When delusional liars like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin begin to lead these legions of stupidity into the streets, as they plan to do shortly in a march on Washington, DC, to profane the memory of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech," the joke starts to become not nearly so funny.

And while defending Cordoba House and decrying racist stereotypes does bring up issues of value to those who treasure the fight for civil rights and who fight for a just society, ultimately it's all such a distraction. The issue of Cordoba House is a trifling, unimportant non-issue. There is no legal controversy. New York City governance has done its job and paved the way for the Islamic center to be built, and there are already undisturbed and uncontroversial storefront mosques just a couple more blocks distant from the site of the World Trade Center. The idiots who want to believe Obama is a Muslim--as if there were something wrong with that in the first place--are a minority firmly on the wrong side of peace and progress anyway.

But these issues keep people from focusing on the continuing economic crisis that the Democrats are unable and the Republicans are uninterested in fixing. They keep people from focusing on the need to undercut terrorism by radically changing American foreign policy. They keep people focused on the gotcha game in which liberal and conservative media enable each other while keeping their audiences firmly hypnotized and safely oh-so-outraged while confined to their sofas or mesmerized by their handheld devices.

We will be a nation of morons if we let all this continue.

Anti-American Art: Airport Insecurity

This stamp was issued by the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, the so-called Vietcong) as propaganda and for use in areas under its control in 1965. It marks the anniversary of the November 1964 NLF attack on Bien Hoa airbase. While today Bien Hoa is an airbase of the Vietnamese People's Air Force, during the war the air field was heavily used by the USAF in its war against the people of Vietnam. While the base, located near Saigon, was attacked many times during the war, in 1964 the NLF attacked the base with mortars destroying twenty U.S. aircraft including bombers. The attackers successfully slipped away after their victory. The stamp shows burning and exploding airplanes at the base.