James Gang - The Midnight Man

Joe Walsh playing some downright amazing guitar, back home in Cleveland, circa 1971. Lovely last chorus vocal is by Mary Sterpka.

Odds and Sods -- Duck Derby edition

DEAD AIR participated in the Reedy River Duck Derby this last weekend, to raise money for all kindsa good causes.





Your humble narrator took an unofficial blog break, as our beleaguered Occupy the Microphone crew gets things up and running at WMXP. I don't know if we will ever have the kind of podcast we had before (at WOLI), which was up on the net before we even got home from the radio studio. (sigh) I got spoiled.

I will keep you updated on our talk radio adventures, as usual.

~*~

In my meditation room (which is actually my kid's old bedroom! but "meditation room" sounds so much better!), I have some old movie posters, as I briefly mentioned in my old obit of Charlton Heston. One of the movie posters is Risky Business (in fact, it is the same poster in that link). Remember that one? It was before Tom Cruise became a Scientologist and was still cute, funny and charming.

Believe it or not, Risky Business REALLY happened in Toronto this past weekend, only without the call girls. The kids streamed in and trashed a whole mansion!

They are blaming social media, which is the only way 2000 kids (!) could have found the place so quickly and easily. From the Toronto Sun:

When you throw a “mansion party,” promote it heavily on social media and 2,000 of your closest friends show up, there’s a good chance it won’t end well.

That’s what happened Friday night when a throng of youth were packed like sardines into a partially-built house on upscale Stanley Carberry Dr. — near Goreway Dr. and Mayfield Rd.

Peel Regional Police quickly shut the house party down before anyone got hurt — but not before some $70,000 damage was done.

“I’m shocked,” Nancy Viveiros said Saturday, as she and her husband stopped by to see the aftermath of the house party their daughter briefly attended.

Gazing at the many broken windows, smashed doors and booze bottles strewn around the property and along the street, the Caledon woman explained her 18-year-old daughter and her friends wisely left the bash soon after arriving.

“My daughter walked in, looked around and told her friends don’t go upstairs because the railing was all falling apart,” Viveiros said.

Her daughter often asks her for a drive when she goes out, but on this night she got a ride with a friend to the party that “everyone at school was talking about.”

Had Viveiros provided transportation Friday night, there’s no way she’d have allowed her daughter to stay.

“She wouldn’t have got out of my car,” Viveiros said. “And I may have advised the police because you don’t want something happening to the kids.”

Police said they began receiving calls for noise complaints around 9:50 p.m., less than an hour after the bash began.

But they were already aware of the party thanks to Twitter.

“A couple of officers went to the address and determined relatively quickly that more units were needed to disperse the crowd safely,” Const. Thomas Ruttan said.

Officers from three divisions ultimately responded and co-ordinated the shutdown, directing vehicular and pedestrian traffic as the partygoers left.

Ruttan said numerous people were also arrested for intoxication and assaulting police.

“Social media is probably not the best place to advertise a party,” he said. “People need to realize how far reaching social media is and how quickly things like this can get out of control.”

The bash was so big that its hashtag #MansionParty began trending on Twitter.

“The homeowner’s son had permission to have a party, but not of this magnitude,” Sgt. Darcy North said.

Neighbours said the 5,000 square-foot home was under construction for a long time, but work suddenly stopped and the house has sat abandoned for several years.

Even without the beer bottles and broken windows, the unfinished house on the huge muddy lot is an eyesore on a street lined with pristine homes, one of which is currently selling for $1.45 million.

One area resident, who didn’t want to be named, said a young man came to his home prior to Friday night to notify him he was having a party “and the music might get a little loud.”

He said “kids” began arriving in droves around 9 p.m. and within half an hour it was obvious the party was out of control.

“It was crazy,” the neighbour said, adding he never did hear the music but the people lining the street were quite noisy.

He was relieved when cops arrived.

“I was ready to phone the police myself,” he said.

Video here. Wow.

~*~

I wanted to organize a demonstration against Senator Tim Scott, when he came to speak at Bob Jones University at the end of April... but nobody else wanted to. And then I got depressed over that. It was another reason for my blog break: I hardly knew what to say. We let Tim Scott come to town and we ... DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. Argh, I just can't stand it.

Nikki Haley fucked us good with Tim Scott. She knew exactly what she was doing.

See, white radicals DO NOT want to demonstrate against Scott and "look racist"--even if he is well to the right of Sean Hannity. Blacks do not want to demonstrate because he is black, the ONLY African-American in the Senate right now. THE ONLY ONE... and for that reason, I guess it does look bad to demonstrate against him, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

So is that tantamount to giving him a free pass to be another right wing swine, or are we going to treat him like Lindsay Graham, Jim DeMint and the others?

I find that I am suddenly (and uncomfortably) understanding the dilemma of the Republicans who want to protest Obama but do not want to be called racist. This is the FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT, and we always have to be aware of that. We must always be aware of the racist, colonialist history of the USA. But... but... but... WHAT ABOUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP? WHAT ABOUT THAT?

I have never backed down from my legendary Haleyating, and the fact that she is the first woman (and nonwhite) governor of SC, has never stopped me from trashing Governor Haley. But I know it does keep the national media from scrutinizing her as carefully and as completely as they should. (It drives her ex-boyfriend Will Folks crazy.)

What to do? Ideas?

Here is the video of Senator Scott at BJU, which I did not listen to. Nor will I. But you might be interested.

~*~

At Left: Miss South Carolina dances with children at the Duck Derby. (you can click to enlarge)


Speaking of Charlton Heston: SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! And do you know, some guy has honest-to-God named his nutritional drink SOYLENT? Seriously, its in the New Yorker, so it must be true.

Check out the story of SOYLENT and Bob Rhinehart, who is readable and interesting. And I actually agree with this:

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.” Soylent isn’t coming for our Sunday potlucks. It’s coming for our frozen quesadillas.

He can have mine. I think that is a great idea. It would be a solid blow against obesity and waste, and would make us enjoy the "real" food we DO eat, that much more.

~*~

I did not do my usual commemoration for Kent State yesterday, because I decided to give that a break for awhile.

I usually reblog the same thing every year, but it always seems to start fights on Facebook. I am from Ohio, as are many of my Facebook friends, and it seems the people of Ohio have NEVER stopped arguing over the subject, who did what first, was there a sniper? etc etc... in fact, you can see that the first time I ever posted it, the fascist-apologists came out of the woodwork in short order. That first post earned me a troll that latched on for months.

I want to honor the day, but I don't like the people that show up. I am taking a break from them this year. Forgive me dear Jeffrey, Allison, William and Sandra.

I always remember you on May 4th, and undoubtedly will for the rest of my life.

~*~

Our Beltane celebration was wonderful on Saturday night, right after the Duck Derby. I hope your Beltane went well.

~*~

FLICKR UPDATE.

What American accent do you have?

Big shocker, I have a middle-American accent: You have a good voice for TV and radio.

For those who don't know, I am from Columbus, Ohio--so this is pretty accurate.

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

 

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

 

The West

 

The South

 

Boston

 

The Inland North

 

North Central

 

Philadelphia

 

The Northeast

What American accent do you have?

Saying I have "no accent" though? Only in America; obviously, the Brits and the Australians hear one. :)

Kent State Remembered

Kent State student John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio discovering the slain Jeffrey Miller.


Originally posted here on May 4, 2008. (I read it on the air yesterday on our radio show, Occupy the Microphone.)

43 years ago on April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced that military operations would be expanding into the neutral, peaceful country of Cambodia, which had the bad fortune to share a border with Vietnam. Viet Cong insurgents were said to be hiding in the mountains of Cambodia. (In fact, the USA had already been conducting a secret bombing campaign, unbeknownst to the general public, engineered by Nixon and his butchers, named Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger.) These illegal, immoral, reprehensible acts were the acts of criminally insane men, who had just realized they were losing their filthy, insane, extremely expensive war.

The result of this announcement was demonstrations on many American college campuses over the next few days. Nixon had promised to end the war, and proved to be a liar. The anger of the youth who would fight this war was palpable. At Kent State University in Ohio, demonstrators burned down an ROTC building. It was never known if this was deliberate or just an act of vandalism that got out of hand. Ostensibly due to this event, Governor James Rhodes declared Martial Law on the campus of Kent State University and sent the National Guard onto the campus. He also held a press conference in which he made famous inflammatory statements: "They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night-riders and the vigilantes," Rhodes said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

On May 4th, a demonstration was scheduled for noon. There were about 2000 people gathered for the demonstration, and about 1000 troops on campus. For unknown reasons, the Guard decided to break up the demonstration, and ordered the crowd to disperse. They were met with rocks and flying debris. The Guard responded with tear gas, and it was on.

I have read multiple versions of what happened next. Several facts dominate these versions: the kids were returning the tear gas cannisters (which do POP loudly like guns when they go off) and the Guard seemed very confused and didn't know what to do. At one point, none seemed sure of which direction to advance, but advance they did. At 12:22 PM, after guardsmen had advanced to the top of the hill near Taylor Hall and the parking lot, they turned and fired. They commenced firing for 13 seconds and fired 67 M-1 semiautomatic bullets. They wounded nine students, and murdered four in cold blood. Only two of these four students, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, were actually demonstrating against the war. The remaining two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, were merely changing classes.

No one knows who gave the order to fire, if anyone did.

The kids in the National Guard were the same ages as the kids on the campus. These kids were all facing the same reality--the males of both groups were trying to avoid going to war. One group could afford college and the other could not, but could somehow get into the Guard. There is no question there was significant class hostility directed at the college kids by the Guard; the males in the Guard were closer to actual combat in Vietnam, although William Schroeder attended Kent on a ROTC scholarship and may well have intended to become an Officer himself.

From this incident, we learned that even the pampered children of the middle class were expendable. We learned that totalitarianism can erupt quickly and suddenly, particularly in small, contained areas where there exists considerable class hostility, panic, and loaded weapons. We learned that the Governor of Ohio was a fascist and a murderer, as was the President and his henchmen, all of whom nodded approvingly at the murders at Kent.

The lines were drawn very clearly, especially for me. I woke that morning in Ohio, to see that my state was all over the national news, all over the newspapers. We had various Moments of Silence for the next week. Everyone seemed to know someone involved. My grandmother cried and explained to me that these students were exercising their civil rights, and had been shot for it. "You have to remember this," she told me.

In the subsequent lawsuits, the families received an average of approximately $63,000 per student.

~*~

Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

The History Project, part 2

My original intention was to put the lady-stuff here on International Women's Day... and I guess you see how that turned out. Hey, better late than never!

And so, I am finally getting around to posting Part Two of the History Project. Intro to the DEAD AIR History Project (and first installment) is here. (You can click all photos to enlarge.)

~*~

Anarcha-Feminist Notes, September 1977, which I believe was published in Madison, Wisconsin.



San Francisco Women's Building Newsletter, March 1981.



From Berkeley 1981, movie poster for "El Salvador: The People Will Win".



Ancient black-and-white photos of my hometown (Columbus, OH) Take Back the Night march, one of those antiquated Second Wave feminist things almost completely lost to posterity. (1983)



Bookmark from Fan the Flames feminist bookstore in Columbus, OH. Since they began in 1974 and this bookmark is celebrating 10 years, it must be from 1984. From Outlook Columbus:

Began in 1974 by six women who each contributed $100 to a book collective, the shop evolved and moved many times over the next 22-and-some years. Fan the Flames grew from the United Christian Center, to the Women’s Action Collective, to the YWCA, and finally to their own space in Clintonville [and the store was then renamed Women's Words]. It may have been the final move that killed them. Moving away from their diverse audience downtown, and adding on to that the burden of renting their own space, proved too much and the advisory board decided to close shop.

The Women's Action Collective was in its own building for awhile, something I can't even imagine now.



Purty Pittsburgh Smoke-In poster, which I framed for my spare room. (1977)



"Freeze It! A citizen's guide to reversing the nuclear arms race"--San Jose, 1983.




Stay tuned for the next installment, sports fans! And I promise it won't be another half-year this time.

Tuesday Tunes

I can't decide between the studio and live versions of Todd Rundgren's "Couldn't I just tell you"--so here are both of em. :)

I saw Todd Rundgren twice in the 70s (once at the infamous Legend Valley Jam) and this lovely tune was the definite high point for me on both occasions.

Couldn't I just tell you - Todd Rundgren (studio version from Something/Anything, 1972)



Couldn't I just tell you - Todd Rundgren (live at the Bottom Line, 5/14/78)



~*~

This video contains lots of nice vintage shots of Stills' entire career... I was attempting to find the heartbreakingly-sublime acoustic version of "Singin Call" by itself, but could only find these two songs joined as a duo. Looks like I'll have to settle for that!

"Singin Call" starts at approx the 4 minute mark, if you want to skip ahead.

You know you got to run/Singin Call - Stephen Stills (1973)

The History Project - part 1

Introduction to The History Project

A couple of months ago, I posted an assortment of old leaflets, posters, propaganda, photos and other interesting paraphernalia on Facebook. People liked it and asked me if I had any more stuff.

That is an understatement.

I'm now extending my history-recovery project to Blogdonia. This will be an ongoing DEAD AIR feature! I'm hoping that people Googling old events/people/etc, will find something here that they have been searching for. I am deliberately choosing events/leaflets that seem to have been forgotten and/or have no other online history.

This historical ephemera (etc) is being posted in no particular order, just in the order I manage to find and date it. (There is TONS of stuff buried in my cedar chest, some in scrapbooks and some in folders.) If I tried to post it in chronological order, I'd NEVER get done.

You can click on any graphic to enlarge.

And don't forget, folks: POST YOUR HISTORY! Don't just wait for someone else to do it or it might not get done.



Official WELCOME to the DEAR AIR History Project! If you're visiting here for the first time, greetings! Hope you find something that interests you.

~*~

Descriptions:

1) The cover of the widely-distributed Yippie Journal, SOUR GRAPES, published in Columbus, Ohio, 1974.

2) Program for "Haven Can't Wait: A Day in the Life of Abbie Hoffman" a play based on the Yippie-founder's life, New York City, August 23, 1978.

3) Cover of Red Tide newspaper, Detroit, MI, March 1978.

4) Poster advertising Wallflower Order Dance Collective show: Wildflower Brigade, Ohio State University, November 23, 1984

5) Poster by Citizens Against Nuclear Power, Chicago, IL, announcing protest against the Zion nuclear power plant in Zion, Illinois, Sept 29-20 1979.

6) Poster for "Women in Struggle" film series, Oakland/San Francisco, August 1981.

7) Poster for Wild Women (band) show at the Artemis Society, San Francisco, March 27, 1981

8) Poster advertising Midwest Alternative Press Convention, August 23-24, 1980, Columbus, Ohio.

9) Poster announcing Kate Millett at the "Women and Power" program series, Ohio State University, May 25, 1978.

10) Campaign poster for Jerry 'Babe' Smith, Yippie-affiliated anarchist running for mayor in Dayton, Ohio, 1980. He was a member of the band The Dates.

~*~

More history to come. Stay tuned, sports fans!

Got bugs?

The elusive furry yellow resident in my uncle's green bean fields. Photo is from The Homestead Fritz.










I love the way the South Carolina state Farmers Market SMELLS... its 1000% stronger (better) in summer, but it smells great all year round.

I've never seen any open markets in the north during the winter (the heating costs would be staggering), but if they do exist, they probably can't sustain that heady, heavy "soil scent" the southern markets have. The earthy scent reminds me of the fields in Ohio where my uncle grew green beans. Every year, we went out to pick them for ourselves and then my grandmother made huge pots of fabulous, scrumptious beans, cooked all day in onions. It was a wonderful yearly ritual. I loved the scent of the fields, as I knelt and started harvesting the fat beans.

I also remember the tiny fuzzy yellow 'bugs'--which were usually on the leaves.

As a kid, I remember thinking the yellow bugs were just so cute... but I couldn't find their eyes. I tried to turn them over and look for eyes on the underside, and they weren't there either. Bugs with no eyes? How weird is that? I remember them as "furry yellow bugs with no eyes"--I would come home from picking the beans and they would be stuck to me, all over my clothes. They didn't bite, and as a child, this meant they were 'good' bugs. And I thought they were just so cute. But no antennae and no eyes? I remember looking in an insect book at the library and not finding the yellow mystery bugs.

Lo and behold, three seconds on that modern marvel, Google, instantly yields my answer: they were larvae, not bugs. This explains the lack of eyes. They are the larvae of the Mexican Bean Beetle. (I also remember seeing the adults, but I didn't know they were related.)

I often wonder how it is to grow up in a culture in which one can find out anything in three seconds flat, but without any actual contact with those things? When I was growing up, if you were moved to look something up in a book at the library, it signaled it was pretty important to you and you really wanted to know. It wasn't simple idle curiosity.

~*~

I've been on an unofficial blog break, due to a major quandary about troublesome life events that I would love to blog about (which I regard as a form of exorcism, banishing various emotional boogeymen once I subject them to my mean-redneck cultural analysis and withering wit)... and yet, knowing that this might well come back to bite me in the ass. Especially where work is concerned. I have decided not to. Better safe than sorry, blah blah blah.

And so (as a similarly-catty consolation prize), here are links to the last two radio shows: September 28th and October 6th. Have a listen!

The amazing Albino Skunk Music Festival was a much-needed balm to my soul. And just in the nick of time!

Hope your weekend was as terrific as mine was.

Got funk?

Great Ohio Players documentary, if you have 40 minutes to spare.

If not, just skip on down to the song.

~*~

UNSUNG (documentary)- The Ohio Players



~*~

My January 2nd post (about the infamous Ohio Players album covers) featured the fabulously-sensuous studio version of this song, which runs closer to 8 minutes... unfortunately it has since been yanked by awful capitalists.

Trying again.

Skin Tight (TV 1974) - Ohio Players



This video, introduced by Wolfman Jack, appears to be from the Midnight Special broadcast, which means it may also get yanked eventually, so LISTEN NOW! I am somewhat shocked to discover that my post of the New York Dolls on the Midnight Special is still intact. Of five songs on that post, only one has been removed since (Carole King), and that is much better odds than most of them.

Unfortunately, YouTube is constantly yanking videos, rendering many of my old posts DEAD as a DOORNAIL... and for those interested in which corporations/individuals are behind this nefarious scheme to deny us our online fun, check out the invaluable YouTomb for details.

May 4th: This Day in History

Kent State student John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio discovering the slain Jeffrey Miller.


Originally posted here on May 4, 2008.

41 years ago on April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced that military operations would be expanding into the neutral, peaceful country of Cambodia, which had the bad fortune to share a border with Vietnam. Viet Cong insurgents were said to be hiding in the mountains of Cambodia. (In fact, the USA had already been conducting a secret bombing campaign, unbeknownst to the general public, engineered by Nixon and his butchers, named Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger.) These illegal, immoral, reprehensible acts were the acts of criminally insane men, who had just realized they were losing their filthy, insane, extremely expensive war.

The result of this announcement was demonstrations on many American college campuses over the next few days. Nixon had promised to end the war, and proved to be a liar. The anger of the youth who would fight this war was palpable. At Kent State University in Ohio, demonstrators burned down an ROTC building. It was never known if this was deliberate or just an act of vandalism that got out of hand. Ostensibly due to this event, Governor James Rhodes declared Martial Law on the campus of Kent State University and sent the National Guard onto the campus. He also held a press conference in which he made famous inflammatory statements: "They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night-riders and the vigilantes," Rhodes said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

On May 4th, a demonstration was scheduled for noon. There were about 2000 people gathered for the demonstration, and about 1000 troops on campus. For unknown reasons, the Guard decided to break up the demonstration, and ordered the crowd to disperse. They were met with rocks and flying debris. The Guard responded with tear gas, and it was on.

I have read multiple versions of what happened next. Several facts dominate these versions: the kids were returning the tear gas cannisters (which do POP loudly like guns when they go off) and the Guard seemed very confused and didn't know what to do. At one point, none seemed sure of which direction to advance, but advance they did. At 12:22 PM, after guardsmen had advanced to the top of the hill near Taylor Hall and the parking lot, they turned and fired. They commenced firing for 13 seconds and fired 67 M-1 semiautomatic bullets. They wounded nine students, and murdered four in cold blood. Only two of these four students, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, were actually demonstrating against the war. The remaining two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, were merely changing classes.

No one knows who gave the order to fire, if anyone did.

The kids in the National Guard were the same ages as the kids on the campus. These kids were all facing the same reality--the males of both groups were trying to avoid going to war. One group could afford college and the other could not, but could somehow get into the Guard. There is no question there was significant class hostility directed at the college kids by the Guard; the males in the Guard were closer to actual combat in Vietnam, although William Schroeder attended Kent on a ROTC scholarship and may well have intended to become an Officer himself.

From this incident, we learned that even the pampered children of the middle class were expendable. We learned that totalitarianism can erupt quickly and suddenly, particularly in small, contained areas where there exists considerable class hostility, panic, and loaded weapons. We learned that the Governor of Ohio was a fascist and a murderer, as was the President and his henchmen, all of whom nodded approvingly at the murders at Kent.

The lines were drawn very clearly, especially for me. I woke that morning in Ohio, to see that my state was all over the national news, all over the newspapers. We had various Moments of Silence for the next week. Everyone seemed to know someone involved. My grandmother cried and explained to me that these students were exercising their civil rights, and had been shot for it. "You have to remember this," she told me.

In the subsequent lawsuits, the families received an average of approximately $63,000 per student.

~*~

Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Roger gets his space ticket

MAD MEN gets it right again.

As I have written here before, LSD was originally the (legal) property of the drawing room and the elite types who visited psychiatrists, such as Henry and Claire Booth Luce, Cary Grant, RD Laing... and Roger Sterling and his wife Jane. Hippies did not widely partake until the Merry Pranksters decided to go cross-country, playing Johnny Appleseed and distributing it throughout the heartland. And THEN it was made illegal (in 1966), in response to their nefarious scheme to Enlighten the Masses.

In fact, where do you think the first hippies came from? Guys like Roger, transformed. I am curious what will happen to Roger now; the show closed with Roger informing the ever-beleaguered Don Draper, "It's a beautiful day!"

At this point in the show, it is likely Roger will tell Don about his acid-experience and 1) try to get Don to take it, or 2) Don will be sufficiently curious (after hearing Roger's description) to try it himself. And all of that childhood-trauma of Don's? Wow, that will be hairy. Because yes, those traumas really do come back in technicolor, they weren't joking about that. I would compare it to one of those 180-degree photographs, everything momentarily frozen so that you can go back and have a full-look at it, maybe start a conversation with someone else in the frame.

From Entertainment Weekly:

I could write 3,000 words just about what happened after Roger let a sugar cube of psychedelic chemicals dissolve on his tongue. So many of Roger's hallucinations fed right back into his horn-dog Peter Pan syndrome: The half-grey-half-black hair dye ad; the Beach Boys' "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" playing overtop a far older song I couldn't quite place; Roger cackling in the bathtub as the 1919 World Series unfolded in his head. It was a telling detail that Roger imagined Don to be his spiritual guide, but I ad0red so many of the small, silly details, too: The bombastic (possibly Russian?) opera that played after Roger uncorked a bottle of vodka; the cigarette that collapsed like an accordion the moment Roger began smoking it; the five dollar bill with Bert Cooper's face on it...

Although it never happened to me personally, paper-dollars with various faces on them was a pretty common LSD-hallucination. Also, the faces on the bills suddenly talking to you. George Washington talks! (I once got out a dollar-bill, hoping George would say something to me, but I guess money only talks to some people.)

And Roger and Jane finally get real:

Really, though, the long, strange trip was all about stripping away Roger's defenses -- his glib charm, his fragile ego -- and building up Jane's self-assurance and confidence so they could both admit to each other that their marriage was over. As Roger and Jane stared at the ceiling, the truth came gently tumbling out of them: "It's over." Their hostess wasn't Jane's friend, she was her therapist, who thinks Jane has been waiting for Roger to tell her their marriage is over so she won't have to. And although Jane's thought about having an affair, her love for Roger was real. But, Jane added, "I just know for a fact that you did not fall in love."

"So what was wrong again?" asked Roger.

"You don't like me."

"I did. I really did."

And their marriage is done.

~*~

As a lone six-year-old who had somehow blundered into the wrong place and time, I was once cornered in the doorway of an empty house by a cluster of (white female) teenage bullies. They had backed me into the proverbial corner and were slapping me, grabbing hair, kicking... all while laughing and laughing. I knew it was just the warm-up, because they were having too much fun. I was sick with fear.

I tried to say something cute, be charming or polite, all the things that had ever worked in the past; like a dog that rolls over and suddenly shows its underbelly in a fight, I was hollering uncle in a hundred ways. They correctly read my body-language of surrender and were emboldened and maliciously overjoyed by it, like a pack of wolves, circling. Exactly like that.

I turned, cupped my hand and peered through the small window on the door. "There's nobody in there," one said, threateningly. The words echoed and echoed through my psyche, and I could never remember what happened directly after. My mother said they had beaten me, but I could not remember it. Approaching that moment in my memory had always frightened me, more than the threat of nuclear weapons, more than drowning, more than snakes. I shut it down, pushed it back, thought of something else.

We all do this, and so do you.

But LSD goes straight for the house that has nobody inside (when it should have), straight for that thing you have repressed. And it can go several ways, from what I am told. But for me?

I was transported back to the sidewalk in front of the house (which I had passed many times) and saw the girls on the porch, who suddenly seemed so young. My goodness, I thought, they are only 14 or 15, aren't they? They aren't giants. They aren't adults. And as I ascended the porch stairs, one by one, they disappeared. I could never remember their faces anyway, but this made it official: they really did not exist any more. They were phantoms that had chased me. I realized, these girls had since grown up. I turned to one, just as she vanished, and asked her if she remembered. "Do you remember this?" I asked her.

She wrinkled her brow and shook her head, no. She was the blonde one, and she was the last to vanish.

I then saw my little six-year-old self, who had been beaten. I was wearing the same clothes I always remembered wearing. They had ripped my favorite shirt, with multicolored pockets on the front. I knew my grandmother (who had bought it for me) would be mad. I hoped she wouldn't be mad at me for straying too far from home, but of course, beaten or not, I thought she would be.

And then, the adult me embraced the six-year-old me. The little-me wept, while I soothed and comforted this little girl (me and not-me, all at once) and told her how strong she was for enduring this. I told her it would make her tough from this point onward, and as I said this, I realized: it had.

I told her everything would be okay, and she would grow up and the girls would vanish. Look, I said, they are gone already. I gestured, and showed her/me, that they were gone.

"They ARE gone!" the six-year-old me said, smiling through tears. Yes, they are.

And they were.

They never came back.

Here's hoping Roger fares as well. And Don, with his ghosts. They might vanish or they might return and kick his ass. It's all up to him.

Be nice to your old self; be charitable and kind to the younger-you. After all, you did the best you could.

Peter Bergman 1939-2012

I really wanted to title this obituary, "Waiting for Peter Bergman, or someone like him," which I think he would have appreciated.




Instead, decided to be properly respectful and just reprint the New York Times obit:

Peter Bergman, Satirist With the Firesign Theater, Dies at 72
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: March 9, 2012

Peter Bergman, a founding member of the surrealist comedy troupe Firesign Theater, whose albums became cult favorites among college students in the late 1960s and ’70s for a brand of sly, multilayered satire so dense it seemed riddled with non sequiturs until the second, third or 30th listening, died on Friday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 72.

The cause was complications of leukemia, said Jeff Abraham, a spokesman for the group.

Mr. Bergman hosted an all-night radio call-in show on KPFK in Los Angeles beginning in 1966, “Radio Free Oz,” which served as the testing ground for the high-spirited Firesign sensibility. Phil Austin and David Ossman, two other founders of the four-man group, were the producer and director of the show; the fourth founder, Phil Proctor, was a frequent guest.

“We started out as four friends, up all night, taking calls from people on bad acid trips and having the time of our lives,” Mr. Austin said in a phone interview Friday. “And that’s what we always were: four friends talking.”

Mr. Bergman and his friends recorded their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” in 1968, followed the next year by “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?”

By 1970, their mordant humor and their mastery of stereophonic recording techniques had made them to their generation of 20-somethings what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are to today’s (if Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart had a weakness for literary wordplay, psychedelic references and jokes about the Counter-Reformation).

Their records employed sound effects in ways considered pioneering in audio comedy at the time. More generally, they were considered important forerunners of comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live.”

Ed Ward, writing in The New York Times in 1972, described the third Firesign album, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” as “a mind-boggling sound drama” and a “work of almost Joycean complexity.”

“It’s almost impossible to summarize any Firesign album,” Mr. Ward wrote, because most of their albums were so filled with “intricate wordplay, stunning engineering and use of sound effects, breakneck pacing and, of course, a terribly complex story line.”

When the Library of Congress placed “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” in its National Recording Registry in 2005, The Los Angeles Times described Firesign Theater as “the Beatles of comedy.”

Mr. Bergman told people the ensemble’s albums, unlike most comedy records, were never made to be listened to just once or twice. “He said our records were made to be heard about 80 times,” Mr. Austin said.

While the ensemble continued making albums for three decades, Mr. Bergman also wrote and produced several one-man shows, including “Help Me Out of This Head,” a 1986 monologue-memoir that drew on his childhood in Cleveland. He also wrote interactive games, including a CD-ROM parody of the popular adventure video game Myst.

Mr. Bergman was born on Nov. 29, 1939, in Cleveland, one of two children of Oscar and Rita Bergman. His parents hosted a radio show in Cleveland when he was growing up, “Breakfast With the Bergmans.” His father also worked as a reporter for The Plain Dealer.

Mr. Bergman graduated from Yale and taught economics there as a Carnegie Fellow. He later attended the Yale School of Drama as a Eugene O’Neill playwriting fellow. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to pursue a writing career.

He is survived by a daughter, Lily Oscar Bergman, and his sister, Wendy Kleckner.

Mr. Bergman got a taste of radio work when he was in high school, according to a biography on Firesign Theater’s official Web site. But he lost his job as an announcer on the school radio system, it said, “after his unauthorized announcement that the Chinese Communists had taken over the school and that a ‘mandatory voluntary assembly was to take place immediately.’ Russell Rupp, the school principal, promptly relieved Peter of his announcing gig. Rupp was the inspiration for the Principal Poop character on ‘Don’t Crush That Dwarf.’ ”

For good or ill, I hold Bergman and Company responsible for much of my rather bizarre sense of humor.

My consigliere posted the following quote from Bergman on Facebook (originally posted on the Firesign website), and I certainly can't improve on it... could any of us improve on Peter Bergman?:

Take heart, dear friends. We are passing through the darkening of the light. We're gonna make it and we're going to make it together. Don't get ground down by cynicism. Don't let depression darken the glass through which you look. This is a garden we live in. A garden seeded with unconditional love. And the tears of the oppressed, and the tears of the frustrated, and the tears of the good will spring those seeds. The flag has been waived. It says occupy. Occupy Wall Street. Occupy the banks. Occupy the nursing homes. Occupy Congress. Occupy the big law offices. Occupy the lobbyists. Occupy...yourself. Because that's where it all comes together. I pledge to you, from this moment on, whatever it means, I'm going to occupy myself.

I love you. See ya tomorrow.

Ah, he's no fun. He fell right over!

Goodbye old friend. We shall not see your like again.

Segregation begins at home

Historic photograph: March 21, 1965, the March from Selma to Montgomery.







The famous US Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery is being reenacted this week, and I was watching the Reverend Al Sharpton (organizer) on television, talking about it. At the same time, I was grieving the loss of my old friend Terri, and I was looking up some of our old haunts in Columbus, Ohio. Much has changed; so much, I often barely recognize the place. (Google Street View is an amazing invention.) I couldn't find Crystal Swim Club, where we spent the majority of our summers. When I last visited Columbus (2006), I had vainly tried to find it, circling and re-circling the neighborhood.

How do you hide two enormous pools like that? Was it smaller than I remembered? WHERE'D IT GO?

And then I found the blog of one Rick Minerd, ex-Chief of Police in Columbus. He wrote an entry on Crystal! (Pause for commercial: THIS is why blogs are so important, folks. We bring you the little-known history of real people and their daily lives.)

And yes, there it was. Had I forgotten?

As I watched the Reverend Sharpton, I was jolted back into reality. White reality.

It was a segregated pool. Like, by design, not by accident.

Well, of course it was. Had I forgotten?

Actually, yes. I had.

Perhaps I had believed that black people just didn't want to be with us. Why would they? White people, I had already noticed as a child, were often pretty nasty to black people, and if I was black, I wouldn't want to be around us either. In fact, the integration of our neighborhood and school was happening at that very same time, and we were all learning (in school anyway), to get along. But we lived on one side of the neighborhood and they lived on another. I didn't question this. I was a child, and it seemed the way of the world.

During the summers, we thought, they go their way and we go ours. It never really occurred to us that this was by design, on purpose.

Below, an excerpt from Minerd's entry on the Crystal Swim Club, which by the way, made me swoon with nostalgia. The description is so dead-on (DOGHOUSES!) that I started sobbing all over again, with memories of my old friend, Pleasant Valley Sunday, and daring each other to jump into the deep end.

Minerd accurately describes how we saved our brave little pennies, all year long:

In the early 1960s it was customary for kids like me to save money year-round for the opportunity to purchase a season membership to the Crystal, a pool in South Columbus located on the corner of Champion Avenue and Markison Avenue. I remember saving change in a jar and occasionally dumping it across my bed and counting it and the euphoria I felt knowing that when the tickets went on sale I would have enough to buy one. That was probably the first lesson my parents taught me in working and saving for what was important.

If I remember correctly the season "ticket" cost around ten dollars and a member could take along a pal who was a non-member who would be allowed in for fifty cents provided that pal was a white person.

It was that last sentence that jolted me back to reality. Was that really true? Of course it was. I never saw a single black person there, ever. But this did not seem strange to me.

As one of a minority of white people in the apartment complex I now live in, it suddenly seems so amazing that I didn't notice the whiteness, as I surely would now. But again, I was a child, and I did not question.

And even though the facility has long been gone I can still recall vividly the lay of the land within its fenced off boundaries. Upon arrival following a two mile walk from our home a member would enter on the Champion Avenue side of it and show their ticket to an employee who sat at a window just inside the main entrance. Then proceeding directly to a changing room where street clothing would be placed in metal baskets and handed to a guy at a counter who would give you a coin shaped object with a number on it to track your property for retrieval at the end of the day.

After changing into swimming trunks and exiting that room you saw what we called the big pool with depths ranging from around three feet at the shallow end to nine at the deep end where there were two diving boards. One just a few feet above the water and a second high dive for bolder swimmers.

Next to that was a smaller pool that we called the new pool and was one that was only five feet deep and usually used more by older members. Near the larger pool was a snack bar that sold potato chips, sodas and candy products and beside it was a small basketball court and a slab of concrete with one wall where some played handball. And scattered around the grassy areas were several multi-colored triangular wooden objects we called dog houses.

They were perfect for sun bathers to sit on a towel on the ground with their backs against it and they served as mini retreats, like camp-sites anytime the life guards would blow the whistles to signal rest periods, usually lasting ten minutes when all swimmers were required to get out of the larger pool. Adults were allowed to remain in the smaller pool during rest periods and I remember thinking during those times as I did often that I wished I were older.

I have mentioned the Girls and Boys Swims (in jest) on this blog before. I had forgotten the numbered coins, but I certainly remember the changing-rooms, and how we squealed with excitement as we smelled the chlorine. We changed in a hyperactive blur, shedding street clothes and racing out to the pools, where all of us extremely pale, blonde and redheaded children soaked up deadly levels of UV rays ... and whoever heard of sunscreen in those days?

Those of us who remember swimming at the Crystal also remember that it was a private club that operated before there were laws forbidding discrimination based on a person's race. It was a cooling spot for white people only.

However, following the civil rights movement of the mid 1960s it became illegal for businesses and private clubs to exclude people because of their race and instead of changing with the times and permitting non-whites entry into the Crystal Swim Club the owners elected to shut it down. The pools were filled with ashes and discarded debris trucked in from nearby Buckeye Steel Castings Company... like filling them with the cremated remains of a disappearing era.

For a number of years the location was operated by another organization as a private club but one without any sign of what it had been. The earth where those pools once were showed signs of discoloration from what was beneath it and the outlines of where they were was visible for several years but if one didn't know the history of the spot they probably wouldn't have known what it was.

Minerd mentions the irony that the neighborhood is now predominantly African-American, and the people who now live in the houses on that spot? Are black. (Do they know what was there before?)

Although it is easy to put down those of us from the past for our resounding racial cluelessness, I have to ask: where are all the public city swimming pools now, for working class kids (of whatever race) to go to? There are few-to-none here (mostly YMCA and YWCA), and from all I have been able to discern, public swimming pools are mostly a thing of the past. Middle-class kids go to pools in their friend's backyards. (I never knew anyone who had an outdoor pool when I was growing up; city yards are notoriously small and there wouldn't have been enough room, even if you had wanted one.) Segregation is not over, it has been taken private and local. If you don't have the money for an expensive membership to the Y, if you don't know someone with an outdoor pool or live in a suburban enclave or apartment complex that provides one for its members, you don't swim.

That leaves out a lot of kids. It certainly would have left ME out.

There may be white people reading this who have never been swimming with minorities, and will believe that they are not like me and my backward childhood. Since segregation isn't an actual written "rule" in a club charter someplace--well, then they believe it really isn't real segregation, even if the results are the same.

But it is.

And so, they paved over the pools rather than open them up to blacks.

And it has pretty much stayed that way, hasn't it?

Terri Leigh McKee 1958-2012

The Queen of Cups, from the Art Nouveau Tarot by Matt Myers.




Advice: When people ask you to stay in touch, stay in touch. Don't tell yourself "one of these days"--because you might Google them one day and find their obituary.

She came to my grandmother's funeral, whom she had loved. I promised her I would mail her copies of photos I had recently discovered, of our childhood... one of us standing next to an old Packard, another of us trying to make Kool-Aid, and still another, in front of a gaudy, awful, silver Christmas tree.

I never remembered to send them.

We grew apart... I became a crazy radical, and she remained devout and conservative. We had little in common as adults, and it was somewhat uncomfortable. You know how that is.

I still remember us singing together, "In the Year 2525" and laughing about the lyrics. We also sang it into the telephone for crank calls, which of course, you can't make any more. (The kids have no idea what they're missing.)

I had been thinking about her all week, possibly due to the death of Davy Jones. But it suddenly became pressing and important, as if I should see if I could try to find her. (She wasn't on Facebook or any of the other social media sites.) So, I did, and found this:

McKEE Terri L. McKee, age 53, passed away Monday, March 5, 2012. She was a member of St. Cecilia Catholic Church and a graduate of Westland High School, Class of '77'. Preceded in death by great-grandparents Charles and Sarah Bentz, grandparents Frank and Thelma Bragg and Adryenne and Arnold McKee, aunt Marilyn Isaac, and cousin Robert Riley. Survived by parents, John and Julia McKee; fiancee, Michael Woolfe; sister, Vicki (Mike) Davis; nephews, Nicholas Davis and Benjamin (Sara) Davis; great-nephew, Thomas Davis; along with aunts, uncles, cousins, loving relatives, and friends. Family will receive friends Sunday from 2-5 p.m. at THE TIDD FUNERAL HOME, 5265 Norwich St., Hilliard, OH 43026. A funeral service will be held 11 a.m. Monday at CONCORDIA LUTHERAN CHURCH, 225 Schoolhouse Lane, Columbus, OH 43228. Interment Sunset Cemetery.

All attempts at taking photos of photos have failed, so you will have to settle for my physical description: light light parakeet-blonde hair (100% natural) and extremely disarming pale blue eyes. Very feminine, small, thin, petite.

Aspasia offers the consoling thought that I thought of Terri because her soul was reaching out to me, to say goodbye. It is a comfort to think so.

And you folks reading: please don't forget my advice. Contact those old friends now. Don't put it off.

~*~

In the year 2525 - Zager and Evans



We got on a roller coaster once, at the Ohio State Fair, while this song was playing, full-blast. We screamed and sang along, all at once. One of those wonderful, great moments of childhood... perhaps she thought of it in her last moments, as I surely will.

Pleasant Valley Sunday - The Monkees



Mr Green, he's so serene, he's got a TV in every room... we decided we liked Mr Green and wanted TVs in every room when we grew up, too.

Goodbye, old friend.

Friday links of interest

DEAD AIR presents Friday linkage for your perusal, on this eve of the first New Hampshire primary debate.

First up, Senator Rick Santorum, family man, is another morally-bankrupt fake. (Nah, go on! Say it isn't so!) Check out Politico's Santorum: Ultimate D.C. insider:

Rick Santorum received a troubling email in 2009, when he was working as a Fox News analyst — an aggrieved husband was accusing Sen. John Ensign, Santorum’s friend and former Republican colleague, of having an extramarital affair with the aide’s wife.

Santorum quickly tipped off Ensign that the man was threatening to go public with the scandal, a move that set in motion a chain of events that allowed Ensign to get ahead of the news by presenting his version of the story first.

For anyone who knows Santorum, his decision to protect Ensign was not surprising. During his 16 years on Capitol Hill, Santorum developed close personal ties with Republican lawmakers, became immersed in the inner workings of the Senate, climbed the ladder of leadership and embraced earmarks.

As Santorum tries to seize the tea party mantle and paint Mitt Romney as the ultimate establishment candidate, the reality is that Santorum became the ultimate Washington insider.

Interesting! Faithful, moral Catholic daddy of seven, makes sure to protect an adulterer from the ire of his constituents. How is this moral?

Answer: it isn't. Santorum is Mr Morality when it suits him, but not when it doesn't.

Radio show host (and former Fox News talking head) Alan Colmes got in considerable trouble for criticizing the behavior of the Santorums, after Karen Santorum had a miscarriage: They brought the fetus home to show the kids.

No, I could never make that up:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has evoked squeamishness and ridicule for retelling the story of the death of his son, Gabriel, at 20 weeks gestation and the family's unconventional response -- taking the body home from the hospital and allowing their other children to cuddle the corpse and say goodbye.

The Internet lit up with comments this week after Santorum's meteoric rise to second-place in the Iowa caucuses, nearly tying him with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Some described Santorum's story as "weird" or "horrifying."

Gabriel was the couple's eighth pregnancy and he survived only two hours. In her book, Karen Santorum wrote about bringing the body home to their other children.

''Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness," she wrote. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'''

But some mental health experts believe the Santorums may have been ahead of their time by ritualizing their son's death in order to exorcize their grief, though they say taking a body home is unusual and not recommended.

In the context of the times -- the year was 1996 when the family buried Gabriel -- their behavior was understandable, according to Dr. David Diamond, a psychologist and co-author of the 2005 book "Unsung Lullabies."

Helen Coons, a clinical psychologist and president of Women's Mental Health Associates in Philadelphia, said couples are not encouraged to bring a deceased fetus home.

"If a couple chooses to do a burial or memorial service for a third-trimester loss, funeral homes will assist in a caring manner," she said.

Everyone jumped on Colmes for his insensitivity, but I think he simply verbalized (accurately) what the rest of us were thinking.

And Santorum is running for the highest office in the land, Saints preserve us.

~*~

More stuff:

FBI Changes definition of rape (Mother Jones)

Illinois Lottery Checks Bounce For 85 Winners (Huffington Post)

Doggie survives avalanche! (UPI)

David Bowie turns 65! (UK Guardian)

Employees of big companies fill Ohio's Medicaid, food stamp rolls, report says (Dayton Daily News)

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (Psychology Today)

~*~

And I profusely apologize to everyone for not writing a much more fascinating blog post... but I confess I have spent my whole day babbling ON THIS INTERMINABLE THREAD instead.

And don't forget to TUNE IN TOMORROW! 9am EST, 1600AM and 94.9FM in upstate South Carolina!

Ohio Players album covers

... were amazing, proudly artsy and pretty dirty, too. (I'm so glad Tipper Gore and the fabled PMRC wasn't around to police us in the 70s.) Did the powers-that-be know about these album covers?

Although pioneering-funk band The Ohio Players (whom I was wildly fortunate to have seen live in 75, rocking the proverbial house!) had #1 hits, these eye-popping album covers seemed to stay under the radar. I remember seeing one of them in a very conservative, old-school Midwestern drug store, another at a truck stop that sold lots of coffee mugs with Bible verses on them. You just had to wonder.

At left, the cover of PAIN, which when opened up, looked like THIS. Coupled with PAIN was, of course, PLEASURE. Finally (and what did you expect?) there was both ECSTACY and ORGASM. That last one, with the metal (is it metal?) dildo popping out of the guy's back, blew my little mind.

Enjoy the linkage-gallery of nostalgic, nasty images; beware questionable taste, probably NSFW.

~*~

And now we go to the video!

Although we are given to believe "skin tight" refers to a woman's jeans, I don't think it does... or rather, I don't think that is the only thing he is talking about. Just a lucky guess!

I remember an interminable ride on the Interstate, primarily saved by these fabulous jams. For this reason, I prefer the long version of this funk masterpiece, which I play in heavy traffic or late at night. Therefore I insist on foisting the original long-ass version on all of you. This is what funk is supposed to sound like! (Yes, you really should listen to all eight-and-a-half minutes for the full 70s experience.)

PS: The guy making this video can't resist showing us the album cover, LOL.

Ohio Players - Skin Tight



Gone, gone, gone with your bad self.

Onward and Upward

At left: Occupy Greenville has kept our plucky heroine from dissolving into hopelessness during her long period of unemployment this year: THREE CHEERS FOR THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT, which has restored many folks' faith in America.

~*~

I used to wonder why people (usually women) deleted their blogs. No longer. I get it now.

As net-denizens Google various religious-and-Christmas-oriented-posts I have written over the past four-and-a-half years, I feel theologically and emotionally bereft. I was so certain, and now I am not.

Or rather, I am certain that uncertainty is the state of humanity. I no longer unequivocally declare that particular existential points of dogma are true, except to say, this is what I feel right now. This is what I believe is true right now.

And this is, in fact, what we are always saying, we just don't seem to realize that our personal truths collide over time. We re-arrange the biography to make our wildly different, disparate truths make sense. But they simply don't.

This is because we are not the same people we were.

The person that started this blog is me, yet it is another me, a past-me. I do not agree with everything the past-me wrote, in fact, I wince at a good deal of it. I can understand why people feel the need to delete that which makes them embarrassed and makes them wince. And women, specifically, can find this nearly intolerable. On the above-linked thread, Feminist Avatar wrote:

I almost deleted my blog as I was fed up with discussions going on in my online community, which I disagreed with and felt had been done so many times before, with no resolution. And, my gut response was- get out of here- and I think I saw leaving my blog up as leaving a part of myself 'there'; in that conversation, even tho' I wasn't and hadn't posted in ages.

A wiser person than me once said that women were more reluctant to 'let go of the authorial signature' than men (that is to stop owning their words- seeing cultural products as a creation of society and context rather than individuals), because they had only recently won the right to own them in the first place (ie women's right to a public voice is historically new and hard won). Perhaps, as a result, when we need to walk away from particular online communities or just the internet as a time suck, we feel we can't leave something of ourselves there- we can't stop owning our words (even if they may be out of date or not where we are any more). And perhaps, because of that sense of ownership, if we move beyond those ideas or no longer agree with them, we also can't leave them out there, as it is no longer us.

Yes, I understand that, as well as the Buddhist concept of impermanence.

~*~

I nearly titled this post "Can Ron Paul win the Iowa primary?" and then thought the better of it. Nah. But I am once again voting strategically for the good doctor, as I did in the last South Carolina Republican primary four years ago.

I heartily recommend Conor Friedersdorf's piece in The Atlantic, titled Grappling With Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters--currently up to a whopping 633 comments. The money quotes:

Do I think that Paul wrote the offending newsletters? I do not. Their style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career in public life -- and he is so forthright and uncensored in his pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically correct opinion -- that I'd wager substantially against his authorship if Las Vegas took such bets. Did I mention how bad some of the newsletters are? It's a level of bigotry that would be exceptionally difficult for a longtime public figure to hide.

For that reason, I cannot agree with [The Weekly Standard's Jamie] Kirchick when he concludes that "Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing -- but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics."

On the other hand, it doesn't seem credible that Paul was unaware of who wrote the execrable newsletters, and although almost a million dollars per year in revenue is a substantial incentive to look away from despicable content, having done so was at minimum an act of gross negligence and at worst an act of deep corruption. Indeed, Paul himself has acknowledged that he "bears moral responsibility" for the content.

Given its odiousness that is no small thing.

For the record, I certainly agree. I also agree with this quote--although regular readers might recall that as a true believer, I defended both Jeremiah Wright AND Bill Ayers:

For me, the disconnect between the Ron Paul newsletters, which make me sick, and Paul's words and actions in public life, which I often admire, put me in mind of the way I reacted when candidate Barack Obama was found to associate with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, both of whom had said execrable things. I couldn't defend any of it. But I could never get exercised about the association in exactly the way that writers like Victor Davis Hanson wanted, because it seemed totally implausible that if Obama was elected he would turn out to secretly share the convictions of the Weather Underground, or hope for God to damn America. It always seemed to me that those relationships were the unsavory product of personal ambition. I don't mean to suggest that the two circumstances are entirely analogous, but I do find it hard to believe that if Paul were elected, he'd turn out to be a secret racist, implement policies that targeted minorities, or drum up support by giving speeches with hateful rhetoric.

And then, he makes the points I wish I had been smart enough to make, says the things I wish I had been smart enough to write. YES!:

[Congressman Ron Paul] has a long history of doing what he says when elected, and no more.

"How could you vote for someone who..."

Isn't that a thorny formulation? I'm sometimes drawn to it. And yet. We're all choosing among a deeply compromised pool of candidates, at least when the field is narrowed to folks who poll above 5 percent. Put it this way. How can you vote for someone who wages an undeclared drone war that kills scores of Pakistani children? Or someone who righteously insisted that indefinite detention is an illegitimate transgression against our civilizational values, and proceeded to support that very practice once he was elected? How can you vote for someone who has claimed to be deeply convicted about abortion on both sides of the issue, constantly misrepresents his record, and demagogues important matters of foreign policy at every opportunity? Or someone who suggests a religious minority group should be discriminated against? Or who insists that even given the benefit of hindsight, the Iraq War was a just and prudent one?

And yet many of you, Republicans and Democrats, will do just that -- just as you and I have voted for a long line of past presidents who've deliberately pursued policies of questionable-at-best morality.

In voting for "the lesser of two evils," there is still evil there -- we're just better at ignoring certain kinds in this fallen world. A national security policy that results in the regular deaths of innocent foreigners in order to maybe make us marginally safer from terrorism is one evil we are very good at ignoring.

Prison rape is an evil we're even better at ignoring.

It is a wonderful thing that Americans are usually unable to ignore the evil of outright racism. It hasn't always been so. The change is a triumph. But important as rhetorical issues of race and ethnicity are in America, we're by necessity choosing the lesser of two -- or three or seven -- evils when we pick a candidate. And so it's worth complicating the moral picture with some questions we don't normally consider when we talk about race.

For example: What American policy most hurts people who'd be a minority group in this country? I'd say cluster bombs, missiles and bullets that inadvertently kill them while we try to kill terrorists or convert tribal or sectarian societies into democracies. Or perhaps an even graver harm is done by the subsidies we give to agribusinesses, destroying Third World agricultural markets and opportunity. To think of the damage done over the decades by sugar dumping in Haiti alone! And isn't it uncomfortable to think about how race and nationality is implicated in the priority we assign to folks who suffer from the aforementioned policies? The policies aren't rooted in personal racism, like the lines in racist tracts -- sugar dumping is rooted in an amoral agricultural lobby that wants to enrich itself -- yet it's hard to imagine such policies would persist as uncontroversially if "people like us" were the victims.

In the U.S., the War on Drugs arguably does the most grave damage to poor communities, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods, where the majority of arrests take place, though whites use drugs more often. The greatest threat to an ethnic minority in the United States isn't that doctrinaire libertarians are going to reverse the Civil Rights Act -- it's that Muslim Americans or immigrants are going to be held without trial in the aftermath of a future terrorist attack because we've allowed our and their civil liberties to erode.

Were it 1964, I'd never vote for Paul, precisely because my desire to protect and expand liberty would've placed the highest priority on the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Paul once said in a speech that "the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty," despite the fact that it clearly enhanced the individual liberty of blacks, the group the state was most implicated in transgressing against.

But it is not 1964. Other injustices better define our times. In 2012, when accused terrorists are held indefinitely without charges or trial, and folks accused of drug possession have their doors broken down by flash-grenade wielding SWAT teams in no-knock raids, Paul would arguably protect the rights of racial, religious or ethnic minority groups better than Obama, regardless of whether Paul is now or ever was a racist, and irrespective of the fact that Obama, as the first black president, has in some ways transformed Americans' thinking on race. (LBJ, who signed the Civil Rights Act, was not know for his personal progressivism on race or women's rights, but he nonetheless backed policies that had powerful consequences for women and minorities).

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.

Read it all, and at least a few of the hundreds of brawling comments, well worth your while if you care about the Republican primary and the next election.

~*~

Check out our show tomorrow, where we will be doing a year-end round-up. In upstate South Carolina, join us at 9am on WFIS radio, 1600 AM and/or 94.9 FM on your radio dial. We have online streaming, so drop by.

And winding up with some holiday tackiness/nostalgia. At left: The Great Southern Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, my hometown. As you can see by the cars, this photo was probably taken some time in the early-to-mid 60s, and certainly, my fondest Christmas-shopping memories come from this period. (This shopping center was only a short distance from one of my very favorite and beloved Drive-In movie theatres, which I know I have rhapsodized about here before.)

The shopping center featured the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD in miniature, and we used to walk around them as kids, taking photos and gawking as if they were real. Surely, this was as close as most of us were ever going to get. My absolute favorite was the Taj Mahal, which apparently even had real water for awhile, but mostly I remember dried-up water with dirt and leaves in it. Unfortunately, my dogged net-searches could NOT bring up the Taj Mahal or Eiffel Tower, presented right alongside Woolworth's and hardware stores and everything else. At Christmas time, the tacky Christmas lights and faux-evergreens were draped around the SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD, and we thought it was the greatest thing we had ever seen.

Confession: I still think it was, but I have since learned how uncool it is to say so.

Thanks to Otherstream for the photo of little-Pisa, which brought back a nice Christmas memory.

PS: And if you have never read Truman Capote's amazingly wonderful A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, you should. Too wonderful for words, but get out those kleenex.