Channeling Durrati

George Allen is a Shithead.

2006-08-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great . . . Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."
-- Sen George Allen refering to S.D. Sidarth while campaigning in rural Virginia, Ausgust 2006.

Just what we need another Republican idiot for president! Allen doesn’t even have the smarts to employ standard Republican code words when referring to ethnics instead hurling racist slurs (admittedly one more at home in a Parisian brothel than a Virginia burb) when feeling a bit out of sorts. What's up with that George, you miss the meeting?I suppose we should be thankful for his mother’s partial North African background (though I in no way indict the woman for her son’s boorishness) that he didn’t call Mr. Sidarth a “Sand nigger.”

An apology, which came hours after Allen's campaign manager dismissed the issue with an expletive (and insisted the senator has "nothing to apologize for,") did little to mollify Webb's campaign or Sidarth, who said he suspects Allen singled him out because his was the only nonwhite face among about 100 Republican supporters.

In the fall of 69 Allen's Palos Verdes High football team was scheduled to play the Morningside Monarchs, a predominently black team from down on the flatlands. During the week before the game, a bunch of racist graffiti was spraypainted on the outdoor walls of Palos Verdes High. It looked to be the work of vandals from Morningside. However, the word "Monarchs" was misspelled, and suspicion immediately fell on George Allen. He fessed up and was forced to apologize over the school PA. School officials made sure the incident was not publicized. They didn't want to see Allen's father embarrassed. Allen had done it to stir up racial tension between the schools -no other reason.

Great, racist graffiti, a confederate flag fetish, tastes in interior design that lean towards nooses, and his place of birth is Whittier, California. Sounds like Rove’s dream candidate!

2006-08-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

Hey all! Sorry I've been absent, summertime and all that....

Anyway we played a fun game over at My Left Wing, thought I'd see if you would like to play.

The rules:

Pick any city (preferably one you know and love), and imagine that it never was there as a city at all, just the woods, riverbank, swampland, beach-and-dunes, or whatever was there before the city was built...except for three places or institutions that are there now. They could be anything: cultural, commercial (yes, bars and restaurants count), educational, professional, or just something personally significant.
You may pick more than one city, but no more than three; if you do, it would be fun if one wasn't in the US, but that's OK too. No, you may not pick the whole city as one of your "places", but a reasonably sized neighborhood or an institution with multiple sites may count as one, as long as there's a theme or discernable character that ties it together. For instance, I'm not sure Harlem should count, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with several sites, would. The French Quarter in NOLA, yes; Staten Island, no. You get the idea.
So the Question is:
What city/cities would you choose?What three places/institutions would you keep?Why?

My reply:

I'll Bite...City 1. Barcelona

Keepers:

The Montana Bar with it's cold cervezas and monumental record collection (hey I'll need something to sip!)

At least one block of La Rambla (if I can't have the whole street).

One Building by Gaudi.

City 2 Dubrovnik, in what used to be Yugoslavia :(

Keepers:

The walk atop the wall of the city from which you get such magnificent views.

The nude beach on the island in the bay.

One of the little cafes where they serve iced coffe and you can watch the piegons fly their proscribed circle from the cathederal each hour when the bell sounds... oops that's four....
and to be a homer....

City 3 St. Louis

Keepers

The Gateway Arch

New Busch Stadium

Cunetto House of Pasta - on "the Hill". Best Italian west of NY and south of Chicago..... :)

What do you say?

Soon To Be An Oliver Stone Film

2006-08-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

“How did it come to this?” the Pressurebent sthinks as he hangs up the phone.

The late afternoon sun slants through the huge windows behind his desk in the Offal Office; He hears Laura quietly slobbing in the ouster office.

“’Hit’s all Daddy’s fault,” he ruminants “who could life up to that? Big war hero jock pilot; superspook conspirator; throwin’ up on that Jap P.M. I never had a snowball’s chance in Crawford. Hell I didn’t even want all this, Hied have been just as slaphappy to stay a drunk and play with my baseball men, but NOOOO he had to shame me, said I wasn’t upendin’ the family honor and all that happy horseshit. Goddammit all!”

Pissed now The Usurper punches the call button on his phone, “Harriet, git me the Vice Pressurestint on the phone. And I mean now!”

“Do you think that’s wise, Georgie?” Miers simpers “Mr. Chaney is a very sick man.”

“I don’t care if he’s got the ribspreader up his ass, Harriet, just git him on the goddamned phone!”

Dubyah hangs up and waits for the connection to be made.

“Wonder what they’ll do with all my pressurebential memorobiliates and all... my collection of “Archie” comic books? My Howdy Doody Sippy Cup? My Desert Cammo G.I. Joads? Toss ‘em all in that river yonder, I suppose. Don’t recon they’ll let a felonizer build a Pressurebential Library.”

“Too bad, Laura’ll need a job.”

“What the Hell,” he sthinks “won’t matter much now” as he reaches for the bottle of Jack in the lower file drawer.

“ Might as well get pie-eyed…..”

The phone rings.

“Dick, that you?” he drawdles picking up.

“Well it ain’t Saddam Hussein, you goddamned idiot.” Chaney rasps.

“Why so ornery, Dick? Yore morphine drip on the fritz?”

“Go Fuck yourself.” Chaney chortles.

“You already made a job of that, asshole."

I just got off the horn with Senator Mac Cain, he said the Federal Marshals will be here in an hour to haul my ass to jail.”

“Ain’t the first time, G.” Chaney seems to be relishing the development.

“Go fuck yourself, Lon, but save some fer Lynne!” W laughs.

“Shit, that pony ain’t pranced in 10 years, dumbass”

“Tell me about it.”

Anyhow that asswipe Cain said he could get me a cush lock-up In South Carolina if I come along quietly. Jerk’ll never forgit South Carolina.”

“They’re talking jail?” Chaney muttered in disbelief.

‘Yeah... shit that’s right - you’ve been in and out of a coma!” W chugs some Jack.

“Just after that David Gregory went nuts and beat Rummy near to death with his microphone, the Senate cut a deal with the World Court in the Haggis…. er ….whatever and said they’d perp walk me outta the Whitehouse and give me a coupla years if them Belgianians would just lay off.”
“What about the Joint Chiefs?” Chaney asks.

“Them losers ain’t gonna be no help, Dick, they tole me they’d rather patrol Fallujah naked with as cap pistol than go agin Mac Cain.”

“Wimps” Chaney grunts.

“And the Secret Service ain’t gonna do nothing either unless there’s gunplay.” W grumbles.

“Well, there’s that Colt in my Desk, W, go down with your boots on!”

“I’ll ponder on that, Dick. How’s the transplant comin’?

“Good news, they found a donor.”

“But you got that rare type, C-note negative , how’d they find one so fast?”

Halliburton came up with it; some 15 year old kid caught one in the back of his head in Baghdad. Same type!”

“That was lucky.”

“Not really, we’ve had our eye on him for some time.” Chaney coughs.

“Well I hope you come out the other end Dick, with Rummy laid up and Rove run off with Gannon, I’m runnin’ short of friends.”

“Watch yer backside, George.”

“Go fuck yourself, Dick.”

As he hangs up, W pours a third shot of Jack. “I’m getting a little buzz on” he sthinks and looks at his watch, “Johnny Lawdog will be here soon.”

He punches the call button on his phone.

“Harriet, call Condi and tell her to git her skinny ass up here.

Hanging up he walks once more around the Offal Office. At a side table he lovingly strokes a studded dog collar given him by Tony Blair. The Jack working on his pint sized brain, he wells up as he reads the inscription “Yours, B(itch)."

Turning to his desk he picks up a glass bauble the Christian Coalition had sent, shaking it he watches with childlike wonder the thousands of “Snowflake Babies" flurrying about a vignette of his Crawford Ranch. Laying it down he moves on to his most prized procession - a paperweight fashioned from the shrapnel of a Daisycutter that had been dropped a multi family dwelling in Qana. A gift from the Israeli Defense Minister.

Reeling from the liquor and what passes for emotion he nearly swoons when he hears the knock on his door.

Walking in, Condi sympathizes “It’s a dark day, Mr. Pressurespent.”
“Sure is” W sobs.“Condi, do you believe in God?”

“You know I do, Mr. pressuredent, it was on the application.”

“Prey with me Condi,” W's drinking from the bottle “Prey with me now.”

He falls on his knees.

“Like that you mean, on our knees?” Rice is incredulous.

“Yes, Prey with me!” W gropes at her knees.

“I couldn’t possibly, Mr. Pressurebent, this is a $1500 Armani pantsuit!. Rice backs away.

W crumbles to the floor in a fetal psition, cradling the bourbon.

“Fuck me, President Pelosi! Mommy will be so pissed. Sheeeet! W mumbles as he passes out.

2006-07-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

Not much on the net about our beloved General Astray but I hope this photo does him justice and here are a few facts from Wikipedia....

On September 2 of that same year, King Alfonso XIII conferred command of the new regiment on Lieutenant Colonel of Infantry José Millán Astray, chief proponent of its establishment. Milan Astray was an able soldier but an eccentric and extreme personality. His style and attitude would become part of the mystique of the Legion. On September 20 the first recruit joined the new Legion. This date is celebrated yearly.
The initial make-up of the regiment was that of a headquarters unit and three battalions (known as Banderas or flags). Each battalion was in turn made up of a headquarters company, two rifle companies and a machine gun company. The regiment's initial location was at the Cuartel del Rey en Ceuta on the Plaza de Colón. At its height, during the Spanish Civil War, the legion consisted of 18 banderas, plus a tank bandera, an assault engineer bandera and a Special Operations Group. Banderas 12 through 18 were considered independent units and never served as part of the tercios.
Francisco Franco was one of the founding members of the Legion and the unit's second-in-command. The Legion fought in Morocco in the War of the Rif (to 1926). Together with the Regulares (Moorish colonial troops), the Legion made up the Spanish Army of Africa. In 1934 both units of the Legion and the Regulares were brought to Spain by the new Republican Government to help put down a workers revolt in Asturias.
Under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe the Army of Africa played an important part in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side. The professionalism of both the Legion and the Regulares gave Franco's Nationalists a significant initial advantage over the less well trained Republican forces. The Army of African remained the elite spearhead of the Nationalist armies throughout the Civil War. Following the Nationalist victory in 1939, the Legion was reduced in size and returned to its bases in Spanish Morocco. When Morocco gained its independence in 1956 the Legion continued in existance as part of the garrison of the remaining Spanish enclaves and territories in North Africa.
On June 17, 1970, legion units opened fire and killed eleven pro-independence demonstrators at the Zemla quarters of El-Aaiun in the Western Sahara, (then still the Spanish Sahara). The incident, which came to be called the Zemla Intifada, had a significant influence on pushing the Sahrawi anticolonial movement into embrarking on an armed struggle which still goes on up to the present, though Spain has long since abandoned the territory and handed it over to Morocco.
Through the course of the Legion's history Spaniards have made up the majority of its members, with foreigners accounting for 25 percent or less. During the Riff War of the early 1920s most of the Foreigners serving with the Legion were Spanish speaking Latin Americans. After 1987 it stopped accepting foreigners altogether and changed its name to the Spanish Legion.
In the 2000s, after the abandonment of conscription, the Spanish Army is again accepting foreigners from select nationalities. The Legion today accepts native Spanish speakers (mostly from Central and South America, but even from countries like Germany) between ages of 18 and 28, be they male or female.
In recent years the Spanish Legion was involved in Bosnia as part of the SFOR. It also took part in the Iraq War, deploying in Najaf alongside El Salvadorean troops, until the new Spanish government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero fulfilled its electoral promises by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq. The Legion units deployed in Iraq were involved in several combats against the insurgency. In 2005 the Legion was deployed in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Stabilisation Force (ISAF).
[edit]

Esprit de corps
Millán Astray provided the Legion with a distinctive spirit and symbolism intended to evoke Spain's Imperial and Christian traditions. For instance, the Legion adopted a regimental unit called the tercio in memory of the sixteenth century Spanish infantry formations that had toppled nations and terrorized the battlefields of Europe in the days of Charles V. Millán-Astray also revived the Spaniard's ancient feud with the Moors and portrayed his men first as crusaders on an extended Reconquista against the Islamic civilization; and later as the saviours of Spain warding off the twin evils of Communism and democratic liberalism.
The Legion's customs and traditions include:
Its members, regardless of rank, are titled caballero legionario ("knight legionnaire"). When women became admitted, they were titled damas legionarias ("lady legionnaire").
Legionnaires consider themselves novios de la muerte ("death bridegrooms").
When in trouble, a legionnaire shouts ¡A mí la Legión! ("To me the Legion!"). Those within earshot are bound to help him regardless of the circumstances. In practice, Legionnaires are never supposed to abandon a comrade on the battlefield; they must try to help him until all have perished, if necessary.
Contrary to usual military practice, Legionnaires are allowed to sport beards and can wear their shirts open on the chest. They are also allowed tattoos, especially the Legion Shield, or typically depict scenes of war. From its establishment the Legion was noted for its plain and simple uniforms, in contrast to the colourful dress uniforms still worn by the Peninsular regiments of the Spanish Army until the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1932. This was part of the cult of austerity favoured by a unit that considered itself on more or less continual active service.
The Legion's march step is faster than the Spanish military standard, 160-190 in contrast to the Army's 90 steps per minute.
During the Holy Week processions, the paso carried by legionnaires is held not on the shoulder but on their extended arms.

Miguel de Unamuno

2006-07-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

"The man of flesh and blood; the one who is born, suffers and dies - above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and is heard; the brother, the real brother." Miguel de Unamuno (from The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913)

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao as the third of six children of Félix Unamuno, a proprietor of a bakery shop, and Salomé de Jugo, who was also his niece. When his father died Unamuno was brought up by an uncle. In his childhood he witnessed during the siege of Bilbao the violence between traditionalist and progressive forces. This experience left deep traces in his political thinking. Unamuno studied in his native city at the Colegio de San Nicolás and the Instituto Vizacaíno. In 1880 he entered the University of Madrid, where he studied philosophy and letters, receiving his Ph.D. four years later. Unamuno's dissertation dealt with the origin and prehistory of his Basque ancestors.
Unamuno's early years were deeply religious but in Madrid he started to visit the Ateneo, sometimes called the blasphemy center of the city. In its library he read works of liberal writers. After completing his doctorate Unamuno worked as a private tutor in Bilbao, where he also founded with his friends the socialist journal La Lucha de Clases. From Bilbao he moved to Salamanca, to assume the chair of Greek at the University. In 1891 he married Concepción Lizárraga Ecénnarro; they had ten children. In 1896-97 he went through a religious crisis, which shattered his belief in finding a rational explanation of God and meaning in life. From universal philosophical constructions and outer reality he turned his attention to the individual person, inner spiritual struggles in the face of questions of death and immortality. Unamuno once stated: "Wisdom is to science what death is to life or, if you will, wisdom is to death what science is to life." Seeing that reason leads to despair, Unamuno concluded that one must abandon all pretence of rationalism and embrace faith.
In 1901 Unamuno became rector of the university; he held the post intermittently until his death. He was relieved of his duties because of political reasons for the first time in 1914. In 1924 he was exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands for opposing the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera. After a few months, he escaped to Paris, where his friends helped him create attention internationally to his exile. He then settled in Hendaye, the French Basque town nearest to the Spanish frontier, where he spent five years. General Rivera died in 1930 and Unamuno returned to the University of Salamanca, and was reelected rector in 1931. He worked as the professor of the history of the Spanish language, but in 1936 he was removed once again - this time denouncing Francisco Franco's Falangists. Unamuno was placed under house arrest.
When The Republican General Milan_Astray took control of University of Salamanca on October 12, 1936, Unamuno confronted him with these words:
"At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right."

Milan-Astray shouted in reply, using typical fascist reasoning;

"Death to intelligence! And long live Death!" whereupon he drove the elderly Unamuno out of the university at gunpoint. Writer and independent thinker, original mind and rector of the University of Salamanca, Unamuno consequently suffered a heart attack and was dead within a week.

DAD AND UNCLE DICK

2006-07-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

So sorry,whatheheh, I haven't been keeping up. I spent a few days at my sister's place, recuperating and she has a telephone provider, not friendly to posting. And while your lucid responses to my posts should be reason enough to carry on, I do wish we had more company. The apparent loss of Marks O and Jackie O distress me and my muse is definitly on the wan. Do not give up on me completely, I may have a comeback in me. My arm is mending but probably will never be the same. Tendons at my age can be stubborn to rehab. Sigh. Lacking inspiration I give you my portrait of my Dad ( Left) and his brother Dick, two fine up from the dirt democrats who helped shape me. My father also carried scars from manual labor, but perhaps bore them better than I....

Dolores Ibarruri - La Pasionaria

2006-07-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

" The Spanish people would rather die on its feet than live on its knees. And do not forget, and let no one forget, that if today it is our turn to resist fascist aggression, the struggle will not end in Spain. Today it's us; but if the Spanish people is allowed to be crushed, you will be next, all of Europe will have to face aggression and war." When the fiery La Pasionaria made this speech in France in 1938 it was a plaintive cry to a sleeping world. Born in desperate poverty in Gallarta, Spain, on the 9th of December, 1895, Dolores Ibarruri matured to become one of the finest orators of her time. Mother of six children, only two of which survived the grinding poverty and lack of adequate food and health care rampant in oligarchical Spain, Dolores took to heart the teachings of Marx. Were she to need more reason to embrace radicalism, her huspand was arrested during a strike in 1920. My poor words will not do her justice, I will let her speak for herself. "The crude reality, the bare truth, hit me as it did every woman, with its unforgiving hands. A few short, fleeting days of illusion and afterwards, in my own experience, I learned the harsh truth of the popular saying 'Mother, what does it mean to be married? Daughter, it means to sew, to give birth and to cry'. To cry, to cry over our misfortunes, to cry over our powerlessness. To cry over our innocent children, to whom all we had to offer was our caresses soaked with tears. To cry over our pain-filled lives, without prospects, with no way out. Bitter tears, with a permanent curse in the heart and a blasphemy on the lips. "Vincent Sheean, the brilliant journalist and author of Not Peace But A Sword said of her - "Sometimes she gave it to them so straight and hard that you could hear the gasp of the whole audience. Her purpose was, of course, to make such failures and mistakes rarer in the future. She criticized the government not at all, but her own and the other revolutionary parties came in for some terrific lashings. And then, having frightened the audience into breathlessness by her picture of disaster, she set out to prove that victory was possible, and on what conditions. To an ordinary American journalist in the front row of the hall it seemed that she was asking these people to stop being Communists altogether, at least until the war was won. The genius of Dolores - her unquestionable genius as a speaker, the most remarkable I ever heard - worked upon them its customary miracle, and she had the whole audience cheering with enthusiasm when she finished." - La Pasionaria "Passion's Flower".

AMERICA UNDER SIEGE

2006-07-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

I am and remain an American Patriot.

Despite the actions of a band of reprobates

determined to undermine her,

Without the consent of the governed,

And against everything she once stood for.

Let us resolve on this Independence day

To oppose with every means available

This continued assault of American ideals.

It may take years

It may take decades

I may not live to see it.

But I will have my country back.

Blame it on the fish

2006-07-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

As the great exchange of comments in my last post got around to both fishing and profound questions about the nature of man and men I thought I would take this opportunity to recommend again, my favorite book, The Flounder, (1978), which contrasts the destructiveness of men with the sanity of women, and examines such matters as politics, feminism, and the art of cooking.
It is the story of an oft re-incarnated man and his ever present companion. Though they don many bodies and minds through the ages they are ever the same spirit. The saga begins in the marshes of the mouth of the River Vistula near Danzig, where a prehistoric fisherman catches a talking flounder. The flounder, in return for not being placed on the menu, takes the hopelessly confused man under his fin and guides him out of the matriarchy which predominates. The women have three breasts and suckle their men. Peace and order reign but…nothing ever happens. Eventually, in modern times, the flounder his hooked again by a gaggle of trolling feminists and is placed on trial for his crimes against women. I won’t tell you more in case you do yourself a favor and read it. I believe the book might give dear whattheheh fresh perspectives with which to sort out her very valid, but hard to plumb, questions.

Durruti

2006-06-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

To condense in a few lines the life story of he who was the true expression of rebelliousness and anarchist utopia is a complicated but necessary task, because the testimony of liberty in struggle that was the life of Buenaventura Durruti must be broadcast yesterday, today and always.He was born the second of eight brothers on July 14 1896 in Leon, city of the Spanish province by the same name. As an adolescent he is initiated on the same path as his father, a workingman affiliated with the socialist union UGT. As a member of his railroad section, he takes active part in the revolutionary general strike of August 1917, promoted in conjunction with the anarchosyndicalist Confederacio'n Nacional del Trabajo (CNT); which caused his being expelled fron the UGT for being too radical, his persecution by the police and his escape to France, where he comes in contact with exiled anarchists, joining CNT of Asturias upon his return in January 1919.He joins the open fight against the aggresive employers in the Asturian mines and is arrested for the first time in March 1919; he escapes and by December he is in San Sebastian, an industrial city in the Basque country, with a job as a metal worker. The bourgeoisie was then promoting a wave of assasinations of syndicalists and Durruti joins a self-defense group - Los Justicieros, they plan a sensational hit in reprisal: an attempt on the life of King Alfonso XIII who would be visiting the City in August 1920, but their plan is discovered and they must escape. Durruti continues doing dangerous clandestine work throughout the nation, meeting Francisco Ascaso who would be his fraternal friend and comrade. They travel to Barcelona in August 1922 and form the group Crisol, that would later adopt a name that would be famous in libertarian history: Los Solidarios. This group brought together the most valuable elements of the catalan proletariat, hitting hard against reaction where it hurt the most, until the Spanish political crisis brought the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, installed September 1923 with the King's wholehearted support. Proper praise for what Los Solidarios did in courageous defense of the CNT during that hopeless hour has never been given. Hundreds of militants fell and CNT could barely survive and recover thanks to its deep roots among the working class, but the price was high: most of the Solidarios were killed or served long sentences, while Ascaso and Durruti had to seek refuge in Paris.The failure of the insurrection plans cooked up during exile forces them to travel to Latin America in December 1924, accompanied by Gregorio Jover, in search for funds for the outlawed and persecuted Iberian anarchosyndicalism. Following 15 months of unbelievable adventures including urban guerrilla actions to obtain supplies, unknown in those parts until then, chases and chilling escapes through several countries. The solidary assistance from an endless number of comrades that supported them wherever they went was their infallible resource in outsmarting police persecution.During quiet times they earn their frugal living as laborers, without ceasing to take part in union work from the grassroots, as the legend grows about these men. In April 1926 they return to Europe and are seduced by an espectacular idea: to kidnap the Spanish King and the dictator when they visit Paris on July 14, but are captured by the police and, after a stormy trial, are expelled from France in July 1927. They keep on living as semiclandestine militants abroad until the fall of Alfonso XIII in April 1931.

AS TRUE TODAY AS WHEN HE SPOKE...

2006-06-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

There are only two roads, victory for the working class, freedom, or victory for the fascists which means tyranny. Both combatants know what's in store for the loser.

Buenaventura Durruti

The Ballad of The Moon

2006-06-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

The Ballad of the Moon

The moon came into the fore

her bustle of flowering nard.

The little boy stares at her, stares.

The boy is staring hard.

In the shaken air

the moon moves her arms,

and shows lubricious and pure,

her breasts of hard tin.

"Moon, moon, moon, run!

If the gypsies come,

they will use your heart

to make white necklaces and rings."

"Let me dance, my little one.

When the gypsies come,

they'll find you on the anvil

with your lively eyes closed tight."

Moon, moon, moon, run!

I can feel their horses come."

"Let me be, my little one,

don't step on me,

all starched and white!"

Closer comes the the horseman,

drumming on the plain.

The boy is in the forge;

his eyes are closed.

Through the olive grove

come the gypsies,

dream and bronze,

their heads held high,

their hooded eyes.

Oh, how the night owl calls,

calling, calling from its tree!

The moon is climbing through the sky

with the child by the hand.

They are crying in the forge,

all the gypsies, shouting, crying.

The air is veiwing all,

views all.

The air is at the viewing.

Garcia Lorca

Jack White

2006-06-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Irish Anarchist Jack White (no he's not a member of the White Stripes) tell us his impression of Civil War Spain.

A Rebel in Barcelona:Jack White's first Spanish impressions
(1st pub. November 11th 1936)
I came out to Barcelona as administrator of the second British Red Cross Unit. Two nurses and myself came on in advance to find a site for the hospital of the Unit somewhere on the Teruel front.
Unfortunately the Unit had been cancelled all except four ambulances which are now en route somewhere between Paris and Barcelona. Some of these ambulances are to go, I believe to the first Unit at Grañen. Till they arrive in any case, I am left with no-one to administrate and nothing to do, so a friend in the CNT-FAI has asked me to write my impressions for broadcast or the press.
My first and deepest impression is that of the natural nobility of the Catalan people. I got that impression as early as Port Bou, where we had to spend six hours waiting for the Barcelona train. A bright sun was shining which tempted me to bathe in the bay. After undressing I left my coat, with some 80 English pounds in the pocket, on the rocks close to a frequented path with a sense of its perfect safety. Half an hour in Cataluña and a few conversations in my faulty Spanish had made me feel I was among friends, who appreciated the effort of the British workers and intelligentsia to help their cause. I would not have dared to risk such a large sum of money unguarded at any English watering place. Here I felt it was guarded by the revolutionary solidarity of Cataluña and even of the international solidarity of the working class of which Cataluña is now the bulwark.
This impression of revolutionary honour and revolutionary order has been maintained by all I have seen and experienced during the week I have been in Barcelona. On one occasion after a trying morning rushing round after the necessary passes to go on to Valencia - that was before the cancellation of the unit and I wanted to go on to the front to find a place for our hospital as soon as possible - I inadvertently paid my taxi driver four pesetas more than his fare. He brought it back to me remarking "eso sobra". This happened as I was entering the door of the Regional Committee of the CNT-FAI, the headquarters of those terrible Anarchists of whose misdeeds we read so much in the Capitalist Press now. I am not going to enter into controversy, philosophic or political, I simply record my experiences, without fear or favour. It is a fact, that the Barcelona churches were burnt, and many of them, where roof and walls are still standing, are used to house medical or commissariat stores instead of, as previously, being used by the fascists as fortresses. I suspect their present function is nearer the purpose of a religion based by its founder on the love of God and the Neighbour. However that may be, the destruction of the churches has not destroyed love and honesty in Spain. If they are not based on the love of God, they are based on brotherliness, selflessness and self respect, which have to be experienced to be believed. Never, till I came to revolutionary Barcelona, had I seen waiters and even shoeblacks refuse a tip. Here the refusal of anything in excess of the exact bill or fee is as invariable as the courtesy with which it is done. This very courtesy makes one feel mean for having offered it, a benighted bourgeois, automatically continuing bourgeois habits and unable to grasp the self- respect of the workers now they are so largely in control. My first day taught me my lesson. I never offend now.
You will have heard no doubt about the Dublin Rising of 1916. That rising is now thought of as purely a national one, of which the aims went no further than the national independence of Ireland. It is conveniently forgotten that not only was the manifesto published by the "bourgeois" leaders conceived in a spirit of extreme liberal democracy, but, associated with the bourgeois leaders, was James Connolly, the international socialist, who some regarded as the greatest revolutionary fighter and organizer of his day. In command of the Irish Citizen Army, which I had drilled, he made common cause with the Republican separatists against the common Imperial enemy. It is said that he threatened to come out with the Citizen Army alone, if the bourgeois Republicans shirked the issue.
It was then the middle of the great war. the rising was ruthlessly suppressed by England and sixteen of the leaders were executed. Connolly himself, badly wounded in the Dublin Post Office which was shelled to ruins by a British gun-boat, was strapped in a chair and shot by a firing-squad before he recovered.
Here in Cataluña, the union of the working class and nation starts off under better auspices than were possible in Ireland. In Cataluña the internal socialist reconstruction goes hand in hand with the armed fight against Spanish and international fascism. You are in advance of us in Syndico-Anarchist and Socialist construction. You are advance of us in dealing with the clerico-fascist menace. Again and again in Ireland the revolutionary Republican movement comes a bit of the way towards Socialism, and scurries back in terror when the Roman catholic Church looses its artificial thunder of condemnation and excommunication.
I come of an Ulster Protestant family. There is a saying in Ulster (the north-east province of Ireland) "Rome is a lamb in adversity, a snake in equality and a lion in prosperity". I am glad that in Cataluña you have made Rome into a lamb. In Ireland Rome is still a lion, or rather a wolf in sheep's clothing. The priests inflame the mob and then pretend to deplore the mob-violence which they have instigated. Last Easter Sunday, I had myself to fight for three kilometres against the Catholic actionists, who attacked us on the streets as we were marching to honour the memory of the Republican dead who fell in Easter week 1916. The pious hooligans actually came inside the cemetery and tore up the grave rails to attack us.
In Ireland, as in Spain, it was the priests who started methods of fire and sword against the people. yet they complain bitterly when their own weapons are turned against themselves.
Comrades of Cataluña! In your hour of trial when you hold the barricades not only for yourselves but for us all, I greet you with the voice of revolutionary Ireland, smothered awhile but destined to regain its strength. I hold myself honoured to be among you, to serve if I can in whatever capacity I can be most useful.

ABE OSHEROFF

2006-06-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

When the war in Spain started, it was no great shock," Osheroff says now. "From the moment Hitler came to power, I hated him, but I couldn't do a fuckin' thing about it. But when I saw the war in Spain change from a civil war into an international war, that's when I knew I had to go. I was 21, I was young and I had a gorgeous-lookin' girlfriend, so it wasn't the easiest decision, but I decided that if I didn't go, I'd feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. So I went." Abe Osheroff was born in Brooklyn in 1915 to impoverished Jewish immigrants. His lifelong love affair with social activism, what he calls "radical humanism", began early in his teens when he formed the Brownville Athletic and Cultural Club which promoted, eccentrically, lifing weights and listening to classical music. His first political activity was helping to carry the furniture of tenants evicted by their landlords back into their apartments. The police frowned on his activities and he was caught and beaten by New York's finest. "They called me a dirty Communist Jew bastard" Abe recollects, "all of which was true, except the bastard part."In 1937 Osherhoff heard, along with some 50,000 men from around the world, the call to the International brigades. Newsreel footage of the bombing of Guernica tipped the balance. Leaving behind his beautiful girlfriend, he defied the prohibition of the State Department and managed to make it to Spain via France. But not without incident - the ship he took from France to Barcelona was torpedoed two miles off the Spanish coast. Osherhoff swam to shore. "I was baptized." he says. In 1937, at the battle for Zaragoza he was wounded in the leg by machinegun fire. The next year, the battle against facsim lost, he returned to the U.S.In 1940 he ran for office on the Communist party ticket. Despite his injuries from the Spanish war he seved in the American Army in World War Two. After the war he worked as a carpenter with his father back in Brooklyn. In 1949, at the beginnings of McCarthyism, an acquaintance in the justice department informed him that he was about to be jailed for his former political activities. Osheroff had little choice but go on the lamb, living the next eight years underground, a fugitive from the FBI. When the Supreme Court halted the persecution of Communists in 1957 he re-emerged.And how. In Mississippi in 1964, he employed his skills as a carpenter to build houses for black Americans living in poverty. And though he personally rejected communism in the 1950's when the proof of Stalin's atrocities came out, he headed to Nicaragua to do the same in the 1980's.In between he protested repression and militarism in Vietnam, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile and Panama. Although he never stopped working with wood, his main income for the past three decades has been derived from lecturing at colleges all over the U.S. In 1974 he produced the documentary "Dreams and Nightmares" about the Spanish war. And he did it in typical Osheroff fashion. With "a hunk of money and a bottle of booze" he bribed contacts at the American TV networks to obtain archival footage of the world. After setting up a dummy film company professing to be producing a film called "The Shield Against Communism, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization" he conned more footage from The Pentagon and the CIA.Now in his nineties and living in Seattle Mr. Osheroff has never retired from "Radical Humanism". To the Seattle Post Intellegencer he reports, "I'm having a wonderful old age, I'm richer than Bill Gates." We salute you, sir.

Abe Osheroff II

2006-05-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

In Feburary I posted an article about the fine old radical and Spanish Civil War Veteran Abe Osheroff. While perusing the web today I found a poem about the shipwreck he survived enroute to Barcelona. Submitted for your approval....

Martín Espada
"The Carpenter Swam to Spain"

For Abe Osheroffand the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

The ship hushed the waves to sleep at midnight:
Ciudad de Barcelona, Ciudad de Barceloniz.
In the name of the aristocrat strolling through his garden
Franco's tanks crawled like a plague of smoldering beetles;
in the name of the bishop and his cathedrals
the firing squads sang a stuttering mass with smoke in their throats;
in the name of the exiled king and blueshirts
on the march bombers with swastika fins
sowed an inferno in village market places
and the ribs of the dead.
At Guernica an ancient woman in black stumbled
across a corpse and clawed her hair;
at Víznar, where the spring bubbles,
a poet in white shoes coughed the bullets' blood onto his white shirt,
gypsy sobbing in the cave of his mouth.
Ciudad de Barcelona: The ship plowed the ocean,
and the ocean was a wheatfield of bread.
And the faces at the portholes thinking: Spain.
In España, the carpenters and miners
kneeled with rifles behind a barricade of killed horses,
the peasant boys cradled grenades
like pomegranatesto fling against the plague of tanks,
the hive of helmets.
Elsewhere across the earth, thousands more laid hammers in toolboxes,
holstered drills, promised letters home,
and crowded onto ships for Spain:
volunteers for the Republic,
congregation of berets, fedoras and fist-salutes for the camera,
cigarettes and union songs.
The handle of the hammer became the stock of the rifle.
The ship called Ciudad de Barcelona steamed
across the thumping tide, hull bearded with foam,
the body of Spain slumbering on the horizon.
Another carpenter read the newspapers
by the tunnel-light of the subway in Brooklyn.
Abe Osheroff sailed for Spain.
Because Franco's mustache was stiff as a paintbrush
with his cousins' blood:
because Hitler's iron maw would be a bulldozer,
heaving a downpour of cadavers into common graves.
The ship of volunteers was Ciudad de Barcelona,
Abe the carpenter among them,
and for them the word Barcelona tingled like the aftertaste of a kiss.
Two miles from shore, they saw the prop plane hover
as if a spectre from the last war,
the pilot's hand jab untranslated warning.
Then the thud, a heart kicking in spasm,
the breastbone of the ship punctured by a torpedo
from Mussolini's submarine.
In seven minutes, the ship called Ciudad de Barcelona
tilted and slid into the gushing sea,
at every porthole a face trapped,
mouth round and silent like the porthole.
Eighty mouths round in the high note of silence.
Schultz, captain of the Brooklyn College swim team,
pinned below deck and drowned,
his champion's breaststroke flailing.
Other hands that could swim burst through the wave-walls
and reached for the hands that could not.
The boats of a fishing village crystallized from the foam,
a fleet of saints with salt glistening in their beards,
blankets and rum on the shore.
Abe swam two miles to Spain,
made trowels of his hands to cleave the thickening water.
His fingers learned the rifle's trigger as they knew the hammer's claw.
'At Fuentes de Ebro, armageddon babbled
and wailed above the trenches;
when he bled there, an ocean of shipwreck surged through his body.
Today, his white beard
is a garland of clouds and sea-foam,
and he remembers Schultz, the swimmer.

Now, for Abe, I tap these words like a telegraph operator with news of survivors:
Ciudad de Barcelona, Ciudad de Barcelona.

Now For Something Different

2006-05-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

I've felt a little constrained by the theme of my blog lately, and hope you don't mind a few off topic posts. This one concerns one of my favorite musical acts, The Big Smith Hillbilly Band. As you can see from their photo, they defer to no one in anarchist fashion and I think you will enjoy a sample of their lyrics....

NO SIR
(Mark Bilyeu / Jody Bilyeu)
My cousin's got a heartache
But he doesn't have a car
So I'm drivin' down to Texas
Where the biggest heartaches are
But something's goin' wrong 'round here
There's rollers in my rear-view mirror
And those Atoka dogs can smell your very fear
And my plates are out of state
So I get a bit more hell
I tell him I don't wish him harm
But I sure don't wish him well
But he'll use that Okie scare on me
And the highway boys get a show for free
He says do you have something you should let me see
No sir
I want to know what's goin' on
I'm gonna know what's goin' on

The only words in Spanish
On highway forty-four
Say checkpoint straight ahead
So you know who they're lookin' for
So tell me why does not one say
Bienvenidos enjoy your stay
You can't tell me that there's no other way
A half an hour in handcuffs
And a half a pound of sweat
Like minnows just green enough
To shimmy through the net
That's over you and it's over me
And the chain gangs workin' for all to see
Servin' mandatory penitentiary
No sir

You never talk to me
You just put a lock on me
He's out there and I'm in here
For reasons that don't seem quite clear
If you'll let me close I'll whisper in your ear

No sir

JOHN "JACK" REED

2006-05-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

John Silas Reed was born October 22, 1887 above the present day Zupan’s Market at 23rd and Burnside in Portland, Oregon. His father C.J. Reed was a dealer in agricultural equipment and his mother an heiress of the wealthy Green Family of Portland. Sickly as a child, Reed immersed himself, as children poor in health often do, in a rigorous reading of books, particularly stories of men of action, of romantic ideals and heroic countenance. His childhood was also greatly influenced by his mother’s brother who used his share of the family fortune to become a freebooter in Central America, dabbling in coffee plantations and local revolutionary politics and filled John’s head with tales of adventure and intrigue. In his teenage years his father became a major figure in local politics, appointed a U.S. Marshall by a man he admired greatly, Teddy Roosevelt, to investigate a major case of fraud in the timber industry. The juries C.J. Reed impaneled returned many indictments and the case eventually led to the fall of a U.S. Senator from Oregon.
And so the die was cast; an uncle who regaled him with stories of foreign adventure and revolution and a father who led a crusade against industrial and political corruption. Before leaving the Northwest John Reed’s life was framed.
Upon graduation from High School Reed traveled the breadth of the country to attend Harvard. There he was a diligent scholar, serving on the editorial boards of the Harvard Monthly and Lampoon and athlete competing with the Swim and Water polo teams. The writer John Dos Passos, who knew Reed during his Harvard days wrote of him: “Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said; when he said something standing with a classmate at the Harvard Club bar; he meant what he said from the soles of his feet to the waves of his untidy hair…Jack Reed was the best American writer of his time.”
Descending upon Manhattan with his newly minted degree, Reed joined the vibrant leftist community that thrived there before the First World War. He became friends with Max Eastman and Emma Goldman and covered the numerous Textile Worker’s strikes that convulsed and furthered the labor movement on the East coast for various Radical Magazines. He met the legendary “Big Bill Haywood” leader of the Industrial Workers of the World or “Wobblies. He also made the acquaintance of Eugene Debs. During this period he embraced not only the cause of exploited workers but also other tenants of the insurgent left including Emma Goldman’s call for “free love” and anti-militarism. Of his growing radicalism and associations Howard Zinn wrote: “What was worse was that they refused to remain mere writers and intellectuals, assailing the system with words; they walked picket lines, loved freely, defied government committees, went to jail. They declared for revolution in their actions as well as their art, ignoring those cautions against commitment offered, in any generation, by the voyeurs of social movements.”
In 1914 Reed traveled to Mexico to continue his education under the tutelage of the border raider and revolutionary Pancho Villa who nicknamed him “Chatito” or “Pug nose”. Despite his progressive views reed was very much a man of his times and fell under the spell of the macho Mexican whom he describe as "the most natural human being I ever saw -- natural in the sense of being nearest a wild animal." Reed also found the comradeship of Villa”s Army intoxicating:. “After draining a bottle of tequila to impress the soldiers, Reed says: "I am very fond of Mexico. I like Mexicans too. And I like sotol, aguardiente, mezcal, tequila, pulque, and other Mexican customs!" They shouted with laughter.
Captain Fernando leaned over and patted my arm. "Now you are with the men (los hombres). When we win the revolución it will be government by the men, not by the rich. We are riding over the lands of the men. They used to belong to the rich, but now they belong to me and the compañeros." "And you will be the army?" I asked. "When the revolución is won," was the astonishing reply, "there will be no more army. The men are sick of armies."
Returning to New York he was sent to cover the onset of WWI. For the next two years he traveled back and forth from Europe and Russia to the States reporting on the war and speaking out against it when in New York. He lost his journalistic objectivity in the killing fields and was not ashamed - "War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists.... It is not our war." He testified before Congress against conscription: "I do not believe in this war...I would not serve in it."
In 1916, back in Portland, he met the woman who would spend the rest of his short life with him, Louise Bryant. She was herself a writer and an anarchist of sorts. In 1917 the two made their way, through Finland, to Russia and the flowering Bolkshevik Revolution. There he met Lenin and Trotsky and witnessed the historic events of the workers revolt. Particularly impressive to him was the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace by the workers’ “Army”. He returned to New York to produce, after a battle with the State Department for his confiscated notes his most important work Ten Days That Shook The World. This short excerpt conveys the excitement of the times: "Up the Nevsky, in the sour twilight, crowds were battling for the latest papers.... On every corner, in every open space, thick groups were clustered; arguing soldiers and students...The Petrograd Soviet was meeting continuously at Smolny, a centre of storm, delegates falling down asleep on the floor and rising again to take part in the debate, Trotsky, Kamenev, Volodarsky speaking six, eight, twelve hours a day..."
Reed helped to form the Communist Party in America and returned to Russia as a delegate to the first Communist International. While at a conference in Baku on the Black Sea he contracted Typhus and quickly took to his deathbed. Louise remained at his side until the end. Reed died in a Moscow Hospital at the age of 33. Although Reed did not live to see the Spanish Civil War we can be sure that his heart and soul would have been with the Spanish worker’s. After his death Louise Bryant wrote to friends in the states…
“But I have been in Red Square since then — since that day all those people came to bury in all honor our dear Jack Reed. I have been there in the busy afternoon when all Russia hurries by, horses and sleighs and bells and peasants carrying bundles, soldiers singing on their way to the front. Once some of the soldiers came over to the grave. They took off their hats and spoke reverently. “what a good fellow he was!” said one. “he came all the way across the world for us.” “he was one of ours” In another moment they shouldered their guns and went on again.”

2006-05-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry all, I know I've been promising a new post but life gotten interesting all of a sudden. I started a new job Monday and my older sister has been ill, just no time to do John Reed the justice he deserves. Check back Saturday night, and if you care to leave suggestions for future posts inside. Please do not grow disgusted and abandon me :( . If you care to leave a comment or question I do have time for those :) . Thanks.

DURRUTI FRUTTTI

2006-05-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry, what, no time to write, Reed will have to wait. I chose to do Joe D.'s suggestion as it was quick. Just a little amalgamation of images plus a song and a quote from the founder of the band "The Durruti Column." At top, as I couldn't find the image of "Gala on The Halfshell" is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, A Second Before Waking Up" by Dali 1944. Explanation: "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee" was painted, using oil on canvas, in 1944, while Dali and Gala were living in America. The full title explains the subject and content of the painting, which was taken from a dream that Gala reported to Dali. He announced that this painting was the first illustration of Freud's discovery, that external stimuli could be the cause of a dream. The catalyst for the dream, which is the pomegranate, hangs in the air with the bee flying toward it. Behind the pomegranate Gala's dream unfolds over a sea of brilliant blue. A naked Gala lies asleep as she hovers over a stone; an illusion to the common floating feeling that can occur in dreams. To the left of Gala is a huge pomegranate that spills seeds on to the sea below. Out of the pomegranate an angry, pink fish is emerging with a wide open mouth. A snarling tiger leaps out of the fish. From this tiger another emerges, its tail in the mouth of the previous one. The tigers are rushing toward Gala, their claws at the ready, but it is the bayonet, mirroring the sting of the bee, that will wake her.
Second down, a colorful "Durriti Column" album cover.
Third a contribution of Joe D, a nightmarish vision of the cloning of W.
Lastly a better look at my "Durutti" profile pic.

Vini explained the recording methods he employed making the album in a 1995 interview with Mark Prendergast for the US Magazine 'Keyboard': "I remember recording a thunderstorm outside my French window at five o'clock one morning, and overdubbing by playing a Strat straight into a Lexicon, pulling that onto another DAT, and then bringing the whole lot into the studio to use as a backing track for a Spanish guitar lead. Three or four pieces were done in that kind of a way. Peter Hook lives around the corner, so he'd pop in occasionally too."

Evening is unreal
When morning leaves the moon
Approaching most in tears
He dances draped and new [?]
Armed with many warnings
We face the ancient mode[?]
If God battles over
Just one of many roads
Forgotten dream
Peace will come and with it sleep
I clear my mind
Peace will come and with it sleep
Forgotten dreams
I clear my mind and
Peace will come and with it sleep
Forgotten dream
Peace will come and with it sleep
I clear my mind
Peace will come and with it sleep
Forgotten dream
I clear my mind
Peace will come and with it sleep

Take two of those Kid, and mail me in the morning :) ....

ANOTHER POEM OF MIGUEL HERNANDEZ

2006-05-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

"To the International Soldier Fallen in Spain"

If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers,

a brow scattered with universal hair,

covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains,

with sand and with snow,

then you are one of those.
Fatherlands called to you with all their banners,

so that your breath filled with beautiful movements.

You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers

and fluttered full against their abuses.
With a taste of all suns and seas,

Spain beckons you because in her you realize

your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent.
Around your bones, the olive groves will grow,

unfolding their iron roots in the ground,

embracing men universally, faithfully.

Miguel Hernandez

Orwell Flees Spain

2006-05-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what those months in Spain meant to me. I have recorded some of the outward events, but I cannot record the feeling they have left me with. It is all mixed up with sights, smells, and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing: the smell of the trenches, the mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of the Barcelona mornings, and the stamp of boots in the barrack yard, back in December when people still believed in the revolution; and the food-queues and the red and black flags and the faces of Spanish militiamen; above all the faces of militiamen--men whom I knew in the line and who are now scattered Lord knows where, some killed in battle, some maimed, some in prison--most of them, I hope, still safe and sound. Good luck to them all; I hope they win their war and drive all the foreigners out of Spain, Germans, Russians, and Italians alike. This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part, has left me with memories that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had missed it. When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this--and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering--the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH DURRUTI

2006-05-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

(Photo from Durruti's funeral)

Durruti's interview with Pierre van Paasen

In September, after the liberation of Aragon from Franco's forces, Durruti was interviewed by Pierre van Paasen of the Toronto Star. In this interview he gives his views on Fascism, government and social revolution despite the fact that his remarks have only been reported in English-and were never actually written down by him in his native Spanish-they are worth repeating here.
"For us", said Durruti, "it is a matter of crushing Fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the Government".
"No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels."
And here Durruti laughed. "You can never tell, you know, the present Government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers' movement . . ."
"We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism."
"I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any Government in the world. . . . We expect no help, not even from our own Government, in the last analysis."
"But", interjected van Paasen, "You will be sitting on a pile of ruins."
Durruti answered: "We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

BEST OF DURRATI-"MANCHOORIAN CANDIDATE"

2006-05-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

Greetings General Sir,I gotta admit Geneal this whole Horowitz business had my head spinnin'like Rosie O'Donnell's bathroom scale on black friday until I saw your painting today of little David sittin' at that commie bastard Lenin's knee. I mean sir, it didn't make sense sir, why would a guy go to a fancy frenchified school like that Columbia in Jew York City, become a communist hiself and work with the Black Panthers, establishing all his tree-huggin', America hatin' bon-a-fides, only to turn around accuse the Panthers of an unsolved murder, turn into Simon Legree overnight and start sidin' up with people who think like you and me do General, sir?

He got a phone call.

That's right sir it's the Manchoorian Candidate all over again.As your picture proves sir, little David did hid toddlerin' in the Kremlin.And I figured out who his Daddy was, how else can you explain Horowitz's resemblence to Leon Trotsky?

See sir, the way I got it figgered is little David Trotsky was kinda of a pet around the Kremlin - Lenin and hell, even old Uncle Joe became right fond of him. But after the big guy died and Stalin had to have poor ole Leon clawhammered down in Mexico he didn't rightly know what to do the tyke. Now the Roosians, I figure was working on them cryonics so when all them Stormtroopers come a marchin' in, why they could just lie in them snowbanks for hours waitin' to ambush 'em. So old Joe had little David frozen stiffer than a frat boy inna room fulla goats. And held prankated into a snow bank somewheres in Siberia till it was time to unleash him on an unsuspecting world. Sir. And I recon when the time's right, after he's got hiself all chummy with the right thinkin' crowd, he'll get another call and turn on us sir. This is all just a Roosian plot to drive us good American's and those frenchified ones too, Batshit crazy (sorry Bruce). I means how else can you explain it sir?

JED in KY

durrati Homepage 02.25.06 - 6:55 am #

ORWELL:ENROUTE BACK TO BARCELONA

2006-04-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

They had put us into ordinary third-class carriages with wooden seats, and many of the men were badly wounded and had only got out of bed for the first time that morning. Before long, what with the heat and the jolting, half of them were in a state of collapse and several vomited on the floor. The hospital orderly threaded his way among the corpse--like forms that sprawled everywhere, carrying a large goatskin bottle full of water which he squirted into this mouth or that. It was beastly water; I remember the taste of it still. We got into Tarragona as the sun was getting low. The line runs along the shore a stone's throw from the sea. As our train drew into the station a troop-train full of men from the International Column was drawing out, and a knot of people on the bridge were waving to them. It was a very long train, packed to bursting-point with men, with field-guns lashed on the open trucks and more men clustering round the guns. I remember with peculiar vividness the spectacle of that train passing in the yellow evening light; window after window full of dark, smiling faces, the long tilted barrels of the guns, the scarlet scarves fluttering--all this gliding slowly past us against a turquoise-coloured sea. 'Extranjeros--foreigners,' said someone. 'They're Italians. 'Obviously they were Italians. No other people could have grouped themselves so picturesquely or returned the salutes of the crowd with so much grace--a grace that was none the less because about half the men on the train were drinking out of up-ended wine bottles. We heard afterwards that these were some of the troops who won the great victory at Guadalajara in March; they had been on leave and were being transferred to the Aragon front. Most of them, I am afraid, were killed at Huesca only a few weeks later. The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all. The hospital at Tarragona was a very big one and full of wounded from all fronts. What wounds one saw there! They had a way of treating certain wounds which I suppose was in accordance with the latest medical practice, but which was peculiarly horrible to look at. This was to leave the wound completely open and unbandaged, but protected from flies by a net of butter-muslin, stretched over wires. Under the muslin you would see the red jelly of a half-healed wound. There was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet of butter-muslin; his mouth was closed up and he breathed through a little tube that was fixed between his lips. Poor devil, he looked so lonely, wandering to and fro, looking at you through his muslin cage and unable to speak. I was three or four days at Tarragona. My strength was coming back, and one day, by going slowly, I managed to walk down as far as the beach. It was queer to see the seaside life going on almost as usual; the smart cafes along the promenade and the plump local bourgeoisie bathing and sunning themselves in deck-chairs as though there had not been a war within a thousand miles. Nevertheless, as it happened, I saw a bather drowned, which one would have thought impossible in that shallow and tepid sea. Finally, eight or nine days after leaving the front, I had my wound examined. In the surgery where newly-arrived cases were examined, doctors with huge pairs of shears were hacking away the breast-plates of plaster in which men with smashed ribs, collar-bones, and so forth had been cased at the dressing-stations behind the line; out of the neck-hole of the huge clumsy breast-plate you would see protruding an anxious, dirty face, scrubby with a week's beard. The doctor, a brisk, handsome man of about thirty, sat me down in a chair, grasped my tongue with a piece of rough gauze, pulled it out as far as it would go, thrust a dentist's mirror down my throat, and told me to say 'Eh!' After doing this till my tongue was bleeding and my eyes running with water, he told me that one vocal cord was paralysed. 'When shall I get my voice back?' I said. 'Your voice? Oh, you'll never get your voice back,' he said cheerfully. However, he was wrong, as it turned out. For about two months I could not speak much above a whisper, but after that my voice became normal rather suddenly, the other vocal cord having 'compensated'. The pain in my arm was due to the bullet having pierced a bunch of nerves at the back of the neck. It was a shooting pain like neuralgia, and it went on hurting continuously for about a month, especially at night, so that I did not get much sleep. The fingers of my right hand were also semi-paralysed. Even now, five months afterwards, my forefinger is still numb--a queer effect for a neck wound to have. The wound was a curiosity in a small way and various doctors examined it with much clicking of tongues and 'Que suerte! Qye suerte!' One of them told me with an air of authority that the bullet had missed the artery by 'about a millimetre'. I don't know how he knew. No one I met at this time--doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients--failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

CORTEZ THE KILLER

2006-04-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

Not to be outdone by the Kid, I give you another post in honor of Neil Young's "Impeach The President", but with a "Channeling" twist. Here are the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" which was banned in Spain by the Generalissimo hisself - fascists hate the truth....

"Cortez The Killer"

He came dancing across the water

With his galleons and guns

Looking for the new world

In that palace in the sun.

On the shore lay Montezuma

With his coca leaves and pearls

In his halls he often wondered

With the secrets of the worlds.

And his subjects

gathered 'round him

Like the leaves around a tree

In their clothes of many colors

For the angry gods to see.

And the women all were beautiful

And the men stood

straight and strong

They offered life in sacrifice

So that others could go on.

Hate was just a legend

And war was never known

The people worked together

And they lifted many stones.

They carried them

to the flatlands

And they died along the way

But they built up

with their bare hands

What we still can't do today.

And I know she's living there

And she loves me to this day

I still can't remember when

Or how I lost my way.

He came dancing across the water

Cortez, Cortez

What a killer.

STRATEGERY

2006-04-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

CAN YOU SPOT THE FASCIST?

2006-04-28T06:22:00.000-07:00

Benevolent, progressive Falange goons enroute to the Dade County vote counting.....

JOSE ANTONIO PRIMO dE RIVERA

2006-04-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

We met some good guys, now one of the bad. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was born in 1903 scion to a minor aristocratic family. His father, Miguel Primo de Rivera was a general in the Spanish army who would, in 1923 establish himself dictator of Spain, suspend the constitution, establish martial law, imposed strict censorship, and ban all political parties. Father and son were both slippery characters, couching their philosophies in the dialectical terms of socialists, a favored tactic of the fascists. Once in power, however their preferred methodology was propping up the traditional rule in Spain of the Church and Aristocracy while persecuting leftist political parties and train unions. Though Jose Antonio was captured and put to death by the Republic for his part in his Organization’s (the Falange) part in the uprising of the generals, his party was merged with Franco’s Carlists to form the one party that would rule Spain for the next 40 years. In the following speech made by him one can fairly easily discern his attempt to seduce individuals of all political stripes to participate in their own demise by buying into his B.S. His prose style in this respect reminds me of a certain extremely unpopular American politician, what do you all think?

"The Nation is a complete unity, wherein all individuals and all classes are integrated. The Nation is a transcendent and individual synthesis with ends of its own to achieve; and the state which it brings forth, shall be the efficient, authoritarian instrument which serves that unchallengeable, permanent, irrevocable unity which is called the Nation."
"We want less liberal verbiage and more respect for the deep liberty of man. Man's liberty is respected only when he is regarded as the corporeal envelope of a soul capable of damnation or of salvation. Only when he is thus regarded can his liberty be said to be truly respected, and still more so if that liberty is combined, as we demand, in a system of authority, hierarchy and order."
"We want all to feel they are members of a serious, complete community. In other words, there are clearly many kinds of tasks to be performed: some manual, some mental, others in the educational or social or cultural fields; but in a community such as we seek, let it be stated there must be no passengers and no drones."
"We want no song about individual rights of the kind that can never be enforced in the homes of the hungry. Instead, let every man, every member of the political community, simply by being a member of it, be given the means of earning a just and decent human livelihood by his work."
"We want the religious spirit, which is the keystone in the finest arches of our history, to be respected and supported as it deserves; but that does not mean that the State should either interfere in functions which do not belong to it."
"The Falange regards man as a combination of a body and a soul; that is, as capable of an eternal destiny and as the bearer of eternal values. Thus the maximum respect is paid to human dignity, to man's integrity and his freedom. But that profound freedom entitles nobody to undermine the foundations of public social life."
"The Falange cannot regard life as a merely interplay of economic factors. It rejects the materialistic interpretation of history. The spiritual has been and is the mainspring in the life of men and peoples."
"All revolutions have hitherto been incomplete, in that none of them has served both the national idea of the Nation and the idea of Social Justice at once. We (the Falange) combine those two things: the Nation and Social Justice, and upon those two unshakable principles we are categorically resolved to make our revolution."
"We realize that a nation is not merely the attractive force of the soil on which we are born, it is not that direct sentimental emotion that we all feel in the presence of our own earth, but a nation is a unity of destiny in the world order, it is a plane to which a people has risen when it fulfils a universal mission in history."
"Work is the best claim to civil dignity. Nothing can deserve more attention from the State than the dignity and welfare of workers."
"The first purpose of wealth is to improve the living conditions of the many, not to sacrifice the many to the luxury and profit of the few."
"Socialism proclaims the monstrous dogma of class warfare. It proclaims the dogma that warfare between the classes is indispensable and occurs naturally in life, because there can never be any appeasing agent. Thus socialism, which started out as a just critique of economic liberalism, has brought us by a different route to the same pass as economic liberalism: disunity, hatred, separation, forgetfulness of every bond of brotherhood and solidarity between men."
"The Falange has certain coincidences with Fascism in essential points which are of universal validity; but it is daily acquiring a clearer outline of it's own, and is convinced that by following this path and no other it will find its most fruitful possibilities of development."

MIGUEL HERNANDEZ 1910-1942

2006-04-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

Miguel Hernandez was one of the twentieth century’s most beloved Spanish Poets. Born in to an impoverished family in Orihuela ,Spain in 1910, Miguel herded goats for his father in the Alicante countryside he would later immortalize in his works. Pablo Neruda said of him “His face was the face of Spain”
Hernandez soldiered for the Republic for the entirety of the war and was captured trying to escape to Portugal after the fall of Barcelona. Captured by Franco’s minions he was imprisoned in Madrid in 1939. Admirers managed to secure his release, whereupon he returned to his beloved Orihuela, but was rearrested shortly thereafter and sentenced to death by Franco’s courts. The death sentence was commuted but nonetheless carried out, he contracted TB in the goal and died in 1942. Next to his prison cot his last poem was written, appropriately, on the wall….
“Farewell brothers, comrades, friends; Give my goodbyes to the sun and the wheatfields.”

Sitting upon the Dead

Sitting upon the dead
fallen silent these two months,
I kiss empty shoes
and make an angry fist
with the heart's hand
and the soul that drives it.
That my voice climb the mountains
and descend to earth as thunder:
this what my throat begs
now and forever.
Come close to my clamor,
people fed from the same breast,
tree whose roots
keep me in prison,
because I am here to love you
and I am here to defend you
with my blood and with my mouth
like two faithful rifles.
If I came out of the earth,
if I was born from a womb,
pitiful and poor,
it was only that I would become
the nightingale of the pitiful,
echo of bad luck,
to sing and to repeat
to those who must hear me
everything of pain,
everything of poverty,
everything of earth.
Yesterday the people woke
stripped and with nothing to cover themselves,
hungry and with nothing to eat,
and now today has dawned justly hateful
and justly bloody.
In their hands the rifles
long to become lions
to finish with ferocity those
who have been so many times ferocious.
Even if you have no weapons,
people of one hundred thousand strengths,
don't let your bones thin;
punish those who wound you
as long as you have fists,
fingernails, saliva, and you have
heart, entrails, guts,
testicles and teeth.
Wild as the wild wind,
gentle as the gentle air,
kill those who kill,
hate those who hate
the peace of your heart
and the womb of your women.
Don't let them stab you in the back,
live face to face and die
with your chest before the bullets,
large as a house.
I sing in grief's voice,
my people, for your heroes:
your desires like my own,
your misfortunes that have
the same metal and tears,
your suffering in the same grain
and of the same wood,
your thought and my mind,
your heart and my blood,
your pain and my laurels.
Life looks to me like
a barricade of nothingness.
I am here to live
while the soul permits,
and here to die,
when the hour arrives,
in the veins of the people
now and forever.
Life is a lot to swallow,
death is only a gulp.

ORWELL IN SPAIN IV

2006-04-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralysed right arm came to life and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken it in falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not become more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going, over lumpy, slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry a wounded man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the silver poplars which, in places, fringed our trenches brushed against my face; I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow. But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth. The doctor re-bandaged the wound, gave me a shot of morphia, and sent me off to Sietamo. The hospitals at Sietamo were hurriedly constructed wooden huts where the wounded were, as a rule, only kept for a few hours before being sent on to Barbastro or Lerida. I was dopey from morphia but still in great pain, practically unable to move and swallowing blood constantly. It was typical of Spanish hospital methods that while I was in this state the untrained nurse tried to force the regulation hospital meal--a huge meal of soup, eggs, greasy stew, and so forth--down my throat and seemed surprised when I would not take it. I asked for a cigarette, but this was one of the periods of tobacco famine and there was not a cigarette in the place. Presently two comrades who had got permission to leave the line for a few hours appeared at my bedside. 'Hullo! You're alive, are you? Good. We want your watch and your revolver and your electric torch. And your knife, if you've got one.' They made off with all my portable possessions. This always happened when a man was wounded--everything he possessed was promptly divided up; quite rightly, for watches, revolvers, and so forth were precious at the front and if they went down the line in a wounded man's kit they were certain to be stolen somewhere on the way. By the evening enough sick and wounded had trickled in to make up a few ambulance-loads, and they sent us on to Barbastro. What a journey! It used to be said that in this war you got well if you were wounded in the extremities, but always died of a wound in the abdomen. I now realized why. No one who was liable to bleed internally could have survived those miles of jolting over metal roads that had been smashed to pieces by heavy lorries and never repaired since the war began. Bang, bump, wallop! It took me back to my early childhood and a dreadful thing called the Wiggle-Woggle at the White City Exhibition. They had forgotten to tie us into the stretchers. I had enough strength in my left arm to hang on, but one poor wretch was spilt on to the floor and suffered God knows what agonies. Another, a walking case who was sitting in the corner of the ambulance, vomited all over the place. The hospital in Barbastro was very crowded, the beds so close together that they were almost touching. Next morning they loaded a number of us on to the hospital train and sent us down to Lerida. I was five or six days in Lerida. It was a big hospital, with sick, wounded, and ordinary civilian patients more or less jumbled up together. Some of the men in my ward had frightful wounds. In the next bed to me there was a youth with black hair who was suffering from some disease or other and was being given medicine that made his urine as green as emerald. His bed-bottle was one of the sights of the ward. An English-speaking Dutch Communist, having heard that there was an Englishman in the hospital, befriended me and brought me English newspapers. He had been ter-ribly wounded in the October fighting, and had somehow managed to settle down at Lerida hospital and had married one of the nurses. Thanks to his wound, one of his legs had shrivelled till it was no thicker than my arm. Two militiamen on leave, whom I had met my first week at the front, came in to see a wounded friend and recognized me. They were kids of about eighteen. They stood awkwardly beside my bed, trying to think of something to say, and then, as a way of demonstrating that they were sorry I was wounded, suddenly took all the tobacco out of their pockets, gave it to me, and fled before I could give it back. How typically Spanish! I discovered afterwards that you could not buy tobacco anywhere in the town and what they had given me was a week's ration.

HELP WANTED

2006-04-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

Let me preface this post by saying this weekend’s posts will not be all about me, Sunday I will post another segment of Orwell. And this poem does not speak so much of who I am, but rather where I was, at about 32 years of age…

HELP WANTED

What bitter and intransigent loves bind,
Us to our terrestrial trough,
Love of palate, of colon, hinds,
The getting on, the getting off.
Masticate, macerate, ejaculate how we will,
We add not one atom to our environs,
But rather forge, of our discordant fill,
Delicate chains and lovely irons.
Lest you think me drear lest me haste to state,
I find amusing our gyrations,
Our Rome and orgy, all things laid waste,
By our bodies’ recreations,
For dire as are man’s predilections,
Direr yet are all predictions,
If things are only to be worse,
We might as not fuck and swill and fill,
Our purse.

So prattled the poet drunken as we,
Slew together another soldier in the night.
He just juiced enough to loose his muses wildly,
Me, too drunk to type.
Were that he and I not one,
This tiresome struggle unnecessary,
Every schizoid anarchist poet bum,
Should come,
Equipped with secretary.

What petty and inconsequent hates blind,
Us to the celestial troth,
Hate of self, of others, kinds,
The pissing on, the pissing off.
Concentrate, segregate, annihilate whom we will,
We learn not a wit from our stupidities,
But rabble ‘round, murderous still,
Any despot who plucks our cupidities.
You I do not wear allow me to prate,
On of our desperate isolation,
Of the sadness of our present state,
Void of hope and inspiration,
For numerous as are man’s predicaments,
The most enduring and consequent,
His refusal to unhand and be free,
His maddening inability to see.

So muttered the wordman as I,
Contemplated turning down his bed.
He just sober enough to drag off his socks,
Me watching and shaking his head.
Were that he and I not one,
His anger makes life such a chore,
Every sotted pretender to Blake,
Should be,
Himself and no one more.

Durrati

Best of Durrati

2006-04-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

Just a fun post, I wrote the damn things might as well have 'em in my archives too....

Most venerable and manly One, I hope you have enjoyed your downtime.

All this talk of mounted tapirs and LSD cults has this denizen of our less than fully celestialized planet's head spinning. There is so much under the fully populated Sun that I have heretofore been sorely ignorant. For example just where did the Prophet Brigham Young, a shining example of the benefits home schooling if I ever read one, locate the peyote cactus he obviously enjoyed as he employed his fair command of grammer and dearth of scientific knowledge to produce these writings? Did he perhaps use Joe Smith's "Seer Stone"?

"Joseph Smith, Jr.'s role in the quest for treasure was especially important since he had a seer stone. Joseph would place this small, special rock in his hat then pull the hat up to his face to block out all light. By doing this he claimed he could see supernaturally, and would help those who were digging by locating the place where the treasure was buried and observing the spirits that were guarding it. Joseph Jr., himself admitted to being a money digger, though he said it was never very profitable for him (History of the Church, V. 3, p. 29). He and his father's money digging continued until at least 1826. On March 20th of that year Joseph was arrested, brought before a judge, and charged with being a "glass-looker" and a disorderly person. The laws at that time had what was known as the "Vagrant Act." It defined a disorderly person as one who pretended to have skill in the areas of palmistry, telling fortunes or discovering where lost goods might be found. According to court records Justice Neely determined that Joseph was guilty, though no penalty was administered, quite possibly because this was a first offense (Inventing Mormonism, Marquardt and Walters, SLC: Signature Books, 1994, pp. 74-75).Shortly after this Joseph discontinued money digging but kept his seer stone. It was with the seer stone that he claimed to both find the plates and later produce the Book of Mormon. This was known by early converts but has since been replaced with later accounts of an angelic visitor. This transition was aided by downplaying the fact that Moroni was a dead Indian warrior, and by referring to him as an angel.'

Mounted tapirs now seem entirely plausable.

Friend demmocommie, I know of a rusted out two-toned '75 Torino on blocks you can have for the taking...

WhattheH, thanks for the missive which I will respond to shortly.ASV, your virginal powers are asset to the board but your avatar distracts the male visitors from their manly duties. Perhaps a likeness of "Major Tammy" might serve to guide our thoughts back to their preferred UberChristian paths...durrati Homepage 02.17.06 - 7:24 pm #

CLAUDE SIMON

2006-04-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

"If the reader find pleasure, let him continue. If not, let him throw the book away.The only criterion in the end is pleasure; all the other arguments are worthless."-Claude Simon

Claude Simon was born in Tananarive, on the island of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. At that time Madagascar was a French colony. Simon's father, an army officer, was killed in 1914 in World War I. His childhood Simon spent in the city of Perpignan, near the Spanish border, where he was raised by his mother and her family.
Simon attended Collége Stanislas in Paris, and Lycée Saint-Louis for naval career, but was dismissed. He studied art with Andre Lhôte, and also studied at Oxford and Cambridge. In the 1930s he travelled in the Soviet Union. From 1934 to 1935 Simon served with the French army's Thirty-first Dragoons. During the Spanish Civil War, he became involved in gunrunning to the Republicans. With the outbreak of World War II, Simon rejoined the Dragoons, and took part in the Battle of Meuse in 1940. After being captured by the Germans, he was sent to a prison camp in Saxony. On the transition to a prison camp in France, he escaped and joined the Resistance. During the 1950's Simon energed as as a leader of the " nouveau roman" school of writing. His stream of concious meanderings, sparsely punctuated and defying all forms of grammatical oversight, were major influenceces on Kerouac and Vonnegut. In 1985 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature; the committee said of him - "who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition"

From his 1985 Nobel Prize letter:

Simon's experiences during this war, like during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, have been of immense importance to him, constantly recurring in his writings. Cruelty and absurdity are the dominating things - unforeseeable. What is apparently well-planned ends in confusion and dissolution. Each one lives through his hardships and has to save himself as best he can. Simon's experiences from the Spanish Civil War were similar, depicted in Le Palace and his latest and most important novel, Les Géorgiques, 1981. For all the sympathies which he and others might have for those faithful to the government who fought against the fascists, it soon turned out that these government champions for their part could not follow any regular and intelligently planned strategies and operations. On the contrary, the fighters were split into factions and mutual strife, obstructions and hazardous enterprises. Simon's picture of the Spanish Civil War and of the intellectual idealists who wanted to find an ideologically clear reason in the fight against oppression, shapes itself into a version, at once grotesque and tragic, compassionate and ironic, of war's reality and of man's inability to guide his fate and correct his conditions. La Route des Flandres and Les Géorgiques are richly decorated compositions which, with sensuous perspicacity and linguistic invocation, conjure up an extremely complicated pattern of personal memories and family traditions, of experiences during modern war and of equivalents from bygone ages, to be exact the Napoleonic era. The parallels are the same. The violence and the absurdity are common to all, likewise the painful compassion and feeling that the author expresses in paradoxical contrast to the fascination that these phenomena obviously have for him. A similar feeling is characteristic of Simon's descriptions of erotic relationships. In these contexts too there is a fixation with violence and violation. The sexual contacts appear as conquests, the taking in possession, mountings which resemble what stallions and mares do, or outrages resembling what occurs in battle. A tragic feeling of life emerges also here - a picture of human loneliness and of how people are exposed to destructive passions and selfish impulses, disguised as vain striving for fellowship and intimacy.

Lots to chew on here, folks....

LILLIAN HELLMAN AND DASHIELL HAMMETT

2006-04-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

"There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat."

McCarthy’s assistant Roy Cohn questioned him about
a short story called “Night Shade,” which Hammett explained “had
to do with Negro-white relations...” “Did that story in any way re-
flect the Communist line?” asked Cohn. Hammett’s response: “That
is a difficult—on the word ‘reflect’I would say no, it didn’t reflect
it. It was against racism.”

"We met when I was twenty-four years old and he was thirty-six in a restaurant in Hollywood," Hellman recalled. "The five-day drunk had left the wonderful face looking rumpled, and the very tall thin figure was tired and sagged. We talked of T.S. Eliot, although I no longer remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at each other and over each other until it was daylight. We were to meet again a few days later, and, after that, on and sometimes off again for the rest of his life and thirty years of mine."
So began one of the great literary romances of the twentieth century, Dashiell Hammett, creator of the hard boiled detective series featuring Sam Spade and iconoclastic Southern playwright Lillian Hellman. Both did their duty for the Spanish Republic, visiting there during the war and speaking out in the U.S., and both, especially Hammett paying the price during the Red Scare. Dashiell would spend six months in jail for his sympathies although neither one ever actually joined the communist party. Hellman got off a bit easier, and for a reason she no doubt hated - “ In 1952 Hellman was called to appear before HUAC. She refused to reveal the names of associates and friends in the theater who might have Communist associations, but she wasn't charged with contempt of Congress. In a letter to the Committee she wrote: "But the hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group..." Hellman was excused by the committee with the remark: "Why cite her for contempt? After all, she is a woman..." ”
Hammett effectively stopped writing after the publication of his finest work “The Thin Man” in 1934 and despite their stormy relationship, was supported by Hellman for much of his life. He died virtually penniless in 1961 but as a veteran of the U.S. armed forces in both WW I and WW II was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Hellman, perhaps made of stronger stuff, overcame the political persecution to enjoy a long and colorful career which she capped with my personal favorite, her memoir, “Scoundrel Time”. Of her involvement with the hearings she said – “Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.”

PICASSO

2006-04-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

PABLO PICASSO

APOSTLES' SONG

2006-04-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Look at all my trials and tribulations

Sinking in a gentle pool of wine

What's that in the bread it's gone to my head

Till this evening is this morning life is fine

Always hoped that I'd be an apostle

Knew that I would make it if I tried

If I tried

Then when we retire we can write the gospels

So they'll still talk about us when we've died

EMMA GOLDMAN II

2006-04-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

I am working hard this week, forgive me for cribbing, but I wanted to post some more about Emma, fine free spirit and anti-fascist that she was...

Emma Goldman was a legend in her own lifetime. Born in Lithuania on 27th June 1869, she emigrated to the United States with her sister Helena in 1885. Like so many other East European immigrants, she found work in a clothing factory. The following year four Chicago anarchists were executed.
They had been prominent trade union activists leading the struggle for an eight-hour day. Framed for a bombing, the authorities hoped that this would scare off the emerging trade union movement, especially its anarchist component. The international outcry which followed these executions on trumped up charges helped to shape Emma's radical and anarchist ideals, which lasted throughout her long life.
Emma Goldman was a formidable public speaker and a prolific writer. Her whole life was devoted to struggle and she was controversial even within the radical and anarchist movement itself. She was one of the first radicals to address the issue of homosexuality, she was a fighter for women's rights, and she advocated the virtues of free love. These ideas were viewed with suspicion by those who placed their faith in the cure-all solution of economic class warfare and they were denounced by many of her contemporaries as "bourgeois inspired" at best.
To mainstream Americans, Emma was known as a demonic "dynamite eating anarchist". She toured the States, agitating and lecturing everywhere she went. She was hounded for much of her life by FBI agents and was imprisoned in 1893, 1901, 1916, 1918, 1919, and 1921 on charges ranging from incitement to riot to advocating the use of birth control to opposition to World War 1.
A self proclaimed anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, assassinated President William McKinley in 1901 and this event unleashed a massive wave of anti-anarchist hysteria throughout the States. Emma was blamed for his action and was forced into hiding for a time. She was deported from the United States, Holland, France, and was denied entry to many other countries. None of this daunted her, she began publishing 'Mother Earth' magazine in 1906 and was very active in the No-Conscription League.
She shared a life long friendship with her political comrade Alexander Berkman. Both of them were deported from the USA to Russia in 1919. At first, Emma was excited to see at first hand the revolution she had fought to bring about all her life. However, it did not take long for her to realise that the Bolsheviks were not lovers of freedom nor partisans of workers' control. What had been created was a massive dictatorship. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the Bolsheviks In 1921 was too much for Emma and Berkman, and they left Russia in a state of disillusionment.
She spent the next number of years moving from country to country and writing a long series of articles and two books about her experiences and struggles. She eventually lived in Britain for many years where she wrote her autobiography and continued supporting workers' struggles in different parts of the world. Suffering from grave illness, Alexander Berkman committed suicide in 1936. Just a week later an anarchist inspired revolution erupted in Spain. Over the next three years Emma committed herself to the support of the anarchists and their fight against fascism and Stalinism.
Her long and incredible life came to an end in 1940. Only after her death was she admitted back into America where she was buried in Chicago near the Haymarket martyrs who had helped to shape her life.

A fine full biography...

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/goldman/aando/bio.html

GEORGE ORWELL IN SPAIN III

2006-04-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o'clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt--it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness. Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock--no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense. The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. 'Gosh! Are you hit?' People gathered round. There was the usual fuss--'Lift him up! Where's he hit? Get his shirt open!' etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it out, but discovered that my right arm was paralysed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of the body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said. Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a bandage and one of the little bottles of alcohol they gave us for field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash on to the wound as a pleasant coolness. They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. 'The artery's gone,' I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting--I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me-- wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.

THE SOUL ABSENT - GARCIA LORCA

2006-04-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

The Soul Absent

Neither the bull nor the fig tree know you,
nor your horses, nor the ants under your floor.
Neither the child nor the evening know you,
because you have died forever.

The spine of rock does not know you,
nor the black satin where you are ruined,
Your mute remembrance does not know you,
because you have died forever.

Autumn will come with its snails,
grapes in mist, and clustered mountains,
but no one will want to gaze in your eyes,
because you have died forever.

Because you have died forever,
like all the dead of the Earth,
like all the dead forgotten
in a pile of lifeless curs.

No one knows you. No. But I sing of you.
I sing for others your profile and grace.
The famed ripeness of your understanding.
Your appetite for death, pleasure in its savour.
The sadness your valiant gaiety contained.

Not for a long time, if ever, will there be born,
an Andalusian so brilliant, so rich in adventure.
I sing his elegance in words that moan,
and remember a sad breeze through the olive-trees.

Garcia Lorca

Emma

2006-04-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

For the wiseasses a more flattering photo of Emma Goldman taken before she spent 50 years fighting for social justice...

EMMA GOLDMAN

2006-04-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Now here was a dangerous mug. To mainstream Americans, Emma Goldman was known as a demonic "dynamite eating anarchist". She toured the States, agitating and lecturing everywhere she went. She was hounded for much of her life by FBI agents and was imprisoned in 1893, 1901, 1916, 1918, 1919, and 1921 on charges ranging from incitement to riot to advocating the use of birth control to opposition to World War 1. In 1937 she traveled to Spain to interview Buenaventura Durruti.

Durruti Is Dead, Yet Living By Emma Goldman

Durruti, whom I saw but a month ago, lost his life in the street-battles of Madrid. My previous knowledge of this stormy petrel of the Anarchist and revolutionary movement in Spain was merely from reading about him. On my arrival in Barcelona I learned many fascinating stories of Durruti and his column. They made me eager to go to the Aragon front, where he was the leading spirit of the brave and valiant militias, fighting against fascism.
I arrived at Durruti's headquarters towards evening, completely exhausted from the long drive over a rough road. A few moments with Durruti was like a strong tonic, refreshing and invigorating. Powerful of body as if hewn from the rocks of Montserrat, Durruti easily represented the most dominating figure among the Anarchists I had met since my arrival in Spain. His terrific energy electrified me as it seemed to effect everyone who came within its radius.
I found Durruti in a veritable beehive of activity. Men came and went, the telephone was constantly calling for Durruti. In addition was the deafening hammering of workers who were constructing a wooden shed for Durruti's staff. Through all the din and constant call on his time Durruti remained serene and patient. He received me as if he had known me all his life. The graciousness and warmth from a man engaged in a life and death struggle against fascism was something I had hardly expected.
I had heard much about Durruti's mastery over the column that went by his name. I was curious to learn by what means other than military drive he had succeeded in welding together 10,000 volunteers without previous military training and experience of any sort. Durruti seemed surprised that I, an old Anarchist should even ask such a question.
"I have been an Anarchist all my life," he replied, "I hope I have remained one. I should consider it very sad indeed, had I to turn into a general and rule the men with a military rod. They have come to me voluntarily, they are ready to stake their lives in our antifascist fight. I believe, as I always have, in freedom. The freedom which rests on the sense of responsibility. I consider discipline indispensable, but it must be inner discipline, motivated by a common purpose and a strong feeling of comradeship." He had gained the confidence of the men and their affection because he had never played the part of a superior. He was one of them. He ate and slept as simply as they did. Often even denying himself his own portion for one weak or sick, and needing more than he. And he shared their danger in every battle. That was no doubt the secret of Durruti's success with his column. The men adored him. They not only carried out all his instructions, they were ready to follow him in the most perilous venture to repulse the fascist position.
I had arrived on the eve of an attack Durruti had prepared for the following morning. At daybreak Durruti, like the rest of the militia with his rifle over his shoulder, led the way. Together with them he drove the enemy back four kilometers, and he also succeeded in capturing a considerable amount of arms the enemies had left behind in their flight.
The moral example of simple equality was by no means the only explanation of Durruti's influence. There was another, his capacity to make the militiamen realize the deeper meaning of the antifascist war--the meaning that had dominated his own life and that he had learned to articulate to the poorest and most undeveloped of the poor.
Durruti told me of his approach to the difficult problems of the men who come for leave of absence at moments when they were most needed at the front. The men evidently knew their leader--they knew his decisiveness--his iron will. But also they knew the sympathy and gentleness hidden behind his austere exterior. How could he resist when the men told him of illness at home--parents, wife or child?
Durruti hounded before the glorious days of July 1936, like a wild beast from country to country. Imprisoned time on end as a criminal. Even condemned to death. He, the hated Anarchist, hated by the sinister trinity, the bourgeoisie, the state and the church. This homeless vagabond incapable of feeling as the whole capitalistic puck proclaimed. How little they knew Durruti. How little they understood his loving heart. He had never remained indifferent to the needs of his fellows. Now however, he was engaged in a desperate struggle with fascism in the defense of the Revolution, and every man was needed at his place. Verily a difficult situation to meet. But Durruti's ingeniousness conquered all difficulties. He listened patiently to the story of woe and then held forth on the cause of illness among the poor. Overwork, malnutrition, lack of air, lack of joy in life.
"Don't you see comrade, the war you and I are waging is to safeguard our Revolution and the Revolution is to do away with the misery and suffering of the poor. We must conquer our fascist enemy. We must win the war. You are an essential part of it. Don't you see, comrade?" Durruti's comrades did see, they usually remained.
Sometimes one would prove abdurate, and insist on leaving the front. "All right," Durruti tells him, "but you will go on foot, and by the time you reach your village, everybody will know that your courage had failed you, that you have run away, that you have shirked your self-imposed task." That worked like magic. The man pleads to remain. No military brow-beating, no coercion, no disciplinary punishment to hold the Durruti column at the front. Only the vulcanic energy of the man carries everyone along and makes them feel as one with him.
A great man this Anarchist Durruti, a born leader and teacher of men, thoughtful and tender comrade all in one. And now Durruti is dead. His great heart beats no more. His powerful body felled down like a giant tree. And yet, and yet--Durruti is not dead. The hundreds of thousands that turned out Sunday, November 22nd, 1936, to pay Durruti their last tribute have testified to that.
No, Durruti is not dead. The fires of his flaming spirit lighted in all who knew and loved him, can never be extinguished. Already the masses have lifted high the torch that fell from Durruti's hand. Triumphantly they are carrying it before them on the path Durruti had blazoned for many years. The path that leads to the highest summit of Durruti's ideal. This ideal was Anarchism--the grand passion of Durruti's life. He had served it utterly. He remained faithful to it until his last breath.
If proof were needed of Durruti's tenderness his concern in my safety gave it to me. There was no place to house me for the night at the General-Staff quarters. And the nearest village was Pina. But it had been repeatedly bombarded by the fascists. Durruti was loathe to send me there. I insisted it was alright. One dies but once. I could see the pride in his face that his old comrade had no fear. He let me go under strong guard.
I was grateful to him because it gave me a rare chance to meet many of the comrades in arms of Durruti and also to speak with the people of the village. The spirit of these much-tried victims of fascism was most impressive.
The enemy was only a short distance from Pina on the other side of a creek. But there was no fear or weakness among the people. Heroically they fought on. "Rather dead, than fascist rule," they told me. "We stand and fall with Durruti in the antifascist fight to the last man."
In Pina I discovered a child of eight years old, an orphan who had already been harnessed to daily toil with a fascist family. Her tiny hands were red and swollen. Her eyes, full of horror from the dreadful shocks she had already suffered at the hands of Franco's hirelings. The people of Pina are pitifully poor. Yet everyone gave this ill-treated child care and love she had never known before.
The European Press has from the very beginning of the antifascist war competed with each other in calumny and vilification of the Spanish defenders of liberty. Not a day during the last four months but what these satraps of European fascism did not write the most sensational reports of atrocities committed by the revolutionary forces. Every day the readers of these yellow sheets were fed on the riots and disorders in Barcelona and other towns and villages, free from the fascist invasion.
Having travelled over the whole of Catalonia, Aragon, and the Levante, having visited every city and village on the way, I can testify that there is not one word of truth in any of the bloodcurdling accounts I had read in some of the British and Continental press.
A recent example of the utter unscrupulous news-fabrication was furnished by some of the papers in regard to the death of the Anarchist and heroic leader of the antifascist struggle, Buenaventura Durruti.
According to this perfectly absurd account, Durruti's death is supposed to have called forth violent dissension and outbreaks in Barcelona among the comrades of the dead revolutionary hero Durruti.
Whoever it was who wrote this preposterous invention he could not have been in Barcelona. Much less know the place of Buenaventura Durruti in the hearts of the members of the CNT and FAI. Indeed, in the hearts and estimation of all regardless of their divergence with Durruti's political and social ideas.
In point of truth, there never was such complete oneness in the ranks of the popular front in Catalonia, as from the moment when the news of Durruti's death became known until the last when he was laid to rest.
Every party of every political tendency fighting Spanish fascism turned out en masse to pay loving tribute to Buenaventura Durruti. But not only the direct comrades of Durruti, numbering hundreds of thousands and all the allies in the antifascist struggle, the largest part of the population of Barcelona represented an incessant stream of humanity. All had come to participate in the long and exhausting funeral procession. Never before had Barcelona witnessed such a human sea whose silent grief rose and fell in complete unison.
As to the comrades of Durruti--comrades closely knit by their ideal and the comrades of the gallant column he had created. Their admiration, their love, their devotion and respect left no place for discord and dissension. They were as one in their grief and in their determination to continue the battle against fascism and for the realization of the Revolution for which Durruti had lived, fought and had staked his all until his last breath.
No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living. His glorious example will now be emulated by all the Catalan workers and peasants, by all the oppressed and disinherited. The memory of Durruti's courage and fortitude will spur them on to great deeds until fascism has been slain. Then the real work will begin--the work on the new social structure of human value, justice and freedom.
No, no! Durruti is not dead! He lives in us for ever and ever.

REPOST: ILYA EHRENBURG

2006-04-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

I hate to risk boring whattheheh, but as I have at least three new readers who probably haven't seen this, here goes. With a war raging in Iraq that threatens to spread to Iran, the fascists in our goverment against the fascists in theirs, I though this informative rant might just be timely...

Now here’s a guy who could lay down some serious smack against the fascists. Some thought, too serious. He is a controversial figure for his propaganda writings from Moscow during WWII when he exhorted soldiers of the Red Army to kill Nazi invaders in the strongest terms possible. Perhaps he did go too far as the Red Army desecrated Hitler’s fatherland encouraging the raping of German women as well. But then, they were wearing clothing and jewelry sacked from his country. Whatever your feelings about that there is no doubt that no one of his generation countered Hitler’s propaganda more forcefully. He reported on the Spanish War for several Russian Newspapers, drinking with Papa Hemmingway in Barcelona. A few words from the master:

“Unappeasable dark spite ignites the heart of fascism. This is the spite of the Ruhr magnates who in the twenties of this century became frightened of the morning dawn, of the maturity of nations, and of the idea of justice. This is the spite of Krupp, of Voegler, of the owners of Fiat and of Schneider who have called in a band of adventurers and unscrupulous killers for assistance. This is the spite of the Prussian barons, of the Andalusian earls, the Rumanian boyars and the Hungarian counts, the untalented and feeble-minded epigones of a once splendid world who look upon countries as hunting grounds with hounds, and at the peasants who collect acorns on the lord’s land as game. This is the spite of the little, ignorant, petty bourgeois, who is revolted by the complexity of culture, by the boldness of thought, and by progress. This is the spite of failures, of provincial Caesars, backwoods Napoleons who are thirsting to enter history, even if by the back door. This is the spite of the renegades who strive to defile everything that they once loved. This is the spite of old age, soullessness, and death.The Italian fascists, coming out onto the stage, dressing themselves up in black shirts, have established the cult of the she wolf and have adopted from the wolf pack the “Alala”. The Spanish Falangists have introduced the ritual of “betrothal and death”, carrying their banners to cemeteries, holding processions with naked hunchbacks, God’s fools, and gravediggers – processions resembling the nightmarish visions of Goya. The French Cagoulards put on blind capes taken from the Middle Ages born out of plague epidemics. The German SS men wear skull and crossbones on their sleeves. Goering has revived the executioner in a frock coat with an axe. Himmler has transferred into his torture chambers the torture instruments kept in the Nuremberg Museum. Even the Fascist window-dressing bears witness to black, desperate spite.Fascism is a monumental attempt to halt the course of history. It has resurrected certain rituals and delusions of the Middle Ages, but the peoples of the Middle Ages did not live only by these rituals and delusions; within them there burned a genuine faith; they created wonderful cathedrals, remarkable epic poems; with their labor, their ecstacy, even with their ignorance they prepared for the age of the Renaissance. The Fascists must not be compared with the peoples of the Middle Ages. They live in a different epoch. They attempted to abandon the concept of time; this explains their sterility. Of course Italy’s grapes still continued to yield wine even under Mussolini; of course Germany’s factories continued to function even under Hitler. But the Fascists did not create anything. They only mobilized contemporary technology for the struggle against the spirit of the time. They turned all achievements of civilization towards destruction.Italy was justly considered the land of the arts. Fascism did not give birth to any artists; Fascism killed artists. Can the Italian people be proud of the conquest of Ethiopia, which was subsequently lost, proud of the use of mustard gas against unarmed herdsmen, proud of the destruction of Malaga, of the shootings in Greece and the gallows in the Ukraine? Did the spirit of Da Vinci, Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Garibaldi express itself in these crimes? When reading the illiterate and dull books of Rosenberg , the articles of Goebbles and Streicher, can we find therein a shadow of German genius, the lucidity of Goethe, the complexity of Hengel, the love of freedom of the romantics? The destruction of hundreds of cities, Europe turned into a desert – such is the creative activity of Fascism. Countries cleared of people and the human head cleared of thought – this is Hitler’s ideal.It is not surprising that Fascism is attracting the dregs of humanity, people with a slovenly biography, sadists, mental freaks, traitors. The untalented painter Hitler, the untalented novelist Goebbles, the untalented dramatist Mussolini - is it not striking that at the head of Fascists States there are people who dreamed of artistic laurels and were denounced as mountebanks? Fascism attracts all renegades. Judas hanged himself out of sorrow. The Fascist Judases prefer to hang others. Mussolini appeased his spite by the killing of two former comrades – socialists. In France Hitler found two followers, two apostates - Laval and Doriot. Sexual perversion and, in the first place, sadism have become a stronghold of Fascism. The morphine addict Goering, the lecher Goebbles, the sadist Himmler,”Doctor” Ley, the specialist in seducing those underage, degenerates about whose whereabouts directors of prisons and hospitals should be arguing, found themselves in ministerial positions."

There is more, it was a long rant, but you get the idea…

POLITICAL SCIENCE

2006-04-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

In honor of all the news reports breaking of Bush's intention to strike Iran, including the use of Nukes, I give you....

Political Science

Randy Newman

No one likes us-I don't know why

We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try

But all around, even our old friends put us down

Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?

No, they're spiteful and they're hateful

They don't respect us-so let's surprise them

We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old

Africa is far too hot

And Canada's too cold

And South America stole our name

Let's drop the big one

There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia

Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo

We'll build an All American amusement park there

They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paree

More room for you and more room for me

And every city the whole world round

Will just be another American town

Oh, how peaceful it will be

We'll set everybody free

You'll wear a Japanese kimono

And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow

So let's drop the big one now

Let's drop the big one now

MEET THE ADMIRAL II

2006-04-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

Just to change gears a bit, more of the admiral's doings...

When I first wnet to Santa Eulalia, I hired a house for a friend who was coming and asked Plat‚ if he would make a garden in front of it. He refused, politely but firmly, and later that day Cosmi told me why. The land had formerly been Plat‚'s own. In fact, Plat‚ had been one of the largest landowners in the town, years back. It seemed that he had had a wife of whome he was very fond, and the wife ha developed some ailment that had baffled not only the island doctor's (of whom the least said the better) but doctors on the mainland as well. Plat‚ had worried until he was ill, too, and had spent a fortune trying to cure her. After she died, Plat‚ started drinking and gambling until he had lost everything he had left. He was unhappy and morose to the point of madness until the remains of his property and money were gone. Then suddenly he became aloof and merry. He moved into a little shack not larger than eight feet by four, on the top of the hill beside the church, slept on straww, fished for his meals and worked only when he needed wine, maybe six hours a week. One of the jobs he would consent to do now and then was to fetch bundles of rosemary for kindling fires, and each morning the fragrant smoke of rosemary would pervade the town.

Old friends! Beloved island of Ibiza! My chosen town! How can I believe that you are of the past, cut off from me as irrevocably as the legendary days of the Moors, the camps of the Romans, the settlements of Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Iberians, all lost in the mirrors of history? You are not all dead, my former comrades. There are dawns in unending series to come, and the rising moon will lift the identical shape of Ibiza from the darkened sea. Shall I ever find your equal or your equivalent? Can I survive another transplantation? Shall I be always saying, "Those were the good old days. They have been destroyed." Or can I keep those scenes a while by re-enacting them, with a pin on the discs of my brain, until they are worn and emit false tones and eventually are discarded?

2006-04-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

"Sacred Cows make the best hamburger." - Twain

ERICA JONG - AUTHENTIC FEMINIST

2006-04-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Off topic but to the point...

Flying high Her erotic, taboo-busting bestseller, Fear of Flying, was a sensation 30 years ago. But what does Erica Jong think of it now? Sharon KrumThursday July 17, 2003The Guardian
The woman who gave us the Zipless Fuck is going to be a grandmother. "A friend of mine said, when the baby arrives, he's going to start calling me the Zipless Granny." Erica Jong doubles over with laughter, and frankly, she is right to. Anyone harbouring visions of Jong sitting in a rocking chair, knitting baby booties, should get over it. At 61, she is still as lusty and provocative as the woman who penned the phrase three decades ago. Only today she doesn't regard the resultant notoriety as a millstone.
"I used to worry they would put zipless fuck on my tombstone," confesses Jong, who still has that thick, blonde mane, throaty laugh and throws four-letter words around like confetti. "I don't any more though. I know it's rare for a book to touch so many lives, and I am really humbled by it."
The book, of course, was Fear of Flying, and it has just been reissued to celebrate its 30th anniversary. For those too young in 1973 to either read it or remember the frenzy, just know it was the Harry Potter of its time. Except, Fear of Flying's obsessive readers were not children, but women stuck in mundane marriages, having lacklustre sex, shocked that their lives had become reduced to the sink and the see-saw.
Fear of Flying, with its talk-dirty-to-me dialogue and sexually unsatisfied wife as protagonist, was their salvation. "I know that psychiatrists were recommending the book to female patients. There were so many women then who couldn't fantasise or masturbate because they were so uptight, and here was a book that said, go ahead," says Jong.
Fear Of Flying tells the story of Isadora Wing, a 29-year-old writer five years into her second marriage to psychiatrist Dr Bennett Wing. Like all women who came of age in the 50s, Isadora was raised to believe that marriage was just like a Doris Day movie. "Nobody bothered to tell you what marriage was really about," says Isadora when she discovers the American fantasy of marriage is a crock. "You weren't even provided, like European girls, with a philosophy of cynicism and practicality.
"Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the tastebuds, no bittersweet edge, no danger."
As Isadora's marriage unravels, she escapes into the arms of a British psychoanalyst and, as they travel through Europe, she mentally revisits past relationships, lovers and the sexual fantasies that sustained her when the aforementioned bombed in bed. Her ultimate was the now infamous Zipless Fuck, a phrase Jong had no idea would enter the popular lexicon. "The fantasy was to have sex that was just totally wild and dreamlike. Nothing real or messy, " she says.
As Jong wrote in Fear of Flying: "The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover." Jong's honesty about the tedium of marriage, coupled with her frank dialogue, turned the book into a phenomenon. "To women who grew up in the 50s and had an uneasy relationship to sexual revolution in the 60s," says feminist author Phyllis Chesler, "Erica brought them to a personal reckoning with identity, including their sexuality. For them this was life altering."
Jong was born in New York City into a neurotic Jewish family straight from central casting. She began writing as a child, studied 18th-century literature, and published her first book of poetry, the erotic Fruits and Vegetables, in 1971. Though she claims she has been a feminist since her teens - "I watched my mother, a great painter, sidelined because she was a woman. Her anger powered my feminism" - she began her first novel in the male voice. "I didn't think anyone would be interested in a woman's point of view."
When her publisher read her male novel, he kindly suggested she shelve it. "He said, 'Why don't you write a book in that fierce female voice of your poems?' And that freed me." Jong had read John Updike's Couples, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, and wondered why women weren't writing about their emotional and sexual lives with the same candour. Jong resolved to march readers into a woman's brain and her bedroom, then give them a front-row seat. Listen to Isadora on her husband: "He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvellous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever."
No surprise then when Fear of Flying was published, reaction was volcanic. Despite inroads made by the women's movement, in 1973, nice girls still didn't write about sex, let alone call it fucking. Social commentators blamed the blonde, mini-skirted Jong for encouraging promiscuity. But for mainstream feminists this was Christmas; a book that celebrated the sexually liberated female. And ordinary women from every social class, "many of whom never read novels", says Jong, clamoured for a copy. "They would say to me, this is my life. How did you get inside my head?"
But some critics got their knickers in an almighty twist. "Erica paid a terrible price when the book came out," says feminist Chesler. "She was a woman writing about sex and admitting she enjoyed it. She had to be punished. You can bet Roth was not treated this way." In America, though the New York Times called it a whiny, feminist novel, Updike raved - "[Chaucer's] Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this." And Miller gushed: "This book will make literary history... because of it, women are going to find their own voice and give us great sagas of sex, life, joy and adventure."
"But when it came out in London, I got hateful reviews," Jong says, proceeding to recite one by Paul Theroux. "Erica Jong's witless heroine looms like a mammoth pudenda." Martin Amis dismissed Isadora's journey as "horrible and embarrassing", adding "for all her laborious sensitivity to experience, Miss Jong's skin is light years thick when it comes to creativity."
"When I read that shit from Amis oh," she screams. "Reviews used to get to me, but they don't bother me any more. To hell with them. I'm still here." Indeed she is, and 30 years after turning the culture on its head, Jong is still annoying people, which she loves. "I took it as my life's work to write about the inner lives of women, and to do it properly that means the emotional and sexual. And when you do that in a culture that is still so puritanical, people are going to give you shit. I don't mind."
What she does mind are young women today who refuse to call themselves feminists and insist the women's movement is obsolete. "They think equal pay and women talking dirty on Sex and the City means we've won, we don't need to fight any more," says Jong, rolling her eyes. A committed feminist, she lectures widely on women's rights, and yet has been branded a traitor to the cause by militants because she supports pornography. Her avowed love and need for men hasn't helped her feminist cred either, not that she cares. Jong has married four times, and calls current husband, lawyer Ken Burrows, "my soulmate".
But Jong knows the feminist revolution is hardly over. "I understand a woman writing about sex 30 years ago was shocking. What bothers me is that nothing seems to have changed." People are still unhappy with their sex lives. As she wrote recently: "Perhaps the problem is not in our marriages but in our expectations. Everything we see on television, in the movies, tells us that passion is the norm in life so we feel deprived when we don't get it. How come Sarah Jessica Parker gets it and we don't? How come Demi Moore gets it and we don't? And our glossy mags would do well to stop teasing us with the impossible while pretending to be helping us."
"The truth is that ziplessness has always been a platonic ideal rather than a daily reality. Yes, wild passionate sex exists. It can even exist in marriage. But it is occasional, not daily."
Jong says feminists can only pack up and go home when women can write erotica and our culture will consider it literary, not dirty. And that hasn't happened yet. "I was amazed when Sappho's Leap came out [Jong's book which was published in the US earlier this year] and I am still getting bullshit about writing about sex."
Recently Jong spoke to a female English literature class studying Fear of Flying. It upset her that the students identified with Isadora so much. "They told me they still feel the conflict between motherhood and a career, and that women in touch with their sexuality are still sluts. I was devastated. How can anyone think the women's movement is irrelevant when you hear that?" she shrieks tearing at her hair. "It just tells me we still have a lot of work to do creating a society where women's sexuality can be powerful and we aren't afraid of it."

FELICIA BROWNE

2006-04-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

Felicia Browne was the first British subject to die in the Spanish Civil War. An accomplished sculptress and artist she was active in the communist party. On vacation in Barcelona in July,1936 when the General's rose in opposition to the Republic, she, without hesitation, and fending off considerable discouragement from friends and party officials, joined a communist militia. On the 25th of August, 1936 Felicia was killed in action on the Aragon Front, part of a band of raiders that attempted to dynamite a Facist munitions train. She was 32 years old. Unfortunately very little other than these facts are available on the web. I cannot even find a photo. Above left is one of her sketches; above right we have a photo of her mother British stage actress Edith Johnston. From Felicia's obit:

The newspapers can be relied upon to make capital out of the fact that she was a woman, and she was the last person to wish to lay any undue stress upon the significance of this fact. But it has significance. She had it in her to represent the very best type of the new woman, but the kind of upbringing to which she was automatically subjected and and the forces with which she had to compete in a society where commercial values are preeminent, seriously and unnecessarily delayed her in harmonising all the remarkable powers within her.
She had most of the best human characteristics, but she conceived her own variety more as a source of opposition than of enjoyment. She was without guile, duplicity or vanity; painfully truthful and honest, immensely kind and generous, completely humane, loving any aspect of livingness, and as capable of enormous humour as she was deeply serious. She was gifted at every craft that she tried, a witty letter-writer, an amusing cartoonist, a vital and interesting companion, and socially much too gracious to belong credibly to the twentieth century. She was enormously well read, with a literary visual capacity which would have made her an excellent illustrator, particularly of Dante and Kafka, by whose strange and elaborate cosmogonies she became fascinated in the last year. She loved and appreciated good music and poetry, and whenever she got it, good food and drink - though materially she was remarkably careless and hopelessly generous.
But if her fighting was the expression of her deeply conscientious but less happy side, at least she had intellectual faith in the future. And she found happiness at the end, as far as one can judge from her letters, in a real sense of comradeship with her fellow militiamen. Intellectually she was quite clear about what was necessary for the next few years other life. In a letter to a friend written just before she went to Spain she said, 'You say I am escaping and evading things by not painting or making sculpture. If there is no painting or sculpture to be made, I cannot make it. I can only make out of what is valid and urgent to me. If painting or sculpture were more valid or urgent to me than the earthquake which is happening in the revolution, or if these two were reconciled so that the demands of the one didn't conflict (in time, even, or concentration) with the demands of the other, I should paint or make sculpture.'

OLIVER LAW

2006-04-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

Oliver Law, extreme left, with other Brigade Commanders of the Internationals. On extreme right future leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito .... I've had a bit of a day, so I will let wikipedia tell his story.

Oliver Law (1899-July 9, 1937) was an African American communist, labor organizer, and social activist, who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
Born in Texas, he served in the army in World War I, then moved to Chicago, where he worked at various jobs. He joined the Communist Party in 1929, during the Great Depression, and became a prominent activist.
Strongly opposed to Fascism, he led demonstrations against Italy's occupation of Ethiopia (Second Italo-Abyssinian War), and in 1936 he travelled to Spain to join the forces fighting against Francisco Franco and the Nationalists. An outstanding soldier with considerable military experience, he served in a machine gun company and soon became the commander of the battalion. It was the first time that an African American commanded white American troops.
In 1936 Law joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a unit that volunteered to fight for the Popular Front government during the Spanish Civil War. Law arrived in Spain in January 1937 and joined the other International Brigades at Albacete.
After failing to take Madrid by frontal assault, General Francisco Franco gave orders for the road that linked the city to the rest of Republican Spain to be cut. A Nationalist force of 40,000 men, including men from the Army of Africa, crossed the Jarama River on February 11 1937.
General José Miaja sent three International Brigades to the Jarama Valley to block the advance. Law first saw action on February 27. He performed so well in the battle he was promoted to commander of the machine-gun company. A few weeks later he became battalion commander.
On July 6, the Popular Front government launched a major offensive in an attempt to relieve the threat to Madrid. General Vicente Rojo Lluch sent the Republican Army to Brunete, challenging Nationalist control of the western approaches to the capital. The 80,000 Republican soldiers made good early progress but they were brought to a halt when General Francisco Franco brought up his reserves.
Fighting in hot summer weather, the Internationals suffered heavy losses. Oliver Law was killed on 9th July when he was leading his men in an attack against Mosquito Ridge.
After the war, an anti-Communist, William Herrick, claimed that Law had been murdered by his own men who objected to being led by a black man. This claim has been dismissed by Harry Fisher, the battalion runner, who took part in the offensive:
He was the first man over the top. He was in the furthest position when he was hit by a Fascist bullet in the chest.
David Smith, the medic who attempted to staunch the bleeding with a coagulant, also confirmed that he had been killed by the Nationalists.

ROBERT MERRIMAN

2006-04-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Robert Merriman is a bit of a mysterious figure; I could find very little about him prior to his involvement in the Spanish Civil war on the internet. We do know that he was the son of a lumberjack, born somewhere in the western U.S. in 1908. He studied economics at University of Nevada and spent two years in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps because it paid seven and a half dollars a month. He also worked as a ranch hand, cement worker and pulp feeder to help finance his studies. After completing his studies Merriman began teaching at University of California. While in California and became active in left-wing politics, and supported the San Francisco General Strike in 1934, an action called by the longshoremen after their strike had been brutally broken by police resulting in sixty four injuries and two deaths.
In 1937 Merriman traveled to Spain with his wife Marion and joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Because of his reserve training he was assigned to train other American volunteers arriving in Spain. Merriman taught the men how to fieldstrip rifles and machine-guns. He also organized a series of lectures on scouting, fortifications and signaling. On February 11th, 1937 Franco, after failing to take Madrid, ordered 40,000 troops to isolate Madrid from the rest of the Republic sending them across the Jarama River. Spanish General José Miaja ordered the Brigade into battle with Merriman in command. On the first day of Battle sixty of his men were wounded and twenty killed. On February 27th, the brigade left the trenches to attack the fascist again, losing another 113 men. Merriman was severely wounded in the shoulder. Merriman’s replacement, Oliver Law, was the first black commander of an integrated American unit in history. After recuperating Merriman fought in several more major battles and was killed in March 1938 in the Battle of Gandesa.
From his wife Marion we have this interesting account of entering Madrid and meeting Papa Hemingway;
As we drove into Madrid, the first thing we saw was the big bullring - the Moorish architecture, arch upon arch, dusky brown with beautiful coloring in the tiles, the columns. It was magnificent, I thought. Entering Madrid was like entering any big city's industrial section. We drove through a ring of factories, then into the nicer part of the city.
'Even under bombardment, Madrid is marvelous!' I said to Bob. The wide tree-lined boulevards and modern buildings had an air of dignity that even blocks of bombed-out ruins could not dispel.
But the scene changed, quickly. As we walked down a broad boulevard, we heard the crack of rifle fire. Then the tempo picked up. 'That's machine gun fire,' Bob said. The machine-guns rattled in the distance, perhaps a few blocks away, I couldn't be sure. Then we heard the boom of artillery and the reality of Madrid at war returned deeply to me. The artillery shell landed some distance away, collapsing part of a building, which fell into a rubble of dust. We dashed down the street, staying close to the buildings. The horror of war was driven home to me. I was terrified.
I was shaking badly when we entered the Hotel Florida and went directly up the stairs to Hemingway's room. Bob steadied me, then knocked on the door.
'Hello, I'm Merriman,' Bob said as Hemingway, looking intense but friendly, opened the door.
'I know,' Hemingway said. Bob introduced me, and the writer greeted me warmly.
Then Hemingway and Bob fell into conversation about the war and the broadcast they planned. They were joined by John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and a scattering of American volunteers and correspondents who sipped Hemingway's scotch and compared notes and stories. I slipped into an old chair, still quite shaken by the action outside.
I studied Bob and Hemingway. They got along. Each talked for a moment, then listened to the other. How different they were, I thought, Bob at twenty-eight, Hemingway at least a good ten years older. Hemingway seemed complex. He was big and bluff and macho. He didn't appear to be a braggart but he got across the message, through an air of self-assurance, that he could handle what he took on.
Bob was taller than Hemingway by several inches. They looked at each other through the same kind of round glasses, Bob's frames of tortoise shell, Hemingway's of steel.
Hemingway was animated, gesturing as he asked questions, scratching his scalp through thick dark hair, perplexed, then scowling, then, something setting him off, laughing from deep down. He wore a sweater, buttoned high on his chest, and a dark tie, loosened at the neck.
Bob was clean shaven. Hemingway needed a shave. He didn't appear to be growing a beard, he just seemed to need a shave, the scrubble roughing his cheeks and chin. He looked like he had had a hard night. He had a knot on his forehead, probably suffered in some roustabout skirmish.
Hemingway sipped a scotch, as did Bob. Someone offered me a drink, and I thought I'd never been as happy in my life to get a drink of whiskey. Even in the relatively safe room I remained frightened. The sheer madness of the war would not leave my mind.
As Bob and Hemingway talked, the contrast between them struck me time and again. Bob was an intellectual, and he looked like one. Hemingway was an intellectual, but he looked more like an adventurer. Bob looked like an observer. Hemingway looked like a man of action.
I was fascinated by Dos Passes, whom I had always thought was a better writer than Hemingway. John DOS Passes was, without question, a seasoned writer of the prose of war. But as a man, he didn't impress me. I thought he was wishy-washy. I couldn't make out everything he was saying, but his message was clear - for whatever reasons, hewanted out of there, out of Hemingway's room, out of bomb-shaken Madrid.
I was scared too, with good reason. But somehow Dos Passes acted more than scared. I guessed it was his uncertainty, his facial expressions, his general attitude that this was a lost cause, given the superior strength of the Franco forces. Dos Passes criticized the Spanish Republic, for which Americans were fighting and dying.
Hemingway, on the other hand, let you know by his presence and through his writing exactly where he stood. Hemingway had told the world of the murder in Madrid, including the murder of children by fascist bombing. He had told about 'the noises kids make when they are hit. There is a sort of foretaste of that when the child sees the planes coming and yells "Aviacion!" Then, too, some kids are very quiet when they are hit - until you move them.'

.

Swans Reflecting Elephants-Dali (1937)

2006-04-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Just a Dali that I like...click comments for larger version ...comments?

ELLIOT PAUL

2006-04-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

"I suppose everyone who is built for a picador wants to wear the cloth of gold, face the bull on his own level, and be fearless and precise. And Anglo-Saxons long to be Latins, and vice versa."

Elliot Paul

Elliot Paul has not gained the Stature of his compatriots of the “Lost Generation” – Gertrude Stein, James Thurber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway , but he was a very fine writer, perhaps the equal of any of them. In Paris in the twenties he worked as a journalist for the Paris Herald and Tribune, co-edited a monthly literary review “transition” with Eugene Jolas, and produced, under a pseudonym, detective-genre pulp fiction. His work on “transition” yielded surprising results, he gained the regular contributions of the two warring lions of expatriate experimental literature, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The young Ernest Hemingway said that if you mentioned Joyce twice to Stein, you were dead: Paul was the exception to the rule. In 1931 he suffered a nervous breakdown and disappeared to seek recovery in the village of Santa Eulalia on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain. His disappearance caused much consternation on the left bank, prompting Stein to comment on his whereabouts in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He was to live in Izbia through the beginning of the Civil War, the takeover of Izbia by the facists and chronicles the crimes, committed on both sides, during this period in his fine book “The Life and Death of a Spanish Town.” But I do not wish to share with you so much the politics of this book, but the beauty of Paul’s prose…

“Far along the shore, among the worn and pocketed ledges, could be seen, before sunrise, a strange figure of a man, Plat‚, nicknamed the Admiral. He would have a short fishing rod or a staff in his hand and he knew where the fish and the small octopi would be lurking and feeding. No one knew the shores or the hills as Plat‚ did. Each mushroom, plant or herb was his familiar friend. He had long shaggy hair and a long unkempt beard, both of which he had shaved clean once a year, in midsummer. His legs and arms were thin; his voice a resonant bass, his face was tanned and wrinkled, except for his large dark blue eyes almost hidden by his shock of hair. He laughed, grinned and talked to himself when he was alone. In company he was silent until the wine began to work on him. Then he sang wild Moorish songs (he knew Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian and Arabic well) and accompanied himself on the table or bar with the heel of his hand in imitation of African drums. I have heard him walking home drunk in the brightest moonlight, carrying on a reproachful and defensive conversation aloud, one voice in Spanish, the other in French, sometimes softly and persuasively, often reaching an angry crescendo so that two of his selves would be bellowing at each other.
At dawn with his trousers legs rolled up above his diminutive knees, he would be walking along the rocks at the water's edge, around the point which sheltered the harbor to the north, or the other way from town, by the mouth of the small river, looking for his breakfast. He did not catch all the fish or the poulpes that he saw, but chose them as if the Mediterranean were his market, and its produce were laid out for him. Fish, mushrooms, wild strawberries, wild leeks, wild asparagus formed his steady diet. He did odd jobs just often enough to keep himself in wine, and tended a few flower and vegetable gardens because he was the best gardener in the Balearic Islands and was proud of his skill. Because of him, the backyards of Cosmi's and the Royalty were not like other backyards but were luxuriant with flowers - dahlias, golden glow, phlox, petunias, asters, small orange and lemon trees, all planted by Plat‚. They would grow for him almost like performing animals. There were many gardens in town, nearly every house had flowers growing near it, but Plat‚ had absorbed all the arts of the Moors in his long stay in Africa and had learned from the French how to trim and take care of trees.”
--------------------------------
If you have not read “Spanish Town” do yourself a favor and track it down.

ANDRE MALRAUX

2006-04-01T07:06:00.000-08:00

(above Andre Malraux and his wife, between John and Jacq and under the serene gaze of The Mona Lisa in "Camelot")

Andre Malraux, who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, led, arguably, the most colorful and controversial life of the twentieth century. While still in his twenties he was a temple-raider in Cambodia, an anti-colonial newspaper publisher in Saigon, and chronicler of the Guomindang uprising in China, (founded by Sun Yat-sen to oppose the Imperial Ching Dynasty, it’s leadership include strange bed fellows Chaing Kai Shek and Mao). Of his adventures in Southeast Asia he was later to say -“There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.” Although I have not read them, his novels of this period have been called “highly informative and erotic” a good combination, no? The titles include “LA VOIE ROYALE” (1930), and “La Condition humaine” (1933).
After his adventure in the orient he traveled as an amateur archaeologist to Yemen and Syria, emerged as a noted art historian and dealer -“Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved”and, not least, freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War. . On the outbreak of the war he acted as a go-between in negotiations between French Statesman Leon Blum and the Spanish Republic's Prime Minister Manuel Azana to buy French aircraft for the struggle. Later he organized a volunteer squadron of French flyers to fight for the Republic. The unit had twenty aircraft and a dozen French volunteer pilots, including Malraux himself. Twice wounded in the defense of Madrid he later toured the U.S. to drum up support for the Republic.
During World War II he became a member of the French Résistance. Two times he was captured and escaped from the Nazis. It was during this time that he was befriended by Résistance leader Charles De Gaulle -an association that would shape the remainder of his life. After the war De Gaulle appointed Malraux as his minister of information (1945-46). He also served as minister of cultural affairs (1960-69). It was during this time that he traveled to “Camelot” and arranged with Jack and Jackie Kennedy an extensive touring and exhibition of The Mona Lisa in the U.S. of this he said -“There has been talk of the risks this painting took by leaving the Louvre. But the risks taken by the boys who landed one day in Normandy-to say nothing of those who had preceded them 25 years before-were much more certain.”
Malraux died in Paris in November of 1976, two years after touring a famine stricken Bangladesh; he was not without his detractors. Called dilettante and poseur by men not fit to carry his luggage, a mere listing of his friends and associates – Piccaso, Chagall, De Gaulle, Hemingway, Mao, John and Jackie Kennedy puts to lie their feeble slanders. As John Kennedy Toole wrote in Confederacy of Dunces -"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him”.

MODERATION

2006-03-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

MODERATION

Do not lecture me moderation,

For I beheld the zealot's rapt gaze,

As he laughed in the vault,

Of a looted bank,

And set good money ablaze.

Do not whine of self preservation,

I will not have you so blab,

Remembering the selfless son,

Of Revolution,

Who took out a mortar with his cab.

And,please, do not speak of freedom,

As you watch the fascists,

devour Spain.

Your precious freedom will come to nothing,

If our Republic dies in vain.

Durrati

HUNGER

2006-03-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

HUNGER

Horde those sardines, little mothers,

We will hunger to be free,

And while I cannot speak for others,

When I soldier I eat voraciously.

And we'll see little wheat from Gaul,

Who will fuck as history is written,

And little meat from John Bull,

Whose precious capitalists we've smitten.

No, I fear, my little mothers,

We will hunger to be free.

The Germans will doubtless send us loaves,

Of steele, to blow up our houses,

And the Italians will send us groves,

Of men to tear at our daughters' blouses.

The fascists will not fail to feed,

Us death, to us and many others.

We will hunger to be freed,

Horde those sardines little mothers.

Durrati

RACIST

2006-03-29T23:02:00.000-08:00

I couldn't a said it better

THE ASS AND THE FLUTE

2006-03-29T16:19:00.000-08:00

Excuse me for being off topic but a quick post in honor of the dust-up at J.C's

Tomás de Iriarte(1750-1791)

The Ass and the Flute

This little fable heard,

It good or ill may be;

But it has just occurred

Thus accidentally.

Passing my abode,

Some fields adjoining me

A big ass on his road

Came accidentally.

And laid upon the spot,

A Flute he chanced to see,

Some shepherd had forgot

There accidentally.

The animal in front

To scan it nigh came he,

And snuffing loud as wont,

Blew accidentally.

The air it chanced around

The pipe went passing free

And thus the Flute a sound

Gave accidentally.

“O then,” exclaimed the Ass,

“I know to play it fine;

And who for bad shall class

This music asinine?”

Without the rules of art,

Even asses, we agree,

May once succeed in part,

Thus accidentally.

A Spaniard In The Works

2006-03-24T15:58:00.000-08:00

No John Lennon did not fight in Spain, but he did make two nods to the conflict during his Public Life. In 1967, taking a break from The Fab Four, he traveled to Spain to shoot "How I Won The War" playing the ironic "private Gripweed" (who else?) . Obstensiously about WW II, it actually looked more like the Spanish Civil War, and Lennon, ironically enough, played a cockney fascist, whom were scarce after the Blitz. The second nod was from his first book "A Spaniard in the Works. The title plays off a well used British phrase for causing confusion and mayhem...a favorite pastime of "The smart Beatle".

"A Spaniard in the Works "

Jesus El Pifco was a foreigner and he knew it. He had imigrateful from his little white slum in Barcelover a good thirsty year ago having first secured the handy job as coachman in Scotland. The job was with the Laird of McAnus, a canny old tin whom have a castle in the Highlads. The first thing Jesus E1 Pifco noticed in early the days was that the Laird didn't seem to have a coach of any discription or even a coach house you know, much to his dismable. But-and I use the word lightly-the Laird did seem to having some horses, each one sporting a fine pair of legs. Jesus fell in love with them at first sight, as they did with him, which was lucky, because his quarters were in the actually stables along side his noble four lepered friends
Pretty polly one could see Jesus almost every day, grooming his masters horses, brushing their manebits and hammering their teeth, whistling a quaint Spanish refrain dreaming of his loved wombs back home in their little white fascist bastard huts.
'A well pair of groomed horses I must say,' he would remark to wee Spastic Sporran the flighty chamberlain, whom he'd had his good eye on eversince Hogmanose.
'Nae sa bad' she would answer in her sliced Aberdeen, martin accent. 'Ye spend more time wi'yon horses than ye do wi' me,' with that she would storm back to her duties, carefully tying her chastity negro hardly to her skim.
Being a good catholic, Jesus wiped the spit from his face and turned the otha cheese-but she had gone leaving him once small in an agatha of christy.
'One cave she wolf go too farther, and I wolf leaf her' he said to his fave rave horse. Of course the horse didn't answer, because as you know they cannot speak, least of all to a garlic eating, stinking, little yellow greasy fascist bastard catholic Spaniard. They soon made it up howevans and Jesus and wee Spastic were once morphia unitely in a love that knew no suzie. The only thing that puzzled Jesus was why his sugarboot got so annoyed when he called her his little Spastic in public.
Little wonder howeapon, with her real name being Patrick, you see?
'Ye musna' call me Spastic whilst ma friends are here Jesus ma bonnie wee dwarf' she said irragated.
'But I cannot not say Patrick me little tartan bag' he replied all herb and angle inside. She looked down at him through a mass of naturally curly warts.
'But Spastic means a kind of cripple in English ma sweet wee Jesus, and ai'm no cripple as you well known!'
'That's true enough' said he 'but I didn't not realize being a foreigner and that, and also not knowing your countries culture and so force, and anywait I can spot a ample anywhere.'
He rambled on as Patrick knelt down lovingly with tears in her eye and slowly bit a piece of his bum. Then lifting her face upwarts, she said with a voice full of emulsion 'Can ye heffer forgive me Jesus, can ye?' she slobbed. He looked at her strangely as if she were a strangely, then taking her slowly right foot he cried; 'Parreesy el pino a strevaro qui bueno el franco senatro!' which rugby transplanted means-'Only if you've got green braces'-and fortunately she had.
They were married in the fallout, with the Lairds blessing of course, he also gave them a 'wee gifty'as he put it, which was a useful addition to their bottom lawyer. It was a special jar of seaet ointment made by generators of his forefingers to help get rid of Patricks aabs which she had unluckily caught from the Laird of McAnus himself at his late wifes (Lady McAnus') wake. They were overjoyced, and grapenut abun and beyond the call of duty.
'The only little crawlie things we want are babies,' quipped Jesus who was a sport. 'That's right sweety' answered Patrick reaching for him with a knowsley hall. 'Guid luck to you and yours' shouted the Laird from the old wing.
'God bless you sir' said Jesus quickly harnessing his wife with a dexterity that only practice can perfect. 'Come on me beauty' he whispered as he rode his wife at a steady trot towards the East Gate. 'We mustn't miss the first race my dear.'
'Not likely' snorted his newly wed wife breaking into a gullup. 'Not likely' she repeated.
The honeymood was don short by a "elephant from Mrs El Pifco (his mother) who was apparently leaving Barcelunder to see her eldest sod febore she died laughing, and besides the air would do her good she added. Patrick looked up from her nosebag and giggled.
'Don't joke about Mamma please if you donlang, she are all I have loft in the world and besides your mother's a bit of a brockwurst herselves' said Jesus, 'And if she's still alive when she gets here we can throw up a party for her and then she can meet all our ugly Scottish friends' he refleacd. 'On the other handle we can always use her as a scarecrab in the top field'said Patrick practically.
So they packed their suitcrates marked 'his and hearse' and set off for their employers highly home in the highlies.
'We're home Sir' said Jesus to the wizened tartan figure knelt crouching over a bag of sheep.
'Why are ye bask so soon'' inquired the Laird, immediately tecognizing his own staff through years of experience. 'I've had some bad jews from my Mammy-she's coming to seagull me, if its all ripe with you sir.' The Laird thought for a mumble, then his face lit up like a boiling wart.
'You're all fired' he smiled and went off whistling.

Orwell At War

2006-03-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

George Orwell (looming head and shoulders above his comrades and in the rear), prepares to march to the Aragon Front.

"It was an extraordinary life that we were living—an extraordinary way to be at war, if you could call it war. The whole militia chafed against the inaction and clamoured constantly to know why we were not allowed to attack. But it was perfectly obvious that there would be no battle for a long while yet, unless the enemy started it. Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. ‘This is not a war,’ he used to say, ‘it is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ As a matter of fact the stagnation on the Aragon front had political causes of which I knew nothing at that time; but the purely military difficulties—quite apart from the lack of reserves of men—were obvious to anybody.
To begin with, there was the nature of the country. The front line, ours and the Fascists’, lay in positions of immense natural strength, which as a rule could only be approached from one side. Provided a few trenches have been dug, such places cannot be taken by infantry, except in overwhelming numbers. In our own position or most of those round us a dozen men with two machine-guns could have held off a battalion. Perched on the hill-tops as we were, we should have made lovely marks for artillery; but there was no artillery. Sometimes I used to gaze round the landscape and long—oh, how passionately!—for a couple of batteries of guns. One could have destroyed the enemy positions one after another as easily as smashing nuts with a hammer. But on our side the guns simply did not exist. The Fascists did occasionally manage to bring a gun or two from Zaragoza and fire a very few shells, so few that they never even found the range and the shells plunged harmlessly into the empty ravines. Against machine-guns and without artillery there are only three things you can do: dig yourself in at a safe distance—four hundred yards, say—advance across the open and be massacred, or make small-scale night-attacks that will not alter the general situation. Practically the alternatives are stagnation or suicide.
There were about thirty of ourselves, including one Spaniard (Ramón, Williams’s brother-in-law), and there were a dozen Spanish machine-gunners. Apart from the one or two inevitable nuisances—for, as everyone knows, war attracts riff-raff—the English were an exceptionally good crowd, both physically and mentally. Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie—the grandson of the famous miners’ leader—who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia. It says a lot for the Spanish character that the English and the Spaniards always got on well together, in spite of the language difficulty. All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was ‘O.K., baby’, the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it. "

THE PIPING

2006-03-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

As Jackie-O liked my last offering and Blogspot has heretofore resisted my attempts to post I offer another of my poems...

THE PIPING

I chanced to hear a piping,

Beyond the fascist redoubt I was sniping,

Some Fascist lackey brute,

Most proficient on his flute.

I slung my rifle and waxed calm,

He played a bit of fluff from Brahms,

Brahms being alien to war,

I wished to hear some more.

The tree I crouched in clinging,

The night stars so clear and singing,

So real just a moment before,

Lost all substance as he finished the score.

The shot that got me hot and glancing,

The putrid infection the doctors are lancing,

Testify the power of his flute,

Which made this soldier moot.

If you chance to hear a piping,

Beyond the fascist redoubt you are sniping,

My suggestion? Plug up you ear,

Pour lead through the music you hear.

Durrati

JUAN OF THE BLACK AND RED

2006-03-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

I hope you all will forgive me a small vanity, a repost of one of my first, a short poem by yours truly that, I hope, captures the spirit of The Barcelona Orwell was so suprised to find.

JUAN OF THE BLACK AND RED

I am Juan, fisher's son,

Barceloneta I now run,

By day I boat just where I might,

Then chase fascists through the night,

I have no use for government,

I have friends who pour cement.

The priests have no use for me,

I carry rope that they might see,

Priests should not make a fuss,

But leave the governing to us,

I have more of God in my buttered toast,

Than priests have in a thousand hosts!

The leech who once took the let,

Now calls me comrade,

when we've met.

I address him almost civilly,

Tap the carbine at my knee,

Funny he mentions not the lease!

I give fish to his pretty niece.

You shits who used to run this place,

Remember well this ugly face,

This man whom you would like to tame,

Will die before you rise again!

Black are my eyes,

my blood red on cement,

I have no use for government.

-Durrati

GEORGE ORWELL

2006-03-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

George Orwell came to Spain as a journalist in 1936 and left some months later a combat veteran.Below are his impressions of revolutionary Barcelona. The sights and sounds he encountered there inspired him to join the POUM (Workers Party Of Marxist Unification) militia and after some rudimentary training he was sent to the Aragon Front. Wounded in the neck he returned to Barcelona to find a city now controlled by minions and allies of Stalin. POUM was outlawed, there was to be no unification. Orwell fled Spain disallusioned but carrying the seeds of his greatest work..."Animal Farm".

I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties;almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobodysaid 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered,and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.

More about Orwell later, his odyssey in Spain will be the subject of several posts.

W.H. Auden

2006-03-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

W.H. Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood served as ambulance drivers during the Spanish Civil War. Although his views on the war changed in later years, at the time, like so many others he responded to the call. Below a snippet from his mammoth poem "Spain, 1937".

To-morrow for the young poets (exploding like bombs)

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;

To-morrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings.

But to-day the struggle.

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candle-lit barn,

and the scraping concert,

The masculine jokes; to-day the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead.

The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day,

and the time is short,

and History to the defeated

May say alas but cannot help or pardon.

Gacela of the Flight

2006-03-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

Gacela of the Flight

Often I lost myself in the sea,
my ears filled with fresh-cut flowers
my tongue filled with love and anguish.
often I lost myself in the sea,
as I am lost in the hearts of children.

No one when giving a kiss
fails to feel the smile of faceless people.
No one who touches a newborn child,
forgets the immobile skulls of horses.

Because the roses search the forehead,
for the toughened landscapes of bone,
and Man’s hands have no fate,
but to imitate roots, under the ground.

As I am lost in the hearts of children,
often I lost myself in the sea.
Ignorant of water, I go searching,
for death, in light, consuming me.

Garcia Lorca

Howard Read

2006-03-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

Just a short post for friend whattheheh, who rightly chastises me when I slack off. This a poem from the English Newpaper man Howard Read whom, like so many men and women of letters, took up the cause of the Spanish proletariat as his own.

"A Song for the Spanish Anarchists "

The golden lemon is not made

but grows on a green tree:

A strong man and his crystal eyes

is a man born free.

The oxen pass under the yoke

and the blind are led at will:

But a man born free

has a path of his own

and a house on the hill.

And men are men who till the land

and women are women who weave:

Fity men own the lemon grove

and no man is a slave.

Herbert Read

2006-03-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

"Goya"

2006-03-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

I had to get the stink out of my blog after writing about those guys! Thanks to dear What I know just how to do that, with some Robert Service.

"Goya"

As in Bordeaux I took the air
An ancient house I passed,
And someone told me it was there
That Goya breathed his last.
Adrift from his beloved Spain,
The splendour of his day,
In twilight penitence and pain
He passed away.

In peasant hovel he was born,
And to the bull-ring rose,
Killing with insolence and scorn
His toros, I suppose.
With gutter drabs no stucco saint,
By courtly dames adored,
His right-hand held a brush to paint,
His left a sword.

See in the Prado in Madrid
A picture on the wall;
Grotesques and satires Goya did,
But this out-horrors all.
A naked girl a monster dread
Is clutching chewing off her head
And blindly chewing off her head
With bloody jaws.
In all the world there is, I swear,
No picture more obscene;
One wonders in what dark despair
The painter's mind had been.
What brain diseased could thus contrive? -
Yet I forgive him for
In hellish horror, I believe,
It symbols WAR.

JUAN JAGUE BLANCO - '' THE BUTCHER OF BADAJOZ'

2006-03-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

Now here is a fine little fascist, Juan Yagũe Blanco, son of a doctor, of all things, born in 1891. He was to become a life long friend and shadow of Franco. They attended The Toledo Military Academy together before honing their murderous style of warfare on the killing fields of Morocco. In fact everywhere that Franco went, Yagũe soon followed. Whether ending strikes by slaughtering a few hundred proles or overthrowing democratically elected governments; these two combined for a great one two punch.
In the days immediately following the uprise of the Generals, while Franco was openly bragging about introducing “White Terror” to Spain, little Yagũe led a force of some 3,000 troops, mostly Moors, to attack, on August 14th, 1936, a city on the border with Portugal, Badajoz. The loyalist elements in the city offered stiff resistance but were finally overcome. What was to happen in Badajoz was, I believe, a warning to the Spanish people of what could be expected when these bastards met resistance. Townspeople were rounded up and led into the town’s bullfighting arena. Women were systematically raped. As many as 1500 Spaniards (some sources say 4,000) were machined-gunned in the "Plaza de Toros”. So thorough was the slaughter that the Nationalists tried to use the lack of eyewitness accounts as evidence that it didn’t happen. But forever after, and as long as the Spanish people have a voice, little Yagũe will be known as “The Butcher of Badajoz.”

Hugo Sperrle

2006-03-03T14:47:00.000-08:00

General Field Marshall Hugo Sperrle was born on February 7th, 1885 in Ludwigsburg, Germany. He flew biplanes in WWI and was awarded Knight’s Cross with Swords of the Hohenzollern House Order by a grateful Kaiser. After the war he waded about in the sewer of German Right Wing politics. In 1935 he joined the reformed Luftwaffe and began his life’s work – bombing the hell out of civil populations.
His heroic action at Guernica is generally accepted to be the genus of a new kind of war, “terror” bombing.
His naturally horrifying fascist bastard good looks made him a favorite of Goering and Hitler who rightfully thought his countenance alone to be adequate to cow civilian populations.
He parlayed his success at Guernica to command, under Goering, of the Luftwaffe. Using the methods he perfected in Spain, he went on to flatten Warsaw and lead the Luftwaffe into the Battle of Britain.
The less said of this piece of shit the better, but he escaped the noose at Nuremberg (probably because of Dresden and Hiroshima) and was allowed to sully the face of the Earth until his death in 1953.

Paco Ranas "The Frog" -Frederico Francisco Franco

2006-03-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

You have met some of the good guys, on to the bad.

Born the son of a Naval Officer,in El Ferrol, Spain, Dec. 4th 1892,Frederico Francisco Franco aspired to a military career emulating his father. He graduated from The Toledo Military Academy in 1910 and was stationed to Morocco in the occupying Spanish Army in 1913. Undoubtedly a talented little fascist bastard he rose to the rank of Major by 1917. He was brought back to Spain in 1918 to help suppress a general strike in Andalusia (a region of Southern Spain that includes the Costa Del Sol, Seville and Cordoba) instigated by the Anarchist CNT syndicate; whose leadership included not co-incidentally our friend Buenaventura Durruti. At this juncture “The Frog” began in earnest his vainglorious career. His forces brutally invaded Andalusia and suppressed the strike killing hundreds of peasants and workers.
As reward for his brutality and success in breaking the strike he was appointed command of the newly formed Spanish Foreign Legion and led them back to Morocco to put down rebellion there. The "Tercio de Extranjeros" quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Franco encouraged the killing and mutilation of Moroccan prisoners. Arturo Barea, who served under Franco in Morocco in 1921, later wrote: "When it attacked, the Tercio knew no limits to its vengeance. When it left a village, nothing remained but fires and the corpses of men, women and children." Nice.
Franco’s style of warfare was simple. Know the terrain and kill without hesitation or scruple. After taking over the leadership in the uprising against the elected democracy of Spain, one of his first calls was to the demented housepainter Hitler. Hermann Goering testified at Nuremberg “When the civil war broke out in Spain Franco sent a call for help to Germany and asked for support, particularly in the air. Franco with his troops was stationed in Africa and he could not get his troops across, as the fleet was in the hands of the communists. The decisive factor was, first of all, to get his troops to Spain. The Führer thought the matter over. I urged him to give support under all circumstances: firstly, to prevent the further spread of communism; secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe in this or that technical respect.”
And test it they did. On April 26th, 1937 the “Condor Legion” bombed Guernica . I will borrow some excerpts here so the story will be told properly. “It was market day in Guernica when the church bells of Santa Maria sounded the alarm that afternoon in 1937. People from the surrounding hillsides crowded the town square. "Every Monday was a fair in Guernica," says José Monasterio, eyewitness to the bombing. "They attacked when there were a lot of people there. And they knew when their bombing would kill the most. When there are more people, more people would die." For over three hours, twenty-five or more of Germany's best-equipped bombers, accompanied by at least twenty more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, slowly and systematically pounding it to rubble. Those trying to escape were cut down by the strafing machine guns of fighter planes. "They kept just going back and forth, sometimes in a long line, sometimes in close formation. It was as if they were practicing new moves. They must have fired thousands of bullets." (eyewitness Juan Guezureya) The fires that engulfed the city burned for three days. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed. Sixteen hundred civilians - one third of the population - were killed or wounded.”

By all accounts Franco was a devout Catholic. Like some “true believers” of most any religion he considered the lives of those not of his faith to be inconsequential when defending it.
The Saturday night after Franco’s death on Nov. 20, 1975, Chevy Chase eulogized him on Saturday Night Live. Reading a quotation from Richard Nixon calling Franco “a great friend and ally” as the “Update” screen displayed a photo of Franco and Hitler glomming onto one another, Chase deadpanned “Franco is still dead.” And he did so for the next several shows. And I repeat that good news today with some merriment. Franco is still dead - and may he burn in hell.

ILYA EHRENBURG

2006-02-26T19:34:00.000-08:00

Now here’s a guy who could lay down some serious smack against the fascists. Some thought, too serious. He is a controversial figure for his propaganda writings from Moscow during WWII when he exhorted soldiers of the Red Army to kill Nazi invaders in the strongest terms possible. Perhaps he did go too far as the Red Army desecrated Hitler’s fatherland encouraging the raping of German women as well. But then, they were wearing clothing and jewelry sacked from his country. Whatever your feelings about that there is no doubt that no one of his generation countered Hitler’s propaganda more forcefully. He reported on the Spanish War for several Russian Newspapers, drinking with Papa Hemmingway in Barcelona. A few words from the master:

“Unappeasable dark spite ignites the heart of fascism. This is the spite of the Ruhr magnates who in the twenties of this century became frightened of the morning dawn, of the maturity of nations, and of the idea of justice. This is the spite of Krupp, of Voegler, of the owners of Fiat and of Schneider who have called in a band of adventurers and unscrupulous killers for assistance. This is the spite of the Prussian barons, of the Andalusian earls, the Rumanian boyars and the Hungarian counts, the untalented and feeble-minded epigones of a once splendid world who look upon countries as hunting grounds with hounds, and at the peasants who collect acorns on the lord’s land as game. This is the spite of the little, ignorant, petty bourgeois, who is revolted by the complexity of culture, by the boldness of thought, and by progress. This is the spite of failures, of provincial Caesars, backwoods Napoleons who are thirsting to enter history, even if by the back door. This is the spite of the renegades who strive to defile everything that they once loved. This is the spite of old age, soullessness, and death.
The Italian fascists, coming out onto the stage, dressing themselves up in black shirts, have established the cult of the she wolf and have adopted from the wolf pack the “Alala”. The Spanish Falangists have introduced the ritual of “betrothal and death”, carrying their banners to cemeteries, holding processions with naked hunchbacks, God’s fools, and gravediggers – processions resembling the nightmarish visions of Goya. The French Cagoulards put on blind capes taken from the Middle Ages born out of plague epidemics. The German SS men wear skull and crossbones on their sleeves. Goering has revived the executioner in a frock coat with an axe. Himmler has transferred into his torture chambers the torture instruments kept in the Nuremberg Museum. Even the Fascist window-dressing bears witness to black, desperate spite.
Fascism is a monumental attempt to halt the course of history. It has resurrected certain rituals and delusions of the Middle Ages, but the peoples of the Middle Ages did not live only by these rituals and delusions; within them there burned a genuine faith; they created wonderful cathedrals, remarkable epic poems; with their labor, their ecstacy, even with their ignorance they prepared for the age of the Renaissance. The Fascists must not be compared with the peoples of the Middle Ages. They live in a different epoch. They attempted to abandon the concept of time; this explains their sterility. Of course Italy’s grapes still continued to yield wine even under Mussolini; of course Germany’s factories continued to function even under Hitler. But the Fascists did not create anything. They only mobilized contemporary technology for the struggle against the spirit of the time. They turned all achievements of civilization towards destruction.
Italy was justly considered the land of the arts. Fascism did not give birth to any artists; Fascism killed artists. Can the Italian people be proud of the conquest of Ethiopia, which was subsequently lost, proud of the use of mustard gas against unarmed herdsmen, proud of the destruction of Malaga, of the shootings in Greece and the gallows in the Ukraine? Did the spirit of Da Vinci, Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Garibaldi express itself in these crimes? When reading the illiterate and dull books of Rosenberg , the articles of Goebbles and Streicher, can we find therein a shadow of German genius, the lucidity of Goethe, the complexity of Hengel, the love of freedom of the romantics? The destruction of hundreds of cities, Europe turned into a desert – such is the creative activity of Fascism. Countries cleared of people and the human head cleared of thought – this is Hitler’s ideal.
It is not surprising that Fascism is attracting the dregs of humanity, people with a slovenly biography, sadists, mental freaks, traitors. The untalented painter Hitler, the untalented novelist Goebbles, the untalented dramatist Mussolini - is it not striking that at the head of Fascists States there are people who dreamed of artistic laurels and were denounced as mountebanks? Fascism attracts all renegades. Judas hanged himself out of sorrow. The Fascist Judases prefer to hang others. Mussolini appeased his spite by the killing of two former comrades – socialists. In France Hitler found two followers, two apostates - Laval and Doriot. Sexual perversion and, in the first place, sadism have become a stronghold of Fascism. The morphine addict Goering, the lecher Goebbles, the sadist Himmler,”Doctor” Ley, the specialist in seducing those underage, degenerates about whose whereabouts directors of prisons and hospitals should be arguing, found themselves in ministerial positions."

There is more, it was a long rant, but you get the idea…

PABLO NERUDA

2006-02-25T22:32:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize winning poet fought for the Republic in Spain in 1936 and 1937.

POETRY

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not,

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating planations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke free on the open sky.

Pablo Neruda

Farewell to The International Brigade

2006-02-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

I give you, once again, the redoubtable Dolores Ibarruri.

"For the first time in the history of the peoples' struggles, there was the spectacle, breathtaking in its grandeur, of the formation of International Brigades to help save a threatened country's freedom and independence - the freedom and independence of our Spanish land.
Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans - men of different colors, differing ideology, antagonistic religions --- yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us unconditionally.
They gave us everything --- their youth or their maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their lives; their hopes and aspirations --- and they asked us for nothing. But yes, it must be said, they did want a post in battle, they aspired to the honor of dying for us.
Banners of Spain! Salute these many heroes! Be lowered to honor so many martyrs!
Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are stanched; when the memory of the sad and bloody days dissipates in a present of liberty, of peace and of wellbeing; when the rancors have died out and pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards, speak to your children. Tell them of these men of the International Brigades.
Recount for them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets, sought by raving dogs thirsting to tear their flesh, these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom, to fight and die for Spain's liberty and independence threatened by German and Italian fascism. They gave up everything --- their loves, their countries, home and fortune, fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters and children --- and they came and said to us: ``We are here. Your cause, Spain's cause, is ours. It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.''

STILL LIFE FAST MOVING

2006-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

A brief repite from the serious suff, I give you, per Marks-O-Lots recommendation, "Still Life Moving Fast" by Dali. I like the way his art looks against my black backdrop.Whattheheh, I will post some poetry for you from work tonight - Durrati

ABE OSHEROFF

2006-02-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

"When the war in Spain started, it was no great shock," Osheroff says now. "From the moment Hitler came to power, I hated him, but I couldn't do a fuckin' thing about it. But when I saw the war in Spain change from a civil war into an international war, that's when I knew I had to go. I was 21, I was young and I had a gorgeous-lookin' girlfriend, so it wasn't the easiest decision, but I decided that if I didn't go, I'd feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. So I went."

Abe Osheroff was born in Brooklyn in 1915 to impoverished Jewish immigrants. His lifelong love affair with social activism, what he calls "radical humanism", began early in his teens when he formed the Brownville Athletic and Cultural Club which promoted, eccentrically, lifing weights and listening to classical music. His first political activity was helping to carry the furniture of tenants evicted by their landlords back into their apartments. The police frowned on his activities and he was caught and beaten by New York's finest. "They called me a dirty Communist Jew bastard" Abe recollects, "all of which was true, except the bastard part."
In 1937 Osherhoff heard, along with some 50,000 men from around the world, the call to the International brigades. Newsreel footage of the bombing of Guernica tipped the balance. Leaving behind his beautiful girlfriend, he defied the prohibition of the State Department and managed to make it to Spain via France. But not without incident - the ship he took from France to Barcelona was torpedoed two miles off the Spanish coast. Osherhoff swam to shore. "I was baptized." he says. In 1937, at the battle for Zaragoza he was wounded in the leg by machinegun fire. The next year, the battle against facsim lost, he returned to the U.S.
In 1940 he ran for office on the Communist party ticket. Despite his injuries from the Spanish war he seved in the American Army in World War Two. After the war he worked as a carpenter with his father back in Brooklyn. In 1949, at the beginnings of McCarthyism, an acquaintance in the justice department informed him that he was about to be jailed for his former political activities. Osheroff had little choice but go on the lamb, living the next eight years underground, a fugitive from the FBI. When the Supreme Court halted the persecution of Communists in 1957 he re-emerged.
And how. In Mississippi in 1964, he employed his skills as a carpenter to build houses for black Americans living in poverty. And though he personally rejected communism in the 1950's when the proof of Stalin's atrocities came out, he headed to Nicaragua to do the same in the 1980's.In between he protested repression and militarism in Vietnam, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile and Panama. Although he never stopped working with wood, his main income for the past three decades has been derived from lecturing at colleges all over the U.S. In 1974 he produced the documentary "Dreams and Nightmares" about the Spanish war. And he did it in typical Osheroff fashion. With "a hunk of money and a bottle of booze" he bribed contacts at the American TV networks to obtain archival footage of the world. After setting up a dummy film company professing to be producing a film called "The Shield Against Communism, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization" he conned more footage from The Pentagon and the CIA.
Now in his nineties and living in Seattle Mr. Osheroff has never retired from "Radical Humanism". To the Seattle Post Intellegencer he reports, "I'm having a wonderful old age, I'm richer than Bill Gates." We salute you, sir.

Dolores Ibarruri - La Pasionaria

2006-02-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

" The Spanish people would rather die on its feet than live on its knees. And do not forget, and let no one forget, that if today it is our turn to resist fascist aggression, the struggle will not end in Spain. Today it's us; but if the Spanish people is allowed to be crushed, you will be next, all of Europe will have to face aggression and war." When the fiery La Pasionaria made this speech in France in 1938 it was a plaintive cry to a sleeping world. Born in desperate poverty in Gallarta, Spain, on the 9th of December, 1895, Dolores Ibarruri matured to become one of the finest orators of her time. Mother of six children, only two of which survived the grinding poverty and lack of adequate food and health care rampant in oligarchical Spain, Dolores took to heart the teachings of Marx. Were she to need more reason to embrace radicalism, her huspand was arrested during a strike in 1920. My poor words will not do her justice, I will let her speak for herself.
"The crude reality, the bare truth, hit me as it did every woman, with its unforgiving hands. A few short, fleeting days of illusion and afterwards, in my own experience, I learned the harsh truth of the popular saying 'Mother, what does it mean to be married? Daughter, it means to sew, to give birth and to cry'. To cry, to cry over our misfortunes, to cry over our powerlessness. To cry over our innocent children, to whom all we had to offer was our caresses soaked with tears. To cry over our pain-filled lives, without prospects, with no way out. Bitter tears, with a permanent curse in the heart and a blasphemy on the lips. "
Vincent Sheean, the brilliant journalist and author of Not Peace But A Sword said of her - "Sometimes she gave it to them so straight and hard that you could hear the gasp of the whole audience. Her purpose was, of course, to make such failures and mistakes rarer in the future. She criticized the government not at all, but her own and the other revolutionary parties came in for some terrific lashings. And then, having frightened the audience into breathlessness by her picture of disaster, she set out to prove that victory was possible, and on what conditions. To an ordinary American journalist in the front row of the hall it seemed that she was asking these people to stop being Communists altogether, at least until the war was won. The genius of Dolores - her unquestionable genius as a speaker, the most remarkable I ever heard - worked upon them its customary miracle, and she had the whole audience cheering with enthusiasm when she finished." - La Pasionaria "Passion's Flower".

The Ascension of Christ

2006-02-20T21:56:00.000-08:00

Because I love his work, and I don't feel much like writing tonight, I give you The Ascension of Christ, another Dali. I consider him to be the greatest realist painter of all time, with or without the Sur.

Gollum W. Bush

2006-02-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

And there's this ugly bastard, who is not my work, but posted just for fun. Whattheheh, I will leave a reply to you under the Gollum's watchful eye later tonight from work. I want to try to find your reccomendation on the net sos we can chat about it.... late, D.

The Chairman of The Board

2006-02-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

What can you say about ole Blue-Eyes that hasn't already been said? The man could really belt one out. This was a commissioned work for an acquaintance who wanted it to hang in his Italian reasturant. Thanks, Fred.

Brother Rick

2006-02-19T17:34:00.000-08:00

Here we have my cocky little brother Rick. It is in pencil like most of my other works. I took the original photo at the base of the Washington Monument on the day of Bill Clinton's first inauguration (more about that later). I always loved the photo and little brother whom I sometimes call Theo... for the obvious reasons. Thanks for your support, bro.

My Madonna

2006-02-19T17:23:00.000-08:00

And here we have My Maddonna. Sadly I do not know who to credit for this tender and thouching photo, I can't even remember what book I found it, lo, those many years ago. One of my favorites, it is housed in the permanent collection of my little brother's (see above) house. He collects and holds on to things better than his flighty brother. Thanks Theo...

We Miss You Audrey

2006-02-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

If I might be permitted a few posts off topic (off course I can it's my blog!) I bragged of being an artist on my profile so I thought I'd bring the goods. This is my pencil portrait of Audrey Hepburn, arguably the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen ( except Katherine Ross...and, well then there's Sophia Loren, Bardot, and the devine Liz, whose Purple eyes in Ivanhoe nearly made me swoon..) dammit then, at very least the cutest. Audrey passed at her home in Switzerland in 1993, leaving us in a little less beautiful world.

The Waterwheel

2006-02-18T23:56:00.000-08:00

This post is for our favorite of visitor (sadly, not a typo) whattheheh, who said such kind things about the Lorca post; and also for all the working people in the world, those that get up everyday and work hard for their families and communities. The German Poet and Playwrite Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), a typical Socialist rabble rouser, sang the praises of such folk as loudly as anyone I know. And though his poems are not so beautiful as Lorca's he was a pretty hip cat for a Geman Socialist; Bobby Darin made a number one hit of a song Brecht wrote for " A Three Penny Opera" a tune called Mack The Knife. And The Doors sampled Brecht for their song Moon of Alabama. So I gve you Brecht's Song of the Waterwheel. It's a muscular little poem, those thirties radicals were the bomb.

"The Song Of The Waterwheel."

Ancient tale and epic story,

Tell of heroes' lives untarnished:

Like the stars they rose in glory,

Like the stars they set when vanquished.

This is comforting and we should know it,

We, alas, who plant the wheat and grow it.

Have but little share in triumph or disasters,

Rise to fame or fall: Who feeds our masters?

Yes, the wheel is always turning madly,

Neither side stays up or down,

But the water underneath fares badly,

For it has to make the wheel go 'round.

Ah, we've had so many masters.

Swine or eagle, lean or fat one:

Some were tigers, some hyenas,

Still we fed this one and that one.

Whether one is better than the other:

Ah, one boot is always like the other:

When it treads upon you.

What I say about them,

Is we need no masters;

We can do without them.

Yes, the wheel is always turning madly,

Neither side stays up or down,

But the water underneath fares badly,

For it has to make the wheel go round.

And they beat each other's heads all bloody,

Scuffling over booty,

Call the other fellows greedy wretches,

They, themselves, but do their duty.

Ceaselessly we watch their wars grow ever grimmer,

Would I knew a way for them to be united.

If we will no more provide the fodder,

Maybe that's the way all would be righted.

For at last the wheel will turn no longer,

And shall ride the stream no more,

When the water joins to water as it gaily,

Drives itself, freed of the load it bore.

Landscape with Girl Skipping Rope

2006-02-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

Salvador Dali is to Spanish painting what his friend Garcia Lorca is to it's literature, (you could substitute 20th century). Their style of juxtaposing contradictory, sometimes startling images, their profound and beautiful appreciation and rendering of nature, make them giants in the annals of Art. "Landscape" was painted in 1936, the year of Lorca's death and, of course the onset of Civil War. The girl skipping rope alone in a vast near empty desert, I like to think, symbolizes his grief and loneliness at his friend's passing. The figure on the right, which is difficult to see at this size, some critics say is Dali walking in the embrace of his dead brother. Dali's brother died exactly nine months before his birth, and Dali believed for many years he was his brother's reincarnation. In the background, storm clouds menace an archetypical Spanish Town -representative of the political turmoil in Spain.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

2006-02-17T23:31:00.000-08:00

Art, when it is allowed to flourish and thrive is the natural enemy of Fascism. One of the early victims of the Civil War was the great Spanish Poet, Musician and Playright Federico Garcia Lorca. Born on June 5th, 1898 to the village of Fuente Vaqueros in the Province 0f Granada, among the more conservative areas of Spain, Lorca, like many artists, did not excell in school but achieved early. His first collection of poems, Impresiones y paisajes, or Impressions and Landscapes was published in his twentieth year. From what I have read of his work he was neither political in an overt way nor a firebrand but a man who wrote of gypsies and love, of nature and the beauty of Spain. Though he struggled to conceal his homosexuality to all but his closest of friends, this, in the end, might have been what incited the ire of reactionary elements in Spanish Society. At the outbreak of the War, although he was cautioned against it, he left Madrid to return to his native Granada. There he and his brother-in-law were arrested on August 19th, 1936, beaten and executed by a Falangist firing squad. Lorca's body was deposited in an unmarked grave. His works were supressed as long as Franco reigned and it was only after Franco's death in 1975 that his legacy was allowed to be openly discussed. Today in the Plaza Victoria in Madrid a Statue of Lorca releasing a dove from his hands shadows the Teatro Español. Political philosopher David Crocker explains: "the statue, at least, is still an emblem of the contested past: each day, the Left puts a red kerchief on the neck of the statue, and someone from the Right comes later to take it off."

I do not pretend to be an expert on his work, but offer a poem of his that I love.

Sonnet

I know that my profile will be serene
in the north of an unreflecting sky.
Mercury of vigil, chaste mirror
to break the pulse of my style.
For if ivy and the cool of linen
are the norm of the body I leave behind,
my profile in the sand will be the old
unblushing silence of a crocodile.
And though my tongue of frozen doves
will never taste of flame,
only of empty broom,
I'll be a free sign of oppressed norms
on the neck of the stiff branch
and in an ache of dahlias without end.

- Garcia Lorca

A Picture's Worth...

2006-02-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

This photo says it all. Two pistols target Durruti, on the left one emblazoned with the Hammer and Sickle, symbolic of Stalin's unwillingness to accept a rival of any kind, from the right one bearing a Swastika. Strewn about in the foreground, as if discarded and laying on the ground, the banners of the various parties on the left that could not unite behind him and present a common front.

EYES RIGHT!!!

2006-02-16T22:46:00.000-08:00

The great tragedy of the Spanish Civil War was the inability of the parties on the Left to work together to defeat Fascism. The Christian Democrats feared the Anarchists, the Socialists feared Stalin and the Communists, The Anarchists feared no one but wanted no compromise. Meanwhile the right, though diverse in ideology,was united in it's goals: Wealth, Power,and Hegemony.
In America today we are in much the same situation. The great Roosevelt coalition of the nineteen thirties and forties , made up of southern segregationist and blacks, dirt farmers and steel workers, highly educated and illiterate, were of different minds on social issues but united by a consciousness of class schooled them in the poverty of the depression.
The relative wealth of America since World War II, the high standard of living enjoyed by most in the last fifty years, has dulled that awareness. And the Right, having fractured us along line of race, gender and sexual orientation works tirelessly to attain and defend ever more wealth and power. They know how fragile is fortune. The slightest diruption of the flow of oil from the Middle East could ruin the American economy in a matter of weeks if not days. So they gather wealth and power to their bosoms much as nations gather weapons before war. Pay heed to the lessons of history. When the time comes be aware where the enemy lies. Eyes Right!!

JUAN OF THE BLACK AND RED

2006-02-05T00:21:00.000-08:00

I am Juan, fisher's son,
Barceloneta I now run,
By day I boat just where I might,
Then chase fascists through the night,
I have no use for government,
I have friends who pour cement.

The priests have no use for me,
I carry rope that they might see,
Priests should not make a fuss,
But leave the governing to us,
I have more of God in my buttered toast,
Than priests have in a thousand hosts!

The leech who once took the let,
Now calls me comrade, when we've met.
I address him almost civilly,
Tap the carbine at my knee,
Funny he mentions not the lease!
I give fish to his pretty niece.

You shits who used to run this place,
Remember well this ugly face,
This man whom you would like to tame,
Will die before you rise again!
Black are my eyes, my blood red on cement,
I have no use for government.

-Durrati

What's inna Name?

2006-02-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

Before I catch a ration of shit for misspelling the name of the great leader of the Spanish Civil War, Buenaventura Durruti, let me explain that I changed the spelling lest anyone think that everything that I post is factual or true, googled and vetted for accuracy. Sometimes I am mistaken. Sometimes I lie. This ain't the New York Times.

I chose to use Durruti's persona out of admiration for the man. Not only was he a leader of the only popular uprising to oppose the takeover of a government by Fascists in all of sorry-ass pre- WW II Europe, he was by all accounts a rogue and a scoundrel, an inspirational leader of men, and hindered Franco's takeover of Spain by several years. When the Nationalists allied with Franco sought to seize control of the city of Barcelona, Durruti led his confederation of Dockworkers, Taxi-Drivers, Hotel-workers and laborers into the streets to defeat them and on into the hills of Aragon to set up defensive positions. The proletariat in the cities of Madrid and Valencia, heartened by Barcelona's defiance, took up arms to defend their recently won democracy. Durruti died on either November 20th or 22nd 1936, killed, it is rumored, by Stalinist agents as he positioned his troops to defend Madrid. Although there is much controversy and disagreement about his character and methods there can be no denying that while Mussolini and Hitler subjugated Italy and Germany with hardly a whiff of resistance, Durruti helped to spare Spain from such disgrace. In an America where Freedom is bartered for the illusion of security, where an Orwellian nightmare of an administration tramples on our rights in order to defend them, where "Homeland" rolls off the lying tongues of neo-fascists who are apparently immune to all irony we could use a few men like him.