I will take the blame for blasting Tom, Joan, and Jane...I could blast Bob Dylan, but I don't, because I know where he came from and how seriously he got hooked on the music he got hooked on, the same music I listened to on the radio at the same time Bob was, so I can recognize his past in his music--and I think he's stayed pretty true to that music over his career in spite of the rotten eggs the folkies threw at him when for ego reasons he decided to do that "Rolling Stone" recording--with the Band and finally get himself some worldwide recognition as a musician and not simply as a folk singer. I've heard Bob say he wasn't a revolutionary--he was simply copying how he thought Woody Guthrie would have carried on and Bob did a better job of it than even Woody's own son Arlo--"Alice's Restaurant" is about the only really good thing Arlo ever wrote and it's no where near original except he's Woody's son. [Arlo reminds me of Liza Minelli mocking her mother's successful singing style and stage presence.]
As for me and my jealousy--the defender of Tom, Joan, and Jane said that I was extremely jealous of these people and that was why I wrote so mockingly about them. This person went on to say Tom, Joan, and Jane had all stayed true to their "socialist" mentalities, blah, blah, blah, quoting how many Grammys Joan has won and all about her comeback at Camp Casey (hey, what about Camp Casey being sold off to the highest bidder?--sorry, it's so easy to go off on some of these people that I feel are hypocrites, maybe even including Casey's mother [and just as I start to snidely insinuate about Cindy Sheehan she up and announces today she's thinking about running for Nancy Pelosi's seat in her California district--it's over Pelosi's turning her back on impeachment--you can't win in the system and Cindy must know that--and maybe selling Camp Casey has given her enough money to get into politics now--you see, here's my problem with people like Cindy, like Jane, Joan, and even Tom Hayden--they are so fiery at first--like why didn't Cindy Sheehan stay on Bush's ass?--and then you find out--oh, yeah, they got a book deal, oh and now they've decided to run for political office--and I thought she was exhausted and feeling totally ineffectual--on the other hand, Cindy's a woman and she knows women better than I do--and why not let women take this country over?--can it be as bad as Indira Ghandi running India or Margaret Thatcher running Great Britain?), and all about how Tom Hayden isn't rich and lives modestly--I pause--wait a minute, you mean a dude who was married to Jane Fonda didn't clean up with the divorce settlement?--and Jane divorced his ass pretty fast didn't she?--their "marriage made in dissident heaven" didn't work out--and I'll bet he did clean up with the divorce settlement--and then I defend trashing Tom's Congressional career because nothing stands out in my memory that he did while he was in Congress and I've kept a pretty mocking eye on that gaggle of Yahoo goons certainly since before Tom decided he was a great Congressman--at least, as a Congressman, did he contribute anything better than what he did as an activist when he had fire in his eyes?--maybe Tom in true hippy fashion gave up any kind of settlement with Jaunty Janey--no matter why they divorced--though I doubt it.
And look at Miss Jane; after Tom, she then went on in her antiwar and antipoverty extreme way to marry drugstore cowboy and self-activist Ted "Just Plain Ole Ted" Turner--whom I guess I'm supposed to know is such a great liberal man and how he's helped fly-bitten African starving children and mothers--why hell, Ted Turner, isn't he rich enough to save all those people in Darfur? Bullshit on rich people. That's my message, oh blaster of me and my mockeries.
And don't tell me Joan "Tax Protester" Baez ain't rich--and so David Harris was her husband and not her boyfriend--I'm sorry, Bob Dylan was her boyfriend--and Harris went to jail and Joan didn't. She divorced his ass, too, didn't she?--didn't she cheat on him with Bob Dylan as well? And like I said, I like Bob Dylan--and if I'd a been Bob Dylan I'd'a banged Joan, too; I always thought she was a cool-looking woman--in my Beat-Cool-Cat-Heppish way of digging natural-looking women--plus, hell, I bought her Vanguard album, the one that made her famous--I thought she had a nice pure mix-cultural California-sweet voice--but, sorry, I just wasn't into folk music. I was into jazz.
As for Tom Hayden. I remember Tom first as a pimple-faced college kid at the University of Michigan (Tom's from Detroit). He had fire in his eyes in those days. Oh yeah, fire in his eyes and soul. He founded Students for a Democratic Society at UM (with Rennie Davis?) and then he married a Texas woman civil rights activist named Casey, by the bye, and became active in the Student Nonviolent Cordinating Committee--good left-wing-leaning (socialist) kids--born at the end of the Great Depression--Tom of Irish descent, from a union family in Detroit, I am imagining...WHY, hell, I'll tell you what--here's Tom's most famous manifesto, the Port Huron (in Michigan) Statement:
Port Huron Statement
Introduction: Agenda for a Generation
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values we found god, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers under nourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology--these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority--the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox; we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through," beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity--but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe that there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
To read the rest, here's the link:http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
And, by God, I'll tell you what kind'a guy I am; I'll even let Tom tell you about how he discovered that Israel and the USA are in total cahoots and our Israel policy is tightly pestered, constantly pestered, by the Israel lobbyists--but Tom didn't know about 'em until he got to Congress--well, here, I'll let Tom tell you all about it (see how fair I am, though, yes, I am still mocking him):
By Tom Hayden
Editor’s note: In this essay, veteran social activist Tom Hayden, drawing upon his own rude political awakening to the realities of Israeli and Middle East politics during the 1980s, warns that the Israel lobby in the U.S. aims to “roll back the clock” and “change the map” of the region and that its neoconservative supporters will probably try to use the current Middle East crisis to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
Twenty-five years ago I stared into the eyes of Michael Berman, chief operative for his congressman-brother, Howard Berman. I was a neophyte running for the California Assembly in a district that the Bermans claimed belonged to them.
“I represent the Israeli defense forces,” Michael said. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Michael seemed to imagine himself the gatekeeper protecting Los Angeles’ Westside for Israel’s political interests, and those of the famous Berman-Waxman machine. Since Jews represented one-third of the Democratic district’s primary voters, Berman held a balance of power.
I had traveled to Israel in a generally supportive capacity, meeting officials from all parties, studying energy projects, befriending peace advocates like the writer Amos Oz. I also met with Palestinians and commented favorably on the works of Edward Said. As a result, a Berman ally prepared an anti-Hayden dossier in an attempt to discredit my candidacy with the Democratic leadership in the California state capital.
This led to the deli lunch with Michael Berman. He and his brother were privately leaning toward an upcoming young prosecutor named Adam Schiff, who later became the congressman from Pasadena. But they calculated that Schiff couldn’t win without name recognition, so they were considering “renting” me the Assembly seat, Berman said. But there was one condition: that I always be a “good friend of Israel.”
This wasn’t a particular problem at the time. Since the 1970s I had favored some sort of two-state solution. I felt close to the local Jewish activists who descended from the labor movement and participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements. I wanted to take up the cause of the aging Holocaust survivors against the global insurance companies that had plundered their assets.
While I believed the Palestinians had a right to self-determination, I didn’t share the animus of some on the American left who questioned Israel’s very legitimacy. I was more inclined toward the politics of Israel’s Peace Now and those Palestinian nationalists and human rights activists who accepted Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a reality to accommodate. I disliked the apocalyptic visions of the Israeli settlers I had met, and thought that even hard-line Palestinians would grudgingly accept a genuine peace initiative.
I can offer my real-life experience to the present discussion about the existence and power of an “Israel lobby.” It is not as monolithic as some argue, but it is far more than just another interest group in a pluralist political world. In recognizing its diversity, distinctions must be drawn between voters and elites, between Reform and Orthodox tendencies, between the less observant and the more observant. During my ultimate 18 years in office, I received most of my Jewish support from the ranks of the liberal and less observant voters. But I also received support from conservative Jews who saw themselves as excluded by a Jewish (and Democratic) establishment.
To read the rest, here's the link:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060718_tom_hayden_things_come_round/
I have tried to be fair to Tom Hayden. Tom writes very wisely, though a bit naively. Janey, I'm sorry; I just don't like Jane Fonda--I think she's a phony. Remember she apologized for her Hanoi Jane acting performance--coward. Sorry; I loved watching older Jane doing her workouts--she was quite a good-looking women in the thirties and forties but now she's sagging-down and looking pasty--besides, which great activist is she gonna marry next?
theapologeticgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
And While Tom Hayden Is Writing His Imaginative Stuff, Here's a Little Reality From Those Poor Hapless Tom Hayden-less Souls in Ole Baghdad
But the bloodshed in the Baghdad area paled in comparison to the carnage Saturday when a truck bomb devastated the public market in Armili, a town north of the capital whose inhabitants are mostly Shiites from the Turkoman ethnic minority.
There was still confusion over the death toll.
Two police officers — Col. Sherzad Abdullah and Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin — said 150 people were killed. Other officials put the death toll at 115. Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite Turkoman lawmaker, told reporters in Baghdad that 130 had died.
Regardless of the precise figure, the attack was clearly among the deadliest in Iraq in months. It reinforced suspicions that al-Qaida extremists were moving north to less protected regions beyond the U.S. security crackdown in Baghdad and on the capital's northern doorstep.
In a joint statement, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus said the attack against the Turkoman Shiites was "another sad example of the nature of the enemy and their use of indiscriminate violence to kill innocent citizens."
We just read where the death toll in Baghdad from yesterday and today is 210--the worst since the US forces occupied this innocent nation!Nancy "Rich Bitch" Pelosi says it's not worth impeaching this "president" and his cronies--and we reply, hell, then, Nance, how 'bout we impeach your ass, too?
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