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Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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JOSHUA BROWN : POLITICAL CARTOON | Majority rule
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Tagged Abortion, Joshua Brown, Life During Wartime, Political Cartoon, Rag Bloggers, Supreme Court
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JAMES RETHERFORD: BOOKS | Judy Gumbo’s ‘Yippie Girl’
Combating authoritarian repression with absurdist political theatre.
Listen to Thorne Dreyer‘s interview with ‘Yippie Girl’ Judy Gumbo on Rag Radio, here.
As Kris Kristofferson sorta said, “[S]he’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” Such is noted Sixties troublemaker Judy Gumbo’s part myth/part romance/part Bildungsroman, Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI, where “Yippie is a state of mind.”
As all good Marxists know, to call something a contradiction is not a criticism but a description of historical process, and free-form myth-making was a central feature of the Yippie creative strategy for combating authoritarian repression in the mid-Sixties/early Seventies. The Yippies can trace their taste for absurdist political theatre at least back to the Zurich dadaists of 1916. Our Marxism comes with an abundant measure of Grouchoism.
I am at least partly responsible for injecting myth into the cannons of Yippie literature. My 1970 work-for-hire bio-fable, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution, portrayed Jerry Rubin as the parabolic “child of America.” The opening line, “The New Left sprang, a predestined pissed-off child, from Elvis’ gyrating pelvis,” even alludes to the birth of the original Olympian wild child of myth and ritual … Dionysus, the patron saint of the Yippies.
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Tagged Books, James Retherford, Judy Gumbo, Rag Bloggers, Sixties, Yippies
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ALICE EMBREE : DOCUMENTARY FILM | The Wobblies are coming to town
The Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, are coming to Austin.
Listen to Thorne Dreyer and Alice Embree‘s Rag Radio interview with labor historian Jane Little Botkin here.
Directed by Stewart Bird & Deborah Shaffer
USA, 1979, 1h 29min, DCP
6:30 pm, Wednesday, May 4, Austin Film Society Special Event
Comments by Labor Historian Jane Little Botkin
Austin Film Society Cinema / austinfilm.org.
6406 N-I-35, Suite 3100, Austin, TX 78752
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are fondly remembered as the “singing union” and the feisty soapbox speakers, and the union that advocated “One Big Union for All the Workers.” A documentary made in 1979 has been re-mastered into digital glory.
JONAH RASKIN : MEMOIR | One organizer, two cities: Jon Melrod’s ‘Fighting Times,’ from Madison to Racine
Jon Melrod recalls those heady days in his new memoir.
The Port Huron Statement (PHS), which was written by Tom Hayden — with help from Al Haber and others — offered the fledgling members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) a critique of U.S. capitalist society. Published in 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and crafted at a retreat owned and operated by the United Auto Workers (UAW), the PHS was a necessary and essential manifesto. But it didn’t present a blueprint for how students were going to challenge the “establishment,” transcend the nuclear age, and overcome the ongoing crisis of capitalism.
Jon Melrod recalls those heady days in his new memoir, Fighting Times (PM Press), painting a portrait of himself as a white radical, a union organizer, a journalist, and more. While he’s not the first of his generation to write about the Long Sixties, he’s one of the few to explore in depth, life in the American working class and in trade unions in the post-Vietnam era and as contradictions in capitalism and imperialism intensified. Whether Melrod is typical of those times I can’t say. Everyone was unique; no two white radicals were the same. Read on and see what you think.
(Hayden has written about civil rights and the anti-war movement. Bill Ayers, Cathy Wilkerson, and Mark Rudd have described their days as fugitives underground. Max Elbaum, a native of Wisconsin, has chronicled lefty movements of the 1970s and 1980s in Revolution in the Air: Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.)
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Tagged Books, Fighting Times, Jon Melrod, Jonah Raskin, Labor Organizing, Memoir, Rag Bloggers, SDS
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ROBERT C. COTTRELL : PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE | Todd Gitlin, RIP
He was always fiercely independent and intelligent.
Todd Gitlin, September 2007. Photo by David Shankbone / Creative Commons.
By Robert C. Cottrell | The Rag Blog | March 24, 2022
- Listen to Thorne Dreyer’s two classic Rag Radio interviews with Todd Gitlin from July 19, 2013, and August 16, 2013. Listen anytime here and here.
- Read Katharine Q. Seelye’s Todd Gitlin obituary in The New York Times, here.
There are undoubtedly those in The Rag Blog community who knew Todd Gitlin far more intimately than I. My direct dealings with him were limited to a small number of occasions. The first involved his response to a query of mine regarding the radical journalist I.F. Stone, about whom I was working on a dissertation. To my delight, Gitlin was one of several luminaries who quickly fired off a lengthy letter to me, then a grad student, in that seemingly long-ago time before emails. He indicated that Izzy, whom he knew, had agreed to deliver a talk on Vietnam to the SDS National Council convening in December 1964. Stone’s address, as Gitlin remembered, proved “eloquent and stirring.” It “therefore, probably played a part in helping generate the enthusiasm for” a scheduled antiwar gathering in Washington, D.C., the next spring, which proved catalytic for the Movement.
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Tagged Deaths, New Left, New Left Critics, Obituary, Rag Bloggers, Robert C. Cottrell, SDS, Todd Gitlin
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THE RAG BLOG : BOOKS | ‘Exploring Space City!’ at Houston’s Printing Museum
Presentations from historian John Moretta and the book’s editors.
By The Rag Blog | March 10, 2012
HOUSTON – Houston’s Printing Museum is presenting a panel discussion – with a pop-up exhibit – of the New Journalism Project’s new book, Exploring Space City!, Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper, on Friday, April 22, 2022, at 6:30 p.m. The Printing Museum is located at 1324 West Clay Street in Houston.
The book was edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop. The discussion will feature remarks by historian John Moretta, author of The Hippies: A 1960s History, who has an essay in the book, and editors Dreyer, Embree, and Bishop.
About Exploring Space City!, historian Robert Cottrell, wrote: “This lovingly crafted compilation captures the spirit of the New Left and the counterculture.” Space City! was an underground newspaper published in Houston from June 5, 1969, to August 3, 1972. The paper – which was continually under assault from the Ku Klux Klan – was widely acknowledged to be one of the very best of the hundreds of ‘60s-‘70s underground newspapers that had significant impact on mainstream journalism. Space City! covered news not otherwise reported and helped pull together a widespread and diverse countercultural and New Left community in Houston.
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Tagged Books, Exploring Space City!, Houston Events, Rag Bloggers, The Printing Museum
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HARRY TARG : WAR AND PEACE | Reflections on the War in Ukraine
Russian invasion of Ukraine / Viewsridge / Creative Commons.
Many of us in the peace movement have had useful conversations (and debates) stimulated by the war on Ukraine. We are discussing the causes of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, both immediate and historical, and how the peace movement should respond to this important crisis.
I commend the Oliver Stone documentary to all as one detailed and informed narrative of a very complicated Ukrainian history. An important element of Stone’s narrative is the role of Ukrainian neo-fascists who were prominently active in the 2014 coup against the elected Ukraine government. These descendants of World War II neo-Nazis, Stone claims, now serve in the Ukraine army.
Also, most accounts of the Ukraine crisis today ignore the extraordinary expansion of NATO in the 1990s and the 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine carried out with the covert support of the United States. Including this in the accounts today adds important context, not for determining good guys and bad guys, but for figuring out what should be done and where peace forces should stand. And to be clear reflection on this context does not deny the immoral and inhumane Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Tagged CodePink, Harry Targ, NATO, Neo-fascism, Rag Bloggers, Russian Invasion, Ukraine
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BRUCE MELTON : CLIMATE | The Texice disaster, Valentine’s week, 2021
Stories of climate change survival, our current emergency, and new solutions to this existential crisis.
By Bruce Melton | The Rag Blog | February 10, 2022
AUSTIN — The Texas winter storm disaster was caused by both climate change and poor planning. Climate change is making extreme weather more extreme, and energy generation planning in Texas did not fully take into consideration cascading feedbacks, simultaneous catastrophes, and the extent to which our climate has already created more extreme weather based on warming we have already measured. Today, because of 30 years delay in climate pollution reform action, we find ourselves in a world vastly different from the one where we developed not only our historic climate pollution reform strategies, but from when we developed engineering criteria to make us safe.
Irreversible climate tipping systems are now active 100 years ahead of schedule and they complete their activation periods and become irreversible with no further warming. Implications of impacts from these tipping systems are profound with large parts of Earth becoming uninhabitable, but because climate science cannot robustly determine if these extreme events are because of climate change or not, we face further delay locking in irreversible existential scenarios.
This article is about the science of why repeatedly unprecedented extreme events we are now enduring are caused by climate change, and includes a compilation of stories from citizens in Austin who were directly impacted by the fury of the astonishingly extreme and unprecedented winter storm of 2021.
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Tagged Austin, blizzard, Bruce Melton, cascading feedbacks, catastrophe, causes, Climate Change, climate pollution treatment, climate tipping, disaster, emissions, Global Warming, ice storm, natural systems, Rag Bloggers, record snow, rolling blackouts, simultaneous catastrophes, solutions, uncertainity, winter storm
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THORNE DREYER : DOCUMENTARY FILM | Documentary about LNS wins prestigious national award
Film with Austin ties wins NETA award for Best Cultural Documentary.
Under the Ground: The Story of Liberation News Service, an 80-minute documentary film produced by Dorothy Dickie for Rhode Island PBS, has won a major national award – the National Educational Telecommunications Award or NETA for Best Cultural Documentary at the 53rd Annual Public Media Awards.
According to Rhode Island PBS, “this year’s unprecedented number of entries were judged by a group of expert panelists from within the public media system, as well as industry professionals working outside of public media.” Entries came from throughout the country.
The documentary tells the story of Liberation News Service which served underground newspapers and other alternative news outlets with news stories, feature articles, art, and photography between 1967 and 1981. LNS played a major – and underrecognized – role in those tumultuous times.
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Tagged Documentary Film, Liberation News Service, LNS, Rag Bloggers, Thorne Dreyer, Under the Ground
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE | Can’t see past the blue
How prosecutors and judges let cops get away with murder, or at least with criminally negligent homicide.
The two or three nationwide instances that we have seen recently of holding police to account for their actions are merely anomalies in a criminal legal system that rarely holds law enforcement officers to a standard of justice that we demand from other citizens. Most cops get a pass from judges and prosecutors, and sometimes from juries and grand juries, though grand jurors are usually less culpable because they are led to their decisions by those same biased and compromised prosecutors.
It is not difficult to understand why cops rarely get treated the same as ordinary people accused of crime or who are suspected of having committed a crime. Prosecutors depend on them to make their cases. Arresting officers and investigators from the various law enforcement agencies funnel cases into the criminal legal system, developing a close relationship with prosecutors in the process. They also serve as witnesses for the prosecution at pretrial hearings and in trials. There is a reluctance by prosecutors to prosecute police for misconduct when those same cops work side by side with prosecutors day after day.
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Tagged Criminal Justice, Lamar W. Hankins, Police Accountability, Rag Bloggers
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INTERVIEW | Why do men keep making war?: An interview
with scholar Michael Klare
Michael Klare has had war on his mind for the past 60 years.
Michael Klare on Rag Radio, May 7, 2021.
Michael Klare has had war in all its many ignominious manifestations on his mind for the past 60 years, going back to the heady days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the same period of time, he has also had on his mind preparations for war, which seem to be ongoing and never ending. When he has not been thinking about war and the rush to war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been thinking about peace, always an elusive goal and especially right now when many nations are expanding their arsenal of autonomous weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles. For years he was the Five Colleges Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College.
I met Klare when we were both undergraduates at Columbia in the early 1960s. We were members of Action, a campus political party that aimed to overturn apathy and that called for the end of the Cold War and an end to the paternalism of the college administration which aimed to treat us as children. These days I hear him on the radio and read what he has to say in magazines like The Nation, and in books such as The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources and All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.
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Tagged Anti-War Movement, History of War, Jonah Raskin, Michael Klare, New Cold War, Rag Bloggers
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BOOKS | ‘Making History Making Blintzes’
A memoir by New Left veterans Mickey Flacks and Dick Flacks.
By Robert C. Cottrell | The Rag Blog | January 20, 2022
As a historian who has concentrated extensively on American radicalism, I attempt to keep abreast of newly released volumes on the subject. The book I explore below is one that skated past me upon its release in 2018 but should be of interest to followers of The Rag Blog due to the radical pedigree of its co-authors. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to point out that one of the authors, Richard Flacks, a longtime professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, served on my graduate committee when I initiated doctoral studies there in the fall of 1977.
Before I would meet with Dr. Flacks, I had to make an appointment, a practice he evidently adopted after an incident at the University of Chicago, where he previously taught and where he might have himself become a victim of the politics of assassination I recently wrote about in this forum. That pattern followed a vicious beating he had endured on May 5, 1969, at the hands of an assailant who had gained entrée by posing as a newspaper reporter. As the New York Times subsequently indicated, Flacks experienced a pair of skull fractures and the near severing of his right hand, which never fully recovered from the attack. Flacks later learned that he was among several SDS leaders whom the FBI tracked through its infamous Counterintelligence Program, better known as COINTELPRO.
I was excited about the chance to work with Flacks at UCSB because I was somewhat familiar with his earlier history. Flacks was among the first leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the two preeminent New Left organizations; the other, of course, was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was involved with the crafting of SDS’s foremost initial documents, The Port Huron Statement (1962) and, more fully, America and the New Era (1963).
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Tagged Books, Dick Flacks, Making History Making Blintzes, Memoir, Mickey Flacks, New Left, Rag Bloggers, Robert C. Cottrell
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