JONAH RASKIN : MEMOIR | One organizer, two cities: Jon Melrod’s ‘Fighting Times,’ from Madison to Racine

Posted on April 7, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Jon Melrod recalls those heady days in his new memoir.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | April 7, 2022

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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ROBERT C. COTTRELL : PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE | Todd Gitlin, RIP

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

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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THE RAG BLOG : BOOKS | ‘Exploring Space City!’ at Houston’s Printing Museum

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

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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HARRY TARG : WAR AND PEACE | Reflections on the War in Ukraine

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Russian invasion of Ukraine / Viewsridge / Creative Commons.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | March 10, 2012

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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BRUCE MELTON : CLIMATE | The Texice disaster, Valentine’s week, 2021

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Stories of climate change survival, our current emergency, and new solutions to this existential crisis.

Interstate 35 in downtown Austin during the unprecedented winter weather disaster. Image: Texas Department of Transportation Twitter feed.

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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THORNE DREYER : DOCUMENTARY FILM | Documentary about LNS wins prestigious national award

Posted on February 4, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Film with Austin ties wins NETA award for Best Cultural Documentary.

Watch the film here.

By Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | February 4, 2022

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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Lamar W. Hankins :
CRIMINAL JUSTICE | Can’t see past the blue

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

How prosecutors and judges let cops get away with murder, or at least with criminally negligent homicide.

Pam Watts at Caldwell County Justice Center.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | January 31, 2022

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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JONAH RASKIN :
INTERVIEW | Why do men keep making war?: An interview
with scholar Michael Klare

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Michael Klare has had war on his mind for the past 60 years.

Michael Klare on Rag Radio, May 7, 2021.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | January 20, 2022

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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Robert C. Cottrell :
BOOKS | ‘Making History Making Blintzes’

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

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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JONAH RASKIN :
BOOKS | Alice Walker’s ‘Gathering Blossoms Under Fire’:
Journals as autobiography

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

The book reads like a peremptory strike meant to deter future biographers.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | January 13, 2022

Before the advent of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and the most recent generation of Black writers, such as Jesmyn Ward and Edwidge Danticat, there was Alice Walker, a Georgia-born novelist, poet, and short story writer who has lived most of her adult life under the radar in northern California. According to Gathering Blossoms Under Fire (528 pages; $37.50), an edited selection of entries from her journals—to be published by Simon & Schuster later this year—she first bought land in Mendocino County in 1980.

She has lived there ever since then and at her other houses in Mexico and San Francisco. In Mendocino, she has planted trees, grown vegetables, relaxed in hot tubs, welcomed lovers both male and female, friends both white and Black, and made space for her daughter, Rebecca, whose father, Melvyn Leventhal, is Jewish and a lawyer and Walker’s one and only husband. In Mississippi, in the 1960s, they were perhaps the only interracial married couple. They divorced many years ago. This February Walker will be 78.
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Alice Embree :
THE VOTE | Voting by mail in Texas

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Alice Embree

Voting rights and voting access are fundamental to democracy.

Photo by Steve Rainwater / Flickr / Creative Commons.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog |January 13, 2022

It’s time. If you are eligible to vote by mail in Texas, send in your application, mark “annual,” and be aware of new requirements.

Voting rights and voting access are fundamental to democracy. In 2020, mail ballots were embraced as a pandemic safety measure in record numbers. Mail ballots accounted for 46% of the votes in the presidential election. And another 26% percent of voters cast ballots in early voting. In contrast, the percentage of election-day voters fell to a record low, 28%.

In three states, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, mail ballots have been universally used and have a lengthy track record as secure. In 2020 with a raging pandemic, many states expanded voting by mail. Texas was one of five states (with Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) that stubbornly refused. Texas kept two barriers in place. Texas required a non-pandemic-related excuse and an annual application by mail to get a Vote By Mail (VBM) ballot. Despite the barriers, voting by mail increased in Texas from 7% in 2016 to 11% in 2020. The Texas Alliance for Retired Americans (TARA), an AFL-CIO affiliate, helped educate Texas voters on the vote by mail option.
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JONAH RASKIN :
FILM | ‘Don’t Look Up’: Apocalypse, again

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Don’t Look Up’ is apocalyptic science fiction, but it’s also biting satire.

Creative Commons image.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | January 6, 2022

I had heard about Don’t Look Up (Netflix, 2 h 18 m) the new apocalyptic science fiction film, but I didn’t watch it until The Rag Blog’s trusty editor, Thorne Dreyer, invited me to watch it and review it. I’m a glutton for punishment, especially if it involves watching movies at home on the screen of my computer, which admittedly isn’t the same as watching on a giant screen in a theater.

One day when it’s safer than it is now, I’ll take myself to my local multiplex, buy popcorn, hunker down in my seat and enjoy the colorful images. Like 2001, a Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove and Blade Runner, Don’t Look Up demands to be viewed on a giant screen. But if the only way you can see it is at home, do that. Don’t wait for ideal conditions.

We don’t know for sure what the future has in store for us and for our dear battered planet Earth, though if we’ve been listening to Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager, who has been urging action on climate change, the prognosis is bad. In Don’t Look Up, the politicians and the talking heads don’t listen, at least not initially, to the scientists (two astronomers) who warn about a comet that’s headed toward Earth and that, they say, will cause the kind of disaster only seen so far in science fiction movies.

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