No Colors Anymore...The Sixties Painted Black

In recent years a number of novels that revolve around Sixties radicals coming to terms with their pasts have hit the bookstores. Some of the better attempts at this are Neil Gordon's The Company You Keep and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. Each of these novels provides a different take on the theme and manages to pull off something quite different. Into this quickly populating genre comes Bob Sommers' Where the Wind Blew. This novel begins with the protagonist on the run and hiding in a national forest camping out of his car. His wife, who knows nothing of his past and knows him only as a successful businessman in Kansas, is left to run the family business and answer questions from a rightwing talk show host who is only to eager to bring down anyone who might be linked to the 1960s radical movement.

As the story unfolds, we find out that Peter St. John's true name and past is discovered accidentally by a high school reporter who set out merely to do a profile of a successful businessperson in her tranquil Kansas town. Her discovery of St. John's previous name through an internet search leads her to ask even more questions. St. John tells her the truth about his past. Part of that truth is that this name is Peter Howell and he is wanted for involvement in the bombing of a corporation involved with military production that accidentally killed four people, including three of the bombers. Peter tells the high school reporter what happened, attempts to insure his family's economic stability and hits the road. He has no idea where he is going but knows somewhere in his soul that he must make amends with his past.

Told in a series of flashbacks that tell about his growing involvement in an independent radical cell grown frustrated with the never-ending war in Vietnam interspersed with a chronicle of his journey away from his suburban mask as Peter St. John, Howell/St. John becomes a fugitive once again. This time, however, he is running from his second life back into his first. He recalls his girlfriend from college who lost Peter to the antiwar movement while she perfected her cello playing and music composition. He relives the night of the bombing and the mixture of machismo and politics that brought the cell to undertaking that act. He recalls the tension after Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia—an action that led directly to the decision to set their bomb. Throughout the story lies an undercurrent of doubt and guilt—for the deaths caused by the bombing; for leaving his St. John family. For not doing enough to stop the war and giving up.

Sommers' novel is an emotionally taut tale. Like the strings on his old girlfriend's cello, the story is tuned perfectly. One twist of the pegs to the left or right would make the story less than what it is—either too flat or mere melodrama. Where the Wind Blew is an intelligent and sensitive treatment of a time when the apocalypse was always just around the corner. It is also a look at how the period we call the Sixties is never far from the present, no matter what we do to deny it or how far we run. It is the story of one man's redemption in a journey both literal and figurative back to that time when his transgressions, no matter how well-meaning, continue to ripple through time.

Unlike Sommers' novel, Zachary Lazar's Sway offers no possibility for redemption. A disturbing fictionalized story of the dark urges released in the freeform milieu that was the 1960s counterculture, Sway brings the lives of Charlie Manson's Family and the Rolling Stones together. Although these two never met, the story Lazar creates makes a connection between the two plausible. Little Richie, a late friend of mine who was part of the communal experiment (that still thrives) known as the Hog Farm, used to talk about parties he attended in late 1960s Los Angeles. These parties might be at some Hollywood producer's spread or just at some hippie's place. Whenever Charlie Manson and his crew showed up, there was what Richie called “a perceptible chill” that fell upon the place. One didn't even need to have a sixth sense to feel this chill, either. It came, Richie said, with the people in the group.

The tenuous connection the Rolling Stones and Charlie Manson did have was the filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger, who is still alive, was a maker of innovative films that blended ancient Egyptian spirituality, Aleister Crowley-like occultism, motorcycle gangs and other urges of the 1960s counterculture into collages of disturbing imagery and music that work on the subconscious mind. His film Lucifer Rising featured the hapless rock musician Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil, who was linked with Manson, was convicted of murdering Gary Hinman—a murder which turned out to be the prelude to the series of grisly slaughters in 1969 known as the Manson murders. Anger also spent some time with the Stones, even including a couple members of the band in cameo roles in Lucifer Rising. If one broadens this a bit, it is fair to say that the other, more ephemeral connection the Stones and Anger shared was a curiosity with the dark side of the era's spirit. Implicit in that curiosity was the realization that this darkness was the essential complement to the period's light.

It is not Lazar's intention in Sway to enhance the physical connection between Anger and the Stones in his novel. Instead, there is an understanding that grows as the novel progresses that the connection between the Stones and the Manson Family exists solely in the era's zeitgeist. This zeitgeist is the same one that informed Peter Howell and his fictional cell of radical bombers. Indeed, it is that zeitgeist that killed the bombers and the employee who happened to be too near the explosion. Lazar's Anger defines one aspect of this zeitgeist early in the novel, utilizing the psychological term thanatomania; or suicidal or homicidal madness. Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, racial, generational and class warfare; heroin, pcp, and methamphetamine abuse on a large scale. Environmental destruction. Some saw capitalism and its Soviet heresy as the cause for this mania. Others looked into religion or the dark arts for their explanations.

The 1960s represent an emotional and intellectual crucible that we still refer to, even if we are not conscious that we do. Those who lived through the period either revisit it more than they would like or, like Peter Howell's self-made reincarnation as Peter St. John, have put as many artificial and emotional barriers between themselves and that period to ensure they are never reminded of the time. One wonders if the Stones revisit that historical moment every time they perform or does it take an unfortunate reminder from somewhere or someone to remove them from their artificial and gilded conventional present, much like the high school reporter’s discovery of Peter Howell’s past removed him from his Kansan suburban reality?

If it is the latter for the Stones, do those reminders bring back only the fear and none of the joy from the apocalyptic time we call the Sixties? Or are they more circumspect, acknowledging that it was the contrasts between the two realities and their vying for the same emotional and psychic space that enhanced the tension of that struggle?

Ulrike Meinhof was a real person that lived what could easily have been a fictional life. A leftist journalist in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s, she went from being a pacifist to a founder of the revolutionary terrorist Red Army Faktion (RAF). In fact, the organization was often referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after the surnames of its founders, even though both founders were captured in 1972, well before the bulk of the group's actions . The story of her life from the moment she committed herself to armed struggle is a story of bombings, bank robberies, hijackings, murder, underground life, romantic trysts with comrades and probably others, capture and imprisonment and death. All of this was chronicled by the German media in sensational fashion. Before Meinhof made the leap into terror, she was an editor of the German journal konkret. Her columns for that journal were literate and pointed analyses of the conquered state of West Germany, its fascist legacy and the left alternative.

Recently, Seven Stories Press released many of these writings in an English translation for the first time. Titled Everybody Talks About the Weather...We Don't, the text is introduced by the editor, McGill professor Karin Bauer. Bauer writes about Meinhof's life and death and the meaning of what came between. Clarity of thought and emotion are the overriding tone of Meinhof's essays, as they provide insight into the intellectual journey of a thoughtful and intelligent person—a journey taken by many western Germans as they watched their government regurgitate and forgive parts of its Nazi past in the name of freedom and security.

Although it is difficult for many to separate the RAF Meinhof from her previous role as writer and editor (and maybe it isn't even something one should do), the essays here represent a Meinhof whose rationality lacks the frustration apparent in her move towards bombings and murder. They are certainly critical of the new NATO-built neocolony known as West Germany, and they are critical of that entity from a leftist perspective that saw the Christian Democrats as more Nazi than Democrat and began to see Bonn's Social-Democratic Party (SPD) as a political successor to the party that sucked the life out of the 1918 German revolution. In other words, Meinhof came to believe that the SPD was part of the capitalist machinery she opposed. As the Sixties progressed, she and much of the German extraparliamentary left saw collaboration with that party's leadership as politically impossible because, after all, it was collaboration with the enemy.

In a rather bitter footnote, Meinhof's daughter Bettina Roehl (who Meinhof abandoned when she went underground) blasts what she terms the myth of Meinhof and the German New Left. In a rather conventional attack on the “communist conspiracy,” Roehl points to East Berlin's partial funding of konkret in its early years and later revelations about interactions between the RAF and East German intelligence as evidence enough that the new left in Germany was just another element of that conspiracy. It is not my place to wonder how much of Roehl's apparent hatred of all things Communist is related to her sense of abandonment, but it is useful to remember that for every contact made by the Eastern bloc's intelligence agencies and every dollar sent to a western journal, there were at least an equal number of contacts made and dollars sent in the opposite direction. That was the nature of the bipolar world of the Cold War.

Roehl's anger and dislike of the radical movement her mom killed and died for serves as an all-too-real metaphor for the nature of love in a time when all human relationships were being redefined and often torn asunder, if not for freedom than for another kind of love that seemed more important. That love could be Anita Pallenberg's rejection of Brian Jones for something else that included Keith Richards and freedom or it could be Peter Howell's growing involvement in the revolutionary antiwar movement in the name of a love for the Vietnamese people. Then again it could be his decision to leave his created Kansas family—a decision made today but certainly informed by his Peter Howell past. It could even be whatever pushed Ulrike Meinhof away from her role as mother, leftist writer and speaker into the RAF’s affair with murder, mayhem and suicide. Such decisions aren't always the best decisions in retrospect, but love doesn't always work like that, even the love of an idea. Sometimes, one just has to make the leap. When they do, any and all consequences are secondary at best. For better and worse.

Television, Murder, Vietnam and A Thirteen Year Old Kid In America 1968

I was a kid in 1968. It was the year I turned 13 and it was the year my dad began to prepare to go to Vietnam. The Tet offensive was on the television in January. I remember the picture of the South Vietnamese police chief killing a suspected NLF fighter. After that, my father didn't watch television news when his younger kids were around. I won grand prize in the science fair at my junior high for an investigation into whether or not my pet guppies talked. Then I won first place in my division at the statewide fair held the last weekend in March of that year at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House.

My dad picked me up after the fair closed down. After we had packed the exhibit in the trunk of his station wagon, we got in the front seat. On the way from College Park, MD to our house in Laurel, MD—about ten miles away—we listened to the speech by President Johnson where he told the nation that he would not “seek or accept the nomination” for his party's candidacy for the presidency. After a brief discussion with my dad about what this meant and why it happened, we turned to a conversation about the differences between FM and AM radio. Then he told me that he had been given orders to go to Vietnam. I didn't say anything while he told me when he thought he would be leaving and what it meant for the family. He never mentioned whether he thought what he would be doing there was right or wrong. When we got home, I talked with my parents for a few minutes and went to bed.

The next day in Social Studies class the teacher talked about how remarkable it was that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for reelection. From there, he segued into a conversation about the elections. After a quick show of hands regarding who we supported, he asked me why I supported Gene McCarthy. I told him it was because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In fact, McCarthy was calling for a negotiated settlement with the northern Vietnamese and the NLF while everyone else (except for maybe Bobby Kennedy) was still talking about some kind of victory. There was only one other person in the class who supported McCarthy. Two or three others supported Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the race only days before. Most supported either Humphrey (who was LBJ's replacement) or Nixon. On the playground at lunch that day, one of the Nixon supporters called me a faggot because I supported McCarthy.

Three days later, April 4, 1968, I was watching TV with my older sister when the graphic before a breaking news bulletin flashed across the screen. I walked over to the TV and turned up the volume. (There were no remotes back then.) A talking head came on the screen and announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew this was something big. I sat down to watch the incoming news while my sister put our younger siblings to bed. I knew that King had been in Memphis supporting a strike of sanitation workers and that there had been trouble at one of the marches. When our parents got home, I told my father what had happened. He sat down for a few minutes and watched as news reports filtered in about angry blacks gathering in different parts of Washington, DC. That night, I listened to WTOP--the all news station in DC-- relay reports on the growing insurrection in that city and around the nation. When I got up to deliver my newspaper route the next morning, the front page was covered with banner headlines and full color pictures of the assassination and the angry response.

The following week, our family attended a cookout at a neighbor's house down the block in our lily-white middle class suburban development. Most of Maryland was under curfew, gun sales were forbidden and liquor sales had been stopped in DC, Baltimore and several counties. While I ate beans, salad and burgers from the paper plate I had loaded up, some of the adults conversed about the murder and the insurrection. The remarks I heard from some of the neighbors changed my impression of them forever. I had never heard such racist remarks before except from some of the working class toughs who wore their hair greased back like early Elvis and smoked cigarettes while hanging out in front of the Peoples Drug Store at the local shopping center. If I learned one thing that night, it was that the ignorance of racism knew no class boundaries. The names they called Martin Luther King and the suggestions they had for the local police to “keep order” in the black section of town were reminiscent of the Klan literature one of my newspaper customers gave me almost every time I collected his month's payment from him. Literature that I threw away after reading it the first time and being repulsed by the hatred therein.

After the King assassination I began to read the newspaper much more carefully. Not just the sports section like before, but all of the news sections as well. Prior to that, I had skimmed the front page and the local section, but had never really read anything too carefully. As the presidential campaign heated up, I switched my allegiance to Bobby Kennedy. His ability to gather huge crowds no matter where he showed up—West Virginia one day and Washington, DC the next—was impressive. He had somehow figured out how to speak to people on a different level than all of the other candidates and he said he was against the war. Meanwhile, I had discovered another newspaper that told a completely different story. That paper was Washington DC's first underground paper, The Washington Free Press. A friend's older brother who went to the University of Maryland used to give me his old copies when he was done with them. Somewhere not very far from the boring suburban redneck town that I lived in there was something going on that was both new and connected to the revolution I was certain had to be happening somewhere. It had to be happening because the Beatles were singing about it, the Rolling Stones seemed to have joined it, and the Free Press reported it. I didn't understand why they didn't like Kennedy or thought the elections were bullshit but I wanted to find out why.

When Bobby Kennedy was killed I was watching TV with my sister once again. I remember feeling angry, sad and bitter all at the same time. After he was killed I gave up on the elections for a while. No more passing out campaign literature at the shopping center or door to door. There was nothing left to do but wait until the convention and hope some kind of miracle happened that would stop the war. A war my dad was heading off to in a few short months. In late July we took a family vacation at a beach near Norfolk, VA. My father was getting ready to go to some kind of school there that was required before he went away to Vietnam. The name of that school? Air War College. You don't have to guess what the general course of studies was. After a week, my older sister and I returned to Laurel. I delivered my newspapers, mowed lawns for the neighbors and hung out with my friends listening to music, reading, and watching TV. It was one of those nights of TV watching when another news bulletin flashed across the screen. Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. This was a year for news bulletins. I followed this event with interest because I was secretly hoping that the Czechs truly could find some kind of humane alternative to both Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, even if that terminology was unknown to me at the time..

Not long after that night, I began watching the coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I recall a sign shown on television that said “Welcome to Czechago.” Those few nights of watching cops beat the shit out of people and politicians showing their true colors—be they fascist in nature or on the side of the protesters—did more to educate and radicalize me than pretty much anything I had ever read or would ever read in my life. The angry repartee between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal on one of the networks gelled in my mind along with pictures of tear gas, bloodied reporters, people chanting “The whole world's watching,” and my mom crying because her country was falling to pieces. When my dad came home for a weekend, he tried to convince me that the protesters were wrong and that voting was the way to solve the country's problems. I was not convinced.

By this time, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain was getting closer and closer to a mark not reached by a major league pitcher in many seasons. He was approaching thirty wins. Although I had given my heart to the Red Sox the year before, I tried to watch or listen to every game McLain pitched. If it wasn't on TV and I couldn't get the game over my AM radio via the nighttime skip phenomenon that somehow brought the games to my transistor, then I reconstructed the box scores the next morning before I delivered my papers. When the World Series came around, I was pulling for Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals. I loved to watch Gibson pitch even though he had beat the Red Sox the year before.

Meanwhile, in school we were composing a scrapbook for the elections. Each of us had to choose either Nixon or Humphrey for our scrapbook and fill it with materials related to the campaign. I chose Humphrey, even though he was for the war, he wasn't Nixon. When it came time to turn in the scrapbook, I covered the front of the binder with “Dick Gregory for President” stickers. My teacher was not happy. She yelled at me and asked how I could support someone who opposed the war when my dad was on his way over there. I snidely suggested that the answer was obvious and ended up being sent to the counselor. He yelled at me and told me to get my head out of my ass. I left there thinking that he should do the same.

On election day we watched the final returns come in over the television in our social studies class. There weren't any exit poll projections back then. The news people actually let the election run its course. When Walter Cronkite said that Nixon had won I had a feeling that the world as I knew it was over. In fact, it was only getting worse. The difference was now I was aware of it. I didn't hit the streets in protest for another year but I was already there in my heart and soul.

Counterpunch reviews Short Order Frame Up

Jeffrey St. Clair gave my novel Short Order Frame Up a pretty decent capsule review that captures the essence of the work. It can be found at this url (third book reviewed).

Who'll Stop the Rain?

Pretty much everyone but the dead know that the US occupation of Iraq is now entering its sixth year. When one looks for comparable circumstances in recent history, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land of course comes to mind, but so does the US war on Vietnam and the French war on Algiers. Despite the best efforts of the Bush administration and other war supporters to frame the Iraqi adventure positively—as in the liberation of Europe from Nazism—the fact is that the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation bear all of the worst elements of the three colonialist endeavors mentioned in the second sentence of this paragraph.

The comparisons run from details like the brutal arrests of men and boys merely because they are males by occupying troops to the greedy profiteering and self-righteous pontificating about the occupied peoples inability to govern themselves. They include the killing of innocents by the occupying troops and the turn towards terrorism by the resistance forces fighting against the occupier and his puppet government. Add to this list the attempts by the occupiers to turn the subject peoples against themselves by creating situations and dynamics that accentuate differences inside the occupied nation and one has a brief description of the current reality in Iraq.

If we listen to those occupying troops who have been in Iraq, we hear some of them now telling the world that not only are they against the war, but that they are actively opposed to it. Unfortunately, many of their fellows in uniform, meanwhile, tell themselves that they don't really care. After all, they say, it's out of our hands. The politicians and the generals are the ones who make the decisions. Perhaps this apathy is understandable on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where caring too much may only make death more likely, but it is inexcusable for those of us not in uniform to not care what happens to the Iraqis, Afghanis, and the individual service men and women on the ground. After all, we have nothing to lose but our refusal to accept the responsibility we must take for the murder and destruction carried on in our name by those men and women. To continue to shirk that responsibility will only precipitate actions even more reprehensible than those already known.

In Frantz Fanon's last work A Dying Colonialism, he writes about the situation faced by the French five years in to the Algerians' war for independence. In essence, he states that France would either have to intensify its military escapade or leave entirely and let the Algerians decide their own future without France. This is similar to where Washington sits right now. It must either enhance its military and political control (whatever there is of the latter) or it must eventually withdraw and let the Iraqis figure out the future of their estranged nation. Since the political will of the American people does not seem to exist to send more US troops into the fray, but it does exist for a US-armed and paid combination of official military and militias to do Washington's work there, the US commanders hope that the combination of Iraqi security forces and Sunni-dominated Awakening militias will do the occupier's bidding and enhance US control. The likelihood of success for this endeavor is, to say the least, questionable, especially given the tenuous allegiance of the Awakening Councils to the US military . Yet, there is no alternative for an occupier unwilling to conscript its youth into colonial service but is insistent on maintaining an empire to gratify its citizens' consumptive desires. Then again, just because there does not seem to be an existing political will to expand the occupation does not mean that such a will can not be created. Nor does it mean that the Pentagon and the politicians might not decide to expand the occupation, no matter which way the political winds might be blowing.

In the mainstream US press, commentators wonder what went wrong. How could Washington let certain domination slip from its grasp? How could a military so dominant in every regard fail to destroy all opposition in Iraq (and Afghanistan—which has been going on for two more years than Iraq)? Why aren't the oil profits from Iraq paying for the occupation and the remaking of that country in Washington's image? In his March 16, 2008 commentary John Burns of the New York Times glowingly describes the attack on Baghdad in March 2003 as if it were the ultimate fireworks show that would certainly free the Iraqi people from the terrible dictator Saddam Hussein—a dictator some Iraqis would now prefer over the occupation and its callous destruction. How could this have gone wrong, he wonders, echoing the refrain of his fellow apologists for imperial America? Of course, his answer is not that the war and occupation are illegal and immoral but that they were mismanaged. Like most of the rest of the US population—politicians, citizens, bureaucrats and others—these commentators forget the Iraqi people and their distaste for occupation. The Iraqis may not throw the occupiers out of their country, but they will not allow them to succeed in their mission. The current state of stalemate, insurgency and internal strife is not making things easier for the Iraqi people, but neither is it allowing the US and its marionettes in Baghdad to install the regime they desire.

The world has seen horrible scenes of carnage coming out of Iraq the past five years. Car bombs and suicide bombs. Cities leveled by US bombs and missiles and children with skin melted by white phosphorus and other chemical weapons. Prisoner abuse and torture by US forces and decapitations by men claiming to be insurgents. Wedding parties and funerals attacked from the air and helicopters in pieces in the ground. None of this seems to faze the men and women calling the shots. They sit inside their offices and travel in motorcades protected by mercenaries that shoot at anything they distrust without fear of reprisal. These things happen because the US invaded Iraq and continues to occupy it. They would not be occurring if this was not the case. Yet, it is this exact situation that is provided by Washington as the reason the occupation must continue. Like Israel in the Palestinian territories, Washington chooses who it will work with and on what terms, despite the obvious fact that those chosen represent only one (not necessarily very popular) element of the subject peoples, if that.

Underlying the entire philosophy of the antiwar movement is the question of what constitutes the Iraqi nation. Is it the Green Zone government or is it the various elements of the insurgency and their supporters? If one considers the former to be the legitimate regime, than they can only go so far in their opposition to the occupation. Why? Because that regime requires the presence of US forces to exist for now and the foreseeable future. That is why the so-called antiwar Democrats and their supporters are not calling for the complete withdrawal of all US forces—military, CIA, mercenaries and others—but speak instead of a timetable for the withdrawal of combat forces only. This element of the antiwar movement does not oppose the US mission in Iraq. They only want to go about it in a way where fewer Americans are in danger and all of the dying is done by the Iraqis. Essentially, they are no different than the war hawks who talk and write about a one-hundred-year occupation. If one considers the disparate groups of the resistance to be the representatives of the Iraqi nation, then the only stance they can take is for the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all US forces of any kind from Iraq. The absence of occupying forces would naturally allow the Iraqis to determine a future that would most likely be considerably more stable than anything Washington might impose. Indeed, the possibility even remains that most of the various factions currently at odds would eventually reconcile enough to work together. This scenario makes even more sense if one considers that part of the US strategy in Iraq has been to inflame the differences between different elements of Iraqi society. In addition, certain lines between the Green Zone government and the resistance are somewhat blurred because there are elements in the current Green Zone government that agree more with one or the other resistance groups yet have a place in Maliki's regime. This fact would be resolved by the Iraqis, too, once the occupiers left.

The occupation of Iraq is not in the interests of the world's peoples. Even those of us in the US are paying for this exercise in greed and death. Economically, this adventure is costing more per day now than it did when it began. Already, hundreds of thousands of American men and women have taken part in the occupation and thousands more are on their way this year. Close to 4,000 have been killed in Iraq, (with more than 800 more killed in Afghanistan). Unknown thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation; millions more have been uprooted from their homes, while thousands languish in prisons merely because they are male and/or because they oppose the occupation of their country. Those who benefit from this exercise are few, yet it continues. Why? Because of the indifference of those who can end it. It is not enough to merely be against the war. One must actively oppose it. It is not only our consciences that should demand this, it is also our future.

Innocent Flesh-Recruiting Kids to Kill

I used to umpire Little League baseball in the roughest section of Burlington, VT. Compared to so-called rough sections of bigger cities in other parts of the United States, the Old North End was certainly not very rough. However, it did have the largest number of working and other poor families, a large number of immigrants and a higher number of single parent homes than most of the rest of Burlington. On any given game day, there would be a couple parole officers hanging around the game watching younger siblings of their charges playing ball. One of the officers who used to talk ball with me a little told me that he had been the parole officer for two old brothers of one of the better players in the league and hoped that the third and youngest boy would avoid the fate of his brothers who had both served time for drugs and robbery. In addition to the parole officers, various workers from Social Services and a good number of parents and relatives, a couple military recruiters began showing up at the occasional game in spring 2002.

The boys (and some of the girls) were intrigued by the recruiters. Their uniforms and their sense of certainty seemed to appeal to these young people—especially the ones with the least stable home lives. Burlington never had much of a gang problem, but it always seemed to me that the appeal of the recruiters was that they promised membership in something very much like a gang with all of the solidarity and unity such membership could provide. On the days the recruiters showed up they would converse with the kids—none who were older than 13—about the Red Sox, the game and what they thought about high school. After all, the military was only recruiting high school graduates at the time. To their credit, the recruiters were more convivial than anything else and may even have inspired some of the kids they talked to into staying in school. Yet, their primary reason for befriending these kids was to get them to join the military and go to war.

High schools across the nation include JROTC as a standard course. In some schools it replaces physical education. The course is about physical education but it is also about regimentation and indoctrination. Boys and girls in the course do not use guns except when they carry fake ones in drill. They do, however, get indoctrinated in the military doctrine and nationalistic propaganda. Meanwhile, the US military has total access to young people's phone numbers and school records. Recruiters come to schools and speak to mandatory assemblies. The US Army sends mail and calls students incessantly in their last two years of high school and send recruitment vans into neighborhoods where many youth are present. Recruiters hang out in shopping malls near arcades hoping to get boys hyped up on the latest video game to consider a couple years in Iraq or Afghanistan as an option. They push their way into job fairs at two and four year colleges and set up offices in as many towns as possible throughout the United States. The Marines have a program called Young Marines that encourages parents to sign up their children in elementary school for drill practices, militarized outings and indoctrination. The culture of militarism is pervasive and it is heavily geared toward young people between the ages of twelve and twenty.

I mention all this in relation to a recent news item from the Associated Press stating that the group the Pentagon calls Al-Qaida in Iraq is recruiting and training teenagers. For the moment, let's assume that this article is true and is not some kind of fake news planted by US psy-ops. According to the story, some videos were found in an operation against insurgents. According to Rear Admiral Smith of the US Navy, the videos “were meant to spread Al Qaida's message among the young rather than train the boys for missions.” This was not the first time such videos had been found, the story continued, but “it was the most disturbing.”

Now, if I understand this right, the US military is appalled and disturbed because some Iraqi insurgent groups (that may or may not have anything to do with Al Qaida in Iraq) are using videos to propagandize among adolescents in the hope that they will enlist. Meanwhile, the US military, which is engaged in the same type of operations as the Iraqi insurgency only as the occupying force, glorifies its mission of bloodshed, intimidation, and killing in videos, video games, in schools, on the television, at shopping malls and through the mails. Naturally, these methods are not training the US adolescents that they are targeting for operations, but they are definitely “meant to spread the US military's message among the young (to borrow Admiral Smith's words.)”

As I write this, a news item is coming over the radio stating that the US Army Surgeon General issued an order telling military counselors to stop helping Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans fill out paperwork required to seek psychological assistance. After denying such a document existed, the General backtracked from that denial when the document was produced. He is now looking for another lie to explain away the order. Do you think the recruiters mention this to the teenagers they target?

Check Out My Books!

From the publisher:
A gripping account of 1960s radicals who took up arms against the state

The arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Silas Bissell, former heir to the rug-cleaning fortune who was discovered living near Eugene, Oregon, in 1987, drew a line under one of the most spectacular and bizarre episodes in the historv of the American New Left, for it marked the official end of the Weathermen. Product of splits within the antiwar movement during the late 1960s, the Weather Underground would become synonymous with violent, clandestine resistance to racism and imperialism in the United States and, for some, a symptom of how the movement went wrong.

In the first comprehensive history of the Weathermen, Ron Jacobs narrates the origins, development and ultimate demise of the organization: its emergence from the Students for a Democratic Society; its role in the famous Days of Rage in Chicago during October 1969; its decision to go underground; the various actions it staged … and in some cases bungled -- during the 1970s; its role as goad to other left organizations to sustain the struggle against racism and imperialism; and finally its disintegration, as various members were either captured or surrendered. Drawing on a rich array of documents, interviews with participants and an unrivalled knowledge of the history of the New Left, Jacobs weaves a gripping tale, by turns inspiring and hair-raising … a fitting testimony to the serried adventures of Weatherman itself.

The Way the Wind Blew fuses the excitement of a thriller with an objective assessment of US 1960s radicalism. It is an indispensable resource for comprehending the recent history of the US left.Available for purchase at Amazon and many other fine stores.

That's the title of my new novel. Published in June 2007 by Mainstay Press, it's set in 1975. America has lost its war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Racially-tinged riots are tearing the city of Boston apart. The The politics and counterculture of the 1960s is disintegrating into nothing more than sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Boston Red Sox are on one of their improbable runs toward a postseason appearance. In a suburban town in Maryland, a young couple is murdered and another young man is accused. The couple are white and the accused is black. It is up to his friends and family to prove he is innocent. This is a story of suburban ennui, race, murder and injustice. Religion and politics, liberal lawyers and racist cops. Short Order Frame Upis a piece of crime fiction that exposes the wound that is US racism. Two cultures existing side by side and across generations—a river very few dare to cross. His characters work and live with and next to each other, often unaware of the other's real life. When the murder occurs, however, those people that care about the man charged must cross that river and meet somewhere in between in order to free him from (what is to them) an obvious miscarriage of justice.

The case against the young man has many flaws, but the racism of the cops and the system makes it easy for them to ignore those flaws. It's only when a radical political group and a minister get involved that the media begins to wonder if the charges are valid. All the while, the friends of the accused and the dead couple are searching their own selves and motivations; and the cops are trying to extract a confession from they man they locked up.

Short Order Frame Up is a crime novel where the crimes are committed not only by those on the other side of the law. Rivetingly told and well-placed in its time, Jacobs' novel is a commentary on America's legacy of racism and a story of suburban malaise gone horribly awry that you won't want to put down until you're done with it.

Available for purchase at Amazon and many other fine stores. Also, if you hurry, I have a few copies for sale that I can sell direct for $12.00 US shipping included. Just email me at ronj1955@gmail.com

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"Ron Jacobs has created a working-class brew of language and music, a quasi-bitter, semi-sweet world of weed and sport, of love and violence, of not-so-innocent innocence up against the walls of racism and power. A compelling story, alas, and an underlying reality of life in America." -Marc Estrin, author of Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa; Golem Song

"With Short Order, Ron Jacobs delivers something I haven't come across since the works of James Baldwin: a great anti-racist novel. Powerful and political without being preachy. Poignant without being treacly. It's stunning." - Dave Zirin, author Welcome to the Terrordome; What's My Name Fool?

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Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin is a sportswriter who occupies a rare niche in the United States. He writes about sports from the left side of the political spectrum. Despite the fact that mainstream media doesn't usually like to provide the left with a forum on its shows, Dave's humor and delivery make him a natural for sports talk shows, so they put him on the airwaves more often than you would think. It's his books, though, that set him apart from most sportswriters in today's world. His latest, Welcome to the Terrordome, is a hard hitting attack on the greed of corporate sports and the culture it has created. Check it out!