The Washington Post is certainly not repeating its brave record of the Viet Nam war era. The paper has been diligent in pushing a very conservative foreign policy agenda and dramatically demonstrating its support for the war fever of the White House junta, but the coverage it gives to today’s massive anti-war demonstration in the Capital, its home town, is unspeakable.
It is now after 7:30 in the evening, and the protest began this morning, but at this late hour the continuously-updated Post website reports, “Demonstrators by the hundreds [my italics] gathered near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Saturday . . . ”
Other sources, even other commercial news media, have already reported that easily tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand people participated.
Protestor numbers are always a difficult and very political call, but It looks like the truth lies somewhere between the two hundred thousand claimed by some organizers and the twenty thousand reported by a number of press sources. [The huge range I describe reflects how bad I personally am with numbers, and the fact that I wasn’t able to be there today to see for myself.] “By the hundreds” is a disgustingly transparent political call by what should be an important print and web-based news source.
Author: jameswagner
throw the puritans out of NYC government!
If you are alive, dancing is a fundamental right, but dancing is illegal in almost any public place in New York City today.
Come to City Hall Park thursday (Halloween!) to help show that we can and will dance when and where we please. Repeal the absurd law!
The law states that an establishment must be licensed if the club features three or more musicians, or if any of the instruments is percussion or brass, or if there is three or more people moving in synchronized fashion.
In the late eighties, after a five year legal battle on behalf of the Musicians Union led by New York University Law Professor Paul Chevigny, the courts declared the three musician rule unconstitutional and accepted live music in zones where bars and restaurants are permitted. But nothing was done to lift the stigma of dancing.
….
Although there are currently over 5,000 liquor licenses in the five boroughs you can only dance in 296 places. You are not allowed to dance to the jukebox or DJ at your local bar. You are not allowed to move to the rock band or jazz act at your neighborhood club.
And while we’re at it, can we finally get rid of the sunday “blue law” that won’t let us buy wine or liquor on that special “holy day” observed by a few religious cults?
the method in their mendacity
“For the Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade.” Paul Krugman deconstructs the short-term strategy of the Bush administration and then, inexplicably, he says that he is confused.
What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush’s control of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public’s fundamental views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration’s hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of that balloon.
Right now the administration is playing the war card, inventing facts as necessary, and trying to use the remnants of Mr. Bush’s post-Sept. 11 popularity to gain control of all three branches of government. But then what? There is, after all, no indication that Mr. Bush ever intends to move to the center.
So the administration’s inner circle must think that full control of the government can be used to lock in a permanent political advantage, even though the more the public learns about their policies, the less it likes them. The big question is whether the press, which is beginning to find its voice, will lose it again in the face of one-party government.
So the media is our only remaining hope? I don’t feel so good.
Adolph Green
The news could not be more sad (even for me, and I have little interest in the Broadway musical form), unless it had included an announcement of the death of Betty Comden as well. In fact, Comden and Green were so much of a partnership it has always been more difficult to imagine either of them as one than as the two that even they insisted they were.
Mr. Green was artistically incomplete without Ms. Comden, and vice versa. They knew it and acknowledged it frequently. “Alone, nothing,” Mr. Green once told The Washington Post. “Together, a household word, a legend, Romulus and Remus, Damon and Pythias, Loeb and Leopold Mr. Words and Miss Words.”
Mr. Words and Miss Words were so professionally inseparable, so committed to each other, so pleased to have their relationship and so happy to talk about it, that many people thought they were married. In 1954 a writer for The New York Times mistakenly referred to them as a “husband-wife” writing team.
… Throughout his career, Mr. Green deferred to Ms. Comden and attributed the team’s success to her. She was always “unforgivably responsible,” he told The New York Herald Tribune in 1961. “She is always on time for everything, while I am late for anything. To make matters worse, she invariably appears at, say, producers’ conferences, with our latest work of dialogue or lyrics neatly typed and arranged in readable form.” He added that “without directly confronting me with my inadequacies, she has always humiliated me fair to distraction. You see, I have lived for years in the shadow of an overwhelming suspicion that all our collaborations have, in reality, been solo efforts, written in toto by Betty alone an untenable position for me.”
Ms. Comden said she was not the secret to the team’s triumphs; they were. “Everything is together,” she explained. “We don’t divide the work up. We develop a mental radar, bounce lines off each other.” She said that she could not envision a life without the collaboration. Years after it all started, she confessed that “we can still be delighted by something the other says or does.”
Lovely.
we’ve lost Senator Wellstone
Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, daughter Marcia, and five others
were killed today in a small plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota.
The Senator was one of our most courageous and progressive legislators, and we have very very few.
His death is a tremendous tragedy for the nation and the world.
the death of a prince, or a princess
HARRY HAY, PAVED THE WAY FOR MODERN GAY ACTIVISM, DIES AT 90
Henry “Harry” Hay, known as the founder of the modern American gay movement, has died at age 90. The pioneering gay activist devoted his life to progressive politics and in 1950, he founded a state-registered foundation and secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society. He was also a co-founder, in 1979, of the Radical Faeries, a movement affirming gayness as a form of spiritual calling. A rare link between gay and progressive politics, Hay and his partner of 39 years, John Burnside, had lived in San Francisco for three years after a lifetime in Los Angeles. Hay had been diagnosed weeks earlier with lung cancer. Despite his illness, he remained lucid and died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of October 24.
“Harry Hay’s determined, visionary activism significantly lifted gays out of oppression,” said Stuart Timmons, who published a biography of Hay in 1990.”All gay people continue to benefit from his fierce affirmation of gays as a people.”
Hay is listed in histories of the American gay movement as first in applying the term “minority” to homosexuals. An uncompromising radical, he easily dismissed “the heteros,” and never rested from challenging the status quo, including within the gay community. Due to the pervasive homophobia of his times (it was illegal for more than two homosexuals to congregate in California during the 1950s) Hay and his colleagues took an oath of anonymity that lasted a quarter century until Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Hay for the ground-breaking book Gay American History. Countless researchers subsequently sought him out; in recent years, Hay became the subject of a biography, a PBS-funded documentary, and an anthology of his own writings.
Previous attempts to create gay organizations in the United States had fizzled – or been stamped out. Hay’s first organizational conception was a group he called Bachelors Anonymous, formed to both support and leverage the 1948 presidential candidacy of Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace. Hay wrote and discreetly circulated a prospectus calling for “the androgynous minority” to organize as a political entity. Hay’s call for an “international bachelor’s fraternal order for peace and social dignity” did not bear results until 1950. That year, his love affair with Viennese immigrant Rudi Gernreich, (whose fashion designs eventually made him a TIME cover-man) brought Hay into gay circles where a critical mass of daring souls could be found to begin sustained meetings. On November 11, 1950, at Hay’s home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, a group of gay men met which became the Mattachine Society. Of the original Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings pre-deceased Hay; Konrad Stevens and John Gruber are the last surviving members of the founding group.
“Mattachine” took its name from a group of medieval dancers who appeared publicly only in mask, a device well understood by homosexuals of the 1950s. Hay devised its secret cell structure (based on the Masonic order) to protect individual gays and the nascent gay network. Officially co gender, the group was largely male; the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization, formed independently in San Francisco in 1956. Though some criticized the Mattachine movement as insular, it grew to include thousands of members in dozens of chapters, which formed from Berkeley to Buffalo, and created a lasting national framework for gay organizing. Mattachine laid the ground for rapid civil rights gains following 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York City.
Harry Hay was born in England in 1912, the day the Titanic sank. His father worked as a mining engineer in South Africa and Chile, but the family settled in Southern California. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, he briefly attended Stanford, but dropped out and returned to Los Angeles. He understood from childhood that he was a sissy – different in behavior from boys or girls – and also that he was attracted to men. His same-sex affairs began when he was a teenager, not long after he began reading 19th Century scholar Edward Carpenter, whose essays on “homogenic love” strongly influenced his thinking.
A tall and muscular young man, Hay worked as both an extra and ghostwriter in 1930s Hollywood. He developed a passion for theater, and performed on Los Angeles stages with Anthony Quinn in the 1930s, and with Will Geer, who became his lover. Geer took Hay to the San Francisco General Strike of 1935, and indoctrinated him into the American Communist Party. Haybecame an active trade unionist. A blend of Marxist analysis andstagecraft strongly influenced Hay’s later gay organizing.
Despite a decade of gay life, in 1938 Hay married the late Anita Platky, also a Communist Party member. The couple were stalwarts of the Los Angeles Left; Hay taught at the California Labor School and worked on domestic campaigns such as campaigning for Ed Roybal, the first Latino elected in Los Angeles. The Hays occasionally hosted Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie when they performed in Los Angeles, and Hay recalled demonstrating with Josephine Baker in 1945 over the Jim Crow policy of a local restaurant. When he felt compelled to go public with the Mattachine Society in 1951, the Hays divorced. After a burst of activity lasting three years, the growing Mattachine rejected Hay as a liability due to his Communist beliefs. In 1955, when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he had trouble finding a progressive attorney to represent him, he felt, due to homophobia on the Left. (He was ultimately dismissed after his curt testimony.) Hay felt exiled from the Left for nearly fifty years, until he received the Life Achievement award of a Los Angeles library preserving progressive movements.
For most of his life Hay lived in Los Angeles. However, during the early
1940s, Hay and his wife lived in New York City; he returned there with John Burnside to march and speak at the Stonewall 25 celebration in 1994. During the 1970s, he and Burnside moved to New Mexico, where he ran the trading post at San Juan Pueblo Indian reservation.
His years of research for gay references in history and anthropology texts lead Hay to formulate his own gay-centered political philosophy, which he wrote and spoke about constantly. His theory of “gay consciousness” placed variant thinking as the most significant trait in homosexuals. “We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the world. That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution to humanity, and why our people keep reappearing over the millennia,” he often stressed. Hay’s occasional exhortations that gays should “maximize the differences” between themselves and heterosexuals remained controversial. Academics tended to reject his ideas as much as they respected his historic stature.
A fixture at anti-draft and anti-war campaigns for sixty years, Hay worked in Women’s Strike for Peace during the Viet Nam War as a conscious strategy to build coalition between gay and feminist progressives. He also worked closely with Native American activists, especially the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life. Hay was a local founder of the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition during the early 1980s, determined to help convince the gay community that its political success was inextricably tied to a broader progressive agenda. His decades of agitation for coalition politics brought him increasing appreciation in later life from labor and third-party groups.
A second wind of activism came in 1979 when Hay founded, with Don Kilhefner, a spiritual movement known as the Radical Faeries. This pagan inspired group continues internationally based on the principal that the consciousness of gays differs from that of heterosexuals. Hay believed that this different way of seeing constituted the contribution gays made to society, and was indeed the reason for their continued presence throughout history. Despite his often-combative nature, Hay became an increasingly beloved figure to younger generations of gay activists. He was often referred to as the “Father of Gay Liberation.”
Hay is survived by Burnside as well as by his self-chosen gay family, a model he strongly advocated for lesbians and gays. His adopted daughters, Kate Berman and Hannah Muldaven also survive him. A circle of Radical Faeries provided care for him and Burnside through their later years. Harry Hay leaves behind a wide circle of friends and admirers among lesbians, gays, and progressive activists.
This memorial was generously provided by Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (1990)
“I adored Harry because he remained radical and iconoclastic to the end. Take a moment and think what it must have been like all those decades ago–to cut a path where none existed. What nerve and vision! Each one of us who uses that path has a responsibilty to keep it clear, and to widen the path for those that follow.”
Bill Dobbs
The photo credit and caption reads:
“One of the founders of the gay rights movement, Harry Hay, left, brushes the cheek of his partner John Burnside with his hand Friday, July 19, 2002, at their home in San Francisco.”
G.M. pushes christian fundamentalism
Gosh, and I thought it was just their cars and SUVs that were offensive.
Chevrolet, a division of General Motors, is title sponsor of the monthlong 16-city Come Together and Worship Tour, which begins on Nov. 1 in Atlanta. The tour will feature two acts in the fast-growing genre known as contemporary Christian music, W. Michael Smith and Third Day, along with a Texas pastor, the Rev. Max Lucado.
When Chevrolet announced its sponsorship, a news release described Mr. Lucado as a “world-renowned author.” But, as The Detroit Free Press said in an article yesterday, Mr. Lucado will be preaching on stage between the musical acts of the show. The shows will also include the distribution of evangelical literature to audience members. As a result, some find Chevrolet’s association with such a tour disturbing.
But there’s even more.
The sponsorship is to be augmented by Chevrolet with a monthlong promotional program to some consumers on the concert stops, inviting them to take test drives at local Chevrolet dealerships where they can get free CD’s featuring songs by Mr. Smith and Third Day and an audio version of a chapter from Mr. Lucado’s new book, “A Love Worth Giving.”
There are complementary promotions sponsored by a national chain known as Family Christian Stores along with general retailers like the Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart divisions of Wal-Mart Stores, Borders and Books-A-Million.
simple questions, not so simple answers
What does the world look like today, compared to what it looked like just two years ago?
No, the dwarf in the White House can’t be blamed for everything, but he certainly can’t be credited with anything.
Admittedly he has done great things for his donors, precisely the people who don’t pay serious taxes, only serious gratuities. Wow, have they gotten good service!
But why on earth are we being told how extraordinarily “popular” he is? I’m afraid to think too much about an answer to that question.
Oh, and has anyone seen a non-war issue lying about lately? I guess, since there’s still a full week and a half before the election, there’s still plenty of time. That is, unless sometime in the next days we see our national sniper standing behind the presidential seal to make a very serious announcement.
We’re probably already doomed, and the world with us, unfortunately.
re-writing the present, before it’s history
Washington chickenhawks don’t like what all of the top intellegence agencies are telling them, so they’ve erected a creature, responsible only to them, to give them the answer they want.
Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.
In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.
(Deputy Defense Secretary) Wolfowitz almost certainly doesn’t understand the irony in his argument for the new Pentagon “intelligence” unit.
He described “a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won’t, and not see other facts that others will.”
everybody feel better now?
President Bush said on Wednesday he was praying for a quick end to the killing spree [our home-grown and our very latest] and offered full government resources to help catch the “ruthless” killer.
Thank God.
Also thank God Dubya is safe in the State of Maine (or wherever), campaigning for the frat brothers.
p.s.
Surely this leak is at least partly intended to help our allies feel good about the competence of their supreme American warlord.