Join Barry Gifford and friends as they celebrate the 20th anniversary of the novel Wild At Heart, a Palme d’Or–winning film adapted for the screen by director David Lynch. The Balboa Theater is joined by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in celebrating the release of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, published by Seven Stories Press. This new collection presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, “the Romeo and Juliet of the South”: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart. Barry Gifford will be on hand with local writers who will be reading excerpts from the Sailor and Lula cycle. The readings will be followed by a screening of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart.

Readers: Robert Mailer Anderson, Eddie Muller, Jim Nisbet, more tba. Followed by a conversation with Barry Gifford.

Admission is $10.00. Proceeds go to support the Balboa Theater (one of the last standing independent movie houses in San Francisco).

Alice Walker in conversation with Michael Krasny. Tickets are $20.00 and cab be purchased by going to http://www.cityboxoffice.com/

Amy Goodman will interview. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit http://www.92y.org

The theme of this year’s lectures is “The Future of Capitalism.” Nader and journalist John Stossel will speak Tuesday, March 30, at 8 p.m. in a point-counterpoint discussion titled “Business or the Consumer First?”

Tickets to the lectures are free to Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff. General public tickets are $10 at Sarratt box office or any Ticketmaster outlet. Tickets may also be purchased at www.ticketmaster.com or by calling 800-745-3000.

Doesn’t Nathan Myhrvold get enough attention? The guy is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, a multimillionaire, a gourmet chef, a prize-winning photographer and keeper of multiple higher degrees from prestigious institutions. As the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private outfit that invests in “pure inventions,” he frequently finds himself in the news.

And yet, at the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. “Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria,” he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria’s main victims, don’t work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead.

That’s why Myhrvold came up with his latest invention: A mini-”Star Wars” weapons system that tracks mosquitoes in the air and shoots them down mid-flight–with lasers, of course. Like a Death Ray. All you need to make one is a Blu-ray player and a laser printer, plus a few months of processing time on a supercomputer, and voila!: you’re on your way to eradicating malaria in Africa for good.

Oh. My.

Obviously this would never work. Many malaria clinics in rural Africa don’t even have wire screens on their windows—how in hell are they going to install mosquito death-ray systems? There’s no regular electricity in rural African villages where malaria lurks. In villages like Namacha, in southern Malawi, where locals receive 170 bites from malaria-infected mosquitoes every year, there’s no running water. Most people don’t even own any furniture.

That’s why the international campaign to stanch malaria, “Roll Back Malaria,” has for years been implementing a series of other measures. For example, lightweight, cheap bednets that can be hung over women and children at night, as they sleep in their huts. And drugs that do not require refrigeration that can be distributed to pregnant women. These aren’t the very best interventions, the ones that will definitely end malaria in the most direct way. But they’re the best interventions that can actually be implemented.

Mhyrvold’s no dummy. He knows this. So why pretend that your useless gizmo is actually going to save African women and children from a killer disease?

Because it gets you lots of attention.

For the rest of Sonia Shah’s article, see the Ms. blog.

Another 120 species went extinct today; they were my kin. I am not going to sit back and wait for every last piece of this living world to be dismembered. I’m going to fight like hell for those kin who remain—and I want everyone who cares to join me. Many are. But many are not. Some of those who are not are those who, for whatever reason, really don’t care. I worry about them. But I worry more about those who do care but have chosen not to fight. A fairly large subset of those who care but have chosen not to fight assert that lifestyle choice is the only possible response to the murder of the planet. They all carry the same essential message—and often use precisely the same words: Resistance isn’t possible. Resistance never works.

Meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today. They were my kin.

There are understandable personal reasons for wanting to believe in the invincibility of an oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, there’s no reason to undertake the often arduous, sometimes dangerous, always necessary work of organizing, preparing to dismantle, and then actually dismantling this (or any) oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, you can, with fully salved conscience, make yourself and your own as comfortable as you can within the confines of the oppressive system while allowing this oppressive system to continue. There are certainly reasons that those in power want us to see them as invincible. Abusive systems, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the familial to the social and political and religious, work best when victims and bystanders police themselves. And one of the best ways to get victims and bystanders to police themselves is for them to internalize the notion that the abusers are invincible and then, even better, to get them to attempt to police anyone who threatens to break up the stable abuser/victim/bystander triad.

And meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today.

But those who believe in the invincibility of perpetrators and their systems are wrong. Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down. People with a lot fewer resources collectively than any single reader of Orion have fought back against systems of domination, and won. There’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. But resistance starts by believing in it, not by talking yourself out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it.

Read the rest of the article at Orion.

… Bechtel paints an excellent portrait of these colorful racers and their Scotch-Irish culture, in which Rebel flags are not rare. So why on Earth were Leonard W. Miller, founder of Miller Racing, and his son, Leonard T. Miller — successful, educated members of the black elite — obsessed with NASCAR racing? It’s a question that perplexed their fellow African Americans, who regarded their quest as “a suicide mission into the country’s deepest pockets of racism.”

We discover in Leonard T. Miller’s moving memoir, “Racing While Black,” that socially, the Millers were notches above the other drivers. “At uppity African-American cocktail parties I sometimes attended with my father,” Miller writes, “guests couldn’t understand why we would invest thousands of dollars into something that could be destroyed in a moment’s notice.”

Although Miller and his father were anomalies, they loved stock cars as much as the next good ol’ boy. “Auto racing is in my blood,” writes Miller, who graduated from Morehouse College and is a commercial airline pilot. “I was drawn to the ear-piercing clamor, the cottony trains of exhaust, and the smell of rubber being singed by the asphalt.” His father had fallen in love with cars as a mechanic in the Army at Fort Bragg, where he felt a sense of camaraderie with his fellow soldiers that transcended race.

Many of the wild men from Bechtel’s book reappear here, but we encounter another side of racing. We meet Tom Rice, a black stock-car driver with NASCAR aspirations, who always took pains not to sit too close to Crystal, his white wife. Tom and Crystal, an “outstanding mechanic,” shared the Millers’ dream.

… Ultimately, however, the sponsorships were not enough for the Millers to attain their dream. Several potential supporters were afraid to ally themselves with an African American outfit. … Despite it all, Miller has written a generous book.

“This is the pain,” [Southwest Worker's Union member Anayanse Garza] said, holding a petition, “these are the 243 signatures of the people at Port IsabeI that have been tortured, beaten and humiliated, and these orders were coming from [ICE's field office director] Michael J. Pitts, who is sitting very comfortably in his air-conditioned room, while other people are being tortured and threatened with force-feeding by having a tube inserted through their noses. I don’t care if the government says that immigrants have no human rights. Immigrants do have human rights. It’s not a crime to hunger strike, it is your right, and that’s why [Pitts] should be tried. He shouldn’t be allowed to even be there right now.”

… “In all my years, I’ve never seen immigrants raising a hand against guards,” said Tony Hefner, a guard at PIDC from 1983 through 1990. “It’s always been the other way around.”

Hefner, who says he was fired in 1985, got his job back in 1987, and was fired again in 1990, spent years gathering information about abuses at PIDC and will publish his findings, “real names and all,” in the book Between the Fences: Before Guantanamo, there was the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, due out in May. Some of those names, documents and pictures a la Abu Ghraib can be seen in his website, torchlake.com/hefner.

“The very same thing that happened [in my time] is happening today [at PIDC],” said Hefner. “Stealing money from detainees, beating detainees up … If detainees from two different countries were fighting, they would handcuff them together and push them into each other and take bets on them.”

Hefner will be a witness for [PIDC hunger strike leader Rama] Carty during the trial.

“They’re framing this young man claiming that he did something that he didn’t do,” Hefner said. “That’s the standard policy there: If you stand up against them, they nail you. What Rama [Carty] is going through is nothing unusual.”

For more on the recent demonstration and on Rama Carty’s case, take a look at the rest of the article at QueBlog. For more information about the PIDC and about Tony Hefner’s time there, please read Between the Fences, due out in May from Seven Stories Press.

Event sponsored by Veterans for Peace.

“Live Through This- On Creativity and Self-Destruction”- a lecture/reading with Sabrina Chapadjiev. Red Emma’s Bookstore, 800 Saint Paul Street Baltimore, MD 21202-2406

In a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography, Nan Goldin, Eileen Myles, bell hooks, and other cutting-edge artists explore their use of art to survive madness, abuse, incest, depression, and the impulse toward self-destruction manifest in eating disorders, cutting, addiction, and contemplation of suicide. The book confronts the brutality many women and girls encounter in the world around them, and bravely takes as its subject the often misunderstood violence they at times inflict upon themselves.

The word recession, meaning a temporary dip in economic activity, was coined in 1929 during the start of the Great Depression, so even then, we were kidding ourselves. Now, after months of babbling on about “green shoots,” the main stream media, always fluffy and clueless when not outright dishonest, are starting to use “Great Recession,” but that’s still sugarcoating it. Why not the Great Recess, as in a fun pause in labor when we can all run out and play, or, better yet, let’s give a nod to Saddam Hussein and label it, properly, as the Mother of all Depressions.

In November of 1929, a month after the stock market crash, Lou Nevin recorded, “Happy days are here again, / The skies above are clear again / Let us sing a song of cheer again.” In June of 2009, eight months after another stock market collapse, the New York Times launched “Happy Days,” a series of mostly palliative, feel good articles. Like Twain was supposed to have said, “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Happy Days was also a popular TV sitcom, of course. Airing from 1974 to 1984, it featured a loveable, corny cast of working class Americans from the 1950’s, with its most popular character a greasy (oily) mechanic and biker named Arthur Fonzarelli. When times were good, even a high school drop out could give two thumbs up and co-own a diner. Today, Fonzie would be lucky to work as a sales associate at Wal-Mart. America’s most enduring and quintessential icons, Elvis Presley, Maralyn Monroe and James Dean, all came out of the 1950’s, a decade of peak American confidence and prosperity. Many factors contributed to these good times, of course, but what’s often overlooked is that we were the biggest oil producer in the world. A nice chunk of our wealth was a godsend. We were all Beverly Hillbillies.

The oil industry started in Pennsylvania in 1859, with the first significant oil well named “Empire,” appropriately enough. Fuel and engine of the American Century, oil has allowed us to build an unprecedentedly sprawling, wasteful and alienating environment, where citizens are conditioned to spend hours sitting alone in a steel box and liking it. The car, not the eagle or cracked bell, is the symbol of American freedom, with its erratic, stop and start speed a metaphor for inevitable progress, but what happens when this joy ride stalls and we are forced to reverse? In 1953, Charles E. Wilson, President of General Motors and later, Secretary for the Department of Defense, declared to congress, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” so if G.M. (and Chrysler) are near death now, are we also lying on the slab?

King Obesity sat grandly on a huge hassock atop a throne composed of solidified animal fat surveying his domain. The last thirty years have been bullish for Obesity, during which the number of seriously overweight children in America tripled. Eating fat, sugary and salty food while sitting for hours daily looking at video screens, being bused to and from school, and not having to bother with physical education, millions of lads and lassies were following orders.

An agitated messenger arrived in the throne room, breathing heavily from his travels. “Oh, my liege, Obesity, I have disturbing news. Michelle Obama, the First Lady, is launching a nationwide project she calls ‘Let’s Move’ to combat childhood obesity and shed billions of pounds of your stuff. She claims that success would reduce all types of diseases now and later, save on medical costs, as well as raise the energy level and self-esteem of millions of children. Here, Your Eminence, are the complete details of her plan.”

Obesity was a hard person to agitate. He had heard of these campaigns before. They went nowhere. He shook his heavy jowls and rubbed his many-layered belly, which was his way of saying “ho, hum, here we go again.”

His fleshy fingers clutched the plan by those people he always called the “lean and meaners,” and saw that improvement in the school lunch program’s menu, exercise at school, farmers’ markets and community gardens were at the top of the action list.

Obesity chortled at his adversaries’ naivete and reticence. For some reason, they avoided the real causes of his success in pouring massive amounts of empty calories into the mouths and down the throats of these children who cry out for more and more of them. It is all about who owns the tongues of these youngsters, not who reaches their brains, mused Obesity. Ownership, he knew, belonged to his most faithful allies—the vast fast food and food processing industry and their clever advertisers. For decades these companies have transformed millions of young tongues into fast food first responders.

The tongue has been turned against the brain for so long that the kids’ parents and even some grandparents accept this conditioned response. Look what they head for in the movies, what they choose in the supermarkets, what they order in the chain restaurants and takeouts. It’s all about the pipeline full of enlarged amounts of sugar, fat and salt, dude! Hour after hour, day after day, these pipelines are flowing to the delight of their video-addicted young customers.

To read the rest of King Obesity, please visit the Eurasia Review.

In a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography, Nan Goldin, Eileen Myles, bell hooks, and other cutting-edge artists explore their use of art to survive madness, abuse, incest, depression, and the impulse toward self-destruction manifest in eating disorders, cutting, addiction, and contemplation of suicide. The book confronts the brutality many women and girls encounter in the world around them, and bravely takes as its subject the often misunderstood violence they at times inflict upon themselves.

Also featuring Amy Goodman, Bernice Johnson Reagon, David Zirin, Rich Rubenstein, and more to follow.

Most of [the seventeen billionaires named in Nader's] story currently spend fortunes on charity—on advancing values not far from those promoted by Nader. But what they do in his fantasy is stop spending the vast proportion of it on direct services. This is not to say that the billions spent on AIDS or malaria abatement have not yielded important results; the 2009 data from UNICEF shows real reductions in child mortality worldwide. Some of Nader’s “characters”—all real persons—are largely responsible for this progress. But their donations are not strongly leveraged, as Nader would propose.

What Nader essentially does is imagine a world where the super-rich seek more than malaria containment—where they seek leveraged change in public investment and decisions. Interestingly, Citizens United may make that shift both more needed and more feasible legally. For if corporations can independently campaign for political candidates protecting the value of their drilling rights and seek to burn carbon accumulated over four billion years as if it were a sparkler lit on the 4th of July, why cannot those who have wealth, lacking such a sunk-cost bias, do likewise? Why can’t Soros and Buffet and Gates and the rest—with wealth freed from direct exploitation bias and able to factor in future costs—participate in countervailing political discourse?

Nader imagines that they end their dabbling and “feel good” dispensation of shots to wide-eyed children and do the work of changing ground rules so that political candidates are bought by the public, not by special interests, so that political campaigns have substance beyond ten-second sound bites and brainless namecalling, so that the many have access to the courts, so that agencies hear from many interests regularly, so that no business is too big to fail.

The fun of reading this book is in joining the author’s fantasy, but punctuating it with our own tactics—what we would do to correct the world’s deviant path had we the resources and visibility of these 17. The characters in this book seek structural and leveraged change—advocacy for public budgets and laws and international agreements—that properly embody more than the exploitation of narrow self-interest. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has radically shifted ground and allowed (contrary to the judgment of the people’s democratic institutions) many billions of corporate and union money to directly influence elections, those interests with capital investment in current profitable enterprise—whether it be mining the seas, polluting the earth, or collecting medical benefits for power wheelchairs and Cialis on the backs of their grandchildren—will increasingly lock-in their self-protection and their imposed external burden on others. Their free ride, notwithstanding future costs, will be further and irretrievably calcified into public law.

Although pathetic, it appears as if these 17 and some of their friends may indeed be the most realistic hope we have.

… After reading Daybreak, I realized that though healthcare reform and emission reductions are extremely important, securing democracy is even more fundamental. What use is good legislation if the president can just ignore it? Chose not to enforce the laws, or break them himself? What Swanson advocates in Daybreak is that Congress enforce the Constitution by impeaching ANY president who fails to uphold it. Only by enforcing the Constitution can we expect presidents and others to uphold it.

… There is no doubt that Swanson is a progressive, but the main thesis of Daybreak does not belong on the fringe of the political spectrum, but should be at home across the broad middle of political ideologies that subscribe to democracy and the rule of law.

… Silent Thunder [Red Sea Press, 2005] told the story of Miller Sr., a longtime amateur and professional racer and a member of the Black Athletes Hall of Fame, who entered a black racing team in the 1972 Indianapolis 500, and details the obstacles he faced trying to enter the traditionally southern white world of motorsports racing in the 1960s and 1970s. The new book, Racing While Black, is about his son Leonard T. Miller’s life as a second-generation African American race car team executive and the problems he faced running Miller Racing, a family-owned black motorsports team in the modern era.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon said the house was releasing a first printing of 5,000 copies, but said “we hope to go much further than that.” Simon described the book as critical of NASCAR and said it examines the problems Miller faced building a stock car racing team with his father; his struggles securing corporate sponsorships despite his team’s successes and the inevitable problems dealing with bigoted fellow-drivers and fans in a traditionally all white sport.

… Simon said that the book even has “a surprise ending,” and said the book will provide a much-needed look at one of the few major American sports that seems closed to African Americans. “The Millers did a great deal for blacks in racing sports,” said Simon, “during years in which NASCAR itself wouldn’t let black drivers in and even sympathetic black executives at General Motors and other car companies who wanted to support the Miller team would have to do so clandestinely. After a few years the persistence of the Millers posed enough of a threat that you started to see black drivers integrating other teams.”

… Judging by similar gatherings for remembering other progressive activists and writers, the encomiums for Professor Zinn, who taught at Spelman College in the late fifties and early sixties (two of his students were Marian Wright Edelman and Alice Walker) and at Boston University until 1988, will be heartfelt, wide-ranging and inspiringly anecdotal.

Receptions will follow and those in attendance will return to their homes, hoping that what Howard Zinn spoke and wrote and how he acted will serve as an example for those who follow his public philosophy of being and doing.

Mr. Zinn’s legacy, however, needs more than sweet memories that carry forward the spirit of people. His impact needs more than the adult and youth book version (now in a television miniseries via the History Channel) to continue inspiring what the Times described as “a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history.”

How about drawing on the large, national constituency whose lives he has informed honestly and helped improve to support the establishment of the Howard Zinn Institute for Advancing Peace and Justice? Thought and action in a seamless flow toward returning the definition of “freedom” back to the words of Marcus Cicero as “participation in power.”

… Roslyn and Howard Zinn left two children, Myla and Jeff, and five grandchildren. Together with his publisher, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press, his editor, Matthew Rothschild, his interviewer, Amy Goodman, his associate, Anthony Arnove, and his innumerable writers and fighters for justice, for the principle that the truth is revolutionary, why not a well-funded and staffed Institute, organizing from the neighborhoods on up, as he urged so often, with horizons for all seasons, as befits his vision?

Although the desire to remember is now intense, it is the willpower that implements the thought.

For the full article, please see nader.org.

Lee Stringer and Black Body contributor Tonita Austin-Hilley discuss The Black Body, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. Discussion, reading, and Q&A.

I Owe You These Lines

Welcome, friend, I give you
My very best friend, to eat.
I did not kill my best friend, friend,
Although I did rejoice at his death,
As I would rejoice at your death,
As you would, no doubt, fall over
Laughing at news of my demise.
With the sharpest or dullest knife,
Whatever’s handy, I’ll point the tip
Of my blade at your jugular vein,
Observe your jiggling jaw, ask
About your questionable taste
In wine, painting and poetry.
Fall is my favorite season, I somberly reflect,
As your blood pools in the sharp morning air,
As I incise a clean cross on your funny belly,
As I gut you, glancing over my thin shoulders. —Linh Dinh

For parents: “Though we usually stick to reviewing books about kids with LGBT families, we decided to break our own rule this month to tell you about 10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert. This is partly because it is such a unique children’s book, featuring a young transgender protagonist, but it’s also great for any kid who knows someone who is different or who may feel a little different themselves sometimes.”

For children (or inner children): “10,000 Dresses is a great book for any kid who has ever felt a little bit different. Everybody needs friends who will accept them for who they are. When Bailey meets another little girl named Laurel, it looks as if she has finally found someone who thinks her ideas for dresses are awesome. Will Laurel help Bailey make her dream of dresses come true? You will have to read 10,000 Dresses to find out!”

… You had this strange encounter with Pentecostal Christianity. How did that happen, and how did your reaction to that experience prompt your concern for reality and even hyper-reality?

My then-future wife Martine got pregnant in 1966, and we didn’t want a child at the time. I was just starting my film career, and the prospect of an unplanned child might force me to abandon film at least temporarily. To a large degree, it was disturbing: during that period, I had a sense that I was losing my mind. I wouldn’t say a psychosis, but it felt close to that. My response was to become a member of a Pentecostal church, for a month. It was an existential need. This wasn’t common in Holland in the ‘60s.

What made you leave?

When an artist friend heard my problem, he told me that it wasn’t much of a problem. His father is a doctor of anesthetics at the Red Cross hospital in The Hague, and he could help us. So reality and pragmatism brought me out of it. This encounter with spiritual, mystical Christianity had an enormous impact on me. As a result, to get out of this dangerously sectarian thinking in which the subconscious elements of my brain were seeping into my conscious, I felt that I had to close the doors of perception, as Huxley calls it. The subconscious elements can be very powerful, and if one isn’t careful, they can take over the conscious parts of your brain. This is what happened to Nietzsche when he lost his mind in Turin. I wanted to protect myself by concentrating for years of my creative life on reality. That explains something of my enormous interest in the reality of everything, and my sense of the reality of violence, an aspect of my work that some people continue to have enormous problems with … In 1985, I started to be able to think about these things again, and open them a little bit, so some of that stuff could drip in. Now, I’m writing a book about Jesus.

What kind of book?

What I think happened. The last years, based on research. I’m a member of the Jesus Seminar, based in Santa Rosa. Their seminars are twice a year, and I’ve attended a lot of them and have presented several papers. I’ve become really pretty good in theology. Although I would say that my focus is more on history than theology per se.

So your Jesus would be closer to Pasolini’s reading?

Perhaps a more Marxist approach. I also love Monty Python’s reading, in Life of Brian, which is just brilliant.

Beverly Gologorsky, Helen Benedict, and Nora Eisenberg, the war brought home an evening of storytelling about war and militarism from women’s prospectives.

Events calendar at KGB

A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember some of what he said. “On May Day in Washington, thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”

… At the end of his comments, he said: “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”

Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston.

… At first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!”

There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.

We expected them to start arresting us, but for a while the police did nothing. They could have manhandled a passage through the line and kept it open for employees to go in or out, but for some reason they didn’t. We thought maybe they really sympathized with our protest, and this was their way of joining in.

As the morning wore on, people took apples and crackers and bottles of water out of their pockets and packs and shared them around, and they always offered some to the police standing in front of us. The police always refused, but they seemed to appreciate the offer.

Then one of the officers came over to Howard and said, “You’re Professor Zinn, aren’t you?” Howard said yes, and the officer reached down and shook his hand enthusiastically. He said, “I heard you lecture at the Police Academy. A lot of us here did. That was a wonderful lecture.” Howard had been asked to speak to them about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in American history.

Several other policemen came over to pay their respects to Howard and thank him for his lecture.

The rest of Daniel Ellsberg’s article can be found at Consortiumnews.com.

Two years ago The New Yorker did a mocking article on my furtive nude picture of Simone de Beauvoir. It had appeared on the January 2008 cover of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur to mark my old friend and feminist’s 100th birthday. Her Chicago novelist lover, when they were both around forty, was my buddy, the novelist and intellectual woman fancier Nelson Algren. He had begged me to find a bathtub for Madame. He bathed at the Division Street Y, and the Y, in 1950, was not yet up to letting a woman into their natatorium.

“It’s quite a rear,” The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik gushed. “The picture was taken in 1950 by, of all people, an American — the photographer Art Shay — in, of all places, Chicago, where Beauvoir was canoodling bilingually with Nelson Algren.”

To be singled out by The New Yorker as one “of all people, an American” who shot the picture in “of all places, Chicago” makes me feel like Ingrid Bergman stumbling upon Humphrey Bogart who as Rick says, “of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, she walks into mine” while Dooley Wilson tinkles out “As Time Goes By” on the pleasantly off-key piano.

For the rest of the article, please see Swans Commentary — and for more photos of Algren-era Chicago from Art Shay, take a look at Shay’s classic Chicago’s Nelson Algren from Seven Stories Press.

I’ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.

As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that’s hardly any different from a Republican–as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there’s no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people–and that’s been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama’s no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.

I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That’s the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he’s not making any significant step away from Bush policies. Sure, he keeps talking about closing Guantánamo, but he still treats the prisoners there as “suspected terrorists.” They have not been tried and have not been found guilty. So when Obama proposes taking people out of Guantánamo and putting them into other prisons, he’s not advancing the cause of constitutional rights very far. And then he’s gone into court arguing for preventive detention, and he’s continued the policy of sending suspects to countries where they very well may be tortured.

I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

Originally published in The Nation.

That my neighbor sold hundreds, thousands of socks to these same questioners isn’t the point. He could have done as much at any other convention, and probably done better financially as well. Libraries are cutting budgets across the nation, starting with travel allotments, and attendance was down significantly from previous midwinter ALA events. In the shadow of the September 2009 scare about the Philadelphia Free Library closing its doors, the survival of libraries is more than ever in doubt—both financially, and in terms of those in power losing respect for a library’s basic mission.

We met plenty of people at ALA who knew about Seven Stories. There were middle and high school librarians who’d adopted A Young People’s History of the US for their courses, freelance reviewers who asked about when they could read the forthcoming Barry Gifford Sailor & Lula omnibus, library coordinators who’d taken classes from Howard Zinn years ago and who wanted to stop and reminisce. In equal measure, there were people who’d never heard of this press, but who stopped at the table anyway to page through Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray’s 10,000 Dresses, which was announced as a Stonewall Honor Book for 2010 during the event.

“This is so beautiful,” they’d say. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about a young boy who dreams about wearing dresses made of flowers and windows,” I said.

“That’s wonderful,” they’d almost without exception reply. They were from Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, parts of the country that you would normally not expect to be all-in for 10,000 Dresses.

But if you’re Carolyn Plocher, who in a recent article re-dubbed the national organization “The GayLA”, it’s no surprise that librarians would respond favorably to Marcus and Rex’s book.

“If past awards are any indication, parents can look forward to the ALA guiding them to dozens of books with themes about “coming out,” pedophilia, trans-gender issues, and sodomy laws,” Plocher writes. “The ALA does not exist simply to provide good, wholesome literature to children. It’s quite the opposite, in fact… The ALA, for whatever reason, has taken up the cause of normalizing homosexuality and advancing the gay agenda.”

“The books that used to inspire; which celebrated American values; that chronicled the exploits of trailblazers, astronauts, soldiers, and other heroes, are fast disappearing,” writes conservative Steve Baldwin in another article. “It has become increasingly clear that the ALA is really not so much dedicated to defending the First Amendment as it is to challenging America’s underlying value system.”

To this last, let’s say this: yes, absolutely. The ALA is challenging America’s underlying value system by attempting to expand its notion of what a hero is. The kids who fought alongside Depression-era adults in favor of New Deal legislation and civil rights protections were heroes. A boy who wears a dress is blazing a trail.

To some kids who live in many conservative areas of the United States—kids growing up queer, different, abused, angry—these are the trails that need to be blazed; these are the heroes that inspire kids who are different to lead exceptional lives—as opposed to lives of lies, silence, sometimes early death. Librarians—and particularly members of “the GayLA”—are the ones who transmit the voices of the survivors of prejudice and hate to the ears of the kids in the process of surviving. What conservatives who talk about “America’s underlying value system” are ignoring is the fact that America’s underlying value system, as it operates in many parts of this country, has historically only existed by hurting and silencing the kids within its geographical reach. There is a difference between “silencing” authors who assert the status quo in these regions—that kids should be punished for who they are and who they love—and taking away the one voice in a community that tells a queer kid in a small town that he doesn’t need to lie about himself to survive.

The “homosexual agenda” is not one of conversion. It’s an agenda of protecting its own, enlarging and expanding the meaning of mainstream America in a way that threatens those who stand to profit by the status quo. In conservative parts of the US, it’s librarians who by and large taken on the work of enacting that agenda: shielding the oppressed from their oppressors. “GayLA” is not an insult; it’s a badge of honor.

Toward the end of the convention, during a slow period, my neighbor at the sock table came over to me.

“I’m going to start sending every one of my customers over to you,” he said. “Everyone’s telling me about how much they love socks, or about how someone they know loves socks. I’m tired of hearing it. I’m going to send them all over to you, and you’ll collect their stories about how much they love socks, and you’ll publish it, all right?”

Librarians love to tell stories, and to hear them. Stories, narratives, are what give ideas a human scale. The people who attack ALA for promoting “offensive” books can’t see past their feelings of being offended, or their perception of a Nation in Peril, to the kids who’ve been waiting all their lives to read those offensive books. Librarians can.

Therefore we love you, librarians; it was great to meet so many of you; we look forward to seeing you in Washington DC for the main ALA convention in June.

—John Thornton

Event Hosted by Rebecca Schneider for Congress, 2010.

Three presentations on the topic of: Corporate Power, Climate Change, and the Economy, followed by a panel discussion. Joel will be presenting on material taken from Mindful Economics. Suggested donation of $10.