I wrote my first original post here three years ago this month after talking with a comrade at a prison strike support event. In part, that event commemorated the killing of George Jackson and the Attica uprising. During the event my memory went back to composers Steve Reich and Frederic Rzewski and their musical statements of solidarity with the Attica inmates and the defendants from the earlier Harlem “fruit stand” riot of 1964. In the course of conversation I realized I’d outlined the post. See Attica: Coming Together.
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jackson’s murder and the Attica revolt that followed.
Pardon merci, je suis le grand zombie I’m just not human tonight
— Mekons, “Big Zombie”
I haven’t thought about anthropologist Wade Davis much since his 1985 nonfiction book The Serpent and the Rainbow was turned into what I thought was an icky film by Wes Craven in 1988.1
In L.A. I had a habit of picking up review copies and other first editions at Cosmopolitan Book Shop, where I got Davis’s book. I always had good luck there.
In his book Davis recounts his attempt to see if zombification in Haitian Vodou had a pharmacological component. I remember his tale being akin to Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, published seven years later, taking the reader on a similar, esoteric journey regarding psychedelics.2
So, on my birthday, last Monday, Wade Davis shows up on of all things, Christiane Amanpour’s PBS show. And he ain’t talking zombies. But perhaps he is. He was tapped because of an August 6 Rolling Stone article that went viral:
The Unraveling of America
Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era
A sampling from that article…
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.
More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom.
In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent.
(Hmm… Maybe there is something to that MAGA hashtag.)
And then there is this:
The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace.
In essence, the U.S. has kept alive its corpse—once decimated by Depression, animated by WWII animus—only to be eviscerated by a military-industrial-congressional complex that planted “defense” plants in every district to insure an economic survival more akin to aspartame than, say, agave.
On July 23, two weeks before Davis published his article, Prof. Richard D. Wolff posted “Why a Cold War Against China?” in which he explains how the U.S. needs enemies to justify an insatiable military.
Predictably Wolff invokes Eisenhower, who warned us about the “conjunction” of arms manufacturers and arms consumers in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. What’s less remembered is that Eisenhower also said, “Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibility,” which left open the United States’ exceptional place in the world. That responsibility, despite Eisenhower’s caveats, meant—and means—arming ourselves and our allies to the teeth rather than cultivating endeavors involved with life rather than death: education, health care, the arts—not to mention sustenance itself.
Three days later Wolff said “our economic system is on life support.”
And then last Friday Wolff published an article in which he discusses the Chinese economic model.
Rising labour productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care, and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.3
Richard D. Wolff – Socialist or Capitalist—What Is China’s Model, Exactly? | Brave New Europe
An interesting take not only on China, but the USSR and Europe as well.
All of this is Economics 101.
Then on Sunday David Cay Johnston’s DCReport posted the following appeal:
Vote! For God’s Sake, Dear America, Vote! | DCReport.org
Vote! For God’s Sake, Dear America, Vote! The Choice In The November Election Comes Down to the choice between Freedom or Tyranny
But what about the tyranny of the military and its stranglehold over whichever choice you choose?
Vote? That’s something the walking, living dead do.
Before Christmas I checked out a book from my little public library branch: Naomi Wolf’s Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. I had a lot of other things to read and left it for last, not knowing what it contained, vaguely recognizing the author’s name. Turning to it, I recognized Wolf’s photo. If nothing else, readers might remember her defense of Julian Assange when he was accused of sex crimes in Sweden. I thought the book would be a history of censorship, but it’s more comprehensive. By introducing and then returning often to her cast of characters, Wolf creates an intimate narrative against the mise en scène of her historical sweep and sociopolitical stance. Continue reading “Symonds, Whitman, Rossetti and Rake”
Note: This is the second in a series of my recollections about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953. See Part 1 and Part 3. My husband David Hughes contributed much research and text to what follows.
On February 2, 1975 my then-husband and I were given tickets to an event titled The Julius & Ethel Rosenberg Case: Reopening the Past in Light of the Present at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.4 One month before, Congress had passed—over Gerald Ford’s veto—the Privacy Act of 1974, which amended the original Freedom of Information Act of 1966. “This [new] law,” the Christian Science Monitor reported, “provides, among other things, for judicial review of classified national security data to decide if it should be held from public view.” The hope was that—via judicial intervention if need be—previously withheld exculpatory information about the Rosenbergs would be forthcoming from the FBI, CIA, and AEC.5Continue reading “Reopening the Rosenbergs”
As early as I can remember I was placed in front of the radio (we had no television). I was exposed to music, advertisements, dramas, and news. At age three I tried to read newspapers. I simply wanted to read about what I’d heard. By the age of five I was reading the “briefs” in the back pages because they were easier for me, but they also could lead me to bigger stories. In particular I remember reading briefs about spies.
I was eight years old in 1950 when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on an eventual charge of—not espionage—but rather conspiracy to commit espionage. Their co-conspirator Morton Sobell also was arrested (while in Mexico during which time Julius was arrested).6 Julius had been implicated by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who said at trial that in September 1945 he’d given Julius a nuclear bomb diagram as well as verbal scientific secrets, typed up by Ethel,7 which presumably were transferred to the Soviet Union. Continue reading “Observing the Sabbath: Killing the Rosenbergs”
This past summer in Cheyenne my uncle Richard Hughes told me of his hallucinations. That a man going blind might also view visions seems an insult to injury. Yet his condition has a name—Charles Bonnet syndrome—after an eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist and philosopher. As profiled in ACNR (Vol. 8, No. 5, 19) Bonnet first listed his grandfather’s
silent visions of men, women, birds, carriages, and buildings, which he fully realised were ‘fictions’ of his brain. Bonnet himself later underwent visual deterioration and experienced hallucinations typical of the syndrome named after him […].
(Compare with “Blinky” Watts, the sound effects technician character from David Lynch’s short-lived TV series On the Air, who suffers from Bozeman’s Simplex, which causes him to see “25.62 times as much as we do.”)
Six months prior I came across a song by Richard Dawson, which I wanted to write about tonight only to find that he too sees things (due to a genetic defect), but through a glass darkly, as Dawson toldThe Guardian‘s Michael Hann, who remarked, “There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity to his writing.” Continue reading “Seeing Things”
What follows is the recollection and reflection of a remarkable musical work, and my work experience around it.
The prison strike of late summer 2018 was in part a commemoration of the killing of prison organizer and author George Jackson on August 21, 1971 as well as the uprising his death sparked (in part) at Attica nineteen days later on September 9. Having just turned 16 at the time, although I was involved in antiwar activity in Boulder, Jackson and Attica were two coastlines away and easy enough for me to ignore. Two years later I was reacquainted with those struggles—through music. Continue reading “Attica: Coming Together”
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