Tar Heel Nation: Elizabeth Dole

Elizabeth Hanford Dole (b. 1936) has been a public servant for most of her life. She is a good exemplar of North Carolina, which has for a long time been a fairly moderate state politically (except for today's Tea Party Republicans, and serious fans of Jesse Helms), about half and half. It went Democratic in the presidential elections of 1960, 1964, 1976 and 2008, for instance.  

Born in Salisbury -- about fifty miles down the road from Greensboro, a city of groundbreaking civil rights fame -- Elizabeth Hanford attended and graduated from Duke University in Durham in 1958, just two years before the Greensboro sit-ins. Duke's East Campus was still "the women's college" at the time. Afterwards, she briefly taught high school history in Massachusetts before heading to Harvard for a master's degree in 1960, at which time she also supported the JFK-LBJ ticket as a Democrat.

Hanford next worked in government in Washington, D.C., then went back to Harvard for law school, earning a J.D. in 1965. In her entering class, there were only 24 women in a class of 550. 

Next, on to join the LBJ administration and the Great Society back in Washington.

In 1968, barely three months after the Tet Offensive, in the midst of the highly controversial war in Vietnam, Hanford switched from Democrat to Independent. She stayed on with the outgoing LBJ administration and was then taken up by the Richard M. Nixon Administration, working in consumer affairs until being picked to serve on the Federal Trade Commission. She married Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole (b. 1923) in 1975, assuming his last name. Just previously, she had switched from Independent to Republican. 

Elizabeth Dole and Bob Dole became, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, a formidable team. In the 1980s, Elizabeth served first as Secretary of Transportation and next as Secretary of Labor. Then she stepped out of government to become President of the American Red Cross in 1991, the first woman to head the organization since Clara Barton.  

Both Doles have had presidential aspirations. Bob first ran as VP candidate in 1976 with Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. He ran against George H. W. Bush in 1988 (losing in the primaries) and then against Bill Clinton in 1996 (losing in the general election). That was it for him. But Elizabeth Dole ran against George W. Bush in 2000, also losing in the primaries. Then, in the wake of North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms' retirement, she ran and won his seat, serving from 2003 until early 2009. After an unfortunate attempt to smear her Democratic opponent (Kay Hagan of Greensboro) using religion as a weapon, she lost her seat in the 2008 election. Hagan remains standing senator. Good fifty year work arc, though, I'd say. 

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Psychedelic Saigon

Sublime Frquencies (Seattle, Washington, USA): Saigon Rock & Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968-1974 2-LP SF060.

This collection is a mind-blower, but as soon as you think about it, everything makes perfect sense. Of course there was a music scene "on the scene" in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) during the US-Vietnam War. Of course there was more going on than that reflected in Hollywood movies about the war. Yes, there were and are Vietnamese people, too! South, North and everything in between.

I've known several Vietnamese Americans and all of them have had rich, complicated family histories. One was a stewardess who emigrated to the States in the late 1960s, having married a GI. Another, an entrepreneur in Philadelphia, was raised Catholic and brought with her two sisters by her mother -- initially to Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1970s. Her father remained in country, fighting for the North. Texas has a large Vietnamese population, too, fanning out from eateries to goods and services businesses and into local colleges. I've worked with many Vietnamese students in Philadelphia, Detroit and in Texas, working on basic English writing skills, and am always struck by how poetic Vietnamese turns of phrase are, even when morphed into English. For these reasons and more, it's with great delight that I choose this collection for today's post. 

To quote from Sublime Frequencies' product description: Every song is a mini-masterpiece be it heavy acid rock psychedelia, horn and guitar drenched funk grooves, or gripping soul ballads reflective of life during wartime. The tracks that form this collection cut a window into a rich musical Vietnamese music scene that has long been obscured, and for the most part, forgotten. As the scope of electrified Vietnamese music from the 1960s and 1970s begins to be revealed, it becomes evident that this was among the heaviest and most eclectic musical scenes of South East Asia at the time. These songs tell of war, love and what war does to love. All of them were recorded in makeshift studios and even US army facilities while the Vietnam War raged – and were issued by a handful of Saigon record companies on vinyl 45s and reel or cassette tapes.

One of my favorite tracks so far is this one by Thành Mái: "Tóc Mai Sợi Vắn Sợi Dài (Long, Uneven Hair)." It's got a trippy tempo with strong vocal. For more from Sublime Frequencies, here's a link. I'm a big fan.



Today's Rune: Joy.                                         

Smoking Typewriters II

When I first heard the name "Joe Pool Lake," I chuckled. It sounds so goofy and quaint. I wondered: What is it? Found out it's a North Texas reservoir and recreational area named after none other than Joe Pool, a Congressional Representative from North Texas (in the 1960s).

In the last couple of years, about the only time Joe Pool Lake has seemed to make news headlines has been when someone dies there. Items like: "Another one drowns in Joe Pool Lake" or: "Boat capsizes, three drown in Joe Pool Lake."

In any case, I finally finished John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press, 2011). In it, Representative Joe Pool makes a couple of comical appearances as a rabid opponent of the Sixties underground press. Apparently he hated actual free speech and attacked anyone opposed to the US-Vietnam War. In Chapter 5 ("Either We Have Freedom of the Press . . . or We Don't Have Freedom of the Press"), Pool is quoted as going after the Underground Press Syndicate, an underground version of Associated Press and United Press International wire services, in 1967.

Here's Joe Pool: "The plan of this Underground Press Syndicate is to take advantage of that part of the First Amendment which protects newspapers and gives them freedom of press."  Doh! So what's the problem with free speech in Texas? According to Joe Pool, "These smut sheets are today's Molotov cocktails thrown at respectability in our nation . . . They encourage depravity and irresponsibility . . ." (Smoking Typewriters, page 129).

What a dope. 

So what happened to Joe Pool? About six months after the Tet Offensive began in early 1968, he keeled over dead in Houston, Texas, age 57, at the airport.

Of Joe Pool: ". . . outspoken critic of Vietnam war protesters and resisters to the draft . . . member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities . . . often said he would vote for a declaration of war against North Vietnam." ("REP. JOE POOL DIES SUDDENLY," Gettysburg Times, July 16, 1968). 

If only more Texas politicians were as adamant about protecting the First Amendment as they are about bandying about the Second . . . but alas, they'd rather go jump in Joe Pool Lake, and drown.

Today's Rune: Signals.     
   

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Take Two

Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) begins with footage from 1967 when the US population is 210 million (it's now 312 million at the time of this posting) at the height of the US-Vietnam War, with a military draft in place and 525,000 American soldiers deployed in Vietnam.

Swedish archival footage gives us fresh glimpses at people, places and events, including stellar footage of Stokely Carmichael (or Kwame Ture, 1941-1998, pictured above) and his mother -- she has a fascinating Trinidid-New York City hybrid accent, while he retains a subtler Trinidadian lilt. When asked in Paris if he fears being imprisoned upon his return to the USA, he responds, "I was born in jail." He relocates to West Africa in 1969. 

Martin Luther King is clearly against the US-Vietnam War, as Angela Davis notes in narration made for parts of the documentary. His "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church, NYC on April 4, 1967 -- exactly one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis -- epitomizes his overall stance: "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

There's footage of MLK and Harry Belafonte meeting with King Gustaf VI Adolf (1882-1973) of Sweden in Stockholm, reminding us of ongoing Swedish support for human and civil rights as well as the international dimensions of American society.

Black Power kicks into high gear when MLK is killed in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and sometimes called Revolutionary Year Zero. (To be continued).

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.       

1968: Romney's Disintegrating Presidential Bid

George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller, representing the business faction of the Republican Party, vs. Richard Nixon: that was the key battle among Republicans for the 1968 nomination. But already in 1967, Romney, Governor of Michigan and former CEO of American Motors Corporation, was found waffling and wobbling.

Tom Wicker put it this way in the New York Times (September 7, 1967): "Now, as a climax to [his] record of stumbling and bumbling, the Governor has given us a staggering confession -- the only reason he ever believed the Vietnamese war was 'necessary' was because he was 'brainwashed' by American generals and diplomats when he made a trip  to Saigon in 1965."

By February 28,1968, Romney dropped out of the race, and "urged his fellow Republicans to unite behind  one man. A majority of the 26 Republican Governors" at the time "favor[ed] Mr. Rockefeller." (New York Times, February 29,1968). But Nixon won the nomination and the presidency. If Romney had criticized the US-Vietnam War during the Tet Offesive of 1968 -- six months after he actually did -- his words might have found more receptive ears, even among Republicans. Indeed, LBJ, the standing Democratic President, announced that he was not running for reelection exactly one month after Romney called it quits. 

As an aside, Romney was born in Mexico, and ultimately ineligible for the presidency -- if he'd prevailed.
           

Meanwhile, at the height of the US-Vietnam War in 1968, George's son Willard Mitt Romney (pictured above, right; photo credit: Andre Salarnier) was enjoying an extended working vacation in France as a Mormon missionary, where he supported the war from afar. How convenient for him.     

Today's Rune: Fertility.

1968: When After All, It Was You and Me

"Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war." Norman Mailer (1923-2007), The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History (1968).

Howard L. Bingham, Black Panthers 1968 (2009 and 2010), aka Howard L. Bingham's Black Panthers 1968. Not to be confused with Ruth-Marion Baruch, Pirkle Jones and Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panthers 1968 (2002).

The Stonewall Riots were a year off. Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg's 1984 documentary Before Stonewall covers the gay and lesbian rights movement before 1969.

Today's Rune: Partnership.  

Zeitgeist 1968

1968 mustard seeds. Chicano Power.

Jimi Hendrix: electric eclectic.

Black Power salute: Mexico.

Civil Rights: Northern Ireland.

Occupy the Factories: France.

Today's Rune: Partnership.

It's 1968, Okay?

1968 is a year that keeps reverberating. Like the eclectic music coming out that year, it's hard to absorb.  The Tet Offensive and a series of massacres in Vietnam, MLK's assassination. The Prague Spring and the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, related because Václav Havel was a fan of the band, an inspiration for engaged artists and protesters behind the Iron Curtain.     

I remember, as a little kid in 1968, a lot of excitement about Jean-Claude Killy, France and the Winter Olympics. Only later did I read about Opération Canopus, the first French thermonuclear test detonations that made France, in 1968, the fifth nuclear power after the USA, USSR, UK and PRC. Since 1968, the governments of India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have joined the club, with Iran's hoping to tag along shortly.

Today's Rune: Journey.   

Street Fighting Man

Before The Rolling Stones completed the song we know as "Street Fighting Man" (1968), it was a work-in-progress referred to as "Did Everybody Pay Their Dues?," or some close variation of that. Listening to the audio track now, part of the lyrics go more or less like this, a sort of gnarly hybrid of "Who's Been Sleeping Here?" (which came before it) and "Brown Sugar (which came after):

Now did everybody pay their dues?
Now did everyone with tribal blues
All the braves and the squaws and the maids and the whores
Did everybody pay their dues?

He's a tribal chief his name is called disorder
He's flesh and blood he tears it up when acting right is normal
Now did everybody pay their dues?
Now did any of them try to refuse?

With this track, the music remained more or less intact, but the lyrics were radically changed. Why? The Tet Offensive, US-Vietnam War. Really?  Yes, really. Mick Jagger participated in an anti-war rally in London (outside the American embassy) in March '68, and was on top of the situation in France (mai '68 and its lead-up). Cataclysm was in the air. In the US on March 31st, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced:  "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." Given all the excitement, Jagger revamped almost everything, changing

He's a tribal chief his name is called disorder . . .

to

Hey, said my name is called Disturbance . . .

 

I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the King, I'll rail at all his servants . . .

And so "Street Fighting Man" was refined that summer and sent out over the airwaves in August 1968. The US was in complete chaos, and the song perfectly captured the spirit of the times. However, the song scared a lot of people -- therefore, it was (haphazardly, voluntarily) suppressed on radio in the US; in the UK, it wasn't even released as a single until 1970.

Mick Jagger has continued to weigh in on current events over the years, but never with such intensity as during Revolutionary Year One, 1968/1969. He is also a wry observer, as with the lyrics to "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (recorded in November, 1968, and released in 1969):

Now I went down to the demonstration
To get my fair share of abuse
Singing "we're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse . . ."

Other examples, all still relevant: "Gimme Shelter" (1969), "Fingerprint File" (1974), "Undercover of the Night" (1983), "Highwire" (1991) and "Sweet Neo Con" (2005).

Today's Rune: Flow.

Jean-Luc Godard: Sympathy for the Devil, Part 1

This memorable part documentary, part street theatre, Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil / One Plus One (1968), brings us right back into the radical Zeitgeist and upheavals of 1968. As noted in an earlier post, 1968 is a sort of Revolutionary Year One marker point. Some of the stuff going on in '68: the Tet Offensive, the shooting deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, the near-fatal shooting of Andy Warhol, the bitter American election cycle of 1968, worldwide street fighting -- and on and on and on. In the midst of it all, the Rolling Stones observe what's going on and create art from chaos. During the "Sympathy for the Devil" sessions, Godard serves as a "recording angel." The overall results? It's boss.

But: many may hate some of the interwoven scenes and voice-overs outside the studio, judging them too far out, too jarringly rad. Fair warning. . .    

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Jean-Luc Godard: Le gai savoir, Part 2

In Le gai savoir (1969), several references are made to mai 1968 and Year Zero. 1968 was, indeed, a cataclysmic and revolutionary year, in Paris and globally.

To recount, 1968 saw the Prague Spring; the Tet Offensive; the My Lai Massacre (not made public until 1969); the assassination of MLK; the 1968 Chicago riots and "disturbances;" the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City; the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol (who never fully recovered). Richard M. Nixon was elected president, unknowing then he was already Watergate bound. Bob Dylan was more or less recording underground post-66' motorcycle accident. Apollo 8 circled the Moon. Hair the musical debuted. HemisFair '68 was held in San Antonio, Texas. Within a year, Ireland entered the period donned "The Troubles" and the Stonewall Riots in New York City galvanized the gay rights movement. The American Indian Movement was formed, the Chicano movement launched, feminism and the womens' rights movement picked up steam and the environmental movement gained traction. 1968/1969 is as good a time as any to name Year Zero.

In Le gai savoir / Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Godard and his characters lay the groundwork for studying, learning, analyzing, acting and critiquing, as well as figuring out new ways to make films with import and impact.

By the time Godard emerges in 1972 from the intervening years of eclectic experimentation, in releasing Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (co-directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin) he has indeed done many of these things. Picking up from mai '68, the latter includes lines like, "Sometimes what's needed is a good kick in the ass" and, "We should just let outselves get fucked over?" "Workers are always made to look sinister." "Each is his [or her] own historian." "They looked at us and we looked at them . . ."  Unlike many other observer-particpants of mai '68, Godard remained determined to keep forging ahead on his own radical terms, despite or perhaps because of repressive political backlash. 

Le gai savoir was banned in France.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Geronimo Pratt: Last Man Standing

Decorated Vietnam War and Black Panther veteran Geronimo Pratt aka Geronimo ji-Jaga, RIP (9/13/1947-6/2/2011). I'm reading his epic story by way of a very compelling book by Jack Olsen: Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triump of Geronimo Pratt (Doubleday, 2000). Long story short, Louisiana-born Pratt was framed for murder as directed by the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program); was convicted on false testimony and served twenty-seven years in prison, including eight in solitary confinement; was released in 1997 when his conviction was "vacated;" was awarded $4.5 million in 2000; and just died a few days ago in Tanzania, his current home. Johnnie Cochran and Stuart Hanlon represented him.

Last Man Standing contextualizes Pratt's life and times in the 1960s, both in terms of what was going on in the USA and also during the US-Vietnam War. Descriptions of conditions in Vietnam are graphic and revealing. Pratt, serving with the 82nd Airborne, experienced the war's intensity up close -- more on that soon, perhaps. But adding insult to injury, he was next sent with his unit to help quell Detroit during the 1967 race riot. Then, back to Nam and the 1968 Tet Offensive. Then the Black Panthers, and then the false conviction and prison. 

Today's Rune: Strength.  

Tết Nguyên Đán: Feast of the New Morning

Happy Tết, y'all -- Year of the Cat, Year of the Rabbit, Year of the Common Era, 2011. How it will proceed, nobody knows, but it's been a wild start. . .

Will we remain in the United States of Amnesia?  Remember all the emotional concerns over the Horrible Truth About Burma (the so-called Republic of the Union of Myanmar)? That was 2009. People forget the year, let alone the country or the issue. Too taxing on the memory, I guess. Tibet (various uprisings; latest reported, 2008)? Katrina (2005) many do remember. The Great Tsunami (2004)? The Great Blackout (2003)?  Y2K (1999/2000)? Tet Offensive (1968)?   




















Year of Catnip? What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)   

Kinji Fukasaku's Black Lizard / Kurotokage / 黒蜥蝪 (1968).

Today's Rune: Movement.

Farewell, Walter Cronkite

Sad that Walter Cronkite (11/4/1916-7/17/2009) died. Used to watch him as a kid for as long as I can remember in the 1960s and 1970s. He always seemed like a reassuring, kindly, wise and avuncular dude, with his signature ending, "And that's the way it is" (even though everybody with a pulse must have known there was far more going on in the world than any thirty minute broadcast could ever cover).

Walter Cronkite had a clear, measured style, deliberately pacing his delivery so that every word would register. He was also a visionary, with a poetic and philosophical sensibility. To me, he represents the constancy of the evening network news (in his case, CBS) of growing up. After he retired in 1980, my by-the-clock-factory-schedule thirty-minute network news watching tapered off.

Thanks to the Iranian Hostage situation, Nightline flourished, as did special reports, and cable news, especially CNN, which began in 1980. Now the internet makes global perspectives easier to come by, which is how I prefer it. Walter Cronkite's death represents the end of a an era in news delivery, no question.



Today's Rune: Initiation.

Robert Strange McNamara is Dead

The former President of Ford Motor Company, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War and President of the World Bank, is dead. He would seem to have been one inspiration for Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" (1963). Fittingly, I suppose, McNamara was born during the First World War and died during Iraq and Afghanistan.

From an early "Erik's Choice" essay (March 10, 2006):

Which brings me to The Fog of War, an excellent documentary released in 2003, centering around Robert S. McNamara, a man spookily like Donald Rumsfeld, our current Secretary of Defense.*

During the course of the film, McNamara ruminates on the excesses of past American policies and practices. Heavily involved during World War Two, McNamara assisted in the planning and evaluation of the air campaigns against Germany and Japan. With a haunting Philip Glass soundtrack overlaying his reminiscences, he recounts 68 bombings and firebombings of Japanese cities followed by the two even more horrific atomic bombings. He bluntly acknowledges that had the United States lost, he and his fellow planners would have been executed as war criminals. This is not to exculpate the Japanese policy makers (they were entirely brutal, as well), but the mass murder of Japanese civilians was one more great crime against humanity.

Lives squandered, cities in ruins. And for me, as with the Iraq War, it's personal. My friend Yoko Akiba of Hiroshima became sickly from that horrible day on, eventually dying of cancer in her fifties. An innocent little girl in 1945, she suffered the horrors of war for the rest of her life. Even her children paid -- born with severe complications, they, too, were casualties of the same war. Where McNamara really seems like Rumsfeld is during his term as Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. The same creepily calculated decision-making, the same deluded optimism, the same attitude toward the press and protesters. Now, just as then, we hear rosy predictions about a bright light at the end of the tunnel, about standing down as our proxies stand up. McNamara admits that, in retrospect, the anti-war protesters were right; American policy makers had been blinded by hubris.

*McNamara resigned in 1968 during the Tet Offensive; Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006 and left office in December, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Today's Rune: Possessions.

The Battle For Saigon: Tet 1968

Reading a very detailed Vietnam War book -- Keith W. Nolan's The Battle for Saigon: Tet 1968 (2002, 1996). Lots of points relevent to Iraq. First, when the U.S. wages war, enemy "body counts" have far less impact on the American psyche than the American dead and wounded. Second, the gap between rhetoric, hope and reality is usually wide. Whether light at the end of the tunnel or "surge" or "wait until September for a partial interim report and even then will be too soon to really know" approach, it all comes down to the same thing:

Given its inherent flaws, the U.S. War effort would eventually burn out of its own accord, and once Westmoreland's sand castles had washed away, there would be nothing to stop Hanoi: the theater commander had neither clamped down on the self-defeating venality of the Siagon regime, nor made a prioroty of upgrading the capbilities of the ill-led, chicken-stealing ARVN. . . (Nolan, Battle for Saigon).

This is Nolan's assessment of the reality on the ground in Vietnam immediately before the Tet Offensive. The event itself turned out to be a military defeat for the Vietcong and North Vietnam, but a political disaster for South Vietnam and the United States, as well. A real turning point in that war. By 2007, we're surely experiencing another real turning point in the Iraq War.

Today's Rune: Movement.