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Today's
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March 8, 2004
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
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March
8, 2004
Radical Continuity
An
Interview with Paul Buhle
By DEREK SEIDMAN
There is probably no one in the world that knows
more about the history of American radicalism than Paul Buhle.
A former member of Students for a Democratic Society and a disciple
of CLR James, Buhle founded the journal Radical America
as well as the Oral History of the American Left project. He
is the author/editor of nearly thirty books, including: Images
of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical
Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies,
The
Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in
the United States, The
New Left Revisited, Insurgent
Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz, and the
forthcoming From
the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture.
Buhle is currently teaching at Brown University. Left Hook's Derek Seidman recently caught up with him for
a short interview.
DS: I know that you take very seriously
the idea of continuity throughout the history of American radicalism.
When we talk about radical continuity, it seems to me we're talking
about how deeply the memory and traditions of our radical past
have stretched into the present, in such a way as to, consciously
or not, inspire and educate current efforts for social change.
It's certainly the case that radical continuity is visible in
certain places. Take, for instance, the anti-war protests earlier
this year: not only did they draw heavily on the experiences
of the sixties in terms of organization and symbols, but many
of the participants were veterans of those earlier struggles.
But it's also the case-and it seems most visible in the labor
movement-that older traditions of militancy, solidarity, and
class-consciousness, embodied by organizations such as the IWW,
the Socialist Party, and the early CIO, have left a much weaker
pull on the present. How strong and how important is radical
continuity for us, and what parts of our radical past do you
see as most important to draw on for lessons and for inspiration
today?
PB: Continuity offers a difficult question
with no easy answer, for a reason persistent in US radical activity:
demographic transformation. What does the history of the fundamentally
Euro-American labor movement mean for African Americans (when
not excluded outright, nearly always relegated to its lower rungs),
or to newer Latino and Asian immigrants? It remains to be established
because we aren't now seeing the moments of solidarity that recall
the best of the legacies.
On the other hand, there is much current interest in the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), for the best reasons. It was at once
egalitarian, bohemian, completely rebellious, and made its influence
felt more through songs and slogans, heroes and martyrs, than
organizational strength. Joe Hill is now better remembered than
the thuggish-racist George Meany (let alone successor Lane Kirkland,
his name unknown to an estimated 97 percent of the AFL-CIO members
who he ruled). My urging of Wobbly legacies now is prompted by
the pervasive sense that if strikes can be won and unions rebuilt,
let alone a wider social movement created, Wobbly-like solidarity
with the new immigrants is the most crucial factor.
Nearly all the particular struggles of the 1960s, as well, seem
to be fading into memory except for civil rights and opposition
to the Vietnam War. This is fascinating because the current,
standard liberal (and conservative) treatment of the era, from
opinion columns to television mini-series, has affirmed a "safe"
interpretation of civil rights as a call for meritocracy, rather
than a "freedom movement" with a broader cause; opposition
to the war, especially the impolite opposition in demonstrations,
is viewed as inherently excessive, irrational and anti-American.
Even those who improbably claim a part in the antiwar legacy,
from Robert McNamara to the older intellectuals around Dissent
magazine who blistered campus activists with attacks throughout
the period, seem determined to make a similar distinction. Some
protest, strictly acceptable to (say) the Americans for Democratic
Action, is proper; the unguarded action of young people like
the whole New Left was improper and, in the words of a recent
New York Times reviewer, "almost as bad" as
the US invaders of Vietnam!
"Black Power," like the Black/Jewish conflict used
by demagogues on both sides (far more successfully by neoliberal
and neoconservative Jewish elites, of course), has now been refracted
by the Latino surge, whose diversity makes even "Chicano"
seem a word from a long time ago. Lamentably, "feminist"
is a word that not many young women want to hear-attaching it,
as they seem to do, to the Glass Ceiling rather than social transformation-and
"gay" or "lesbian" has become more lifestyle,
albeit including an important appeal for tolerance, than political
message. "Homocons" and black conservatives are the
most heavily promoted political figures of the Right, and likely
to remain so, along with hawk-liberals like Jean Bethke Elshtain,
and the handful of erstwhile New Leftists who have, since the
1970s, become boosters for a sweeping global military crusade.
Readers may want to troll the Website of First of the Month
to see how bizarre the craving for militarization has become
in some quarters, and what strange claims are made upon the 1960s
to justify it. Then again, most of this sounds pretty much like
the Congress of Cultural Freedom intellectuals, during the 1950s,
enthusing at the military coup in Guatemala and adamantly refuting
charges that African Americans weren't receiving fair trials
in the South. They, too, claimed to be defending democracy against
totalitarianism-and making a good living for themselves in the
process.
What remains from older struggles may
be best symbolized in the timeless struggle against Empire and
imperial militarization of life everywhere, in the name of planetary
survival, egalitarianism, and real human freedom (not just "civic
society," the 1990s favorite recipe for the unhindered accumulation
of capital). This is not so far, after all, from the older visions
of socialists, communists, feminists, etc., well articulated
by Woody Guthrie in bygone days, Tony Kushner now. It's no surprise
to read savage attacks on Angels in America, very much
in the old Commentary/Partisan Review fashion, in the
pages of the New Republic or New York Review of Books:
they firmly believe that they own culture, and the perceive accurately
that Kushner's popularity and critical acclaim is dangerous to
that claim. Even the specifics echo the rage at Arthur Miller,
and the ravings of Robert Warshow against Carl Foreman's biting
social commentary in High Noon, or again, Pauline Kael's endless
attack on leftwing films from Salt of the Earth to anything
at all directed by Martin Ritt. She (and they) didn't need to
see a film or play to hate it; they only had to look at the credits
to smell subversion, invariably described as bad aesthetics.
DS: In your book "Marxism in
the United States", you wrote that "Marxism in the
United States has been a class manifestation of the national
question." This is a very interesting formulation- can you
elaborate on its meaning?
PB: One of the chief results of my fieldwork,
interviewing octogenarians of every Left milieu during the 1970s
and early 1980s, was to fill in what I knew only abstractly:
that the "foreign born" had been the majority of Marxists
from the 1860s to the 1930s, and their children the dominant
group probably through the 1950s (far more so if the Communist
Party had not been repressed, and imploded). The formulation
that you cite may be one of the most original in the book, because
no one had appreciated the implications. Political and labor
leaders had always urged assimilation, so as to reach "the
real Americans." But the appeal of radical ideas was linked
to the commitment to the homeland, and also a vision of a multicultural
socialist America-even back in the 1880s. The idea of the US
as a potential world society in itself has been, in a way, a
consolation for the heterogeneous workforce unable to gain coherence
within itself.
Let me put this another and directly
more political way: the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s probably
set up the working class "Americanism" of the 1940s-50s
for a sharp rightward turn; the opening of immigration again
during the 1960s has created once again the possibility of a
global proletariat here. The progressive tilt of Dominicans in
a little spot like Rhode Island has already had good effects,
and not because these immigrants have ceased to think about the
D.R.
DS: In that same book, you also posed
the question (referring to Marxism): "Can a theoretical
system historically rooted in response to Victorian capitalism
hope to come to grips with the challenges of 2000?" This
is a complicated question, and we can broaden it and ask (which
you do in your book) about the complicated relationship between
Marxism and American radicalism throughout history. At the time
that Marxism made its entrance on to the American scene in the
late 19th century, it was indeed a European import, with European
immigrants as its strongest and most orthodox adherents. This
is obviously not to say that the basic recognitions of Marxism-the
class struggle, exploitation, etc.-weren't grasped by the native
born population, but that they were understood within a different
cultural framework, which you sometimes refer to as our "common
democratic sensibility". This "sensibility" arose
from an entirely different radical tradition than that which
Marxism emerged from; as you observed, "Native born Americans
saw class and socialism in democratic terms", where as it
was the opposite with most radical immigrants. Much more amorphous
and less class-oriented and class-conscious, homegrown radicalism
nevertheless carried with it as central the "ethical imperative
of socialism", as you call it. All this being said, what
do you see as the main tensions between Marxism and "homegrown"
American radicalism?
PB: This is not quite right, and perhaps
I have put it a bit imprecisely, because the obvious racial dimensions
have always added another, related angle to the issues involved.
For a long time, Christian Socialists made the best anti-racists,
and their role has returned intermittently, sometimes from the
heights of the National Council of Churches (or, in hemispheric
terms especially, from Orbis Press, and the political arms of
the Maryknoll Fathers). African American participation in leftwing
political movements has practically always had roots in the Black
church. Pacifism, related to these matters-interconnected with
Empire-and going beyond them somewhat to global war and peace,
is likewise an ethical, philosophical position with roots homegrown.
Immigrant Marxists, their own backgrounds in free thought societies,
had enormous conceptual difficulty valuing with anything religious.
Where Euro-radicalism persisted over generations-especially among
Jewish Americans-the strains of religious radicalism were (and
are) thin compared to politically conservative trends.
I like to say, playfully, that the gentiles need socialist religious
doctrines while Jews are free to be as atheistic as they want.
But "atheism" has never had the strength of radical
"spiritualism," the evocation of nature and of human
possibility that was never absent from Jewish secular socialism
either.
DS: You knew CLR James, and from what
I know, he has been a central influence of yours. Can you tell
us a bit about James, why he had an important role in the history
of the American Left, and more importantly, why he is relevant
to the Left today?
PB: I began publishing James' essays
in 1968 in the pages of Radical America, edited and published
the first anthology of his writings in 1970, and with my fellow
editors distributed his obscure pamphlets at the tail end of
the New Left. To us, he was the Marxist with the deepest sense
of culture, but he was also the last great Pan African figure,
a universal thinker who could see the entirety of human history
within details, and write about it brilliantly. He remains relevant
and becomes more relevant because he saw, better than anyone
else, how the ongoing process of capital drawing deeper and deeper
into the layers of the planet's population was creating new cultures
of revolutionary possibility. He didn't get stuck on the Second
International model of building parliamentary socialist parties,
or on the Third International model of creating State Capitalist
economies. He saw a Lenin that few others appreciated (DuBois
was one of them), and he never lost sight of the Caribbean promise.
It's still worth mentioning that The Black Jacobins is
the novelistic account of the first successful slave revolt in
two thousand years; like DuBois' Black Reconstruction,
it will never be out of date.
DS: You mentioned Radical America.
Tell us about this: what it was, how and why it began, the role
it played, and its overall vision.
PB: Radical America, whose origins
are discussed pretty thoroughly in History and the New Left,
was invented for the Radical Education Project of SDS. It came
to life as a real magazine in Fall, 1967, largely thanks to a
fellow graduate student in Madison, Jim O'Brien, and to O'Brien's
housemate (and local SDS chair) Hank Haslach, a Wobbly printer
with a single-sheet press. Given the political moment, it took
merely ferocious determination to put out bimonthly issues (the
schedule was copied after New Left Review). Its vision
was to put radical history to work, but also to reflect the radical
cultural impulses of the moment, and until the New Left collapsed
(also a bit after) it did marvelously. Its best strokes were
probably underground comics, black proletarian history and women's
history, all new or renewed at that moment. I moved the magazine
to the Boston area in 1971, and abandoned it to others in 1973.
What had been created and what remained,
for years after my exit, was a distinctive New Left vision, the
effort to create a history for a "radical America,"
something that (say) the Germans never had to do but would be
quite as difficult in the UK as the US, although for somewhat
different reasons. RA, at its best, had the CLR James
vision of a movement that needed to replace the political State
rather than infiltrating it, and a future that reflected what
we called "self-activity," a descendent of Wobbly syndicalism,
rather than social democratic or communist bureaucracy.
I have one more thing to add to this.
The first, crude issue of Radical America carried a very
old document by Daniel DeLeon, the first professor to preach
anti-imperialism, and the popularizer of what he called the "Marx-Morgan
system" (after anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan) of socialism
as a new stage of civilization, succeeding capital and the political
state. DeLeon, expelled from the IWW (in 1907), had reached me
in 1963, thanks to the continuation of the tiny Socialist Labor
Party.
I didn't stay long in this museum of
a political organization, but I did imbibe a quasi-anthropological
vision, very common in the late nineteenth century (August Bebel's
Women And Socialism was an especially potent source) of
competition as a phase between the cooperative pre-state, perhaps
Neolithic "Golden Age" of old and the "Golden
Age" to come. I never quite lost that sense, even if other
Radical America editors might not have known what to make
of DeLeon, the Sephardic immigrant from the tiny island of Curacao.
But close observers commented, later on, that in traveling from
Curacao to Trinidad (of CLR James), I hadn't come so far after
all. Or from another angle, the garment district bureaucrats
of the 1920s accused their rank-and-file Communist opponents
of being "gilgul DeLeonists," spiritual descendents
of the uncompromising socialists of the 1890s. I was the gilgul
DeLeonist within the New Left.
DS: Last question: I know you're big
on comics. What do you have to say about comics as a medium for
radical ideas? And last question number two: what can we expect
to see from Paul Buhle in the near future?
PB: From the Lower East Side
to Hollywood: Jews and American Popular Culture will be out
shortly and wrap up more than fifty years of experience (since
my first reading of Mad Comics, or perhaps it was the
viewing of the very leftwing Superman and the Mole Men
on my 6th birthday), personal and political. It is far from comprehensive-I
wish I'd known that Saturday Night Live founder Lorne
Michaels has received an award for promoting Yiddish among Canadians--but
I hope it will be read as a useful and also a deeply personal
book.
So is the unfinished biography that I've
drafted of C.L.R. James's disciple Tim Hector, foremost socialist
pan-Caribbeanist for the last quarter century, until his early
death in 2002. Hector and I drew sustenance from the same well
of knowledge and wisdom and this is a mini-history of the Caribbean
Left, with its distinctive "reggae socialism," as well
as a close reading of Tim's life, the rolling general strike
of Caribbean workers during the later 1930s, and other subjects.
I'm hoping to finish the volume this Spring and it means a lot
to me.
But I think my heart belongs now to comics,
and to a related subject, the iconographic revolution of Hieronymous
Bosch in the 15th century. Next year sees the appearance of a
"graphic story" history of the IWW, on the centenary,
co-edited by artist Nicole Schulman of the World War 3 Illustrated
crowd. I aspire to more comics projects, republishing old things
and creating new ones by scripting for artists. Several projects
are in process, and if some succeed, it will take me back to
my earlier days. All I've left out, I suppose, is Science Fiction
(best left to my friend Kim Stanley Robinson, the greatest socialist
science fiction writer in a long time), another source of my
early (and never fulfilled) aspirations as a writer, and stand-up
comedy, the Lenny Bruce that I still admire boundlessly (he stayed
in the same fleabag hotel as me in San Francisco! But not quite
in the same year) but don't try to emulate. Instead, I've been
luckily placed to be the Emcee at local protest events, off and
on for forty years, and perhaps that's my best spot.
Derek Seidman,
23, is a co-editor of the radical youth journal Left
Hook . He can be reached at derekseidman@yahoo.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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