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Recent
Stories
July
3, 2003
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis
to Attack US Troops
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
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
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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July
4, 2003
Rebel Angel: a Memoir
Chapter
Six: Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
By DAVID VEST
Having grown up white in Huntsville and Birmingham,
Alabama, I entered college regarding segregation as a matter
of personal inconvenience. It denied me access to the musicians
I wanted to learn from. From my mother I had gathered that racial
prejudice was worse than inconvenient. It was rude.
That it might also be unjust was a thought
that had not yet presented itself to me. Standing on a corner
waiting for a bus, I had heard a man say that the country would
never be free until it rid itself of all the Niggers, Jews and
Catholics. This struck me at the time not as frightening but
merely odd. I had never knowingly met a Jew or a Catholic. Brother
Cecil O'Rear at the West Huntsville Baptist Church had explained
that Catholics were Christians, too, they were just in "bondage."
I had seen plenty of Black people, but I had been dimly aware
at 13 and 14 that I knew no Black people my own age. Where were
they?
So having led the sheltered life of the
Southern white liberal, I enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College,
located in a neighborhood that had experienced 65 unsolved bombings
in recent years. BSC was considered a nest of Communist agitation
by many locals. However, the commencement  speaker at my graduation urged
us to marry within our own race.
The college did have a Communist cell,
located just off campus. I dropped by there on Saturdays in the
fall, lured by free liquor, color TV for football, and the sexiest
woman I had ever laid eyes on, who met me at the door with a
wide-open smile and said, "It's Jack Daniels, isn't it?"
I'd have joined anything she wanted to see me in, but she never
asked.
I did get asked to coach a Little League
baseball team -- at the Jewish Community Center. People there
were friendly and invited me to come watch foreign movies. Thus
was I introduced to Ingmar Bergman and to bomb threats. At almost
every showing the film would be paused while we went out to the
lobby and let the bomb dogs do their thing. These Jews seemed
unafraid so I stayed close to them. Much of the conversation
focused on efforts to rid the city of Bull Connor.
I had regarded Connor as a clown, a dolt.
How dangerous he was I learned at the JCC.
I had thought of politics, insofar as
I had thought of it at all, as a circus where you watched fools
in their folly, applauding the most outrageous for their entertainment
value. That it was our duty to get rid of these buffoons was
news to me.
>From time to time I saw Rev. Shuttlesworth,
Dr. King and their followers marching as I drove from college
to gig and back. In a short span of time I went from seeing them
as a traffic problem (more of that good old personal inconvenience)
to regarding them as unutterably heroic. Every time Martin Luther
King, Jr. was taken to jail for parading without a permit, I
expected him to be killed. Every morning I looked at the paper
to see whether they had blown up Shuttlesworth's home.
I never joined them in the streets. I
was not yet fully awake and, to tell the truth, I was afraid.
Where people found the courage to walk into the mouth of rage
and hatred, to face police dogs and fire hoses and tear gas and
billy sticks, I could not imagine.
I was with them in my heart, but I had
a long way to go before I would learn how different that was
from really being with them. I hadn't even begun to identify
the ways in which I had personally benefitted, however unwittingly,
from racism and segregation.
I did go to work in Tom King's campaign
to unseat Bull Connor. King was the great progressive hope in
60s Birmingham. He never had a prayer. His poorly-run campaign
sent us out repeatedly to places where there were no people.
I wound up driving a flat-bed trailer rig that the band and the
candidate would stand on. With no experience in driving a truck
with so many gears, I tended to run late, like everything else
in the campaign. I pulled into a steel mill parking lot where
King was greeting a shift change just in time to take out the
tail lights of a row of cars belonging to the men he was shaking
hands with.
I began to attend political events at
the college. At one of them I stood up and demanded to know where
my cousin, Sen. John Sparkman, stood on the subject of Vietnam,
a subject I myself was but newly aware of. He told me, in a ten-minute
answer, that it was a good question and he was glad I asked it.
Then he winked at me and changed the subject.
The Attorney General of the state, Richmond
Flowers, came to campus running for governor, styling himself
as a progressive alternative to George Wallace. He told us that
Wallace had not a single Black person on his staff and that if
we would elect him, he would change that in a hurry.
When he paused to take questions, I raised
my hand. "You are the Attorney General of Alabama. How many
Black people do you have on your staff right now?"
Flowers turned bright red and glared
at me with unmistakable venom. "What you've got to understand
about that is that it's a completely different situation,"
the answer began. I was gone before he finished it.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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