INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Novelist Beverly Gologorsky Was Shaped by Sixties, Feminism, and The Bronx

Novelist Beverly Gologorsky. Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

An Interview with Beverly Gologorsky:
Novelist and long-time activist's
new book shouts its presence

“Working people are as ubiquitous as Blue Jays. When they fly they’re beautiful."

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2013

No one wants to be saddled with labels from the past, certainly not that ubiquitous species known as the creative writer. But even writers -- or perhaps especially writers -- have emotional attachments to moments and to spaces from the past. That’s true for Beverly Gologorsky, the author of the 1999 novel, The Things We Do to Make it Home -- and a new novel, Stop Here (Seven Stories; $16.95), the title of which practically shouts its presence.

A long-time activist, Gologorsky edited two anti-war publications -- Viet-Report and Leviathan -- that made a difference by informing and inspiring. She also played a part in the women’s liberation movement in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.

But before the long decade of defiance and resistance to the war and to the patriarchy, she was shaped by her blue collar and pink collar neighborhood in The Bronx where she grew up like everyone else in her generation, in the shadow of war: World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Moreover, like the women characters she writes about in Stop Here, she worked as a waitress.

I’ve known Gologorsky since about 1970 when, if I remember correctly, we rallied in the streets and sat through interminable meetings. I interviewed her in 1999 when her first novel came out. “Writing is the only thing that really makes me happy,” she told me then. When asked the same question recently, she said, “I should have said -- and I feel now -- that I don't always understand myself. Writing is my connection to the universe.”

In many ways, she’s a perfect perfectionist. She writes and rewrites and rewrites some more. Sometimes she’ll rewrite a chapter 12 and 13 times. She’ll put a book away for years, then come back to it and start anew. In her new novel, Stop Here, she writes with the ears of a poet and the eyes of an historian, with compassion and love and with a sense of solidarity, too.

“There’s no way to ignore the warmongering on Fox News, though Ava is trying,” her new book begins. From the start, you know where you’re at, though you don’t know where the book will take you or how it will end. There’s no stopping the momentum of the story once in starts and the characters are unstoppable, too.

Labels are rather limited -- and yet they’re also essential. You could call Gologorsky a daughter of the working class, a feminist and a novelist shaped by the New Left. That’s all true. Still, I’d suggest that you read her novels and forget about the labels. In Stop Here, you’ll want to linger at Murray’s Diner, meet the customers and the employees, and watch as the drama of their lives unfolds against the backdrop of war and resistance.

If you want to read a novel by a radical from the past who’s still a radical, read Stop Here. And if you weren’t a radical then and aren’t one now but you’re curious about the lives of Americans who watch Fox news, this novel has your name written all over it.

 

Jonah Raskin: Here it is September 11 again. What do you remember about that day in 2001? Where were you?

Beverly Gologorsky: I had just turned on the news in my Upper West Side apartment and after the first sentence the station (NPR) went dead. That was the first plane. Never before have I experienced New York City as quiet of traffic and airplanes as it was in the next three days. Never before had I seen actual shock on ordinary people's faces as I did that day.

Was it a pivotal point in your own life? If so how?

No, though I must admit it remains unforgettable. Particularly, the few days after the event, the sense of burning bodies, the smell, and the sadness of it did permeate all else. No one I knew could work or think about anything except the death and destruction. My doctor friend ran to a hospital to help out, but hardly any bodies needed attending. Horrid. After two days, I went with friends and came as close to the devastation as permitted. The feeling of loss was palpable.

What if anything have Americans learned from 9/11?

Mostly, I fear, the wrong lessons. What should have been seen as a criminal act became a war on state terrorism. So many unnecessary deaths occurred and still do on a lesser basis. Fear was ratcheted up among the populace here, which allowed so much to be done to others in our name that wasn't necessary and was in fact evil. I speak here in particular of Iraq.

It seems to me that American history for the past 80 years or so is a record of war, bombings, invasions, and mass death? How would you describe this last phase of history?

Unfortunately, what you say is true, however, I maintain that people, lots of them, can change policy. It takes a village and it takes patience.

You have written about the impact of war in two novels, The Things We Do to Make it Home from 1999 and your new novel, Stop Here. Why have you focused on war?

I don't see myself focusing on war, per se. Rather, the characters that speak to me happen to be for the most part working class men and women and it has always been their lives that have been affected by war. Also, in my novels, I speak of their relationships to one another not only to the results of war.

The War in Vietnam really was different wasn’t it, as wars go? The opposition was immense, the friendship between the Vietnamese and the American ran really deep, and the solidarity of the global community was awesome. Was that time an aberration in history?

I hope not, and I don't believe so. There are too many reasons for me to go into here, but let me say that many factors keep movements from forming or from not forming.

When I hear writers say that their characters are made up I don’t believe them because we usually find out that their characters -- I’m thinking of Hemingway, for example, or Willa Cather -- are based on actual people. What can you tell us about your main characters?

They are figures from my imagination and composites of various people I've met. But as Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, said, "Every character, C'est moi."

Much of your new book takes place in a diner -- that all-American institution. It’s what the café is to France and the pub to England. How did the idea of the diner come to you?

It was always the cheapest place to eat, the one where you could sit and rap with your friends or family for hours. I love diners.

One of my favorite authors, B. Traven, said that working people were far more interesting from a novelist’s point of view than rich and famous people? What do you think of that comment?

Working people are as ubiquitous as Blue Jays and when they fly they are beautiful.

You wrote for and edited Leviathan and for other anti-war publications. What did you learn about writing from that experience?

A great deal about challenge and about patience. Many of the encounters with other writers were learning experiences. It was the period in which I was gathering my own worldview.

Women writers talk about the gender imbalance in publishing, reviewing, and publicity. While women read more books than men, buy more books, belong to more book groups, male writers are reviewed more often and get more space. It looks like the patriarchy controls a lot of the book industry. Does that affect you?

Yes. Newspaper and magazine review space has dwindled. It’s barely there, and what little space there is isn't shared evenly, so we need to keep up the pressure so the inequitable coverage will change. We can do that. We have in the past, around other male-dominated venues. So I'm hopeful.

What is it that women today most need to know and appreciate about the women’s liberation movement from the 1960s and 1970s?

Women need to continue to educate other woman about the progress, as well as the failures: to say what needs to be done and perhaps even how to do it.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Oral Historian Margaret Randall on Che and the Cuban Revolution

Margaret Randall, Berkeley, California, March 23, 2011. Photo © Scott Braley.

Interview with Margaret Randall:
Feminist, poet, and oral historian of Che,
Fidel, and the Cuban revolution

"Che, even on his early motorcycle adventure through Latin America, was deeply affected by human misery and beginning to figure out what he felt could be done to alleviate it."

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2013

Margaret Randall, 77, lives today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her roots run as deep as they do in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua where she has also lived for extended periods of time.

In the 1980s she was a woman without a country -- or at least a woman without a legal passport. Born in New York in 1936, she dropped out of college, moved to Spain and then to Mexico where she married the poet, Sergio Mondragon, with whom she founded and edited the literary magazine, El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn).

In 1968, after a year of involvement with the Mexican student movement, she went underground and escaped to Cuba where she lived until 1980, interviewing Cuban women and serving as a judge for the Casas de las Americas poetry contest and raising a family. Then, after four years in Sandanista Nicaragua, she returned to the U.S. where she was greeted by family members and friends -- and declared persona non grata by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In 1969, when she had acquired Mexican citizenship she also simultaneously lost her American citizenship. Immigration officials stated that, in her writings, she had expressed views "against the good order and happiness of the United States." After a five-year legal battle, the Center for Constitutional Rights won Randall’s case and succeeded in having her U.S. citizenship reinstated.

The author of more than 120 books, she lives with painter and teacher Barbara Byers. In 1990, Randall was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers persecuted by political repression. In 2004, she was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

She has four children and10 grandchildren. Duke University Press has just published Che On My Mind, which Noam Chomsky calls “a compelling personal meditation.”

Randall with her husband, the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon.

Jonah Raskin: We’re close to the anniversary of Che’s death. He was murdered 46 years ago, on October 8, 1967. In some ways he might not recognize the world of 2013.

Margaret Randall: Would Che recognize the world of 2013? I'm inclined to think he would. One of the fascinating things about him is that he had a far-ranging analytical mind. He was curious about everything and knew a lot of political theory, revolutionary practice, medicine, anthropology, art, language, and more.

So, extrapolating from this I believe our world would not have surprised him. It would be more interesting to know how he might gotten from "there" to "here." We'll never know. With his murder those who feared him put an end to his astonishing capacity to see history and to process it. What we’re left with is a story made static by its unnatural end.

Your own life was intense in this period. Can you say something about it?

I was part of the Mexican student movement of 1968 that was brutally repressed; hundreds were shot and killed by the army. A year later, in 1969, we were preparing to honor those who had died. Two paramilitary guys forced there way into my house at gunpoint and stole my passport. I reported it stolen but the Mexican government refused to give me another. That’s when I went underground. I acquired fake papers, traveled to the U.S., then to Toronto and to Prague and from there then to Havana. My kids had gone on ahead of me and met me at the airport.

Was there an epiphany during the writing of the book?

The whole book was a kind of epiphany. Che had long fascinated me. I knew one of his sisters and a brother, too. I felt close to the family. I kept reading and rereading and than one day I just found myself writing. At first I thought it was going to be a short essay, then it turned into a book.

In Che On My Mind, you’re both critical of Che and at the same time empathetic. Did it take time for you to reach that vantage point where you saw his strengths and his flaws?

I’ve been ruminating on the man and his era -- which was also mine -- for almost half a century.

I imagine that if you had written a book about Che in, say, 1968, or even in 1975, it would have been a very different book. This book reflects who you are now in 2013 doesn’t it?

Absolutely. It’s a culmination of years of my own experience, losses, thinking and rethinking -- observing how Che’s persona has been reflected in and used by generations for whom he’s been a model in one way or another.

The photos of Che that you include say a lot about him and his personality. The photo with his mother seems to reveal their deep connection, while the photo of him from 1963 in Havana smoking a big cigar suggests a kind of arrogance -- at least to me. Do you have one favorite image of Che?

My favorite photograph of Che, or the image that haunts me most insistently, is the one taken on October 9, 1967, by Bolivian press photographer, Freddy Alborta, of the man lying dead in a schoolhouse in Bolivia. I reproduce it twice in my book, one full frame and again as a close-up of Che’s face. Although “lifeless” his features retain a mysterious quality -- something between terrible foreboding and infinite calm. The CIA and Bolivian Army staged this photo shoot in order to prove that the guerrilla leader was dead. This image proved just the opposite.

Your book reflects your own personal journey from North America to Latin America -- Mexico and  Cuba and Nicaragua -- and back to North America. At one time you might have said that living here was living “in the Belly of the Beast.” Is there an image or a metaphor you would use today to describe the USA?

Che with Fidel, left, circa 1958 in the mountains during the guerrilla war against the Bautista dictatorship. Photos of Che Guevara from Che on My Mind by Margaret Randall, Duke University Press, 2013.

Living in the U.S. today is like living on the far side of Alice’s Looking Glass or, as Eduardo Galeano has said, in a world that is upside down. Official wisdom is really smug deception. Criminality passes itself off as benevolence, and the 1% continues to ignore all the warming signs in a world it’s destroying.

It’s definitely difficult for guerrillas from the mountains to morph into government officials in the capital. Che did that for a while when he was president of the Bank of Cuba. Che as banker doesn’t fit the popular mythology does it, but its part of the picture.

Che was one among many who pointed out that winning a military campaign and restructuring society are very different endeavors, and that the latter is far more complex and difficult than the former. I believe that Che had immense courage, some valuable ideas, and also made some painful mistakes in both contexts. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that had his ideas about a new society continued to be implemented after he left Cuba, more of the revolution would exist in that country today.

I like the selections from Che’s letters that you have included. In several of them he seems to romanticize violence as when he writes about “the staccato singing of the machine guns.” Machine guns probably don’t really sing do they?

No, they don’t sing; they kill.

Why did you return to the United States after years of living in what might be called “exile”? Did you feel that you took that part of your journey as far as you could take it?

I missed my language, my culture, the space and colors of my New Mexico desert, my aging parents: all the components that together define home. And I was tired after so many years away, often on the front lines of battles that were and were not my own. I was close to 50. It was time to come home.

What do you miss most about the Latin American world that you knew?

I miss its rich cultures, extraordinary creativity, and unfailing hope in the face of forces that continue to exploit and usurp. I miss good Mexican mole, Cuban yuca al mojo de ajo, Nicaraguan tamales. I miss César Vallejo’s voice and all the voices of young poets who exist because he did. I miss my children, three of whom opted to remain in Latin America; and of course I miss my grandchildren whose lives are unfolding in Mexico and Uruguay.

You’re also critical of Fidel and Cuba in your book -- including what you call “the stagnation.” Given the blockade and U.S. foreign policy on the one hand and the reliance on the Soviet Union for so long on the other hand, what choices did the Cubans really have?

I am critical of decisions I feel were paternalistic, didn’t display enough faith in the Cuban people themselves, discouraged healthy criticism, and further isolated a nation that is, after all, an island. Given the balance of power during the Cold War years, Cuba may not have had more viable options. Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. When the Cuban revolution has been most open and embracing I believe it has achieved its greatest successes. This said, every time I revisit the country I come away with a palpable sense of justice and possibility I don’t experience anywhere else.

Edward Boorstein, the American economist who wrote about Cuba, told me a story about how Che became head of the national bank. In his version, it was Fidel who asked if there was anyone in a room of guerrillas who was an economist. Che raised his hand. Later, when he wasn’t very effective at the bank, Fidel went to him and said, “I thought you told me you knew economics.” Che replied, “I thought you asked if anyone was a communist.” You point out that the story may be apocryphal. What does the story say to you? How do you interpret it?

Popular culture tends to pick up and focus in on moments that illustrate deep truths, and then incorporate them into legend. I’m sure there is at least a kernel of truth in this story. The Cubans have a marvelous capacity to laugh at their own idiosyncrasies. If this story didn’t happen exactly as it is told, what remains significant is that changing society requires superhuman effort, often by people who have no particular training for the job and must invent as they go along. Making the effort is always better than saying, “We can’t do this because we don’t know how.”

For me the most sobering moment in your book isn’t the death of Che in Bolivia but the suicide of Haydee Santamaria, perhaps the most prominent of the revolutionary leaders, in 1980 in Cuba. What can you tell us about her suicide? How did she take her life? Did she leave a suicide note? Was her death covered up?

Her death wasn’t covered up. But, as with many such major events, in Cuba and elsewhere, we know what those who control the information want us to know. As far as I’m aware, she didn’t leave a note. But she left a life. Like Che, Haydée Santamaría was an exceptional human being. To me, she represented the very best humanity has to offer. She definitely envisioned and worked to create a better world. It must have been unbearably painful for her to have to live in the one that exists.

The chapter about Che and Haydée is the one in my book that means the most to me, the one on which I worked the hardest, and the one I believe embodies most completely what I want to say about the Cuban revolution, its central figures, that whole extraordinary swatch of history.

Che in 1963 in his office in the Hotel Rivera in Havana. Photo by the French photographer Rene Burri, on assignment for Look magazine.

You seem to be positive about the Weather Underground. You say that the organization remained “the voice of a certain radical faction” when the New Left declined. Do you admire the organization more than any other in the USA from that time?

I admired it at the time. I admired all those who dared speak out, rise up, and fight the power of U.S. hegemony and imperialist abuse of other nations and our own. And I continue to feel that admiration. I was also living somewhere else, though, and therefore in no position to observe or judge the excesses, the lack of connection many radical groups had with the lives of ordinary working people, certain sectarian or authoritarian ideas that created dangerous divisions and doomed brilliantly creative projects.

The young Che Guevara seems like a young Jack Kerouac in some ways; he was in search of “adventures” and “fun” to use his own words. Che went on his motorcycle journey about the same time that Kerouac was traveling across the U.S.A. And he was extraordinarily poetic, too, as when he wrote that, “words turn to prisons inhibiting my feelings.” Do you think he and the Beats would have been comrades on the road if they had met in say, 1955?

I can see them as comrades on the road if they had met in 1955, though probably not in 1965. The Beats were motivated by a rejection of the social hypocrisy pervasive in the U.S. throughout the 1950s. But their solutions involved lighting up and dropping out. Che, even on his early motorcycle adventure through Latin America, was deeply affected by human misery and beginning to figure out what he felt could be done to alleviate it. Kerouac’s and Che’s roads diverged. But I definitely sense an underlying “brotherhood.”

Che was in New York in 1964 and 1965. He talked about sleeping in a hammock in Central Park -- the closest he could get to a jungle. What thoughts do you have about him in New York?

I wasn’t there. But I imagine he was lonely, enraged much of the time, deeply curious as he always was about places with which he was unfamiliar, perceptive, and perhaps a little bit in love.

If you had met him what might you have wanted to ask him?

At this point in my life all I can be sure of is that I would not, back then, have been able to ask the right questions -- of him or anyone else. It’s taken me a while to be able to formulate the questions I do ask in my book.

Though he used the Spanish word for “faggot” to describe homosexuals you don’t think he was homophobic?

I struggled with this in my book, and I am honest about the process of that struggle. Of course, there was a great deal of the macho in Guevara, and his use of the word “faggot” was disgusting, unforgivable. It was also an almost unthinking part of the popular culture at the time. I came to the conclusion, after looking closely at the role he played or did not play in the actual repression of homosexuals in Cuba, that he was not one of those for whom that egregious repression was personally important.

And looking at other ways in which he departed from the norm, I came to feel that -- like Fidel -- had he lived long enough to experience the call for gay rights, he would have endorsed them. Che was a man of his time, but deeply principled.

Your book might be described as a feminist reading of Che’s life and work. Do you see it that way?

Absolutely. Insofar as feminism is a framework for looking at power relations, I read everything from a feminist point of view. I also see this as a poet’s book, a poetic reading of a life.

[Jonah Raskin, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Occupy's Nathan Schneider on Anarchy and Radical Catholicism

Nathan Schneider, June 17, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Interview with Occupy’s Nathan Schneider:
Anarchy, activism, and radical Catholicism

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. But they also have peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers." -- Nathan Schneider

If Nathan Schneider had a middle name it might be “Contrary” or “Confrontational.” There isn’t a sentence that he writes or speaks that’s not provocative. In that sense, he’s a child of the Sixties, though he wasn’t born until the Reagan 1980s, and more precisely in 1984, the year that George Orwell warned us against.

“Half Jewish,” as he calls himself, he grew up in the free-floating spiritual environment that characterized the end of the twentieth century in America, which meant that he was touched by secular Judaism, secular Christianity, and “a strong dose of Eastern Spirituality” -- through his mother. Not surprisingly, given his family and background and the force of his own quest for a spiritual matrix, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 18.

After he graduated from public schools in Virginia, he attended Brown and then the University of California at Santa Barbara, but gave up on academia to pursue his “education through journalism.” Schneider has been connected, as an observer and a participant, to the Occupy Movement for two years, beginning in 2011 and continuing until the present.

He tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism in God in Proof, and the story of his engagement with Occupy in Thank You, Anarchy which Rebecca Solnit calls, in her introduction, a “superb book.” It’s not the first book about Occupy but perhaps it’s the most comprehensive.

On the cusp of 30, Schneider has quickly become one of the “best and the brightest” -- to borrow a phrase from the 1960s -- in a generation of intellectuals and activists who are reinventing the American radical tradition. In the under-30 crowd, there’s probably no one with a deeper affinity for the Sixties than Schneider, and no one more eager to question the legacies of the Sixties than he — all of which makes his books and articles provocative and entertaining.

Nathan Schneider, March 19, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Jonah Raskin: An Old Left friend of mine -- Alexander Saxton -- used to say that there was a gene for utopia. Do you think that there’s a gene for anarchy?

Nathan Schneider: Maybe it's the same gene. Or maybe it's a mood or a moment. Many people who were talking the anarchist talk during Occupy are now more or less back to doing the same-old-same-old. The Occupy mood or moment was caused partly by a failure -- from the Democratic Party of Obama to radical left organizations -- to bring young folks into the fold. A few years after Obama's election - - with no limits on Wall Street or the security state -- there were no viable alternatives. So, there was a craving to do away with everything, take over a square and start from scratch.

My Catholic friends tell me that I’m a closet Catholic. I’m motivated by guilt and by the need to confess. There’s more to Catholicism than guilt and confession isn’t there?

Guilt motivates me, too, but I don't attribute that to Catholicism. Despite evidence to the contrary, thanks to 2,000 years of baggage, the Catholic Church is supposed to be a durable institution that helps people live out the gospel of faith, hope, and love. I've found a great deal of inspiration and support in communities of radical Catholics such as the Catholic Worker. But my faith is enlivened just as much by acts of witness that aren't done by Catholics -- and Occupy was chock full of them.

Do you wish you had been alive in 1968? If so what might you have done?

I might have kept to the sidelines. My mother was in France that year and my father in Southern California, yet their proximity to rebellion didn't seem to impact them appreciably. Occupy could just as well have passed me by if I hadn't happened to be in on it from the beginning. I had time on my hands.

What if you were alive in Paris in, say, 1789?

I would have liked to be a pamphleteer.

Or in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944?

I probably would have died, as members of my family did.

I remember Tom Hayden popularizing the notion that repression leads to resistance. In Chile, for example, repression lead to the death of a movement that had culminated in the election of Salvador Allende. Is there a more nuanced view of repression and resistance in Hayden’s?

In Occupy, repression inspired wider resistance only for the first few weeks. Occupiers, especially in early 2012, got addicted to repression and couldn't understand why their arrests stopped inspiring the public. Movements in far more repressive regimes tend to understand this dynamic instinctively. Activists need to be strategic about how much to invite the repression of the state and how much to circumvent it.

What you attribute to Hayden is related to the horrible notion that "things have to get worse before they get better." No Thanks!

When you say in Thank You, Anarchy that the revolution isn’t far off, what are you actually saying? What do you mean by “far off” and what do you mean by “revolution”?

I was thinking of a conversation I had with an Egyptian activist. I asked whether, she expected that Mubarak would be out of power. She said, "Not in a million years." Social transformation is hard; when it happens it can seem so easy and inevitable, until it gets really hard again. In the passage you're quoting from, I'm trying to play with the dialectic. As for what we mean by revolution, take your pick. I'm trying to talk about the way in which revolution can't be talked about.

You have published two books this year? What other books do you have in the works?

My goodness, two's not enough? They've got me plenty busy. But I am also working on an essay about dispensationalism, a popular form of apocalyptic theology.

What political writers have taught you the most about writing about politics?

Jeff Sharlet -- who also writes at the intersection of politics and religion -- has long been a mentor, though I can't come close to imitating him. He introduced me to JoAnn Wypijewski who guided me at a formative time. As the initial occupation approached, I was reading Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night -- about the 1967 anti-war march on Washington -- which I loved and hated, because all that seems to matter to Mailer is what he’s thinking. At times his thoughts are brilliant. Lastly, I've learned a lot from Joan Didion, especially how her thinking is less important than what she reveals.

How white was Occupy Wall Street?

Schneider on Occupy.

It started out pretty white, and then became less white and then white again. We saw some of the wrinkles in our supposedly post-racial society when it turned out that people didn't know how to relate to each other across racial lines.

The other day, I saw a young black man in my neighborhood wearing one of Jay Z's "Occupy All Streets" T-shirts. The movement forced Jay Z to discontinue those shirts. In Occupy Atlanta, John Lewis, a civil rights hero, was denied a chance to speak. A lot of the beauty in us and in our society that’s normally hidden under a bushel was allowed to shine in Occupy. So was a lot of ugliness.

Can you say more about Jay Z and the T-shirts?

People were very sensitive to rip-offs and co-optation. It was a tough decision because if the shirts had been around they might have led to more connections to communities of color.

Is there a revolution from the past that inspires you more than any other?

It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. Every revolution betrays. But they also have their peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers. Still, it's hard to pick one that I'd be willing to wish on anyone.

The Left used to have a monopoly on the word “contradictions.” Now it’s everywhere. What would you say were the main contradictions, in the Marxist/Maoist sense, of Occupy?

So many: autonomy and accountability, sanity and madness, order and mischief, creativity and frustration, occupation and colonization, relief and recovery, grievance and self-sufficiency, ecstasy and failure. The moment these contradictions resolved themselves, and one element in them came to dominate over the other, the dynamism went away.

Why do you think it is that every generation in America over the past 60 years or so has wanted to define itself in opposition to an earlier and an older generation? Why not emphasize continuities between generations?

Occupy had the potential to be powerfully cross-generational. From the outset, young folks were driving it, but they were very eager to hear from elders. They wanted advice, support and help. Many leading organizers had grown up in political families, and, while they viewed their parents as more moderate than themselves, they credited their upbringing for their politics.

Sounds like you have a theory on this. 

I think that the Sixties generation of radicals had to rebel so hard against their parents that, when they became the new establishment in left wing groups, they had an Oedipal fear that later generations would do the same to them. So they didn't make a priority of raising young leaders.

If you look around at the established radical organizations, especially in New York City, you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny minority of young people involved. But as those who turned out for Occupy showed, it's not for lack of young activists. Before and after Occupy, young folks eager to get involved in radical politics had to hustle to find mentors and material support. Friends of mine affiliated with the political right don’t seem to have this problem.

Are you calling for defiance against older generations?

I’m trying to bridge the gaps between generations. I tend to get along with older people.

My favorite political quotation is from Gramsci about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. What’s yours?

Mine is the entirety of the commencement speech that the poet-priest (and friend) Daniel Berrigan once gave at a Catholic prep school in Manhattan: "Know where you stand and stand there." Not that I follow it, really -- I just like it.

What’s your connection to Berrigan?

We met about five years ago. I started going to his monthly community suppers. We talked and saw that we had common interests. I see him regularly now, but his health is deteriorating rapidly. I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.

In a nutshell what does anarchy mean to you?

A society in which some people don't wield unnecessary power over others, and one in which the needs of all are put before the privileges of a few. "Anarchy" has so many connotations, and in the book I like to play off of several of them at once. It's a very ambidextrous word: chaos, freedom, organization, and structurelessness. I want them all.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : The Quest of Cannabis King Jorge Cervantes

Jorge Cervantes with some of his queenly Cannabis plants. Photos special to The Rag Blog.

An Interview with Jorge Cervantes:
The king of marijuana cultivators and
his quest for the 'Queens of Cannabis'

Marijuana will keep its underground character for a while, but it will eventually become legal. The wind is blowing in that direction. Politicians like to be on the winning side and cannabis is slowly winning.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 27, 2013

Call him the counterculture godfather of cannabis cultivation. He’s the go-to guy who can tell you -- in nearly every media, new and old -- when to plant a crop, when to harvest it and what to do in-between. His YouTube channel -- has had nearly 5 million hits since it started in 2010.

Or, better yet, just call him Mr. God. He’s the author of the best-selling bible on both indoor and outdoor marijuana cultivation first published in 1983, and with hundreds of thousands of copies in print. Unlike God, who rested on the seventh day, Jorge Cervantes hardly takes a day off. Over the last five years he’s worked -- with time out for a joint or two -- on a new book that offers nearly all the cannabis information you could want. Out January 2014, it’s entitled Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible and it’s a labor of love.

An editor, publisher, photographer, researcher, and the writer of all his books, Jorge Cervantes, 59 years old, was born George Van Patten in Ontario, Oregon, near the Idaho border. (His alias is hardy a secret. Jorge is George in Spanish. Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, is his favorite writer.)

George smoked his first joint -- rolled from “dirt weed,” he says -- in 1968, when Mexican pounds sold for $100. Not long afterwards, George morphed into Jorge. Ever since then, his journey has taken him to California and to Spain, where he lives much of the year, writing, making videos, and appearing at cannabis fairs where he’s become an iconic figure, nearly as recognizable as Don Quixote himself.

Jorge Cervantes wasn’t the first cannabis aficionado to write how-to-books for cultivators. Mel Frank and Ed Rosenthal preceded him. Their Marijuana Grower’s Guide, first published in 1980, became perhaps the most popular how-to-grow-sinsemilla book during the Reagan era War on Drugs.

Cervantes quickly caught up -- and along the way never got arrested. No one in the global cannabis world is more visible than he, and yet no icon in the cannabis world is more invisible. Like Frank and Rosenthal, he’s been a long-time High Times columnist and as devoted a HT reader as anyone around.

“He’s tenacious,” HT editor Chris Simunek says. “He’s a real horticulturist who loves all kinds of plants.” Cervantes began the interview by speaking in Spanish, then changed to English. He’s fluent in both languages.

Jonah Raskin: What’s it like there now in Barcelona?

Jorge Cervantes: It’s raining buckets of water and as they say, rain makes the flowers grow.

In Spain is there a shift from hash to cannabis?

It took a long time before cannabis became popular in Spain. We‘re across the Straits of Gibraltar and Moroccan hash is relatively inexpensive and abundant here. Domestically grown cannabis has come down in price; it’s nearly the same as hash. Now, in Spain, people are cultivating cannabis for less money than it takes to buy hash. There’s also so much cannabis here that people are making hash and concentrated oils.

In my part of California, growers are "sitting on” their medicine. What’s the supply/demand story in your world?

Unemployment in Spain is 27%. The number is double for those under 30. Growing cannabis is a way to survive. Few Spanish growers have the luxury of holding out for a higher price. Moreover, the 27 countries in the European Union provide a large market. The price of cannabis will remain less volatile than in the U.S where growers produce much more than can be consumed and where oversupply drives down the price. In Europe, the cost of production and transportation have remained surprisingly stable.

In what ways have the Spanish learned from U.S. farmers?

Spanish growers have taken information from the best cannabis cultivators in the world. They’re adapting it to their conditions. Then, too, over the last 20 years, growers from all over Europe, especially the Netherlands, have moved to Spain. American and Canadian cannabis companies have a major presence through huge trade fairs (www.cannabis.com, www.growmed.es, www.expocannabis.com, and www.expogrow.net). They’re the biggest in the world.

Some guerrilla growers in the States go into forests and damage the environment. What’s the Spanish awareness about the environment?

Until Spain entered the EU, their track record on environmental responsibility was low. Today attitude has improved. Guerilla growers tend to be messy, but most of them remove trash because it attracts unwanted attention.

Are growers growing organically? Do companies make soil mixes and "teas"?

Organic gardening is around but it is not as developed as it is in the U.S or Germany. There’s a basic knowledge about composting and growers use compost teas. But, I have not seen activated aerated compost teas (AACT) in use. The U.S. is more innovative in this respect, but the technology is moving to Spain. I recently gave two lectures at GrowMed in Valencia where I talked about AACT. Growers want to try it.

Has greed crept into the cannabis culture in Spain? Have Spaniards becoming wealthy, as has happened in California?

When money is involved there’s bound to be greed. But greed and getting rich don’t drive the bulk of Spanish growers. Most start off wanting to grow their own cannabis so that they don’t have to buy it. Some overproduce. When they do, they give to friends or make hash for personal consumption.

What about cannabis clubs?

They started to surface a few years ago. Their location is not advertised and they’re behind secure doors. Members are charged a modest annual fee. When they belong they can purchase small amounts of cannabis. But the legality of the clubs is up in the air and so the situation is unstable.

Spain has come a long way since the days of the dictator, Franco, hasn’t it?

The funny thing about Spain under Franco is that hashish was a common commodity. Many soldiers and fishermen, too, smoked it. Smuggling hash into the country was commonplace. I smoked it in Spain when Franco was still alive. In fact, the military controlled many of the hash smuggling operations.

In the 1980s, I remember people smoking joints in Spanish resort towns. During the 1990s, when there were squats around Barcelona, everybody smoked Moroccan hash. Today, the biggest cannabis fairs in the world are in Spain. Spannabis in Barcelona is by far the biggest of all. Spain is a natural for cannabis: sunny, relatively inexpensive and tolerated when cultivation is on a small scale.

So, the police are not a heavy presence?

In Spain there is a big respect for personal space and individual sovereignty. The police don’t have the same kinds of power in Spain they do in the States. They’re not real heavy or overbearing. They would not, for example, stop someone and search a backpack.

Why do you think the DEA is so against cannabis?

I think they want to keep their jobs and get paid. They also really believe it’s bad for you.

Are doctors recommending or prescribing cannabis?

Spain legalized medical cannabis in 2006. The province of Cataluña -- where I live -- also legalized distribution through pharmacies, but the current financial crisis has prevented the creation of a distribution network.

At the recent GrowMed Fair in Valencia, several doctors talked about the medical benefits. They prescribe it for many ailments. Several medical studies have been completed in Spain, including Dr. Guzman’s 2000 “Pot Shrinks Tumors,” and there’s an organization, Fundación CANNA, that studies the medical properties of cannabis.

Are there regions where there’s more of it grown? Are there urban gardens?

More cannabis is grown in the Basque country, Cataluña, and on the Mediterranean Coast than in the interior. But other regions are growing their fair share of cannabis, so much so that cannabis theft is a problem. Outdoor cultivation is bigger than indoor cultivation. Greenhouse cultivation is also popular. In Galicia, where it rains more in than in Seattle, growing outdoors is difficult. Growing in a greenhouse works well there and hydroponic stores have opened.

The magazine, Soft Secrets, published in seven languages, is the biggest in Europe and is widely read by indoor and outdoor growers. All editions, except for the Spanish one, show a country flag on top of the front page. Spain is a group of distinct zones. We speak five different languages: Gallego, Basco, Catalan, Asturiano, and Castellano (Spanish) and every region differs geographically, climatically, and culturally.

If you walk around Barcelona in the summertime, cannabis growing on balconies is a relatively common sight. Indoor urban gardens are also commonplace. They’re generally small because of the limited space and electrical service.

In California, there are neighborhoods where you smell cannabis at harvest because there’s so much of it. Is it similar in Spain?

Yes! It’s a problem! But a bigger one is rogue male pollen in the air. Many people grow from seed here and male plants are common. I have attended neighborhood meetings where residents bring photos of male plants and ask neighbors to pull them. Fragrance is a problem only with large stands of cannabis outdoors, which is not common.

What is the legal status of cannabis in Spain?

It’s legal to grow for personal consumption and it isn’t a crime to consume cannabis. But the legal situation is still unclear because the law is interpreted differently and enforced inconsistently. Of course, it’s illegal to sell cannabis, but the clubs are all doing it. In the Basque and Cataluña, laws appear to be more lax.

Are there “stoners" In Spain?

In Spain there never was a “stoner hippie” stereotype. But in Spanish there’s lots of cannabis slang. A stoner might be a “fumeta” in Spain or a “voludo” in Latin America, but those words are more common in South America. Spanish is a very rich language that lends itself to innovation. However, unlike English, cannabis terms evolve around describing an object or the effect of a substance.

Spain has a long history of hashish smoking so there’s a rich vocabulary to describe hash. “China’ is the word for a small piece of hash, “pedazo” the word for a larger piece of hash, and “taco” for a still larger piece of hash.

I like the notion that we ought not to separate and distinguish between the "recreational" user and the "medicinal" user. What thought do you have about that?

I believe that recreational users can be classified as medicinal users. Consuming cannabis lowers pressure in the body. It’s relaxing and therapeutic.

How is the Spanish cannabis world different than Holland?

For one thing, we have five big cannabis fairs and the Dutch have just one, the Cannabis Cup. We have sunshine and they have rain. The Dutch coffee shop industry has ground to a halt. We have more than 200 cannabis clubs and the number is growing rapidly.

In Holland, as in Spain, a right-wing government is in power. Here, unemployment is high and the government is scrambling to solve social problems. Here, people are thrown out of their homes if they can’t pay the mortgage, and that’s a bigger issue than cannabis.

Where I live in California there are at least three generations of cannabis smokers -- people from 15 to 75. What is the generational picture in Spain?

I have a couple of friends that grew up growing cannabis. They have baby photos in which they’re watering cannabis. Industrial hemp. Then in the late 1970s after Franco, the country had many rural areas that were abandoned. Some of these areas were planted with cannabis.

It depends upon age, one’s profession and geographic location here. Many young people consume cannabis, but it also depends on geography, profession, and actual age. It is common in the society as is reflected in the program Malviviendo. The YouTube series is hilarious! It reflects life today in Seville, Andalucía.

Is smoking the preferred method, or edibles, or tinctures?

Virtually everybody mixes tobacco with cannabis. The habit comes from mixing hashish with tobacco. Edibles and tinctures are few and far between, but concentrates are becoming popular

I think of California’s Proposition 215, the Compassionate Care Act of 1996 as a real game-changer. Do you?

Prop. 215 was huge, a breakthrough, and the momentum it unleashed is still building. It hasn’t come to a head yet. Before 215, people were afraid. They’re less afraid now, though they’re still anxious about paying fines, going to jail, losing their rights, having their name in the paper and being shamed. Those are all big penalties for someone who hasn’t stolen anything or hurt anyone. For the most part, it’s victimless crime. Throughout history, fear is the biggest controller. It works.

What do you hope will happen vis-a-vis cannabis in the next year or two?

I hope that the UN repeals the Single Convention Treaty of 1961 when they meet in Vienna, Austria, in March of 2014. The treaty, signed by member nations, classifies cannabis as having absolutely no medicinal use. The treaty lumps cannabis into the same group as heroin. Next, I think we’ll see more and more states in the U.S. adopt both medical and recreational cannabis laws.

A tipping point will be reached with about 30-35 states -- a situation similar to the repeal of prohibition. Scientific research on cannabis will also become popular. Wall Street will invest in the medicinal cannabis industry. Seed sales and information dissemination will continue on the Internet worldwide. Cannabis gardeners around the world will continue to plant more cannabis. It is virtually impossible to stop the life cycle of this ancient plant.

Marijuana will keep its underground character for a while, but it will eventually become legal. The wind is blowing in that direction. Politicians like to be on the winning side and cannabis is slowly winning.

You’ve had a long, close connection to HT haven’t you?

High Times is the first and longest-lived cannabis/drug magazine in the world. It’s had an amazing run; it has lived through drug czars, crackdowns, wild times and very serious times. High Times goes on and on! The High Times website is packed with the latest, vital information. The future is with the Internet. Of course, everyone at High Times knows this.

What’s in your future?

I´m finishing a new cultivation book. It’s been five years in the making and it’s twice as big as Marijuana Horticulture – with both text and images. It’ll be released January 1, 2014. My sites -- www.youtube.com/user/jorgecervantesmj and www.marijuanagrowing.com -- are growing very quickly and I continue to write for more than 20 magazines in 10 languages.

Hadn't you said everything that you wanted to say already?

No, not even close. There was so much left out of the “Bible” and so much has changed over the last seven years. For example, we now have much more information about ultraviolet light and its effect on plants. LED (Light Emitting Diode) lamps, HEP (High-Efficiency Plasma) lamps and Induction lamps were not covered in the bible.

What's new and different to say? 

The problem with the new book is there’s not enough paper to include all the new information. I had to cut many subjects down and refer readers to our website forum for more information. Cannabis is a never-ending subject and always changing. It’s universal and certainly one of the most fascinating plants on the face of the earth. Go to Google earth and you can see marijuana everywhere. It’s here to stay.

[Jonah Raskin, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Jonah Raskin : Reviewing 'Fruitvale' and Remembering the Panthers

Reviewing Coogler's Fruitvale Station
and reflecting on the Black Panthers

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 12, 2013

The only Oakland, California, African-Americans I’ve ever known belonged to the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. In my mind, Oakland and the Panthers are as one. I can’t think of the city -- its streets, churches, and parks -- without thinking of Panthers. And I can’t think of the Panthers without also thinking of the city.

Of course, I know that Oakland’s history includes much more than the Panther past. I know, too, that Oakland has continued to be a place of rebellion and defiance without the Panthers. The Occupy Movement rocked the city and the city rocked the movement. Violence has long stalked the city and its residents.

Not surprisingly, no Panthers appear in Ryan Coogler’s 85-minute feature film, Fruitvale Station, which recounts the life and the death of Oscar Grant III, the 22-year-old Oakland African-American who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on January 1, 2009.

The slaying of Grant would not have surprised Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who are, of course, dead and who were well aware of police brutality in their own time, and saw the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods. I doubt that Bobby Seale and Dave Hilliard, two living Panthers, would be surprised, either, by the murder of Oscar Grant.

The avant-garde American writer, Gertrude Stein, noted apropos Oakland, “There is no there there.” Unfortunately, there is a there there, and, now as in the past, it’s the there of violence and death.

The release of Coogler’s movie, Fruitvale Station, coincided with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges on July 13, 2013. The movie was released July 28, 2013.

News about the trial and the verdict gave the film a boost at the box office and reminded audiences that white officers of the law have been murdering young black men for years and have gotten away with murder, too.

Oscar Grant III might have joined the Panthers had he been alive in 1967 or 1968. Newton and Seale might have tried to recruit him. After all, he’d been to prison -- he served time at San Quentin -- and he had street smarts. The film depicts him as a well-meaning young man who tries and fails to get his life together.

He’s a fuck-up but he’s not evil. Unable to keep a job, or to tell the truth consistently to friends and family members, he’d like to do the right thing and doesn’t. In the film, he deals marijuana, lies to the mother of his daughter, drives around Oakland in an old car, and hangs out with the boys in the ‘hood.

He doesn’t set his sights much further than tomorrow and he doesn’t look much further than the street around the next corner. His worldview is limited; he doesn’t seem to know his own personal history, the history of Oakland, its African-Americans, or the Black Panther Party.

His family members and his friends care about him and try to help him. They rally around him. They’d like to save his life and bring him back to life after he’s shot and killed.

The film offers a steady stream of images in which Grant and his friends hug one another, high-five one another, and talk the rhetoric of togetherness. They don’t have much tangible togetherness beneath the surface. They don’t go to church together, don’t have a clubhouse, don’t have anything at all that resembles the Black Panther Party, and don’t know a single older person who embodies the legacy of the Panthers.

Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton at Black Panther headquarters in Oakland. Image from Babylon Falling.

I didn’t take my eyes off the screen in the theater where I saw the film, but I found Oscar and his friends sad and even pathetic. I don’t doubt that the film accurately reflects Grant’s life. Ryan Coogler had the cooperation of the lawyer for Grant’s family. What I don’t know for sure is how typical or representative a figure Grant was and is.

I suspect that he is rather typical and that a great many young African-American men in Oakland share his sweetness and his anger, his desire to be something better than he is, and who, like him, lack the ability to get out of the traps in which they find themselves.

There’s something fatalist about the film. From the start, you know that he’ll be shot and killed on January 1, 2009; the film begins with documentary footage of his murder. You watch and you know that nothing will prevent that act from taking place.

The movie moves depressingly through Grant’s last day, and, because it’s depressing I can’t really recommend it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say stay away. If you want to see a movie made by a living African-American filmmaker about a dead African-American then by all means see the picture.

The director hasn’t aimed to make a big statement or to offer a plea for change. That speaks well for him. He mostly lets the story tell itself. But he hasn’t lifted his sights as a filmmaker beyond Grant’s individual life and beyond the lives of those in his immediate circle. That struck me as a lapse in filmmaking. It left me with a sense of disappointment.

I didn’t want slogans or sloganeering. I didn’t want Panthers to suddenly appear in the movie and to analyze and explain the situation. That would have been unreal. But I would have liked some acknowledgement that once upon a time in the West the Panthers made a difference.

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled. It does seem to reflect the feelings of young people in Oakland today: their sense of injustice and powerlessness, too. The world is fucked up and there isn’t much to be done about it now, except go to movies like Fruitvale Station and go about one’s life.

The same week that I saw the film, I also saw at exhibit at Mills College in Oakland that focused on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the space was allocated to the posters of Emory Douglas, which had many of the slogans from the heyday of the Panthers such as, “All power to the people” and “We shall survive without a doubt.”

I thought that I could hear those slogans echoing in the distance, and I knew that I would never hear them again in my own lifetime.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emiritus at Sonoma State University. Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Blake Slonecker's 'New Dawn' Tells the LNS Story

A New Dawn for the New Left:
Blake Slonecker's valuable history of LNS

“By distributing a common news packet to underground outlets, LNS enabled local rags to cover national and international news to an unprecedented degree, curbing their isolation and giving shape to a vibrant Movement print culture.” -- Blake Slonecker

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2013

[A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties by Blake Slonecker (2012: Palgrave Macmillan); Hardback; 267 pages; $85.]

It’s hard to imagine anyone paying $85 -- the list price -- for Blake Slonecker’s comprehensive book about Liberation News Service (LNS), its eclectic members, and its curious reincarnations and permutations. Published in December 2012, A New Dawn for the New Left offers a close look at LNS, the radical organization that lasted more than a decade and that provided a real alternative to the manufactured news and information disseminated by the Associated Press (AP).

Slonecker, a professor of history at Waldorf College in Iowa, captures the spirit of the freewheeling Sixties, though he’s also a compassionate critic who recognizes the excesses and the flaws of the radical movement and the counterculture that accompanied it in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s not that the book isn’t worth reading. On the contrary, it offers a valuable portrait of LNS as a political collective that aimed to put into practice the rousing slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” The book ought to be available at a reasonable price and not priced out of the hands of readers.

Of course, Slonecker isn’t to blame for the $85 sticker shock. His publisher is.

The book begins where it ought to begin -- with the notorious heist of the LNS printing press by its two cofounders, the legendary Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo. It follows Bloom and Mungo to Montague Farm in Massachusetts, traces the evolution of the rural commune, its deep rural roots, and turn to anti-nuclear protest. At the same time, it looks closely at the LNS collective that regrouped in New York without its troublesome founders.

Slonecker believes that the New York office of LNS was located in Harlem. In the first sentence, he writes, “On the morning of August 11, 1968, something brazen was happening in the Harlem basement of Liberation News Service.” Throughout the book he refers to LNS’s Harlem office.

As a longtime resident of the neighborhood and as a contributor to LNS from 1967 to 1970 who often attended meetings, I can say with a great deal of certainty that LNS was not in Harlem. It was in a basement on Claremont Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from 125th Street and Broadway. Claremont Avenue was a stone’s throw from Columbia University; LNS’s geographical proximity to academia was more significant than its proximity to Harlem.

LNS staff members such as Allen Young, who played a pivotal role in the early days, graduated from Columbia and from the Washington Post and brought to the New Left’s pioneering news organization a wealth of experience in both academia and professional journalism.

Others at LNS came from similar backgrounds: Andy Marx dropped out of Harvard to join LNS; Mark Feinstein came from The New York Times. Not everyone, of course, was an Ivy Leaguer. Katherine Mulvihill, whose picture appears on the cover of the book, was a high school dropout.

Slonecker does a good job of describing the internal politics, including the sexism, at LNS and the role of the collective within the larger political world of the New Left. He looks at LNS and at the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and at gay and women’s liberation, as well as Third World and working class struggles. He also provides vivid portraits of Mungo and Bloom, Marty Jezer, Harvey Wasserman, Sam Lovejoy, and Allen Young. The Rag Blog’s Thorne Dreyer makes a few brief appearances, and so does Vicky Smith.

What Slonecker doesn’t do -- and that he might have done -- is to describe the basement office in more detail. After all, the workplace environment contributed to the state of mind and to the culture of LNS itself. The graffiti in the bathroom was a veritable museum of New Left and counterculture slogans. My favorite was “Stones Cut Beatles.” I also remember the LNS ritual of watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News during the War in Vietnam.

Slonecker might have provided more details about the actual production of the mimeographed LNS packets that went out to underground newspapers all around the country -- to The Seed in Chicago, The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, The Barb in Berkeley, and many others. The cover photo by Anne Dockery, shows Katherine Mulvihill at a machine; a description of the work itself would help.

If LNS went out to underground papers, the papers also flooded the office. I’d spend many an afternoon sitting around with the roar of the Gestetner machines in the background reading The Seed, The Barb, The Rag, and finding out what was happening on a grassroots level in Chicago, Berkeley, and Austin.

LNS was a kind of living library, a real movement hub and, not surprisingly, movement honchos often visited. The New Left, including SDS and the Yippies, took it seriously. When I wrote a review critical of Jerry Rubin’s Do It!, Rubin called LNS and complained bitterly. How could LNS not rave about him and his book? he wanted to know, and was told that LNS wasn’t in the business of writing advertising copy and blurbs for New Left and countercultural writers. Hadn’t he heard about freedom of the press?

A New Dawn for the New Left offers ample remarks from the likes of John Wilcock, the cofounder of the Underground Press Syndicate, and Teddy Franklin, part of LNS’s early core group. “We’re paying LNS $180 a year,” Wilcock complained, “to send us whatever they damn well feel like sending us.”

Some of my own pieces for LNS were widely picked up by papers -- including a critique of hippie culture entitled “The Children of Imperialism” and a review of a concert by the Rolling Stones I did with Franklin. But other pieces -- about books such as B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre -- hardly proved exciting to editors at the feisty rags around the country.

Still, it was to LNS’s credit that odd, quirky pieces were published -- sometimes by leading movement figures like Abbie Hoffman who wrote with real passion about Marshall Bloom’s suicide.

LNS lasted until about 1980, but by then its glory days had long since passed. Allen Young had moved to rural Massachusetts to live on a commune with other gay men. I’d relocated to California. Thorne Dreyer and Vicky Smith had gone to Houston to start Space City!

By the summer of 1972, veteran LNS members such as Teddy Franklin were lamenting the decline and fall of the underground press and bemoaning the sinking numbers of subscribers to LNS. “I’m hard put to name 10 underground newspapers I have any respect for at this point,” Franklin wrote in 1972. “Let’s be honest, we’re losing our readers out from under our feet.”

In part, what happened was a shift from underground newspapers to what were called “sea-level” weeklies or monthlies, such as University Review and The Chicago Reader.

In the 1970s, papers such as the Village Voice grew fatter and fatter with ad revenue and took over the role that had been played by the underground papers. Moreover, reporters for LNS, such as Mike Schuster, moved to much more reputable news organizations such as PBS. The New Left and its countercultural institutions had provided a training ground for a whole generation of editors, publishers, and journalists who went on to work for mainstream magazines and newspapers.

In a sense, LNS and the underground papers died not because they failed but because they succeeded. As one New Leftist put it, “Nothing sucks like success.”

Slonecker’s book makes a substantial contribution to the literature about the Sixties. It joins the company of recent, outstanding books about the underground press such as John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, Sean Stewart’s wonderfully illustrated On the Ground, and Ken Wachsberger’s multi-volume Voices from Underground. Along with them and young writers like Thai Jones, Slonecker belongs to the generation of historians reinterpreting radicalism in America.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Jonah Raskin : Robert Redford 'Keeps Company' with the Sixties Underground

'The Company You Keep':
Robert Redford's overambitious
take on the Sixties underground

He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2013

The Company You Keep, released in December 2012, was directed by Robert Redford with a screenplay by Lem Dobbs based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon.

Robert Redford’s new movie, The Company You Keep, boasts a huge cast of characters that includes cops, reporters, FBI agents, and former members of an organization of 1960s/1970s radicals that resembles the Weather Underground. A few of the characters are on the run and the target of a manhunt, while others have crept back into the halls of respectability and want nothing to do with their former comrades.

Redford himself certainly remembers that era of seemingly unending protest, resistance, and an invincible underground as well as anyone else in the movie industry today, except perhaps the director and screenwriter Haskell Wexler (best known for Medium Cool, 1969).

Indeed, Redford was near the height of his movie career when fugitives in the Weather Underground set off bombs in federal, state, and local government buildings to protest the war machine, the criminal justice system, along with imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and more.

Redford is, of course, also familiar with Sam Green’s 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, which tends to romanticize the fugitives and their clandestine organization. The picture was nominated for an Oscar after it made the rounds at Redford’s Sundance Film Festival.

Neil Gordon, the author of the novel that inspired the movie, had the cooperation of former members of the Weather Underground. Like Sam Green, Gordon also romanticizes the characters he portrays. He once told me he thought of the Weather Underground as the American equivalent of the African National Conference (ANC), the organization that helped end apartheid in South Africa. Like others before him, Gordon fell prey to myth.

There’s something about fugitives that makes them endearing, even when they’re desperados such as Duke Mantee, the gangster on the run played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1936 classic, The Petrified Forest. But perhaps that endearing quality has vanished in the era of terrorists and terrorism when whole neighborhoods are locked down.

I know the pitfalls of writing about fugitives, though I often found the actualities of fugitive life mundane. I remember an occasion more than 30 years ago when the FBI launched a massive hunt for the Weathermen and Weatherwomen. Curiously, they didn’t panic. Instead, they calmly and deliberately destroyed everything in their possession that might have led to their capture.

And they spent days wearing rubber gloves, wiping every surface perfectly clean in an apartment to eradicate fingerprints. That took dedication, but it certainly wasn’t glamorous. From the actualities of fugitives cleaning an apartment with Ajax you can’t really make a dramatic picture.

Mimi, the most fetching of the fugitives in Redford’s picture -- played to perfection by Julie Christie -- makes a speech in which she says that everything she once protested against is as insidious as ever before, and perhaps even more so. She’s eloquent and so is the character that Redford plays.

He’s an ex-radical who has reinvented himself as a liberal lawyer. His past catches up with him and so he goes in search of his own past to clear his name. The hunter is hunted. Mimi is the only person who can help him. By the end of the movie, he finds her and convinces her to come out of hiding and rescue him.

The character Redford plays is also a widower with a young daughter who doesn’t know who he really is or what he’s done in the past. Between the two of them, there’s a huge generation gap. Redford also has a beautiful older daughter -- his love child -- who was born underground, then adopted and raised by a police officer and his wife. (That part of the story doesn’t make any sense. When the picture tries to tie-up loose ends it only makes more of a mess.)

Both daughters are in the dark. Like the younger daughter, the older daughter doesn’t know that her real father was a Sixties radical who went on the lam. Nor does she know that she has a half-sister. The two sisters don’t ever meet. Family secrets flourish until the FBI flushes them out. Moreover, the older sister never meets her biological mother, Mimi, who has survived underground as a drug smuggler.

All the pieces in this big jigsaw puzzle of a picture don’t fit together.

Redford was overly ambitious. He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off. His ending is anti-climactic, though it also avoids a great many Hollywood clichés. There are no bombings and nothing is blown up -- a real virtue in a picture about bombers and bombers.

There’s a long chase by car, train and on foot. Indeed, Redford’s character is on the run most of the time, though he’s long past his prime running days. Even his designer running shoes don’t help him. An old, ex-radical trying to run from the FBI presents a rather comic figure. Old fugitives can’t run. That much is clear, though it’s also clear that the acting is stellar. Redford elicited stunning performances from his team.

Along with Julie Christie, there’s Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliott, and Chris Cooper. It’s almost as if Redford called all of his old Hollywood pals and asked them to join with him and to make a picture that would pay homage to the Sixties and bury ideological hatchets.

It’s a kinder, gentler America that Redford would like -- along with integrity in journalism and fresh organic food from local farms. But nothing bigger or bolder. Even Mimi, the most revolutionary of the characters, hasn’t any hope for revolution.

The personal is more important than the political for Redford and for the character he plays. In The Company You Keep, family and friends carry more weight than ideology, and in that sense the picture does seem to accurately reflect the lives of former Weather Underground members who have almost all married, embraced monogamy, become moms and dads, raised families, become lawyers and doctors, joined the middle class and remained loyal to one another.

But has no one really become a moral monster? Or poor? Or serve a life sentence in prison? The picture gives the impression that all the old New Leftists became solidly middle class with cars, toys, and gadgets. Perhaps so, though Dave Gilbert and Judy Clark, two Weather Undergrounders, are both behind bars.

Watching the picture, I found myself caring about the characters. I kept waiting to see whether Redford would be captured by the cops -- or if he’d remain at large. Still, there’s something musty and outdated about the picture that prevented me from getting emotionally caught up in the dramatic conflicts. The news got in the way.

Think about the recent bombings in Boston and the manhunt for the two brothers suspected of planting the explosives, and then think of Redford’s movie, and it’s clear that we’re in another era with a whole other set of rules. The Company You Keep is mostly an exercise in nostalgia.

The bombers of today bear little if any resemblance to the Weather Underground bombers of yesterday who were white, middle class, college educated, well-read in Marx and Mao, atheists or agnostics, and not motivated by religion or ethnicity.

I never once met a single member of the Weather Underground who knew a thing about Chechnya or about Islam. Geopolitics have changed, and the power of law enforcement has grown exponentially. If today’s tactics had been applied to the Weather Undergrounders they wouldn’t have remained at-large for a decade.

It’s too bad Redford didn’t make his picture in, say, 1980. It would have seemed a lot more relevant then. Now, it’s a curiosity, though it’s also a reminder that older actors such as Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon can still give strong performances. The young Shia LaBeouf does a credible job as an idealistic, fledgling reporter carrying on the tradition of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

You remember those guys don’t you? Redford starred in the picture, All the President’s Men, as Bob Woodward of The Washington Post and Watergate fame who helped bring down President Nixon. And surely you remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), another movie about outlaws and fugitives that stars Redford and Paul Newman and that inspired the Weather Undergrounders. All the guys wanted to be Butch or Sundance and to go out in a blaze of glory.

What hasn’t changed, of course, after all all these years, is the chemistry of the company you keep. The title of Redford’s movie about fugitives on the run seems to suggest that one ought to be careful about choosing one’s associates. Guilt by association goes a long way.

In the era of Homeland Security, the company one keeps can be as harmful to one’s health, as it was during the Salem witch trials more than 300 years ago or during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. So, if you’re going to conspire, make sure you conspire with the ones you really love.

[Jonah Raskin, a long-time journalist and activist and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, was involved with the Yippies and, tangentially, with the Weather Underground. He is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Documentary Filmmakers Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar Dish on 'Junk Food News'

Documentary filmmakers Christopher Oscar, left, and Doug Hecker.

Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar:
Documentary filmmakers on media,
civil liberties, and 'Project Censored'

“The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.” -- Doug Hecker, Co-Producer, Co-Director, Co-Writer, 'Project Censored: The Movie'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

Filmmaker, Doug Hecker, 47, was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His pal and cinematic collaborator, Christopher Oscar, 42, hails from Montclair, New Jersey.

Six years ago, they met in the town of Sonoma, California, and ever since then -- with time off for good behavior -- they’ve worked on a documentary about the media watchdog group, Project Censored, founded by Carl Jensen in the wake of Watergate.

Hecker and Oscar are both college grads and they’re both the kinds of grads that teachers will practically die for -- which means they’re committed to critical thinking, life-long learning, and social responsibility.

When they graduated from college -- Oscar from C.W. Post University on Long Island, New York, Hecker from Sonoma State University in California -- their studies just began.

Their new 60-minute documentary, Project Censored: The Movie, Ending the Reign of Junk Food News, informs, entertains, and riles up citizen activists, too, about the loss of civil liberties in the United States today and the rise of what they regard as a police state.

The talking heads who speak in the movie -- historian Howard Zinn, all-around gadfly Noam Chomsky, poet Amiri Baraka, UCLA Professor Nora Barrows-Freeman, and more -- make far more sense than the talking heads on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.

“Human consciousness,” Zinn says “is hard to fathom, but every so often it breaks to the surface.” Hecker and Oscar know that the media puts humanity to sleep all day and all night, and that the media can also wake humanity from its slumber.

Mickey Huff, the current director of Project Censored, points out that there’s more information available these days thanks to the Internet, but that, paradoxically, there’s also greater misinformation. Movie producer, director, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler suggests that in our peculiar form of democracy, Americans may not want to known the truth. Hecker and Oscar hope that’s not true.

Their rousing picture about Project Censored and the state of the media in America today is also a wake-up call to viewers sickened by the steady diet of junk food news dished out by corporate media.

The interview with both Hecker and Oscar took place two days after I saw their movie.

 

Jonah Raskin: Can you say something about an exact moment when the proverbial light went on in your head?

Doug Hecker: The light went on for me when I was enrolled in communications classes. As a student in Project Censored, we constantly discussed the spin that corporate media uses when reporting the news.

Christopher Oscar: For me, it was when I was an investigative journalism major and writing a story about the fact that crime was down 30%, but crime coverage increased 70%.

In your own life have you noticed a strong urge to censor?

Hecker: I choose my words wisely, but I tend not to censor myself. I could lose some business as a realtor because of the movie. If a client chooses not to work with me because I believe the press should be free and should present news that lead to social change, I’d rather not work with that person.

As a father with children, what kinds of limits if any do you set for them about TV and the Internet?

Hecker: I prefer to discuss topics on TV and the Internet and to help create awareness and media literacy in my children. However, I do limit violence, foul language, and sexual content.

Oscar: It’s very rare that we find a program that is suitable for my children to watch. My kids don't use the Internet. They are eight and five years old. If and when we find a child-friendly program, we limit viewing.

Your documentary shows that when there's war there's censorship and when there's censorship there's war.

Hecker: Censorship leads to war. War doesn’t benefit anyone except those in power. It’s corrupt and it’s brought about by power, money, greed, religion, politics, ignorance, and stupidity.

Doug, you grew up in a small California town. Did you buy into the official story disseminated by the media?

Hecker: I did for years. I began reading newspapers in high school and believed what I read. However, once I got to college I realized that a majority of U.S. news is designed to control the population, shape public policy, and instill fear into citizens.

Oscar, what about you?

Oscar: What I witnessed was that my parents watched tons of fear. I could never understand why they were so hypnotized by it. As I grew older, I found that I enjoyed investigative news shows like 60 Minutes. It wasn't until college that I became a critic of corporate media.

Looking at the global picture, would you say censorship is better or worse in the U.S. than in say, China, Russia, or Iran?

Hecker: I would say it's not better or worse, but different. U.S. censorship is subtle -- not the dictatorship-style where the consequences are prison or death. However, the attack on journalists and the First Amendment is increasing in the U.S. Under the guise of protecting us against terrorism, we’re losing civil liberties.

Oscar: The majority of people don't even know censorship is there. Next thing you know, America will be back in another illegal war.

In the U.S. if you want to play the corporate media game I guess you have to play by the corporate rules -- or get out.

Hecker: The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.

Oscar: Reporters should investigate the owners of their own stations.

Where you live in California, what local stories and truths do you think are hidden from citizens now?

Hecker: GMOs, pesticides, farm animal abuse, the ever-increasing rise of health care, petroleum products, pollution, lobbyists, government corruption, etc.

Fear is a big factor in our society isn't it? Reporters are afraid and citizens are afraid. How do we overcome fear?

Hecker: Fear-based news leads to higher ratings, which leads to increased ad revenue. To change fear-based news you need to start at the grassroots with programs like Project Censored and other alternative media sources that have validated news and fact-based reporting.

Oscar: People glued to the nightly news are bombarded and besieged with violence and destruction. The message you get is that people are out to get you so you better watch out. We need a media system that shines light on the good that people are doing in the world to create a more harmonious planet.

There still are people who are courageous, such as the Australian, Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who released on the Internet confidential U.S. documents. Did he go too far?

Hecker: We need more people like Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning who realize that sacrifice may be necessary to expose human rights abuses, corruption, and environmental damage.

Oscar: Hopefully, governments will think twice about their actions now that there is a Julian Assange out there. It's surprising, though, how little attention it's really gotten. You would think more people would be upset about the failure of the news to dig for truth.

What gives you hope for a world in which your kids are grown up?

Hecker: Without hope no future is possible. We made this film to help future generations and to point out that social change is needed and that the people of the world need to put an end to complacency and become active and involved citizens both politically and socially in order to end the human and environmental atrocities that plague our world.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is  a long-time journalist and author. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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