LA Times Campaign to Bash Public Schools and the Teachers who Love Them

I noticed a few weeks ago on the LA Times website a series of articles featuring yet again the failures of LA city schools, its union, and most recently a screed about teachers who get paid not to work because they can't be fired. A cursory look at some of the headlines should leave little doubt where the LA Times positions itself: "LA schools chief critical of unfit teachers milking the system," "School officials call for legislation easing firing of teachers," "Firing tenured teachers a tough and costly task," "LA Unified pays teachers not to teach," ad nauseum. This is vintage Reagan bashing Welfare Queens.



As a former public school teacher, who, a la James Baldwin's desire to leave the church to spread the gospel and Tony Benn's to leave Parliament to practice politics: I left teaching to be empowered to teach, since I had less power due to institutions and conspiracies like this one waged by the venerable LA Times.



So I am prejudiced. I am not only a former teacher but also come from a family of school teachers.



What is essentially behind this atrocious conspiracy to malign public schools is the same as that conspiracy to malign public services for want of neo-liberal privatizations, busting the rights of works as a necessary pre-condition for profits to be earned by those stellar pillars of the society that Ayn Rand alleged in Atlas Shrugged that we cannot do without.



So we must not have any faith at all in public schools or the men and women who serve them, who love them. I have not met any outsider who when finding out I was a teacher tell me that teachers deserve more money. Maybe, but I think not. My politics inform me that expanding public services is paramount to simply raising wages. Teachers go into the profession knowing they will not be on par with your average stockbroker - but our values are obviously different. Consider that when you see who the LA Times attacks [teachers] and who they do not [stock brokers] and deduce what values they want to govern civil society. Molesting a child is an horrific crime, but so is rationing homes so millions would live on the streets, health care so millions die, jobs so 5 million+ be unable to support themselves.



What we must see, as through the prism of the LA Times, is that schools are corrupt, dysfunctional, and its [union] workers suffer hubris, and they are not serving our children.



Our children? Neither the Left or Right, Republican or Democrat or Socialist, vegetarian or carnivore have a monopoly on concern for children and society. The Times of course has a checkered history in spreading lies and using children. Way back in the early 1930's when Upton Sinclair was running for governor of the state with the EPIC Movement Campaign [End Poverty in California], his victory was in reach. Sinclair was a socialist. The Chandler Family-controlled LA Times launched a smear campaign against Sinclair alleging he was going to take children from parents. This sort of psy-ops worked effectively, and Sinclair's support plummeted, and he lost the election.



I see absolutely no moral evolution between that Depression-era campaign and the present one in its desire to make people vote against its own best interest. In this respect, the LA Times' knuckles scrape the ground as it lumbers along pre-historically. These campaigns become a self-fulfilling prophecy since the more the LA Times maligns schools and the more they are short-changed basic resources, the worse off they will be, and the greater the cries to dismantle them altogether for some Voucher/Free Market option, where you will see the voucher lowered in value and the poor relegated to truly inferior, unfunded schools and forgotten on the pages of the venerable LA Times.



People who do not know, who follow such elitist paradigms, like to tell me that socialism doesn't work. Really? Besides reminding them where many old people might be without social security or where our neighborhoods would be without community fire departments, I mention the infinite successes of public education. It is offered to all, free of charge, and along with free- and reduced lunch programs, it has socialized many a young people to understand civil society.



The answer cannot be followed fro the LA Times' leads but in the opposite direction. Public schools should be a greater funded priority, free education should not be limited to K-12 but be extended to colleges and technical programs. Society has an interest in having literate, educated, trained people. Conversely, the political elites are frightened of the demands such masses make: this is that ancient and infamous crisis of democracy and why we cannot live in one and why the The LA Times must play its role in undermining this movement.

Undocumented Immigrants should remind us of the Underground Railroad

While we are often quick to make heat-of-the-moment judgement about social matters, history would teach us to have more reservations. The immigration issue burns hot in our national consciousness, albeit a distant second to the "economy.". Whether you rank immigration linearly or see it as one of many overlapping, intersecting circles that make up our "society" you can't escape a heated debate of the issue in news coverage and water-cooler chat.



Tough talk abounds and rarely do we put some distance to this issue and take a long view.





History is a saner judge of these dust-ups, and our collective socio-political struggles really do develop political consciousness, despte the cynicism we are told is pandemic in this country. The Underground Railroad, led by Harriet Tubman, is for example, revered today but viewed as a crime during this country's long tenure as a slave colony, which turned human beings into property and enshrined this human rights abuse into our very US Constitution. We look back - back! - and admire Ms Tubman for her courage and ponder not well enough her stunning observation that she could have liberated more men and women had they known they were slaves[!]



Compare old views of the Underground Railroad with our visceral reactions to Illegal Aliens today. Compare our view of Harriet Tubman t with Roberto Canchola, an Underground Railroad Conductor if ever there was one. Canchola is the longtime LAX worker who was arrested last fall for using his LAX security clearance to allow undocumented immigrants to bypass immigration and customs officers and into the country. To use the old Negro parlance, he "stole" them away.


We cannot say that in the former example of Black slaves that these were citizens, and the illegals today not. US Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney was quite clear about the fact Blacks were not and could never be citizens. We cannot say the Undocumented weren't slaves in the countries of their birth given the official poverty imposed on them by law, union-busting, and the lack of any social service, just so a few privileged familes can live to excess.


Harriet Tubman was a thief yesterday, just as surely as Nelson Mandela was once branded a terrorist by the US and British governments. But today, our political elite know to get a little catch in their throats and tear in the eye when speaking about these yesterday's villains, today's heroes. When will Mr. Canchola, a 23 year employee and vetted by LAX and the federal government for his security access, be declared a hero? I suspect first when those undocumented immigrants he successfully got out of their poor countries and into our much less poor one are invited to the White House and honored for their bravery. Second, if history instructs us, with the passage of time Canchola's meager efforts, kindling in a current debate, will make school kids yawn tomorrow. Hopefully the time enough will elapse before the three years Canchola was sentenced to federal prison in a plea deal. When, Bernard Shaw's St Joan asks, when will be ready for our Saints? When?

Arlen Specter's switch from Old Slave Merchant to New Slave Merchant

Sen. Arlen Specter's big switch from Republican to Democrat is only news to those inside the spiritually bankrupt beltway of two-party politics. It is within this barren space that our alleged two parties fight for the center-right by not addressing structural problems of poverty and human rights. The very fact Specter, who used to be a Democrat, can jump from one ship to another so easily speaks to the common ground of our one party system, its ideological seamlessness. The US is ruled by one political party, the Property Party, and it has two branches. James Baldwin, with his usual articulate phrasing, said the official religion of the United States is Commerce.

To help you visualize the fact of the single party, look at the left and right origins from the French Revolution. Left and Right came into political speech literally from where different factions of the merchant class, the bourgeoisie, sat themselves to caucus for the future of the French state.

Alas, they were merchants all, whose liberty, equality, and fraternity did not at all extend to the slaves they were buying and selling or those kept captive in the richest colony in the Americas: France's San Domingue, which became Haiti after its own revolution. These French merchants may have sat themselves in different places within the Assembly, but they were united in that they had been kept out of political power by the Old Regime of Sun King, Nobles, and the Church, a wicked trinity more alive today than dead.

Alas, the Republicans and Democrats are a merchant party as well, fundamentally believing in and willing to fight wars against workers, the poor, women within and beyond the US border. And if you believe they've reformed their tolerance of human slavery, look at some of the regimes they support.

Specter's switch from Democrat to Republican and back again is unremarkable because he moves from one faction that condones terrorism to another faction that condones terrorism. Putting profits for a few over the well being of humanity is the perfect foundation from which to allow terrorism. Remember, Ronald Reagan was a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat and a Union boss before he left the party to become a Republican.

For Specter to join the Greens, the Socialist Party USA, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Revolutionary Communist Party would be a earth-shaking as the deathbed conversion of a Roman emperor to Christianity, another merchant party if ever there was one, to distinguish it by all means by the revolutionary teaching of that quasi-rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. These political parties to varying degrees propose a radical restructuring of our political machinery.

Democrats are aglow at the prospect of a 60-seat majority in the US Senate. But this has nothing to do with expanding medical benefits to all, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public education, the slaughter of Iraqi and US young in that Imperial adventure, US support of the Israeli apartheid measures, or the theft of public funds to support failing private enterprise with arguments that certainly make the late infamous Ayn Rand smiling in her dark pit next to the Christian Roman emperor.

The slaves must rise up as surely as those in San Domingue did, perhaps putting meaning to the empty phrases of our masters: yesterday, liberty, equality, fraternity; today: change is coming. The villainy they teach we must execute ...

The US is still without a viable working-class political party. This is by design. Those I mentioned have a hard time getting ballot access because the rulers rule the roost. In California, the Peace & Freedom Party, my current affiliation, is elegantly described as a "feminist socialist political party." This hits all the right notes for me. It is the only socialist party recognized by the California secretary of state, which means I can run for mayor under the party label and not as an Independent. But Peace & Freedom is a rarity, and it should not be. In place of real sea-change we as spectators are asked to be awed by Specter's shift from one side of the Titanic to the other. Specter would never consider taking planks from a socialist party platform, not even on the principle that all children must be fed. Our bankrupt political system is owned by people for whom such socialism is as much a threat as democracy was to the Framers of the US Constitution.

Swine Flu or Pig Lie?

We'd sort of been here before. Illness emerges in the headlines and strikes a few human souls down. I was barely in high school with Gay Cancer emerged in the early 1980's, going through a few names before all the world except US president Ronald Reagan knew HIV/AIDS, which like sex and violence, became one concept and often erroneously used interchangeably. Today, Swine Flu is reportedly sending Mexico into a panic. Schools and shops shuttered closed. Sport events played to empty stadiums. And the crisis shows no sign so slowing. The Mexican military were redeeming themselves by passing out face masks after bloodying themselves in the mid-1990's with Zapatista Rebellions. I myself saw them go from doing the best a modern, civilized military could by tidying the streets of Mexico, DF to behaving like any pre-modern imperialist milita.

This morning, only a handful of cases were reported north of that arbitrary, politcal boundary that delineates the Third World from the First, the United States of Mexico and the United States of America. By afternoon, more cases, further inland. The speed with which this epidemic seems to spread is interesting and triggers the horrors of our medical history.

Something in this morning's reportage made me think back to the earlier time of Gay Cancer and or need to seriously investigate our medicine: NPR reported that most of the deaths in Mexico were of men 25-45. They themselves noted the strangeness of this, just as I did.

Was I simply suffering from post-trauma from being a queer man who has seen men go from health to being dead, and any mention of young men dying "myseriously" triggers in me a flash-back from the 80's?

I wondered if these Mexican men were gay.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of an experimental vaccine gone awry.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of a vaccine made on the cheap, and then sold to the Third World. "Scientists" wonder aloud if this isn't already incubating in the corners of the globe: I wonder if it's not already been injected or dispensed, like in the antibiotic I had to take recently for a bad sinus infection picked up from the ocean waters (and: what's being dumped into that water that knows nor respects boundaries).

I wanted to know the profiles of those sicken in the United States [at this writing, no one has died in the US from this], like some New York school children who had visited Mexico.

I readily admit to retaining a healthy skepticism for modern medicine. When I have approached its labs, it is with the utmost reservations and only after exhausting - even to the point of near-death - the other options short of a witch's incantation.

Swine flu: human, pig, and bird virus. What a bizarre jury for Mother Nature to bring together, no? But a creepy mad scientist: indeed.

Our vaccines are harvested from animals after all as are some medicines for chronic ailments. Do you know where your medicines come from, swine, human, bird, or what?

Who is being experimented on, the cats in cages or you and me and our comrades in the Third World and in Third World communities within the First World?

And while I am sounding paranoid, I remember that the West has used germ warfare on countries as innocent as Cuba, just to ruin its economy so its socialist experiment would not succeed; the US spread dengue microbes over the island to sicken the workers. Our esteemed scientists tell us unconvincingly that HIV/AIDS came from Africa, a tribesman, and a monkey he dined on. Constantly, the narrative is of our pristine, angelic, well-meaning societies put in peril by the Dark Corners of the World!

Our official scientists, like from the World Health Organization or National Institutes of Health, cannot air such speculations. But they are puzzled: they are airing a deep perplexment. That's enough for me to have pause.

Nature is a tempramental force, but she is not perplexing. She does not one morning change her laws. Man does that. Industrial society attempts that. Greed does that. Power does that.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings die daily from curable diseases because our for-profit drug companies cannot see it profitable to produce basic antibiotics. When they do produce these medicines, they do so on the cheap.

Summit of the Americas: An Open Vein?

THE SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS [sic] has ended, as the promised veto by Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, of the Final declaration, no declaration was forthcoming. I watched some of the Youtube videos of the opening speeches. It filled me with such emotion to see Daniel Ortega, who lead a socialist revolution against the US-backed dictator, Agustin Somoza, and for this crime Nicaragua was rained on with US bombs, and a Contra War. The US Government finally told the Sandinista revolutionaries that they would stop the war only if a US-sanctioned "election" was staged. Violeta Chamorro, backed by the CIA, won ... of course. But there was Ortega. President, speaking of being ashamed at being at such a summit without Cuba, and without PUERTO RICO, which remains under US control. Christina Fernandez de Kirchner also spoke on behalf of Cuba and highlighted the hypocrisy that Cuba should have been expelled for threatening the hemisphere but Argentina, 20 years later, was left alone when the UK sent the royal navy in the Falklands War.

At this point, this is sort of like an earthquake. Not sure what will fall and what will be left standing. Clearly, all but one of the Latin American/Caribbean countries have taken a turn Left, some moreso than others. All but one have embraced Cuba in their family of nations. The US stands alone, but I do not underestimate the US to bow under such pressure, right or wrong.

A BBC online news story makes this assessment: "US President Barack Obama said he saw positive signs from Cuba and Venezuela ..." Once again, the world is to be seen from the vantage point of the US! Even from the British side of the pond. This is predictabe since the UK is what Gore Vidal called a "US aircraft carrier."

When Fidel and the Revolutionaries rode into Havana January 1, 1959, they were approached by a delegation of the US military. Fidel told them they should return to their home country, that their pupils had failed, and that the Cubans had no use for their lessons. I imagine he gave them a RuPaul double-snap.

It would seem in light of the global melt-down - or, I still suspect the manufacture of said meltdown - Obama would be told the same in no uncertain terms.

But I am not a diplomat. I am an essayist, stream-of-consciouser, provocateur.

The BBC further reports: "In a news conference at the close of the summit, Mr Obama conceded that decades of US policy on Cuba 'hasn't worked the way we wanted it to'. But he highlighted a string of key issues where Cuba must make progress. 'Issues of political prisoners, freedom of speech and democracy are important, and can't simply be brushed aside,' Mr Obama said."

I am sure, although it went unreported by the BBC, which made every excuse not to air the Gaza Appeal a few months ago, our American neighbors had a reply to these comments from our president, which to me only speaks to our pig-headed stubbornness to dictate how the world is to be shaped. For our benefit, of course. How, praytell, did we "want" US policy to work? The assassination of the Cuban leadership, destruction of commerce, buildig mass internal discontent?

Let Obama address the issues listed at home first, openly. Let him begin with the heinos constitutional crimes committed by the Bush administration and work his way back through J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO.

And what about democracy in such disparate places as Saudi Arabia. Israel. The Vatican. Will this be brushed aside? History answers in the affirmative.

Reading the bourgeois press is indeed seductive. Thanks to YOUTUBE I watched the Summit speeches, understood as much as I was able with my remedial Spanish. I also watched a speech by Cuban president Raul Castro a few days before the Summit. Raul has been protrayed lately in a quote attributed to him that he would discuss anything with the US. It was implied, but never directly stated, this meant the Cuban government was ready to negotiate certain acheivements. But then I watched the speech, in the presence of international journalists and other Latin American leaders who are forming a new bloc of their own, ALBA. Raul was in military uniform and was as animated as his older, famous brother on the subject of US duplicity.

Chavez, during one aired session, stood and gave Obama the gift of an Eduardo Galeano book, OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA: FIVE CENTURIES OF THE PILLAGE OF A CONTINENT. I have read Galeano, a Uruguayan leftist who cooled his support of Cuba after the arrests of 70+ dissidents a few years ago. His is the history of the conquerors and victims. The gift was symbolically important, but it suggests the trap many of us fall into when having a disagreement with someone: that the other person is simply unaware of the "facts", and, once informed, the sky will open up. The powerful interests behind the US government very simply have a different universe of facts from which they act. These facts would indicate a South African-style, regional-wide TRUTH COMMISSION, where everything can be brought to bear, British involvement in the Caribbean and Latin America, US involvement in the same; border disputes between South American countries; all levels of human rights, including the right to housing food, and work.

It is from these pages we must glean new lessons, and form the new bonds that Kirchner demanded of the region. But the ensuing days and months will tell, the period after the earthquake, when things are properly assessed. Which Summit? A fractured one unable to come to any approved agreement, or one marking the Turning-Point in seeing positive signs from the US?

FREE TIBET!! LET CHINA DEVELOP IT

A recent letter published in the Guardian UK. It is addressed to the People's Republic of China by a motley array of thinkers. The subject is TIBET, that favorite liberal cause celebre in the West. FREE TIBET! That tiny country invaded by Red China.

Tibet is portrayed as a poor victim and its former headman, the Dalai Lama, a man of peace in exile. But this narrative has more to do with Western geopolitics than Reality.

Before China invaded - re-claimed, or whatever - its province, territory, or that sovereign country called Tibet, it was a feudal theocratic monarchy, a privileged elite, and masses of its people living in squalor and poverty not unlike centuries passed, where serfdom and slavery existed. Punishments included gouging out a person's eyes or cutting off body parts. How does a feudal theocratic monarchy keep its people poor and itself rich and in power, class if not by gouging out the eyes of "criminals"? The current Dalai Lama's predecessors collaborated with British and US agents: to what end, one wonders. Franklin Roosevelt sent an expedition to bear gifts to the Dalai Lama during his presidency. One wonders why ...

China under its ancien regime before its revolution was little better than its Tibetan neighbor, wide class disparities, abject poverty and a ruling elite, imperial powers taking wealth here and there from it. Then, as Lincoln famously remotely said: the war came.

Mao Tse Tung began a social, economic, and political awakening to that great country with a devoutly communist revolution. Examine the record, and tell me where a capitalist revolution has brought such great changes to not only the peasant but also national productivity. It is a much-ignored fact that thanks to Joseph Stalin [yes, Stalin!] the USSR was the most industrializing and prosperous country while the West was sorting through its 1930's Depression. But official doctrine says Stalin must only be remembered for his heinous crimes - that of the murder of thousands. The Western equivalent of such crimes - the massacre of Native Americans/Indians, for example, by men like Gen. George Washington, are dropped from the narrative and are not worthy of historical record.

Mao and the PRC, like Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the USSR, were anathemas to the Capitalist West. So of course, our official hearts began to bleed for those peasants we had yesterday forced opium on. Human Rights is a novel tool employed by the West. Like Apple Pie it would seem uncontroversial, but a look at the historical record of the 40's and 50's, the former Imperial powers gave not a damn about Human Rights in Latin America, Southeast Asia ["French" Indochina!], or Asia as a whole. Indeed, no. Human rights seemed only to extend to the privileged West's right to exploit the humans within the Axis of Dark Corners of the Globe. This hypocrisy would extend to that tiny, brutal country called Tibet.

I have no position on whether it was a China province or a sovereign country, but I recognize such a position is important on principal. Do I endorse invading foreign countries at will and claiming them? This is an important principle and debate. But it is also an important principle to speak Truths.

We can endorse sovereignty for Afghanistan, for example. But will we not highlight laws against women, against gays? Free Afghanistan for the Misogynists?

Enter an Open Letter, authored by Vaclav Havel, Prince Hassan Bin Talal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others. I am struck by this intersection of theatre [Havel being a brilliant playwright and essayist], a member of the Jordan Royal Family - a client state carved there by their British masters after the Ottoman humiliation, and a very, very honorable man who has defended the rights of democracy, women, LGBT's, the poor. Strange Bedfellows indeed and one wonders why Tutu's name would be added!

The Open Letter may reveal this. Anyway, Open Letters are kind of joke to me coming out of a weekly barrage of Open Letter Campaigns in my Queer Nation days. This one asks for a fair trail for some Accused and more openness in China's goings-on within Tibet. Tutu chaired a famous Truth Commission the likes of which the world has not seen. He has unblemished authority in this matter. A son of the Jordan ruling family is poxed. His country is poxed. His terrain is poxed. That he would have any authority to speak about human rights is a joke.

On the eminent closure of the Guantanamo gulag, Mumia Abu-Jamal warns us that there are Guantanamos within every one of our 50 states. But where is the chorus demanding US openness, British complicity - with these War on Terror crimes against humanity?

The Free Tibet Movement is a tool. Some good-thinking people who know little about how tools are made back it out of an sincere desire to want to end oppression. But the Western Interest forms the movement's foundation and continues to use it by perennial assaults on Chinese Communism. The Official Narrative dictates we must never think anything promising about Communism, so we must keep getting proofs of Chinese barbarism and evidence of Western compassion. As usual the Official Story is Twisted.

On Pets

Six-month old BO has landed. The newest presidential dog provoked some really strong feelings in me, nothing like the social justice/socialism/communism I consider a craft, mission, and passion. Having a pet is farther up the List, like swimming, good espresso, feeling Ochun. The Obama Family is lucky, and smart, to have a pet. The old saying goes they are Man's Best Friend. But one of my weaknesses for the unelected Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland is that she is a life-long dog owner and horse breeder. She's reared, birthed, coddled, trained, and buried a host of dogs - corgis and labradors. I feel I know something of her fundamental trustworthiness because of her insistence that her dogs be with her, travel with her. I know they must give her the kind of relief we ourselves cannot give each other even in private moments let alone public ones.

I grew up with collies, which is a described as a herding (or pastoral) dog. But my parents' first dog was a German Shepard named KING. I don't remember KING. My mother got him when he was a pup and I was in cloth diapers, and having no mother, my own mother got a bottle and nursed the King. Still, as he got older, that Nature came out and he became rather dangerous, first the furniture, then ... yours truly. King had to go.

Then they got a collie, LAD JANLO, which was a rendering of my parents first names. Lad died a natural death of old age with my father, whom my mother had already divorced and moved us human children to California.

My mother started a kennel. Collies again, of course. The Bitch was bred and birthed several beautiful little pups, sable. Lad was Tri-color. One night we went out to dinner. My mother, step-father, sisters and me. Mexican Food. I remember the evening even though I must have been in 4th grade, 1977ish. When we got home from dinner and began to wander through the dark house, I heard my step-father call out with some urgency. Then, my mother's "Oh, no!". The back door to the backyard slid open. I came out of my room to see what the commotion was. Our pool light lit a dull green across the pool I practiced laps in. And floating in the water were the several little furry plumps of collies. Their Mother was in her kennel nearby, in view of the whole disaster. The pups had apparently done what dogs do and dug holes under the fencing around the kennel, gotten into the pool, and couldn't get out. The holes too small for Mama to get through. We got the pups out, cried and cried. My mother and I took each lifeless body and began to administer mouth-to-mouth. My step-father discouraged this, wanted to spare us I guess. It was an incredible night. Nothing could spare us. What a cold, dark, damp, lifeless night that was.

The kennel ended that night.

Years later, we bought another collie. It was originally a family dog, so my sister won the poll to name her JADE, after a Brooke Shields character. I won the tag for her kennel name, which American Kennel Club dogs have to have: Love Nest's Plantagenet, for my mother and step-father's home and for the historic name of English kings. Love Nest's Plantagenet Jade [Jade for short] became officially my dog soon after. This doesn't mean I combed her like I was supposed to. Collies shed! And my mother would get angry at the shreds of Jade's coat all over the carpets in the house and blowing in the backyard.

It was at this time I really fell in love. Dogs have an instinct bred into them and just because you put them in a house and give them human names doesn't end that instinct. The human instict seems to be bred out of us, but really we just turn to drugs and violence and indifference, human sicknesses. Anyway, Jade made sure I got up for school in the morning, laying her long nose on my bed by my face. She laid next to me while I did my homework, wrote in my journal of all my woes ["Woe is Me!!!"], slept next to me while I watched infinite hours of TV, and struggled with all the moods a young boy needing to Come Out went through. When I was especially full of the melacholia wickeds [as Katharine Hepburn calls it], Jade would come into my room, insist I take her paw, and look at me. I would drop the paw, discouraged, and Jade wold lift it again until I held it. Magic dog! She wouldn't let me be alone, bless her! Whenever I dared get in our pool to do laps or play, Jade came frantically to the edge, barking at me, seeming to want to leap in after me ... like ... like ... that Bitch mama must have wanted to do years before.

When I went to college back in St. Louis I had to leave Jade. When I moved to San Francisco I couldn't find a place that allowed pets. At any rate, I told myself Jade was better off in her domain of that backyard, monitoring the horses passing on the trail behind our house. This is how I imagined her. This is how my mother described Jade's golden years.

One day, she came up to the back door, stretched out for a nap, and never woke up. My sister found her. I can't remember who called me. Jade was buried in her spot by the back gate to the horse trail, where she spent those twilight years.

Jehovah was my next pet. A rat. That's right, a rat. And I indeed named it Jehovah. Rats are very smart creatures. He quickly learned his name, would come when called. He loved cooked [cooled] brussels sprouts (my favorite vegetable) and popcorn. I would close my bedroom door, let him out of his big cage, and he would explore my room and always come when called. I would sit him on my shoulder, and he would somehow manage to recline as if to nap or stick his nose into my ear and lick the inside of my ear.

Jehovah died while I was away in Cuba.

I vowed never to get a pet again. Didn't want to abandon a creature like that again. But after moving to Los Angeles's Koreatown, I rescued a very small, newborn CAT! I am allergic to cats. But the sight of this frail, barely able to walk thing on Pico and Normandie, oblivious to the dangers around it and those dangers oblivious to it, I scooped him up and brought him to the house I shared. I named him OBI SECO, he being black and white and obi seco being a term of art for coconut. Obi Seco grew strong. He had other cats in the house to commune with, a huge yard to stalk and climb, various planters to nap in. When I came home, I would call out to him, sometimes anxious that he'd left as magically as he came ... but he would emerge from the brush, galloping towards me. I could hear him purring.

That house began to go to hell. Another story. I had to leave. I got an apartment in Long Beach, and Obi Seco, literally reared in what must have seemed like Nature, was suddenly confined to a studio apartment. I never heard him make a sound, but now he cried and moaned all day and all night. He began to tear up carpet, blinds, scratch at the door. The night he ripped a large slit in the bathroom screen and tried to jump out two storeys below, I had to make a change. Another house-mate who escaped the madness offered to house Obi at his sister's. She had a house, large yard, other cats.

Humans abandon their young, sacrifice their blood for wars, starve some as being "undeserving poor." Pets - animals, that is: normal, adjusted beasts of Nature - are much more civilized than us. They will love us unconditionally and what's more: they do not hold back their nurture instinct, another uncivilized trait humans seem to cherish with maturity. This is a characteristic I know must at some remote level sustain the human subject [i.e., the "owner"]. This is why I know Queen Elizabeth II must be decent. LBJ's Beagles. Reagan's Pomeranians. Of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bull Terriers. Henry II's corgis. Queen Elizabeth I's pocket terriers. Queen Victoria's Pomeranians, greyhounds, sky terriers, dachshunds, pugs, Pekinese, and ... yes: COLLIES. Lincoln loved mongrels. Bill Clinton, like the Queen: labradors. Mary Queen of Scots loved her Toy Spanel so much she kept it under her large skirts and it wasn't found until after her head was cut off. It is too often said of pet lovers that they are more at ease with their pet companions than with humans of their own species: well, of course we are! We all want to be loved, and having a caring companion for a pet shows that we can be loved, and that civilization is not totally lost.

PASSOVER/PESACH begins Tonight: My Thoughts

And what is the status of my Freedom and yours and ours? Where are the new Revolutionaries?

Passover (or Pesach) is about finally taking more than enough abuse and leaving an abusive relationship, an abusive system. You have to see that it's abusive first, that plagues are not Love. If you don't see this, Passover is but another Fairy Tale for your dusty King James[!!!!] Bible.

I am not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, but revere the essential spirit behind these religions and other paths that have crossed my Path for their deep, spiritual lessons they teach. I have made it a point since my college days to observe all of these Holy Days in some measure - Lent, Ramadan, Passover, The Solstices. Our best teachers employ metaphors to make their lessons more powerful and better digested, and these Holy Days are powerful focal points from which to take steps forward. The symbols behind Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are no less - even while its supposed adherents happily enslave themselves in superstition rather than lessons of prophets, wise men and women [yes, there had always to be women!]. Being a "Westerner" and more impacted by the Christians, I see them a lot like Baldwin did: pretenders, lacking moral authority by their crimes; or Maya Angelou, which said her Christianity was more like a Holy Grail that daily, hourly, had to be fought for, always elusive, first requiring a boundless passion, because you were always coming up short. Like being a revolutionary, conscious a successful revolution begins a process.

Jesus, who was born and died a Jew, was also revolutionary. Undoubtedly, if you see beyond the sectarianism and religious partisanship, he was essentially trying to extend the mission of the Jews leaving Egypt and continue the Revolution. Our sects and religious parties - no better than our political parties - draw strict boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. How idiotic. How short-sighted. How ... calculated! Also, Egypt was and is in AFRICA. The Jews were escaping the terrors of Ramses II, but they were in Africa. Egypt in some historical twist ceased to be in Africa, the cradle of civilization, the site of the oldest Jewish synagogue [Ethiopia]. What does the breaking of these continuums of philosophy and geography do to break the bonds that tie us and form a cohesive and coherent moral story?

What is Pharoah teaching you today?

So, on this Passover: how's your state of Freedom? Broken? What old, worn-out, diseased ideas are you chained to? Where is your Liberation? How many injustices and profanities will you swallow before you gather what you can and move on?

Tonight, I will sit at my boveda with my Eggun [ancestors] and read the Passover story from Exodus. I will do so conscious of a strong, historical thread linking that old Mother continent, Africa, with Judaism, Christianity, Islam; our common class struggle; and our spiritual prisons, our economic prisons, whose bars need tearing down. Conscious that it was not at the first abuse we stood up but after 210 years of slavery. This seems strange in hindsight, but don't we all know co-conspirators? Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, wrote about these Jews in the camps and what they did to survive and what they had to become, as bad as their captors, and equally weak-in-spirit.

How often do we turn against our comrades, empowering the wicked, degenerate Values of our oppressors and cowarding from the human values?

CHANGE BEGINS WITH ME is a reality. We can all be a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Sojourner Truth, an Emma Goldman, a Fidel, a Mao, a Bolivar, a Boukman. When the knife hits the bone and you scream "Enough!" depends on your constitution and what you are ready to give up. Fidel admonished us many years ago that the duty of a revolutionary is to make a Revolution, not to sit on your porch waiting for the corpse of Imperialism to be brought passed.

I guess you must at some point see the civilization around you as being fundamentally wicked. My co-workers/co-conspirators who would take milk from a baby because some government rules allow it is a daily, profound reminder we just might do better under the Taliban than suffer another hour of such nonsense. That many of my co-workers/co-conspirators digest this whole and seem to gain a sense of power speaks to lack of moral and ethical authority the West and Christianity have.

For, Christianity no more exists than Judaism or Islam. The distinction between them is rather like the distinction between Mexico, the USA, and Canada: political boundaries in what Nature created as one cohesive land-mass. Together, these teachings speak to a powerful revolution of human society. Separate, we are prisoners in ghettos, under the boot of an overlord, wage-slaves, tyrannized. Ramses II's troops may have drowned in that sea, but the pharoah lives on and on and continues to amass new troops.

Socialized Housing

If maintaining a viable postal service for all is an important service, why not housing? The answer is somewhat obscured but fairly simple why our various so-called leftists and avowedly right-wing elected officials wring their hands over the homeless and housing but do very little to solving the problem. And I read many years ago in college how our US Army Corps of Engineers can go into a remote backwater and in a few breaths construct a workable bridge over which to carry supplies. But we cannot provide truly decent shelter for the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed.

So why not Housing for the growing numbers of people, families, children, working adults, even middle class? There is no means-test for buying a US postage stamp. We do not ask for a tax return before selling someone a stamp to send a letter. Why should there be means-tests for the paltry excuse for available, affordable Section 8 housing? It's because Section 8 housing is intentionally kept to a bare minimum, and less than that. Section 8 feeds the myth of a "deserving" poor as separate from an undeserving poor. Section 8 further hides the working poor from our sights. Section 8 housing is only meant to keep a few of the many homeless in shelter. We have no such paradigm for postage stamps.

And yet our postal system stares us in the face with the obvious solution to housing that no politician dare enact. The postal system is government run, and this is an anathema to any private enterprise. Federal express and UPS are private shipping companies. It's not hard to imagine a country where FEDEX and UPS controlled our political culture and sponsored the elimination of the US Postal System to increase their clientele. It's not hard because so much of our political culture is run by private, for-profit interests where our basic needs are sold and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Eliminating the postal service would give FEDEX/UPS the lion-share of the market, and it would cost us several dollars just to mail a letter, more if the letter be mailed to a remote area out of FEDEX's service area. Imagine this. You don't have to, because this is what we have with our housing. FEDEX owns the houses, pays or political culture to maintain its monopoly, and reaps the profits.

Not coincidentally, one of the first logical acts the Cuban Revolution implemented in 1959 was to cut rents in half. Housing was not socialized, but the Revolution clearly recognized as clearly we we seem to deny our property system that it is unworkable. We here in the US seem to think this arrangement came from the Heavens. The Cuban Revolution knew it came from landlords, many Cuban, many living in the US.

I was moved the other day when hearing Fidel in 1968 expound on the various facets of underdevelopment. He covered the ones known to most well-read intellectuals, but he touched on a new one: that underdevelopment is a psyhological problem. So one of the challenges of a successful revolutionary process is to enlighten the people to discard their futilistic thinking, that not much is possible, this-is-the-way-it-is thinking. I would say this is the biggest problem facing underdeveloped peoples and countries.

Why can't our city and state governments, which levy taxes on us, buy apartment buildings and houses and trailor parks and duplexes and lofts? Who said these must be the domains of private interests only motivated in profits, even to the point of keeping them empty!?

There is no law of nature that dictates this.

Our elected government should buy properties for the public use, rent out these properties at a low cost to those who choose to take that route as easily as those who choose a US stamp over a UPS fee. I as a lifelong renter should have the choice of renting with my government for a low, no-frills apartment or choosing a private concern, which might want to offer an array of bells and whistles.

But as I said, this is not the case because our property system owns our city councils, city assessors, mayors, and state governments. How did this come to be so? The end of feudalism and the beginning of the "modern" [i.e., capitalist] era was marked by a series of Enclosure Acts in Europe. Land-Lords discovered they could earn more money by selling surplus goods rather than fulfilling their feudal obligations and giving them to their tenants, the serfs. The serfs were thrown off the land, literally onto the streets. Police powers were instituted to keep the poor off the land. In Britain, after peasant revolts, laws were passed that mandated a homeless person show his means of livelihood or be thrown in jail. So from the beginning, the state created the problem then penalized its victims.

Among the "classic" causes of homelessness - lack of affordable housing, unemployment/underemployment, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, mental health law reforms, evictions, and foreclosures - socialized housing models would address several of these at once. Without high rents to pay, an otherwise low-wage worker [with socialized health care of course!] could well afford a decent place to live. Of course, if or high-wage brethren wish to partake of socialzed housing that would be their right too as well as accessing a socialized health system.

Bottom line, with a working model of public/private mail service in our midst, such a model of housing is not unrealizable. Arguably, housing services are much more vital than mail services. Our elected politicians, in the pockets of a private housing monopoly, are in a fix: they dare not anger their politcal funders by robbing them of a captive audience of customers. Further, banks fearful of losing profits will make arguments against such a measure. But faced with publc anger over the sight of homeless encampments, like the one that used to be in front of San Francisco's beautiful City Hall, public servants are stuck finding cracks in a paradigm to fill a huge population of people.

We [HEART] Pedro??

Are biopics dangerous artifacts to put in public view? In light of my emotional response to MILK, I was a bit taken aback to learn a new feature was airing about the late Pedro Zamora, a fallen soldier seemingly from another time in the LGBT sensibility.

"Pedro" aires on MTV and LOGO and comes in the wake of the successful biopic, MILK, written by the same screenwriter.

Zamora and his 15 minutes of fame are being brought back to a new generation of viewers for whom the early days of AIDS is a blank slate of indifference to hedonistic gay men's lives. MTV and LOGO are airing a "biopic" about Zamora, not the editors of DISEASED PARIAH NEWS. Zamora the biopic is pure Hollywood; DPN, a 'zine of the time was fun, raunchy, bitter, and always pointed (remember AIDS Barbie pictures intubated or with KS?!). With "Pedro" get the tissues ready but will we really be educated about the Health-Care Crisis, Racism within San Francisco whose working class and ethnic minorities were already beginning the Recession & Bubble Bursts that are only spoken of now after it affects the Establishment.

In the early 90's we were barely acknowledging lesbians (remember the ADVOCATE: a GAY magazine without any mention of lesbians on its masthead?), and certainly not warm to AIDS sufferers - adult OR children. Silence=Death really, really meant something. The Masses simply weren't talking while young men were dying.

But I suspect "Pedro" will make heroes where there were none and forget DPN and those who worked in the trenches, buried the dead, volunteered at SHANTI Project.

"Pedro" The Movie would not have been greenlighted in those days. So why is Zamora, the HIV+ Cuban-Ameican namesake being brought to life for this program now? Fifteen years have passed since Season 3 of REAL WORLD [MTV 1994] filmed in San Francisco and featured him in the cast. It is too ironic that this project be greenlighted while Zamora himself - an educator - had no health care. What does it say about our civilzation that we don't take care of our educators?

I suspect the biopic is to purge us our official guilt, our crimes, show how much we loved, followed, this ONE young boy who will somehow assign us a compassion[!!] for all things HIV/AIDS. As Pres Obama would say: let me be clear: this compassion did not exist beyond the LGBT community, its close allies and friends. With "Pedro" we can all say as other Ostriches have said in another Holocaust: "We love Jews: we hid Jews. we didn't know what was happpening." Former president, Bill Clinton, reportedly will introduce the MTV/LOGO feature, undoubtedly looking folksy and solemn.

I further suspect in our Gay Marriage-Obsessed days, Zamora's pre-nuptial lifestyle that many gay men came to celebrate with their bodies will be ... white-washed. I heard some psycho-babble that he threw himself into sex to compensate for the death of his mother. I have never heard such an analysis made of our philandering presidents.

"Pedro's" version will pprobably go: He caught The Bug, and he became a Hero. Yuck! No, he worked with his body through the hypocrisy and homo-hatred of a phony Christian society in many places, in many ways.

Zamora died "from complications from AIDS" a day after the final episode aired, no biopic slated. He had a union ceremony with another HIV+ activist, Sean Sasser, a Black man, whom we've otherwise heard nothing about. Zamora was one of many who insisted they would "fight" this, meaning Death, meaning Indifference, meaning Hate. Will viewers be equally moved to the rage that fueled ACT-UP to meet the US's official indifference to HIV specifically and health care generally or crocodile tears?

Is Multi-Party Socialism Possible? It is a Necessity

According to a recent news item from Agence France-Presse (AFP), the socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is having chilly relations with Cuba's newest communist president, Raul Castro. The story, written by Rosanna Mina, alleges Chavez backed a coup d'etat against Raul and implicates some of Fidel's advisers. Former Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, Vice President Carlos Lage, both appointed by Fidel, and the other recently dismissed government ministers were co-conspirators.

Truth or fiction? I know from a cursury reading of history that the West is quite prone to psy-ops/PSYWAR, psychological-operations/psychological warfare , whereby Western institutions will spread malicious lies about a group so that their official enemies will turn on each other and devour their own. This is to be expected, anticipated, and guarded against.

Famous examples include the US government, the Chandler Family-run Los Angeles Times undermining the increasingly popular End Poverty in California Program of socialist gubernatorial candidate, Upton Sinclair, in 1934, by telling voters Sinclair was going to take their children away. The US Phoenix Program in Viet Nam to make monsters of Vietnamese freedom fighters and anti-colonialists. COINTELPRO against Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Women's Movement, leftwing artists, like John Lennon and Paul Newman. Nixon's Enemies List and the use of government institutions, like the IRS, to harrass dissidents. Shock and awe in Iraq and Afghanistan. Spreading the lies that Cuba's revolutionary government in 1959 would force Blacks and Whites to marry, take children away, and force Believers to throw all religious artifacts into the sea ...

But even former president Bill Clinton, in one of his final interviews, dismissed much animosity against the Republicans saying he knew it wasn't personal. The fight was about Power. We forget politics is like playing chess.

Which begs the Question: what differences might exist between Fidel's appointees, like Perez Roque, and Raul? During the USSR's glasnost/perestroika under Mikael Gorbachev, Fidel stood firmly against any such reformism in Cuba. Raul reportedly favored it. Going back to the early years of Cuba's revolutionary struggle against the US-backed and funded regime, Raul is said to have embraced communism early, the first to befriend Dr. Ernesto Guevara ["Che"], and was instrumental in introducing Fidel to both. Fidel, contrastly, had married into one of Cuba's ruling-class families, the Diaz-Balarts, and it is his own nephews who sit in the US Congress staunchly against Fidel, the Cuban revolution, and communism. Fidel was by many accounts a Cuban Nationalist, wanting Cuba's wealth for Cuba.

Do these differences inhibit the development of a socialist society? Cllearly, the Diaz-Balart nephews in Florida have nothing to add to the building of socialism, but what about within Cuba or within a socialist movement anywhere?

Again, history: we might see these differences as a Threat rather than the "necessary fund of options" lesbian communist poet Audre Lorde spoke of.

A revolutionary ally, Carlos Franqui, fell out of favor in the early 1960's largely because Franqui, a member of the Cuban Communist Party, soured at seeing revolutionary Cuba go from being a US protectorate and sugar provider to being the same under Kruschev's USSR.

Whether Fidel Castro was a crypto-Communist we do not know. We only know his actions as a nationalist, Orthodox Party senatorial candidate, and married into one of Cuba's prominent families.

But I do not intend in any way to dispute that Fidel became a deeply orthodox and sincere communist, and his brilliant mind and political sensibilities saw him excel his brother. He undoubtedly went throough a similar transformation as what happened to our Beatniks, Flower Children, and home-grown dissidents of the 1960's: awed by Cuba's old colonial institutions he grew to believe they were like the Wizard of Oz, thunderous and powerless. This transformation must be behind his "charisma" as a public speaker, having the distinction of giving the longest public address by the Guinness Book of World Records, when he addressed the United Nations for almost 7 hours.

In the US we fare no better. Our debates are between factions of the Property Party, a capitalist fundamentalist party having two wings: the Republicans and the Democrats. This is one party that serves capitalism's interest, and each faction will resort to lies, blackmails, smears, and even robbing the opponent's offices to keep the balance from tipping one way or another. Remember: a fish rots from the head down. Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Swift Boats. Watergate.

In the perfect world, which is acheivable, we would have a broad menu of political parties, left and right, capitalist and communist, and the system would defend and protect all sides, and each ideology would be given free and open access to make its arguments to perfect our Civilization. Presently, no such defense exists to defend us against the Nixons and J Edgar Hoovers and the COINTELPRO and or own home-grown purges. We, the marginalized, the poor, the LGBT, the women, the dark, the light, the laborer are not defended. The US rivals more Third World countries in that we have no workers party. We are the only first-world country without one.

The Property Party will argue socialism doesn't work; that it has failed; that leftwing third parties cannot garner public support to be included in debates or covered by mainstream media. There is no Voice allowed to dispute this refrain. But this is a Lie.

Socialism has not failed. It was failed. Fidel employed the perfect metaphor years ago when he lambasted the US policymakers for "hanging us by our necks and criticizing us for not breathing." Since the Revoution's inception, the US has sought to undermine it and this government used its hegemony over the Organization of American States to have Cuba expelled (only Mexico retained diplomatic relations to Revolution Cuba, the last to re-establish relations happened just the other day: Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, a man who compared Fidel to Chile's Pinochet, which was not evicted from the OAS). No where has socialism been allowed to live and thrive or crash and burn by its own devices and aspirations: it simply has not been allowed to acheive its aims ... except one place, not a country, but in the US public school system.

Despite popular criticism of our poor public schools - a critcism I believe is founded on a hatred of the Masses - the creation and funding of this most public institution has educated mass numbers of young people, cultivated them to a multi-dimensional society, socialized them to working with other genders and groups of people, fed them free- and reduced-lunches.

So socialism can and must work. It will not work if we do to other socialists and communists what the Property Party does to us, the Third Parties, the anti-parties, the socialists, communists, or those still not matured to these bold ideas: the "progressives." A Socialist array of parties would argue for the perfection of socialism/communism. So one imagines while the US is utterly capable of domestic and international terrorism, psyhcological warfare against domestic and foreign populations, one also dreams that Cuba - which inspired Ho Chi Minh's revolution in Viet Nam - would see in the AFP story a genuine and healthy struggle between a Raulista Camp, a Fidelistia Camp, and other Camps, like one comprehending the socialism of the late Celia Hart (see It is Never too Late to Love or to Rebel), among others. All would have the sole aim of making socialism/communism more effective, more real for working people, benefitting children and the elderly.

Our socialist tendencies are too big to fail, our socialist voices too vital in the construction of a better society: that is, after all, what government is for.

Days of Contrast: "Rent" & My 1989

Everything happens for a reason. If this is so, and the older I get the more I believe this, my hasty move to San Francisco in 1989, literally days after my college graduation ceremony, was Predestined.

What I found after the requisite rocky start - my Richmond District, hole-in-the-wall dwelling run by a southasian slumlord, the October 1989 earthquake - was a fabulous pool, fabulous swim team [USF Masters], and the 727 Clayton Clan: Nicko, Molly, Olivier, and me. Lidi came later, hanging her bedclothes from our front window a la French style.

We were young, full of ourselves. Nick and I writers. Molly an actress. Olivier seemed to me a man of letters. I think he was the first Intellectual Gay man I'd ever met. I'd certainly met Out ones, proud ones, fierce ones, even in high school. But Olivier was, like I thought of myself but pale to him, studied. Oh, we had "Jobs," but that was never the Point. It never seemed the Point: we were climbing up a Big Tree to where the Big, Red Appples were.

Along with everyone's ambitions - Michael Moore opined that no one seemed to work in San Francisco in those days - was desire for social change. ACT-UP [AIDS COALTION TO UNLEASH POWER] started in New York City and spread to the Bay Area in response the Ronald Reagan's official silence toward the rising epidemic of young, gay men dying of AIDS. QUEER NATION followed suit to combat homohatreds in whatever city council or strip mall or trolley stop. Both countering not only Reagan [and his evil sister, Margaret Thatcher, in the UK] but also what was woven into the fabric of our very streets, the marches, the hangings-out at Cafe Flore: that is, Death.

Nineteen-eighty-nine was several years before the supposed improvement of HIV medications: this is a topic I will have to put my attention to another time, since there is persuasive debate about the evolution of meds and the evolution of survival. At that time, at that year, I could see men walking the streets of the Castro, being held and supported by friends, lovers, neighbors, god-knows-who. Weathered, whithered men not much older than I.

The Christians said their crimes were ... but why give more Voice to that din of unreason and superstition?

I was a Black, Midwestern kid, born of Southern roots, set in the middle of a white affluence in Southern California, and did not know up from down what to make of the world. Or, as my dear grandmother, Mary Adele Denny, would observe: "You have nothing to say [as a writer]". So it was not coincidental that I should feel a hunger to forgo a silly Marching ceremony at a prestigious university that, at bottom, is just as evil as Siblings Reagan and Thatcher, and rush headlong into the Bay Area, a better schooling.

Like a later headlong rush into Cuba in 1992, San Francisco was just the right chill of cold water to begin the breaking of something, an initiation. My godmother says "to gain wisdom you must sacrifice your ignorance." Despite myself, I was striving a knife into an enemy.

Clinton came. ACT-UP would split. Queer Nation dissolved. The poor began to be evicted from the City to make room for the dot-commies. I'll never forget the canary in the mine for me was hearing my godsisters become disenchanted with Club El Rio in the Mission because a new Class of men - macho and aggressive - tried lording over them: who were these arrogant fuck-heads? I came to my own conclusions about the decay that followed in what seemed like a Wonderland. I hadn't seen or read anything that touched the slice of that life until I picked up a DVD of the film, RENT.

I don't like musicals as a rule. I take myself much too seriously. So the opening scene of the cast singing to me made me uneasy: had I made an error and wasted $10? Another song. Another song. Does anyone not speak? Then: Angel rescues Tom, and I no longer noticed the songs.

RENT is about my generation, my social-economic Class. My real class. Not the class of 1989 Washington University. RENT seems to me to be the first, unique portrayal of a working class, imaginative bunch who will take shelter together, piece together their small fortunes, and dream big - big in their Art and Activism and exorcizing the world - at least the country - of the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher and the offfical hatred of all things Queer and black and brown and working class.

"FIGHT AIDS" Tom scribbles on the board in the coffeehouse during the performance of "La Vie Boheme".

So what can I say? I cried like a baby so much of a slice of the wonderment of those days, days of contrasts. Swimming with my team at 6am. Running in Golden Gate Park. Walking up the hill to the Castro. Meeting an amazing bunch of fascinating, vibrant, real people who would show me how to be the Man I Could be. Then, seeing Angel fade like that made me conjure the last real-life moments of Andy, Gerald, Martin. They went like that, those Deaths every day ... Andy back home in the UK; Gerald a few weeks before I could return to see him one last time; ... Martin. And many others went with them. Every week - every, single week - the BAR [Bay Area Reporter] displayed two to three pages of thumbnail-pictured obituaries of our NEIGHBORS who had just died "from complications from AIDS."

How did we survive that? What balls we had! I guess in our own way, we sang through it. By the way, before my grandmother died, I think it was my musing one day over those years - an analysis of sorts - that she exclaimed: "See, now you have something to say. I can't wait to read your Book!"

News of Economic Freefall a Concotion

There is no economic crisis, but there is a political one. The lie obscures the cancer.

The headlines continue daily to astound, bewilder, and distract us.

* "U.S. unemployment rate at 7.6%; jobs disappearing at faster pace" [LA Times]

* "The labor market is in free fall and has been since November," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm in Lexington, Mass. [LA Times]

* There has been a huge rise in the number of firms going bust in England and Wales because of the recession. [BBC]

* German industrial output has seen a record fall after a sharp contraction in manufacturing activity. [BBC]

* France's trade deficit hit 55.7bn euros ($71.4bn; £48.6bn) in 2008, due to high oil prices and the slowing economy, the customs office said. [BBC]

* Economic slump pushes 19,100 people into bankruptcy, while there was a 52% increase in company insolvencies in the last three months of 2008. [UK Guardian]

* Britain has officially entered recession for the first time since 1991, after the economy shrank at the fastest pace for nearly 30 years in the fourth quarter. [UK Guardian].

Et cetera.

Our economy suffers new implosions and thousands upon thousands of workers lose their jobs, which in the US means the lose the ground beneath their feet - rent or mortgage must be paid; health care sought [probably not]; food.

So, we watch the stock market, our bank accounts, pray that our jobs will be there tomorrow. My coworkers ponder often whether and how we might be laid off.

The Dollar is a curtain shielding a political system that must be revolted. It is a curtain behind which stands the Wizard, but a wizard with a deadly agenda. Our state of anxieties keeps us from interrogating our governors, examining the political class, which we think is there to dole our rights and entitlements, seat belt laws, safe food and water, minimum wages, WIC, etc., etc. Sure, there is some anger when we here that from billions in bailout money, top executives get bonuses, but this structural problem is only the tip of an iceberg. We still fundamentally believe government is good and has been the source of our rights, beyond suspicion.

The problem is a vicious political system that is drying up the funds to working class people - for meager jobs, for student loans, for social services. These things are disappearing by the hour, and thanks to Welfare Reform there is no safety net to catch ... the Irish peasant thrown off the land.

I am throwing in an historical fact to make a point. The Irish Famine was not a natural phenomenon. Queen Victoria threw Irish peasants off lands they had historically occupied in bare subsistence, denying them access to food. Their lives on that land cannot be romanticiized, but the political famine created by the Queen and her government was an historical evil. Today, our subsistence is being pulled from under us, too, and just as deliberately.

In a politically orchestrated act, Queen Victoria threw those peasants off the land in the 1840's when large landowners found raising sheep and livestock more profitable than employing illiterate workers. They chose to deliberately starve to death thousands of Irish for profit, then to send the survivors abroad.

If you think morality dawned upon the Queen's Death in 1901, the 20th century was equally full of Christian Crimes by Christian Governments.

So here we are, The Dispossessed!

Economic Crisis, you insist? I am a stupid Conspiracy Theorist/Paranoid, you think?

If you live near the majority of Indian Reservations* you might be aware that the reality of high unemployment far surpasses South Central LA [10% in California, 18% in the Black community] or East Oakland, East St. Louis, etc. Is this crisis from the heavens, like Katrina? No, it is by politically orchestrated conspiracies to deprive resources to that area, locate them amid economicallly abandoned lands, locate few services, and build little infrastucture.

Conversely, consider that in the US military and US prison system there is near FULL EMPLOYMENT [there is also food, shelter, health care].

When was the last time you heard of any "threat" of a rise in unemployment in a federal prison? It just doesn't exist. But maybe you don't even know about prison labor. Prison and military jobs are created with different motives, including the self-esteem of the prisoner or soldier. Safety. Idel hands and all that. Certainly there is a market beyond the prison for its labors.

I am not suggesting we emulate a prison state, but rather highlighting the powers of our political class to solve those problems they want to solve, if they even become problems at all.

I am suggesting a political revolution. I am suggesting we get in the way, not be silent [silence=death] and make the rascals serve humanity.

Former Labour Party MP, Tony Benn, says "If the poor turned out and voted their interests it would be a real, democratic revolution. So they don't want that to happen. So keeping people hopeless and pessimistic is ... See, there are two ways in which to control people: first of all frighten people; second of all demoralise them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern. There is an element in the thinking among some who don't want the nation to be educated, healthy confident because they would get out of control."

MILK

I'm just home and recovered from the latest Sean Penn biopic, MILK, based on the political life of Harvey Milk, slain gay San Francisco politician. JEEZ! From the opening shots of the movie, my eyes filled and that sensation I was about to cry-me-a-river came to my jaws. My eyes never dried in the 2+ hours that followed.

Gus Van Sant has created a masterpiece in LGBT cinema. Indeed, US cinema. Sean Penn ... from Scott Piccoli in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH to this portrayal is amazing: this actor must rank in the top handful of artists/actors. I did not know Milk, moved to San Francisco 10 years after his assassination, but I know a bit about the City he himself came to from New York, to change his life. San Franciscans mark the assassinations of Milk and Mayor George Moscone every year with the same candlelight march you will see at the end of the movie, and I remember my first march. Quiet. Hushed. 10 years on people still shocked by the act where Our ranks were Thinned.

I feared Penn would parody Milk, mechanize a renowned, humorous, intelligent gay activist. But Penn showed no fear - NO FEAR - in portraying Milk, even to my view taking on such a range of emotions of sexual minorities - mockery, passion, heart-break, Penn hit every note, naturally. Real Professional. He did it so naturally that his first deep kiss with another male actor went almost unnoticed. He had become Harvey Milk, gay man. Angry Gay Man. "I have done the state some service and it knows it."

Van Sant spliced much archival footage of San Francisco in general and the Castro neighborhood in particular. I know that place like the back of my hand, where Harvey's camera shop used to sit, that CASTRO theatre where I took my sister to see GONE WITH THE WIND. The Underground Station where Milk mounts a crate to demand his new community respond to the official brutality of Old San Francisco. Milk's friend, Tom Ammiano appears to heckle John Briggs, who sought to fire all LGBT teachers and their supporters[!] Ammiano was not only a friend of Milk's, but also at the time was a grade-school teacher. Ammiano went on to be on the Board of Supervisors, ran for mayor, and is now in the California State Legislature. Milk's encounter with Cleve Jones, with those trademark eyeglasses, made me sob. Jones is responsible for The Quilt, which if you've never seen it you cannot know LGBT anger - that memorial of the dead.

How times and one's better efforts change!

I was mindful of how Milk followed his mission, even after age 40 it wasn't too late. Some stories DO take time to tell. Bernard Shaw was 41 when he got his first play written. Christopher Isherwood 51 when he met the love-of-his-Life. Mindful how he had to make sacrifices to follow that Life Force that drove him, even at the cost of a relationship, to fulfill his Task. It's the end of the year, time to clean our lives of people who aren't there to help and fill our cups with people who will. That is my Coming out 2009. Eleggua is already pointing me ...

I left the theatre more angry at that slim voter majority in California that passed Prop 8 and at this president-elect for taking a landslide election and making it look like a similar slim victory, especially in his horrific naming of "pastor" Rick Warren, Minister Homophobe, to speak at his inauguration. What would Harvey say? Obama's team says it's a nod to the Diversity of the Country: No, it is further evidence "Christianity" has no moral authority in the West, and, LGBT's must come out of the bars and bathhouses and smash some windows. That we are viewed still as a fringe, powerless sect, like CHILDREN. Will Obama appoint an anti-Semite to spread his filth? A Klansman's Grand Wizard? A Southern Baptist who demands wives submit to their husbands? Hell, No!! Those prejudices are beyond the pale because of the activism of those communities.

Please see this movie. And if it gets you like it did me look for THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, a 1980's documentary about Milk. As far as Obama and his pal, Warren: I don't know what to say. Whether Obama dis-invites the Wretch or Warren backs out is immaterial. Day after Day, Obama tosses another rock at the body politic, the commonweal.

The Dissing of Fem Black Gays by Macho Black Gays

"UNLEASH THE QUEEN" - Queer Nation motto, circa 1990

There's a lot to unpack when trying to talk about hatred of gays WITHIN the gay community.

First a few observations: it happens, just as it happens among women, among Blacks, among Latinos - all who have been taught this aversion.

Second, man and male are two different things, of course. Male is a biological distinction; man being a social one. Males come in embryos, much of the plant world, other species, and you and me. Man is more of less a human being over 18 [vs. a boy or infant]. I say all this because masculinity and manhood are social constructs not Natural ones, and as social constructs they change over time. Acting like a MAN/being masculine is not something from Nature but from the political world. Too many men and women have NO appreciation of this fact, but think our behaviors are set in nature by God. Rubbish. Just as we have been taught by dominant culture to hate Blackness, so too we've been taught to hate women [gay or straight], darker skin among non-white peoples, and certain characteristics deemed threatening by dominant culture. Some may acknowledge this and insist their preference for MAN/MASCULINE is just a preference.

More rubbish. These values were instilled, taught to us, often by entities that did not have our best interest in mind: this fact demands we examine our Views and take noting for granted.
Dominant culture found best our current arrangement of one man-one women in holy matrimony to control laborers and to assure property was bequeathed ONLY to the man's offspring. At one time in human history, believe it or not, there was no such arrangement and women bore children from different men without controversy. When property became central - more or less when nomadic cultures settled into farms and settlements - men wanted their land to go only to their children for the preservation of the community so it was deemed necessary to control women's sexuality. Homosexual sex was initially disparaged among groups whose numbers were threatened, as in Jews in biblical times. It was not disparaged among the dominant culture of the day - Roman and Greek. So among assaulted tribes, homosex is a threat to the perceived preservation of the group.

For reasons I cannot fathom, just as we have kept an early 18th century pubic school structure right into the present day, our society is obsessed with a post-nomadic, agricultural era morality around gender and sexuality - I speak directly to the obsession with the Bible as more than a beautiful history but a blueprint for a post-industrial, postmodern, post feudal society. Again, this is equally absurd as relying on old modes of public education, yet we do! This is ALL reinforced by a dominant culture which - as the victors - lends out rewards and meets punishments, which most docile people accept, swallow, and think their own "preferences." So, Black gay men lack reverence for other gay men [feminine, Black] because they have been taught to do so as a subtle means of controlling their compliance within the culture, to keep them more likely to stay within the flock - which is producing babies and being a docile worker who must provide for house and home for said babies (a few generations ago, a bachelor had no hope of being promoted in major companies since the companies thought a married, father was less likely to rock the boat).

Ultimately, endowed with such stupid prejudices/preferences, these narrow-minded Black gay men will not grow into a revolutionary cadre - this phenomenon transcends race/ethnicity, of course, functioning the exact same way among other wage-slave, working class peoples. This is a conversation that has run through my gay/queer existence since high school in the early 80's and met documentation in my Queer Nation/SF 90's .

90th Anniversary of the Soviet Revolution

Reportage being what it is, it's best to follow the old-school reporter's adage: "Even if your mother says she loves you, fact-check it." This has been clear the last week with the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution that began the USSR [being on an older calendar, our November was their October]. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about the Soviet Union and has reduced that long history to an aspect of Joseph Stalin's years as leader.

I did read one clever joke which goes like this:

The Soviet Union is founded and Lenin dies and goes to Hell. Soon after, the Devil becomes so agitated with Lenin trying to organize the doomed residents of Hell he calls God and asks for a trade, Lenin for God's worst angel. God makes the trade. Later on, the Devil calls God to see how things are going, but his call is answered by a bureaucrat Angel who tells the Devil "God doesn't exist."

Funny, but what the USSR did was serious. It took an exploited country in peonage and reorganized its resources to become a First-World Industrial country and "power". It did this despite a bank-imposed Western economic Depression of the 1930's and invasions by the capitalist West. Keep that in mind: while the US and UK witnessed bread lines and a shrinking of available money, this backward, mystical Czarist-ruled country was building factories, universities, and seeing the first rural to urban migration of an educated cadre of people.

Enter Stalin in the Western nightmare. Since we cannot focus on the achievements of the USSR during these years, AND LEARN FROM THEM, Uncle Joe is trotted out as a tyrant and murderer of millions of people, period.

Can you hear the liberals and conservatives howl if "I" were to reduce the US Revolution to the slaughter of millions of Native Americans? The Native Americans got in the way of Western imperial expansion. As Primo Levi would say, those who could not be complicit, perished. So too in Stalin's years: how many of us know people stuck in their old ways and who refuse - as Che put it - to be "housebroken"? Stalin exterminated them for holding on to their peonage and peonage values, and this is just as cruel. But just as our liberals and conservatives would say US history is more complicated than just bleeding the lives of Natives, the USSR's is too.

When I worked at San Francisco's YMCA - one of the best jobs I have ever had - I met many Russian retirees who were patrons. They were very proud of what the USSR did and the technical education it afforded them. They would always introduce themselves as Russians who had post-doctoral degrees in [fill in the blank].

Similarly, at the end of the Ibero-American Summit in Chile, Spain's king told President Hugo Chavez to shut up. Predictably, this was badly reported. Of course, the end of the story is King Juan Carlos hailed a hero in Europe for "putting Chavez in his place." No irony here, which should remind us that Spain is still part of Europe.

The reports I read from the BBC and the Miami Herald reported that Chavez called former Spanish PM a "a fascist," and current PM Zapatero interrupted to ask for more civility. Chavez persisted, and the king stepped in using the verb tense you would use with a child "Why don't you shut up?" No mention that Aznar was behind backing the coup against Chavez's elected government. The BBC and Miami Herald are silent on this. Chavez, like Stalin, cannot be credited with sanity or achievement, only insanity.

Our Shared Values - The Rulers Speak

A week ago, the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, an absolute ruler who is known to oppress women, ethnic minorities, and torture dissidents was fetted by none other than the queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. Since nothing the queen says publicly is of her own making but approved by the government, her lavish of praise of this man should alert conscious people. I daresay it will not.

The Queen toasted this potentate noting "our shared values." Why shouldn't we be immediately frightened and incensed enough by this transparent assault on the public dignity to rid the world of both their royal offices? For whom do they speak?

The world is now noting - in some dark corners celebrating - the significance of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about this, depicting it as one long, bloody Stalinist nightmare. NPR is depicting present-day Russians as under some kind of voodoo spell for longing for the Stalin days. Could it be that in the 1930's while the West was plunged into a manufactured economic depression, the USSR was industrializing, ending peonage, building universities and outpacing the West in GNP?

May I suggest we examine our shared values?

The other day our Retard in Chief, Bush, said some words about Cuba being a GULAG, desiring democracy in Cuba, dissidents of conscience, and never budging an inch from the blockade against the island until multi-party elections were allowed.

Former First Minister to HER MAJESTY'S government,. Tony Blair, has been quoted as saying some rude things about Fidel and Cuba's government as well.

The Saudis don't get such bile from the Free World. No Presidential Medals of Freedom for any of the Disappeared in Saudi dungeons. So what then are the shared values if the Saudis can disappear, torture, subjugate huge swathes of its population and be fetted by the Queen and fawned over by the prince of Wales?

Could the shared value be the primacy of personal profit, even if human slavery is required, the laboring and starving of children to meet the bottom line, the brutalization of women, sexual & ethnic minorities to keep our minds in the Dark Ages, the destruction of the environment is concerned?

The proof is in their pudding. Katrina: the poor and Black literally abandoned in full view of the world to die, and our Dry Drunk kept to the line: GOOD JOB BROWNIE!

Believe them.

Believe the queen when she speaks of the shared values, and look ahead and behind you. As Maya Angelou said: when someone tells you they're crazy, believe them the FIRST time.

US Civics 101: Gay Cruising

"I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport." Sen Larry Craig.

That was the only true statement he made, this closeted liar who is another hypocrite who backed DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act].

"I am not gay. I never have been gay." This is a LIE and queerly rendered phrase, "never have been".

Let me give you a quick lesson about your country and how it has treated gay men.

CNN and the major media in the first 24 hours of this news release that Craig was caught in a bathroom police sting at the Minneapolis airport: are treating his behavior as a psychotic episode rather than an indictment on what the West has wrought on gay men.

Veteran journalist and MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews tonight wants to draw a distinction between the gay lifestyle and breaking the law.

Mr. Matthews, laws are lines in the sand written by men with power and can sweep any class of person into a prison cell. Not too long ago, gay lifestyle AND cruising a park were equally illicit acts, at the very least deserving the person a good beating by your local police.

I resist being made into the moral equivalent of hegemonic straights, being asked to follow their line.

It was not until a stone's throw away that we've seen a proliferation of gay night spots, raves, journalism of many stripes, stars coming out, Republicans endorsing civil unions.

But I remember as a teen in the 80's and even into the 90's that there was only THE ADVOCATE, a rather right-wingish gay magazine that was kept tucked away in some magazine stores in the PORN SECTION. Mind you: THE ADVOCATE is strictly a news magazine, nothing pornographic about it, but the very topic "gay" was enough to have it hidden in certain magazine shops where we knew where and how to get it. This was the Reagan Era.

Meeting each other as youth meant relying on the good graces of older gay men who would open their homes for our parties and our youth-organizing meetings, which I sneaked away to every Tuesday. In St Louis where I went to college and the Inland Empire where I mostly grew up: there were no gay bars. None! You had to drive to East St. Louis or Hollywood for that. Meanwhile, Gay men of many various reputations met in the park. It actually was a social thing, laughing, joking, and checking out ... always aware that the St Louis police would descend on us at any moment and make arrests. Missouri was one of 24 states where being gay was illegal.

We also knew that many gay men met in public bathrooms of airports and bus stations. The locker rooms of gyms were also known spaces to meet gay men.

If you don't know the signals we would give each other, read the Craig story: the peering, the foot tap ... Craig sounds really dumb having an excuse for these signals. Straight men do not peer into closed bathroom stalls, tap the foot of men in neighboring stalls, or make hand gestures under the stall to other men. This is a private tale of gay men, mostly gay men of a certain time.

For mystical reasons from Heaven, this same phenomenon exists in Mexico where I spent three months and Cuba, where I spent a month. The famous park in central Havana, La Copelia, is a big cruising ground for gay men. La Copelia is known in Latin America as the place to get the best ice cream, and Cubans line up for hours for a scoop. Sweets and Sweets at La Copelia!!

When I worked at the YMCA men were often caught being naughty in the sauna or elsewhere. My straight coworkers and my younger gay coworkers could not relate to this phenomenon, but I had had enough of their bafflement and had to let them know what country they lived in.

Now you know. By the way, the new so-called openness in the gay community has thrown our gay elders to the trash, since the young no longer need their good graces, but that is another diatribe.