In Defense of Hippies Danny Goldberg's reaction to denigration of "hippie element" at Occupy Wall St. Dissent Magazine October 23, 2011Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture.
In a post for the Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg lamented, “Drum circles and clusters of earnest incense-burning meditators ensure that stereotypes about the hippie left remain alive.” AtEsquire, Charles Pierce worried that few could “see past all the dreadlocks and hear…over the drum circles.” Michael Smerconish asked on the MSNBC show Hardball if middle Americans “in their Barcalounger” could relate to drum circles. The New Republic’s Alex Klein chimed in, “In the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies....Wall Street survived.” And the host of MSNBC’s Up, Chris Hayes (editor at large of the Nation), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn’t going to “beat the drum” or “give you a free hug,” to knowing laughter. continue reading... |
|
This is a must-read essay...we have much to learn from Tom Hayden's wisdom and experience, and his prescient vision over forty years ago...our only criticism is that he doesn't call for the eradication of capital as an ontological construct, which as we've said throughout, is a root cause of our social, economic, political and environmental problems...see our note to him below.
Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street,
|
Dear Tom,With only the greatest respect and admiration for you I have to say, this time it's different. You make many, many good points here, and we have much to learn from your leadership. But we cannot talk about reform until we eradicate capital as an ontological being.
Capitalism has progressed exponentially as a destructive force in the last forty years, both of the planet and of individuals and communities. It reshapes the world according to its inhuman teleology. It is the fabricating material used by the most inhuman among us, the pleonexic psychopath, to build his competitive, productive and consumptive anti-human world. Its singular essence of reproduction destroys and so the fiction must be revealed, discarded and a better story told. No reform that leaves capital as our social organizing principal will enable us to endure. With warmest regards, EJW |
"As I've often told Allen Ginsberg, you can't blame the president for the state of the country; it's always the poet's fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold."
--Ken Kesey, speaking to the Reality Club in NY 1989
Quoted from Adventures With Kesey, The Nation Magazine, December 19, 2011
--Ken Kesey, speaking to the Reality Club in NY 1989
Quoted from Adventures With Kesey, The Nation Magazine, December 19, 2011
Love Always, Carolyn A film about Kerouac, Cassady and Me
The real genius behind the Beat movement in literature never published a book during his life. He appeared as a main character in many books, though, from ‘Go’ by John Clellon Holmes to ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac to ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ by Tom Wolfe....
His free-flowing letter writing style inspired the young Kerouac to break his ties to the sentimental style he’d picked up from Thomas Wolfe and invent his notion of ‘spontaneous prose.’ Without Neal Cassady, the Beat Generation would never have happened.
Neal Cassady was raised by an alcoholic father in the skid row hotels of Denver’s Larimer Street. A car thief with a unique ability to charm strangers, he spent time in reform schools and juvenile prisons and developed the suave instincts of a con artist, although he never seemed to want to con anybody out of more than a ten-dollar bill, a roll in the hay or a good conversation.
A friend named Hal Chase left Denver to enroll at Columbia University, and Cassady traveled to New York to visit him in December 1946. It was here that he met Kerouac and Ginsberg. Ginsberg immediately fell in love with him, and Cassady, who had a hustler’s instinct to be whatever the person he’s with wants him to be, began a sexual relationship with Ginsberg, balancing it with the numerous heterosexual relationships he enjoyed more. At the same time, he persuaded Kerouac to teach him how to write fiction. continue reading...
Neal Cassady was raised by an alcoholic father in the skid row hotels of Denver’s Larimer Street. A car thief with a unique ability to charm strangers, he spent time in reform schools and juvenile prisons and developed the suave instincts of a con artist, although he never seemed to want to con anybody out of more than a ten-dollar bill, a roll in the hay or a good conversation.
A friend named Hal Chase left Denver to enroll at Columbia University, and Cassady traveled to New York to visit him in December 1946. It was here that he met Kerouac and Ginsberg. Ginsberg immediately fell in love with him, and Cassady, who had a hustler’s instinct to be whatever the person he’s with wants him to be, began a sexual relationship with Ginsberg, balancing it with the numerous heterosexual relationships he enjoyed more. At the same time, he persuaded Kerouac to teach him how to write fiction. continue reading...
Should We Bring Back the Free Breakfast Program?
Written by RK Byers on August 30, 2010 12:09 pm
As everyone on Blackplanet knows, the Black Panther Free Breakfast Program was perhaps the most creative, ingenious, daring and visionary of all their initiatives.
It was also, despite the gun totting and the spouting of Constitutional rights like Founding Fathers with Tourettes, their most dangerous.
It was, after all, the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast Program that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover labeled the “greatest threat to the internal security of the United States”
Amazing, huh? Feeding little poor kids from the hood was a threat to national security.
Of course, the Panthers mixed in political theory, Black history and self-pride with the bowls of grits they passed around.
And of course they also knew, as most nutritionists can tell you, that not only is breakfast the most important meal of the day, but that kids that go without breakfast are often slower, more lethargic and have a harder time learning then their better fed contemporaries.
Personally, I’ve always believed one of the reasons that while an average IQ is 100, the average IQ of a person of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage is 116, isn’t because Jews have less schooling, but because they have considerably more.
Jews have, in addition to their traditional American education, Hebrew school, where they learn about and take pride in their own culture.
The Free Breakfast Program was taking that route.
Now, conspiracy theorists amongst us will probably suggest that the reason that feeding little Black kids from the hood is so dangerous is because with more education, not only will little Black kids become less likely to strengthen the Prison-industrial complex, but also, with more education, it is likely that little Black kids will altogether lose interest in crap.
And America’s the world’s greatest creator and exporter of crap.
Black intellectuals as diverse as Dick Gregory and Kwame Nkrumah have agreed that part of the neo-colonialist hustle is to keep the underclass not only earning pennies working brain-dead jobs, but also to keep them only interested in shinny toys and gadgets. The latest phone. The newest watch.
A generation of Black kids that had no interest at all in such nonsense and only wanted to rush the libraries for more and more copies of Invisible Man and The Fire Next Time would be astonishing.
But would it all get shut down again?
As everyone on Blackplanet knows, the Black Panther Free Breakfast Program was perhaps the most creative, ingenious, daring and visionary of all their initiatives.
It was also, despite the gun totting and the spouting of Constitutional rights like Founding Fathers with Tourettes, their most dangerous.
It was, after all, the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast Program that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover labeled the “greatest threat to the internal security of the United States”
Amazing, huh? Feeding little poor kids from the hood was a threat to national security.
Of course, the Panthers mixed in political theory, Black history and self-pride with the bowls of grits they passed around.
And of course they also knew, as most nutritionists can tell you, that not only is breakfast the most important meal of the day, but that kids that go without breakfast are often slower, more lethargic and have a harder time learning then their better fed contemporaries.
Personally, I’ve always believed one of the reasons that while an average IQ is 100, the average IQ of a person of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage is 116, isn’t because Jews have less schooling, but because they have considerably more.
Jews have, in addition to their traditional American education, Hebrew school, where they learn about and take pride in their own culture.
The Free Breakfast Program was taking that route.
Now, conspiracy theorists amongst us will probably suggest that the reason that feeding little Black kids from the hood is so dangerous is because with more education, not only will little Black kids become less likely to strengthen the Prison-industrial complex, but also, with more education, it is likely that little Black kids will altogether lose interest in crap.
And America’s the world’s greatest creator and exporter of crap.
Black intellectuals as diverse as Dick Gregory and Kwame Nkrumah have agreed that part of the neo-colonialist hustle is to keep the underclass not only earning pennies working brain-dead jobs, but also to keep them only interested in shinny toys and gadgets. The latest phone. The newest watch.
A generation of Black kids that had no interest at all in such nonsense and only wanted to rush the libraries for more and more copies of Invisible Man and The Fire Next Time would be astonishing.
But would it all get shut down again?
Jill Bolte Taylor PhD is a neuro-anatomist who watched herself have a massive stroke that wiped out the left side of her brain--the language side, the analytic side. Over course of her recovery she wrote, My Stoke of Insight, a book in which she describes her near death experience and connection with the world solely by virtue of her right brain--a brain without the mechanism to divide the world into recognizable parts, but instead perceives the world as masses of vibrating energy that flow one into the other, all interconnected, a sublime experience and awareness of the world. This is the heart of the hippie movement. It is the heart of the Occupy movement. Jill is moved to tell this story, to share this story, because her hopes are your hopes: a oneness in the world, an awareness of our utter interconnectedness. "If I found nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find nirvana...If people could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres...what a tremendous gift this would be...to how we live our lives." Watch her talk, read her book, then you'll know: we can step to the right of our left hemispheres and shape the world with what we find there.