DEVO: Chicago, the Vic. 11.13.2009, 8 PM Night Two-Freedom of Choice (review)

Chicago, Illinois--Last night's Chicago performance was a barn burner for the many Midwestern fans of DEVO, itself being a Midwestern band going back to the early 1970s. As a matter of fact, the members of DEVO met at Kent State University during the Vietnam War era, some were members of SDS, and bassist Gerald Casale helped organize the antiwar demonstration in the spring of 1970 in which the infamous shootings took place. If you stay in the Midwest long enough, you get as weird as these guys or weirder, mostly from boredom.

Far from being "nerds," or "yuppies," DEVO began as a multimedia arts collective and still operates as one to this day. The real irony in all of this is that they never broke up and have continued to record in their Sunset Strip "Mutato" studio doing soundtrack and commercial work, the most well known being with director Wes Anderson.

Like several other old school punk and postpunk bands that have been touring this year--like the Pixies and even R.E.M.--the spuds were doing entire albums live and in their original running order. Night one was "Are We Not Men?" from 1978 (a punk classic) which sold out so quickly that another night was added to their Chicago appearance. Night two brought the entire "Freedom of Choice" LP from 1980, and yes, "Whip It" was in full bloom with all of its punch and glory. The music hasn't aged and the entire original lineup looked healthier and happier than they have in--well--over a decade, and the mood was celebratory, even for Chicago. From the opening guitar-riffs of "Girl U Want" to the more obscured album cuts like "Gates of Steel" and Mr. B's Ballroom," there was a real sense that this music hasn't aged at all...which was interesting since there were probably no more than maybe two dozen twenty-somethings to be seen. The majority of the crowd was 30-and-up, and with the bar, it was an 18-and-older show. But what the hell, people are broke all over the place these days! The audience was more fun than people watching at Wal-Mart. The icing on the cake was the gorgeous Bettie Page-style model coming out with her boxing-round cards emblazoned with "Track 1," and so on.

Some of the best times I had was looking at all of the former New Wave glam queens, now in their forties and early fifties, but still looking pretty good! Many concertgoers literally hadn't seen the group since the 1980s, or if they were like this writer it was their first time ever. The merchandising will be legendary, but there was nothing especially crass about it and it all appeared to have been made in America. All said, it was exactly what you would have wanted out of a DEVO concert and that includes Mark Mothersbaugh coming out onstage and singing "Beautiful World" in the second set dressed as the utterly grotesque "Boojie Boy," then regaling the audience in a totally surreal account of DEVO's trek to Los Angeles and meeting Michael Jackson, that he was dead, and how great it would be if he could rise from the grave like in the video "Thriller" to tell us all "what a beautiful world it truly is." The brutal truth was that there was no irony to be had!

But really, having been a budding teenager listening to Freedom of Choice when it was new, this was just a real road to Mecca moment, pure bliss. Not only is DEVO still great, they're professional and can still stop on a dime. Most of these guys are hitting their sixties, but the joy and the appreciation were so palpable that Mark Mothersbaugh, and even Gerald Casale, could only smile along with the rest of us and enjoy a very special tour in a very unique cultural moment. One of the greatest surprises of the evening was the dusting-off of a very old DEVO song, "Be Stiff," going back to the mid-1970s, almost one of the earliest songs that they ever did. Hey, they weren't going to do "Oh No! It's DEVO!" (1982) or "Shout!" (1984). Here's to art and crowd pleasers! Whoever said you can't have both in art was wrong.

LBJ Library releases final recordings...and implicates Richard Nixon in treason

Austin, Texas--The library is reporting that these are the very last tapes, covering the final months of the President Lyndon Baines Johnson from May 1968 to January 1969.

What's revelatory is his discussion with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen and the person-in-question, Richard M. Nixon. During the Watergate hearings Dirksen was the Republican congressman who stated that Richard M. Nixon would "split the party."

"This is treason," Johnson said, referring to people close to Nixon, during a conversation with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen. The Democratic president never accused the Republican who would succeed him of treason, but said, "If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the (peace) conference table, that's going to be his responsibility." ("New tapes show LBJ worried about Vietnam, Nixon," AP, 12.04.2008)

So, he's stated that Nixon's operatives were committing "treason," yet never "accused" Nixon of them in the tapes directly. The problem is, he was telling Dirksen just those very words. Isn't it great to have the press tell us our history, even when evidence suggests otherwise, right before our eyes?

Nixon's operatives were in South Vietnam doing their best to scuttle peace negotiations until the elections were over in the United States, namely, after November 1968. Their approach was to keep South Vietnamese leaders away from the negotiating tables to hurt the chances of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. This is an attempt at prolonging a war, which is treason.

In our timeworn American political tradition, this was brought-up during the Watergate hearings and quickly swept under the rug like the allegations of CIA drug smuggling in Southeast Asia during the war and in the Iran-Contra pipeline.

Special counsel John Dohr's investigators discovered corroboration into these stories and LBJ sounds absolutely certain that this was occurring in Vietnam. He had intelligence and media reports to suggest this was so, and he went so far as to contact Richard Nixon--then running for the White House--and confronted him over it. LBJ continued to harangue the President-elect after the elections for several days. Nixon being Nixon, he lied and did his best to dissuade LBJ that this was not the case.

But never mind LBJ--he didn't know what treason or abuse of office was, he had no experience there...excepting in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when he authorized wiretaps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (with the aid of Bill Moyers) and many civil rights era leaders, strong-armed everyone who got in his way, and so on. A wolf knows a wolf.

Do a search on John Dohr and his role in the Watergate investigations and hearings, and while you're at it, try finding much of anything on the Watergate probe's findings in any detail. You're not going to find much. Why is that? Unsurprisingly, CBS neglected even one mention of this--the most important revelation--from their broadcasts, instead focusing on LBJ's reactions to the riots at the Democratic Convention and other errata. Big surprise.

"New tapes show LBJ worried about Vietnam, Nixon," AP, 12.04.2008:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=32294008

The LBJ Library and Museum: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu

The Indiana GOP's Laughable Obama Mailer on William Ayers

South Bend, Indiana--What do you do when your party has nothing to offer the public except more of the same corruption, pederasty, whore-mongering, ethical-lapses, and an unbending loyalty to the rich at the expense of the rest of the public? You keep beating the same drum, over-and-over again because you have no new ideas or agendas and never did. In that moronic indefatigable spirit, Indiana's GOP sent this piece-of-paper to me.

This isn't to say Barack Obama is perfect by a long-shot, but the connection to former Weathermen leader Bill Ayers is stretching things more than a little bit. The truth is, it's a blatant lie meant to squeeze the rest of that 9/11 fear out of a frightened minority of the public.

Recall that this piece is coming from someone who doesn't intend to vote for Barack Obama, but for Ralph Nader (a write-in, Madonna's...well, Madonna, though Mickey Mouse is a real person). That said, I don't have a problem with the majority of the Weathermen bombings, though the truth be known, their core leadership (people like Ayers and Dohrn) were all rich kids throwing a tantrum over their parents' war. Like their parents, they had--and probably still harbor--a lust for power, which they got a good taste of during their rampage.

But the United States was committing genocide in Southeast Asia at that time, violence against Black Americans over the Civil Rights movement was appalling and widespread, and the nation was in flames and divided as it had been during the Civil War. Today, one could argue forcefully that we're doing the same things in slow-motion in Iraq, and that the GOP is doing their best to neglect and disenfranchise Blacks. One would expect similar activitites as the Weathermen today, but welcome to the post-9/11 and Oklahoma City bombing world. Today, domestic terrorism is unlikely to come from a leftward-direction.

If you're an individual who sees these things for what they are--unspeakable crimes against humanity committed by our government for the benefit of giant corporations, you have some options.The choices are few and difficult: you could just try to go on with your life knowing what's really happening in another country in your name. If you have a conscience, this isn't going to be easy, but never underestimate the power of rationalization, it worked wonders in Germany under Hitler. One of them is what Ayers and the rest of them did during the Vietnam war, though I don't recommend doing so.

Another option is to back what's happening wholeheartedly, eventually becoming a party to the slaughter, if only indirectly. This is the easiest route, since most of society and its institutions are going to tell you constantly that this viewpoint is not only valid, but necessary for "the maintenance of our way of life." And isn't our way of life wonderful? You'll be rewarded for doing what's wrong in most cases, but it's even money you won't be punished...at least not by Americans.

Yet another option is to take the route of nonviolent civil disobedience to the war, not even allowing for the application of violence against property that serves the war's expediencies--property that makes the war possible at all, like supply-dumps, recruiting centers, military bases, defense research labs, defense contractors and their facilities, defense research labs at public universities, and-so-on. These were the kinds of targets that the Weathermen targeted, and their main goal was to destroy property only, not to target human beings. But they did want to instill fear and terror in those who supported and expedited the war in Southeast Asia, making them terrorists. They wanted to "spread the love," which I don't find morally wrong.

Ultimately, I don't advocate what Ayers and others in the Weathermen Group did during the 1960s-70s. They and a group that became the PLP (the ineffectual Maoist People's Labor Party) splintered the most effective progressive student political organizations, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) America has likely ever known. That's not the issue. The issue is Obama's connection to Ayers, which is practically nonexistent. Times have changed, but the GOP doesn't appear to have noticed.

For example, the generation of new voters never lived through the red-baiting of the Cold War years, scarcely knows all the details of the 1960s, and doesn't really care at all. They just know things are fucked-up and that they don't make enough money to live on. No "socialism" there, just common sense by ordinary people. The kids don't want to hear about Bill Ayers. Neither do the majority of Americans who want to hear about what McCain and Palin plan to do to "fix" the economy and to stabilize it. Reform is in the air, but all candidate McCain can do is talk about Ayers. This is because he has no "plan" and no vision, and neither does the rest of his obsolete party (who said they were ever good? not I).

Imagine that: all the GOP has to sell is fear. That's not a good platform for needed change that the vast majority of the public now wants and is going to start demanding before long. But please, please keep banging that same drum until the bitter end. I know you will. In one week--at-minimum--you're going to lose a lot of seats in Congress. And, oh yeah: thanks Indiana GOP, I needed kindling to burn the rest of my trash out here in the country. Thanks.

If Bill Ayers was a threat to anyone during the 1960s-70s, it was himself and the rest of the Weathermen, a cop, and a janitor. He and his wife Bernadine Dohrn helped splinter most of the New Left, making it essentially impotent in-the-face of an escalating war under President Nixon. It's all reminiscent of what Pier Paolo Pasolini said about the student riots in Paris during the Spring of 1968. "It's an internecine struggle." said the radical Italian Communist, poet, philosopher, movie director, and general polymath. Pasolini was right about Europe--and unwittingly--about people like the Weathermen. Ayers and Dohrn came from privileged-backgrounds. While underclass radicals went to prison in the 1970s-80s, Ayers and Dohrn were allowed into academia. Maybe that's why they do so much community work today. They should for the rest of their lives, they owe us and their comrades in our prison system.

This Republican mailer below omits quite a bit. If you were ignorant of the facts--as most Hoosiers are--you'd think Ayers met Obama right after he stopped bombing and turned himself in alongside his wife in 1980. Obama was a blip at that time, a nobody.

Barack Obama a radical Leftist? Take it from someone who actually is: that's a laugh. If only he was a Fred Hampton, a Malcolm X, or a Martin Luther King Jr. The fact is, he isn't. If....

Exploiting our victims: CNN's "Youssef"

CNN--There are no words for how despicable and misguided all of the coverage surrounding this poor little Iraqi boy has been. It's just another humiliating illustration of how sick and indifferent our culture is at this particular historical moment. This is nothing new.

In 1906, we were finishing a similar act of aggression in the Philippines, murdering tens-of-thousands of human beings there so that the Navy could have a refueling station in the Pacific.

In a war of aggression, it's understood in the codes of the Geneva Conventions (beginning in 1928 with President Coolidge's and the Senate's ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact) and other areas of international law that an aggressor is responsible for children like Youssif. For some reason, Americans haven't been properly educated about the fact that any deaths or injuries following an illegal invasion are the fault and responsibility of the aggressor nation.

Regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and Afghanistan), we are the aggressors with no legal merit to our reasoning for the attacks. We did this to little Youssef. It doesn't matter if a militia of Shia, Sunni, Syrians, Iranians, or even Bedouins, set-fire to him. It's nobody else's fault but America's. CNN and the rest of the mainstream media carried the water for the Bush administration and banged the drums of war loudly for the interests who wanted the invasion.

This is to their eternal shame, and they now appear to be showing signs of cracking-up from the guilt...in little Youssef. Notice that it's OK to show someone like Youssef and their scars if it has a propaganda value. If it was just framed as something we did to him--which it was patently not in the CNN story--it might be noble, but this is far from that. How many tens-of-thousands of "Youssefs" are there in Iraq and the region who bear scars from our aggressions? Surely, it's staggering and creating another generation of future "terrorists." An historical example is necessary.

Imagine Youssef that was a grocer's son in Chicago during the 1930s. Youssef's father is attacked and intimidated by a gang that has taken-over their neighborhood, and they want protection money or they're going to torch their home and their business. Youssef's father declines paying these extortionists and the gang eventually firebombs the grocery store, causing the same injuries to him that we see in our current real world example.

But the gang doesn't stop there--they're afraid of looking too bad, and too dangerous, so they pay for Youseff's hospital bills while the cameras are rolling, and while the press is swallowing the lie out of fear. The thugs never return to torment Youssef and his family, but the damage has already been done.

This is the essence of the term "corruption," the destruction and liquefaction of human bodies for the enrichment of criminals. Welcome to Iraq, welcome to hell, we are that gang. We learned the lessons of Vietnam alright: hide the victims, even if it's necessary to hide them in-plain-sight.

CNN on August 23rd: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/23/iraq.boyfolo/index.html