President Obama — SNCC’s Victory

Victory, after forty six years.
This happened last night. This is for the children.
It is for the grand children.  This is the victory
of the Movement. This is the victory of SNCC.
What were they fighting for? Not just integration.
Not even justice and the right to vote.
They did not use the word Hope. I never heard “hope”
spoken. I did hear the word “Dream”.
“It was like I died and went to Heaven and it was
integrated there.”
Heaven, that is a word I heard.
SNCC was fighting for heaven on earth here in America.
SNCC was fighting for equality in jobs, in income, not only for
Black folk, but for all folks.
Many are dead who  lead this fight. James Forman is  dead.
He led us all. Sam Shirah is dead. He was a white boy from
Alabama, who  they picked out and spit on, always,
He was a “nigger lover.” So was I for that matter.
Nigger lover and proud of it.
And now this, this victory.
It took forty-six years.
I was twenty. That’s how old I was.  Everyone was young.
June Johnson is dead. She was fifteen.
This is for everyone. This is for the children. This is forever.
This is amazing.

November 4, 2008

The Digital Dark Age

Trying to read Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s new Booker Prize winning novel I noticed
the text was not centered on the page. On every page, there was at least an eighth of an inch of white space on the right side of the page, above the text, than there was on the left. In other words when the pages were printed, the text was not properly lined up or when they cut the pages up, the printers were negligent in doing that job. The pages belonged in the heap of recycled paper. But they were instead bound into my book, a minor best seller.
Who cares? At least there was ink on the page. Many books I purchase today have so little ink on the pages that the text is hard to make out. Nancy is reading a new book on dogs that seems to be printed on newsprint. We have shown this to our dogs, and they too have trouble with it. Hers doesn’t even smell like a book. Who cares? Dogs only chew on books. They don’t actually read them.
Recently I was in the classy Photography Gallery on Fifth Avenue and a new intern there, recently graduated from a fine eastern university said to me, “I almost never read a book.” Now I hear on the radio that having books digitilized is popular because it makes reading “more convenient”. Why carry a book around, when you have to commute, when you can grab your Kindle and just keep reading on the train, and the subway. Great. I can look over the shoulder of the person next to me and peep into their Kindle. Much more convenient.
Isn’t life convenient enough? We do almost nothing to sustain ourselves. We neither hunt nor fish nor garden. Some one else does it for us, sort of. We do not walk. We fly through the air in huge containers all mashed up like slaves in the middle passage. We zip around in cars not having to communicate with a single other person, not inside our own car. Isn’t that convenient enough. We need not write a letter because we can wiz off an e-mail. We need not do anything at all anymore because machines will do those things for us.
So why are we still here? And now they want to take our books. What will the dogs chew on? But dogs are messy, they get old and piss on the carpets and worse. Thank God for the children and the grandchildren. They can live on into the Digital Dark Age. Everything will be convenient and then they can stop having sex. What a mess that is! And then there will be nothing.

Google and the Narrowing of Knowledge

I am reading The Wilderness Warrior, Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley, a real page turner if you like to spend time in the American wilderness. You almost wish Teddy was president today. He’d take care of Global Warming. Probably shoot a couple people driving Hummers, and demolish a coal burning power plant, after declaring them all illegal by Presidential Degree. Teddy was a bear when it came to protecting Mother Nature for us. He also was not impressed by the then, 1907, brand new gasoline powered automobiles in Washington (he walked fast and rode a horse), and he found Henry Ford and his Model T “boring.” Perhaps in his inner child he knew that one day automobiles would destroy life on the planet. I have a similar feeling about Google (which I use interchangeably with The Net). Who cares about words anyway?

Then I reached P. 671 and started reading about El Morro, which Teddy declared a National Monument in 1906. El Morro! I love El Morro. You can see this massive hump of sand stone from sixty miles away, and you cannot reach the Zuni reservation from the east without passing right beneath it. The conquistador Juan de Onate carved his name in it in 1605. Nothing like finding a lost love in a book you are reading or a film you are watching. Only The Wilderness Warrior says that El Morro is in Trinidad, New Mexico.

But there is no Trinidad, New Mexico! Trinidad is in Colorado. Trinidad is the location of Drop City where the hippies lived in geodesic domes and consumed quantities of Acid. El Morro, the El Morro, is near Ramah, a Navajo town hundreds of miles away deep in New Mexico.

How could such a glaring error be published in such an important book? Easy.
Today even in major publishing houses people no longer think, as in using the brain God gave them, which is crammed full of the information they worked so hard to gather themselves, by, among other things, reading books! Or worse, actually having an experience in the real world like walking in the woods or desert. They “Google it”.
My guess is that an intern proofread the book, and using the internet typed in “El Morro”, found that there is a Mt. Moro in Southern Colorado, and then proceeded to undo all the correct information in the paragraph and replace it with the miss-information he or she had found on the web.

That’s what’s wrong with google and the internet. It has narrowed our portal of knowledge from an infinitesimal number of individuals walking into libraries all over the world, and going through the “work” of reading and assimilating information with their brains, into the simplistic task of point and click and scan. Who needs to think? You cut and paste, its much less emotional. If Darwin was right, this should result in a world wide web of people that look human, but actually do not know how to think.

“America the beautiful”

The best way to learn anything about America is to talk to someone else. Having breakfast in a diner in Greenport, Long Island, I talked to the cook. After making the eggs, he was outside to wash the windows. The young Latino’s teeth were spaced and crooked, his right arm covered with some fine Aztec tattoos. Since his English was as good as my Spanish, we went back and forth between the two languages. I always ask people like this kid the same question. Do you get to go home? The answer tells us a lot about ourselves.

No, he hasn’t been home to Mexico City in ten years. That’s how long it’s been since he has seen “his Mami.” That’s the word he used, “Mami.” He began his perilous journey when he was seventeen, now he is twenty-seven. If he were to go back to visit, it would cost him $15,000 to pay a smuggler to get him back across the border, and return him to Greenport. This is where he cleaned the toilet long enough until they gave him a job cleaning windows and he did that long enough for him to get a job cooking eggs. He wanted to show me the Lady of Guadalupe, which was tattooed on his back. A friend runs a shop in Greenwich Village and did it for free.

So this illegal cooks eggs in Greenport, takes the Hampton Jitney into Manhattan ($42 round trip), and returns to cooks eggs for people like me. He has never committed a crime, in fact I am sure he is a much more law abiding citizen than I ever was, but he has not been able to visit his “Mami” in Mexico because if he did, he could not return. He is illegal. He is an illegal person.

How can a person be illegal? He has zero rights? He doesn’t exist? He lives constantly in a shadow like a dangerous animal or insect that we step on if he peeps out of his hole, only we need him to clean the toilets the windows the tables and cook the eggs, over easy. Last week in Los Angeles the Obama administration put pressure on a downtown clothing employer and they were forced to fire payroll 1,800 workers. Some of these people had been working there for ten years. They all paid into the social security system. Ten years! Most of them were women. What do they tell their children when they come home? I got fired from the place I have worked in since you were born and now I’m going into hiding and will ask if I can be a maid and clean houses? What kind of country is this? These out of control right wing people haters that keep repeating the mantra “everyone must obey the law”; where did they come from? Who were their ancestors? Lakota? Lenapes? Pueblo Indians? Where was their grandmother, or grandfather, or great grandmother born? Didn’t anyone ever give them a helping hand? Our treatment of illegal immigrants is plain disgusting. Nothing is more shameful of us as a people, not any war we make, not any lack of medical insurance, nothing. The right wing position is simply a matter of saying “I’ve got it, and you can go rot as far as I care.”

Immigration is a simple issue. It is an issue of caring about people. You either care that this kid can go home and visit his “Mami” or you do not. And of the people that do not care; there is something seriously wrong with them. I suggest counseling. Meanwhile, politically, we had best move forward without them.

Google vs The Bikeriders

The Bikeriders 1968, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan 1969, and Conversations with the Dead 1971, were all out of print within  two years of their publications. They had all been remaindered by their publishers and would remain out of print for at least twenty years each. “Conversations” is still out of print. Under Google’s new rules, Conversations with the Dead could be scanned and put on line by Google without even contacting me. Many photo book makers are torn between standing up for their rights, and “being left out” by the Ruler of the Internet.
So what is wrong with having Goggle bring my out of print work to the world wide web?
1) It is theft. Owner ship of out of print work reverts to the author (me). Copy right has worked well in America for centuries and is part of the foundation of our Democracy and the Ist Amendment.  I own my writing and my work. They really do have to ask.
2) Picture books are different. You cannot scan them and put them on the internet. Scanning a printed image destroys the beauty of the work which is embedded in the work itself. That is why authors make picture books. They are making a thing of beauty. That is why printers, ink, paper, and publishers and production managers are all so important. They all work  to create a thing of beauty, a book. In this case, as picture book.
There is nothing wrong with putting a picture book on the internet. But that can only be done the way a book is printed, which is to scan the individual images.  It is the difference between “the real thing” and a bad xerox of it.
If they want “Conversations with the Dead” on the internet they have to work with publishers, who employ the people to make the prints and make the scans and recreate the book for internet use, just the way a person makes a good website.
That’s a lot of work that will create a lot of jobs, and it should.
Publishers are the people to do this, as they are in the book business. Google seems intent on destroying the book business and its just possible, that they will.

Books, the printed smelly kind you hold in your hand, have been part of and have helped advance civilization for five hundred years. The Greeks and Ancient Jews used papyrus rolls, which they also held to write on, and to read, 2,500 years ago.  I’ld be real careful about messing with this stuff.  I’m not sure I would want to live without them.

Walter Cronkite RIP

Recently there was a ceremony to honor Walter Cronkite, who has passed away. “Everyone” was there, including our President Obama. Obama? What was he doing there? Walter is held up as an example for all journalists.

I must have missed something. By the nineteen seventies, as I tried to understand what was happening to our country, I   came to blame what was then beginning to be called “The Media”. “The News” was becoming omnipresent.  It was as if it was replacing reality.  I began to think of Walter Cronkite as a war criminal.

Now as I see this picture of President Obama and so many notables lined up to praise Cronkite I begin to think perhaps there is something wrong with me. Walter reached everyone, including me. As a child I could see him on “You Are There”, a pseudo history show that took you back to the Romans. In time he became the public face of CBS News. “Uncle Walter”, someone, everyone trusted. “Trusted” means you believed what he said was true. He was an inspiration in the sense that he presented and interpreted American reality and everyone believed what he said. Everyone. I wanted to be like Walter Cronkite!

But was it true? Did the America he reported on actually exist?
It took a couple days in the civil rights movement in 1962 to realize that everything I was hearing from Walter and CBS and all early 1960’s Media, was not so true. And then, about the very same time, came our slow but steady entrance into the War in Vietnam. What was Uncle Walter saying? What was CBS saying? I defy PBS, NPR, the History Channel, and any old documentarian out there to collect what CBS was telling us in 1962 and 1963 about the disaster we were creating, because I watched and I know.

Courage in journalism, as in any field is when you stand up and say what no one else wants you to say. Where were the broadcasts begging us to stay out of another war in Asia? Where were the broadcasts taking on Kennedy and the Warriors that were going to defend us from Communism and “the Domino Effect?” What Walter did, what CBS did, what Life and Look Magazine did, what they all did, was to beat the drumbeats of war. They did just what the media, and NPR does today; they followed individual American soldiers which automatically put them in a heroic light, slogging through rice paddy’s or what ever the duty of the day was, in order to do whatever our Government was telling us they were doing.

That’s not journalism. That is patriotism, something Joseph Goebbles would have understood. Walter was a Patriot, I grant him that. Dare I say it? Journalists are supposed to love the truth, not their country. I am from New York City, and I love it as much as anyone loves any place, but that is not what journalism is about.

So where did Cronkite lead us? Once we were well on our way to killing a million Vietnamese, and bringing about the death of 50,000 young Americans, he figured out, much too late, that the war he helped start wasn’t such a good idea after all. Once thousands of hippies and war protesters were getting their brains beaten out in front of him in 1968, he cried on television and admitted that, “gee, this is bad.”

So why does President Obama kow tow to this image? What is he bowing to? He is bowing to the power, what is left of it, of American Media. I mourn the passing of newspapers, we really must have them, but I will shed no tears for the passing of “The Media”. If the kids are not tuning in, it is because they are in front of the curve and figured out there are other and better ways of finding out the truth, one of which is to part the curtains and look out the window.

September 11, 2009

Memories of Myself, Photo Essays by Danny Lyon

http://www.amazon.com/Danny-Lyon-Memories-Myself/dp/0714848514

Memories of Myself, the Photo Essays of Danny Lyon. This new book from Phaidon, is ready after two years of work. Copies will reach Amerika in April, 2009.
Photojournalism from 1964 through 2002.

From “The Fisherman”, an unpublished excerpt

He sat in a Virginia jail cell, blood running down his head. Christ his head hurt. Was it the stitches? Or the fact that he had been knocked unconscious by long wooden baton. That morning they had walked the bridge that crossed the Potomac. He and Mark and Rachel, Mark holding the B&W home made flag, walking to the Pentagon. They got there before everyone else did. And he was knocked out by a Marshall who took one good swing at his skull using a long wooden baton, leaving him unconscious and bleeding. He woke up in jail. The air was filled with cigarette smoke. The dormitory, the bunks covered with young men, arrested and waiting, the sun light of morning slanting in through the narrow window. Hippies talking, students talking, poets talking, talking about police, talking about justice, talking about batons and clubs, talking about revolution.

He stood at the Lincoln Memorial remembering. Remembering when Peter Paul and Mary were standing there. He asked to make a picture of Marlon Brando, and the big guy grabbed James Baldwin who was half his size, grabbing him around the shoulders and both gave enormous grins as if they shared a secret, Baldwin showing a big gap in the middle between his front teeth. Bob Dylan the folksinger looked so young, a little lost, holding his guitar case among all those people milling beneath the statue. The great March for Jobs and Freedom which later be known as The March, to distinguish it for the many Marches that followed. This day as the Fisherman stood there, there was no March, just a cold winter day, with half a dozen people standing near the statue, as out on the Mall they prepared to swear Barack Obama in as the Forty Fourth President of the United States of America. It had to be done by Noon, that’s what the Constitution says. At lunch Julian said it was “the greatest event of my lifetime.”

He looked up at Lincoln, an alabaster giant, seated high above them. “In this Temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” It was a temple, the statue like Athena, high above the Greeks, who painted her all sorts of colors and considered her God. And to Lincoln’s left the words of the Second inaugural, one of the finest uses of the English language in all history, written by a self educated lawyer. It is wonderful to read, and it justifies a war that killed 700,000 Americans. Lincoln calls it “strange” that the South would fight for such a cause, he does not judge his enemies, but seems to understand that they too had a reason to go to war. The war, and the horrible suffering of the victims, including those on the battle field who suffered amputations for gun shot wounds, without anesthetics, were an Act of God. So the Union is preserved, and we now have Barack Obama in Lincoln’s place.

The fisherman does not buy this. The Civil war even more insane as all other wars. What Martin Luther King had to say on the steps on the Lincoln Monument, made more sense. He espoused non-violence. The great March was at the height of a non violent Movement, a Movement that was stopped by yet another war, the War in Vietnam.
Just a few hundred feet below the Lincoln Monument is the Monument to the soldiers killed in Vietnam, all 54,000 of them. The March took place in August of 1963. One year later the Movement floods Mississippi with voter registration workers, three of which are murdered that June, as soon as the program begins. In August of that same year, 1964, Congress passes the Bay of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the sending of combat troops to Vietnam. By then, hundreds of American “advisors” had already died. In the Spring of 1965 Johnson begins sending thousands of combat troops to Vietnam, and the dieing and killing escalates. That act of war, another “worthy” war, perhaps another war that God wanted, certainly another “just” war, is what ended the American Civil Rights Movement. Students and young people and Amerika turned their attention else where. Their lives were on the line. And some of them, many of them, lost them. Others ran to Canada. And a few, like the Fisherman, went to jail, or got knocked out, or marched. Vietnam had no Lincoln in the White House. The poets were in the streets.
“Hay Hay LBJ! How Many Kids did you Kill Today!”
Will Barack do better than Lincoln? He is going to have to. The stakes are higher. The ship of state is greater and more powerful, and moves by its own force, steadily, through the night.

From “The Fisherman”, work in progress

Grace Under Fire Part One — Zoriah at War

Zoriah war photographer

Zoriah Miller, age 32, has done what few Americans ever do. He has put his principles before his future ability to earn a living. He was “dis-embedded” with the Marines in Iraq because he first refused to give up the pictures he made of dead US Marines, and then refused to remove them from his remarkable blog. http://www.zoriah.net/

What a brave man. I am sure this ban is permanent and this war photographer will never again get to work closely with our armed forces. Censorship and control have always been part of our militarism. It was very hard, to cover the US in WW2 without submitting to censorship, but brave journalists often found a way to the front without approval. Even so publishers than censored their work. Self censorship, conducted by all the media has created more harm to our democracy than any foreign power ever has.

His two most damned pictures, both in B&W are as stressful to see as Gardner’s dead at Gettysburg and Fredericksburg. The way governments continue to create generations that support war is partly by keeping images like those now released by Zoriah away from us.

This is a very brave man, and a very good writer, and not because he can function under such horrific conditions. But because he has the courage of his convictions, something succsessful Americans in most fields seldom exhibit . From Zoriah’s blog:
“There are dying people strewn around like limp dolls along with lifeless bodies of all ages. People are screaming and crying running as if they have something important they have to do, only they can’t figure out what that important thing could possibly be. The air smells of burnt flesh and sweat is pouring off of my body. My lungs are still on fire from the run and I have to concentrate to see through the sweat coating my ballistic goggles and dust on my camera’s viewfinder. “

( READ THE ATHENIANS ON THE BEACH IN SYRACUSE)
THUCYDIDES

“Freedom is what I’m doin’ right now. ”

““Freedom is what I’m doin’ right now. Sittin’ down and talkin’ to you,” says Jesse Ruiz, one subject of MURDERERS, a man who had just spent eight and a half years in penitentiary for beating another man to death in Alphabet City with a Louisville Slugger. “Outside prison; this is freedom.” Freedom has perhaps never been so succinctly, convincingly, defined.” From David Velasco’s remarkable Artforum review of Lyon’s films at the Anthology Film Archive http://artforum.com/film/id=20599