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COLUMN EIGHTY-THREE, JANUARY 15, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)

PEACE POET

Subject: peace poet
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 17:47:24 -0800
From: "peacepoet" peacepoet@lmi.net
To: Address: info@blacklistedjournalist.com  

"Peace comes with a change of consciousness.  Poetry changes consciousness.  Spread the word."  

"Builder's Progress"  

"What is this then that is written. . ."
Luke 20: 17

Each of the victims brought a stone:
The boy who trembled in this father's arms,
Trapped in the camera's snare,
Where soldiers shot him, the body parts
Hacked to mince in bombing runs.
They all came, each with a stone.  

And with their collection of stones,
They built a wall.  It was so high,
The wall, so thick, so pitiless,
That even the politicians
Had to see it.  This was a wall
For weeping, a weeping wall,
A wall that buried the lies
Of greed and war.  We came.  We knelt
Before it, wept, and kissed its stones.

Peacepoet  ##

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EFFUSIVE PRAISE FROM THE RAINKING

Subject: your music your life ,your reward
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 02:29:17 EST
From: Raje7@aol.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

i was so excited reading your story  I had to write. I've never written anyone before cause i cant type. i was looking for a halfway house in houston for my daughter when i found your site. you have been so priviledged to have known these incredible guitarists and so accomplished in your own right. i mean my god the stones call you for a try. woooooow J. edgar winter, my idol long before any other guitarist SHAPED MY LIFE. AND YOUR MUSIC IS IN MY BONES, EVEYONE YOU TALK OF TOTALLY WAS PART OF MY LIFE. SO WAS ALL THE DRUGS AN ALCOHOL. SOBERED UP IN 77, AND HAVENT LOOKED BACK. thanks to aa god an friends an family. now i got a 17 yr old daughter following in my steps. scary huh. anyway if your ever playing anywhere around baton rouge or houston let me know ill be there. beck clapton an all the others how about the reverend billy gibbons i cant believe you missed him. i shook his hand once. you have been blessed twice nio once stoned. an once sober. you seem grateful as i am for your music and sobriety. strength, hope courage, and happiness, i charge you with sincerely, rick richardson, <rainking>  ##

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MORE ABOUT RED RUDENSKY

Subject: Red Rudensky
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 10:32:58 -0600
From: "Carly" carly@semo.net
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

I saw your letter about Red Rudensky on the net and thought I would write you. I was able to meet him in 1975 when he came to visit my grandparents, Paul and Laura Eakins in Sikeston, Missouri. They had restored Al Capone's 1931 Limousine and had him come and see the car. He signed his book and was in the local paper with the car. (That is the car that we sold to the Imperial Palace in 1982, and I believe they sold it recently). We also taped an interview with him on reel-to-reel tapes. I also have some pictures of him and AL Capone's family that he gave us... It was all very interesting.  He also appeared on the TV show, TO TELL THE TRUTH.. He told us a story about when he went to appear on  the show and told them he had lost his suitcase. They bought his some new clothes so he could look nice on TV.. But actually, he said he never lost his suitcase and made the story up just to get a free suit... LOL   Even though I was very young, he still stands out in my memories.  That was the first "gangster" I had ever met..

Thanks,

CHRIS CARLISLE

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FROM A SOAPBOX

Subject: [Fwd: FW: Thrill Is Gone With Hyphen Politics]
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 14:03:24 -0600
From: Lew Rosenbaum rosetree@mindspring.com
To: AGALIST-owner@yahoogroups.com

Al -- I'm sure you've seen this.  Dem's have Gored us again. With Nader campaigning for some Dems, they haven't even got Ralph to blame this time . . .

Lew

paul metsa wrote:

  Folks, I think Breslin absolutely nails it.  

--------------------

Thrill Is Gone With Hyphen Politics

Jimmy Breslin

November 7, 2002

It is depressing to realize that people who voted on Tuesday in an election that blew stale air through polling places might think that this is how it always was, that there is no other possibility, that this is our politics.

They never saw or realized what it was like in 1968, when Robert Kennedy of New York ran for president on two issues: he was against war and against poverty.

I don't think that anybody today can understand the sheer thrill of a campaign that was based on uncomplicated good. Vote for the guy and you could stop people from getting killed. Your own vote could save a life! Vote for the guy and you could get a roof for somebody in Brooklyn and food for children in Mississippi. People got so excited they couldn't sleep.

Wherever he went, there were huge crowds and tumult and hope. I never experienced a reaction to a candidate like the ones at the University of Kansas and Kansas State on the same day. At Kansas State, the big fieldhouse had a dirt floor and the crowd - what was it, 14,000? - was so packed that it couldn't move either way. But it could roar and stomp. It stomped so much that it raised dust high to the rafters and made it difficult to see.

Nobody wanted war. People weren't crazy. They didn't want to get killed. The leaders were shot with grandiose notions: I am heroic with other people's children. People then also didn't want poverty. People are human. They couldn't stand the guilt of knowing that so many lived desperate lives.

It is the single political party and not the people who want to kill now, and poverty ended by throwing more of the poor into the streets.

In 1968, candidate Kennedy was exciting and right and gave people so much hope that everybody wanted to do their utmost on the two great topics, war and poverty. Huge crowds reached out and tore at Kennedy. It never subsided. He has lived on in the American imagination.

Suddenly, after a California presidential primary, a young Palestinian, Sirhan, shot and killed him in a ballroom kitchen of the Hotel Ambassador in Los Angeles. Nobody saw anything significant about Sirhan being from the Mideast. It was just a place where he was from, where he had lived a lousy life and grown into a murderer.

Not one single solitary person realized what it was, nor did anybody until now, that Sirhan Sirhan of the Mideast was the start of terrorism.

All these years later, I didn't realize there was an election this week until the Sunday before. On election day, I was in neighborhoods where they should have been calling out Carl McCall's name. There was no sound. Then I realized that this silence was right, that there was no election. McCall was the candidate, but he did not ruin the politics here. It was shameless Bill Clinton who used the Democratic Party and left it with a hyphen. Not because of his trailer camp sex, nor his lying under oath to a grand jury. Rather, he merged the Democratic Party with the Republican Party. The Democratic-Republican Party. He left the Democrats with no issues, no purpose, no aim, no desire for anything except keeping the job. Do whatever the Republicans do. They want a tax cut that can break us? Good. Vote for it. They want a war? Of course. Let's kill.

Therefore, Carl McCall yesterday had no reason to be the least despondent over the election. McCall didn't lose any election. He was with the winner, the Democrat-Republican party. There's not a dime's worth of difference between them and the candidates would never change this. Why differ when you believe what the others say? And why cry when your views win? Keep your job. Vote with the president. Or in New York, with the governor.

Of all the crowd of payroll bums and bindle stiffs on the stage with Pataki the other night, Hugh Carey was the one committing an indictable offense. He would have been an unknown singing at the bar at Snooky's or Farrell's or the old P.J.'s. Instead dead loyal Democratic voters put him in Washington, then into Albany twice as governor. He had no excuse. Whenever he did things that made no sense, you could just say, "That's Society Carey." But on Tuesday it was different. It looked ugly.

The Democrats got carried out everywhere on Tuesday. Why not? Why would you ever vote for a Democrat when you can vote for the original, the Republicans?

There is not one national voice that is against a war with Iraq. You don't have to go past New York to see what hyphen politics - Democrat-Republican - has done. The two Democratic senators voted for the Republican resolution to invade Iraq.

Clinton's wife raises her wedding ring to vote aye for all New Yorkers. Let's blow Iraq up. The other senator, Schumer, usually has a Sunday press conference to announce a new red light in Bay Ridge. This time he went bigger and voted to give the government a green light on killing.

Yesterday, Gephardt of Missouri resigned as Democratic minority leader of the House. He was an illusion with a haircut. He never was the leader of anything. On Monday, Daschle was the Senate majority leader and on Wednesday he was the minority leader andd tomorrow he should be out o there, too. He is another one from the Empty Quadrant, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and the like, where there aren't enough voters to make a district in Brooklyn. All officials listed as Democrats, but we know they are in a hyphen party, must get out of the way. The people are going to have to manage a peace movement themselves that is certain to give legitimate Democratic voters a chance at something real.  

Copyright (c) 2002, Newsday, Inc.  This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres072995101nov07,0,1553393.column

  Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com

--

"...it is necessary for a people concerned with liberty, even if they live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and pressure the official structure into recognizing its needs." Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, 1964

--

Please Note E-Mail Addresses:
reply to  Lew Rosenbaum: rosetree@mindspring.com
reply to  Diana Berek: phoebemoon@mindspring.com

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"I went down to the rich man's house
And took back what he stole from me
Took back my dignity
Took back my humanity
Kensington Welfare Rights Union Choir

"All of working-class poetry from the 1820's to the present needs to be retrieved and studied.. . . From the Wobblies to the poststructuralists, the basic question is: Who represents the working class? With an immensely diverse and complex working class, can a handful of writers "represent" or give a "realistic" portrait of the whole class?

Julia Stein, from the essay "Industrial Music" in What We Hold In Common (Zandy, editor. 

Lew Rosenbaum
Diana Berek
773-761-6229        ##

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MISGUIDED JEWEL!

Subject: E mail
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 21:09:20 EST
From: KhunRum@aol.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

Al, For your information

Jewel's sleep-deprived dream

GUYS who don't want to sleep with Jewel must be gay - just ask her. The sexy songbird, who played the Performing Arts Center in Newark on Wednesday, told her audience about a dream she had when she was 16, in which she played guitar with Bob Dylan and slept with him. Later, in real life, after she became famous and went on tour with Dylan, she was summoned to the rocker's dressing room. "I thought, 'My dream is coming true, not only am I playing with Bob Dylan, I'm going to sleep with him."" But much to her disappointment, he didn't make a pass at her. "Obviously Bob Dylan is gay if he's not interested in me," Jewel cracked to the crowd. "I mean, look at me." She showed off her skimpy tank top and micro-miniskirt. "Who would have  guessed that Dylan is a fag? That's going to get me in trouble. It's going to be in all the papers tomorrow." Just in the only paper that matters, Jewel. ##

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