Sunday, November 29, 2015

Children of the Future Past

"Hippie Modernism – The Struggle for Utopia,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Through February 28, 2016.

Every 5 years or so, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has a break-through show, similar to the ones they did on Frida Kahlo and on Picasso’s influence.  This is one.  It is organized by the theme “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out,” which seems a cheesy, clichéd way to approach the issue, but there it is.

Organized mostly by architects, it highlights the technological developments brought about by the hippie movement in the 1960s-1970s like the use of geodesic domes, inflatables, early ‘Google glass’ headsets, light shows, the Whole Earth catalog of tools, DIY mass production of art and publications, tiny houses and modular living structures and, lastly, early computer graphics.  It doesn’t talk about the role of hippies like Steve Jobs, who, along with many others, was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. These are the people who invented the personal computer.  1975 is the end of the hippie era for this show and the end of the Vietnam war, too.  

President Ford - Puppet of Corporations.  BPP/Douglas
Other aspects of the hippie cultural movement are also represented, a movement that was world-wide - though this sample is not so clear on that.  The use of LSD (marijuana is strangely absent) by Timothy Leary, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead and during the Acid Tests is mentioned, though its uses to help PTSD, depression and alcoholism are not followed up on.  There are great San Francisco rock posters from Mouse, Moscoso and other famous artists.  Mention is made of the free ‘white bikes’ of Copenhagen; recycled fabric threads using in clothing; a light show done with overhead projectors and colored oil in water.  There are many different types of art projects, some of which were political; and oddly enough a real eco-greenhouse of fruit trees.

Groups like the Cockettes, an early out-front gay rights movement, who grew out of the San Francisco Mime Troop have a section, along with the “Ant Farm,’ which set up free rest stops for hippies and nomads traveling or hitch-hiking around the U.S.  The Drop City art colony living in geodesic domes in Colorado - the first commune ostensibly - is also represented in a section.  There is even complex art describing the democratization of education in Free Universities at that time, and the concurrent growth of auto-didacticism. 

The direct political content of the show is very thin, as would be expected from a show set up by architects and engineers. It consists of posters by the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas**; anti-war posters produced by members of Berkeley’s art department; social-justice posters done by a radical Catholic nun.  There is one large picture from a march on the Pentagon, where activists carried Viet Cong flags and got into the Pentagon.  There are also panels on the Diggers, an anarchist collective in San Francisco named after the original ‘leveler’ Diggers of the U.K.  There is little about the feminist movement; nothing about cultural festivals like Woodstock; the cooperative movement in the cities; vegetarianism; jeans; hippie writers, but then this cultural movement was so broad one show cannot contain it.

20-30 Million Strong - We are not afraid. BPP/Douglas
What is significant here is that the cultural ferment of the hippie movement would not have been possible without the political ferment in the U.S. over Jim Crow and Vietnam.  It basically loosened the control of the dominant culture.  Every society in the world had their issues during that time too, as the explosions in France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Italy and other countries proved, giving birth to hippie movements there.  The hippie movement itself was forward-thinking to such an extent that now many ‘way out ideas’ of that time are givens.  Concern for the planet, organic food, rock music, festivals, weed, a peace movement, a black-rights movement, environmentalism, recycling, etc. – all are continuing mass concerns, though still denounced by the troglodyte right as ‘hippie’ craziness. 

But ultimately this search for ‘utopia’ had conflicting byproducts.  It produced more democratic cultural forms, but also a new boost to capitalist productivity in the form of the personal computer technological revolution and new ideas for capitalist expansion that fit reality better.  For instance, North Face was at one time a tiny hippie outdoors store in North Beach, and is now a world-wide winter clothing behemoth.  Vancouver shoe outfits like John Fluevog were inspired by hippie naturalism.  Large capitalist chains are adopting organic standards.  Solar and wind businesses are becoming dominant over carbon-producing technologies like coal.  Recycling is a normal part of the production cycle.  Bicycling is growing and actually providing more tourist income in some states than tourists in cars.  Local food and farmers markets are returning.  In this case the past IS prologue to the present and the future.

There was a local panel hosted by the Walker of people discussing hippie developments in Minneapolis during this period, but I have no information on how that went.  Mayday Books itself in 1975 grew out of the political/cultural ferment of that time as part of the co-operative movement.  Some people call us 'throwbacks.'  We prefer to think that we are still ahead of our time. 

**Emory Douglas will be talking at Penumbra Theater on December 14th at 5:30 PM about his cultural work for the Black Panther Party.  

A prior review on the Walker's Frida Kahlo show is below. Reviews on other art issues like the Tate Modern and art in London, Banksy and "9.5 Thesis on Art & Class" are also below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

Red Frog
November 29, 2015

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Blacksgiving and Women in Film

It Was Only a Matter of Time

The execution of an unarmed and possibly handcuffed young black man, Jamar Clark, by Minneapolis police was only a matter of time.  The video on UTube is out there blurrily showing Clark to be handcuffed and the testimony of many eye-witnesses.  The Guardian count for civilians killed by police in the U.S. is over 3 a day.  The protest against the 4th Precinct in Minneapolis was later visited repeatedly by white racists, who confronted protesters again, then pulled out guns and shot 5 young black men from Black Lives Matter.  The cops told BLM that ‘that is what they wanted, wasn’t it?”

One of the fascists who shot BLM protesters
The 4th Precinct Police station is still under siege.  It is an “Occupy” scene.  Tents, fires, gas heaters, barricades and food lines full of protesters and neighborhood people limit or stop cop movement out of the front of the police station.  The street is closed.  How long will the cop’s ‘patience’ last?  They chafe at the orders of the lesbian Chief and the female mayor.  How long will BLM’s patience last?  After all, an Injustice Department examination of this issue could take months. 

The black proletariat, when roused, is a revolutionary force.  This is what the election of Obama was meant to corral, through symbolism and quarter-measures.  It is also the role of the police departments across the U.S. – to intimidate and kill black people so that no one gets out of line.  Calling the police ‘slave patrols’ and these ‘legal lynching’s’ is not far wrong.  Now both have been institutionalized by the whole capitalist state and are not just concentrated in the South. 

The third force trying to stop the development of a revolutionary black and Latino movement are the white fascists and right-populist demagogues like Donald “El Duce” Trump.  The fact that they have taken their bravado to a new level – not just beating a BLM member in Alabama during a Trump Rally, or arriving at protests with ‘open-carry’ firearms, but shooting 5 BLM folks - means that the things are reaching a new level.

Noticeable at the camp in front of the 4th Precinct is the absence of any visible military organization, though BLM does have marshals that protect rallies and marches.  No sentinels at the corners of the camp, no armbands, no communications in evidence.  The Black Panther party started as a force monitoring police violence against the Black community and developed a form of home-grown black socialism.  BLM has the potential to go that route, though it is influenced by members of the black middle class and also by some reports, money from George Soros.  All of these still have illusions as to the reformability of the police.  Remember, the BPP was upset about the same issues nearly 50 years ago.  Nothing has changed. 

Which is why police reformism is dead.  No amount of civilian review committees, body-cams, black cops, enlightened chiefs of police or better training changes this situation.  After all, it is Grand Juries and police unions with control over politicians that rule immediately.  The BPP advocated 'community-controlled policing' which would essentially end the present form of police.  This is similar to the Cuban block committees, which monitored crime.  This demands a very high level of organization in a neighborhood but also a change in the class structure of society. Both things BLM is not yet advocating.

Mayday Books pledges any support needed.

Note:  On November 30, the Democratic Party elite and their middle-class black hangers-on (what Black Agenda Report calls, "the black mis-leadership class") told the protesters to shut down the encampment in front of the police station, portraying it as a massive problem on the north side.  The liberal mayor Betsy Hodges, the slippery 'lefty' Keith Ellison, the corporate Start Tribune, millionaire governor Dayton and various preachers inveighed against the encampment.   The protesters held solid.  A few days later the cops cleared the camp.

Four Somewhat Political Films that Center on Women’s Issues 'Grandma,' ‘Sicario,’ ‘Suffragette’ and ‘MockingJay, Part II.’  (Warning, Spoilers Ahead…)

'Tis the season for political films.  ‘Trumbo’ and ‘Spotlight’ are also playing in theaters. 

"Grandma"

This is one of the first Hollywood films to give an unapologetic and rousing defense of the right to abortion.  Lilly Tomlin plays a tough and out-front lesbian feminist. Elle Reid, who helps her too-young niece get an abortion.  Reid would probably be a hard person to live with, but if you need someone in a fight, she's it.  Hilarious, pointed and angry, Tomlin's character should wake up some of the young women who think that 'women have won' and can consequently sit back, knowing little and doing nothing.  Reid knows otherwise.

“Sicario

Sicario is a film about the drug war in Mexico, in which a young female FBI agent is drawn into the ‘heart of darkness’ that is U.S. anti-drug methods.  She is tricked by the CIA and perhaps DEA into participating in their efforts – to give them cover while they carry out illegal acts.  The essence is that the agents are actually working for one of the drug cartels in Columbia and revenge-killing their competition.  The ‘logic’ is to make the fight against drugs simpler, instead of a fractionated drug-delivery system. (which is what happens when you kill ‘king pins.’) This reminds one of “Operation Fast & Furious,” in which the BATF sold weapons in 2009 to the cartels in order to ‘track them.’  The most dramatic scenes are shot in Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of Mexico – a place where not just gang members end up dead, but plenty of innocent people. 

The agent, played by Emily Blunt, eventually rebels, but signs off on their methods at the point of a gun.  Ah, naiveté.  The film asks if women are the Achilles’ heel of capitalist or government corruption.  A black FBI agent also accompanies her – another Achilles’ heel, but neither sufficient to stop the investment of the U.S. government in the failed drug war.

“Suffragette”

Notice the singular nature of the title.  This is the story of a young woman working in a laundry who becomes radicalized by her experiences and through contact with the British feminist movement of the 1900s, fighting for the right for women to vote.  She is dumped by her weak husband, loses custody of her child, is fired from her job, is made homeless, jailed several times, yet comes through to become an activist for the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU).  She participates in demonstrations, testifies before Parliament, bomb’s Lloyd George’s new house and some post-boxes and goes to Epsom Derby to protest, only to see a comrade die under the horses.  She protects a young woman in the laundry from sexual abuse by the owner – the same abuse she suffered. 

The problem in the film is that it is somewhat claustrophobic and its notion of a ‘movement’ is very tiny.  There is little understanding of broader events in society or even the time period.  The socialist movement was a big supporter of the right to vote, for instance.  The labor movement was beginning to flex its political and economic muscle. There was a left in the feminist movement that opposed WWI, represented by Sylvia Pankhurst; and a right represented by Emmeline Pankhurst that supported the war and stopped feminist activities during it.  All this was happening at the time of the film.  As is standard in films for U.S. audiences, it focuses on one isolated woman’s struggles.  The part is played by Carey Mulligan, who seems too middle-class to be a laundry-woman.  Then it moves to a very small group of activists who carry out direct action of various types, like bombings and window-breaking.  Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading middle-class Suffragette, is played by Meryl Streep for 3 minutes - an unfortunate and humorous choice. 

All women over 21 gained the right to vote in England in 1928. 

“Mocking Jay II,” (The last of the Hunger Games)

The ‘democratic’ revolution finally arrives.  All the districts are now united and Alma Coin, the head of the rebellion in District 13, orders a general attack.  Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence, leads a combat group underground through Panem to assassinate the dictatorial President Snow.  (Everdeen, by the way, is the last name of the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” so the name is no accident.)

Fancy Panem is now a wasteland, as the whole city has been booby-trapped by Snow.  Snow ultimately orders his well-dressed subjects to come to his palace for protection.  At the gates of the palace, what 'looks' like an imperial plane drops floating bombs, killing many children (including Katniss’ sister Prim, who is now a rebel nurse) and the resistance collapses after this war crime.  Coin subsequently postpones any election and Katniss is chosen to kill Snow with an arrow to the heart. 

Katniss figures out that the plane was actually a rebel plane, and that Coin committed an atrocity before she cancelled elections.  Bombing people who rush to aid wounded people is actually something American drone operators do.  Katniss instead shoots Coin with her arrow and the crowd kills Snow.  The 13 districts decide to have a vote right away, and the black female leader of District 2 is chosen president.

So the revolution is not in vain, as some middle class critics were trying to say, chief among them Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com.  Nor is the old refrain by the Tory band, the Who, ‘Won’t get fooled again’ played out.  What is significant here is that it is now part of the popular understanding that any revolution has to be aware of the possibilities of a new bureaucracy rising, and to deal with it quickly.  Here that is done with one arrow, given this is a ‘political revolution’ in a movie that does not change the class system.

The most disturbing part of the film is what happens to Katniss after the revolution.  Her relationship with Peeta was always unconvincing, idiotic and juvenile, but then this was a YA book.  She returns to live in the empty District 12 shooting pheasants, living with Peeta and has two children, ending up dressed in a calico dress with her baby.  So a woman who has basically became the face and a fighter of a national revolution, who was chosen to execute the dictator, is now having babies and living a rural life.  Almost like the author wanted this woman to stay non-political, barefoot and pregnant. 

Reviews of books on the police – “The New Jim Crow,” and “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” an examination of the drug war, “Drug War Capitalism,” proletarian analyses of the women’s movement, “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” and “Fortunes of Feminism,” and reviews of prior films in the Hunger Games series, below.  Use blog search box, upper left. 

Red Frog
November 26, 2015
Blacksgiving / Civil War Thanksgiving / Native American Mourning Day

Sunday, November 22, 2015

All Power to the Imagination

"The Utopia of Rules – On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy,” by David Graeber, 2015

Graeber is the author of “Debt,” the anarchist blockbuster analyzing financial debt from the beginnings of human civilization, citing government as its source.  Yet Graeber is really an anthropologist, not a political economist or a political ‘scientist’ and it shows in this book.  Written as a somewhat gentle description of ‘bureaucracy,’ it might convince you that not all bureaucracy is really so bad.  After all, he calls everything bureaucracy – filling out forms, getting a POA for his dying mother, any paperwork, the military, building codes, government regulations in general, the Post Office, government transparency – everything it seems but the call and response meetings of Occupy.  In this, he seems a bit like a child.

Fill Out the Form, please.
Graeber sums it up in the phrase ‘all power to the imagination’ – a phrase made popular during the 1968 uprising in France.  Those who can ‘imagine’ another way of being can usher in a new reality – not just escape from this one.  While he is an anarchist, he admits in this book that bureaucracy - the real, hard state bureaucracy of the U.S. government or of international capitalist institutions like the World Bank and IMF – are merely aids to capital. This puts him in the same position as Marxists and Marx, whom he quotes frequently.  Unlike many Libertarians and some anarchists, he does not see the government as separate from the economic system, but an essential part of it.  In addition, he repeatedly describes the inherent violence residing behind even the most innocuous ‘rules’ in a capitalist society – private guard intervention, police action, FBI arrests, NSA surveillance, military occupation, prison. As he figures, rules are only the advance guard of guns.  As Engels wrote about long ago, ‘force’ lies at the bottom of all states, legal systems and property rights.  Mao said the same thing somewhat more crudely - ‘all power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’

Graeber goes on in this book somewhat like Zizek, analyzing bits of culture and bringing out what is underneath. He complains that all the techno-futurism of ‘flying cars’ promised by bourgeois optimists like Alvin Toffler in “Future Shock” has not come to pass – something he as a child actually believed.(!)  He explains, using Marx’s ‘falling rate of profit’ theory, why U.S. technological development is actually stagnant and becoming more so. He praises “Star Trek” as a film showing a regime of communism and also praises the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union for being the last people to ‘dream big’ through their gargantuan projects, something he refers to as ‘poetic technologies.’ (His estimate of Indian or Chinese dam building or American proposals for weather geo-engineering to fight global warming might be interesting to hear.)  He opposes ‘deep ecologists’ who reject nearly all technology and long for a return to the Stone Age.  In that vein he considers the iPhone and the internet to be modest fetishes at best.   

Graeber uses his own experience in the university to decry the time administrative work takes from professors.  He sees this as one of the reasons why, in his area, there has been a stagnation of social theory in the U.S., which instead recycles 1970s French post-modernists like Deleuze, Foucault or Bourdieu.  Graeber even refers to the ‘global class war’ in relation to the competition with the Soviets, a phrase not often heard on the lips of an anarchist.

The discussion of the origins of the excellent Post Office in Prussian Germany, an organization praised by Lenin, is one of the first examples of a possibly ‘good bureaucracy,’ according to Graeber. The post office may lure people into thinking that bureaucracy can be ‘neutral.’  The German post office had many deliveries per day and reached all over Germany.  Berlin had its own series of pneumatic air tubes shooting mail around town.  The German post office was run from the top-down, and also developed as a way to forestall actual Bolshevism.  That must be his point, though you might miss it.  Postal workers will find his description of the post office somewhat odd.  They might work for bureaucrats, but they perform a useful service in spite of that. Check out a country like Ecuador that has no real post office. Graeber however now thinks his mail is all junk.  Perhaps he relies too much on the internet, something he has mixed feelings about. As the infamous PeeWee Herman once said, ‘you have to send a letter to get a letter.

Graeber has a section on 20th century science fiction and fantasy, which he understands as a return to the middle ages,  He references Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and assumably JRR Martin as writers that harken back to a time before ‘logic’ and bureaucracy.  A time of desirable and dangerous personalist leadership and unruly, violent behavior.  He seems oblivious of their modern parallels - for Tolkien, a reverberation of World War I; and for Martin, a recreation of the bloodthirsty pursuit of power in our own time inspired by the Vietnam war.  C.S. Lewis was an attempt to bring Christian ‘magic’ back into the world, but ended up being mostly for children.  In other words, he misunderstands the masters.  Harry Potter is in this latter vein as well, which does suggest that one wing of upscale fantasy is concerned with pre-industrial life and rejects modernism.  He intimates that events like the Renaissance Festival harken back to a time of revolt, peasant gluttony and sexual debauchery – yet ignores that all this happens in the shadow of kingly rule.  In one section, he hints that anti-racism and demands for capitalist transparency are both ‘bureaucratic’ thinking – another oddity of his worship of spontaneity and ‘play.’   

Lastly is a chapter on comics and film super-heroes – the conservative ‘superegos’ that all ultimately back up conventional power and law.  Graeber targets the worst example in this avalanche of super-heroes, the blatantly anti-Occupy “Dark Knight Rises.” (reviewed below.)

What are we to make of this grab-bag?  Many interesting ideas here, but ultimately weak execution and questionable logic, or ‘anti-logic.’ 

Graeber’s “Debt;” a review of Situationist books, “The Beach Beneath the Street” and “Society of the Spectacle;” a review of post-modernism, “Fashionable Nonsense,” and reviews of cultural works "The Dark Knight Rises, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, all reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
November 22, 2015

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Paradise Confused

“American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth, 1997

Philip Roth is one of the ‘great white male middle-class’ writers of the last decades in the U.S.  In this book he attempts to portray the wider 1960s and early 1970s and fails.  At bottom, this is a claustrophobic novel.  It is like being locked in the obsessive mind of, first, the ‘writer’ of the Newark High class of 1950, Skip Zuckerman (a thinly disguised Roth?), and then his hero, the uber-jock, conformist and kind man, Seymour “Swede” Levov.  In the process, it is hard to understand why either is worth our attention.  In the course of the novel, the writer disappears and instead his idol becomes the narrator.

Swede is an assimilating Jew who drops the possibility of an incredible sports career and marries a shiksa Ms. New Jersey.  He takes over the family business making gloves in Newark, then moves to a giant house in Old Rimrock, a fake rich suburb somewhere in New Jersey. The "Swede" is a large and gifted athlete - and Roth goes into ecstasies about the athletic and cultural skills of this 'body.'  The social subtext is the existences and maintenance of a ‘Jewish’ identity in patrician, goy New Jersey.  This might be the point for some readers, but the book attempts to carry much more historical weight than that.

1972 Bombing of North Vietnam
The book is a not so subtle parallel to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” as the sections are called “Paradise Remembered,” then “The Fall,” then “Paradise Lost.”  The ‘paradise’ is the complacent world of 1950s high school sports, adolescent awkwardness, puppy love and innocence, a period that nearly everyone goes through. For Jewish youth of the second or third generation, it was their chance to become somewhat like the Christian ‘goys.’   Here it is reflected in a long description of a high school reunion 45 years later.  The ‘fall’ in this idyllic life is Swede’s child Merry.  She is a stutterer that grows up to be a Vietnam antiwar activist, who at the age of 16 decides to put a bomb in the neighborhood post office and kills an innocent doctor.  She goes on to kill 3 other people with bombs.  Oddly, the police don’t track her; nor is her admission to her father that she did it even credible.  Yet this is the central event in the book.

The problem is nothing like this happened during the Vietnam war era.  It’s like the myth of ‘spitting’ on troops by anti-war activists.  There were plenty of bombings, yes, all over the country, but almost no one was killed in those bombings.  Roth attempts to link Merry to the “Weatherman,” an ultra-left split from SDS.  Yet the Weatherman didn’t kill any innocent civilians.  Their only victims were themselves – 3 dying in a townhouse in New York when one of their bombs exploded accidentally.  The one innocent victim of an anti-war bombing that I know of was in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Army Mathematics Research Center in 1970.  That is it.  One.   

The book’s characters associate Marx, Che, the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese with ‘crazy.’   Working-class labor exploitation is only referred to sarcastically.  Swede at one point oddly hopes that Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party, will help him find Merry, who has gone underground.  Merry eventually leaves the anti-war movement and becomes a religious ‘Jain’ that her father later locates in a stinking tenement room in Newark.

The consuming focus on this ‘insane’ young woman who passionately hated the war says more about Roth than the 1960s or 1970s.  There is no mention of the actual incineration of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by the real bombers – Johnson, Nixon, LeMay, McNamara, Kissinger.  Not one mention of the 1968 assassination of MLK and the oppression of black people in the city – which led to the rebellion/riots in Newark.  This book focuses so much on psychological and individual issues that the real world outside the cramped heads of the characters disappears.  It is typical middle-class fiction.  And yet this book got kudos from the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, LA Times, Playboy, People, the St. Louis Dispatch and the NY Observer.  Most importantly, this book won the Pulitzer Prize!  Really.

More pointedly, 4 women are the ‘bad people’ in this book.  All are too left-wing.  Merry the murderer; some sexually crazy anti-war blackmailer named Linda Cohen; a left-wing neighbor who dresses in caftans, Marcia; and Sheila, another neighbor who hid Merry from the police and her family right after the bombing.  It is almost as if femininity is politically deviant too.  Roth has a long history of being criticized by the feminist movement and this book would seem to offer no exception.  At the end of the book, Swede ultimately suspects his own wife Dawn of an affair with a rich gentile architect, so no woman goes unscathed.  

The 1968 riots tear Newark apart, but we don’t know why from this book.  Only a few gunshots from racist police break the windows of the glove factory, as it has a sign on the window that says it employs black people, written to protect it from rioters.  Swede’s father Lou is the family patriarch, decrying the death of Newark, explaining how to make gloves and being angry about what is wrong with the film “Deep Throat” and Linda Lovelace.   It seems the 1960s destroyed the upper middle-class dreams of reasonable, hard-working, considerate Jewish businessmen and dropped them into an ocean of violence, infidelity, sex, conformism and disappearing Jewishness.  

The best part of the book is actually the tours inside the Newark glove factory and the information on the dirty and difficult business of making fine leather gloves, which as a piece of clothing is one of the hardest to make well.  Roth’s detailed descriptions of the cutters dressed in suits and ties link the fine hand work to a different era.  Yet that is small compensation for a novel that offers a dishonest window into its time.

(see reviews of “The Way the Wind Blew,” about the Weather Underground; “The Bomb,” about the Haymarket events; “Kill Anything That Moves,” about the attempted destruction of Vietnam; “People’s History of the Vietnam War” and other books on Vietnam, all below.  Use blog search box, upper left.)

(Sorry John!)
Red Frog
November 8, 2015