Disarming Tome of Trans Childhood

My Rainbow (Koala Penguin Random House, 2020)

by Trinity and DeShanna Neal

Illustrated by Art Twink

DeShanna Neal has crafted a disarming and instructive tale about trans kids, specifically, her daughter and collaborator in the tome, Trinity.

The whole issue does need disarming, having been heartlessly weaponized by capitalists and their allies sowing fear from a commercialized pulpit. As well, folks of a certain age like me need instruction, old dogs that we are, tripped up by pronouns.

With beautiful illustrations by Art Twink, the story opens in the living room of Trinity’s African American family. Trinity, a child with autism, sooths herself—DeShanna calls Trinity “her” and “she”—by stroking the soft pelt of the family’s pet pig, Peter Porker. But Trinity is troubled. She sees herself (identifies as?) a trans girl, so, she informs Mom, she wishes she had long hair.

Now, in the adult world, this suggests a host of fraught issues: about Black hair, about gendered hair lengths, about living with a host of other marginalized traits.

The reader, as well as Trinity, is quickly put at ease as DeShanna navigates these issues with the equanimity of a Buddhist—DeShanna is a Buddhist, by the way—and the tenderness of a loving mother. “We are all a little different from one another,” she tells here daughter. “You’re a beautiful rainbow.” As much as Trinity wants long hair, however, “it made her itchy when it was growing out,” Mom reports. Still, says wise Mom, “Trinity knew herself best of all. And if she said she needed long hair, she NEEDED long hair!”

Exactly how our happy ending unfolds, I’ll let the reader buy the book, but the final page says, “When each of your colors has space to shine, you light up the whole sky.”

Incidentally, DeShanna’s book has been banned in Texas, home of nation-wide schoolbook cancelling for decades. The enormous number of library and schoolbooks cancelled by a few right-wing activists in Texas—the dominant market in the USA—makes the small number of works some progressives have challenged pale into near insignificance. All the same, as a socialist writer and publisher, I think the cancelling tends to skirt due process, validate corporate and state censorship, and favor calling out over organizing the multiracial, multi-gendered working class.

And DeShanna’s work deals only with a mother’s wise and compassionate response to her trans-identifying daughter’s wishes for long hair. It’s not about medical treatments, about which, in the non-fiction world, DeShanna has been a champion. Texas attempts to deny the mere reality of a trans-childhood, lest it become socially contagious, a claim made in a recent paper by Lisa Littman called “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” Littman interviewed only the confounded parents of trans teens, not trans teens themselves, and not trans teens driven from their families by such confounded parents, teens rendered homeless, sexually exploited, suicidal.

Now, Delaware’s big-hearted author DeShanna Neal is nationally celebrated as an activist, having advocated for trans-inclusive policies in the Red Clay Consolidated School District’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I) Committee.

Haters often try to obscure the working-class-based intersectional solidarity in such activism. Pink-washing corporations often implement D.E.I programs for good P.R. and lawsuit-avoidance while continuing to funnel campaign support to fascists and LBGTQ-plus-phobes to fight unions and corporate taxes.

As DeShanna puts it in her campaign literature, “Currently, a conservative vocal minority and multi-millionaire corporations dominate the conversation in Dover. I believe in the power of individuals speaking for themselves.”

Did I forget to tell you DeShanna is running for office in Delaware Representative District 13, covering Elsmere? She hopes to replace House Majority Whip Rep. Larry Mitchell, a former police officer opposed to police accountability legislation and protections for the most basic human rights for people without housing.

Having graduated from Concord High-School (go Raiders!), Deshanna holds a master’s degree and is endorsed by Progressive Democrats of Delaware, the Working Families Party, Moms Demand Action/Gun Sense Legislation, and Delaware Democratic Socialists of America.

A person with DeShanna Neal’s courage, principles, and effectiveness will be an equally effective Representative for Elsmere.

My Rainbow is available at all major book outlets, including Amazon Kindle.

To get involved in DeShanna Neal’s campaign click https://www.deshanna4district13.com.

 

Why I support One-Person-One-Vote in the upcoming UAW referendum

By Phillip Bannowsky

“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?” called UAW Vice President General Holiefield to hundreds of Chrysler’s Newark (Delaware) Assembly plant workers. The “General” no doubt expected a resounding martial response. None came. Maybe nobody in this 2007 special meeting of UAW Local 1183 workers heard him. I retired from Chrysler in 2001, but I was there.

“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?” Holifield repeated.

A few titters here and there—crickets, basically.

What, I wondered, did he expect, having come basically to shove a s**t sandwich—the two-tier wage structure—down our throats? New hires would get half-pay indefinitely.

Undeterred, Holiefield continued his pitch. The global economy was circling the drain. Detroit automakers were bleeding cash. This was only temporary. It would affect only a special class of workers, not those on our current jobs.

Having experience in local collective bargaining, I was inclined to be sympathetic. We were always squeezed between the rock of a good contract and the hard place of a shut-down. In the Q and A, I expressed my sympathy but argued that the two-tier violated UAW principles of solidarity and was contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23, paragraph 2: “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.”

Turns out that Holliefield did not exactly abide with that principle when he took the lion’s share of some 3.5 million dollars in bribes doled out to UAW officials by Fiat Chrysler Auto (FCA) and laundered through the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC). Since the capitulation, the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) was serving itself up ever move lavish vacations and gifts with union funds.

Now ten UAW officials, including two former presidents, have been sentenced for corruption, and the Union barely escaped a federal take-over by signing a consent decree (CD) agreeing to a membership-wide referendum on whether to continue electing our national leadership by convention delegates or do it by an all-member one-person-one-vote (1P1V) system. Essentially, claim advocates of 1P1V, “To stifle dissent, the AC has bribed, pressured and intimidated convention delegates and their locals to force them to vote for their candidates.”

I am not inclined to doubt it.

UAW members should be receiving their ballots on October 19. Still, some members have fallen off (or been dropped off) the union's LUIS information sharing application. Ballots must be received by November 29, 2021.

An independent monitor is in charge of this process, and members should contact them or their local union if they don't get a ballot, although some locals have been less than responsive.

All sides agree that a lack of transparency and accountability has led to this disaster. But there is a third factor that the sides do not agree on: the stranglehold on the UAW by the Administration Caucus, which was founded in the late forties by UAW pioneer Walter Reuther.

Walter and his brother Victor were both members of the Socialist Party and part of a broad coalition of progressives who built the UAW. It made sense that those organizers should make sure that new leaders should share the social vision of its founders.

I chanced to run into the son of an early UAW VP at a bar in Cape Cod, and he told me how it worked in the old days. “My dad had to ask a union leader if he could run for steward. Dad was a smart guy with a college degree, and he said OK, but most of his constituents were—let us say—not Jewish, he explained, and would be unlikely to vote for a Jew. On election day, the leader ran up to him, profusely apologizing that they had misspelled his name on the ballot. Now it looked not-Jewish, and he won.” Such shenanigans might seem understandable: Why should prejudice among new union members trump solidarity?

And indeed, the UAW system won us great pay, benefits, defined-benefit pensions, and a modicum of due process dealing with management.

So, when I began working for Chrysler in 1969, I was able to enjoy these benefits due to some hard bargaining and costly strikes.

At the same time, the working conditions were appalling. There were contaminants and crushing dangers everywhere. Some folks roasted between paint ovens while sloshing toxic solvents over car bodies and themselves. A man working in a pit near me was crushed to death by an overhanging fixture moving down the line. Some foremen were just plan nasty or incompetent buffoons—unnecessarily, because some were decent guys. Maybe two women in a shop of 300. Few foremen were Black, and all were men. The highest-ranking Black employee was a safety manager who sold safety shoes and was there to take a fall when disaster struck. And it was pure, numbing drudgery. We were treated like dumb children because it was dumbbell work.

Despite his social conscience, Reuther's Administration Caucus was built to forestall rivals. And his unionism tended toward what’s called business unionism. Focus on economics and let the corporations manage. Reuther referred to auto factories as “gold-plated sweatshops.”

Still, Reuther took progressive social positions. He supported the Civil Rights movement. He opposed nuclear energy. But he could not control what others would do with the Administration Caucus after he was killed in a plane crash in 1970.

When Leonard Woodcock took over as UAW president, he fired the anti-nuke staff and began hobnobbing with the corporate elite. He became a diplomat after Doug Frazer took over the UAW presidency.

Frazer confronted a great turning point in the labor movement when the capitalists went on the

offensive. Frazer had joined the Labor-Management Group, set up under the Nixon administration to seek cooperative solutions to labor-management problems. But then Frazer saw the light and quit in 1978, warning of “a one-sided class war." He declared, "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold."

Our contracts had been improving dramatically up to this period. We were up to 12 days paid personal leave each year, in addition to our holidays, sick days, and supplemental unemployment benefits during model change and other layoffs. But then came a series of strategic attacks on the better union contracts. A fiscal crisis hit New York City in 1978, and a special board dominated by financial bigwigs like Felix Rohatyn “negotiated” concessions with city unions, all as part of a “rescue plan.” The next year, Chrysler was facing bankruptcy, and another special board concocted a rescue plan entailing dumping those personal days and exacting a loan from union members in the form of delayed pay. Rohatyn had advised on this rescue, as well. The “one-sided class war” that Dough Frazer feared was being won by the one side fighting it. In 1979 union membership was at its peak. It has plummeted ever since.

I wrote a poem about this disaster called “The Crisis at Chrysler, 1979”:

 

An economic system’s in disarray and fast decline,

And Chrysler Corporation has the sickest bottom line

But that doesn’t say

That Chrysler can’t pay

                                    When you calculate the kickback:

 

While the bankers, executives, lawyers and ad agents

Get interest and rents, bribes, and dividend payments,

It’s crack that whip

And here’s your pink slip

                                    For Joe and Sally Sixpack.

 

Since that fateful year, UAW membership has declined from 1.5 million to 400 thousand.

I entered union politics during the 70’s when an SDS comrade and I joined up with some African American brothers to challenge the sitting local president. He was part of the Green Slate caucus that dominated our local and was a pipeline to the Administration Caucus.

The Green slate had much to admire. They were very diverse, they were mostly very capable, and their rough and tumble tactics can be partially excused by the rough and tumble realities of working-class life and confronting the boss. Management is always trying to take away everything you’ve won, and you get hard representing your constituents, and you will kick hard at anyone who tries to challenge you politically.

Still, there were few Blacks in skilled trades, safety was pathetic, and we were a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring back that socialist vision largely abandoned since Reuther.

I decided to run for shop steward and won two votes.

By 1980 we had a new caucus, The Progressive Movement. For several years we passed out flyers on safety, women's rights, labor history, affirmative action in skilled trades, internationalism, and socialism. In 1982, I won an upset election for Committeeperson.

At that time, the UAW might have been autocratic but, by-and-large, it was not corrupt. "Spend it, don't steal it," was what one international rep told me, regarding the perks of office. What corruption I saw was a petty crook here or there: a former committeeman who was a loan shark, another officer who was said to be a company plant. Some skimming of interest from a union fund we were told was not interest-bearing. Cheating on skilled trades exams. 300-dollar monthly stipends for committeepersons—until I was elected, that is. And management played favorites with their patsies, resolving a train of grievances for offering the wrong guy overtime with money damages, while telling the rest of us, “we’ll make it up next time.”

Oddly, the international union broke up the caucuses in the locals around 1984, calling joint slates “undemocratic.”

    I am told that delegates to the national convention are threatened and shouted down if they don’t support the anointed AC candidates or are promised jobs with the International for going along. I am not inclined to doubt it. The only time anyone outside the AC was elected to the IEB was when Jerry Tucker was elected as Director Region 5 in 1986. This, however, was only after the National Labor Relations Board threw out the first election because the AC had cheated.

   But would AC officials sell us out with a s**t sandwich for a bribe? I would have doubted it then, but now we know.
        The problem is we can’t leave it to Administration Caucus to clean up their act. As reported in a 2019 Detroit News article, two former UAW communications directors, Rev. Peter Laarman and Frank Joyce, “broke what they called an ‘institutional code of silence’ to give a scathing rebuke of the UAW leadership . . . [and] called for the resignations of the UAW's entire international executive board. . . . All of them. Senior staff assisting current officers and board members are themselves 'see no evil, hear no evil,' enablers. They too should resign."

This is not to say every local or regional official is culpable. I am forever grateful for my local president who supported my leadership of a forty-organization coalition that worked to restore voting rights to former felons in Delaware. However, even Laarman and Joyce admit that, like frogs in a gradually warming pot of corruption, they were slow to hop out.

In the debate held by the UAW Monitor on October 7 of this year, Administrative Caucus arguments were weak. They complained about all the old people speaking and claimed most UAW members don't even know who the UAW President is, much less how the union should be run. Their strongest arguments relied on the UAW’s tremendous record before the decline. See for yourself at UAW Monitorship Webinar.

By the way, the idea put forward by Administration Caucus defenders that outside money (like Fiat Chryser’s!) could influence a 1P1V election is dead on arrival. The Consent Agreement holds that if 1P1V is chosen by the rank and file in the referendum, the manner in which the 1P1V election will be carried out will be negotiated between the Monitor and the present UAW IEB. Supporters of 1P1V like Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) have called on the monitor to impose spending limits and reporting requirements. If the current IEB is worried about outside money, they can support those limits and requirements, too.

The UAW is great because we had great founding principles of solidarity, we had great leaders, and we had a rank and file brave and bold enough to seize the plants until the Big Three accepted the union. It will take an enormous effort to rebuild the UAW. Only the rank and file can do it. We have an opportunity and a duty to recharge the labor movement and to do that, we need to step up and select a new leadership ourselves.

 

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,

Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old

For the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever!

—Ralph Chapman, “Solidarity Forever,” UAW Anthem

Booklist Out, Books Back, Jacobo Published

    Broken Turtle Books is coming back, but Broken Turtle Booklist is set to be retired, with one last featured author, ME.

    A confession, Broken Turtle Booklist was a great idea: to catalogue all Delaware authors in one place and feature specific authors from time to time, but it was an overly ambitious project. In the meantime, Broken Turtle Books, a publishing company created by the editors of Dreamstreets, gradually stopped publishing, and I assumed the assets and debts, roughly a wash, but for a few ISBNs. With the publication of my latest work, Jacobo the Turko: a novel in verses, I have revived the company. I intend to revive promotion of works we published previously, such as Steven Leech’s Untime and Douglas Morea’s Letters to You, as well as works by other authors in the Dreamstreets collective, such as Franetta McMillians latest novel, The Hololounge of the Mundane. A new website, Broken Turtle Books, will serve that purpose, but it is now “under construction.” The old Broken Turtle Booklist is still up, with my brooding mug soon to cast its shadow over the homepage.

    As for my latest opus, Jacobo the Turko explores the braided rivers of human kinship by tracing the misadventures of Jacobo Bitar, a young Ecuadorian of blended heritage and naïve dreams.

    With snippets of news, scholarship, and a host of classical and experimental forms, this hybrid, tragicomic novel shows how Jacobo, an Ecuadorian youth of Indigenous and Lebanese parentage, lands summer work at a Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Pizza joint, loses his pay and passport, cuts wings at a Georgetown poultry plant, scrambles to evade ICE, is rescued by an African American artist of Wilmington, bakes donuts on the graveyard shift at Dunkin’, and gets nabbed and deported to Lebanon (where he’s never been), and is ultimately jailed at Guantánamo.

    Jacobo earned me the 2017 Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellowship in Literature: Poetry.

    For stylistic inspiration, I drew on the works of Nicolás Guillén, Eduardo Galeano, William Carlos Williams, Rita Dove, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The more I think of it, however, I realize how all sorts of bad actors intrude on my esthetics—you know, Pound, Eliot, and such, maybe Keats, maybe that ad copywriter Don Blanding’s cheap encomiums to Waikiki beach, hula dancers, and coconuts I read in the fifth grade when my Navy pilot dad was stationed in Hawaii.

     Check out my webpage for more on Jacobo and other works, including videos of my performances of and at this and that.

    

RBG: Don't Despair; Defy!

Ruth Bader Gins-
burg’s passing is a good time to choose action over despair.

Like others, I felt her death as a tightening of the right’s death-grip on the country, a shrinking of what’s left to save, an impulse to give in to Trumptopian Covid depression.

But no.

No! 

Hell, no!

Tomorrow I do something, with no time to worry it’s not enough or not good enough. If we must rage against the dying of the light, let us rage with action. Even if it feels feeble and feckless, at least it’s defiant. For example:

Register and Vote. For Biden, of course. Assistance can be found in Facebook, or Steven Colbert’s State-specific videos on registering, requesting absentee ballots, and voting early in Covid America. In short, have a plan.

Multiply your vote with Vote Tripling, a personal approach much superior to texts from strangers. Get three friends to get three friends to commit to voting, and then remind them as the election nears. Three times three times three ad victoria.

Adopt a battleground state and help turn out targeted new and/or infrequent voters, a proven and efficient method of boosting turnout of folks on our side where it matters most. Crooked Media can guide you.

Call your Senators now and demand they REFUSE to consider any Supreme Court Justice until the new president is inaugurated. Indivisible makes it easy.

Demonstrate for causes like Black Lives Matter with discipline to fit the times.

Oh, yeah, and if you got it, give money. I suspect those texts from strangers are telling you how.

Every conversation these days tends to fall off down that black hole of Trump-sickness. As soon as he comes up, say, “I am doing A, B, and C, about it. What will you promise to do?

Optimism is sometimes defined as a belief that things will turn out better than what’s probable and thereby improve one’s chances. Antonio Gramsci spoke about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit.” He wrote that from a fascist prison, and you are not there, yet. So, take heart, defy the odds, and fight back!

If you got a better idea, tell it, spread it, and, especially, DO it.

When I was pessimistic about you sharing pics of that sad kitten, none of you did. I am betting that many of you will share this one, now.

Don’t Just Call Out: Organize!

No we don't fit in with that white collar crowd
We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud
There's no place that I'd rather be than right here
With my red-necks white socks and blue ribbon beer

-Johnny Russell

The White Working Class is not some single thing seething with macho resentment, racism, and contempt for expertise, but a contradictory conglomeration of mostly decent, hardworking people, exploited, sneered at, and abandoned by a liberal elite, who are sometimes mischaracterized as left. I say this because I am of the white working class and of the left, having humped the line for 31 backbreaking years alongside workers—both white and of color—at Chrysler’s Newark Assembly Plant in Delaware. In the early ‘80s, they voted for me, a professed socialist, to serve them in the Plant Shop Committee for three years. They’d seen the newsletters I’d distributed with my comrades at the plant gates opposing speedup, pushing for safety, and urging affirmative action in our pale and male skilled trades. Later, in the late ‘90s, they voted nearly unanimously at our UAW local 1183 meeting to support my work chairing state-wide efforts to stop denying former felons their right to vote, a disenfranchisement targeting citizens of color. One of my proudest possessions is hanging in my office: a plaque my union gave me recognizing my work.
Like me, a Texas descendant, many of these folks are of southern heritage. One of my shop-mates who wore the Stars and Bars on his back once decided it would be fun to harass me as a “Polack” until I thought we would come to blows. I knew I would come out the worse, but it was a matter of honor, so I decided on a day of reckoning and confronted him, gently. He got it, saying he believed in treating everybody with respect. And then we were friends. He taught me a lesson about honor, himself, when he declared once and for all that he was through drinking after a bad car crash, and he was true to his word, boasting, “I don’t have to go to any of those meetings; I just said it and it was done.”
Some, I am sure, would keep those Confederate statues. I have seen the ones in Montgomery, Alabama in front of the Statehouse—Jefferson Davis and the rest. I have also seen the suspended pillars of weathering steel at the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice, each one signifying an American county, including New Castle, where human beings like our shop mates of color and some whites were lynched by the thousands. I am sure my white sisters and brothers would weep as I did as they read the names of the dead embossed on those rust-hued reminders.
Whites, Blacks, Latinx, male, female, gay, straight and trans worked and struggled side-by-side in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) for economic security and common dignity, just like the GM workers on strike are doing now. They did not always abandon their prejudices, but they demonstrated solidarity in ways the “woke” generation could learn from.
Now, I teach college English and have my students write essays from the angle of vision of different roles during the Freedom Rides, the 1960 struggle to integrate interstate bus transportation in the South. One role the class considers is the fictional Gavin Stevens, William Faulkner’s white Mississippi lawyer, who, in Intruder in the Dust, holds off a lynch mob with a shotgun until his African American client is cleared of murder. Stevens imagines lecturing a northerner who wants to civilize the red neck crowd. Says he (with punctuation added for clarity), “’Come down here and look at us before you make up your mind,’ and you reply, ‘No thanks, the smell is bad enough from here,’ and we say, ‘Surely you will at least look at the dog you plan to housebreak.’”
Calling out from a distance may feel like a blow against oppression, but winning someone over to a common struggle is what makes history.

Chelsea and Julian: When Poetry Crosses with Coverup

One of the yet unpublished poems from my novel in verse Jacobo the Turko is called “Wikileaks: JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment.” It comes early in my story, and it gives me a chance to use the form of a Gitmo detainee assessment to outline the course of Jacobo’s life as well as the absurd fabrication by which his tormentors justify his imprisonment. I can thank Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for my material. Anyone who peruses the Guantanamo Files will soon see how the truth is more absurd than my somewhat absurdist fable of an Ecuadorian indigenous who is mistaken for a Middle East terrorist. The pursuit of the files’ leakers reveals the lengths the intelligence community will go to to equate anyone who exposes them with the accused terrorists whose human rights they have trampled. Sometimes I wonder if fear of government persecution has deterred publishers from publishing my book. Or maybe it stinks, although half the poems in the book have been published by over a dozen national and international journals and anthologies, just not the prestigious lit rags.

The greatest crime of Chelsea Manning was to reveal to Julian Assange and thence to the world the murderous nature of the U.S. military’s campaign in Iraq (see “Collateral Murder”), the bogus nature of U.S. claims against the vast majority of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the towering arrogance at the U.S. State Department, especially when conflating our national interests with empire. Julian has just been arrested at London's Ecuadorian Embassy, and Chelsea has been returned to prison, where she is tortured with solitary confinement, on the yet to be proved pretext that she and Julian went a step beyond downloading secrets to hacking the password of a secure military server. This last charge, partially spelled out in a March 6, 2018 sealed indictment, gives great comfort to the war criminals who have murdered, tortured, and set the world on fire and wish to reverse the direction of opprobrium back to the smarmy Assange, as well as to Manning (and perhaps to President Obama, who pardoned Manning). It also gives some relief to the New York Times, who published the same documents as did Assange, and lets the mainstream media return to making Assange the scapegoat for Hillary Clinton’s loss. It also gives some distress to those of us who see the arrests of Manning and Assange as an attack on freedom of information and the press and a warning to all who challenge imperialist policy and state-sanctioned mayhem.

I invite you to peruse Andy Worthington’s 2017 characterization of what the Guantanamo Files reveal. The cult of secrecy, so often defended with cant about methods and means, is there exposed as a cover for incompetence and crime.

We who have been around a while have seen this before. For decades, everyone to the left of Richard Nixon was tarred as an ally or dupe of Russia. Communists were branded as traitors, not dissidents, and anyone whose opinions could be tied to the soviets, from the liberal Helen Gahagen Douglas to the red Dalton Trumbo, was smeared, blacklisted, or jailed.

Make no mistake, Russia today is ruled by a criminal clique of former apparatchiks who seized the property of the Russian people after the apparatchiks had run the socialist system into the ground. However, attempts to paint Trump or Assange as Russian assets is an opportunistic case of historical acid reflux disease. I remember how Khrushchev and his gang got rid of Stalin’s vile henchman Lavrentiy Beria without accusing themselves: they charged him with being a British spy. Similarly, American media accuses Trump, without admitting their own predilection for talking heads trumpery and establishment talking points over substantive news. One can hardly blame Americans for seeking news from alternative sources.

For example, there’s RT America, funded by the Russian Government. While often inserting Russian propaganda, it also broadcasts several distinguished Americans such as the commentators Chris Hedges and Larry King and the comic Lee Camp. Of course, Liz Wahl famously broke with RT when RT blipped out her question to Ron Paul about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. On the other hand, RT’s Breaking the Set host Abby Martin condemned the Ukrainian invasion on-air, but stated RT backed her. You can accuse those remaining of being opportunistic or can doubt their ethos, but that’s too easy a way to dismiss their views. Personally, I prefer Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and Juan González. At least there you may learn that if Trump pulls out of the START treaty with Russia, it will be the first time since 1972 that nuclear weapons are totally unregulated. Slim Pickens rides again!

If we let our dismay over our national disaster get highjacked by corporate media’s reductionism we may soon find ourselves swept up in the narrative of those, liberal to conservative, who backed the Iraqi war crimes Wikileaks exposed.

We love Chelsea Manning. Will we let her be tortured and destroyed? We hate Julian Assange. Is that a sufficient reason to accept DOJ claims about an incomplete password Assange might have sussed? Remember that the greater crime, the crime of the century, is the invasion of Iraq and the dismantling of human rights by the nation that proselytized human rights. Will we, poets or politicos, collude in the coverup?

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Eulogy for Vic Sadot
Presented at his Celebration of Life
Ashland Nature Center
Hockessin, Delaware
January 13, 2019

by Phillip Bannowsky

Vic Sadot
July 21, 1947-October 6, 2018

Vic Sadot’s musical career is charted beautifully by his brother Rob in his remarks and obituary, from Vic’s founding of the Americana and folk-rock Crazy Planet Band to its re-incarnation as the Cajun-Zydeco Planete Folle, and we learn how Vic so often performed at events in the struggle for peace and social justice. I’d like to fill in a little with what I know about the political activism integral to his musical career. When I’m done, we’d like anyone else who has something to share about any aspect or incident in Vic’s life to come forward.

Victor Rene Sadot. “Vic,” was a musician, writer, publisher, social worker, disc-jockey, autoworker, and above all a revolutionary patriot. A son of an autoworker who had come to America after his French home had been force to quarter Nazi soldiers, Vic shared his father’s love for his adopted home, in spite of the economic insecurities of working class life. It is rumored (and now verified by his brother Rob) that he even led the Young Republicans at the University of Delaware. However, like so many of us from of that era, he was badly disillusioned as the truth about America’s aggression in Viet Nam came to light and as peace and black liberation struggles met with repression, but he was inspired by the protest, folk, and rock music of the era and by the first principles of America’s founding mothers and fathers. A 1968 article in The Review, official student newspaper at the university, lists Vic Sadot as a speaker at a rally opposing the firing of Professors Rob Bresler and Al Myers. A year later, Vic was named “Outstanding Senior” at a Student Government Association banquet where then Governor Russell Peterson castigated students who disrupted classes. Inside scoop: Peterson’s son was a conscientious objector and member of Students for a Democratic Society.

I remember really getting to know Vic in Washington DC at a peace demonstration in the early seventies. Around that time Vic and his brothers Joe and Rob had been arrested at the Fort Belvoir Army base in Virginia for leafleting the troops during an Armed Forces “Open to the Public Day.” He was the public, an American citizen, and whether they liked it or not he was going to act in the spirit of the nation’s founders. Joe, by the way, used to publish a satirical newsletter called The Crazy Planet, hence the name of Vic’s band.

Back to what the founders had to say, their words inspired Vic to become an organizer for the Delaware People’s Bicentennial Commission, a group founded by Jeremy Rifkin that crashed various official parties put on in 1975 and 1976 and applied what founding patriots like Thomas Paine said about King George to the corporate kings who had taken over. Vic recruited me and about a dozen others to shake thinks up in the Company State. Once, the city of Newark held a public bicentennial-slash-renaissance fair celebration, and of course Vic and the rest of us showed up to exercise our free-speech rights, but they tried to kick us out, trying to claim it was actually private. The brouhaha revealed that one of the City Council members had a financial interest in the event, even though she hoped that news would not be made public, but that’s your corporate Queens for you. We had a lot of fun in PBC, a somewhat gonzo operation in Delaware, where Vic set the tone.

Ovelapping somewhat with these activities, Vic began working for Chrysler in Newark and was one of the founding members of what we called the Progressive Movement, a rank-and-file faction of the United Automobile Workers Local 1183 that agitated for civil rights, women’s rights, safety, union democracy, and a return to the union’s first principles.  In fact, Vic inspired one of our first campaigns, the distribution of Labor’s Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais. Vic wrote a review in the Progressive Movement’s newsletter, and we managed to sell maybe a dozen copies. These stories of radical agitators who built the labor movement had a positive influence on the political environment at Newark Assembly where several of us eventually won union office, although after Vic left.

One day while we were passing out our newsletter at the front gate, a couple of guys from the leading faction showed up, clearly looking for trouble, but we can’t completely blame them for what happened. We had been on a short strike a couple weeks before and Lyndon Larouche’s phony U.S. labor party showed up claiming that the strike was a plot by the C.I.A., that they were members of the University’s SDS chapter—they were not—that they had many of their members in the plant—they did not—and they were taking over. Long story short, these two union guys tried to tear the flyers out of Vic’s hands and throw him over the rail, where most certainly he would have broken some bones. Vic pulled away, fortunately, and started explaining to the guy rationally how we were union brothers simply expressing our opinions blah blah, but these guys had got themselves good and drunk to elevate their courage and suppress their rational thinking. In 1979, Vic expanded into publishing. Carrying on the tradition begun by the late 60s Heterodoxical Voice and the early 70s Purgatory Swamp Press, in 1979 Vic founded the Delaware Free Press, changed to Delaware Alternative Press after the first issue was hit with a cease and desist. Somebody had already trademarked the name.

Soon after that, Vic joined the editorial board for the historic Broadside—Sing Out Magazine, the famous mimeographed music mag from New York that printed words and music by topical singers from Woody Guthrie to Steve Forbert to Phil Ochs. In 1982, Vic republished in Broadside an article he wrote for the Delaware Alternative Press called “Phil Ochs’ FBI File.”

Vic was the ideal musicologist to host the “Freewheeling Roots Show” on the University of Delaware’s radio station in the early nineties. He brought the spirit of Phil Ochs to Delaware’s airwaves, the spirit of “The Broadside Balladeer,” to quote the title of Vic’s tribute song to Phil.

Over the years Vic contributed his music, analysis, and activism to numerous environmental and social justice issues, from the campaign to “Save White Clay Creek—Don’t Dam it” to the struggle against the suppression of Dupont: Behinnd the Nylon Curtain, by Gerald Colby Zilg, to intervening to help fellow workers at the Newark Food Coop, to the struggle for Democracy and Independence in Haiti, to Save the Whales and to the dangers of Fukushima.

Vic saw countless deceptions and outrages emanating from the national security state that ruled the country he loved, from the assassination of JFK to Gulf of Tonkin incident to the Saddam’s missing weapons of mass destruction. Accordingly, Vic took on the mantle of “the Truth Troubadour” on behalf of the 9-11 truth movement, which holds that the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a false flag operation. He composed and recorded dozens of songs on the topic such as “The Ballad of Pat Tillman,” “Cheney’s in the Bunker,” and “Trouble in the Rubble.” These songs can all be found under Vic Sadot on YouTube.

We lost touch somewhat after he moved to California in 2008, but his name was always coming up in reports from the barricades. Vic had always kept up the struggle, even when he was struggling with his own troubles. Who knew he’d find peace in Berzerkely?

I recently learned that Vic had joined the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, where he of course became chair of their social justice committee. I had always known him as a non-believer in religious mythology. We had been business partners painting houses in one period and roommates in another, and we had many discussions about science, politics, and free-thinking. Still, I think how Vic felt can be described in the words he applied to his brother Joe Sadot, who died in 1978 at the age of 26. In Vic’s introduction to Green Leaves, the collected literary and sketch work of Joe’s, Vic wrote:  “He rejected supernatural spiritualism, but he embraced the natural spiritualism of awe and reverence for the mysteries of life and the intimacies of love and comradery.”

Before I call on friends and family to share their memories, I’d like us all to remember Vic and those of his family who have passed on in the tradition practiced by South American revolutionaries who would call roll for their fallen comrades. After each name, all assembled would call out “presente,” meaning the fallen are still present in their works and in our hearts. Let’s try it first with Phil Ochs. I say his name and you say “Presente! loud.”

Phil Ochs: Presente!

We’ll begin with Vic’s father, then his mother, his brother, and himself.

Jean Sadot: Presente!

Eleanor Sadot: Presente!

Joe Sadot: Presente!

Vic Sadot: Presente!

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