"Humanity First" CCF Poster. Professionally matted and framed. $150.00 plus S&H. No S&H and free delivery in Regina though. Click image to enlarge.
M. J. Coldwell poster. National leader of CCF. Professionally framed. $105.00 plus S&H. No S&H and free delivery in Regina though. Click image to enlarge. Email doug.taylor@sasktel.netto order.
I tried selling these to local antique dealers. Two didn't know what the CCF was and weren't interested. The third one did but said they were too political and that "politics in this province can be dangerous" and also wasn't interested. I think I responded by stating that we don't have politics in Saskatchewan anymore but the posters were from a time when we did. - NYC
FOR SALE - $50.00 each or both for $90.00. Free delivery within Regina, otherwise s&h added.
It was 43 years ago today that four students were killed at Kent State University, shot dead by the Ohio National Guard as they protested US military involvement in Cambodia. The bloody tragedy would move Neil Young to write the timeless protest song Ohio, which was recorded and heard on the radio within weeks of the incident.
In his liner notes for the song on his later Decade retrospective, Young would call the massacre “probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning.” In our current political climate where dissent in increasingly repressed and criminalized, including here in Canada let us make sure we do not forget this lesson.
The current Canadian government has a thing for monarchy. In fact the Conservatives seem to like it better than democracy.
First it seemed quirky and quaint when they ordered portraits of Queen Elizabeth II to be put up in Canada’s overseas missions and promoted British royal visits. Then it got a little embarrassing when they reinstated “Royal” to the Canadian Air Force and the Navy’s official name.
But since the “Arab Spring” democracy struggles that began in 2011 Stephen Harper’s government has gotten down right scary, apparently supporting the divine right of kings over rule by the people.
Billy Bragg : Tuesday April 9 2013 in the
The Orr Centre,
4400 4th Avenue,
Regina
Regina Folk Festival Concert Series 2013
Billy Bragg April 9th; Doors open 7:30pm. The Orr Centre
Billy Bragg was recently described by The Times newspaper as a “national treasure.” In the two decades of his career Bragg has certainly made an indelible mark on the conscience of British music, becoming perhaps the most stalwart guardian of the radical dissenting tradition that stretches back over centuries of the country’s political, cultural and social history.
It’s a legacy that’s brought Bragg fans the world over as an artist with a keen sense of political activism as well as a way with a pop hook, all informed with a sense of humanity and humour. All Ages.
Advance tickets $32/40 at the door (subject to availability). No exchanges or refunds. Handling fees not included in ticket price (for Globe Theatre purchases only).
Andrew Cartmel, script editor of Doctor Who from 1986 to 1989, takes a look back at Doctor Who’s nonconformist history, in conversation with Carl Rowlands.
I love the quote from Sydney Newman, one of the creators of Doctor Who, back in 1963. He once described science fiction stories as "a marvellous way—and a safe way, I might add—of saying nasty things about our own society." Though Newman was the son of a Jewish émigré in Canada, I don't see the Doctor as a refugee or a nomad, but purely as an enigma. I'm a bit of a bore on this subject, but I think the show's creators had a similar idea—they wanted a mysterious character and probably just saw him as a blank slate.
When you click on the website of CinemaChile, the promoter of Chilean films around the world, you see a close-up of Mexican actor Gael García Bernal looking over his shoulder, a huge rainbow blurred out in the background. No one familiar with Chilean film needs the tiny caption. It’s from the movie “No,” released in 2012, now representing Chile at the Academy Awards as the country’s first-ever Oscar nomination.
With the Oscar ceremony set for Sunday evening,Santiago’s small but thriving film world is preparing for a late night — the broadcast will start at 9 p.m. local time. And the habitual local pessimism is yielding to a spot of hope.
Jerry Mander is founder and distinguished fellow of the International Forum on Globalization, and was called “patriarch of the anti-globalization movement” by the New York Times. His early career was as president of a commercial ad agency, and then later, non-profit political advertising with Public Media Center, which concentrated on environmental and anti-war work.
Is advertising legal? Most people agree that it is an uninvited intrusion into our lives and our minds, an invasion of privacy. But the fact that we can be aware of this without being furious, and that we do little to change the situation, is a good measure of our level of submission. There is a power relationship in advertising that is rarely, if ever, looked at, and yet it is a profoundly corrupt one. Some speak; others listen.
“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one – on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful – as usual – will shout for the war. The pulpit will – warily and cautiously – object – at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder.
"A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers – as earlier – but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation – pulpit and all – will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
“We are the keepers of the flame of liberty,” said then-US president Ronald Reagan, opening the centennial celebration in 1986 of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour. Reagan claimed the statue as an American beacon of freedom to the world.
As Edward Berenson shows, however, the statue’s political virtue had been compromised long before Reagan’s neo-conservative hypocrisy.
The French creators who gifted the statue to America in 1886 — Edouard Laboulaye (legal scholar), Frederic Bartholdi (architect) and Gustave Eiffel (engineer) — were “centrist liberals”. Although civil libertarians and anti-slavery abolitionists, they opposed the progressive republicans, democrats and socialists to their left.
Award-winning journalist Chris Hedges thinks corporate influence is increasing in Canada.
The American-born journalist, who was once ordered to be assassinated by Saddam Hussein, was in Regina on Thursday to give a lecture at the University of Regina.
The outspoken author of 12 books didn't mince words when talking about corporate influence in North American politics.
"You have corporate overloads - and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a product of corporatism - creating neo-feudalism where your poor and working class are shunned aside and your middle class is decimated," said Hedges.
Upton Sinclair, a poor young socialist determined to do his part to make a better world, wrote his incredible book titled "The Jungle" in the tarpaper shack in Princeton that was his home. Page after page in the book is filled with the nauseating details of how the meatpacking industry was preparing America's food.
When the book came out Sept. 20, 1906 it became an instant best seller.
The nation was shocked as it learned about the conditions in the Chicago stockyards.
Sinclair told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors on the payroll of the companies looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as potted ham.
Within months a gagging, but aroused population demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who became physically ill after reading an advance copy, demanded that Congress establish the Food and Drug Administration and , for the first time, set up federal inspection standards for meat.
At the age of 28 Sinclair was viewed as the man who took on a mighty industry and won.
Sinclair spent months in the Chicago stockyars, mingling with the immigrant workers he described as "wage slaves."
Over their kitchen tables in their tenement apartments he heard them tell about the backbreaking, mind-numbing work they did for totally inadequate wages. He said he worked on The Jungle for three months, "pouring into the pages all the pain" he had experienced.
Since the book's publication federal regulation of the food industry has been considered part and parcel of the things that are good about America. Not until the tea bagger Republicans of today came on the scene has that ever been challenged.
Railsea By China Miéville Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 2012
China Miéville’s first novel for young adults, Un Lun Dun, was a playful and pun-filled deconstruction of classic fantasy tropes. With Railsea, Mieville returns to the YA field, this time playing it fairly straight.
The book pays homage to the classic seafaring adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick. But in place of roiling water and wooden ships, Miéville drops the reader into a post-apocalyptic world of dirt and steel. There are two layers to the sky and four to the world. The upsky is a toxic place filled with huge, dangerous air beasts. The downsky is the breathable air, stretching from the base of the highlands – which hold their own terrors – to the habitable lands of the continents. Below lies the flatearth, on which sit the twisting tracks and ties of the railsea, which rests above the caverns and beast trails of the subterrestrial.
The origin of the railsea is unknown. Some say the gods put down the train tracks or that they extruded from the ground like exposed fossils. Others say that the rails were written “in heavenly script, that people unknowingly recited as they travelled.”
One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to another watershed moment in America's history.
The man behind "Strange Fruit" is New York City's Abel Meeropol, and he really has two stories. They both begin at Dewitt Clinton High School, a public high school in the Bronx that has an astonishing number of famous people in its alumni. James Baldwin went there. So did Countee Cullen, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren.
Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.
In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol "was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge."
Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner — who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.
When Holiday decided to sing "Strange Fruit," the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.
In 1999, Time magazine named "Strange Fruit" the "song of the century." The Library of Congress put it in the National Recording Registry. It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock andMarcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller evoking the poem on his mournful bass clarinet.
Miller says he was surprised to learn the song was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. "Strange Fruit," he says, took extraordinary courage both for Meeropol to write and for Holiday to sing.
"The '60s hadn't happened yet," he says. "Things like that weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about."
New York lawmakers didn't like "Strange Fruit." In 1940, Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the American Communist Party had paid him to write the song. They had not — but, like many New York teachers in his day, Meeropol was a Communist.
Journalist David Margolick, who wrote Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, says, "There are a million reasons to disparage communism now. But American Communism, one point it had in its favor was that it was concerned about civil rights very early."
Meeropol left his teaching job at Dewitt Clinton in 1945. He eventually quit the Communist Party.
And that's where the second part of Meeropol's story begins. The link is the pseudonym he used when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan.
"Abel Meeropol's pen name 'Lewis Allan' were the names of their children who were stillborn, who never lived," says his son, Robert Meeropol. He and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel and his wife, Anne Meeropol, after the boys' parents — Ethel and Julius Rosenberg — were executed for espionage in 1953.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs had also been Communists.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are taken to prison after being found guilty of nuclear espionage. They were subsequently executed.
The couple's trial and execution made national headlines, and there was also something of a salacious element, given that the Rosenbergs were a married couple. News accounts described it as "the first husband and wife to die in the electric chair."
At the time, the Rosenberg sons, Robert and Michael, were 6 and 10, respectively. News photographs of the boys show them dressed in suits visiting their parents in prison.
"They're these little boys and they're wearing these caps, and they look so young and so vulnerable. It's really a very poignant image," says Margolick.
Robert Meeropol says that in the months following his parents' execution, it was unclear who would take care of him and his brother. It was the height of McCarthyism. Even family members were fearful of being in any way associated with the Rosenbergs or Communism.
Then, at a Christmas party at the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, the boys were introduced to Abel and Anne Meeropol. A few weeks later, they were living with them.
"One of the most remarkable things was how quickly we adapted," Robert says. "First of all, Abel, what I remember about him as a 6-year-old was that he was a real jokester. He liked to tell silly jokes and play word games, and he would put on these comedy shows that would leave me rolling."
There is something else about Abel Meeropol that seems to connect the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" to the man who created a loving family out of a national scandal. "He was incredibly softhearted," Robert says.
Anne Meeropol plays a song on guitar for her sons, Robert and Michael.
For example, there was an old Japanese maple tree in their backyard, which sent out many new seedlings every year.
"I was the official lawnmower," Robert says, "and I was going to mow over them, and he said, 'Oh, no, you can't kill the seedlings!' I said, 'What are you going to do with them, Dad? There are dozens of them.'
"Well, he dug them up and put them in coffee cans and lined them up along the side of the house. And there were hundreds of them. But he couldn't bring himself to just kill them. It was just something he couldn't do."
Abel Meeropol died in 1986. His sons, Robert and Michael, both became college professors. They're also both involved in social issues. Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children. And he says that even after all these years, he still finds himself unable to kill things in his own garden.
