Chris Kinder was a dear friend and comrade, a self-taught Marxist historian who made his living for many decades as a worker in a Movement print shop and organizer of the Labor Action committee to Free Mumia abu-Jamal. He lived in Oakland, California, and participated in all the labor, social justice, antiwar and socialist activities there.

Chris stayed over my place in Brooklyn many times, and he gave me his study to crash in, sometimes for several months at a time, when I made it out to California. He’d helped to arrange part of my book tour on the West Coast in 2019, and went wayyyy out of his way to run books to northern California bookstores when I found myself running short.

When I learned he died fom pneumonia (complications from a Flu) early Monday morning, April 14, 2025, I remembered an interview we did 17 years ago for my radio show, Steal This Radio, about the frame-up of Mumia abu-Jamal, a cause that occupied a great deal of Chris’s life these past 40 years. I searched and eventually found that interview, and it is with sadness triggered by hearing Chris (and Mumia’s) voices, and also with an immense sense of appreciation for having been friends with Chris and learning so much from him.

Stan Woods writes from Oakland: “I saw Chris a few days before his death at Kaiser – Oakland. Though he could barely speak he attempted to talk politics ! A Socialist activist to the last! Chris was literally an Internationalist who spent five years in Australia working with a Socialist group there. Also he was a Teamsters Union retiree, who represented the workers at Inkworks, the print shop.”

The following, then, is from Steal This Radio 45, May 2008 …. Rest in Peace and power, my friend.

https://archive.org/details/interview-with-chris-kinder-re-mumia-may-2008

In 1999, President Bill Clinton directed NATO to bomb the hell out of the independent country of Yugoslavia.

BOMBING THE BRIDGE TO THE 21st CENTURY
(to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain”)

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see
further into the future.”
-Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, Feb. 19, 1999

I could bomb you every hour
Irradiate the flowers
And mock you in disdain (heh-heh heh-heh heh-heh)
It may be a bitter pillage
When I cluster bomb your village
Oh, but I can feel your pain

I will bomb you to obey me
Until you Rambouillet me
Ethnic cleansing as we speak
Dan I’d Rather not report it
Tom Broke-off will distort it
(too bad Cockburn’s off this week)

BRIDGE
O I won’t tell you why
We bomb hossssspittttals and skkools
Just remember the golden rule —
Who’s got the gold (snap! snap!) — They make the rule

I’m as tender as a kitten
When I am I-M-F’n
World Bankin’ on yer chain
Structurally adjust ya
Privatize’n bustya
Ooooh, “Let me feel yer pain.”

When someone’s an empty kettle
Steely eyed and metal
Rust in all the parts
New world order-up some oil
For my friends who’ve been so loyal
If I only had a heart.

And so I blow up all your bridges
Short out electric grid-ges
For Bechtel and WalMart
Pristina ain’t so pristine
With uranium oxide misting
My irradiated heart

BRIDGE
Picture me a bombardier
Invisible to all below
Target rich environment
And if I miss Who’s gonna know?

Milosovic is evil
So we kill 3 thousand people
Worse than Hitler, what a perv!
Russian sector? — can’t oblige ya
I’m just a paper tijer
Until I get some noive.

Primakov & Chernomyrdin
They won’t get a word in
In their direction let us fart
With my missiles of uranium
And my tanks made of titanium
And my access to your cranium
Through the TV in your brainium
I’m war criminally insanium
‘Cause I haven’t got a heart.

BRIDGE
With Monica by my side
I’ve got courage to the core
Under the missile TOW
Kiss me once! And blow some more!

(Spoken) And now: Joschka! Joschka Fischer! —

I could bomb you just a bissel
Cruisin’ on my missile
Some red paint on my frown
Our new Luftwaffe may seem callous
But I say, “NATO über alles” —
My Greens won’t let me down

I could bomb you every hour
Blast away the flowers
And mock you in disdain (heh-heh heh-heh heh-heh)
It may be a bitter pillage
When I cluster bomb your village
Oh, but I can feel your pain.

I will bomb you to obey me
Until you Rambouillet me
Ethnic cleansing as we speak
Dan I’d Rather not report it
Tom Broke-off will distort it
(too bad Cockburn’s off this week)

BRIDGE
O I won’t tell you why
We bomb hossssspittttals and skkools
Just remember the golden rule —
Who’s got the gold (snap! snap!) — They make the rule

I’m as tender as a kitten
When I am I-M-F’n
World Bankin’ on yer chain
Structurally adjust ya
Privatize’n bustya
Ooooh, “Let me feel yer pain.”

For more info on the role of NATO and Clinton on Yugoslavia and in getting us to where we are today, see Mitchel Cohen, “NOT ON THE NEWS: AGAINST NATO’S WAR ON YUGOSLAVIA” and “BOMBING THE BRIDGE TO THE 21ST CENTURY: Behind NATO’s Bombardment of Yugoslavia“

Some who should know better seized on the retraction without ever considering WHY it was retracted on narrow grounds, as supposed evidence that Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and Quercetin are worthless in fighting against Covid. Not only are they NOT worthless, but we actually have learned why they are important in anti-Covid protocols.Most “alternative” researchers and medical practitioners, such as Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, focused on Vitamin D3, zinc, Vitamin C, N.A.C., and Azithromycin as crucial components of protocols that combat Covid. Along with Dr. Zelenko, they also utilized low-dose hydroxychloroquine as a “carrier” for the zinc to transport it directly to the affected cells, highly effective when it was administered in the very early stages of the illness. (The timing and sequence matters!) Other supplements, including Quercetin or Ivermectin, perform that same “carrier” function.

Contrary to the claim made in Science and in Portside, the withdrawn paper was NOT the only research done on hydroxychloroquine, which was shown to be effective when taken in the early stages of the disease and in conjunction with zinc, despite the implications otherwise in Cathleen O’Grady’s Science article. She reports that many later studies debunked the use of hydroxychloroquine in the protocols for treating Covid-19, but she fails to report that those studies omitted the necessary administering of Zinc and the fact that dangerously high dosages of HCL were used in the research, a much-too-high dosage that no practitioner was advocating and which indeed would be extremely dangerous.

It is at least a bit strange that the retraction reported in Science doesn’t seem to comprehend or report on the timing, sequence, and dosages which Dr. Zelenko et al. actually utilized effectively against Covid-19.

Additionally, the retraction seems to focus on methodological and ethical concerns focusing on whether Covid-19 patients had given prior approval to the administering of Azithromycin — required in France (it was a doctor in France, Didier Raoult, who promoted the use of Azithromycin) but not required in the U.S. These are no doubt important strictures, but they have nothing to do with addressing the biochemical mechanisms of the drugs/supplements themselves, which many practitioners like Vladimir Zelenko have noted. The retraction, however, says nothing to condemn hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness when administered properly.

If correctly performed analysies would indicate that hydorxychloroquine turned out to be unsuccessful as part of protocols for treating Covid-19, then so be it. But they don’t show that, and hydroxy is indeed effective when administered properly. One should not have a stake in a study’s outcome, as a number of mRNA “inoculees” do; like O’Grady, they fail to research without bias and report fairly. The stupidity of taking sides due to preconceptions or simply wanting to trust in those promotng a drug and politicizing the results is, I suppose, a sign of the panicky, desperate idiocy we’re seeing all around us, but it should not be accepted as legitimate or honest reportage.

In that sense, neither should we accept the problematic last paragraph of O’Grady’s article, given what we now know of the dangers of the mRNA vaxxines, dangers that are now widely recognized. O’Grady, on behalf of Science magazine, gloats over the summation of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics with regard to the paper on hydroxychloroquine: “This series of events serves as a reminder of an essential point when it comes to medicines: Even in times of health crisis, prescribing medicines without solid proof of efficacy, outside the rigorous framework of well-conducted clinical trials, remains unacceptable,” the society says.

Absolutely right, as a general principle. So why do we not find O’Grady pointing out that the mRNA vaxxines at the very least offered no “solid proof of efficacy, outside the rigorous framework of well-conducted clinical trials?” Why the different standard, then, for studying hydroxychloroquine but not for the mRNA vaxxines? Her failure to raise that point with consistency indicates, again “at best”, a lack of objectivity and a vested interest in politicizing the outcome she’s reporting on.

Unbelievably, the city had passed an ordinance that stated that after June 10, 1791, “no tree was to stand within the city limits,” according to Jonah Raskin, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature (Regent Press, 2014). Freneau — born in New York and later living in Mt. Pleasant, New Jersey — went to war in verse against the government of New York City. One line in Freneau’s widely discussed poem stands out: “Trees now to grow is held a crime.”

In addition to his anti-British satires in the colonial period, Freneau had been publishing popular poems about trees he loved, such as “The Dying Elm.” He rallied the people of New York City in support of the city’s trees, just as folk singers 180 years later took direct action against the city’s ban of folk music in the famed Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village and scene of the up-and-coming folk music revival in 1961. (The park is named for the American general and first President of the U.S., whom Freneau despised). Freneau’s poetic campaign forced the City to repeal the anti-tree ordinance.

Across the Atlantic in Europe fifty years after Freneau defeated New York City’s attempt to clear all trees from the city, an editor of the Cologne’s Rheinische Zeitung wrote powerful editorials in defense of trees, against their privatization, and in favor of the rights of peasants to collect dead wood from the forest floor that had been previously unrestricted by law and used in common for millennia.

The editor of Rheinische Zeitung was a brash 24 year-old named Karl Marx. Marx railed against the state’s expropriation of “the commons”. Few remember today that ecological justice was central to Marx’s outlook. From his earliest mature writings and throughout his life, Marx was outraged by the cutting down of forests for private profit; he denounced the enclosure of lands that had been used in common and the state’s criminalization of peasants who took dead wood for heating and cooking.

Marx termed that and other expropriations of Nature “primitive accumulation,” and investigated how such ‘enclosures’ came to receive social acceptance and sanction in law. He pointed out that by 1842, 85 percent of all prosecutions in the Rhineland dealt with a new crime: the “theft” of dead wood lying on the ground. The state enforced that law only on peasants who collected the dead wood, while allowing wealthy businessmen and corporations to strip whole living forests with impunity.

Few today ever heard of poet Philip Freneau, or knew that Karl Marx was an aggressive defender of the forests. Under the Clinton/ Gore administration, considered by some to be ecologically astute, their industry-friendly “environmental” rules enabled more trees to be cut down in the U.S. than by any of their predecessors — combined!

The rolls of newsprint for printing The New York Times equate to 75,000 trees for one weekend of “The Paper of Record’s” publication of its Sunday propaganda and advertisements!

At SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island NY, where I went to college and never learned about Freneau, NY State cleared a large tract of beautiful forest behind H Quad dormitory in order to build …. ready? …. the headquarters of the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation!

Long live Philip Freneau, poet and Tree Hugger, whom George Washington called “a wretched and insolent dog.”

Wretched and insolent dogs of the world, unite!

Dad – Abe Cohen – and two-year-old Mitchel in Sheepshead Bay, 1951

THE YEAR WAS 1979. Genevieve – the nom de guerre I’m assigning to this member of our Red Balloon Collective and Poetry Conspiracy (she did after all look like Genevieve Bujold) – returned trembling to our rented collective house in Port Jefferson Station from her Physics for Beginners class at SUNY Stony Brook, half-way across Long Island toward Montauk. “Dr. Mould said the sun will burn off all its hy­dro­gen in 5 billion years and go dark. We are half-way to the end. What’s it all worth?”

Genevieve was in the throes of an existential grief as profound to her as the terror generated in younger people by today’s planetary emergencies, and Israel’s infliction of genocide on the Palestinian people. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Hershey Pennsylvania was in the process of melting down; the barely fictional Hollywood film “The China Syndrome” miraculously hit theaters around this same time, and it revealed the lies and apocalyptic upshot of the nuclear corporate madness that ruled our lives.

Thousands of anti-nuke protesters – Gen­evieve, myself, and our mutual friend Bonita among them – marched repeatedly against the horrors and immorality of those who would hold the world hostage to their techno-fantasies and lust for profits. Barron’s Weekly, that capitalist paragon, summed up their socio­pathology: “In the generation of nuclear energy, manmade hazards seem unavoidable, but bankruptcy strikes us as a needless risk.”

Dr. Richard Mould, physics teacher extraordinaire, saw his goal – at least one of them – as unraveling the politics and stultified thinking hidden in the way physics was generally taught. Dr. Mould had already become the faculty advisor for the Stony Brook chapter of Students for a Democratic Society when it formed on the campus in 1966; he joined his students in their desperate fight against the U.S. government’s war on Vietnam. He helped guide them in battling for social justice especially for Black people trying to survive in America, and in trying to make sense of their corporeal and emotional existence in this vast but finite universe.

Our Red Balloon Collective grew out of the wreckage of SDS and its independent caucus. Nineteen and twenty-year-olds were thrown into debates that had perplexed philosophers from time immemorial. Would people come to revolutionary consciousness on their own, or would they – and we – need what amounted to a Leninist vanguard organization to intercede and provide Aesopian “morals” – the “correct line” – to lead them? The same debate wracked the hundreds of similar collectives sprouting on campuses across the country, and indeed throughout the world.

Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t a-Marching Anymore” became the Red Balloon Collective’s first theme song:

It’s always the old to lead us to the wars
Always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won
With a sabre and a gun
Tell me is it worth it all

– and so too did the Fugs’ nihilistic song “Nothing,” which tugged in a different direc­tion. Pretty much every­thing seemed irrational and absurd; we felt it was imperative to fight to bring the warmongers to justice.

Che Guevara famously (and wisely) said: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Everyone had pinned that poster to their kitchen walls.

Che inspired me greatly, but I also wondered about the first part of that quote: Why would it be ridiculous to say that true revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love? Why would we fear being ridiculed? The Jefferson Airplane sang a rejoinder of sorts: “We are forces of chaos and anarchy / everything they say we are, we are / And we’re very proud of ourselves.”

Indeed, why not embrace the Absurd, the Irrational, the Alienation, the Ridiculous?

The Talking Heads made it explicit in the 80s with their album, “Stop Making Sense.” It replayed over and over again as Arielle and I – we’d met at the No Easy Answers Left conference in New York City – clutched onto each other to keep from separately flying off into the cosmos as we tripped in Mt. Kisco on some of the finest LSD I’d ever taken, each drop in its own organ­ic honeycomb section, compliments of a member of the Jefferson Starship for helping him salvage his relationship with his girlfriend – my “ex”, a member of the Red Balloon Collective.

*   *   *

FORTY-THREE YEARS LATER, I’m just another old white guy dozing on the subway in and out of what some call reality. I wake to see several Black teenagers finding a few dollars that had fallen out of a sleeping homeless man’s pocket. I ask myself a version of the question that comes up so frequently, “Should I intervene?” or, should I wait to see if the kids themselves resolve it? My poem, “School’s Out!,” unfolds that dilemma and tells that story. Kudos to the big-hearted teens at John Dewey High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – and to the cops for not showing up.

SCHOOL’S OUT

Raucous teens explode
onto the D train at Bay 50th
from John Dewey High School.
Half a century past
my friends and I, too, would fly wild
like that station’s pigeons
clamoring in the rafters.

Subway screeches. Steel girders sway.
A homeless man, exhausted,
reeks from urine, sleeps through the ruckus.
At his feet, a plastic dish
filled with gruel.
By its side, a dollar and change.

One teen snatches the bill
holds it high: “My lucky day!”
What to do?
I sit quietly, waiting for the world to turn.
Hey,” his chum glares,
that’s the guy’s lunch money.”
I hold my breath. A second passes.
And another.
Then, “snap” – just like that,
the way Derek Jeter
fielded ground balls and threw
to first all in one motion –
consciousness stirs, decision seamless.

“Wake up!,” he says,
shakes the sleeper,
does not wake.
He stuffs the dollar and 63 cents
into the homeless guy’s pocket. It falls out,
he picks it up, stuffs it back in.
Careful,” he warns –
someone might steal this!”

*  *   *

Through the windows, story after story rattles with me across Brooklyn. The D train – the ride to Coney Island that Bob Dylan found so interminable in visiting Woody Guthrie at his apart­ment on Mermaid Avenue – bounces me back and forth between the decades and key landscapes jolting the three-quarters-of-a-century of non-stop experiences and memories.

Here is the asphalt field, a triangle across from Lafayette High School, where my dad — invited to join a game with me and my friends one weekend morning — whacked a softball over the fence. The ball didn’t just clear the fence; it sailed over the train tracks and then carried over another fence to the park across the street – a gargantuan shot. The kids in the neighborhood followed the ball’s flight with mouths agape and jaws dropping. My best friend Lloyd reluctantly told me it was my responsibility to inform my father that hitting the ball over the fence – to say nothing of his hitting it over the train and over the second fence across the street – was, absurd as it sounds, an automatic out by our ground rules, though, looking back, it was worth trading an out for all the glorious memories-to-be!

Across the Stillwell Avenue el is the Marlboro housing project where I grew up after my family had moved from Brigh­ton Beach. Down the block, L&B Pizza and Spu­moni Gardens still thrive. And here is John Dewey High School which my dad – elected to the school board to fill the last of nine slots – fought to set up as a “magnet” school in the belief that children in the Projects and not just the elites should have access to quality education.

One day on the D train I overhear a teen from John Dewey announce that he’d just been diagnosed with lead poisoning, epidemic am­ong Black children in New York City. His friend responds as only a New Yorker can: “Well at least the lead will block the radiation from the bombs and power plants.” Yea, dad!

Genevieve tore herself apart over the meaninglessness of it all, as the world would be coming to an end in 5 billion years. The meaninglessness in this world smacked us around as well. Having no witty words for her – we’re back again in the late 1970s, remember – I slid the Buffalo Springfield record, For What It’s Worth, from its sleeve and placed the vinyl onto the turntable careful to match the hole with the metal spindle, and cranked up the volume. (I write about those mechanisms for my grandkids Zaya’s and Nova’s benefit!) Blast the darkness away with music, absurdity, bales of sar­casic laughter and protests!

FLASH FORWARD FORTY YEAR. I was excited to discover the Pandora App on my lover’s computer. She was six years older than me, already in her mid-70s and people on the street often smiled when we’d walk by entangled in each other’s arms. “Are you dating” some would ask and I would answer, “Yes, we’re carbon dating.” Using Pandora, needing no bent spindle to misalign the record (the new technologies do have some ben­efits!), I began blasting 60-year-old For What It’s Worth over her wireless speakers.

There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

The moment she said “turn it down” I knew we were star-crossed lovers. Her parallel universe held no memory or recognition of the very loud Stony Brook where our music rebounded in every corner of the campus and stitched together the multiple threads of our movements! True, I tried to prolong our doomed relationship, and when she couldn’t bear it any longer she fled to Cuba.

I found the Wiki­pedia entry to be a revelation. I had a mistaken idea of the song’s actual origins. So I’ll offer an excerpt here:

Although For What It’s Worth is often considered an anti-war anthem of sorts, Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song [not about Chicago 1968, which many assume, but] because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles in November 1966 …

“On Saturday, November 12, 1966, fliers were distributed on the Sunset Strip inviting people to join demonstrations later that day. Several Los Angeles rock radio stations also announced a rally outside the Pandora’s Box club on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. That evening, as many as 1,000 young demonstrators, including future celebrities Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda (who was handcuffed by police) gathered to protest against the curfew’s enforcement.

“Although the rallies began peacefully, trouble eventually broke out. The unrest continued the next night, and periodically throughout the rest of November and December, forcing some clubs to shut down within weeks. It was against the background of these civil disturbances that Stills recorded For What It’s Worth on December 5, 1966.

“Stills said in an interview that the name of the song came about when he presented it to the record company executive Ahmet Ertegun (who signed Buffalo Springfield to the Atlantic Records’ ATCO label). Stills said: ‘I have this song here, for what it’s worth, if you want it.’” That throw-away phrase stuck.

There’s battle lines being drawn
nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Gettin’ so much resistance from behind
It’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

As usual, things happen sideways – for what it’s worth. I still can’t console Genev­i­eve’s existential despair, or definitively resolve my Collective’s political dilemma – intervene by brand­ish­ing Aesopian moral lectures, or trust in the creative human spirit to find its own way? Does doing the one damage the possibility of achieving the other? Is there a correct answer? As a child I loved the maroon-covered book of Aesop’s Fables my mom read to me. I’d twist my brain every which way trying to understand the “moral” of each story. These days, I remind myself of the motto from my own Zen-Marxism writings: If there’s only one answer the question is wrong.

Ruth Cohen (Mom), Mitchel and Robert, 1952

Are stories and poems meaningful today in the face of Covid, genocide, climate collapse, and pending nuclear war? Bob Dylan sang: “Without freedom of speech I might be in the swamp.” Should a writer of any color or creed squander time on joyful word-plays and personal and even fanciful tales, when drivers, if Black, are systematically pulled over by police and face the crapshoot reality of summary execution with every encounter? Leonard Peltier, Mumia abu-Jamal remain locked up in prison. Julian Assange was finally allowed to return to Australia after many years in prison, though without being pardoned. Mumia, Julian, Leonard Peltier, Chel­sea Manning, Edward Snowden, and dozens more) have been tortured and punished, many for their hubris in publishing exposés of government violence, terror and insanity.

NO FLY ZONE

As little kids in Brighton Beach

little Odessa, today

we wore outfits

knit by my grandmother, Gertrude,

that had no “Lekhereh” –

no opening through which to pee.

It’s been 75 years

yet every time some politician today

talks about a “No Fly” zone

I remember Granny

and have to pee.

Welcome to scenic Bensonhurst!

EMMA GOLDMAN – America’s infamous anarchist and radical feminist agitator in the late 1800s and all the way up through her death in 1940 – wrote in her autobiography Living My Life of returning to the apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side she sometimes shared with her lover Al­exander Berkman. Berkman berated her for hav­ing gone to the movies with another lover. Berkman fumed, roaring, jealous. But jealousy is not cool for good anarchists, so he turned it into a political tirade against Emma, ranting that Hollywood films are bourgeois and that she’d squandered money needed for their new anarchist publication (all of 10 cents). Berkman then bummed a few dollars and went down to the local pub; he ordered a steak, again rationalizing it by saying “revolutionaries need to eat well to keep up their strength”.

Emma could have looked into the future and retorted with: “Stop providing phony political excuses for your personal desires; stop justifying your unacceptable behavior! Instead of spending our money eating steak, maybe you should practice shooting a revolver so next time you won’t miss when shooting capitalists like Frick, and not just wounding them.” Frick was the head of Car­negie Steel in Homestead, near Pittsburgh and had deployed hundreds of Pinkerton thugs to kill striking workers, crushing the 1892 steelworkers’ strike. Berkman spent the next 14 years in prison.

Emma, who had fled St. Petersberg in Russia for New York City (by way of Roch­ester) described the first time (1889) she met Berkman when she was twenty-years-old: “While the four of us were having dinner … I suddenly heard a powerful voice call: ‘Extra-large steak! Extra cup of coffee!’ My own capital was so small and the need for economy so great that I was startled by such apparent extravagance. … I wondered who that reckless person could be and how he could afford such food. ‘Who is that glutton?’ I asked. Solataroff laughed aloud. ‘That is Alexander Berkman. He can eat for three. But he rarely has enough money for food. … I’ll introduce you.’”

“Several people came to our table to talk to Solotaroff. The man of the extra-large steak was still packing it away as if he had gone hungry for weeks.” And then she relays the incident that changed her life: “Berkman remarked to me: ‘Johann Most is speaking tonight. Do you want to come hear him?’

“How extraordinary, I thought, that on my very first day in New York I should have the chance to behold with my own eyes and hear this fiery man whom the Rochester press used to portray as the personification of the devil, a criminal, a bloodthirsty demon! I had planned to visit Most in the office of his newspaper some time later, but that the opportunity should present itself in such an unexpected manner gave me the feeling that something wonderful was about to happen, something that would decide the whole course of my life.”

Quite the historic first date!

So when Berkman scolded Emma years later for wasting money on a movie, their whole encounter came full circle, as it began with Emma griping about Berkman spending their money on his beloved steaks! “Why should one not love beauty?” Emma asked. The future Phil Ochs joins the debate: “Ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.”

“I did not say one should not enjoy or appreciate beauty,” Berkman replied; “I said it was wrong to spend money on such things when the movement is so much in need of it. It is inconsistent for an anarchist to enjoy luxuries when people live in poverty.”

“Beautiful things are not luxuries,” Emma insisted. “They are necessaries. Life would be unbearable without them.” Yet, at heart Emma felt that Berkman was right. Revolutionists gave up even their lives – why not also beauty?

I was thinking of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Johann Most, whose great grand­daughter was a member of the Brooklyn Greens, as I stood perplexed watching the line of tour­ists outside Katz’s deli anticipating biting into its 3-inch thick pastrami sandwich – total heart attack material. In prior years, the line wrapped all the way ’round the block and across the street; it would be greeted by a statue of V.I. Lenin atop a condo overlooking E. Houston St. known as Red Square, in front of a giant clock whose numbers were scrambled and spun backwards.

The statue was removed a few years ago; everyone apparently now comes to Katz’s not to visit Lenin but to practice their orgasm vocalizations, following upon that famous scene in Katz’s from the film When Harry Met Sally! Rent for a tiny apartment in the 6-story walk-up on E. 13 St. near third avenue that replaced the dilapidated tenement where Emma lived from 1903 to 1913, today rents for $6,000 per month.

TIME IS NOT SEQUENTIAL IT OVERLAPS. Human beings make their own history, true, but not just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances they’ve chosen freely, but under conditions already existing that they’re born into, rituals handed down and transmitted from the past.

Dilemma afer dilemma from yesteryear re-emerges in the fierce urgency of now. Karl Marx waxed poetic in 1851: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they are occupied with revolutionizing themselves and social conditions, creating some­thing that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

So it was when one day I, having hitchhiked into the city disheveled, hungry and craving a Lower East Side slice of Challah, stumbled into the no-longer-existing famous Jewish res­tau­rant Ratner’s, a few blocks from Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side. There was no line, and no tourists. That statue of Lenin would appear like Hamlet’s father’s ghost as soon as one turned off Delancey and onto the parallel Houston Street. (That’s “How-stun” in New Yorkese.) The waiters at Ratner’s were already eyeing me with suspicion. So I innocently asked (hoping they’d give me a free slice) “How much does that Hallah cost?” (say it fast.)

Dead silence.

History has long fingers; they claw upward through ancient dust, scraping through obscure folds of consciousness. Life is as complex and as confusing today as it was generations ago. Human emotions are as fraught with profound uncertainties as ever. Still, humor, compassion and Love dare to risk the ridicule Che Guevara fretted over as he reached across the chasm of existential fears and panic proposing to create a new socialist human being. Songs and memories arising out of the steam of social conflict and personal experiences almost 60 years ago, let alone radical anecdotes like Red Emma’s from 130 years ago, burst upon us today raising the same issues, as they are rediscovered by new generations and social movements.

Today I revel in stories for their own sake (forgive me, Berkman!), the wordplays of poems, nonlinear connections, the joy of learning about our forebears. I am fascinated by how such stories can explode into meaning, rage, and joy, with or without the teaching of moral les­sons, in this jumble of greater and lesser holocausts.

The scene: Bonnie’s Grill on 5th Avenue in Park Slope. Out of the blue, I hear the almost never publicly uttered Fugs’ song, “Nothing.” I catch my breath, look up; at the next table sits a family with three kids all being led in the song by the dad and mom.

Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing,
Wednesday and Thursday nothing,
Friday for a change a little more nothing,
Saturday once more nothing.

I stare, barely recognizing the dad, Steve Becker, one of the important poets in The Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy half-a-century ago. I join in singing, of course – as I said, Tuli Kup­fer­berg’s and Ed Sanders’ musical absurdity had become one of my Collective’s theme songs!

The kids look over to my table amazed that this old guy (me!) actually knows the words to the song they’d known as their own private mantra since they’d been born. When we come to the verse, “Carlos Marx, nothing, Engels, nothing, Bakunin and Kro­pot­kin, nothing, Leon Trotsky, lots of nothing,” we all are enthusiastically pounding our separate tables, anticipating the next line, which we shout out just as the Red Balloon Collective had always done: “Stalin, less than nothing.” To the young ones the names we are all singing are just loony-sounding chants devoid of meaning, the way my brothers and I would “pray” before bed every night, Shaday, Ishmoraini, Mot­z­alaini, McColoroo. What could each of us know of the insanities and struggles that dominated our existences, propelling us into some dys­topian version of a shared future?

In 2018, after Steve Becker had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, I happened upon an old friend while on line to use the bathroom at a croissant café in New York City during the giant rally for women’s rights. Stunned and unsure, her name barely made it through my lips. “Bonita?” I stuttered. She stared at me, “Yes,” and then “Who are you?”

In 1978, Bonita had driven to West Virginia – our collective’s second trip there – to support the coal miners’ wildcat strike. “We don’t need no Jews or Commie food,” the union officials muttered. So Red Balloon collected three large truckloads of food at Stony Brook and sent them to the independent groups of miners we’d met who’s organized an autonomous distribution network, bypassing the union honchos. We distributed hundreds of copies of our newspaper. The strikers’ pictures and stories in Beckley and Bluefield leapt from those pages. The smell of the still-fresh ink mixed for me with the exciting smells of Bonita’s body as we drove all over a section of West Virginia, slept in the same bed, and hoped to change the world. The excitement carried by those smells more than anything else had staggered through four dec­ades frayed, but olfactorily intact!

One doesn’t often get the chance to touch-up the frescoes of an old romance. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the Sistine Chapel and you (I write to myself in the third-person) – poor delusional boy – think you can just say, paintbrush in hand, “oops, missed a couple of spots!” There are reasons – there are always reasons – for why people believe what they do. “Where are your horns,” a North Carolinian asked my not-yet parents in 1945, as they drove back to New York from the war. Dad and his 19-year-old bride-to-be were the first Jews they’d met; they didn’t have horns, of course – a mistranslation of “Halo” from the Hebrew bible by Michel­angelo.

So Bonita and I tried; perhaps someday we’ll try again.

With my poetry muse (and roman­ticism) finally returning after a pandemic’s hiatus, I think back to Genevieve’s existential anguish regarding the future burn-out of the sun and the trove of philosophical questions she raised. I may no longer shoot for the Aesopian moral lessons at the end of each story, but those smells from yesteryear linger like tattered antiwar posters peeling from the crumbled walls of time’s elaborate maze. I clutch at one or two, pressing them to my nose, and – odors being the most elusive of our senses and yet the key to remembering – I let them unlock those memories and carry me off.

I may not have the answers, still, but along the way I have at least accumulated a helluva lot of good stories …. for what it’s worth.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life, it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away
Stop. Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills
Rest in Peace, David Crosby

Here, it stops
The circles of deceit
broken promises, rancid dreams

here it stops
this beach of crushed utopias
preparations for world war

here it stops
this litany of lies
false refuge in religion

here it stops
Israel murders in our name

here it stops
imperial designs

here it stops
the empire wears no clothes

here it stops
plunder profits rape

here it stops
the rockets red glare

here it stops
bombs bursting in air

here it stops
Do not allow yourself to grow
into boots you seek to overthrow

here it stops
contras, fascists, the morally depraved

here it stops
Apartheid, genocide

here it stops
with me it stops
with you it stops

here it stops
here, it stops

HEAR IT.

Also published athttps://www.counterpunch.org

UNLIKE MOST EVERYWHERE ELSE, real estate speculators in New York City run the Democratic Party. They care just as little as speculators elsewhere for preserving the City’s history. The D train — the same West End line above which dad slugged that Clincher softball of lore six decades ago — creaks high above that asphalt Bensonhurst ballfield triangle, now bulldozed and “improved”.

Across Benson Avenue, Laf­ay­ette High School students painted magnificent murals in tribute to their fellow students who’d died. They updated them every year, utilizing the handball court walls as their canvasses. Shockingly — like Diego Rivera’s famous painting in Rockefeller Center of V.I. Lenin addres­sing Russia’s revolutionary workers — the school has covered the beautiful artistic tributes to dead friends with gray paint, gray after gray after gray.

Teachers and school administrators stake their claims to the area next to the handball courts by parking their cars on the large cement softball yard that had been the scene of so many great games 50 years ago. No one can play there today, it’s filled with cars. The school has also re-fenced the openings we’d cut to enable us to sneak through late at night and hang out with friends on the high school’s steps. A new sign says they’ve extended the lone grassy baseball diamond in right field to 389 feet from home plate, 94 feet deeper than the infamous short-porch down the right field line in the old Yankee Stadium, That, too, would be quite the impressive shot.

When in 1932 a reporter commented on Babe Ruth’s demand for an $80,000/year contract — same as he received the previous two years — the reporter chortled: $8o,ooo a year! In these times! Don’t be silly, Babe. Why, that’s more than Hoover gets for being president of the United States.“ The Babe was quick to swing back: “What the hell has Hoover got to do with this? Anyway, I had a better year than he did.”

From throughout Gravesend and Bensonhurst, neighborhood youth would meet on the stone stairways by the heavy metal doors at Lafayette. Summer nights were hot and sticky; parents couldn’t afford private air-conditioning, so the teens would explode out of their apartments, gathering, listening to music, singing Doo Wop and “making out“ until after midnight. When the new air-conditioned 24-hour Pathmark supermarket appeared nearby on Cropsey Avenue, its ice cream aisle became the favored and chilled gathering spot.

Math teacher Jack Shalom subbed at Lafayette a few years ago and explored the unfamiliar high school. He discovered behind a tied door a metal plaque — of whom? Jack squeezed behind the obstruction and closely examined the plaque, which honored baseball pitching great Sandy Koufax, the school’s most famous alumnus! (And what of the great musician Howie Cohen? radical Red Balloon Collective troublemaker Doug Appel? former NY Mets owner Fred Wilpon? and notorious billionaire scuzz-ball Jeffrey Epstein? All attended Lafayette H.S. Wilpon was Koufax’s friend long before purchasing the NY Mets; the others high-schooled there a decade later.)

Koufax, as every self-respecting Brooklyn­ite in the late 50s knew, was our hometown hero — and was then whisked off with the Dodgers to Los Angeles where he blossomed into one of the all-time great pitchers, after adjusting his mechanics in 1961 — the year owned by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle for the New York Yankees. Over the next few years Koufax threw 4 no-hitters, one of them a rare “perfect game“. The Black players on the Dodgers — Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe — protected the young Jewish Koufax from the permicious antisemitism of their white Christian teammates and management, as Newcombe reported years later.

Jack Shalom dusted off the hidden Koufax plaque and rubbed it, expecting the genie to pop out. “Who’s that,“? the security guard asked as he stumbled over Koufax’s name. Jack was too shook up to say, “Koufax — the greatest pitcher in baseball for six years running.“ And he also didn’t say that Koufax was most famous, strangely, for the one game he refused to pitch in October 1965 during the World Series against Minnesota, because the game fell on the first day of Yom Kippur.

“Koufax’s decision to observe Yom Kippur in 1965 didn’t attract particular attention in the media at first,“ writes Steve Lipman in a 2014 article for NY Jewish Telegraph Agency. The New York Times and New York Post reported matter-of-factly that he would miss the start because that day was “the holiest Jewish holiday.“

“… But, through word of mouth in Jewish circles, everyone knew. Over time, that game assumed mythic proportions. … Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna tells The Jewish Week. ‘In an era when lots of Jews thought it was best to keep their Judaism quiet,’ Koufax’s act ‘gave some Jews courage to be outwardly Jewish in other ways — by wearing a Jewish symbol, demonstrating for Soviet Jews, or the like.’“

Steven Schnur, an author and college instructor, says that by that one game not played, Koufax became “the universal symbol of a Jew who made a choice that we as a community admired. It has nothing to do with an Orthodox lifestyle, or with a commitment to observance of halacha,“ says Schnur.

Judaism today is unfortunately and wrongly equated with Zionism and the state of Israel. Students protesting Israel’s bombardment and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank are blasted as “antisemites“ — even though many of those protesting Israel’s genocidal acts are themselves Jewish, as were many progressive Jews in the 1940s who opposed the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. New York University has just announced that those who condemn zionism == the political policies and actions entered into by the state of Isrrael — would be taken as having committed a hate crime against individual Jews! They’d risk losing their scholarships and being suspended from school. Lipman doesn’t discuss the great pitcher’s views on today’s historical events. But he observes: “Koufax … was (and remains, as far as is known) devoutly secular, with little formal Jewish education and (according to all accounts) no bar mitzvah. He intermarried twice and divorced twice; he has no children.“

“A secular, non-practicing Jew,“ Jane Leavy describes him in her book Sandy Koufax: A Lefty‘s Legacy. A secular Jew who became a symbol for the entire Jewish community.

“When Sandy Koufax stated that he would not pitch on Yom Kippur, many Jews in America stood a little taller and had a better sense of self-worth and Jewish pride,“ even though Hank Greenberg, playing for the Detroit Tigers 30 years earlier, had also refused to play on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Berel Wein, an Orthodox scholar and historian who now lives in Jerusalem, wrote that Hammering Hank’s “refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur influenced that generation of American Jews to become more publicly assertive and to be less ashamed of their Jewishness. The decision of Koufax to do the Jewish thing so publicly and in such a quintessential American setting as the World Series pumped a new confidence into that generation of American Jews.“

During Koufax’s heyday, Pope John XXIII changed the liturgy. Sunday sermons would no longer pound into Christian church-goers’ heads the calumny “The Jews killed Jesus.“ But Vatican II didn’t prevent the Italian Catholic Corraggio twins who lived in the next building in the Marlboro projects, from punching me. “You killed Jesus“ they’d yell as they chased me through the Projects. I never thought to shout back, “What about Vatican II?“ Instead, I proudly accepted their accusation. “Let’s own it!,“ I thought. There’s power among the powerless in having killed their God, if that’s what they want to believe.

“The Jews killed Jesus“ meme ever really ended; it just receded and is now re-emerging due to Israel’s subjugation and mass-murder of the Palestinian people, in the name of Jews everywhere. So for that reason, as though the commission of genocide is not enough, Jews are obliged to speak up and shout from the rooftops: “Stop! Not in my name!“ Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now When? are so important today.

Koufax is still alive, and now lives in Florida. Through my Bensonhurst neighborhood a black Nissan with “Koufax“ plates slips unnoticed, parking near Lafayette H.S. Is it Sandy? I sometimes wait to see who gets out of the car, but my stakeouts have been too frayed to find out.

of capitalism NOT

by positing

an ideal world

and wishing for it;

nor by establishing

a Communistic plot —

he’s buried in one! —

but by unraveling

the way

the system unfolds

inevitably, globally,

propelled by its own

internal contradictions.

What

does all that mean,

every phrase coiled

in its wintry history

oiled to spring!

Where

will it first collapse?

Will

there be a future worth living in?

a planet to live on?

Who

is in position to take action?

How

must we organize ourselves

to achieve the revolutionary new society we seek?

When

will loneliness evaporate

and love take root?

– Mitchel Cohen

Brooklyn Public Library, Passover, 4/23/2024  Photo by Jennifer Jager

I was asked by some current students today at SUNY Stony Brook for a message of solidarity for those taking action today in support of Palestine. Here is the statement I just sent, with help from other former students at Stony Brook and Red Balloon Collective members. Feel free to forward.

I want to express my solidarity as a student and member of the radical Red Balloon Collective at SUNY Stony Brook from 50 years ago, and the solidarity with you all by most of the remaining Red Balloonistas and Stony Brook activists.

We send greetings from the many protests we are still engaged in — we never stopped, despite the corporate media’s false portrayals. And we all participate against the overwhelmingly brutal and immoral Israeli bombardment of Gaza — of hospitals, schools, peoples homes, sanitation facilities, infrastructure … along with thousands of individual civilians whom Israel treats like vermin and kills with impunity.

Many of us protesting Israel’s colonization of Gaza and bombardment are Jewish. Israel does not speak for us. Far from falling under the spell of some sort of religious or tribal unity, we stand with those who choose to uphold humanity and oppose genocide and mass murder.

From the beginning Israel’s ruling class has been interested in seizing Gaza. As Naomi Klein has brilliantly pointed out, Israeli mass ideology always had the seeds of Nakba in it, but today Zionism has morphed into something exceedingly ugly. From the beginning, however, Israel was predicated on the “expulsion” of the indigenous Arab population from Gaza and “ethnically cleansing” it and the rest of the Occupied territories, expelling Palestinians from Palestine to finish the “task” of 1948.

That has from the start been Israel’s ideological basis, in softer or harder versions.

That is why a faction of Israel’s rulers headed by Netanyahu supported and funded the origin of what today is Hamas. In a widely circulated video (since scrubbed from the internet), Netanyahu himself “explained” that Israel’s secret support for the early Hamas was a ruse to split Palestinian support from the Palestine Authority and Liberation Organization, to prevent a “two-state solution” from gaining support among Palestinians!

There have even been very recent calls within the Israeli government to exploit Gaza’s resources.

We say NO, not in our name, and not in anyone’s name!

Stony Brook has a long history of occupations and tent cities for all sorts of issues. We occupied buildings to oppose war-related research and recruitment, over which many Stony Brook students, including me, were arrested and thrown into prison. We occupied to free political prisoners.

We took over buildings in solidarity with revolutions in Nicaragua and in opposition to fascists in El Salvador.

We fought Stony Brook’s connections to apartheid in South Africa and also to fascist Chile, with whom Stony Brook had made marine biology joint research compacts, seeking to break an international boycott against Pinochet.

We broke into and stole secret files in 1968 and published them in a newspaper “The Open File: Project Themis”, a precursor to this era of Israel’s “Lavender” Artificial Intelligence murders.

One of the largest tent cities came — and this is very funny in this context, looking back — to protest the huge amount of mud on campus!

We took over buildings against budget cuts but instead of shutting them down in protest we opened them up for public use!

We are so glad to see the current wave of students reaching out to those who came before and taking action on behalf of all of humanity. What a glimmer of hope, a continuity from one political generation to the next!

Don’t be fooled by the “mainstream” corporate media attempts to distort who we are, our history, and their smear campaign against us. In opposing Israel, we are not “Anti-Semites” but Anti-Colonialists and anti-Fascists.

The corporate media twists our motives and distorts the meaning of our movements. But we are clear: we are NOT anti-Jewish but anti-fascist.

For many years we had to fight within our own movements to support self-determination for the Palestinian people. Many groups running the big antiwar organizations wouldn’t touch this issue. But this current wave of young people has made it clear what we are doing and why. We hold human freedom and dignity to be sacrosanct, and will not allow Israel’s murders of tens of thousands of Palestinians to be rationalized by labeling us anti-Semites. We’re not. (And for the record, Palestinians are “Semites” too!)

It is a wonderful thing that “you have decided not to be silent and decided to speak out against the repression that you see with your own eyes.” That’s how Mumia abu-Jamal put it last week. Mumia is a former Black Panther imprisoned his entire adult life in Pennsylvania’s state prisons. “You are part of something massive, and you are part of something that is on the right side of history.

“You’re against a colonial regime that steals the land from the people who are Indigenous to that area. I urge you to speak out against the terrorism that is afflicted upon Gaza with all of your might, all of your will and all of your strength. Do not bow to those who want you to be silent.

“This is the moment to be heard and shake the earth so that the people of Gaza, the people of Rafah, the people of the West Bank, the people of Palestine can feel your solidarity with them.ﾔ

We refuse to allow ourselves to be divided into “in groups” and “others”. That categorizing is a ploy designed to defeat us. We are in this ongoing fight against colonialism, fascism, capitalism and imperialism rolled into one. Putting that understanding into action takes courage, just as it did for John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X.

We once forced Stony Brook to divest from South Africa and to cut ties with companies supporting the apartheid regime. We need to do the same today, to cut off all U.S. funding for the Israeli military, and Stony Brook University’s part in it.

Our tradition is universal, and joins with those who’ve fought that battle before. The struggle continues over the decades. It didn’t end with the 60’s, nor with the 80s. As Dr. Martin Luther King observed in 1968, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

With your courage and commitment, Justice shall prevail.

Freedom for Palestine, and for all.

Mitchel Cohen
Red Balloon Collective
Stony Brook, 1970 thru 1994.

Happy New Year!
Here’s a 7.5 minute piece I put together for WBAI/Pacifica radio, re: New Years Day 2024 in Coney Island at the Polar Plunge. Enjoy.

https://archive.org/details/new-years-day-i-coney-island-2024

Two vast and trunkless legs of steel

Like silent Pharaohs over Wall Street stood

Scraping the vast canvas of immortality

How many died erecting those towers:

Welders of iron, exoskeletal beams?

Manhattan is missing her two front teeth

Can you help me find them?

What were their thoughts on that morning’s long fall?

Beat, you wings! Just another few breaths!

Millions of fingers — of Flesh, of Memory —

Sift and sift that ancient dust

Manhattan is missing her two front teeth

Help me find them!

Now, only a torn, disfigured pedestal remains

And on it these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.*

Autumn, impervious,

Mocking our imperial pretense,

Swirls her bluest skirt, whips her hips,

Casts the bones of September

Like I-Ching sticks over Baghdad

Throwing sunsets to die for.

                        *Stanza by Percy Bysshe Shelley

BROOKLYN BENEATH THE TOXIC PLUME

by Mitchel Cohen, from The Permanent Carnival

Greetings from Brooklyn, this little corner of the world.

The bones of September have barely been exhumed and new crises are already punching through the hum-drum drop­pings of everyday life. Flying in an airplane; attending antiwar protests; wearing darker skin; praying to an unsanctioned God facing the wrong direction; opening a letter ̶— all are filled with trepidation.

The anxiousness is pervasive, all-too-real. As Ginsberg once wrote: We hug and kiss the United States under our bed­sheets, the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep.

There is a sense, not fully articulated, that at least some of the hysteria is being orchestrated, our emotions are manipulated and somewhere deep down a noisy lit­tle ulcer gnaws that this all may have something to do with Ter­rorism with a capital T, yes, but it also has something to do with Oil, with Pipeline, with Empire. Aladdin’s lamps are exploding all at once, and Papa Bush’s genetically engineered genies sweep down our chimneys at night when we are sleeping, jangling keys to apocalyptic dungeons lined with TV screens, we don’t know why and we don’t have time to think about it as the next crisis is announced and is upon us as earlier ones recede, wave after wave from sea to shining sea.

We are exhorted by mouths white with foam: Support America: Go shopping, wave flags (made in sweat­shops in China), cheer­ing (and, for some, pleading: Don’t hit me, I’m Ameri­can too, not one of THEM), never breaking off, allowing themselves to think about who is stampeding us into returning to routines we des­pised but which we now romanticize as “the good old days.”

Peace is not a noun meaning the absence of war; it is a verb: To Peace. To live as though the oneness is real (despite all the doubters, despite one’s own doubts!). To live as though we still have rights. To understand that ALL soil is sacred even as the gaping anthraxial wound swallows up Manhattan’s two front teeth and we wait for some tooth fairy to exchange them for quarters left under the pillow, this Autumn of abandoned child­hoods.

How is it that the death count keeps shrinking at Ground Zero — the Washington Post has exhaustive­ly tallied it at one-third of what the Mayor had been claim­ing ̶— and is get­ting higher at some­one else’s Ground Zero other side of the world?

Is there a huge transfer of bodies through the dark channels of earth, some insane transmigration of souls from the spiritual desert of Wall Street to Afghanistan’s flat earthly sands?

Beyond right and wrong,

beyond the political struggle to stop the bombardment,

beyond this and that, the harrowing dig through centuries of rubble to pull out real human lives;

beyond the tarpits of civilization, we charge through life like wounded Tyrannosaurs fired up by avenging Generals named Electric and Dynamic, Lockheed and Boeing and Unocal, Bechtel and Halliburton and Carlyle, merchants of both sides’ instru­ments, their awful machinery of holocausts, oblivious, sitting at the edge of world war three, or four, or five, about to extinct ourselves in Ginsberg’s hydrogen jukebox in a place called Paki­stan, called India ̶— Whose God is stronger? Which one do we trust the most — the one with the accurate Timex watch delivering videos at just the right moment, cell phone, dialysis machine and patch over one-eye slaughtering the lambs or the accountant book­keeper of capital with knotted white hair whose only prophet is profit, measuring out abysmal teaspoons of what he calls justice for every abyss full of his believers’ tortured souls?

Said Camus: I wish I could love my country and still love Justice.

We live in my country Tisofthee somewhere amidst the stars. Bush’s stolen election has kicked the whole world out of whack, thrown us into a parallel universe that wasn’t supposed to be, and everything that has trans­pired since ̶— the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, the stolen dreams of real democracy ̶— pile jumbled on the ocean floor as the earth heats up, the seas rise around us, and, like the World Trade Center, swallow us whole.

Written in early October, 2001

Mitchel Cohen, being taken in 1973 to RIVERHEAD and to YAPHANK PRISON, U.S.A., to begin a 4-month sentence for antiwar protests at SUNY Stony Brook, upon arrest 4 years earlier.

The walls are a mosaic of green weasel-snot. Something is crawling along my leg, I feel it under the blanket. Today is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, I don’t know. Some noise is penetrating the darkness, an electrical buzzing that will not stop. It must be a hundred degrees in here.

The bed rocks. I am in the top bunk, Star Spangled Banner is blasting over the loudspeaker right over my head. Someone is endlessly coughing across the room, and the stink of cigarettes is everywhere. It is still dark out. The shadows of barbed wire line the window edges. Everywhere I look there are bars and barbed wire.

There is a pervasive shuffling of feet and meaningless noise. I drop down from my bunk bed, pull on my prison-grays, and follow the trudge-trudge-trudge wherever it goes. Twenty steps, 30 steps, the guards search every prisoner. Forty steps more, go through an electronically opened gate and get searched again.

We come to the “mess hall”. The line moves quickly. Fellow prisoner cooks slop some food onto the trays. I stop, sit down, see my face distorted in the stainless steel table. “No talking!” I open my mouth and shovel liquids and mush into it. Then the shuffling and noise begins again. I follow it. It leads back to my dorm. I climb back into bed. I sleep, I think, or I wake. Which is the wake and which is the dream?

A train whistle’s blowing, brakes screeching. A red-faced man in a uniform – a drill sergeant — is standing next to me, his mouth wide open and smoke pouring out of his ears. I roll over and pull my pillow onto my head. A steel-toed workboot smacks the tile wall, narrowly missing my face.

Slowly, I turn my head and glare across the dorm room that houses 24 prisoners. Four car thieves and drug addicts, Vietnam vets all, stop their conversation, glare back at me. So, this is how it’s gonna be? My first day in Yaphank Prison and this is the welcoming committee.

I bury my face sideways against my pillow, tuck a deep breath into a forgotten corner of my lungs and, without looking up, a quiet, forceful and altogether alien voice emerges from my throat: “Whoever threw that boot, come pick it up. While you still can.”

JeesUS, did I say that? Down boy! Where the hell did that come from? Now I’m in for it, these guys’ll tear me to shreds. But there’s another force controlling me. I’m on automatic pilot. I keep my head down after my challenge, feign apathy. But my legs are getting ready to kick someone in the head, and my heart, oh yes, my strong athletic heart that normally beats slowly at 50 pulses per minute is now chugging along in high gear. I can feel the whole bunk bed trembling.

A minute passes. Nothing. No one says a word. Another minute. A pair of feet shuffle over near my bed, stop, then shuffle again. A hand reaches down, barely grazes my face, picks up the shoe. I hold my breath. Then the feet shuffle away. I slowly let my breath escape.

I am an unknown quantity, nerves of steel. Can I keep up this pretense for four months? That toothless fishmonger verbally fragged by an anti-war long-haired commie rat returns to his bunk to sulk. His buddies razz him. My bunk won’t stop quivering. Stop it, dammit!

*   *   *

“Hey Red,” bellows Adams. “Y’ever eat pussy?”

“Hell no!” Red groans back across the dorm, his eyes rolling, voice warbling, caricature of himself as a Black southern sharecropper. “Man, you is disgustin. Ain’t he disgustin, though?”

“Hey Red” Adams calls again in his high pitched whine, “your old lady ever give you a blow job?”

“Man, whatsamatter with you?! I just gets down there, puts the ol’ man in the boat. I don’t mess around with funky stuff like you white boys. Don’t talk. Nuthin’. When we rocks it, we make waves! And then it’s so quiet you could hear a rat pissin’ on cotton!”

Red, you don’t know what you’re missing. And your wife don’t know what she’s missing either! Why, I bet you never even ass fucked!” Adams is in top form, and all 340 pounds of his white body shivers like fatty chicken soup, taunted by dill and parsley.

“Hey Red,” someone else gets in on the act, “I bet you never even fucked a sheep.”

“What you talking about man. Ha. The man should hear you talkin’ now. Hey home piece,” Red calls to the guard, “hey home …”

Hey Red, Adams fucks the sheep out on the farm every day. ‘Course the rules say you’re not s’posed to mutilate the animals, but that don’t stop’m. Ain’t that right, fatso?”

“Damn straight. Fuck’m, suck’m, turn’m inside out and do it all again.”

“Hey Lee!” Red calls out. “Lee, y’ever eat pussy?”

“Only on weekends,” my bunkmate snorts. “Now shut the fuck up and let me get some sleep.” Uh oh. Bad move. A barrage of knotted socks come flying across the dorm. The war is on. “The commie corner! Get the commie corner!”

“You had to open your mouth,” I glower at Mark Lee from the top deck. We manage to stay out of it for a while, but ChopShop Sal, ever ready for a good sock battle, has stashed away six pairs of smelly old socks the guards didn’t find in searching the dorm. “This one’s for that Mongoloid Bartholomew,” Sal trumpets, invoking the name of the sadistic guard everyone hates. Sal leaps out of bed, hurls half his stash, and is back under the covers before the guard turns around in time to see who’s throwing the socks.

The NY State prison in Yaphank — the “honor farm” — draws its guards from the surrounding community, as do most prisons. Yaphank, and a few other towns on Long Island, such as Freeport and Ronkonkoma, served as KKK and Nazi bases leading up to World War II in the 1930s. As late as 2022, that heritage, such as it is, erupted into a county-wide fight over renaming a street that all these years has been named after a Grand Cyclops of the KKK.

When I first got to the Yaphank minimum security prison farm, all anyone ever talked about was fucking. Not beautiful sex. Not anything resembling human relationships. Mark and I play a lot of chess; we talk a lot about sexism, politics, books, and life. More and more inmates come around our bunk.

One night a scantily clad woman tries to sell us a car in a t.v. commercial. One of the nerds springs up to the screen and starts kissing it, and everyone else in the room screams “yiowwww!”

“Oh, Jesus, Mark, I’ve gotta get out of here. Let’s dig a tunnel.”

“Hold on, man, only 9 weeks for you to go.”

And then Adams begins his routine again, with Red. And Red answers, the same words, night after night: “Oh, man, ain’t you disgustin’.”

And the circle remains unbroken.

The only reprieve comes from ChopShop Sal, who brags about how quickly he and “his guys” can strip a car. He impersonates the guards in Donald Duck talk, throws his voice like the best ventriloquist, and we’re all in stitches. They never figure out where it’s coming from.

Mark and I start breaking down that circle. We talk about how people are brain­washed, how they view each other as objects. “They set us against each other, make us compete to buy things, and we don’t even need’m.” Mark agrees.

“Hey, Professor,” Red nicknames me. “What’re you some sociologist or something?”

“Me? No, I’m just an anti war student.”

“Anti war,” Red says, “that’s a good thing to be. Now I bet you eat pussy … Got that, Adams?”

“Damn fool war, if you ask me,” Sal sneers without once looking over to the vets. “But if my country’d ask me to serve, I’d go.”

“Who’d ask you?” one of the vets bats an eye in Sal’s direction. Sal responds with a sock, and a new battle begins.

How should society be run? What is wrong with the way things are? Everyone joins the discussion. Some of the older inmates tell us to shut up. They’re losing control. We’re breaking out of what we’re allowed to talk about and upending all the rules.

*   *   *

First week they took me to Riverhead’s maximum security prison. The corridor holds a column of 22 cells, each one clanging open onto a common area eight feet across, running the length of the tier. Stainless steel tables are polished and re-polished until they perfectly reflect the fluorescent nothingness. A television is hinged to the wall on the other side of the bars and beyond the reach of the inmates. Every 20 minutes or so, someone calls the guard — “Hey Key! Hey Key!” — to change the channel.

There are 22 men on the tier, 13 Whites and 9 Blacks. The big debate my first night is over which program to watch, and it breaks down along racial lines.

Actually, there are only four prisoners who want to watch television at all. The rest play cards, talk, or sit in their cells reading, as I was doing. I must have read that Time Magazine issue three times already, and I’m willing to read it once more if it means staying out of the argument. What the hell did Thoreau know, anyway? His one night in some bucolic jail cell talking with Emerson. “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Emerson asked. “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”, Thoreau famously quipped, in defense of his Civil Disobedience. Hey, Henry David, did you ever eat pussy?

And what a fight! Should we watch “Born Free” (two White guys wanted that one), or “The F.B.I.”, with Efram Zimbalist Jr. collaring another criminal? A Black inmate wanted that one. Finally, it was decided to vote. The two honchos (one Black and one White) began polling the prisoners. The White guy in the last cell shouts out “Born Free”, even though he can’t see the t.v. from his cell and obviously has no interest in watching anything. The first Black guy says “The F.B.I.”, and it dawns on me what’s going on. The outcome is predetermined. They all know it already so why are they even bothering to vote? Sounds like the U.S. Presidential election. It’s my turn. I pretend not to hear. “Hey, Jew­boy, whatcha wanna watch?”

“Nuthin”‘, I say. “I just wanna read.”

Within 30 seconds, a delegation of both White and Black prisoners arrives at my cell. I suddenly thank my first weekend’s jailer for locking me in.

“Hey, Cohen . . .

“Call me Mitchel.”

“Cohen . . . Good thing yer new here.” It’s the White guy talking. “Mr. Simpson, here, has something to tell you.”

Simpson, the Black honcho, clears his throat. “Listen, Cohen, it’s your first time up, so you probably don’t get it. We run this tier democratically, see. Danny and me are the chiefs on this tier.” Danny, the White guy, nods his head. “When we calls for a vote, you vote! Understand?” Danny adds: “Whatsa matter witt you. Don’t you believe in democracy?”

Too scared to be a wise-ass (although I wisely censor the dozens of potential responses sailing through my brain), I say simply: “Why are you voting? All the Black guys vote whatever the Black chief says; all the White guys vote whatever the White chief says. No one gives a shit about the program for themselves. And the Black guys will always lose!”

“Hey, you must be a smart cookie. You’re catching on quick.” Danny and Simpson rub fists, and smile.

“So next time,” Danny says, “you vote. And make sure you vote with your own kind.” He says “your own kind” again, hesitantly, as if the thought had never even crossed his mind before that a White boy might do otherwise.

*   *   *

I tell this story to the great South African poet Dennis Brutus a decade after apartheid was defeated and shortly before he died. He can’t stop laughing. Dennis had been imprisoned for many years in the notorious Robben Island, alongside Nelson Mandela. I ask him why he’s laughing.

“Well, we don’t have that problem in South Africa,” he says, trying to contain his laughter.

“What do you mean?”

“Whites have their own prison. Blacks have their own prison.”

“Even now, after the end of apartheid?” I was incredulous.

“Yes, even now.” He now is in full uproar. I was interviewing him for my radio show, “Steal This Radio.”

“Some things never change.” It’s a very short journey from laughing at the Absurd to tumbling into the Pathetic, in an ocean of tears.

Dinner in Brooklyn (July, 2008) with Dennis Brutus. From Left (clockwise): Robert Gold, Dennis Brutus, Julio Velasquez, Murray Gordon, Alison Cichowski, Cathryn Swan, Frank LeFever, Mitchel Cohen

An hour later Danny is back at my cell door. “Hey Cohen,” he says. “You went to college?”

“Stony Brook. Haven’t finished yet.”

“But you went there. So what you doin’ in jail?”

“Demonstrations.”

“Demonstrations?”

“Anti war demonstrations.”

His look conveys his sense of bewilderment. Not that he took one side or another, “mind you”; just that he couldn’t imagine someone concerning himself with such questions as foreign policy, self-determination, imperialism, and civil rights.

“What was your major?”

“English.” It was actually math, at first, and I was in the process of ending up with a degree in Liberal Arts, but I didn’t really feel like explaining.

“English?! Hey, do you read poetry?” I nod. All else is forgotten in the excitement, of the moment. “Here, take a look at these poems I wrote. Let me read’m to you.”

“Her lips are like ice blue veins
Sending shudders up my spine.
As she says she will be mine;
The devil in me can’t wait
As I press against her thigh
And she trembles, and undresses
And I sigh.”

“Whaddya think?”

“Well, I can’t really . . . err can’t really . . . Listen. I’ve got some really good poetry books coming this week. You ever read Neruda? Or Shelley?

“Hey! Get a load of the professor here! He wants me to read his books.” There is a general chuckling throughout the tier. “Hey, Cohen, professor, you get Danny to read anything but Playboy and I’ll give ya a Suzie Q’ Free! ”

“I’ve written some poems here, if you want to hear’m,” I say. Danny is livid. His red handlebar mustache and red hair pale before the color his face is turning.

“What?,” he screams, “you! How could they be any good . . . Naw, I don’t want to hear any of your Jew poems. Cohen.” I notice his language change. He is making a conscious effort to enunciate clearly, to stop slurring his words.

“Look,” I said, “you don’t have to read them, you know. You’re still the chief poet here.”

Danny was thoughtful for a moment. That was the first time in a long while I kissed someone’s ass. “Yea, you really mean that?” he said.

Who’d want to take on an enraged 230- pound Irish bruiser. “All right, Cohen, I’ll read your poems.” And, as happens so often from unexpected quarters, his criticisms are actually quite on the mark, although it takes me a few days to calm down and realize it.