For Bastille Day

Bastille Day automatically makes me think of this verse about the storming of the Bastille:

Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all!

It's from a song hailing the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in the Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade.

I first saw the play when my brother Brian played in it in a community theater production in the late '60s, but many of us elderly people know the song "Poor Old Marat" from the Judy Collins album, In My Life.

I couldn't find that on YouTube, so here's a rockier take on it by the False Prophets, from Coca Crystal's fabled NYC cable access show in 1988. (The song starts at about the 1:30 mark, and is commendably accessible.)

Full lyrics bel0w the fold!


Four years after the revolution
And the old king's execution
Four years after I remember how
Those courtiers took their final vow

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests
Let them live on their fat

Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell

Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their ass

Good old Marat by your side we'll stand or fall
You're the only one that we can trust at all

Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest
The businessman, the bourgeois, the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
Of the sons of the ass-licking dying regime

We've got new generals,
Our leaders are new
They sit and they argue
And all that they do
Is sell their own colleagues
And ride upon their backs
And jail them
And break them
And give them all the axe
Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want our revolution now

Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power
Why why why
Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing
Always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make us wait anymore
Poor old Marat they hunt you down
The bloodhounds are sniffing all over the town
Poor old Marat you work 'til your eyes turn as red as rust

Poor old Marat
We trust in you ...

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Damn, I Really Don't Know About This...

[I've just been "tagged" by "Celtic Fire" with a "meme." (For your sake, I hope you don't know what that means--if you do, you are probably spending altogether too much time on teh Intertubes.)

Translation: a fellow blogger has listed me with some other bloggers and requests that we continue the circulation of a participatory email resembling a chain-letter that he got suckered into earlier. Because, lately, I've been thinking about how the blogosphere works--and how it doesn't--and because I like CF, I've decided to give his request a play, the first time I've ever chosen not to simply shitcan one of these things.]


Having been tagged by Celtic Fire, I take the liberty of presenting the rules:

The Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Optional: 5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you'd like.


My 7 Things:

1. Somehow I've wound up blogging under three different names.
2. Boy, do I miss Dave Cline.
3. When I was 15, I once bought Mississippi John Hurt a beer.
4. Broke doesn't even begin to describe it, even bad broke doesn't quite do it.
5. I enjoy splitting infinitives (vide supra).
6. I've just started a concerted drive to lose some weight and support is welcome.
7. Michael Jackson and I have something in common, and it's neither young persons nor musical talent.

I'm tagging:
Levine and his Flying Machine
Sankofa Meets the Future
The Primary Contradiction
Big Noise
Magitator
The Mustard Seed
Union Gal
(Apologies, in advance, to all.)

My optional "image of martial discord."
It's at the top. Explanation, if needed, and credits after the fold.

This was tacked onto the original meme a couple of iterations ago by a blogger named soob. I chose the the famous photo of the Red Army taking the Reichstag as Hitler's Germany crumbles--restaged in Legos by a Brit named Mike Stimson.

For comparison purposes, the original shot by Yevgeny Khaldei:

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Casey J Porter Breaks the Lob-Bomb Story!

Two days ago the Washington Post broke a story on a new weapon that Shi'ite resistance forces in Iraq are using against US Troops there.

U.S. military officials call the devices Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions, or IRAMs. They are propane tanks packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives and powered by 107mm rockets.

Then again, you might have already known about it, that is, if you follow the videos being posted by Casey J Porter, a soldier based near Baghdad who is an active-duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. FotM has been proud to carry previous videos of his, like this one, and a moving letter of apology for the occupation he wrote.

His latest vlog from inside the Sandbox is call "A.O.--Area of Operations."

The video opens with this text:

Lob-Bombs are the new threat here in Iraq. It is the process of taking an oxygen tank that is used for welding and using it as a weapon. You cut it open and pack a portion of it with ball bearings, screws, and bolts. You then weld the tank back together and put pressure into it, some 3,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.

For maximum effectiveness, you attach mortars or small rockets to the side and set those off.

The video gives you a real-time glimpse of a Lob-Bomb attack in which two US troops died. Casey points out that the military reported these deaths to the media and the American public as resulting from "small arms fire."

Unh-hunh.

[And thanks again to the invaluable Jeri Reed for the tip-off.]

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Workers Erupt in Durban, in Peru--and in Nishinari

South Africa: One day province-wide strikes called by COSATU to protest soaring electricity prices and also the threat they pose to jobs slammed the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal on July 9, paralyzing industrial Durban. Five more are slated for next Wednesday, to be followed by a national shutdown August 6.

Peru: A one day national strike called by the CGTP union federation to protest soaring prices, especially of food, and neo-liberal policies on July 9 saw 200 arrested and the government building in the Madre de Dios region burned.

These strikes actually made the US news in the last two days--the business news anyhow. And well they might. Anger and unease in the working class of various countries is growing as inflation mushrooms and crisis looms. And these were political strikes, aimed at the government rather than individual firms or employers associations.

But I'm writing this to kick you another place name to go with KwaZulu and Madre de Dios--Nishinari.

Nishinari is a neighborhood in Osaka, Japan. The action there was almost 4 weeks ago and took place on a much smaller scale, 2 days, around 200 people. Day laborers in Nishinari rioted, fighting the cops with rocks and firebombs, setting up burning barricades. The workers were angered by police brutality, lack of jobs and the earlier arrest of a leader. Even the Japanese economy has taken on a more neo-liberal shape, with a growing section of the populace driven into poverty even as the social safety net shreds.

But 200 people? Last month? Hey, Jimmy (I hear you grouse), I'm as partial to riots as the next lefty, but what on earth makes this worth writing about?

Well, four things. First, frankly, is the simple fact that an important Financial Times reporter named Michiyo Nakamoto spun a whole op-ed piece around Nishinari yesterday, talking about phenomena like Japan's almost 2 million "freeters"

who take on whatever temporary jobs they can find and generally have no benefits. Thousands of freeters, in their 20s and 30s, sleep in internet cafés and are unable to find stable employment because they lack a permanent address.

Second, she seems to not only report on but unite with a growing Japanese critique of neo-liberal deregulation as trashing Japan's prized egalitarianism and social solidarity.

Third, though Nakamoto doesn't mention it, I seem to recall Nishinari being the site of similar struggles two decades or so ago, with young radicals joining in with the day laborers then and helping them organize. I wonder if the same dynamic is at work here, given that a short report in the Daily Yomiuri led with the arrests of "nine men and a high school girl."

Fourth, I just like the little rush of optimism I get from commentary like Nakamoto's conclusion that

it may not be too far fetched to conceive of the social unrest witnessed in Nishinari spreading to other parts of the country.

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A One Shot Joke (But A Good One)

Saw this for the first time today. In a week we'll doubtless all be sick of it, but for the moment, enjoy.

Wonder if anybody's selling tee shirts yet...

(Apologies to FotM readers from outside the US who don't get it.)



[Note: a fine short introduction to Fanon's theoretical contributions from a Marxist standpoint can be found here.]





UPDATE:
Apologies to Isaac (see comments) and others inside the US who've said the same thing to me, namely "Hunh? I don' geddit."

Chalk it up to Frog in the Well Syndrome. Here in Harlem, it seems like you can't go a block without seeing Shepard Fairey's distinctive agitprop-retro creation in a shop window or on a bootleg tee. And if you spend any time rummaging around in the vast sock drawer of the left liberal blogosphere, you'll o.d. on it pretty soon too.

And a one shot joke that needs explanation. How funny is that?

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