​I’ve been reading a great deal of Auden recently as part of my History to the Defeated project. But not as much as Carolyn Steedman.
 
Although it is probably unnecessary, I will tell you that Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor of History at Warwick University, the author of Dust, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, Master and Servant and Landscape for a Good Woman; and that her latest book was published a couple of weeks ago.

The new book is entitled Poetry for Historians or, W.H. Auden and History and it examines “a kind of love story” between historians and poets, history and poetry, historiography and poetics. It is also, perhaps even primarily, about Carolyn Steedman and Auden and their very particular relationship, “a kind of love story” in its own right.
 
At the (literal) centre of the book is a chapter headed “W.H. Auden and Me”. It is also the heart of the book. In it, she stresses the importance of her schooling in poetics, her ability to master the business of scansion and clause analysis at the expense of understanding the meaning; to concern oneself with the sound-system of the English language rather than its import.
 
Her dilemma – the imagined dilemma of her fifteen year old self - is that Auden himself, the great experimenter with form, did not agree, or at least said he didn’t. She quotes him as saying “Accents, long and short syllables, are really quite simple. You will always read a line of poetry right if you know its meaning” and asks “What would we have made of it … to be told that our pursuit should be meaning before the effect on us of sound and rhythm?”
 
I was taught English at about the same time as Professor Steedman. But unlike her, I was encouraged to write “on what exactly Auden meant” or perhaps that is what I elected to do and was allowed to do. Certainly, my considerations and speculations on his meanings pushed me towards a politics (but not a poetics) which remains with me to this day.

​And when I read, for the first time in Poetry for Historians that Auden looks in a poem “for one thing only, lines of poetry”, I am driven again to that haunting couplet which I first read more than half a century ago:
 
“And history to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”
 
Auden explains his requirement for lines of poetry. "By this I mean a line which speaks for itself, which, as it were, no longer needs its author’s help to exist."

Of course, the lines I love exist today not only without its author’s help, but with his positive disapproval. He first revised and then renounced the poem, calling it – as he did the entire decade in which it was written – “dishonest”.

​But that doesn’t matter: it doesn’t need Auden to exist, to be authentic, to be true. To be honest.
 
And Auden did not and does not have to sit, as Carolyn points out, “in a small claustrophobic room … and listen to the Boy Marxists explain to him, in patient and exhaustive detail, exactly why his position was so very incorrect.”
 
As one of those Boy Marxists, then and now, I still admire, respect, and quote Auden’s poetry and poetics. Just as I will the history and historiography of Carolyn Steedman.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The first couple of weeks of May mean two things: from the vaults come the Grateful Dead’s East Coast shows from May 1977 and the song Isis by Bob Dylan (recorded 1975, released 1976) because "I married Isis on the fifth day of May".
 

I read that a new political party is in the process of being formed. It has apparently been “secretly under development for more than a year by a network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and donors”. And it has “access to up to £50 million in funding”.
 
Obviously I believe this story implicitly. After all, it quotes variously “a source”, “one source”,  and “sources”. Getting increasingly specific, it “understands” this, and “it appears” that; this is “said to be”, that “is believed”, and there is a great deal of “the Observer understands”.
 
Yes, it’s the Observer. Of course it is.
 
And it’s clearly pretty convincing. Which is why in a week which has seen so many major stories from Syria, Salisbury, Washington, London, this detailed revelation is the lead story.

It’s clearly a major priority for editor Paul Webster, Michael Savage, described as Policy Editor, and of course Andrew Rawnsley, the political columnist who told us that Labour “should choose Jeremy Corbyn and field him as its leader at the next election, so that the thesis that Labour loses because it is not left-wing enough is finally tested to the destruction that it so richly deserves”. Finger on the pulse as you would expect.
 
He tells us what is required: “a potential audience” - tick; “money” - tick; “a policy platform - tick”; a name – he has heard “Mainstream” mooted and notes that it “sounds moderate and inclusive without being as anaemic as ‘Centre party’.”
 
Obviously, we have to await the verdict of Nick Cohen before we make a firm decision as to whether we embrace membership of the Mainstream Party. Nick was concerned this week with the politics of the forthcoming movie Entebbe and hasn’t had the time to give his well-considered views on a new party. But he will. Not for nothing did the Observer refuse to publish a letter from women in Unite pointing out his misogynist response to the election of Jennie Formby. Don’t worry, Nick will make his views known, but maybe in the Spectator where his politics has a “potential audience”, “money”, “policy platform” etc etc.
 
Enough already.
 
I have no idea whether these meetings of “sources” and “figures from across the political spectrum” have taken place. I have no idea whether the new Mainstream Party will make a formal appearance any time soon or, indeed, any time at all.
 
But I know a flier when I see one.
 
Unattributed and unattributable quotes. A Nick Clegg interview on Radio 4 this morning, arguing that Labour is fractured and that a break would unleash a new kind of politics, straight out of the SDP songbook. Doubtless, there will be more over the next few days. We’ll hear the phrase “breaking the mould” over and over again.
 
But the mould is already broken. And so is the “mainstream”.

​It's about time that the "mainstream" press and "mainstream" politicians recognised this.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: On the anniversary of its release, New Morning. The original acetate together with outtakes. Happy days.

I'm very careful on Sunday mornings. At my age, I have to be.

At least half an hour before turning to the Comment section of The Observer, I take 10mg of diazepam, and whilst waiting for it to kick in, carry out a series of deep breathing exercises to bring down my heart rate.

Only then am I able to turn, tentatively, to Nick Cohen's column. Usually, whatever its apparent subject, I can read through to the end with its gratuitous and irrelevant slur against Corbyn without too much difficulty. After all, I’ve been doing it for years. With the appropriate preparation and medication, it is possible to complete the entire piece without serious risk to one’s long-term health.

Not this morning.

Even by Cohen’s standards, the attack on Jennie Formby is appalling. Take a deep breath, hold your nose, and read this:

“Unite is trying to force through the appointment of its official Jennie Formby as labour’s new general secretary on the grounds that she is the feminist candidate who will challenge the patriarchy. Its egalitarian argument would carry greater force were she not McCluskey’s former mistress. Was it for this Emily Davison died?”

Where to start? Unite is not trying to ‘force’ anything through; it is backing her in an appointment process. Yes, she is a feminist candidate and I hope she will challenge the patriarchy. But she has a great many other credentials for the role as well. Not least 30 years as a union official, working as a Regional Officer, National Officer, Political Director and Regional Secretary. None of which has any bearing as far as Cohen is concerned, because her entire career is reduced to one thing.

She is “McCluskey’s former mistress”.

For fuck’s sake. Of what conceivable relevance is this? And who uses the word ‘mistress’ these days? Emily Davison and Emily Dickinson would both be turning in their graves. If this is the kind of language used in 2018 by an Oxford-educated writer, then yes, they did die in vain.

So with stomach churning and heart racing, I ask what the hell The Observer is doing providing a platform for this offensive nonsense?

At a push, I can accept that Cohen has a right to think this kind of misogyny, and even express it. But I don’t want to see it in my Sunday newspaper.

Equally, if Mohammed bin Salman wants to spend a million or so on charm offensive advertisements, there is nothing to prevent him doing so. But I don’t want to see them in my copy of The Guardian. And while we’re on the subject, the editor of The Guardian may believe that Leveson 2 should not be progressed, but this is not a view I expect from my daily paper.

These examples are, I’m afraid, indicative of a conscious move by The Guardian and The Observer away from their once proud tradition and important role within a responsible and free press.

They have taken their new format too literally. They are, increasingly, tabloid tat. And although I have threatened it before, I really think that the subscription they took from my account on the 1st of March, will be the last.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from the Boar’s Head Coffee House in 1961. Historically fascinating. Musically great.

Warwick District Council presides over an area with nearly 600 empty houses. 33 of them have been empty for ten years or more; 79 for five years or more; 188 for more than two years.
 
Warwick District Council can do something about this. It has the power to take these houses over and make them homes again through EDMOs (empty dwelling management orders).
 
But there are still 600 empty houses which could be utilized for much-needed social housing, to help the rising tide of the homeless.
 
Instead, the council is proposing to build new offices, selling off its current site in order to create new private housing.
 
No affordable homes. No social housing. No council housing.
 
Absolute zero.
 
This is in a district which is one of the most affluent towns in the sixth richest county in the country, a district which is represented by an MP who has made homelessness a priority, raising the issue of the Riverside development in parliament and campaigning hard to make the council see sense.
 
To defeat this proposal is crucial, because in our district, it is symbolic. It is only one development, but it represents everything that is wrong with the process and the people who drive it.
 
The petition signed by thousands goes unheeded. The campaigns by Matt Western are ignored. The huge opposition from residents is dismissed. The highly visible and increasing homelessness is left to under-funded charities and over-worked volunteers.
 
But the Riverside development is voted through, with only Labour councillors opposing it.
 
The ultimate decision on this profligacy with public finances for the benefit of private developers will now rest with Sajid Javid, the minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government. But, even though his own directive insists that new developments must include at least 40% affordable housing, I have no great hopes that he will come to the right decision.
 
Not least because we discover that, over the last two years, he has ‘surrendered’ £292 million which had been allocated for the affordable homes we so desperately need. Plus a further £379 million which had been ear-marked for Starter Homes projects, a so-called ‘flagship’ government policy.

In total, there is £1.1 billion – yes, billion -  of the housing budget which has not been used, despite the platitudes about the housing crisis which we heard from the minister on the Today programme this morning. (Unsurprisingly, he was not questioned at all about the spending shortfall.)

​He did, however, make one point which local councillors of his own party in Warwick, Leamington and Whitnash, would do well to take on board.
 
The councils have the power to make a difference. But they are not using it. We, the residents and voters of Warwick District, can also make a difference. We can replace them with people who will.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The heritage of the Grateful Dead continues. LiveDead 69 the other week, Dead & Co rumoured to be heading to Europe this autumn. And through my speakers this morning, a great show from Broken Arrow, with David Gans and Phil Lesh.
​

Last month’s absurdity of the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and the Times revealing that Corbyn had contact with a Czeck spy came to an end with the groveling apology from Ben Bradley MP, but still lingers on in the mainstream press.
 
Despite, or rather because, Corbyn pointed out on social media that, although the charges were risible, they were indicative of the approach dictated by tax-exile press barons.
 
“Change is coming” he promised.

But yesterday, we watched as Channel Four News allowed Rees-Mogg to claim that Corbyn had voted against the Good Friday Agreement. (He didn’t. He voted for it and made an eloquent speech in its favour.)
 
Yesterday, we watched as, during Prime Minister’s Questions, the BBC scrolled a succession of tweets down the side of the live footage of Corbyn’s questions. The tweets were from someone called Carrie Symonds. You may not know the name. But you should. She is the Tory Director of Communications.
 
The BBC being as impartial as ever, right?
 
But that was last month, and it was winter. Today is the first day of Spring. We look forward with renewed hope, optimism and all that.
 
So the news today is … that Leveson Part 2, promised by Cameron and still not delivered, has been cancelled. The enquiry into corporate malpractice and corrupt relationships between press and police will not take place.
 
But that’s OK, because the Government “will take action to safeguard the lifeblood of our democratic discourse and tackle the challenges our media face today, not a decade ago.”
 
At the end of the Part 1 enquiry, The Right Honourable Sir Brian Leveson stated “that there is still a legitimate expectation on behalf of the public and, in particular, the alleged victims of phone hacking and other unlawful conduct, that there will be a full public examination of the circumstances that allowed the behavious to develop and clear reassurances that nothing of the same scale could occur again: that is what they were promised. … I do not believe we are yet even near that position.”
 
As we have seen recently, we are not. And the malpractice continues daily. The bias, the bigotry, the fantasy is a regular part of my daily reading of the mainstream press and our daily listening and viewing of the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel Four.
 
But we are promised by the Culture Secretary that the ‘free’ press will be ‘safeguarded’. Action is promised to ‘tackle the challenges our media face today’.
 
Like the truth, for example? Like honesty, fairness, impartiality, objectivity? Because these  are these challenges for the media today.
 
If change is coming, let it be soon.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Those extraordinary sessions at The Supper Club in November 1993. Playing alternately the soundboards and some high quality audience tapes. As ever, am preferring the AUDs.

The word is, Oprah Winfrey is ‘entertaining the idea’ of running for the presidency, after making a powerful speech at the Golden Globe Awards the other week. She is being hailed as ‘the antidote to Trump”, with Stephen Spielberg claiming that we need ‘a mindful, empathetic human being in the White House’.
 
No argument there. But I suspect that the key word in that first dentence is not ‘idea’ but ‘entertaining’.
 
Trump is a TV celebrity turned politician. And the States has also given us Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura. In the UK, we have showmen like Boris Johnson in key positions, regularly making idiots of themselves and the electorate with ludicrous actions and crass statements.
 
The ‘celebrity culture’ is not merely taking over our TV and movie screens. It is taking over our lives and our national institutions.
 
What’s equally concerning is the way that this culture, propagated by the mainstream media, forces even principled politicians to play the same game.
 
Yes, I am thinking of Jeremy Corbyn.

​Politics is now profoundly personalized. It is easier to relate to an individual than to an idea or ideology. And for a lazy journalist, of which there are currently far too many across the political spectrum, it is so much simpler to present a caricature than to explain complex issues, even though almost all decisions and policies are now collegial rather than individual.
 
It was no accident that many voters told Labour canvassers that ‘they couldn’t vote for Corbyn’, until the election campaign suddenly forced the mainstream media to put policies on the front page.
 
Right now, Corbyn has a massive following. He is popular but not, willingly, populist. If he is not a celebrity, he has celebrity status. He appears at rock gigs. Thousands serenade him:  “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”.
 
I don’t join in (or at least not without a sense of irony). But then I am neither a Corbynite nor a Corbynista; I am Labour.
 
Yes, I am impressed by the way in which Corbyn remains principled, quietly spoken, committed to ideas and policies, steadfast in his refusal to involve himself in personal abuse.
 
But my allegiance is not to him personally. It is to the the political philosophy he espouses and uses his celebrity to promote.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: A December 2000 gig from the avant-jazz-funk band Medeski, Martin & Wood. Not everyone’s cup of tea – it is, after all, a fusion of avant, jazz and funk – but now and then, I'm in the mood.

It is a truism that “history is written by the victors”, but it’s not true.
 
There is, however, just enough truth in Churchill’s dictum to make it widely accepted by non-historians at least. It is plausible to assume that the weight of the state can manipulate a narrative to create a “useable past” which reinforces a status quo and provides an intellectual integrity to the setting of specific objectives and the means used to achieve them.
 
Plausible but wrong.
 
I am not an academic, and certainly no historian. I didn’t ‘read’ history at university. But all my life I have read history voraciously and I have been attracted, primarily, to the “lost cause”: those movements, philosophies, revolutions and revolts which coruscated briefly before, ultimately and often quickly, failing.
 
I guess I am hard-wired for opposition.
 
The road not taken is, for me, more interesting than the motorway along which we all race today. Not least because “History to the defeated/may say Alas but cannot help or pardon”.
 
And it is significant that Auden, who wrote those lines in 1937 in his poem Spain later renounced his communism and the poem itself. The volunteer ambulance driver on the Republican side took only a few steps along that road before taking the slip-road to the mainstream motorway. He fought in Spain, but when the real war against Nazi Germany, for which Spain was a rehearsal, broke out in 1939, he decamped to the United States.
 
He called the transAtlantic move “a new way of happening”. Others called it betrayal. “But today the struggle” he claimed. Yeh, right.
 
Nevertheless, it is that final stanza of Spain which has given me my title and theme for my 2018 project. And I’m putting this resolution out there to ensure that I remain committed.
 
It will be a book. And a podcast. And a website. It will discuss the failures of the Levellers, the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof gang). To balance the political scales, it will address movements such as the British Union of Fascists (Mosley’s lot) during the ‘30s and perhaps Prohibition -  I am open to suggestions.
 
Not Dark Yet, my musings on baseball and Bob and books, will continue in its parallel world here at www.everysmith.com. But my priority will be this history of historical failure.

​It will be entitled History to the Defeated and www.historytothedefeated.net has been duly registered. I am hoping – ambitiously, you may think, as I do – to research, write and record one topic per month throughout 2018.
 
But, by the end of next year, I at least will be able to say, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “nous avons appris l’Histoire et nous pretendons qu’il ne faut pas l’oublier”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have always preferred the acoustic work of Hot Tuna to their electric stuff. So I am delighted to acquire two acoustic shows recently, and the one I am listening to right now is from the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma CA back in 2000. “If you don’t know Jorma, you don’t know Jack!”

I don’t do Pinterest, or Instagram, or Snapchat. But I do tweet and I do, occasionally,  do facebook.
 
Twitter I use primarily for monitoring and commenting on politics, literature, music and baseball; facebook is to see what friends and acquaintances are up to. Both are also and often sources of the kind of news which the mainstream media choose to ignore, an invaluable resource at the moment.
 
But yesterday, social media was all about the snow: how beautiful it was, how dangerous it was, how it had disrupted travel, and isn’t my snowman gorgeous?!
 
Which, in the way that my mind works, took me straight to Ulrike Meinhof, because she wrote a powerful essay in konkret entitled “Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t”.
 
The slogan came, originally, from a Deutsche Bahn (West German Railways) poster of the mid 1960s, showing a train powering through the German snow. It was adopted and transformed by the German SDS, this time featuring portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The message was clear: socialism would plough through any obstacles in order to create a juster, fairer socialist society.
 
(“At least they make the trains run on time” you may think, and Lenin, of course, had particular reason to be grateful for the reliability of European train services.)

​Yesterday, skimming through social media, I was struck by the absence of any serious political debate on a day on which David Davis revealed that the new ‘agreement’ with the EU was not an agreement at all. It was merely a ‘statement of intent’.
 
But hey, look at my snowman. Look at the view from my bedroom window. What happened to the gritters?
 
The statement by Davis was particularly significant because the Sunday press had been full of the triumph of the negotiations with Ireland and the EU. The Tories and Mrs May had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat etc etc.
 
In fact, it appears, they had agreed to agree to almost everything to keep Brexit negotiations going. And if the implication of this ‘statement of intent’ is a soft Brexit, then 1. no it isn’t and 2. so be it.
 
Of course, for those of us for whom even a soft Brexit is a disaster in waiting, Brexit continues to be rather more important than the fact that we couldn’t get to the pub at lunchtime. And it is clear that the question is made more vexed by the refusal of Labour to make a clean break with the whole issue.
 
It is time Corbyn and Starmer did that, doing what they say they do which is being a party whose policies are determined by the memebership.

As members, we do not want Brexit hard or soft. And nor, I suspect, do many of those who voted to leave Europe last year.
 
The need for a parliamentary vote and, if necessary (although legally it isn’t) a second referendum, is what I and my chums are talking about.
 
Not the weather.
 
We know that an overtly anti-Brexit Labour Party will plough through the snowdrifts of these shambolic negotiations and Tory in-fighting.

​And we know that we don't need a weatherman to know which the way the wind blows.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: There is now a fair representation of Dohnanyi’s work in the vaults, and much of it has been playing recently; punctuated by the Dead from 76, those FM broadcasts after the hiatus and also Luna at Brooklyn Steel last month. All that good stuff.

Coverage of Game 7 of the World Series on my iPad was interrupted by a succession of noisy news notifications. The defence secretary, the Right Honourable Sir Michael Fallon KCB MP, had resigned for ‘inappropriate behaviour’ a decade or so ago, although it now appears that his closet also contains skeletons which date from more recent times.
 
Overnight, on Thursday, it was not difficult to ignore these news flashes. A Game 7 is a rare treat regardless of one’s allegiance and the preceding six had given us baseball at its best. I have sympathy for Dave Roberts, who stole one of the most significant bases in Red Sox history, but I am delighted for Houston, a club which has switched leagues and reinvented itself over the last four years. In Altuve, they have a brilliant player for whom I voted as AL MVP. In Verlander, they have a pitcher who deserves the Cy Young. And in Houston, they have a fan base which has stuck with them throughout the rebuilding process and deserves gloating rights over the Sox and the Yankees, both of whom they beat on the way to the ALCS.
 
The following morning, however, our focus was on the activities of the dishonourable members and the shambles which is our Parliament and our government.
 
Given the recent stories about similar activity in the creative and corporate worlds, one might think that this is Parliament reflecting its constituencies and the electorate at large. But it isn’t.
 
It is about power, and the abuse of power. It is about a very particular culture which casts a shadow over our political and economic institutions. It is about the bubble in which they operate.
 
It manifests itself in different ways. Sir Fred Goodwin, for example, treated RBS as a plaything, with corporate jets flying him across the world for Formula 1 events and the pursuit of vanity projects. His victims were employees, shareholders and the global financial system.
 
In the case of Weinstein, Fallon and their ilk, the victims are women.
 
An excuse has been ventured by some. The BBC’s Nick Robinson tweeted that: “Admirer of Fallon says alcohol is a power drug which turns some into a Jekyll & Hyde”. I guess he – or the  ‘admirer of Fallon’ - means Hyde, because even in Dr Jekyll mode, Fallon was a deeply unpleasant politician. But as someone who is not averse to a glass of red myself, I know that alcohol invariably provokes an exaggerated version of the original, minimising the inhibitions of normal social behaviour, and creating a personal dissonance. There is some sense to the maxim of in vino veritas.  And if it’s not there in the first place, it can’t be spewed out after a large glass of Shiraz.
 
I am not singling out Fallon because he is a Tory. It would appear that Labour has its own problems in this regard. And he is joining an ignominious list of those corrupted by power: Trump, Nixon, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Kim Jong-Il to name merely a few which spring immediately to mind.
 
Years ago, we used to joke that anyone who wanted the highest office should be barred on psychological grounds; that the desire for power was a symptom of a malaise which makes them unfit to exercise it.
 
Maybe it’s not a joke after all. It’s certainly not funny.

Today from the everysmith vaults: 30 Days of Dead from Deadnet. A new track for each day during November, a series now in its seventh year. Currently I'm on 2014.

We don’t talk very much about Harold Wilson these days. For my younger readers, he was leader of the Labour Party for 13 years and prime minister for eight, winning four general elections and losing one. He presided over a turbulent period of British and international politics and history, in the form of accounts written by his successors and colleagues, has not been kind to him.
 
But whatever his failings and his record of failure, we in Britain can be grateful to him for one thing.
 
He kept us out of Vietnam.
 
Where Thatcher leapt at the opportunity to take on Argentina over the Falklands, and Blair jumped into bed with Bush to invade Iraq, Harold Wilson devoted his energies duing the Vietnam War to peace initiatives, no less than nine of them during the course of Johnson’s presidency. And if his refusal to send British troops was more practical and ‘pragmatic’ (a Wilson word) than principled, and his refusal to condemn the American position upset the Labour Left, he did ensure that our generation was not called upon to fight an immoral war in south-east Asia.
 
I was contemplating this as I watched the opening half-dozen episodes of the Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War. It is notable for its inclusion of Vietnamese voices as well as American, reminding us that this conflict was not solely or even primarily an American tragedy, despite the fact that the blockbuster movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon) and the key texts (Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, James Crumley’s And One To Count Cadence) focus on the American experience and in so doing reflect the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ treatment of Vietnam as an abstract concept in a game of dominoes rather than a country and a people with a long history and a vibrant culture.
 
By the end, of course, Vietnam was not longer even a concept; it was a situation from which the US needed to extract itself for reasons which had more to do with US politics than any recognition of the wrongness of the initial policy and the war itself.
 
What the Vietnamese call ‘the American War’ was the backdrop to my teenage and student years: I was 15 in 1964 when the first major demonstration against the war, at Berkeley, occurred and 18 at the time of the Tet Offensive in 1967. It is a truism that the war initiated a new era of divisive politics and a breakdown in the national consensus; it is also true that the war, the resistance to the war, and the raising of black consciousness which was an essential part of both, affected many of us beyond the shores of the US profoundly and individually.
 
Certainly it was our political focus in those years, and our political philosophy was forged from it and around it. My politics in particular are defined by it to this day and watching the documentary is a form of catharsis for my generation.
 
If you are not doing so, you should.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Zappa from the Boston Music Hall, 1976. Frank’s on fire.