Obama has selected a new “Drug Czar”, a place in the government which is a little problematic, though it’s being pointed out by pointer-outters of these things that the new “Drug Czar” has some liberalizing tendencies toward low level drugs and holistic views in prevention, etc.

But really, he’s a disappointment as a pick.  I was hoping Obama would tap Cheech Marin as Drug Czar.  I think he’d be a real Change Agent.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

I.  In the Spring of 1923, working on the docks at San Pedro, in California, I knew a good many IWW’s.  The movement was then at its height on the Coast, and they were just starting a new longshoremen’s union in the harbor.  Most of the leaders and organizers with whom I came in contact seemed to me to be more or less lopsided fanatics, given to over-dramatizing themselves and their caus.

Perhaps the most level-headed and philosophical of the lot was a tall, gangling fellow, forty-five or so, sharp-featured, with deep-sunken brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, and his left leg stiff in the knee, which in walking made him swing it out sideways in a semi-circle.  He was obviously unwell, but still energetic; always coughing slightly, clearing his throat.  He had a suggestion of the Indian in his leathery, long face and dark straight hair, which was beginning to gray over the ears; later, when we got acquainted, he told me his was quarter Indian, and a native of Colorado.

One day someone pointed to him in an IWW hangout:  “That’s Jack Kipps, the guy who assassinated Woodrow Wilson.”

I took this as some sort of wobby joke and thought little of it at the time.  The wobblies were full of wild stories.  Wilson, in fact, then was still living.

Later I met Kipps, off and on, in the room of a mutual friend, and in the course of a few months he told me, in snatches, probably all there was to know about him.

As a very young man he had been a miner in Colorado.  Early in the 1900’s he became a Socialist and developed into an agitator for the radical Western Federation of Miners.  He had known Bill Haywood and liked to talk of him.  He had had but a few years’ schooling; was self-educated and read, unlike most wobblies, not only radical literature, but everything else that he thought worthwhile and could lay his hands on.

In the so-called Ludlow Massacre in 1913, in which thirty or more working people were killed by employers’ gunmen in a labor dispute, Kipps was shot in his left knee; hence his stiff leg.

During the war he laid low.  Having trouble with his chest, he went to the Mojave Desert in Calironia and read Plutarch’s Lives and re-read Dickens and Fielding’s “Tom Jones.”

His health strengthened after the Armistice and he drifted to Seattle, where, in the Spring of 1919, a powerful IWW movement sprang up almost overnight.  Ole Hanson was mayor of the city and immediately gained national prominence as a 105% American by his efforts to suppress the wobblies.  The country was being swept by the first wave of anti-Red hysteria.  There were great strikes along Pugent Sound.  The wobblies tied up the port of Seattle, and gangs of American Legion heroes warred upon them.

Kipps soon attained to a sort of leadership among the Seattle IWW’s.  He wrote pieces for Solidarity and other wobbly sheets, which often printed his portrait, playing up his part-Indian ancestry to offset the patriots’ charge that the movement was un-American and appealed only to “foreign scum.”  He was a leader of the faction that opposed dynamite, arson, gunfire and slugging; he advocated, instead, what he called “non-violent violence” or “the force of numbers.”  He published a pamphlet on the subject.

II.  One evening, in San Pedro, I remarked to him that I had heard wobblies refer to him as the man who had assassinated Woodrow Wilson; what did they mean by that?  I expected him to laugh at my question, but he didn’t, though I knew him to have an active sense of humor.  He just sat silent, evidently reluctant to talk about it.

Curious, I urged him to explain to me what the IWW understood by “the assassination of Woodrow Wilson.”

Then he began:

“It happened in Seattle in 1919.  As you know, in August of that year, Wilson went on his swing around the country, to appeal to the people for his League of Nations, which the ‘pigmy minds’ in the Senate were determined to kill.  He spoke in all the bigger cities and wherever he came the mob cheered him — not quite as wildly as he had been cheered in Europe a few months before, but still.

“According to his schedule, he was due in Seattle on September 13.  As you know, the IWW’s were then definitely on the up and up in Seattle, and so about the first of the month we accounced that when Wilson came a delegation of wobblies would call on him and present to him a petition for the release of the political prisoners in the Federal penitentiaries.  Of course we didn’t expect him to act on our request, but we figured that presenting the petition would be good propaganda.

“But we no sooner gave out our announcement than the politicians in charge of the preparations let it be known the effective steps would be taken to prevent the wobblies from ‘annoying’ the President.  That was the word they used — annoying him.  It appeared that we were unworthy of consideration from anybody in authority.  We were an ‘outlaw organization’ made up of un-American, low-down foreign scum — an ulcer on the fair and otherwise immaculate body of the Republic.

“Naturally, although scum, we didn’t like this sort of treatment, but we knew that if they wanted to, they could keep our delegation from coming near Wilson.  They had their cops and soldiers.

“For two or three days we didn’t know what to do about it.  But we couldn’t let Ole Hanson and his gang of petty politicians, and the American Legion, lick us.

“Just then, we were talking a good deal among ourselves about non-violent violence and the force of mere numbers.  I was hot for that idea, and still am.  So I began to figure how we could get the best of Ole.  I hated the little squarehead — not because he was against us, but because he was such a small-time opportunist.  I had nothing much against Wilson, and that was true of most wobblies.

“We had numbers.  Some of the biggest unions in Seattle were IWW organizations.

“Then I got an idea — an inspiration.

“The idea seemed wonderful to me, and so I got together about a dozen wobs who were sort of active on the agitation end of the movement, and I said to them: ‘When Wilson is driven through the streets in a machine so that the mob can see him and cheer him, why don’t we — thousands of us — line up along certain blocks along the route, all of us dressed in our working clothes, sleeves rolled up, arms folded on our chests?  It’ll be Saturday afternoon and all the work will be suspended for the occasion, and some of us aren’t working anyhow.  We can get thousands of workers and mass them altogether, occupying, say, five or six blocks.  We can get out early so that hoi polloi can’t get those blocks.  And when Wilson comes by, we don’t give him a tumble; nobody lets out a sound of cheer and nobody claps his hands.  We just stand still, all of us, thousands of us.  Just stand still like this, our arms folded — nobody moves and everybody looks straight ahead, not at him, but at nothing at all — just stares past him — everybody still and silent.’

Previous to his coronation in Jerusalem, Tomlinson and the Theocratic Party merged their political efforts with a new political entity on the scene called The National Hamiltonian Party.  Exactly what form this merger took is unclear, for the Hamiltonians bear scant similarity to the Theocrats.The National Hamiltonian Party was founded in December 1965 by what appears to be a group of bluebloods.  Its candidate for President in 1968 is Eric Sebastian, a descendant of Alexander Hamilton and a graduate of Harvard and Oxford.  At one time he worked in the Dewey, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and Nixon campaigns but gave up in disgust in 1960.  He noted with sadness “the degradation of blintz – eating politics that was forced on a truly aristocratic man” such as Rockefeller.

Other leaders in the Party are Adrian Tilt, like Sebastian a stockbroker by trade; Lindsay Williams and Maxwell Byrnes, both bankers; J. Thomas Aldrich, who complained that he had to run against “an unbelievable assortment of ambitious politicians” in Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District; and Mannings Claiborne Case, who claims relationship to a number of well-known Louisianans of the past and who is described as a writer, a political and philosophical commentator, a philanthropist, and a plantation owner.  Case unsuccessfully contested the Senate seat now held by Allen Ellender.

Eric Sebestian, in opening his campaign for the 1968 race, said on 4 July 1966:  “We, of the National Hamiltonian Party stand proudly together, united and determined to return America to the hands of the aristocracy.  We are now calling for a return to the this form of government as set forth in the Constitution:  Rule by the Aristocrats!”  Hamiltonain literature notes that Sebastian has entered the 1968 race with several disadvantages:  “… he is educated, he is intelligent, and he is disdainful of stupidity.  As we know, stupidity is the one quality that has been identified [with] the average American voter.”

Hamiltonians have a five-plank platform: the return to the election of Senators by state legislatures; the return to the election of the president by independent electors, not by the popular vote; a reorganization of the tax system in order to “encourage success”; the abolition of Constitutional Amendments Thirteen through Twenty-Two; and the restriction of voting rights “to educated land-owning leaders.”  The Party’s slogan is a quote from Alexander Hamilton:  “Your People, Sir, Are A Great Beast.”

Sebastian promises not to bow and scrape for votes.  Nor will he accept support from any group that he considers to be beneath the dignity of the office.  President Johnson and vice-president Humphrey he refers to as “peasants” who have squandered the respect of the free world by such actions as riding on a merry-go-round and showing off an abdominal scar.

How the Hamiltonians and the Theocrats will work together may prove to be one of the more fascinating demonstrations of political skill of the twentieth century.  Neither has much in common except considerable idealism and patriotism.  Tomlinson, for one, is unconcerned with the details.  [… [“God will work them out.”] ]

The Farther Shores of Politics:  The American Political Fringe Today, George Thayer, 1968

From a marijuana enthusiast advocating a boycott of Kellogg’s for not renewing Michael Phelps’s Endorsement deal, words found their way here:
 a quick Wikipedia search shows the founder of Kellogg’s – John Harvey Kellogg – was a total frickin’ weirdo who believe in putting children’s genitals in a cage to keep them from playing with themselves and also believed in yogurt enemas.

Might have mixed up the two Kelloggs, but their brothers — one invented Corn Flakes, the other founded the company that has/had its central product Corn Flakes.  The thing, though, is — I don’t know about the Yogurt Enema — I guess that’s best classified as a scientific experiment that reached a dead end, but I do believe that the antimasturbatory efforts wouldn’t make him a “weirdo”, but put him right in the center of the attempts to keep the nation Morally Clean.  The Weirdo would have been the man who did nothing to stop the child’s vice, or:

In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.

… Necessary means to stop any sense of pleasure.

The history of Kelloggs with regard to a form of Health-Concious Prohibitionism gets a bit off track, as when we enter the twentieth century, Kelloggs would start pumping to the youth of America cereals such as Sugar Flakes, Sugar Pops, Sugar Sugar, and from there.

The Kelloggs fit in the historical tradition carried out today by:

this a 2004 Campaign/Lecture flier from Prohibition Party candidate Gene Ambondson.  Unless you agree with the other side of the splinter dispute.  I don’t know… read the wikipedia focus, go to the discussion to see cries that this is “slander”, and decide for yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_Party#Secession_of_2003

While the liberals celebrated, the Republicans meditated, and their conclusions made them just so many floats in the triumphal parade for Fair Dealer Harry Truman.  “Does the Republican Party Have a Future?” asked the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, and his answer was affirmative only if the party established a “liberal record.”  The Saturday Evening Post, of all magazines, stripped away the main argument Deweyites had been using to console themselves; a heavier vote, the Post’s analyst argued, would have meant only a more resounding victory for the Democrats.  Nobody, it seemed, was a conservative any more.  Ex-Speaker Joe Martin discovered that the GOP was too full of “plutocrats.”  Senator Taft lectured a Republican caucus on the wisdom of backing “welfare measures”, and Senator Wherry let it be known that “fundamentalist” rather than “conservative” was the proper adjective for his philosophy.  Thomas Dewey used the occasion of his first major statement after the election to tongue-lash Republicans who “try to go back to the 19th century, or even to the 1920s.”  They “ought to … try to get elected in a typical American community and see what happens to them,” said Dewey, who spoke with considerable authority on the subject.

—- Eric F Goldman Rendezvous With Destiny
A History of Modern American Reform, 1952

Just a passing thought word alterations in the “liberal” / “progressive” dichotemy (words have just been dropped on us interchangable, aren’t they?  Latter adopted after the former lost favor.  Actually it is that reason that I tend to cringe whenever I hear or read the word “progressive”, unless referring to something from the first two decades of the last century.)
Of course, the conservatives in 1948 quickly caught sight of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and they were all set.

I was somewhat startled to see that Mr. Adams had gone into the “belly of the beast” by granting an interview with Just Out.  Then I re-read and saw I had read wrongly — Just Out.  Not The local gay press rag which called on his resignation, the national gay magazine.  It figures.

I guess the biggest whimper out of the story this week came in the form of KGW’s Exclusive Interview with Mr. Breedlove, the latest example in the shoddened word usage for “exclusive” — it was exclusive except for the other two interviews.  I’m sure it was a ratings sensation for KGW and this February Sweeps’ — so sweeping that it had to be cut off into some installments and stretched out over a week.  This exclusive, in combination with the exclsuive KOIN (local cbs affiliate) / Logo (“MTV Gay”, look high up on your premium cable service), offered nothing not already unveiled in the exclusive Oregonian interview from a week or so ago, except it would appear: HE’S WILLING TO TAKE A LIE DETECTOR TEST!  Regarding his assertion that he did not have sex with Mr. Adams until after he was 18.

To which I can only ask, “To what end?”  Why does it matter?  The criminal code is pretty firm that that pro-longed intimate toilet stall kiss figures as sexual conduct, at this point I’d just as soon punt Mr. Breedlove out of mind and punt away — he I have no particular interest in, whereas Mr. Adams I do.

Media item the next for L’Affaire Adams, Lars Larson made an appearance at city council to confront Mayor Adams.  I won’t be too impressed unless he continues this on at least a weekly basis for a prolonged period of time, say three months.