The Sandoz Collection - Sandoz Diego Cerveza (the ebook reader .txt) 📗

and gadgets were fantasy...imagine talking into a watch that was a phone and a video at the same time...impossible...not plausible...the stuff of fantasy...Star Trek...beaming and streaming through space the final frontier..preposterous!!

Later it was Alex Trebeck tossing out trick questions, coded messages, over our heads, and into the shortwave earphones of East Berlin agents; reruns of a James Dickey South floating flotilla's of Ned Beatty’s running the rapids in rivers of no return, banjo's dueling. Then bang pow zoom...caped crusaders chasing after boy wonders and men from u.n.c.l.e.s. avenging them and getting smart with agent 99 who had just finished bonding with james showing pussy galore. Hillbillies on the move to be with Beverly in the hills, and gullible Gilligan was guiless and directionless, adrift and drift less at the same time, timeless and out of time with the times and out of step and off the beaten path on a three hour tour.

Superman had committed suicide. The fucking Man of Steel, not faster than a speeding bullet to the brain. Kennedy proved that too...Two Kennedy's actually on the table, and King in the wings of Memphis. Conspiracy...conspiracy...a canned good packaged since man invented paranoia...Judge Crater...Amelia Earhart....who killed Kennedy and King and Oswald and Giancana and Rosselli and just where the hell is Hoffa anyway?

The Sixties brought a war right smack dab into our living rooms....we had vicious attack dogs by German Shepards who were eating southern Negroes who in turn were only trying to effect and initiate a counter balance to the unbalanced bus depot lunch counter. These dogs were so vicious PETA itself would call for the wholesale killing of them on a level never imagined before or since along with the holders and handlers who grinned with shit kickin' grits eatin' drawl and backwoods smile and simplicity of someone whose been dropped on their heads one two many times or swam in the swamps or bobbed for apples in the family outhouse on Grandaddys birthday while he dithered himself to Buck Owens music in old black and white on the Grand Old Opry...

Firehoses flooded our patio from these images, imagine...people trying for equality in late 20th century America...America for Christ sakes...land of the free, all men are created equal..except for them and you and me. Protesters bashed daily by Daley in Chicago...protesters ...imagine that in the land of the free, America again, where freedom of speech and dissent are cornerstones of its democracy...no this is not Red Square or Tiananmen...but Chicago. The Pepsi Generation was replacing all things Coke...and cola moved over for the un-cola and everything was upside down...damn that Pong...I forgot about that little bastard of genuine genetic engineering genius..a Mengele experiment...like shoving a VW up the ass of a 1939 Jewish banker and turning him into a flesh and blood garage for stolen and now stored Gestapo booty in a booty.


Player pianos rippin' out with 78 rpm honky tonk wimmen to Victorious Victoria's Victrola and through the alley and 8-tracking it through the woods to the planet MP3 where a full scale invasion of the body snatching I-Pods was carefully underway. The telegraph cables were twisted into knots, poles used for pirate planks and fiber was good for optics as well as your digestive tract. So many channels to choose from it's as grueling as watching one episode of Real Housewives of Toledo. Cougars my ass.

Face lifted hags who have spent too much time in the sun and look like cheap hookers on the streets of Gary, Indiana...that is as bad as it gets...no lower than Gary my friends. Been there? Don't judge unless you have. We went from the telegraphers key...dit..dit..dit...dat...dis n' dat....rattatat-tat...Thompson machine gun fast across the wired landscape of the old odd west to images of Chistopher Walken on SNL offering more Campagn-ya.

Today..it's the Food Channel, Look-A-Like on the TV Guide Channel..like we really tune in the TV Guide Channel for programming...we just want to know what’s on NatGeo, please, thats it...Ok, "Punk'd" isnt bad...Bravo with it's feminine overtones, reality this and reality that none of which are reality anyway, CNN boring it's way around the world stuck on one news subject for 24-hours a day for a 6 months at a time...newspapers have burst into the flame of history and nostalgia and turn into the ashes of the past as Yahoo and Google bring us our news with the speed of light...so fast, it makes you twitter with delight. The Weather Channel that is predictably wrong when it comes to predicting.

Cable, cell phones, i-pods, wireless computers, wired computers, radio, the internet, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, blah, blah, blog...today we are bundled...and coddled by technology....it's an overdose of information. It's all about self today..thank god in the Sixties these channels of information weren't available. We would never have gotten out of the house or on the road. Fuck GPS...give me a ratty old randy Rand McNally with creases and food greases from diners and dives. The lava lamp was about as high tech as we got...we just got high, not high tech...we got stoned in Technicolor...not technical...freaks...not geeks ...better living through chemistry...outer space? The light show at the Fillmore was our space shuttle to our starship on Jefferson Airlines riding on the back of a white rabbit....the music? Amplified!, not computerized wimp pop Beyonce crap either. Our imaginations ran rampant....we read Ramparts...we were Fugged, not fucked...and Tinfoil? Yes...it was the Mother of Invention.

Today...the Borg revel in a lack of revelation...the tinfoil is flying off the shelves like Burrito Brothers, brother, where art thou? The next time you see some hapless individual wearing tinfoil protection as a protective suit of armor...walk up to them....greet them kindly...and say simply this..."Just unplug the damn thing...cut the power of the technological age...the Twin Towers was nothing...pull the plug and see what happens...."

The Red Bear and The Black Panther
America's Political Third Rail

What happens in the atomic political reactor when you unscientifically split the atoms of two people who share a nuclear passion for societal change? Whats worse, is that each is from a different end of the socio-ethnic spectrum? The answer? Easy, that is when political isotopes go kaboom! A Big Bang, that's what happens!

One of these fissionabe personages is aa real iron range son of a political bitch, born of Finnish immigrants who, like many before them, made their home, home on the range, in and on the Mesabi Range. The Mesabi kimosabe, is in northern "youbetcha" Minnesota. Stout, workahlolic, alcolholic miners. Proud stock, with shirts of proletarian plaid in all colors of the rainbow and Rockford socks (forerunner of Sockmonkeys) to help fight off the winter freeze. Flapping flags of Finland adorn the working class town and the inevitable company store. It's a cacophany of the proud heritage of steely, swarthy workers intermingled with doses of liberal amounts of labor friendly leanings.

The other reactor factor: a fiery young black woman with deep southern fried routes in the fertile soil that was also the fiercely racist real estate south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis would emerge as an inspiring intellectual and passionate proselytizer of peoples rights, making her one of the most vocal of voices of the purple hazed double dazed Sixties that gave shape to a new generation of questioning activists, who believe me, weren't proud to be Okie's from Muskogee. Leave that to the haggard huddled masses that didn't and still don't quite understand that dissent is as American as apple pie, baseball and imposing democracy down other nations throat at the point of a bayonet..now, that's about as American as it gets!

The formidable fornication of socialist philosophy and conviction eventually generated enough politically sexual heat and gravity to bring these two separate orbs into perfect alignment, fusing them together in concise orbits, which in turn lead to the Communist Party's Presidential Campaign Ticket that featured the Red Bear and the Black Panther, Gus Hall and Angela Davis. It was the political equivilent of "Dancing with the Leftist Stars" as the times they are a changin' times produced the all-American dream team of the Communist Party of the USA. It was the birth of the third party political third rail of American politics where the red star of communism wore a hammer and sickle along with a mountainous skyscraper Afro. In effect, Davis was the party's stick of dynamite while mucho gusto Gus added a red tinged hue of Bolshevism to a socialist rainbow of radical activism.

A little background if you please Maestro! Following the no-bullshit Bolseviks takin' it to the streets ousting and elimination of the Czar and his family in old imperial Nicholas Russia (most famous for large fur hats and Faberge eggs!) the left wing of the Socialist Party of America organized the first American Communists with a determination to build support among American workers, support the Soviet Union and of course, the simple matter of overthrowing capitalism. The gospel according the Marx and Engels.

It had been a long time since the American government was afraid of a portion of it's citizenry, (and all governments should be afraid of it's citizens and not the the other way around,) so the United States began a not so land of the free campaign to limit it's dosage of democracy and instead suggested suppressing the "godless" movement that wanted rights for the working class. The gall of it all. The persecution forced them to go underground like bolshevik ground hogs, hoverin in secret cells, which only strengthened their resolve. After a bit of infighting, the new party was unified after a period of ideological constipation and managed to emerge above ground existence with the friction of fractured factions easing up. Then as though someone tossed another log onto the campfire the flames of dissent erupted again in the camp of the comrades, ending in the eventual expulsion of those Hot to Trotskyists.

Gus Hall wasn't always, well, Gus Hall...in fact his real name was a gusher of a moniker. He came marching proudly from the womb in 1910 as Arvo Kustaa Halberg to parents who at the time were involved in the Industrial Workers of the World..or Wobblies as they were known. They were also early members of the Communist Party of the USA as far back as 1919. It wasn't unusual, as those madcap Finnish immigrants were often red hued radicals when it came to political preferences. They tended to be extremely active in labor militancy and political activism. Arvos father had to pay the political piper the price for his leftists leanings, resulting in his beinng booted by the bosses from working in the mines when he joined in the IWW strike. This of course resulted in the diminshing returns of whatever income and safety net that capitalism had failed to provide for in just such circumstances. It's no wonder in those days workers were attracted to communism over capitalism..capitalism tended to have it's citizens bend over as far forward as it could for an economic fucking with the dildo of democracy.

The family then went all from comfortable working class to all out Ted Kacyinski rustic, and moved into a small cabin in the northwoods that Gus's dad built with his own hands. Here Gus lived there as a proletarian version of Davey "The Commie" Crockett. Politically, he was loaded for bear, or "bar" in the frontier parlance of the buckskin and fringe days. With ten in the family to feed, Gus by the age of 15, had to forgoe any formal schooling, and instead rolled up his working class sleeves working to help keep the starving family from sinking below the surface of a hungry ocean. The north woods howled a wolf call to him and Gus went to work in