This blog will be dormant

until 3/28, as I will be in New Orleans, El Paso, Austin and Chicago, with brief stops in Charlotte and San Antonio. In Austin, I will give a reading from my novel, and in Chicago, I will present a quickie slide show:



Readings by Balcones Prize Winners Linh Dinh and Chase Twichell

March 21, 7PM
Rio Grande Campus Gallery Theater
1212 Rio Grande
Austin, TX 78701



Linh Dinh won the Balcones Fiction Prize for his novel Love Like Hate.

Chase Twichell is the Balcones Prize-winning author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information contact Charlotte Gullick, (512) 223.3226, cgullick@austincc.edu




The 23nd Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party in Chicago

March 24, 8PM
Wicker Park Art Center (a/k/a/ St. Paul's)
2215 W. North Ave.
Chicago, IL

$10/$7 students--Info: 773/235 4267--Street parking available--Cash bar

Legendary pianist and boogie expert Erwin Helfer kicks off this years birthday party, which will feature, among others, award-winning novelist/photographer Linh Dinh, writer/dissident psychologist Bruce Levine, U. Conn. Algren scholar Mike Jones, renowned folksinger Bucky Halker, poet/raconteur/magazine maven Bob Katzman, singer/songwriter Kristin Lems and poets Charlie Newman & Co. Guitarist and "Rio Bamba" headliner John Garvey will back Algren Committee co-founder Warren Leming, who will perform a poem from "Chicago: City on the Make," while photographer and Algren fan Ron Seymour will show some of his photos of Algren. A mystery guest and old Algren pal will talk about the days when Ma's was where you ate, or chose not to; Doc was the man who dealt the cards, if you lacked judgment; and women with troubles worse than your own were relatively unknown. This year's Algren Committee Award winners are Chicago historical researcher and re-enactor extraordinaire Paul Durica and scholar/activist/Maxwell Street preservationist Elliot Zashin. The cash bar, "Sto Lat" singalong and birthday cake remain sacrosanct. Come join the fun!

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[Man drinking leftover soda fished from a trash can. Ukranian guy. I photographed him for the first time on 7/26/09.]



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[Grand Masonic Lodge in background]


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[Half a block from City Hall]



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[An entrance to Suburban Station, a commuter hub in Center City.]



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Thanks for a $50 donation from Burnaby, British Columbia!




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Triage on Uncle Sam

As published at OpEd News, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, CounterPunch and Intrepid Report, 3/4/12:





As is clear to any doctor, new age healer, medicine man or back alley quack, Uncle Sam is in terrible shape. Though his organs are barely vital, save one, his head remains strangely swollen, and his priapic condition is more steely than ever, to the world’s dismay. Like a hybrid dipstick and divination rod, it always shoots straight for the oil, usually Muslim-owned. America’s current motto, LEAVE NO SHI’ITE OR SUNNI UNTURNED.

Long overweight, he has always sought to expand his eating horizon. Starting with the blasé turkey, he moved on to spicy Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino and Okinawan, etc. Lately he’s been stuffing his face with all-you-can-eat helpings of hummus, sharwama and sheikh mahshi. Yummm! But no earth is big enough to satisfy this infinite growth appetite, so with his overseas options dwindling, the fat man is consuming his own body. America is eating up its own young and future.

What to do? When a country is this sick, how do you go about curing it? And what should we tend to first? Among presidential candidates, the only one with anything like a sensible platform is Ron Paul, who insists on bringing all the troops home, restoring our raped Constitution, and lopping off the Federal Reserve, thus castrating our thieving banksters, but since Paul threatens the beast so directly, there’s no way our military/banking complex will allow him to win.

American electoral politics is modeled after game shows, sit-coms, professional wrestling and Jerry Springer, with everything well-orchestrated and media sculpted, but should the masses fail to cheer, laugh, tear up or become indignant on cues, there’s still the Diebold voting machine to yield a preordained result. Even with a fair shake, however, voters may still reject Ron Paul because of his opposition to social programs and abortion, as well as his laissez-faire stance towards big business.

As for third party candidates, the last one to have even the remotest chance of winning was Ross Perot, in 1992, but he ended up with zero Electoral College vote! As for Ralph Nader, his best showing was 2.74% of the popular vote, in 2000. In short, we don’t have a viable candidate to lever us from this quicksand. The system simply won’t allow it.

It won’t allow it because it’s not there to serve us, silly. This is no government for the people. Where have you been? While we had a brief moment occupying a few plazas, dusty lots and parks, they continued to occupy everything else. With their nonstop media pollution, they occupy your very mind. So what are you going to do about it?

Many of us just want to get off this death train. In 2008, a Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” A growing number would rather be a citizen of the Second Vermont Republic or Cascadia, etc., and in Wyoming, lawmakers just narrowly voted down a “doomsday bill” that would have prepared the state to function independently of Washington. Though it was posed as an emergency measure, it sounded suspiciously like a secession plan, what with the state having its own currency, army and even aircraft carrier.

Aspiring Cascadians chafe at having “to put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power,” but you can live in Washington DC itself and feel exactly the same way. Just ask the many homeless sprawling on the sidewalks within sight of the US Capitol, or the people of Adams Morgan or Anacostia. Like those in Bagdad or Kabul, they are not being served by the war criminals who huddle daily on that hill. So the distance is ideological and not necessarily physical. In the latest poll, released three weeks ago, 86% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Some may see their “representatives” as incompetent, but many Americans already know that they are being ruled by an alien government that only got elected through lying and a rigged system.

The more illegitimate they become, the more flags they display, and the bigger the flags, though they care nothing about what the flag stands for. To them, the American flag is just something to drape over your coffin, after they’ve sent you to commit mass murder for Big Oil, Big Banks and Israel, after they’ve used you thoroughly to enrich themselves. Isn’t it time we bury this grotesquely corrupt and bloodthirsty cabal? The big question is how?

Strategies, strategies. Recognizing that one-day protests accomplish nothing, the Occupy Movement sought to disrupt the system by occupying Wall Street. It didn’t happen that way, of course, because hundreds of cops were brought in to protect the New York Stock Exchange for months on end.

Thwarted, the occupiers moved to a park, and that became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. As you sleep outside and become symbolically homeless, your sneering masters will continue to ruin lives by starting wars and ripping people off in plain sight.

And so the first stage of our rebellion is over, and though I fully applaud the courage and sacrifice of those who endured prolonged discomfort or police brutality to rouse America from its slumber, we must now aim for tangible results and not symbolic victories. Since time is short, we must get deadly serious. No more hedges.






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Thanks for a $20 donation from Coventry in the UK!



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American Awakening-News Analysis-02-28-2012

Iran's Press TV on 2/28/12:

The Occupy movement has decided to protest against the big corporations using the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] to buy off legislators to craft laws serving their interests.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Linh Dinh, writer and political analyst from Philadelphia, to further discuss the issue.

The program also provides the insights of two other guests: Caleb Maupin, with the International Action Center from New York, and Mark Glenn who is an author and political commentator.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Mr. Dinh, the next question that I would like to put here is what the occupy protesters, those who are protesting corporations, have been saying in their sites. They have been saying that they are specifically targeting corporations that use the American Legislative Exchange Council to buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interest of those corporations and I am quoting them now. Tell us about this exchange council [ALEC] and the role of corporations in American politics and economy.

Dinh: Well, I agree with everything that have just been said. I like to go back to the original premises of the Occupy Movement in that they wanted to target Wall Street, which was a brilliant idea, which is to focus people’s attention to the heart of the problem that says a handful of banks, six or seven banks, are running this country, OK?

So I agree with everything that has just been said, but here is the problem.

Another original premise of the Occupy Movement was that they’re going to disrupt the system, because there have been many protests in the Unites States and most of them only take place for one day or one afternoon and the original premise of the Occupy Movement is that they’re going to disrupt the system; they’re going to occupy Wall Street, they’re going to disrupt it from functioning.

It did not happen that way, because the government here knows how dangerous that is. So they had hundreds of policemen surrounding the Wall Street edifice for months to prevent this from happening.

So what happened was they could only occupy a park. So that became the model nationwide. So the Occupy Movement became like this occupation of a space that did not really matter, OK?

You can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. So I would like the Occupy to move forward and to return to its original premise of disrupting the system.

And until that happens nothing will change, including tomorrow. I am not belittling the people who are putting their bodies on the line, who are getting beaten up, who are getting arrested, but until you can disrupt the system, it will go on and do what it has always done which is starting wars and ripping people off and disrupting and ruining lives.

Press TV: When we are looking at the effects of these movements is or can have, one effect is going to be on the presidential elections presumably that is going to take place in November.

Do you think that there is going to be any effect at all on the elections in terms of who people chose? We know of course that there have been protests against the Republican presidential hopefuls, but does this mean that people trust the Democrats?

Dinh: I have visited about 8 Occupy camps repeatedly and I can tell you that most of the people in these camps have no faith in the political system as it is.

So I myself have no faith in any substantial changes in the next election.

It is just a circus; it is just a distraction. Basically, the system cannot be changed from within and that should be one of the primary messages of the Occupy Protest Movement.

So again, like I said, the system ... In fact, Time Magazine voted “the Protester” Person of the Year.

If you have such a mainstream media patting you on the head, it means that they are not afraid of you. So if the system can brush off this protest movement by giving it a kind of backhanded accolade, then we know that we are not going far enough.

So I expect nothing to happen from this election. But the national conventions coming up will give this Occupy movement a renewed focus to do something substantial and I think they need to come up with new strategies because we do not have all the time in the world....

In fact, when Time Magazine gave the Occupy movement the ‘Man of the Year’ award, they compared it to the Civil Rights Movement and said it took ten years for the Civil Rights Movement to achieve a concrete result, but frankly we do not have ten years.

Press TV: Linh Dinh, I would like to bring up the case of the police brutality with you as well. We know that the recent police killings of a black teenager in his grandmother’s house and also a black officer in front of his two daughters has put the case of police brutality also high on the agenda of these protesters.

There are also of course criticisms about the stop-and-frisk program in New York. The National Defense Act was approved by President Obama. The question now would be, some are asking actually, is America becoming a police state?

Dinh: Yes, of course it is a police state. It is interesting that these laws are being passed now. It is the kind of a legal preparation for what is going to come next because even as the government preaches nonviolence towards the protesters, that has become a kind of accepted common ideology that you should not resort to violence unless you are the state.

So even as they preach that to us, they are preparing to deal with actual outbreak of violence because it is inevitable that is going to happen because as the American people become more impoverished, they are going to get angrier and there is going to be outbreaks just as in Greece and in Spain and I suspect it is going to be even worse here, because I mean, we are the leader in violence of any kind.

So the government is putting laws into place where they can arrest you without charge. You have no access to a lawyer; they can even kill you without charge.

So since those laws are already in place, we do have a fascist government, OK?

So in the months ahead, I expect not less violence but more violence from the state and likely from the protesters because people are very upset.

MY/MSK/JR





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