Daily Bleed for April 18th

This is Darrow,
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart,
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox
And his sadness, and kindness,
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

— Edgar Lee Masters, "Darrow," (1922)

Relative Web version:
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0418.htm

Text excerpts:

APRIL 18

JO LABABIE
American individualist poet, writer, anarchist theorist.

US: ALFRED PACKER DAY. Eatcher heart out,
Ronald McDonald: Honors the only American to be
convicted on charges of cannibalism (1854).

______________________________



1839 - France: What is Today's Youth Coming To?!:
French decadent Charles Baudelaire expelled from college.

1850 - Joseph A. Labadie. Labor activist, writer, poet,
printer, anarchist, lives, Paw Paw, Michigan.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/LabadieJoseph.htm

1857 - American lawyer for the underdog Clarence Darrow lives.
Daily Bleed Saint 2003-05.

Hard to think "saint" & "lawyer" together, but Darrow
defended Debs, anti-work radicals & "the underdog."

"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt."

1879 - US: Trial starts in Standing Bear vs. General
Crook in front of Judge Dundy, arguing that Indians
citizens have the same rights to habeas corpus as
other U.S. citizens.

1906 - San Francisco Earthquake destroys much of the city.

"I asked a man standing next to me what happened. Before he
could answer a thousand bricks fell on him & he was killed.
A woman threw her arms around my neck. I pushed her away
& fled.

All around me buildings were rocking & flames shooting.
As I ran, people on all sides were crying , praying &
calling for help. I thought the end of the world had come."

1908 - The IWW poem "We Have Fed You All For A
Thousand Years" published in "Industrial Union Bulletin".

We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers dead
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool
But if blood be the price of all your wealth
Good God we have paid in full...

1913 -- US: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek coal miners, on strike
for over a year; they have endured a cold winter in tents &
on meager rations.

They had suffered humiliation, brutality & death at the
hands of mine guards. They had been machined gunned
by an armor plated train, illegally court martialed & illegally
imprisoned by the state governor...

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/04ref.htm#18/1913

1930 -- US: Atlanta's "Barbecue Bob" (aka Robert Hicks),
records "We Sure Got Hard Times Now". One of the most
popular bluesmen of the late 20's, recording 68 sides before
his death in 1931.

Spring. Four million Americans are out of work.
Breadlines continue to form in New York, Chicago
& other American cities.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/04ref.htm#18/1930

1948 - Kathy Acker lives. (listed variously as
1944, 45, 47, 48; it is agreed, howsomever, that she died in 1997)

On the television
football game with the sound off
World in which Strom Thurmond
outlives Kathy Acker
We walk under the grey sky
past the massive brick apartments
of outer Connecticut Avenue
toward a strip mall café

— Ron Silliman, excerpt, "Dadaquest"

"Kathy Acker loved Miles Davis &, like Miles, she didn't give
a fuck, except about the things she gave a fuck about. She
gave a fuck about books (the ones she wrote & the library of
30,000 volumes she amassed over the years), about the
subliminal politics of everyday life — where the brittle
edges of gender politics & class would come into sharp focus —
&, mostly, about the power of words to define the world &
shape our thoughts. Whoever controlled the words controlled
thought, Kathy knew. She set out to understand & liberate
words (& herself) by direct action: She'd seize control of
language & reinvent it in her work.

— Richard Kadrey, author (Metrophage; Horse Latitudes;
Covert Culture Sourcebook; From Myst To Riven")

In the words of David Antin: Her works will answer for her.
They remain alive.

1955 - Relative Death, more or less, of Albert Einstein,
pacifist, socialist, scientist, Princeton, New Jersey.

Human society is passing through a crisis ... The economic
anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my
opinion, the real source of the evil...

The result of...[the concentration of private capital in a few
hands] is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power
of which cannot be checked even by a democratically
organised political society.

— Albert Einstein, "Why I Am A Socialist", 1949

"It's all relative"

1968 - Baaaaa Humbug?: US Army concedes that nerve gas
sprayed from planes, burned in pits, & released from 155mm
shells at its Dugway Proving Ground was responsible for the
death of at least 6,400 Utah sheep.

No Weapons of Mass Destruction here.

1969 - Stout Fellow?: Patrick Stout, a former Army sergeant
who had entered an atomic bomb crater in Alamogordo, New
Mexico to demonstrate that it presented no safety hazard, dies
of leukemia. Doctors attributed Stout's contraction of the
disease to atomic radiation exposure.

1977 - US: Native American activist Leonard Peltier
found guilty of murdering two FBI agents, despite
government testimony that he was not present at the
scene of the killings. He remains behind bars as of 2011.

1996 - Lebanon: 102 refugees in U.N. compound killed by
intentionally targeted Israeli artillery, Quana.

1997 - Sweden: "Choose Life" Plowshares action at Bofors
weapons factory in Karlskoga, exporter of arms to Indonesia.

1998 - Chile: Labor organizations from across Latin America
converge on Santiago, in a mass protest of Beloved &
Respected Comrade Leader President Bill Clinton's free trade
visit & negotiations there.

_______________

"Strange that science, which in the old days seemed
harmless, should have evolved into a nightmare that
causes everyone to tremble."


"Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the
world."

— Albert Einstein

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/einstein_tongue.jpg
_______________

— Auntie-Nightmare 1997-366 or thereabouts, relatively speaking