It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

We took off early yesterday morning for the beaches at the southern end of Queens, which happen to be just past Kennedy Airport. The ocean beaches there include the one cited by beloved, local punk rock progenitors The Ramones, the uniformly black leather jacket & torn blue jeans-wearing rouges who famously recalled in one of their most well-known, under 2 minute, songs, the wonderful bygone, fun days spent in the communal act of hitchhiking there as kids. There are only two ways to drive to Rockaway Beach from within New York City and both ways require tolls. We went the way that takes you through a very, and I mean very, narrow stretch of land, by a very small hamlet known as Broad Channel. It’s literally a tiny island in the middle of Jamaica Bay.

There’s no way of mistaking being on Broad Channel Island, even if only passing through as most are, on your way to the beaches. Holiday or no holiday, I’ve never before seen so many American flags in one place in my life. Literally, every 15-20ft or so on the main thoroughfare a flag is hung either from a utility pole or home; it as if the municipality has written it into its civic code.

As we drove to and from the beach I noticed on every side street, which are not longer than two blocks in either direction before you’re at water’s edge, that there were flags in neat rows down the entire length of those streets too. Officially the population is 3,000. But it seems like less than half of that, it's so small. The population, however many there really are, is known regionally as being predominately compromised of firefighters and cops. And as it goes the traditionally heavily Irish town is pretty parochial-minded out there.

It eventually struck me as sadly ironic, after my initial feeling was to inveigh against the gauntlet of full frontal fascism blaring like a stuck car horn. A lifetime of nationalistic propaganda, conditioning those not given to deeper engagement with politics or history, to have unconditional allegiance to their country - even when they've been abandoned in their hour of need.

That's because whenever I’m down this way, which is only enroute to the beach, I recall the experience of driving my supply-packed van there as part of an activist-led relief effort after Hurricane Sandy hit in October of 2012. The streets we were passing on this hot July morning looked much differently than then. Small boats were strewn all around, crashed up into houses or flipped upside down; mattresses, dressers, and sports trophies piled in heaps and signs pleading for help from FEMA - all just a few feet from the road on which we were passing yesterday on our way to the Rockaways.

I’m sure many of the folks there, and especially those where we ended up staged on the Rockaways near Breezy Point, another similar marine outpost in Queens with similar demographics, will not soon forget the Occupy-led effort of which we were a part, if they are honest with themselves. Besides the hurricane, Breezy Point was also devastated by a horrendous sweeping fire that claimed 80 homes, which is almost half of the entire residences on the peninsula.

It was there that I had an activist epiphany, the lesson of which I’ll never forget.

After we made a delivery to a designated spot that other activists had organized (the regional effort, which spanned also to the Jersey Shore and Staten Island, was soon thereafter to be referred to as Occupy Sandy) we drove around the twisted wreckage of the ocean beachfront area. I was walking with a half dozen other Occupy activists when we came upon local residents still in the process of clean up. Entire homes’ water-logged and filthy contents were piled up 8 feet high in front of the abandoned husks to which they were now reduced. We also noticed there were other activists already there on the block, knocking on doors asking what they could do. Amazingly, we were to find out, that even though it was a couple of or a few days later, there still hadn’t been any official City administrators or relief people to make it their areas yet.

We were told, by a couple of residents on such a devastated block we visited, that, we, Occupy activists, were the first people they’d seen from outside. This was inadvertently confirmed moments later when a man wearing an official “Office of the Mayor of NYC” approached us and asked for our help in distributing supplies. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but it ultimately made sense. He admitted to our group that basically we had already demonstrated to have the infrastructure or channels with which to facilitate the dispersal of supplies that were now piling up at a depot the City was overseeing. He then handed us his business card with his cell phone number. It was a surreal and proud moment for all of us activists who answered the call in our locality, 20 miles away and organized by a woman Socialist activist in conjunction with Occupy folks and the local library.

Most of all, however, the takeaway for me was that it was a deep and penetrating lesson about the strength and power of activist movements, the whole experience a light bulb moment of the Bakunin/Kropotkin model of “mutual aid” brought to life, from out of the pages of anarcho-socialism and into the streets of devastated New York City. When there was serious crisis, we saw firsthand that it was organized people who were the first on the scene and were able to nimbly respond to the immediate matter at hand, which was to simply get into people’s hands the life-preserving necessities, such as bottled, water, baby food, canned food, batteries, clothes, blankets, etc., unencumbered from the often byzantine bureaucracy of government protocol.

I’ll have to write the whole story up some time.

So it’s a bittersweet thing whenever I pass all those flags a-waving, which is ostensibly a signal to all and sundry that "this is our home and we have great fealty to this great land of the Stars and Stripes and everything it stands for." This has got me wondering now: how many flags are flying today in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, or in Ferguson, or Baltimore? Sadly, I'd bet there are at least a few, maybe more.

The mythology, inscribed in all Americans from the moment they’re placed into the indoctrination centers otherwise known as the public school system, doesn’t die easy. Even when after your home is blown away and have no roof to gather under, nor food or running water or lights, no one from your government arrives in your neighborhood to help pick up the pieces and sort you out. Personally the more I ruminate on all that the flag has come to mean to me, from blind allegiance (“pledging” is a requirement in kindergarten), to xenophobic nationalism, to a fealty that lies in the twin engines of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream™ and co-opted by all the major sports industries - the more I loathe it completely.

Our salvation will always rest with the People, in recognition of the humanity and dignity in each other with no exceptions, and not the State, which, as long as it is beholden to Big Money for its campaigns, will be nothing more than a front for the global financial elites who render the elections a charade and don’t give a shit about either People or the State. We the People and the Flag are merely functionary pathways to endless, greed profiteering at the expense of all of us.

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Manic Street Preachers "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours"

(the single, "If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next," was put to a moving video compilation honoring the Socialist and Anarchist rebels of the Spanish Civil War. The Wiki entry gives this:

The song's theme is taken from the Spanish Civil War, and the idealism of Welsh volunteers who joined the left-wing International Brigades fighting for the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco's military rebels. The song takes its name from a Republican poster of the time, displaying a photograph of a young child killed by the Nationalists under a sky of bombers with the stark warning "If you tolerate this, your children will be next" written at the bottom.[2] Various works on the Spanish Civil War were the inspiration for this song, and certain lyrics pertain directly to these works. For example, the line "If I can shoot rabbits/then I can shoot fascists" is attributed to a remark made by a man who signed up with the Republican fighters to his brother in an interview years later. This was originally quoted in the book Miners Against Fascism by Hywel Francis. Another work George Orwell's first-hand account, "Homage to Catalonia". "I've walked Las Ramblas/but not with real intent" brings to mind the account in Orwell's book of fighting on the Ramblas, with the various factions seemingly getting nowhere, with the fighting and often a sense of camaraderie overriding the vaunted principles each side was supposed to be fighting for. Nicky Wire has also acknowledged that he was also inspired by a song by The Clash, "Spanish Bombs", which has a similar subject.[3]

"If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next"

Please see C99 member JekyllnHyde's brilliant series on the Spanish Civil War, including "Fighting Fascism: "When Courage Goes Unrewarded" (Part I) and "Fighting Fascism: "When Courage Goes Unrewarded" (Part II))

Reading/Browsing List:

"Memoirs Of A Revolutionist" Peter Kropotkin

"Lobotomy: Surviving The Ramones" by Dee Ramone, Veronica Kofman and Legs McNeil

"Heretics & Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917" Margaret C. Jones

Garlic Scape Pesto

(It's that time of year (here at least) when you can luck upon those wonderful long green, fibrous, curly-cued garlic sprouts.

Man, if you haven't ever had them get ready to have your mind blown.)

Coarsely chop the long stems and add to the food processor, along with walnuts or pine nuts, salt and pepper, drizzling olive oil all the while. Maybe take extra pulsing and a little water to get the fiber to become fine.

Add to pasta or as a spread on sandwiches.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass

shards of cinnamon bark

a few cardamom pods

a few black peppercorns

A few cloves

fresh chopped ginger