are we better than this?

headlines


Pittsburgh Cartoonist References Nazi 'Kristallnacht' In Synagogue Shooting Sketch

^ Huffington Post


Kristallnacht:  The night Nazis killed Jews and destroyed synagogues 80 years before Pittsburgh

^ Washington Post


NJ Holocaust survivor:  I worry Kristallnacht could happen again
 ^ Philly.com

__________________________________

Wikipedia:

Kristallnacht -- "Crystal Night" or Night of Broken Glass

Kristallnacht changed the nature of the Nazi persecution of Jews from economic, political, and social to physical with beatings, incarceration, and murder; the event is often referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust.  

In the words of historian Max Rein in 1988, "Kristallnacht came...and everything was changed."


While November 1938 predated the overt articulation of "the Final Solution," it foreshadowed the genocide to come.

____________________________________
____________________________________

The next song on

Mississippi John Hurt- The Best Of

is "Salty Dog Blues" -- John Hurt's velvet, intimate singing style and his confident construction of melody and rhythm on his acoustic guitar is extended to his version of this early 1900s folk song.

     [Wikipedia] - "In his Library of Congress interviews, Jelly Roll Morton recalled a three-piece string band led by Bill Johnson playing the number to great acclaim, probably before 1910."

-----------------------

     You can hit Play on The Best Of on You Tube and listen for this, it's the sixth song on there; or you can type in on You Tube "Salty Dog Blues" and get various versions of the song, including that of Mississippi John Hurt.

_____________________________________
_____________________________________

___________________________________

[Wikipedia] ----------- Eugene McCarthy was an American politician, poet, and a long-time congressman from Minnesota.  He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and the United States Senate from 1959 to 1971.

--------------------- [excerpt, Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72] ----------------------------

     Later, when his outlandish success in New Hampshire shocked Johnson 

into retirement, [in 1968] I half-expected McCarthy to quit the race himself, rather than suffer all the way to Chicago (like Castro in Cuba -- after Batista fled) . . . 

and God only knows what kind of vengeful energy is driving him this time [in 1972], but a lot of people who said he was suffering from brain bubbles when he first mentioned that he might run again in '72 are beginning to take him seriously:  not as a Democratic contender, but as an increasingly possible Fourth Party candidate with the power to put a candidate like Muskie through terrible changes between August and November.

     To Democratic chairman Larry O'Brien, the specter of a McCarthy candidacy in '72 must be something like hearing the Hound of the Baskervilles sniffing and pissing around on your porch every night.  A left-bent Fourth Party candidate with a few serious grudges on his mind could easily take enough left/radical votes away from either Muskie or Humphrey to make the Democratic nomination all but worthless to either one of them.

     Nobody seems to know what McCarthy has in mind this year, but the possibilities are ominous, and anybody who thought he was kidding got snapped around fast last week when McCarthy launched a brutish attack on Muskie within hours after the Maine Senator made his candidacy official.


     The front page of the Washington Post carried photos of both men, along with a prominent headline and McCarthy's harsh warning that he was going to hold Muskie "accountable" for his hawkish stance on the war in Vietnam prior to 1968.  McCarthy also accused Muskie of being "the most active representative of Johnson administration policy at the 1968 Convention."

     Muskie seemed genuinely shaken by this attack.  He immediately called a press conference to admit that he'd been wrong about Vietnam in the past, but that now "I've had reason to change my mind."  

His new position was an awkward thing to explain, but after admitting his "past mistakes" he said that he now favored "as close to an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam as possible."

***********

     McCarthy merely shrugged.  He had done his gig for the day, and Muskie was jolted. -----------------------

{Hunter Thompson.  Simon & Schuster.  1973}

Vietnamese silk painting

-30-