Baby steps to the revolution

And stumbles on the way

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it,” says Arundhati Roy. “To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we are being brainwashed to believe.

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

“Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Thank you, Arundhati Roy. This should be our mantra.

But we also have our bad moments when we forget where we are headed, forget what we are trying to do. I have had such moments, moments when I should have been channeling Arundhati Roy. Or channeling any one of a thousand other activists I have known who did not believe that the obligation to make change was somehow a personal obligation, an outcome on which they personally would have been judged. But we all have our bad moments, moments in which our frustration and confusion leads us to the conclusion that we, as individuals have failed. Our egos get in the way.

I recall just such a missed opportunity. At the time, I might have said, channeling Ms. Roy, something like this:

“So tell a story—any story—that shares your vision of what ought to be, of what real justice looks like, of why you resist, of who you remember, who you honor, what you hold sacred, of the community that sustains you.”

But I didn’t.

That moment, which has stuck with me, came a little more than a decade ago. I was the publisher of In These Times (ITT), a left-wing magazine based in Chicago. A few years before that I had been, with Marrianne McMullen, the co-publisher of an alternative weekly originally named the Dayton Voice, later Impact Weekly.

I was not generally a person who could be relied on to focus on a task until it was done, but some of Marrianne’s motivation and work ethic had rubbed off on me, and together, and with a cadre of dedicated staff, we had pushed the Voice more or less forward for seven years.

Our explicit mission was to select, report, edit and publish stories that treated working people, women, communities of color and the LGBTQ community as legitimate subjects, sources and audiences for the news. We did not always succeed in this mission, but as a staff we tried to remain mindful of our goal. The larger reality of the paper, editorial consistency or no, was that as an entrepreneurial effort, the Voice was permanently (and fatally) undercapitalized.

Designed to be a for-profit enterprise, we did not have donors, but investors, who were never rewarded with profits. More often, they were the targets of desperate appeals to “invest” more. But our editorial ambition consistently outran the resources available to support it. Never flush to begin with, Marrianne and I went broke trying to hold up our end of the financial bargain. By the time our son, Brendan, was born in December 1998, I had fallen into the habit of sometimes covering expenses, occasionally an entire payroll, with credit cards.

We staggered through another year with the paper, but spent part of the time looking for jobs that would pay us. Eventually, Marrianne found a position in Chicago with the Illinois State Council of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

Soon after we moved, I found a job, too. Together, and for a couple of years, Marrianne and I made more than five or six times what we had been able to pay ourselves at the Voice, had benefits, good health insurance, paid down debt, and managed, with next to no down payment, to buy ourselves a place to live.

Then I took the job with In These Times, an estimable publication on the left, but one that required a constant transfusion of funds from reliable donors, especially from its founder, James Weinstein. As it happened Weinstein was nearing the end of his life and tiring of the magazine’s inability to provide for itself. As publisher, my principle task was to correct that condition, but, though I made a few smart moves to keep the magazine going, I ended up using funds that Weinstein had intended for another use, pissed off the entire Weinstein family, and alienated several other donors along with virtually the entire board of directors.

Into the bargain, and without telling Marrianne, I used my personal credit cards to inject thousands of additional dollars into the ITT operation without creating a proper paper trail to account for what I gave. With the magazine in bad shape, the board arrived at the defensible conclusion that I had done far more harm than good and fired me with a warning that I should make no claims on the magazine to repay loans that I could not conclusively document.

Despite the two-year debacle that constituted my term as publisher at In These Times, I have to say that I learned more than just a few grim lessons while I was there. In fact, I met a long list of skilled and passionate writers and activists, and got to participate in a variety of ways in valuable discussions about defining and working for social change.

One of my more instructive experiences came in the spring of 2004 with the opportunity to meet with a journalism class at Northwestern University. The class kicked off with my overview of high-priority peace and justice issues of the time.

This included a long look at the preparations for war in Iraq, especially the accusation that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction (WMDs),” and a further look at the massive loss of Iraqi lives and destruction of civilian infrastructure that accompanied the war when it was finally launched in March of 2003. In discussing the war, I also observed that the global anti-war movement, which had been celebrated as the largest and most significant anti-war mobilization in history, had failed to stop the war, though it may have succeeded in keeping a few European countries from joining in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Other topics I covered with the class included the anemic economic “recovery” of the time and the continuing erosion of the purchasing power of the average wage, and the fact that the United States imprisoned a larger percentage of its population than any other country in the world and targeted, in particular, young black men, at a considerable cost in lives, treasure and human potential.

These problems, I observed, were linked. A country whose leadership manufactured non-existent weapons and argued that an enemy with an imaginary capacity for destruction could only be stopped by going to war, was also a country that would logically underfund public education, neglect crucial domestic investments, embrace climbing prison populations as an economic development strategy, and ignore widespread environmental damage in favor of laying waste to several countries in the Middle East.

By the time I concluded my indictment of the policies and political leadership of the country, the class of aspiring journalists was pumped, ready to do their part in the work of exposing fundamental problems with our politics. One student raised her hand and asked a broad general question along the lines of “what can we do about all this bad stuff?”

I should have been ready for the question. I had written stories and op-eds for In These Times and The Voice about the movement for social change that I thought was developing across the country and manifesting in a variety of ways. I had been part of any number of union and community organizing efforts and worked on a variety of political and issue-oriented campaigns. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, I had even run for public office. Ordinarily, I was an optimistic sort, seeing in every initiative and every new organizing effort the potential to make a significant difference, to connect to and support suddenly promising movements for social change.

Nevertheless, the question threw me off. I looked out at the classroom of 20-somethings and felt a wave of despair. For more than 35 years, I had been organizing, writing, protesting, above all, believing that together we, the people, were finally on our way. But we were nowhere.

We hadn’t stopped the war in Iraq. Hell, we hadn’t stopped the one that had begun in Afghanistan two years earlier. The rate at which Americans were being thrown into prison had been increasing for two decades. Wages had been stagnating since the 1970s. Industrial unions were collapsing. And the presidential election of 2000 had been outright stolen from Al Gore, who was nothing more than a centrist Democrat who seemed overmatched by the son of the man who, in Texas Governor Ann Richards phrase, “had been born on third base and thought he hit a triple.”

What could they do to fix things? At that moment, somehow focused only on myself and the notion that I had been on a very long losing streak, I forgot completely that I was part of an effort much larger than myself. I had no answer. I felt the weight of failure. I got nothing I told them. I wish I could tell you what to do. I’m sorry.

The air went out of the room. The instructor tried to save what was left of the class. Well, thank you, she said and shook my hand. As I walked out the door, I could hear her try and refocus. “Well, what do you think we can do?” she asked.

I don’t know how the class ended. I never talked to the instructor, again. And I’ve returned to that terrible moment over and over in the years since. What can we do about all this bad stuff?

Oddly, I do have an answer to that question. I’ve always had an answer, even if there are also times when the question catches me standing there, looking like a deer in the headlights.

The first part of the answer is that the changes we want to make are big changes. They happen when people organize and don’t give up. They happen when people pursue justice, bit by bit, with and for their own communities. The big changes depend on the little things that each of us do. They happen because we commit to be part of something larger than ourselves. They happen when we build something that will outlast our own efforts. That will endure and continue the work when we have nothing left to give.

Individually, we don’t leave much of a mark. Our own footprints will get washed away. But we should join hands and join up and build something larger than ourselves, something that will leave a mark. Work with groups and organizations that will multiply our aspirations and leverage our energy. Support groups that will move ahead, even when we are feeling a bit feeble and very alone.

What would I tell those young journalists now? I’d say, excuse my moment of brain freeze. I’d say, reach out. Find allies. Build networks. I’d tell them I have my own list of organizations that I try to help, that I support with contributions, whose stories and positions I try to amplify, groups that don’t falter, that have an institutional existence that helps to aggregate the individual energy that each of us can add to their work, that will persist when we are tired, that will move ahead even we are not there.

If they were to ask what groups are on my list, I would say my list includes the Equal Justice Initiative, Planned Parenthood, Jobs withJustice, The Center for Economic and Policy Research, Jewish Voices for Peace, the North Carolina NAACP, and the group with which I currently volunteer, Teaching for Change. But I would add that the possibilities are endless. At the time, I would also have mentioned In These Times, of course, and maybe it should be on my list today. It has a decent on-line following, still reports important stories, and offers a perspective that is reliably at odds with the mainstream media.

Maybe my list should also include some more self-consciously revolutionary groups, as well—they are certainly out there—but I have this feeling that not only will the revolution not be televised, we won’t really know it’s upon us until it’s actually the new world we are living in. In other words, I don’t believe that there are any giant steps we can take to change the world. It’s all baby steps, a little bit at a time. It’s two steps forward, one step back, at best, and sadly, from time to time it’s two steps back, or even three. But we can make that work. We have to make that work. We build something, something small to carry on after our energy runs out. We play a long game and the moral arc of the universe will bend our way.

And, I would say, you journalists. You tell the stories that need to be told, that will help us make the choices we need to make about peace and justice and sustainability.

Go find the truth and tell it.

Dirty Dealings

A story of CIA complicity in a drug scourge that destroyed neighborhoods

I wrote this story for Impact Weekly--which I prefer to remember as the Dayton Voice, its original name--in 1999. It followed on a series of stories by Gary Webb that originally ran in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the title "Dark Alliance" (later a book by the same name).

I thought Webb's reports ought to have won journalism prizes, but they were greeted with scorn by his colleagues in the mainstream media, and official cover up. Now, a new film about the stories, "Kill the Messenger," is in first-run theaters around the country. Though Webb and his work are still dissed by some journalists who should know better, his core allegations and his investigative effort stand up well to any fair assessment.

We founded the Dayton Voice in 1993 precisely because we believed that mainstream media ignored or misreported stories like this with devastating effect on the people and politics of the United States. We tried to follow paths blazed by journalists like Gary Webb and scholars like Manning Marable and activists like Harvey Milk and writers like Toni Morrison because we believed that was the true mission of responsible journalism. The story below is the longest of three pieces I wrote for the Voice about "Dark Alliance." I loved doing it and believe that the story remains relevant today. 

Impact Weekly,

April 29—May 5, 1999

by Jeff Epton

In 1985, Sgt. David Neil was assigned to duty as a police shift commander at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Because Homeland was a point of entry for flights originating in foreign countries, the Air Force police had the responsibility for enforcing customs regulations, including searches of individuals and cargo. But Neil, now living in Dayton after 19 years in the service, sometimes ran into surprising obstacles that prevented him from doing his job.

In one incident, in the spring of 1986, Neil and another officer using a drug dog approached a private plane that had landed at the base without proper notification. From a distance, Neil says, they could see people unloading cargo. As the neared the plane, the dog “alerted,” indicating that there were drugs present. But before they could take any further investigatory action, Air Force officers on the scene told Neil to leave.

“There were a couple of lieutenant colonels out there,” Neil says . “Technically they out-ranked me, but they didn’t have jurisdiction. I was a police officer engaged in the performance of his duties.” But when Neil indicated his intention to proceed, he found himself confronted by the base commander who did have the authority to tell him to stop and did so. “The wing commander came out and said ‘you haven’t seen anything, you don’t know anything, leave it alone,’” says Neil.

That was the only time that base police got a drug dog close enough to a mysterious flight to get an alert, he says, but it wasn’t the only time they were unable to enforce customs regulations. Beginning early in 1986 and continuing at least into the next year, at least 20 private planes came to Homestead that he and his crew were unable to inspect.

“These aircraft wouldn’t do radio notifications on final approach and we weren’t hearing from the control tower. Some of the planes would touch down and leave before we could get there,” Neil says. “The drug dog incident was in May or June of 1986. About a month later, we got an order from the chief not to inspect executive fleet aircraft [U.S. government planes] or civilian aircraft with drug dogs.”

Neil was all set to tell that story and others at a Federal Court hearing last month. At the hearing, local attorney John Paul Rion, arguing that his client, Charles Goff Jr., should get a downward departure from federal sentencing guidelines, told the court that the drug-dealing of Nicaraguan Contras and the support they received from the CIA and other U.S. agencies had resulted in the establishment of huge drug trafficking operations in the 1980s. The existence of these enterprises, Rion argued, was a major factor in the crack “epidemic” of that time and should be a mitigating factor in the sentencing of all those convicted in federal court of crack-related violations. In support of his argument, Rion wanted to bring in Neil and journalists Gary Webb and Martha Honey to testify.

But neither Rion nor his client got a long day in court on the argument. Judge Walter Rice decided not to hear from witnesses, ruling that the CIA complicity that Rion proposed to prove did not apply exclusively to Goff’s case and could not be considered as a basis for a departure from sentencing guidelines. Rice’s decision delayed, at least temporarily, the opportunity for Neil to put on an official record the stories whose implications trouble him deeply more than a decade later.

“I don’t think Air Force guys on the scene knew these were drug flights,” Neil says. “But somebody in D.C. made a deal with the devil and ordered us away. The result was that we had drugs coming through that created huge problems,” he adds as he ticks off a list of issues he connects to the crack cocaine explosion. “We’ve almost destroyed this country, for god’s sake—500,000 in prison, widespread violence, people selling their babies. If you destroy your country, it used to be called treason.”

Among those most disappointed by the missed opportunity to hear Neil was Webb, who wrote a detailed account of the Contra-CIA connection to Freeway Rick Ross, for a time reputed to be the largest cocaine dealer in South Central Los Angeles. In a three-part series published in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, Webb focused on connections between the CIA, Nicaraguan Contras and cocaine trafficking in South Central L.A. Webb’s charges and his supporting evidence came under attack from mainstream media, but the story he told was repeated over and over, especially among African Americans using the internet and talk radio to share the details.

For Webb, who left his job at the Mercury News after his editors backed away from the story, testifying at the sentencing hearing was a duty. But getting a chance to hear Neil tell his story would have been almost a pleasure, an opportunity to listen to one more eyewitness step forward to confirm official involvement in drug trafficking. Neil’s account would have been one more corroboration of official wrongdoing and one more piece of evidence that the story isn’t going to go away, despite CIA denials and despite media attacks on the story.

Weighted scales

Neil’s take on the effects of the crack epidemic may include elements of hyperbole—after all, some drug experts say that crack never became the drug of choice everywhere in the country—but his assertion that crack fueled an explosion in the prison population is right on target. From the beginning to the end of the 1980s, the number of people in prisons and jails in the United States doubled, and before the end of this decade the prison population will have doubled again, giving the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

While the CIA was giving an intentional assist to drug traffickers who would bring cocaine into this country at unprecedented rates, news operations that had finally discovered crack were busy painting a picture of vicious black criminals—feeding the hysteria that would support Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs and fuel the prison population boom.

And the fastest growing segment of that population was, and is, young African Americans doing crack-related time based on the kinds of sentencing guidelines that attorney Rion sought to challenge. A key feature of the federal guidelines is a formula that punishes a crack cocaine conviction (most often a black defendant) at 100 times the rate of a powder cocaine conviction (most often a white defendant).

“The scales of justice became so lopsided that a powder dealer had to sell $50,000 worth of cocaine to get the same five-year mandatory sentence as someone who sold $750 worth of crack. (As if crack could be made without powder cocaine),” wrote Webb in Dark Alliance, a book-length follow-up to his original story.

Disparities in sentencing is one of the great injustices of the drug war. But the drug trade that created the basis for that war was aided and abetted by CIA and other federal employees. That they have so far escaped prosecution for the damage they did is another of the drug war’s great injustices. And though it is true that crack was not the primary drug scourge in every urban area, it did widespread damage spreading across the country from L.A. and other prime distribution points like Miami and Detroit.

Crack arrived in Dayton in the mid-‘80s, getting here through a variety of routes. Ross, the dealer from South Central, also established a significant crack enterprise in Cincinnati. From there, according to court documents, he funneled cocaine out to other Midwestern cities, Dayton included. According to one U.S. attorney, Ross’ Cincinnati activities may have grossed as much as $30,000 a day. And a DEA informant placed Ross in Dayton on April 26 and 27, 1987 selling more than 7 kilograms of cocaine, a quantity worth between $200,000 and $300,000.

There were other possible drug routes to Dayton. In 1988, an FBI agent based in the Dayton office claimed that a million dollar drug bust at the Residence Inn near I-70 and I-75 was connected to an effort by “the Crips,” an L.A. street gang, to take over the cocaine trade in Dayton. If so, the gang would have been working the trail blazed by Ross, the one that originated with a Contra source.

Also in 1988, a shootout on the Central State University campus signaled the presence of other drug trafficking operations. The incident involved rival gangs, one of them called Pony Down, actually composed of elements of a larger Detroit-based gang of the same name. Pony Down and another Detroit gang, Young Boys Incorporated, may have been at the end of another Contra-connected pipeline, one supplied by pilot Michael Palmer, who was indicted in Detroit in the mid-80s on drug-trafficking charges.

Palmer also worked as a pilot during the same period for the State Department’s Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office. And, though the connection has yet to be made by investigators, a drug ring bringing cocaine to Dayton in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had sources in Florida and Louisiana, and possible connections to Michael Palmer and Barry Seal, the latter an associate of Columbian drug cartels, who oversaw some drug importations through Central America. Seal was shot to death the night after testifying before a grand jury in New Orleans, perhaps burying his connections forever.

Urban atom bomb

But whatever route crack travelled to get to Dayton, it arrived with destructive impact. Dayton City Commissioner Dean Lovelace, who grew up on the west side and lives there still, was a witness to drug dealing and related violence in his neighborhood. Lovelace and his family have hung in through the changes that have wounded his community—the flight of the black middle class, the loss of neighborhood jobs and factory jobs, highways rammed right through residential areas, and the pervasive sale and use of drugs—and he ranks the effect of crack as equal to or greater than all the rest.

“Crack devastated—let me underline that—devastated our inner city neighborhoods, especially African American neighborhoods. Once it hit the streets, it was like ‘whomp!’ an urban atom bomb.” Lovelace says. “Crack addicts may be more aggressive than heroin addicts, but the real violence associated with crack comes from dealers fighting for turf. And whether it’s Ricky Ross or the CIA, crack wrecked lives at both ends of the pipeline. You got people in South America saying ‘I’ll grow this stuff here because my life would be better,’ and folks here that say, ‘I’ll sell this stuff because my life would be better,’ but the consequences are death at both ends,” Lovelace concludes.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, who represents South Central in congress, makes a similar point about violence associated with the crack trade. Sophisticated automatic weaponry was showing up on the streets of South Central in the early ‘80s, she said. “They were not simply handguns, they were Uzis and AK-47s, sophisticated weapons brought in by the same CIA operatives who were selling the cocaine because they had to enforce bringing the profits back.”

After Webb’s series briefly grabbed headlines and provoked a media counterattack, Waters began her own investigation. After all, she says, her own constituents were asking “where are all the drugs coming from?” After visits to Central America and discussions with many of the individuals identified by Webb, including Ricky Ross, Waters concluded “that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles and throughout the U.S.—and they let the dealing go on.”

With some audiences, the thesis that drugs entered the black community with official support comes as no surprise. “The first major jump in narcotics addiction in black neighborhoods followed the urban rebellions of the 1960s,” wrote Earl Ofari Hutchinson in his 1990 book, The Mugging of Black America. “The ease of entry and the widespread availability of heroin gave rise to the first alarms by blacks that drugs were being used to control discontent and pacify the community.” And though Hutchinson’s reference is to heroin, not to cocaine, a CIA connection to the heroin trade has also been documented repeatedly, most notably since the Vietnam War.

One of the earliest accounts of CIA involvement in drug trafficking was developed by Alan McCoy in his book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. McCoy’s story has been corroborated over and over again by others. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny did it in two books, Endless Enemies and The Crimes of Patriots. And in his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors, author Dan Baum blasted the war on drugs.

In a book focused primarily on “expensive, ineffective, delusional and destructive” anti-drug programs and policies, Baum takes on the CIA in a short aside. The “CIA’s Air America [helped fund] the secret war in Laos by flying the dopelord’s smack…a decade later the CIA would get caught doing the same thing, this time subverting Congress’s specific prohibition against funding the Nicaraguan Contras by making unholy and lucrative deals with cocaine dealers.”

Media backlash

Since its 1996 publication, Webb’s story has been the target of deeply critical attacks by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and other influential media. Even the Dayton Daily News has joined the braying pack from time to time—most recently when Webb came to town to testify in support of Rion’s legal action. Though the News passed on the opportunity to interview Webb, it took a journalistic moment to note that his accusations had been denied by the CIA and repudiated by his own editor at the Mercury News. That gratuitous slam at Webb omitted mention of editor Jerry Ceppos’ equally important assertion that the central claims of “Dark Alliance” had not been factually challenged by any source.

To succeed, the disinformation campaign that overtook the Dark Alliance story needed an audience that could be persuaded that Gary Webb was an isolated nut travelling a winding road to nowhere that had been blazed by conspiracy crackpots before him. And, having consistently ignored, and even suppressed, previous reports of the CIA’s criminal history, mainstream media was perfectly positioned to launch its smear campaign against Webb and his story.

But if Webb is a nut, so, too, is Rep. Waters. And so is U.S. Senator John Kerry, whose subcommittee tried and succeeded, at least partially, to document the misdeeds of CIA agents and their Contra assets in Central America. And so are authors Hutchinson, McCoy, Kwitny and Baum. And so is David Neil, the military policy officer once stationed at Homestead Air Force base. And so is ex-DEA agent Celerino Castillo, who has told his own story of Contra drug trafficking to Webb, Waters and others, including testimony before a congressional committee.

Castillo even posted a statement on a web page maintained by ex-California narcotics officer, Michael Rupert. On the page, Castillo has listed numerous names and dates, all portions of reports of drug trafficking by the Contras and of CIA support for those activities that he submitted to his own superiors. “In 1991, before I departed the DEA, I met with FBI agent Mike Foster, investigator for the Office of the Independent Counsel on Iran-Contra,” wrote Castillo, “where I gave him detailed information of the Contras’ involvement in drugs.”

Despite the accumulated evidence, corporate media may be among the last U.S. institutions (along with the CIA, itself, and the courts) to admit what others know—that the CIA did it. But the question for everyone else is what to do next. In 1997, Lovelace, along with fellow commissioners Tony Capizzi and Bootsie Neal, wrote Rep. Tony Hall expressing concern about the allegations against the CIA. Hall responded with a letter of his own.

“This matter will be fully investigated. The CIA’s inspector general has launched an internal investigation, “ Hall wrote. Since that time, the CIA has completed that investigation and issued a report with a summary that claims “no information has been found…” to link the CIA to drug trafficking or drug traffickers.

But the summary’s conclusions are not supported by the hundreds of pages of materials that are included in the report. And, in March 1998, CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz appeared before a congressional committee and confessed that the CIA had maintained relationships with Contras and others who were allegedly involved in drug trafficking and, in an admission that Waters calls “the smoking gun,” admitted that CIA Director William Casey had negotiated an agreement with the Justice Department that would allow CIA agents to suppress information about drug trafficking by individuals with whom they had contact.

Though Congress has taken no further action and Hall has had no further contact with the city commission about the matter, the CIA’s report details, and Hitz’s admission, have provided a basis for legal action such as Rion’s. In California, three attorneys have filed a class action suit against the agency, the Department of Jutice (DOJ), and numerous government and former government officials . The suit alleges that inner-city residents of Los Angeles, Compton and other California cities “experienced particular economic, physical and/or emotional injuries arising from the neighborhoods hardest hit by the crack cocaine epidemic, such as: addiction tocrack cocaine, death or absence of loved ones due to drug-related crime, reduction of income, and increase in the number of defendants.” The suit also alleges that the communities as a whole suffered from a related “lack of safety, overburdened social services, loss of local businesses and damage to the tax base.”

The suit asks for “a declaration that the secret CIA/DOJ agreement and the consequent policy and practice of not reporting drug crimes were illegal.” It also asks for “an order requiring the CIA to report to the DOJ all possible drug crimes by all persons…” and “money to rebuild the community and fund drug treatment.”

Now, that seems like a good start. It may not be justice, but should any affected community settle for less?

Storm's coming,

but not yet.

Soon enough, though. The wind's rising and the sky's getting quite dark.

Just a bit ago, I was walking up the hill on 17th, getting to Jackson. To my right, there was a cop on a motorcycle, cruising slowly up to a stop sign. The vibe I got was pretty relaxed. Still, a cop.

Since the time I first sat in front of a TV watching thugs with guns and badges beat civil rights marchers, and ever since I got caught up on the losing side in a police riot in Chicago in 1968, and all the times since that I got myself thrown to the ground and handcuffed, when I see a cop my first response is to assess possible risks.

But at the Dayton Voice in the 1990s, I had a very different, and somewhat sustained, experience of a cop who was always getting himself in trouble with other cops, particularly chain of command-type trouble--Lt. David Sherrer. Constantly in conflict with his superiors during his career with the Dayton police department, Sherrer came to the Voice in '97 or '98 with a story about how the department was persecuting him for criticizing other cops who didn't follow procedure, and brutalizing people on the street. Sherrer was also detailed in his criticisms of the way the department dealt with African-American officers in general.

Early in our collaboration, I told Sherrer that I didn't trust police very much and had my doubts about him. Suck it up, he responded. After all, he observed, he was in a postion where he had to trust a white newspaper publisher.

David was pretty much always angry. There didn't seem to be much happiness in his life. He's gone now; here's his obituary, which tells quite a lot about his difficulties with his employer and the troubles in his life generally.

So, there was the cop on the bike. He looked around at the stop sign and rolled through. He looked at me and nodded. I waved a hand and laughed. He was still a cop, and he looked  pleased to be one, but it didn't look like he was so full of the power of his position. He just looked like he felt pretty good on a warm day, looked as though something like joy pulsed through him. A feeling that David Sherer didn't have very often.

All of that is probably beside the point that needs to be made, which is this: Cops are the shock troops for maintaining the status quo in communities where the status quo is generally a painful thing. That's not going to change, not until the status quo stops hurting so much, stops being a matter of unemployment and dim prospects, a matter of exclusion from social benefits, a matter of brutal policing and false arrests and wrongful convictions. David Sherrer knew this, I think, and in his small way waged a difficult fight to change it. Sherrer died too young and the struggle that laid heavy on his mind and heart was one of the reasons for it.

Robert McNamara and the Dayton Daily News

A little j'accuse from the Dayton Voice

So, I'm finally taking the time to really think about the Dayton Voice--what the experience was like for me, what it was like for others, what we tried to accomplish, how much of Dayton life it chronicled, the Voice in retrospect, and other passing thoughts. Of course, to interrogate only my own self is to make the story of the Voice about me, which it most certainly was not. To get it right, I would actually have to report, talk to others who were with the Voice and of the Voice and for the Voice, readers and writers and photographers and carriers and sales staff and fellow travelers.

And I would have to set aside time and effort to write about Marrianne McMullen and what she did as co-publisher, editor and writer. She reported some of the papers most important stories, like the Dayton Public Schools' reliance on suspension and expulsion, like what prostitution felt like to the women who had fallen into it, like what Jenny Wilcox, wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, experienced during and after her release, like how the Voice was Marrianne's inspiration.

But as important as it is to make sure that my story of the Voice is not some hagiographic fantasy of myself, I'm going to end this post with a pretty complete transcription of a piece I wrote for the April 20, 1996 issue of the paper about Vietnam, Kennedy-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and U.S. media at the time. In that piece, McNamara didn't lie alone," I was, per usual, much more opinion writer than reporter. And so it goes:

"Last week, the Dayton Daily News joined others in the mainstream media in criticizing former Secretary of Defense robert McNamara for hiding the truth about Vietnam. A News editorial chided McNamara for his "late, awfully late" revelations about the mistakes and failures of the devastating war against Vietnam.

"As the News would have it, the prolonged agony of the war was the responsibility of those who governed at the time and especially of an elite few, McNamara included. Americans wanted to trust their government, but the "...leadership at the top carries...the guilt of having hidden the truth from the American people," said the editorial.

"But DDN misses the point--as it must--that it took an enormous collaborative effort to hide the "truth." And the mainstream media was crucial to that collaboration, the News included.

"The media cooperated in a White House strategy of burying inconvenient facts, and omitted critical perspectives in covering the war. Such editorial policy facilitated the physical devastation of Vietnam, submerged the deepening impoverishment of parts of the United States and, ultimately undermined faith not only in American government, but in the media as well.

"After all, the truth about the war was known fairly early. In 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution that authorized President Johnson "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to oppose the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. But in March 1968, I. F. Stone reported in the New York Review that the alleged North Vietnamese attack in international waters on U.S. ships--the incident that the Johnson administration used to obtain passage of the declaration--actually had been a violation of North Vietnamese coastal waters and an attack provoked by the actions of the U.S. Navy. The News ought to check its own file library to see when, if ever, the paper reported that the Congressional quasi-declaration of war had been passed in response to an invented incident.

"Anti-war organizing [at the time] was based on a variety of different considerations. The United States, activists believed, had no legitimate national interest at stake in Vietnam and no reason to fight to maintain client regimes in the old outposts of French colonialism. Of course, rich ore and oil deposits in Southeast Asia and Indonesia were at stake, but access to these resources was not an admitted goal of U.S. war policy.

"Instead, we were fighting to stop a communist takeover and protect the "free world," even though a Vietnamese election in 1956 and agreed to by Ho Chi Minh was stopped by the Eisenhower administration. The News can check to see when it reported that Ngo Dinh Diem was installed with the support of the United States in preference to a freely elected Communist government."

"The national news media, and local outposts like the News, were delighted with the spectacle of protest, which they covered, and uninterested in the substance of these protests. The News, which helped to perpetuate the myth that opposition to the war tied the hands of the U.S. military, ought to go back and check its files to see when, if ever, it reported that more tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were dropped on Europe and Japan during all of World War II.

"Thought the media was comfortable with the studied and persistent omission of the facts about the air bombardment of Vietnam, they delighted in reporting about alleged abuses of returning Vietnam vets by war protestors. The News might consider how many times it covered abuses of vets compared to the far more frequent physical assaults on protestors. Further, compare that to coverage of the estimated 200 or more massacres of Vietnamese villagers by American ground forces. These events were common knowledge among Vietnam vets and war protestors. They were "truths" that Washington elites and a cooperative press ignored.

"The cost of the military build-up resulted in severely underfunding anti-poverty programs. That is one reason why Dr. Martin Luther King spoke out against the war. The News might check its files to see how ofteh the paper reported on Dr. king's opposition to the war.

"Yes, it is terrible that Robert McNamara waited so long to confess. After all, 60,000 Americans and 400,000 Vietnamese died in the war. But mainstream dailies told precious little truth about the war and the Dayton Daily News' editorial maintains that tradition. "Awfully late" is too soon to expect an apology from the News."

"McNamara didn't lie alone," Dayton Voice, April 20, 1995.

Between paradise and fear...

...and further on.

I don't love all of "The Creation Story" by Joy Harjo, but I really do love these three stanzas:

"It's not easy to say this
or anything when my entrails
dangle between paradise
and fear.

"I am ashamed
I never had the words
to carry a friend from her death
to the stars
correctly.

"Or the words to keep
my people safe
from drought
or gunshot."

Like Harjo, I've discovered I didn't (and don't and won't) "have the words" countless times, including the words to carry a friend to the stars, but here Harjo finds the words to name the shortfall. And when she rues her inability to keep her "people safe from drought or gunshot," she has named both herself and her people. Good words.

In his poem "Three Women," Donald Hall has come into possession of a few words that do get the job done. They will not carry him or anyone else to the stars, but they work for capturing the richness of some experiences and the loss that sometimes follows. In fact, they work so well that Hall uses the same words exactly in three consecutive stanzas, making up the whole of his poem:

"When you like a woman,
you talk and talk.
One night you kiss.
Another night you fuck.
You're both content,
maybe more than content.
Then she goes away."

The poem is included in Hall's last book of poetry, The Back Chamber, described on the book jacket as "full of the life-affirming energy" of the poet. But I see it full of a rich, inescapable melancholy.

Kim-An Lieberman won a poetry prize from the Dayton Voice in 1995 or '96 (I suppose I could look it up, sort through the bound copies of the paper we have in our possession, but one thing at a time here). A decade later, her book, Breaking the Map, was published and she sent an autographed copy to Marrianne and I. Her book ended up being part of the motivation for publishing Wild, Once and Captured, a book of my own poetry. Sampling Kim-An's poetry I come to "Grandmother Song," and am struck by the fact that she has found a way to lift her grandmother to the stars.

"...Underneath is a ruby of blood.
The needles and tubes are webbed like milliner's lace.
Last the jade necklace, leaking the milk of her heart."

Perhaps, the words come to Lieberman because she so clearly hears and sees and feels her grandmother at the end of her life.

"...She gestures
faintly upward from the bed; I bring my ear
to the rasp of her laboring breath. I watch her draw
pin by pin from the loose chignon
...I roll the soiled gown..."

Hunting more details, I found an interview with Kim-An where she observes that "journalism and poetry, in particular, both share a language of ear-catching 'sound bites' as well as an urge to make a permanent record of fleeting events and observations." This seems an apt description of how Ernesto Cardenal goes about writing a poetry that finds the words to make permanent a record of "fleeting events." His book, Zero Hour, is a collection of what Cardenal calls "documentary poems."

"In Mr. Spencer's gold mines they X-ray
each miner twice a year
to see if he shows symptoms of TB.
If there's a shadow, he's paid off
at once. In due course he spits blood, and tries
to claim: ...
... and so he dies on a Managua sidewalk."

Cardenal, is a poet and a Catholic priest and the Nicaraguan Minister of Culture after the overthrow of Somoza. His poetry is the work of a man who hears music in his head, but feels the urgent need to change the acoustics of the world around him so that others may hear their own music. Cardenal makes poetry relevant as Lawrence Ferlinghetti insisted it should be when he wrote:

“I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs. Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?”

And Cardenal is one of the poets I was thinking about when I wrote "Wild Dogs of Poets:" 

The wild dogs of poets

speak sharps and blunts,

wish the streets

to the back alleys

of emerald cities;

some singing separately

and, alive for now,

glow in the dusky, dreaming sky.

Some scratch for pennies

wherever there are no such

generosities. Some kill time

as though they are flush,

And some few,

the chosen,

die on the barricades,

hopeful and ready.

The Dayton Voice, Again

David Esrati and Chuck Porter responded to a previous post: The Dayton Voice and A.J. Wagner. I could have used the comment section of that post to follow up, but there is so very much to say it seemed better to use a whole new post to further explore the life and times of the Dayton Voice.

The first message excerpted below is from David, a Dayton-area iconoclast of the first rank, a blogger on local political issues, and a candidate for Dayton City Commission in the upcoming election. (Read the full text in the comment section at the end of The Dayton Voice and A.J. Wagner):

Letter from David Esrati

"Jeff," David writes,

"Although I think AJ is a much better candidate than the democratic party endorsed Nan Whaley, I think of AJ as a career politicians, with a boatload of baggage."

The truth, David, is we all travel with "boatload[s] of baggage. It's the human condition. Ad hominem attacks don't accomplish much, except to muddy the water.

"[Incumbent Mayor] Leitzell is an independent, who challenged all candidates to run for less than $10K. Nan and AJ have each raised in excess of $60K already- and are going to spend much more.

"I'd have to think you'd respect that."

Well, I suppose I can respect that, and it might make Leitzell's defeat more noble when it happens. But it will still be a defeat.

"Also- the part you leave out about AJ is that he's still a political animal. He quit his last elected position as Judge, so his friend Steve Dankof could get nominated by Strickland before he left office. When Dankof wouldn't keep AJ's friends and family on the patronage payroll- AJ wanted to "un-resign." They worked a backroom deal so AJ's pal could keep her job. This is what we need to put a stop to in Dayton."

I actually omitted a lot about A.J.--mostly because I wasn't making any attempt to be comprehensive. But here's the thing, David--when A.J. published a few official county notices in the Voice, he was being a good steward of public funds and opposing policy that mandated purchasing from the Dayton Daily News at monopoly prices. That's the sort of frugal government expenditure you believe in and support, yes?

As for A.J.'s on-again, off-again retirement, why wouldn't I simply conclude that A.J. was trying to protect a competent colleague and public employee? Indeed, it seems awkward and there might be more to the story, but your implication that it was a corrupt ("back room") move ought to be supported by more rigorous journalism.

"Just because AJ put some cash in your pockets- doesn't make him a good guy, or a good choice for Mayor.

"David Esrati"

Actually, David, none of the money the county paid for those public announcements made it all the way to my pockets. In the heat of unpaid bills, it all evaporated before it hit the ground.

Who knows, maybe it paid for a press run that included an article about you--one in which we likely treated you with more respect than you ever got from the Dayton Daily News.

The next message, also excerpted, is from Chuck Porter, who worked for the Voice for several years as paper carrier, bookkeeper and circulation manager. When he finally left Dayton, Chuck and his family moved to Nebraska to manage an organic farm. Chuck's still out there, making his committed, diligent and trying-to-be-green way.

Letter from Chuck Porter

"Jeff," Chuck writes,

"I have very limited memory of AJ Wagner, and, so, won't comment about his character or fitness for leadership. But, I couldn't let a read of your post go by without thanking you (and I sincerely mean this) for letting me see and experience a way in which speaking truth to power and embracing diversity could be guiding principles for a business. The Voice was much more (and, I know, sometimes much less) than a business.

Well, our mission--to treat working people, women, people of color and the LGBT community as legitimate readers, sources and audiences for the news was a very good thing, but I'm not sure about the guiding-principles-for-a-business thing. Regardless, it seemed the right thing to do.

"I look fondly back on my years as a staff member, and I proudly remember that we paid delivery drivers $8/hr -even in the mid-to-late 90's- because we knew they were people of the utmost importance to our mission. I was proud and happy to be one of those drivers, and I was even more delighted to remain on staff in other roles, even after your departure.

"It is my hope that you and Marrianne look at those years in Dayton as important and formative, not just for you, but for a city that needed a Voice."

Thanks, Chuck for the "atta-boy."  Marrianne and I hope that the Voice told stories that were relevant and unique, but what we know is that being part of the Voice and working with everybody there and developing real relationships with readers and activists was singularly enriching. No other work experience in my lifetime has taught me more or been more rewarding. We had the privilege to be part of something much bigger than ourselves.

"...I do believe countless people were changed -if even in a small way- by picking up The Dayton Voice off the rack somewhere in the Miami Valley. Awareness was given where it hadn't been before...regarding racial/sexual/gender inequality, ecological/financial negligence, and political/media shenanigans, eyes that were closed were pried open with the possibilities for local performance and visual art.

"I came into that mix of people because you invited me.

"Chuck Porter"

Whatever we accomplished we did it together, and you were part of the mix because you recognized what the Voice was trying to do and made yourself part of that effort. Too bad we couldn't make it last, but like you say, the Voice is still there, part of us.

The Dayton Voice and A.J. Wagner

Allies in the good fight

A.J. Wagner is the only county auditor I've ever known, or heard of, who managed to inject his social justice values into the business of managing public funds. Years ago, when Marrianne and I ran the Dayton Voice, A.J. made the decision that Montgomery County, Ohio was paying far too much to run legal notices in the Dayton Daily News (DDN). He reasoned that the requirement that certain official notices be published throughout the county in general circulation publications could be met by placing the notices in a combination of small newspapers that, in the aggregate, covered the county.

In doing so, A.J. argued, the cost of publication would be greatly reduced. And, though A.J. got sued by DDN, he eventually got the News to sign a five-year contract for publication of all notices at two-thirds the rate the paper had been charging. In the process of reaching the agreement, the county ran a couple of multi-page listings of tax-delinquent properties in the Voice at a rock-bottom price that was, nevertheless, manna from heaven for our paper.

Of course, A.J. would argue that one cannot manage public funds responsibly without having strong social justice values, but DDN was a powerful entity at the time, one that most politicians in its circulation area wouldn't have considered offending. No matter, this is my blog and I've got a different bone to pick with A.J.

In the years since he served as Montgomery County auditor, he has been a Common Pleas judge and, more recently, a blogger on legal issues for the Dayton City Paper, a direct descendant of the Voice. Wearing his blogger hat, A.J. wrote a column about the decision we made at the Voice to change our name.

It was a good post. I just disagreed with parts of it, so I e-mailed A.J. to express my disagreement with some important parts of his column, "A rose by any other name."
Here's my message:

"Hey, A.J.,

It's been awhile since you were Montgomery County Auditor and Marrianne and I were Dayton residents. I don't know if the '90s count as the good, old days in Dayton, but the memories work for me. You're still my all-time favorite county auditor, anywhere.

I have a blog of my own now--inandoutwithjeff.blogspot.com--and on the way to mentioning the Dayton Voice in a post, I googled the paper to see how it presented on the web.

Pretty weak, I'd say, but I did come across a mention of the Voice on your Dayton City Paper blog and decided I wanted to object to your description of how we came to change the paper's name from the Dayton Voice to Impact Weekly.

No question that it was a lamentable decision. The name Dayton Voice was almost iconic regionally, while Impact Weekly was an awkward handle that had none of the same grit.

Your column looked at some legal issues related to trademarks, noting in particular the time when the Village Voice asked us to stop the use of a name to which they claimed to have exclusive rights.

You wrote: "The courts will uphold exclusive use of a trademark name if another business uses it in a like or similar manner that 'is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive.' The Dayton Voice was prepared to argue that no one would confuse a small weekly entertainment paper in Ohio with the New York weekly that was high on production values, big on investigative reporting, larger in size and catering to a totally different market. But alas, David could not find the needed rock to slay Goliath. The Dayton Voice, short on cash and, thus, lawyer power, became philosophical and decided the name change might be good. They settled with the Village Voice and became Impact Weekly." 

Later, referring to the Cape Cod Voice, which did not change its name, you wrote, "I wish there were a legal case that set forth the law on all this, but the Village Voice never took these cases to court. They scared off the Dayton Voice and others with letters from lawyers. Cape Cod Voice refused to back down to the letters and that is where it ended."

But, A. J., they didn't scare us off, at all. We printed the letter from their lawyer and printed one of our own. Our letter treated the Village Voice with deliberate disrespect and asserted that our decision to name our paper the Voice was out of respect for Michael Moore's Flint Voice, with no thought, at all, about any other paper, New York-based or otherwise.

We prayed to be taken to court. It would have been a PR coup for us that might even have had a positive effect on the business side of our operation. But we couldn’t even pay our printer at the time, a more immediate concern to be sure.

Sometime after Thanksgiving I got a call from the publisher of the Village Voice who actually expressed admiration for our response and offered to pay us to resolve the matter in their favor.

They paid us an amount big enough to pay our printer (for about 8 more issues, if I recall correctly). Our public position was that we needed to avoid a court fight and that there was something to be gained by changing our name to Impact Weekly. We stopped calling the paper by the name it deserved and got a few pieces of silver. Call us sellouts, if you like, but don't call us chicken.

And don't call us merely "a small weekly entertainment paper," either. Had we been an entertainment weekly, we might have been able to pay the printer regularly, but our desire to make an editorial difference pushed our costs higher than we could manage.  

The Village Voice had a much higher percentage of its pages in personal ads, and in tobacco and liquor advertising. We wouldn't carry any personal ads that objectified women or bordered on sex trade advertising. Believing that tobacco companies were racketeers who deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the nature of their product, we wouldn't take tobacco advertising, either.

Fully one-third of our paper each week was editorial copy, covering politics and community issues (including covering local bands as grassroots art-generators). No other alternative weekly at the time committed so much space to editorial. And our mission was always explicit:

To treat working people, communities of color, women and the LGBT community as subjects, audience and sources for the news.

As I said, we would have loved for the Village Voice to take us to court. After all, we were totally judgement proof. And we would have argued, on our own behalf, not that they were "high on production values, big on investigative reporting, larger in size and catering to a totally different market," but that they were a grasping, avaricious, corporate entity who were not in our league.

Like you, I wish we had gotten the chance. But we gave that chance up in favor of taking their money and paying our printer.

It was probably a bad decision at the time. I never got to apologize to readers or to staff for it. And I'm sure not proud of it. I loved the Dayton Voice."

That's the message I sent to A.J. But I'd like to add a postscript.

The truth is A.J. loved the Voice, too. And, even after he could no longer use public funds to publish legal notices in the paper, he always made a good subject, audience and source for the news. He was always a supporter of the good fight and always engaged with great zest. Now, A.J. is running for mayor of Dayton, a city desperately in need of a leader who will take on the difficult challenges with a smile. You go, A.J., the Dayton Voice (or one of its tattered remnants, anyhow) endorses you.

Letters from the Earth

(Actually not a reference to climate change, however much I may have been beating that horse of late.)

Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth is the title story in a collection of writings published posthumously. The letters are the Archangel Satan's side of a correspondence with his brethren, Gabriel and Michael.

As Twain's version of the story goes, Satan routinely gets on God's last nerve. And, with apparent regularity, Satan gets suspended, i.e., banished from heaven for varying lengths of time. One of Satan's banishments follows on the heels (in celestial time) of one of God's most baffling experiments, the creation of animals, in general, and humans, in particular. The fact that they are all found on Earth and no place else is part of the experiment. After all, God doesn't know what the outcome of the experiment will be, so why risk contaminating the universe? (This, of course, raises another question, how to measure the extent of contamination, if any.)

Anyway, Gabriel and Michael and Satan can't puzzle out quite why God has done such a ridiculous thing and, ordinarily, would confine themselves to heavenly inquiry, navel-gazing and the like. But Satan figures that since he has to wander through space, cold and dark as it is, until his current suspension ends, he may as well visit Earth and see how the experiment is coming along. Letters from the Earth lays out his observations about humans.

"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane," Satan writes in the first letter.

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and at all time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God'," continues Satan. "This is the truth I am telling you."

And, indeed, Satan's story does seem fact-based. There is more, lots more, but you'll have to find the Letters someplace and read them. In general, Twain always had an easier time spotting the pretensions and pontifications of faith. He was also inclined to minimize the apparent benefits, but not the power of religion, organized or otherwise. That is why Letters from the Earth wasn't published during Twain's lifetime. The book probably would have been banned, and Twain almost certainly wounded financially.

And speaking of banned, if you followed (or follow) the link to the Wikipedia entry for the book, you might encounter a link there to Dan Savage, who actually wrote a stage adaptation of Letters. When Marrianne and I were co-publishers of The Dayton Voice, we carried Savage's wickedly funny and very gay friendly advice column, "Savage Love." Occasional columns and other bits by Savage have almost certainly gotten the publications they were in banned from time to time, but that would also be a measure of their real value.

King's Day...

and other things
on my mind

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, while I consider Dr. King the most effective, progressive leader of my lifetime, my thoughts are only briefly on him, focused instead on a radio show that I’m going to guest on in Chicago on Saturday, the 23rd. Host Michael James, whose business card identifies him as an activist and an entrepreneur, is a former SDS member and co-owner, with Katie Hogan, of Rogers Park’s legendary Heartland Café. It’s worth noting, as an aside here, that SDS was not only basically correct in its political analysis and righteous in its fury, but also entrepreneurial to the core. There was not a soul running or sympathizing with SDS who was not themselves capable of falling out of line at any given moment.

Anyway, Michael wants a little summary of what I want to talk about. He will, he says, do his homework on whatever subject I choose. But that won’t be necessary. There’s nothing I want to talk about that he hasn’t thought about himself. There’s a high probability that we will talk about Chicago’s 1983 mayoral race, because the show originates at the Heartland Café on the city’s Northside, and because I am Bernie Epton’s son and because there is always more to say about that election and the people who made it what it was..

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to outline some other things to talk about. Here’s a list:

1. Politically, the real dangers of this moment are more compelling, lethal and closer to overwhelming, than were IMO the challenges of any other decade of my adult life.

2. Poverty and the failure of democratic institutions, like the public schools and mass transit, affect a larger number of people more severely than ever before.

3. Climate change, militarized agendas, market health care and the socialized liabilities of private capital are poised to sicken, maim, wound and kill more people in a single century than the total sickened and killed by similar means in the entire history of the world.

4. Inevitably, consider also the accuracy of the previous statements.

5. The people alive now, especially people under, say, forty years old, can not only stop the looming catastrophe, they can be the force that ushers in a global Golden Age.

6. What is there that we can offer from the perspective of those of us who once believed we would be the agents of some sort of similarly creative and humane epoch?

Also, time permitting, what might we say about the collapse of mainstream journalism enterprises, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of life?

From 1993 to very nearly the last day of 1999, Marrianne McMullen and I ran the Dayton Voice, aka Impact Weekly. In combining so much life and so much love, at least for me, the mini-decade of my life largely defined by my association with the Voice and my colleagues there and the whole city of Dayton, OH stands out in memory as seven fruitful and creative and satisfying years.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Voice would run a graphic image of King on the front page and excerpt one of his speeches. Here’s a brief quote from one of those speeches:

“It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must admit that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon On Peace”
Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, December 1967

A good, clean story wasted (maybe) by an ambling start in which Rule One is broken

and I go on, probably far too long, to explain why

Assuming one writes to be read, there is a Rule One: Keep your first sentence short. Further, do as I say, not as I do. My last post (Kill, Kill, Kill the F-22), opened with a 50-something word sentence and, in all probability, killed more readers than F-22s.

Now, how many good, clean and brief sentences must I write to cover my tracks? A baker's dozen? Four and twenty? Four score and seven? The math is unclear, but however many I must write, the Washington Post's Michael Shear is penalized for worse and probably ought to write at least twice as many as I.

In "Hearings Not Just About Sotomayor," Shear leads with a 40-word, paragraph-long sentence. He follows that one with a 47-word, paragraph-long sentence. By "historic," Shear's 100th word, I am defeated. The front-page, top-of-the-fold story has lost a reader, at least temporarily.

My newspaper bad habit being what it is, I won't quit on Shear's story, which is probably, on balance, a good one. But the Post, which like daily papers everywhere, keeps taking hard punches to the financial chin and circulation gut, ought to tighten things up. I mean, why pay editors, if they're not going to do their job? Somebody really should have kicked the story back to Shear with a pithy shorten-your-lead note.

Back in the day, when Marrianne McMullen (the person to whom I am married) was my editor, she'd invariably return my copy with the first two paragraphs crossed out. Sometimes, she'd say something like "put the point at the beginning" or "your warm-up doesn't belong in the story."

Of course, if Shear and his editors had stuck with Rule One, I'd have to find something else to blog about. Sonia Sotomayor, perhaps.

Playlist Begins With P

Ends With Dayton Reverie

So Brendan gave me an Ipod Shuffle for Father's Day. You know, the one I gave him a year earlier as my gift on Father's Day to my youngest child. I've barely seen the tiny device since Brendan gave it back. He borrowed it the next day--he was saving his new Nano for other purposes--and misplaced it the next. Still, it's around and, after I relocate it, I fully intend to load it with a playlist designed to help me remember who I think I am.

Like, for instance, I'm not a grandfather. You might think that since that is an actual objective state, I wouldn't need reminding that I'm not a grandpa, but some life trajectories do pass from parenthood and on to grandparenthood (though not always in the straightest of lines). And some mornings I wake up with aches that seem to be "slow down, gramps" messages from my bones. And many of the parents of Brendan's schoolmates appeal to me in precisely the way my own children appeal--I want to stop everything and give them a hug.

So "Playlist" begins with P, which is also the first letter of Pogues, whose music is sometimes cranky and grumpy and angry, or wistful, nostalgic and rueful, but never grandfatherly. Several Pogues songs yet to be determined will make my playlist.

Daniel Emerich, who left a decent job with a mainstream newspaper in Ohio to come to work at the Dayton Voice (and what a slippery slope that started him on) sent me a link for the Felice Brothers' Run Chicken Run, which will surely make my list, once I figure out how to transfer the song to my iTunes playlist and from there to my shuffle.

Citing the opinion of others, Daniel tells me that there is a developing music genre called "Dark Americana" into which the Felice Brothers fit. OK, note to self: find out more about Dark Americana. A Dayton band called Horsefeathers turned up through another link on the same page as Run Chicken Run. Read about them and download some of their music here.

Frankly, I'm not sure about Horsefeathers "Working Poor." It may be too country for my tastes, though Dayton music, even garage band rock stuff, has always been influenced by country and, for that matter, by the funk sound that developed in Cincinnati and in Dayton's Westside in the '70s and early '80s (Ohio Players being the most well-known Dayton funk band).

A lot of Dayton Voice staff were musicians: Steve Bright, Nick Kizirnis, Michelle Bodine, Don Thrasher, Greg Spence and CJ Sexson. When they were still high school students Jonathan and Hans Drexler became the Voice's first delivery staff. Later, Jonathan and Hans moved to Chicago where a lot of Dayton musicians migrated. I don't know what they're up to now, but Steve Bright is in Chicago, too, working at Northwestern University and planning on getting a graduate degree there.

Nick and Greg played together for awhile in a group called Cage, among others. I used to have a Cage CD, but I can't find it. Nick was a great rocker and page layout guy, but for my money, Michelle Bodine (with the O-Matics, among others) was the #1 rocker/page layout combination.

But Nick could play the theramin--the eerie sound effects device from the early days of movies, the one moviemakers used to make brooding, haunting sounds in horror films. At Cage performances, Nick on the theramin was always a showstopper. Sometimes, I think that bothered him, He was a serious guitarist and he didn't want that to be overshadowed by his mastery of something which at times felt to him like a gimmick.

Greg died while we were all still putting out the Voice. His death was pretty hard on everybody, especially the musicians. He was always an absolutely gentle and calming presence. He was a great writer, too, very expressive and competent across a wide range of topics. I think Greg had a lot of friends who would have traded a few years off their own life so that he might live longer.

Not too long ago Michelle started playing with another band that tours occasionally, but I'll have to get the details later.

Then there was Don Thrasher, another relentlessly positive presence around the office. Don gave up drumming for Guided By Voices because touring separated him from his family. After that Don played in a number of local bands that were always a lot of fun. They were also distinguished by their cleverly idiosyncratic and suggestive names. The last one I was aware of was Swearing At Motorists.

Don didn't leave GBV for the Voice, that would have been abandoning a shot at artistic success for an ultimately doomed enterprise. Instead, he went to work in the accounting office of Standard Register, a Fortune 500 company at the time, which would end up slowly chopping off pieces of itself until it disappeared in the maw of some competitor.

Before that, though, Don did leave Standard Register for the Voice, where he became music reviewer and arts editor. For a brief time, the Voice was where he could both be at home with his family and also work where his heart led him. I think Don might be working for the Dayton Daily News in some fashion now, but that's clearly not a job with a future, either.

Right now, I'm listening to another Dayton original, Jayne Sachs. I don't know if any of her stuff is available on the web, but some of it will make my playlist. Jayne has always reminded me of a range of other more successful, but not superior (to my ear) female singer-songwriters. The Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins comes to mind. So does Liz Phair.

What started out here as an effort to blog my way, with the help of others, to a playlist for my new Shuffle has ended up being a post that needs more feedback than I first imagined and lots more links. I need readers to get back to me with links to music by some of the musicians I've mentioned here. And additions and reflections on the Voice and on the Dayton music scene in the '90s, and since. And other helpful feedback.

Feel free to e-mail me, if you wish, at jeffepton07@comcast.net, but it would also be helpful if you'd share your thoughts in the form of comments right here on this post.

The Ohio Primary - Getting Down in Dayton and Vandalia

Arrived in Dayton on Sunday and went right to the Plumber's Hall on the eastside where I picked up voter lists and Obama lit for the Grafton Hill neighborhood. Knocked on doors (37 of them) for two hours, asking voters who answered to vote for Barack on Tuesday. Fourteen of the 17 I talked to were already intending to vote for Obama.

In that sense, all of Dayton's Westside was like gold; votes to be mined--the vast majority Barack voters--but, unfortunately, not in quantities sufficient to overcome the advantage Clinton had in the wrecked industrial landscape of eastern and northern Ohio. The Obama campaign seemed to be everywhere, but we know that the Clinton campaign was pretty mobilized, too.

The next day I walked a neighborhood in Vandalia that was far from Obama territory and likely not much in the way of Clinton territory, either. The neighborhood, a sprawling collection of 1950s-era ranch homes and split-levels on wide lots, lies just west of I-75 and south of US-40 (the National Road).

It was a puzzling place. When I arrived there late morning, there was virtually no activity on the street--pretty much me and the mail carrier. I walked quite a few streets before I saw my first campaign sign and most of the vehicles parked in driveways, or curbside, had no bumper stickers, either.

After awhile, putting a little bit more effort into observation, I did begin to notice American flags planted on houses. Three or four lawns with campaign signs were supporting Hillary. I didn't see a single McCain sign and, ultimately, near the end of my door-to-door sweep, one Obama sign. But I ran across a Huckabee sign before I saw the Obama sign.

It was a definite thought-bubble moment. I'm striding up the street, thinking, "Huckabee?"

When I hit the house with the Obama sign in the yard, I felt a certain solidarity with the occupants, who weren't actually there and who were likely at work or school. Wondering how many allies they might have on the street, I slid an Obama vote-reminder under the welcome mat. I'm sure they needed no such reminder, but the act felt more like a "you-have-friends-here" note.

I don't mean to suggest that anybody in Vandalia was hostile. More like indifferent or just not present. By mid-afternoon there were teenagers on the street, walking home from a nearby high school. One group of teens came out of a house and got into a late model sedan with a "Newt in 08" bumper sticker.

Another guy in fatigues, washing a modest pick-up truck, told me he was a Republican, but that he might vote for Clinton "just to keep you guys going." He laughed as he said it, so we would both know he wouldn't really do something like that, but I told him that would be fine.

"I think we can handle a long primary and still take care of business in November," I told him.

"I think you can, too," he said.

Though Vandalia seemed a strange land, it's likely that Vandalia residents--skewing quite white, hanging on to middle-class life, facing foreclosures and bankruptcy, leaning Republican and sending their children to Iraq, are facing much of the same social distress the rest of the country is facing.

But they've swallowed more of the Kool-Aid than some of the rest of us. They think big government is bad government and social programs are debilitating.

Well, we will have to be patient. Some of the change we wish for won't happen unless some of them start wishing for it, too.

It would have been nice if Barack could have won in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday and effectively ended the Democratic primary. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Still, I would have made the journey even if I had known Barack would lose. I wasn't pretending to myself that knocking on a few doors or talking to a few voters would make much difference. I just wanted to see some of the campaigning up close.

And, of course, it also represented an opportunity to come back to Dayton, where Marrianne and I spent the '90s working on the Dayton Voice/Impact Weekly, and where Brendan spent most of 1998 in utero, working on being born. It is the people we worked with at the Voice and the people we knew here that make coming back worthwhile.

I stayed two nights at Kristen's house. Since working as a reporter at the Voice, Kristen has been working in journalism and communications. She's also put in time in the public relations department at the University of Dayton and taught writing at Stivers High School.

Stivers is probably the jewel of Dayton Public Schools, but Dayton and the public schools being what they are, Kristen's job as head of the creative writing department got axed shortly after she took it. Tough, out-spoken and a skilled journalist with a secret life working on more personal writings, Kristen would be a great teacher.

Lost job or no, she will get another shot at teaching writing; this time in a storefront in the Oregon District from which she and a friend will be offering writing classes for adults.

Dayton's not an easy place for entrepreneurial efforts like Kristen's. It wasn't an easy place for the Voice, either. And it hasn't been kind to working people for many years.

The area was once the location, after Detroit and Flint, of the third largest concentration of GM factories in the country. There were a lot of good jobs at National Cash Register, McCall's printing facility and other mid-century industrial giants, as well.

But all those jobs are gone now and Dayton is a depopulated center-city surrounded by much wealthier suburbs, which are themselves experiencing real decline. There are probably a wide variety of statistical measures that would demonstrate just how desperate things in Dayton are, but it should suffice to say that in Dayton-area dialect there are about 32 words or phrases for urban decline.

That makes it all the more important to note that for all the hard knocks life in Dayton delivers, it also seems to foster a streak of stubbornness and persistence that is evident in so many of the people I know there. Old Voice colleagues apparently never give up. They keep trying to do their art and their music and their writing, and raise their families, and fix up their houses, and start new businesses, and find another job that will get them a step closer to where they want to go.

I loved the two days I spent in Dayton for Obama, but my time there was not really for Barack. It was for me, and I spent a good part of it listening to Annie and Kristen and Kier and Dean and Michelle and Joe and Margaret and Jim McC and Robin and others. These are committed, creative and durable people.

Barack's formulation, we "are the ones we've been waiting for" is made manifest in Dayton. The changes that we insist must occur if America is to realize its promise of economic and social justice will come when more of us are like the heroes I know in Dayton.