Hammer Mill Days

That one was mine. Oh yes, absolutely it was. It had that black spot on the left side. No, no... the left-hand side, as one looks at it. Bloody mongoose! Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our... our... man, I'm hungry! All right, to be honest... it is lunchtime at the Mill. (The whistle just blew - crazy thing still works even though there hasn't been a shift...

I have to think that President Obama really wants to be remembered as one of the great presidents, like FDR or Lincoln. (Don't say Reagan, because that would just be silly.) I just don't know if he thinks big enough. But whatever his motivations or limitations may be, we simply cannot allow ourselves to be confined by them. What America needs is a healthy dose of movement politics - the kind that brought us the five day work week, earned black people the vote, and brought the Vietnam war to an end. It's the only way fundamental change happens, and we had best start facing that fact. That is something the late great Howard Zinn understood. (Very sorry to hear of his passing this week.) And it's something that gets repeated frequently in these strange days when the closest thing we have to a national progressive party behaves like a timid opposition even while it enjoys the largest majorities it has seen in Congress since the Watergate era. One can, with some justificatio...