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Today's
Stories
October
16, 2003
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
October
11 / 13, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
Saul Landau
Contradictions: Pumping Empire and Losing Job Muscles
Phillip Cryan
The War on Human Rights in Colombia
Kurt Nimmo
Cuba and the "Necessary Viciousness" of the Bushites
Nelson P. Valdes
Traveling to Cuba: Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Lisa Viscidi
The Guatemalan Elections: Fraud, Intimidation and Indifference
Maria Trigona and Fabian
Pierucci
Allende Lives
Larry
Tuttle
States of Corruption
William A. Cook
Failing America
Brian
Cloughley
US Economic Space and New Zealand
Adrian Zupp
What Would Buddha Do? Why Won't the Dalai Lama Pick a Fight?
Merlin
Chowkwanyun
The Strange and Tragic Case of Sherman Marlin Austin
Ben Tripp
Screw You Right Back: CIA FU!
Lee Ballinger
Grits Ain't Groceries
Mickey Z.
Not All Italians Love Columbus
Bruce
Jackson
On Charles Burnett's "Warming By the Devil's Fire"
William Benzon
The Door is Open: Scorsese's Blues, 2
Adam Engel
The Eyes of Lora Shelley
Walt Brasch
Facing a McBlimp Attack
Poets'
Basement
Mickey Z, Albert, Kearney
October 10, 2003
John Chuckman
Schwarzenegger
and the Lottery Society
Toni Solo
Trashing
Free Software
Chris
Floyd
Body
Blow: Bush Joins the Worldwide War on Women
October
9, 2003
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Bombing
Syria
Ramzi
Kysia
Seeing
the Iraqi People
Fran Shor
Groping the Body Politic
Mark Hand
President Schwarzenegger?
Alexander
Cockburn
Welcome
to Arnold, King for a Day
Website of the Day
The Awful Truth about Wesley Clark
October
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Schwarzenegger
and the Failure of the Centrist Dems
Ramzy
Baroud
Israel's
WMDs and the West's Double Standard
John Ross
Mexico
Tilts South
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust
James
Bovard
The
Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster
Michael
Neumann
One
State or Two?
A False Dilemma
October
7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion
Ethnic Cleansing
Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta
Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present
David
Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required
Cynthia
McKinney
Who Are "We"?
Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case
Walter
Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall
Gary Leupp
Israel's
Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?
Website
of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot
October
6, 2003
Robert
Fisk
US
Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria
Forrest
Hylton
Upheaval
in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity
Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War
Bridget
Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus
Nicole
Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
Website
of the Day
Guerrilla Funk
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
October
16, 2003
Doing Time with the
Perfect Black Panther
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me!
By
LENNI BRENNER
The best argument for capital punishment is that
nothing beats the certainty of being hung in the morning for
focusing the mind. But I can say that when you've just been sentenced
to one to 10 years in the California state pen, you're only thinking
about what you'll be doing for the next 10 years. That's what
was on my mind on October 16th, 1964, as an elevator took me
to a holding tank in the Alameda County Courthouse. But I had
no more than put both feet into the barred room when someone
tapped me on the shoulder and said:
"I know you. You're Lenny Glaser.
I heard you speak at Merritt College during the Cuban missile
crisis. John Thomas told me about you. My name is Huey Newton."
He knew me by my step-father's name,
which I used at that time. He was a trustee, he had chores to
do, but we were able to spend some of the next four days discussing
race and revolution.
What fate, what destiny, what chance
had thrown us together at that time and place? Huey didn't give
me any details of his case, except that he was there to start
6 months on the county farm. But later research provides ample
detail.
He was all of 22, the last of seven children.
His later as-told-to book, Revolutionary Suicide, listed burglary
and pimping among his endless youthful crimes. But his older
brother, Melvin, was a social worker, and he developed himself
intellectually so as to be a credit to him. Melvin had been invited
to a dinner party and brought Huey along. An older man, Odell
Lee, got into a discussion with him and it became an argument.
Huey turned away to eat his steak. Lee, insulted, took his arm
and turned him around. The ultimate street-fighter thought Lee
was going for him. When Lee--s other hand dropped to his hip
pocket, Huey slashed at him with the steak-knife.
Simultaneous reading and roistering had
turned Huey into a jail-house lawyer. He defended himself at
trial, arguing that, as a ghetto youth, he thought he was about
to be attacked with a knife, and that therefore he was defending
himself when he slashed Lee. He was found guilty of felony assault
with a deadly weapon. His family hired a lawyer, who got him
a 'good' sentence of three years, with 2 1/2 years on probation
after the county time.
The October 1962 Cuban missile crisis
had found us hard leftists ready. A street corner rally on the
23rd easily convinced politically interested University of California
students that the Soviets obviously sent them there to defend
Cuba from the US, which had organized the failed 1961 Bay of
Pigs invasion of the island. No one was plotting to nuke the
US. On the 24th we decided to sent speakers to Merritt to capitalize,
if you will permit the word, on the interest we knew would be
there. I was automatically chosen to go with Brian
Shannon of the Young Socialist Alliance, Avacha, a popular Black
Jewess, and John Thomas, a Black Maoist from the Progressive
Labor Party.
I was then in my youthful glory, with
friend and foe alike seeing me as Berkeley's reigning 'outside
agitator' street corner orator. The campus never heard anyone
like me before. I became a history buff at age seven, and, as
a radical of 10 years standing, I really did know a lot about
America and the world's sins and crimes. At 25, I was no older
than a lot of grad students at Cal. But I had been 'soap-boxing'
since I was 16. I started in Manhattan's Union Square, in its
last years as the equivalent of London's Hyde Park. There is
no better training for speech-making than facing an audience
of know-it-all hecklers. Whenever I spoke, dozens to hundreds
of students would stop to listen, depending on what issues I
was dealing with.
Merritt had a racially mixed student
body. We attracted about 300 youths, black, white, right and
left. Huey and Bobby Seale, later co-founders of the Black Panther
Party, came to the rally as supporters of Don Warden, a capitalist
Black nationalist. As the best orator, I was allowed lots of
time to beat down the white rightists. I knew I won the argument
but, as I didn't return to the school, I didn--t know that we
had picked up strength there.
Coming out of capitalist Black nationalism,
Huey gravitated to Thomas. Ultimately John went mad and had to
be institutionalized, but before that he pulled Huey completely
loose from Warden. Maoism, with its slogan, 'political power
comes out of the barrel of a gun,' naturally appealed to the
new revolutionary zealots. But the future founder of the Black
Panthers (in 1966) was still far too much the nationalist for
PL to recruit him to their racially integrated organization.
How did I get locked up? Let Judge Richard
Sims of California's Court of Appeals tell you, in a March 3,
1966 letter to the head of the parole board:
"Re: Leonard B. Glaser .... He was
convicted...on March 27, 1964 of possession of marijuana, and
... was granted probation. On October 5, 1964 a petition was
filed to revoke his probation because he had been creating a
disturbance at the University of California and interfered with
an officer in the performance of his duties. The hearing was
held and it appeared that he was present at Sproul Hall on February
30th (September 30th--LB), and around a police automobile on
the campus on October 1st. Subsequently he was involved in some
demonstration on October 12th in San Francisco in connection
with the arrest of a picket.
The whole record reflects that he is
what is superficially termed a "beatnik" type. He admittedly
had experimented with the use of dangerous drugs and marijuana
but there is nothing to show that he is an addict or purveyor....
The case has persistently bothered me ... because, although I
do not agree with the defendant's social and economic views,
I do not think he is a felon."
One night in July 1963, a friend offered
me a joint. After smoking it, I put the roach, as we called the
butt, in my pocket. Then we tried his new favorite, a legal cough
medicine called Romillar, which then contained Dextromethophan
Hydro-Bromide. If you took enough it made you quite high.
Forgetting that he had built up to it,
my buddy gave me his dose. It hit me with a wack, and I decided
to go home. After walking three blocks In my intoxicated state,
I realized that I could get into an accident. I sat down on a
bus bench. My friend and another pal found me and tried to convince
me to go with them. Suddenly a cop car pulled up. As the cop
couldn't smell alcohol, he took me to a Berkeley hospital. A
doctor told him I was on Romillar. He left me with the cop while
he went out of the room to sign papers to send me to the county
hospital. The cop called his sargent to the Berkeley hospital.
They searched and found the roach, no bigger than the width of
my thumbnail. I woke up in jail, arrested for felony marijuana
possession.
My family put up money for a lawyer.
Charles Garry, later the lawyer for the Panthers, and then for
Jim Jones of the mass suicide at Jonestown, defended me at a
preliminary hearing. He did well, but I was held for trial. My
folks wanted me to plead guilty, so no more cash was forthcoming,
and I defended myself. A jury found me guilty. Sims' letter gives
the legal basics of why I was there for our rendezvous. The campus
demos were the 1st actions of the Free Speech Movement, a central
event of the American 60s, and the University sent a representative
to demand that my probation be revoked. This will be discussed
somewhat below, but now we return to Huey.
If you find a noose around your neck,
getting it off is the most important thing in the world. Thus
the priority for Americas Blacks had to be their own liberation.
That inevitably made nationalists out of much of the community.
Trotskyists particularly saw militant nationalism as progressive
because it meant a break with the Black Democrats, who talked
the equality talk, but rarely organized the equality walk.
But we also had international priorities,
first defense of Cuba, then getting the GIs out of Vietnam. And
we knew that agitation in progressive unions was the only way
to mobilize substantial numbers of black workers for the civil
rights and anti-war movements. So while Huey and I instantly
saw each other as comrades, and our discussion was remarkably
relaxed, given our intense personalities and our circumstances,
it was soon obvious to me that we had our differences, which
I now know stemmed from his lumpen-bohemian existence produced
by his personal pathology.
There is no doubt that he learned from
me at Merritt, less so in the holding tank. I told Huey that
he had to do his Black thing and our common American revolutionary
thing. "I'll stick to being Black, but good bye comrade,"
he said with a smile and a handshake as they came to take me
to Vacaville.
I rejoiced in Blacks freeing themselves
under their own leadership. Nevertheless, I remembered Charlie
Mingus's dismissal of ethnicity, in 1963, at Tim Leary's home
in Newton in greater Boston. As he had come to Boston for a civil
rights concert, and I was involved in the struggle on both coasts,
we got to talking about racism, Malcolm X, and civil rights.
He had no time for nationalism. "People think the white
race and the black race are their teams. Those are the colors
of their jerseys." In context, he meant that, whatever the
masses thought, everybody did their individual thing.
I had also heard Malcolm at Berkeley
on October 11, 1963. After the outdoor talk, I went up close
to him to catch the post-speech informal chatter. Two Iranian
students I knew approached him. One said "Mister X, we agree
with most of your speech. But we are from a Muslim country and
we know the Koran and Islam. There is nothing in Islam about
color or race." Malcolm stared at him for about a minute,
but didn't say a word in defense of the Black Muslims' racist
version of Islam, complete with a story about a mad Black scientist
who invented mighty Whitey, until his academic handlers led him
away.
These two experiences made me see the
wisdom in the proverb, 'tho I give you my gun, I keep my good
right eye.' I was for Black nationalism insofar as it moved people
away from the system. But I could see that, even tho it acts
as an exit for the Black masses from acceptance of the system,
it provides no scientific methodology for fully understanding
their enemy, much less defeating it.
I could see that Huey was 1st a Black
liberationist, then an internationalist. He was simply too new
at revolution to grasp that it meant more than zeal for Black
liberation. But if we differed over nationalism in the few hours
we were able to talk, nevertheless nothing he said gave me reason
to doubt that he would, over time, become a Marxist. On the other
hand, nothing he later did--as he rose like a missile, from total
obscurity to world-wide attention, or as he fell back to earth
and his drug-deal death--came as a shock, given his inability
to put internationalism at the epicenter of his radicalism.
Like many a freshly minted radical, he
thought he knew more than he knew. Later the Panthers decided
that, given the circumstances of Black existence, the unemployed
and hustlers, the lumpen, the rag-proletariat, not the workers,
would be the motor force of Black liberation. That only served
to point them even further away from the unionized Black workers.
Additionally, the Maoist slogan they
relished, "political power comes out of a gun," stands
things on their head. Marx read Karl von Clausewitz and accepted
his major dictums. For the great military theorist, "war
is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means."
And, like the general, Marx understood that the defense in any
struggle has the advantage because public opinion instinctually
supports defenders against aggressors.
In any more or less democratic society,
revolutionaries must be electorally oriented. We must always
be seen as defending the people's rights and always preferring
peaceful means to get them. The public must be convinced that
it is the ruling class that is utilizing force, its police and/or
military apparatus, against the movement. We want the public
to focus on the system's violence, not ours.
Certainly Blacks had the duty to resist
Klan and police violence. But the key to success in ending legal
segregation was the mobilization of the broad masses in peaceful
demonstrations. This is why Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King
were the central figures of the civil rights struggle, not Malcolm
or Huey.
Freudian psychoanalysis also gives us
some insight into Huey. In Revolutionary Suicide he describes
himself as a school-child:
"We were not taught to fight by
our parents, although my father .... told us never to start a
fight, but once in it to stand fast until the end .... I remember
my reaction to Little Black Sambo. Sambo was, first of all, a
coward. When confronted by the tigers, he gave up the presents
from his father without a struggle--first the umbrella, then
the beautiful crimson, felt-lined shoes, everything until he
had nothing left. And afterward, Sambo wanted only to eat pancakes."
Adult Huey told us this in a denunciation
of racist children's tales. Go past that to this wonderful kid
reaction: Ain't no tiger livin' ever gonna take nothin' from
this black panther. He explained why he had to beat up every
kid on the block:
"Huey P. Newton became Huey 'pee'
Newton, and when a rhyme came at me like 'Huey P. goes wee, wee,
wee,' I started throwing hands until it stopped."
Truely, the boy is father to the man,
in this singular case the founder of the Black Panther Party?
Huey took its name from the emblem of Alabama's Loundes County
Freedom Organization. That was his unconscious preferring its
fierce symbol to its prosaic name. The Oedipal complex is about
how a boy age 3-6 unconsciously wants to castrate his father,
the rival for his mother. Its a fight the child can't win. So
the boy then fantasizes that his big foe is going to castrate
him unless he 'listens to daddy,' i. e, internalizes the father's
values, in this case the demand to defend himself to the end.
The other kids' Huey "pee" jibes magnified his infantile
penis anxiety but also gave him the way to overcome it: Fight
the imagined threat.
Years later, that's what made him say
that "all the way through school," meaning college,
"my baby face made people think I was younger than I was.
I resented being treated like a baby, and to show them I was
as 'bad' as they were, I would fight at the drop of a hat. As
soon as I saw a dude rearing up, I struck him before he struck
me." That's what made him slash Odell Lee, who meant him
no harm.
His book tells how he got thrown into
solitary in the Courthouse, in the county jail at Santa Rita,
later yet in prison at San Luis Obispo. Sometimes it was for
fighting the system for good reasons, sometimes out of unbridled
aggression against the system converting itself into monkish
self-torture in solitary, sometime it was for fighting other
cons. He made an unreal, or should we say, very revealing charge
about the guys in San Luis Obispo:
"(V)ery important, 80 per cent of
the prisoners were homosexual, and homosexuals are docile and
subservient; they tend to obey prison regulations....As a matter
of fact, many guards were themselves homosexuals."
Too be sure, there were a few flaming
swishes, and a goodly number of young gunsels fucked them in
the absence of women. That hardly qualifies them as being gay.
And most of the ol' timey bank robbers and murderers were stone
heterosexuals. As homosexuality was illegal, I abstained because
the authorities would use charges of it to hold me longer in
the joint. But I saw that, aside from a sprinkling of lovers'
quarrels getting violent, which happens everywhere, homosexuality
was a live and let live part of our circumstances, rather than
a deadening negative. And Huey's 100% fantasy about gay guards
would be of more interest to psychiatrists than political scientists,
but for the fact that he became a central Black figure of the
60s and 70s.
As I've done time in all three, I can
assure you that, while none of those 'joints' were user-friendly,
he was more their problem than they were his. The 1st thing 99
out of 100 cons learn is how to stay out of the hole. He unconsc
iously projected his natural homosexuality onto his fellows,
then won his superego's approval by reacting violently to them,
i. e., to his own repressed homosexuality.
The racism of that day's America turned
his private pathology towards nationalist resistance. Another
aspect of that America brought me and Thomas and Marxism to his
school. Later yet the flaws in his radicalism, due to his ferocious
character, propelled him out of politics. Given his unconscious
wiring, Huey was destined to die violently, in 1989, over crack,
not for a political reason, as he said he would, in Revolutionary
Suicide.
Because he was the 1st person to speak
to me after my sentence, I could never forget his 1st words.
And because of his "baby face," as handsome as any
movie star's, and his lithe body, I can never forget, and never
want to forget, that perfect black panther, whatever his faults.
In any case, the UCB administrators thought
they threw me out of the civil rights battle. How could they
possibly know that they threw this bunny back into the political
briar patch, where, by chance, he landed on history's baddest
tar baby?
Frequently, there are interesting tidbits
that spinoff from a meeting with historic figures. You get one
now as the fit end to my Huey episode. On the 4th day in the
Oakland tank, I was taken downstairs for the ride to the penitentiary.
At one point on the road to Vacaville, the northern entry into
California--s penal system, the driver and another cop left me
for few minutes in the locked prison car, handcuffed, sitting
in back, along side a big older country Black, with emerald green
eyes.
He had been in the next tank. He couldn't
see us, but could hear, or thought he could hear, some of our
discussion. When he recognized my voice he proclaimed that "Some
guy has been telling Black people what to think. A buddy of mine
was in there with him, and when he gets to the joint, and points
him out, I'm going to wup his ass good."
I kept my mouth shut, ready defend myself
when he came at me. Two days later, I ran into him and his friend.
I guess his pal explained to ol' green eyes that Huey and I were
having a friendly rap, because he said nothing. Anyway, there
I was, A86455 stamped into my prison shoes, doing 10.
Lenni Brenner
is editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, and
a contributor to CounterPunch's new book The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Brenner will be
one of the featured speakers, along with Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey
Blankfort, at the CounterPunch forum
on the book in Berkeley on October 19. He can be reached
at BrennerL21@aol.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
Saul Landau
Contradictions: Pumping Empire and Losing Job Muscles
Phillip Cryan
The War on Human Rights in Colombia
Kurt Nimmo
Cuba and the "Necessary Viciousness" of the Bushites
Nelson P. Valdes
Traveling to Cuba: Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Lisa Viscidi
The Guatemalan Elections: Fraud, Intimidation and Indifference
Maria Trigona and Fabian
Pierucci
Allende Lives
Larry
Tuttle
States of Corruption
William A. Cook
Failing America
Brian
Cloughley
US Economic Space and New Zealand
Adrian Zupp
What Would Buddha Do? Why Won't the Dalai Lama Pick a Fight?
Merlin
Chowkwanyun
The Strange and Tragic Case of Sherman Marlin Austin
Ben Tripp
Screw You Right Back: CIA FU!
Lee Ballinger
Grits Ain't Groceries
Mickey Z.
Not All Italians Love Columbus
Bruce
Jackson
On Charles Burnett's "Warming By the Devil's Fire"
William Benzon
The Door is Open: Scorsese's Blues, 2
Adam Engel
The Eyes of Lora Shelley
Walt Brasch
Facing a McBlimp Attack
Poets'
Basement
Mickey Z, Albert, Kearney
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