|
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Raping the
Palestinians
Matt Vidal
Corporate
Ethics Red Herrings
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
Weekend
Edition
July 13, 2002
Rebel Angel: a Memoir
Chapter One:
I'll Never Get
Out of This Band Alive
by David Vest
[Editors'
Note: Over the coming months CounterPunch is proud to present
installments from David Vest's memoir Rebel Angel, the chronicle
of how an Alabama boy became a poet, a rocker, and a political
radical, with stops in Romania, academia and the inner sanctums
of Big Oil along the way. Enjoy the ride..--JSC/AC]
By night I ride to and from the gig in a Bluesmobile
with over 220,000 miles on it. The car cost me 32 cents a pound,
not counting the clutch I replaced. The four passengers include
an alcoholic, a former crack dealer, a convicted killer, a poet,
an ex-Moonie, a guy who played with Iron Butterfly for a couple
of years, a bank collections agent, a Fulbright Scholar, a speech
writer for a big oil company, a motorcycle enthusiast who rides
a lot of funeral escort, a Vanderbilt <Ph.D>., a corporate
sales rep and a CounterPunch columnist. These are The Cannonballs.
If you walked into a club where they were playing, you might
hear Dylan's unreleased song "Julius and Ethel," an
acapella Blind Boys-style version of "Nobody's Fault But
Mine" or a song no one, including the band, has ever heard
before. Or you might not.
Mostly I play piano, sometimes mandolin
if I'm in the mood. I like to play the two-fisted Gulf Coast
barrel house boogie style I learned by direct laying on of hands
from piano players like Big Walter the Thunderbird, Katie Webster
and Floyd Dixon.
By day I scribble, mainly. Some days
I mount the public platform and "view with alarm,"
in the fond hope that I will end up with fewer opinions.
I am descended from a line of rebel angels
(my great-great-grandfather enlisted in the Confederate Army
at 16 just in time to fight at Chickamauga the following day).
My own rebellion began at the piano and spilled over into my
life, far too slowly for my own good. I was a secret sympathizer
far too long, a secret agent for nothing in particular. My heart
was in the right place, but I couldn't always find it.
How did a white southern male, descended
from Confederates and slave owners, baptized at thirteen by total
immersion, end up a radical -- escaping not only patriarchal
fundamentalism but even the slough of southern liberalism, into
which, as the cousin of Adlai Stevenson's running mate (John
Sparkman) he should rightly have disappeared? How long did they
have to knock to wake him up? What did it take? And what does
any of it have to do with the blues?
Tonight I'll be singing, "Lawd lawd
lawdy Miss Clawdy, you just don't treat me right, you like to
ball till the morning then you stay gone late at night."
I have sung that song in six different decades now. I have sung
it from Birmingham to Bucharest. I have sung it when I should
have been at home.
But it's the nights I didn't sing it,
the nights I did stay home, that I regret.
Today I'm sitting under the wych elm
tree, drinking the last of my Russian Caravan tea, more sorry
for the harm I haven't done than the other. I'm able to make
a living doing nothing I don't love to do, namely making music
and writing words. I do not remember not wanting to do them.
As far as I can tell, I could always play the piano and I could
always write. I decided some time ago that this is how I would
live, by my gifts, doing what I felt I was meant to do. I resolved
to get up every day and work whether I had any paid work to do
or not. I vowed to support myself at whatever level my music
and my writing would bring in, and to give it away when I couldn't
sell it. I haven't had a boring day since.
That's my advice: quit that job. Jump!
I'm sorry I ever did anything else, to tell the truth, although
it wouldn't leave me with much of a story to tell if I hadn't.
(Before following my advice, you might want to read ahead and
find out where following it got me!)
Show me someone whose life is not an
appalling sequence of betrayals -- of friends, lovers, mentors,
institutions, principles and above all self.
And yet, looking back, wouldn't we think
more highly of ourselves if we'd betrayed some of them a little
earlier?
Early in life I might have heard a voice
crying in the wilderness. It was the voice of John Lee Hooker,
a life-guide as good as any other. In my childhood he went about
the South, driving at night and dodging "ghostses in the
road" to sing his great songs of liberation, like this one,
an anti-credo more powerful than anything ever nailed to a door:
Ain't no heaven
Ain't no burning hell
When I die
Where I go
Don't nobody know
Can't nobody tell
Take that, Emily Dickinson. For me, the
great American song is not "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light
Brown Hair" or "Stardust" or even "Blowin'
in the Wind," great as they all are. It is "Burnin'
Hell," by John Lee Hooker. The fact that it is virtually
unsingable by anyone else, that no glee club could ever hope
to hum it, that its intractable individuality does not lend itself
to any kind of communal expression -- all the more reason to
admire it.
There was a disc jockey at a radio station
in my home town who would give me records, stuff the station
didn't intend to play. I left there one night with a handful
of John Lee singles.
The next time you turn on the TV and
find yourself greeted by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson,
Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, Mother Angelica or Osama bin Laden,
recite John Lee at them. Next time you're telling the worry beads,
call on Saint John Lee, I declare he will see you through. ("Blues
the healer -- it heal me, it can heal you too.")
"Get in the water or get off the
diving board," I hear an old P.E. coach say, moonlighting
as my editor. Let's get it on, then.
My father's family was more or less Methodist,
if that is not a redundancy. His great-grandfather, who looks
remarkably like me in his portrait, had built something called
the Old Vest Mission in Oak Ridge, Alabama, near the Flint River,
where the Vest family had settled shortly after the defeat of
the Creek Nation at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend opened up the
territory. Some of the Vests came from Georgia in a covered wagon,
others rode down from Tennessee on the Bump-Ass Trail. At the
Vest Mission circuit-riding ministers preached to free and slave
alike. The free people sang about going to heaven when they died.
The enslaved people sang about about killing their oppressors
and escaping to freedom. They were singing the same songs, of
course. White people said you could walk by that way at night
and hear the ghost of a slave baby crying.
I saw the Old Vest Mission for the first
time in about 1991, a year or so before it finally gave up its
ghost and collapsed into the overgrown field where it sagged
and rotted. I don't know who owns the land now. The family lost
it after the Civil War. Some of them wound up living as sharecroppers
and tenant farmers on the same acreage. By the time my father
Wilburn Ester Vest was born the family was flat-out poor, like
almost everyone else in the area, yet haunted by stories of lost
wealth and position. Wilburn's grandmother, born in Texas, was
later said to be the direct heir of the original owner of the
land from which the Spindletop oil field gushed forth. That I
was theoretically one of the richest people ever to have lived
has amused me in an idle hour.
Wilburn's mother was one-quarter Cherokee.
Both she and her father were Native American in appearance. The
family did not talk about it much; inter-marrying with Indians
had not improved their social standing. Yet my grandmother Vest
did tell me that her full-blooded grandmother took her into the
forest, taught her the names of plants, and showed her how to
have visions. Once in a dream she came to me and revealed that
I had once been a character named Crazy Ghost, who liked to hide
behind trees and make everyone pretend he was invisible. Evidently
she also paid attention to the plant lectures: she had a legendary
green thumb and could have fed an entire neighborhood from her
back yard garden. Her husband, Connie Ester Vest, was happy to
get a low-paying job in a factory, preferring to go to work early
every morning in his coveralls, with a dried knout of tobacco
(called a "Mickey Twist") in his back pocket, than
to walk another mile behind a mule. If he did you a favor, and
you remembered to thank him, he'd say something like, "Hit
wont no trouble. Glad I could hope ye out."
My mother's people regarded all this
talk of Indians and Texas as faintly barbaric (they were townspeople,
eternally grateful to have nothing to do with mules and Mickey
Twists). Her parents were lapsed Catholic and Southern Baptist,
with Nazarene tendencies. My maternal grandmother, whose name
was Ora Bell Ryland, was an unusual woman in that she applied
the strictest religious principles to herself but not to others.
In her mind, the commandments were a set of instructions for
her to follow, not a scorecard to keep track of other people.
A less judgmental human being I have not encountered since her
death in 1956 at the age of 54. She wore no make-up, never cut
her hair, and attended no movies, not even The Ten Commandments
or King of Kings. Yet she was friends with hard-drinking Lesbians,
freely welcomed all the neighborhood bad boys into her kitchen
because she liked them and never claimed to know what anyone
else needed to do. She might not enter a movie theater herself
out of her desire to avoid "graven images," but she
was quick with a quarter when there was a Rocky Lane western
or Randolph Scott picture I wanted to see. If the French are
a "think Left, live Right" race of people, Ora Bell
was "think Right, live Left" at its finest.
A great beauty in her youth, she had
been aged prematurely by heart trouble. She appears to be well
past eighty in photos taken in her early fifties.
She married an alcoholic Scots-Irish
Catholic she had met at a semipro baseball game at a time when
both of them were married to other people. James Oscar Curnutt,
a short, wiry line-drive hitting first baseman with a wife and
a couple of children, noticed her in the stands and stole her
away from one William O'Connell. This duty-bound woman who had
been the primary caregiver for a host of younger siblings before
her first marriage threw duty to the wind and leapt toward love
when she found it. Neither of them ever looked back.
It was J.O. who later bought me my first
typewriter and a stack of newsprint cut up into 8 x 10 sheets
and told me to get to writing.
And it was Ora Bell who gave me my first
piano, paying $50 she had earned working in a Kress store for
an old H. P. Nelson upright so heavy it almost fell through the
front porch when they brought it to the house.
Ora Bell possessed a great voice, sounding
a bit like an Appalachian Judy Collins. She was the star of her
church choir but seldom attended because J.O. wouldn't go and
she couldn't endure to hear him criticized, patronized or prayed
over. Her favorite song was "the Old Rugged Cross,"
but she played jazz and boogie-woogie records for me.
She bore three children, my mother Mildred
(born in Selma, Alabama) and two doomed sons. One of them, Jerry,
died at seven months. J.O. had taken Ora Bell down to Tuscaloosa
to give birth because her sister's brother worked at a foundry
and had access to a company doctor in the Depression years. It
was all to little avail. Was malnutrition the cause of death?
The other boy, Robert, was her golden
child. A gifted athlete, he scored the winning touchdown in a
championship high school football game about three weeks after
I was born. The following Monday, only 18 and to all appearances
in the full bloom of health, he collapsed and died at a pickup
basketball game across the street from our rented house in West
Huntsville. Now she had lost both sons.
My father came home from basic infantry
training, as he had done when I was born, to attend the funeral,
then shipped out again. A few months later he would land at Omaha
Beach and promptly disappear, missing in action, presumed dead.
An inauspicious but not uncharacteristic
beginning for a child born on November 2, the Day, after all,
of the Dead.
* * *
Tracing My Name
(first published in Antaeus, 1977)
Impossible is but the faith of fear.
-- Fulke Greville
Long back, in the waning of childhood,
waxing of absence,
Sometimes at the foot of the stairs or, at dusk, in the boxwoods,
And once in the dark garage, emptied of coal dust, or
At night in the plate glass window of the feed store
Next to my house, which had to be passed, and once,
I swear this is true, at a tomb,
A mausoleum, returning my foolish gaze
Through stained-glass windows, something looked at me.
It had my grandfather's eyes, and the
light brown hair
My grandmother wore in braids (when she let it down
It reached to the back of her knees). And I could tell
The roots of my family line were lining its lightless
Veins to finger the breath it could not draw.
Setting fire to the neighborhood failed,
I realize now, and not just because it rained,
For it sat on the smoldering fences and studied me
For all the world as if it intended to
learn
My name (which was not the name I go by now).
Though people have looked at me as if I possessed
The kind of warped mind that could have invented this story,
And doctors have claimed they can't find anything wrong,
And if, to be truthful about it,
I've sometimes pretended the whole thing never happened,
Especially when mistaken for someone else,
Something like the faith of fear, and
the precious
Immunity to sophistication, passed down
Through succeeding generations like a Bible,
Sustain me, in spite of my sense of ridicule,
To keep this image relatively pure --
Though angels in love with death
And people from unknown countries have offered me money
To write it down as if it had happened to them.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
You can purchase a copy of The Cannonballs' new CD from CounterPunch
by clicking here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
This Weekend's
Features
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|