#all we are is a nation of children churned out for a war machine!

[gatheredfates]

SKINNING THE CHILDREN FOR A WAR DRUM.

[antoine-roquentin]

“Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.”

– Jem Bendell, professor of sustainability leadership, University of Cumbria, UK

“Perseverance porn goes hand in hand with the rise of a GoFundMe economy that relies on personal narrative over collective policy, emotional appeals over baseline human rights. $930 million out of the $2 billion raised on GoFundMe since its inception in 2010 was for healthcare expenses, while an estimated 45,000 people a year die a year due to a lack of medical treatment. Meanwhile, anchors across cable news insist that single-payer healthcare is “unaffordable,” browbeating guests who support it, while populating their broadcasts with these one-off tales of people heroically scraping by.”

– Adam Johnson, Media’s Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn, (FAIR)

“The liberal class thus divides into two breakaway clans, those who limit themselves to lip-service monologues with which they publicize their sense of injustice over comfortable meals, wine glasses brandished as weapons to punctuate their outrage. Then there are the true thespians, who take to the streets, wielding placards filled with exclamations and chanting songs of resistance as their throngs progress clumsily down the avenue, thoughtfully cleared of traffic in advance by local authorities. On the one hand, gestural politics; on the other, theater.”

– Jason Hirthler, The Curious Malaise of the Middle Class, (Dissident Voice)

“This present momentism appears, at least on the surface, as a therapeutic solvent for all our problems, making our present situation more bearable. But this bearability of the status quo amounts to a permanent retreat to the psychic bomb shelter of now, a kind of bury-your-head in the sand mindfulness which acts as a sanitized palliative for neoliberal subjects who have lost hope for alternatives to capitalism.”

– Ronald Purser, The Faux Revolution of Mindfulness, Open Democracy, author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

“Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal basis, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness.”

– Phil Rochstroh, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Capitalism, Counterpunch

In the waning days of the American Empire a sort of collective madness has seemed to take hold of its ruling class. It is perhaps most clear in the unhinged and incessant decrees of the bloated emperor via tweet. But it is also in the idiotic ramblings of his minions redefining fossil fuels as “freedom gas” or rapidly melting Arctic seas as an economic “opportunity.”  It can also be seen in the reactionary and warmongering responses of the so-called resistance in the corrupt Democratic Party establishment and corporate media regarding Russiagate. Or Bolton and Pompeo inventing evidence to justify more imperial wars just years after the disastrous assault on Iraq and during the longest ongoing US war in Afghanistan. It extends to the incredulous claims of Michele Bachmann that Trump is “godly and biblical” and televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who described his aversion to flying commercial airlines as getting in “a long tube with demons,” calling for a national day of prayer for the orange-tinted tyrant. It is truly staggering to behold.

Amidst all this madness, crimes and atrocities are being committed in broad daylight by that same ruling class both domestically and abroad. In the Middle-East the ruling class, via their corporations General Dynamics, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is aiding and benefiting from outright genocide in Yemen by the most brutal and criminal of America’s colonies: Saudi Arabia. Similar profits are garnished from backing the apartheid regime in Israel and the military junta in Egypt. In Brazil the ruling class has only just begun to see the dollars roll in from Bolsonaro’s further opening up of the Amazon, the planet’s proverbial lungs. In Modi’s India, they are salivating at the chance to despoil more of the sub-continents riches. And around the world corporations and the fossil fuel industry continues its mad and blind dash toward species extinction.

Back in the US police violence against people of color remains steady and the prison industry is still booming. Along the southern border, migrants from Central America are seeking legal asylum, scores of them young children. Their only “crime” is fleeing their homelands which have been ruthlessly torn up by US foreign policy for at least a century. But they are being rounded up by militias and sent to concentration camps. LGBT and mentally ill migrants are being tortured in solitary confinement. Families are being separated, children caged, violated, dying from preventable diseases.

In the era of social media all of this information is readily available for those interested. Even those uninterested are exposed to what is happening via the ubiquitous social media newsfeed. Indeed, a subdued disquiet among the bourgeoisie has become undeniable. But endless imperialistic wars, rampant corruption, human rights abuses, waning economic advancement, and mass species extinction hasn’t yet prodded most of them from their homes to shut down the machinery of this cult of death, even though it threatens the very futures of their own children. When the bourgeoisie in the US do get out to protest the events are generally scripted, scheduled, sanctioned and televised by the establishment itself. The appropriate permits are obtained. No traffic is stopped. No building is occupied. The status quo remains intact and the necessary steam of middle-class angst is let off until the next event. In the meantime, the war, prison and surveillance industry expand, police militarization continues apace, the environment continues to be raped and pillaged, and fundamental freedoms like speech and reproductive rights are systematically dismantled. By comparison, any actual dissent is met with swift authoritarian violence by the corporate state; Standing Rock Sioux and BLM as stark examples.

Perpetually harried and fearful of losing the tenuous privilege afforded to them by the ruling class, the white middle class in the US has little time to focus on anything outside their prescribed bubble of experience. They inhabit a world constructed by the capricious and cynical designers of the free market. A place devoid of the words “ruling class,” where the mantra of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” reigns supreme in an era of neoliberal barbarism. Where even if one is working fulltime they may still not have access to basic healthcare coverage. Where they are saddled with enormous debt that can never really be paid off in anyone’s lifetime. Peering at the world through the lens of glowing, hand sized screens, connecting algorithmically to the pulse of a commercially constructed world, most essentially exist in a pixelated prison of suspended and unconnected moments, reinforced by procedural programs which have been meticulously written in the posh and sterile board rooms of Madison Avenue and in the Silicon Valley. History is extinguished here, as are agency and imagination. It is a consumerist world that conforms to the dictatorship of money.

Americans have been socially conditioned for decades to accept these contradictions of their economic, social and political arrangement. Meanwhile suicide is rampant, punctuated by mass shootings. Opioid abuse is taking many more lives. Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry has thrived off this angst, convincing millions that their psychic and social maladies are all due to a personal or chemical defect, not the system itself. That working people barely stave off homelessness and middle class families are increasingly separated from their loved ones and communities by having to travel long hours to a job (or jobs) which hardly covers daily expenses, is a struggle not considered telegenic enough, unless it is cast in the heroic light of “personal responsibility.”

Indeed, Hollywood and corporate media reinforce the mythology of American greatness while its populace becomes ever more weighted down by the late stage capitalist nightmare. Whether it be CNN or MSNBC, distraction from issues related to class or economic disenfranchisement rule the day. Russiagate, the “scary” (and non-existent) migrant caravan, or Trump’s latest outlandish or absurd tweet dominate the news cycles. Catastrophic climate change, the staggering loss of biodiversity, burgeoning suicides among youth, the elderly or veterans, the never-ending and expanding war machine of the Pentagon, growing police violence and a bursting prison industrial complex, corporate and banking corruption, increased economic disparity and hardship? Not so much.

Movies and programs about dystopia have been ubiquitous for many years now, but the factors that contribute to these apocalyptic futures have nothing to do with the actual existential threats we are now facing. Zombies and terrorists dominate the themes presented, and this reflects back on the enormous influence of the Pentagon, Department of Defense, CIA, et al. on mass media. Even video games mirror the warped and expansionist aspirations of the American establishment and its bellicose foreign policy. For decades, these agencies have sought to steer the narrative of American angst toward conformity with the capitalist status quo. And they have been largely successful thanks to many attributes of American life itself. Suburbia and automobile culture after WW 2 erased the commons to create a sort of facsimile of community, often devoid of central spaces, character or originality, and connected by ribbons of featureless highway. Vast dead spaces that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

But even relatively innocuous programs and movies are divorced from lived reality. I was watching one recently at a friend’s house about a group of friends taking a trip to the wine country. With some mild and typically safe humor to garnish a few chuckles, it was rife with convention and contrivance. The most glaring thing of all, though, was the lack of any class reflected in the character’s diverse lives. All were of the American middle-class in one form or another. Some single mothers, others working highly paid jobs. But none of them facing what the majority of Americans actually face. None of them living pay check to pay check, lacking basic healthcare coverage, paying exorbitant rents or mortgages, or saddled with perpetual debt. But as long as their character’s clothing and surroundings were furnished by Zara, Williams-Sonoma and Pier One, the circumstances of reality were easily eclipsed. Forgotten.

Indeed, the Age of Trump, which is the product of decades of capitalist rot, has demonstrated that the American bourgeoisie have been largely inured to their continually degraded status. They cannot see class oppression because those words are not in the lexicon. Corporate capitalism has created an insular world of sterile detachment from the real world in which it inhabits. “Human resource” departments, situated in nearly every workplace, effectively erase class and context by enforcing optimism and encouraging a kind of self-policed dialogue. Outside this world, mass media manages “threats” by externalizing and otherizing. So little has really changed in the narrative. Once upon a time it was the communists, Jews, Khrushchev, the Vietcong, the sexually “deviant,” people of color, Russia. Now it is migrants, Muslims, Julian Assange, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, LGBTQ, people of color, Russia. All scapegoats for the country’s failures and abysmal state. All psychic projections of animus and angst for a bourgeoisie in America that never understood the machinations of its ruling class or shook itself free of the “exceptionalism” of its Calvinist puritanical roots.

But the angst of the American bourgeoisie is demonstrated more by what it doesn’t speak about than what it does. It is a disquiet which is at once terrified of the collapse that looms ahead and horrified at the idea of losing the status quo arrangement, even though that status quo is benefiting fewer and fewer people. It stands simultaneously aghast and paralyzed before the obvious madness of its rulers, and yet continually grasps at failed “lesser evilism” as a solution. And it largely still buys into the noxious mythology of it being the “greatest country on earth.” The corporate elite, having stripped down civic education over decades, robbed them of their political agency and resistance and replaced it with a sanitized history and demoralizing optimism, or “positive thinking,” which places all blame for their collective state and its inadequacies on the individual. That it has been so lauded by Wall Street should cause anyone to wonder why it has been so internalized by the disenfranchised masses.

To be sure, this arrangement is rapidly meeting its end. Banking and corporate corruption, never really having been dealt with in the last “Great Recession” or its notorious state funded “bailout,” has only become more blind and reckless. The membrane of the bubble created after that fiasco, born in avarice, is thinning in plain sight. It is about to burst again, and this time it will be far more catastrophic. The endless imperialistic wars that the US has engaged in for the last decades are also creating a financial strain. Coupled with climate breakdown those expensive bases of aggression around the world will begin to cost more than they bring in profit. In the US itself biblical floods are wiping clean the soil graded for agriculture throughout the Midwest and causing tremendous economic hardship for scores of rural and commercial farmers. Droughts offer a grim alternative to this increasingly chaotic climate pattern. Food prices will undoubtedly rise in the future thanks to a capitalist system which creates artificial shortages and surpluses.

Indeed, around the world the climate is shifting dramatically between drought and deluge affecting huge swaths of habitat. Already countless species have succumbed to this ramification of a warming world. But also to industrial pollution, defilement of the oceans, misuse of land and extraction of minerals and fossil fuels: the excesses of capitalism. According to a recent study, a million more species are being marched down the halls of extinction today. Trash is filling the world’s oceans, with birds, turtles and whales washing up by the thousands with bloated bellies full of plastic detritus. It’s literally raining plastic particles now in many places. And all the while the beneficiaries of this pernicious and omnicidal system are dwindling to a select few who are incapable of grasping the quietus of all life on the planet, let alone their own. But without a doubt, this small segment of society will fight ferociously for their continued privilege no matter how untenable, absurd or suicidal it is.

The concurrent madness of the ruling class and the angst of the bourgeoisie in our age isn’t anything surprising. Like the phenomenon of Trump, it has been an unholy union in the making for a long time. The product of empire itself. Social media and the death throes of capitalism have only made it more visible to the general public as of late. But it should be understood that while the ruling class are moneyed and powerful, they are not omnipotent, nor are they more intelligent than the rest of us. On the contrary, even as it sees the demise of the biosphere on which it depends, this “elite” class can do nothing else but marshal the language in an attempt to save its failing economic trajectory. Thus, it is militarizing our collective existential moment: not to save the planet, but to save capitalism itself. And it will do this by deflection, brutally punishing or even eradicating those who have the least impact: the poor, the working class, and the global south.

Under a darkening, climate changed sky, created by the avarice of a few and their ceaseless wars and atrocities, an imperiled and disappearing biosphere lies before us all. Therefore, remaining silent and accepting the status quo in the face of ruling class folly, cruelty and madness, should only be interpreted as complicity to the crime.

[pendragonfics]

Family

Paring: Jim Hopper/Reader

Tags: female reader, adopted children, family dynamics, journalism, domestic fluff, spoilers for Stranger Things 2.

Summary: Sometimes, family isn’t nuclear, with the happy little American love story where it’s all good and well. Family is two adults who found each other in their times of need, and a miracle child.

Word Count: 2,355

Current Date: 2017-11-03

It’s dark when he comes home, but you’re awake. You’ve been awake for almost fifteen hours, and despite sore eyes, an aching headache, and sore limbs, you’re sitting up, to see the door open, and close very slowly. To see the way Jim takes off his shoes, peels off his socks, puts his hat upon the rack by the window. He looks as tired as you feel – in the moonlight through the window, you can see the lines above his eyebrows, beside his eyes.

Jim’s barefoot and stifling a yawn, working on undoing the buttons on his uniform. You watch as he walks toward you in the kitchenette, but as he turns the paraffin lamp, he jumps a little, but still quiet. You’re sitting on the bench, beside the sink, legs dangling like a novelty made-at-home dolly, wearing one of Hopper’s holey old shirts and boxers.

“You scared me,” he says, low, quiet. “What are you doing up so late?”

You shrug, gesturing to the cup of tea growing cold beside you. “Story came to me, couldn’t stop, and then couldn’t sleep.” You take a sip from your cold tea, and wince, “Why are you home so late?”

There could be a myriad of answers. Kids egged a house down on an avenue in town – perhaps he’d helped an elderly lady at the grocery store pack her bags into her late husband’s station wagon, maybe the paperwork wasn’t done on time and Flo stopped him until it was completed. But there wasn’t any egg on his wrinkled uniform, nor groceries in his arms, or ink on his hand.

“Found a kid walking around town, all alone. Drove them home.” His smile wan, he moved past you, flicking the stove on heat up the soup you made earlier for yourself and El. “Flo wanted to know how the story’s coming along.”

You make a noise. “Slow. Be better if I didn’t screw up my last typewriter.” You hummed, showing your hands to your boyfriend, hands that were covered in pen scratches and ink transferred from the paper.

“________, those things don’t come cheap,” he mutters, taking his dinner from the fridge, shoving it in the microwave.

“Ellie went to bed happily again.” You change the subject, tapping your bare foot lazily on the cabinets.

Jim raises an eyebrow. “Ellie?” he asks.

You shrug, drawing a knee to your chest, watching as the screen on the magical microwave oven counts down the seconds until it pings! “She doesn’t like me calling her Jane, and you know I feel funny calling her a number. She’s a teenager, Jim, Ellie suits her, I think.” You pause, and sliding down from the countertop, you add, “She was kind of bummed she didn’t get a goodnight kiss from her dad.”

The clock on the wall clicks over to the new hour, reading the hour that the witches come out to play. Or at least, that’s what your mother used to tell you back home in Boston, before the split as a child when your dad moved you to Hawkins.

“She called me Dad?” Jim asks, just as the sausages and gravy are ready.

You nod. “Right before nodding off. Said she missed your scratchy kisses.” You grin, eyes scrunching up like there’s no greater happiness in the world than seeing the person you love described so simply. “I missed your scratchy kisses too.”

Jim takes his meal to the table, smiling to himself. You stand there in the kitchen, still, swaying. It’s almost like you’re caught between being awake, and overtired, or perhaps you’re imitating a ghost caught between this world and the one beside it, swaying in the breeze of life. But you snap out of your moment when Jim’s fork clanks against the table, and carrying the paraffin lamp to the table, you sit opposite, silent.

While you’re not as important in your workplace as Jim; you’re just a journalist at the local newspaper, writing the little things that happen around the place. The editor in chief had a ‘real’ writer for the larger stories, saying you were second rate because you were more creative, and wrote things that weren’t real (or maybe because you were a woman). One day you’ll be published, a shiny hardcover in the hands of the nation – but until then, you wrote about the effects of the weather on chicken farming in the outer-regions of Hawkins.

It was a strange paring, your father said – you, and Jim. The divorced recluse of a police chief, and the daydreaming old maid who wrote. But you hadn’t talked to him in ten years, so what he thought didn’t matter to you. You weren’t that old. Thirty-five was just a number. Hopper insisted you were young – but then again, he’d gone to hell and back, fought in the war, lost his first family. He thought he was as old as the mountains themselves, and at the best of times (as well as the worst) doubted why you loved him as much as you did.

“________, you’ve got the thousand-mile stare.” Jim hums, and you’re brought back to the moment, instead of inside your head. He glances to his dinner, almost all eaten, and says, “What about you head to bed, and I follow?”

You nod, too tired to speak. But when your head hits the pillow, you’re gone, consumed by sleep’s touch.

---

You’re standing before the mirror on the basin, hairbrush in hand. Except, it’s not your hairbrush, and you’re not checking out your reflection in the mirror. Instead, you’re carefully carding the tines through your adoptive daughter’s hair, trying to get her in the habit of brushing her unruly locks. El’s face is composed of unadulterated joy, eyes bright, mouth stretched wide with excitement.

“Big day today,” you say, running your fingers through the last bit, untangling a knot the size of your thumbnail. “First day of school.”

She bounces on the balls of her feet at the sound of the word school, meeting your eyes in the mirror. When you first met El, she’d acted all shy like a woodland creature, then, after time went on, moody like a storm about to break. That was before all the commotion with the Hawkins lab and the passing of Mr. Newby. Now she’s sunshine in a bottle, threatening to explode.

“What was your…favourite?” she asks, selecting the right words.

You beam. “I loved the library. They have books on everything there.” You fluff out her head of curls with both hands, the hairbrush tucked under your arm, and add, “But my favourite class was where we read the books.” You peer out of the bathroom, seeing where Jim is lacing his boots, a piece of toast between his teeth as he rushes out the door, “Your dad liked it more in gym.” You remember the way he looked back in high school in the uniform, and you chuckle.

“Gym?” El asks. “Mike said it’s hard.”

You shake your head. “You’re not Mike, though, are you?” You ask her, and moving before her, you kneel, pushing the hair from her eyes away, you add, “Hey, Ellie,” you see your reflection in her eyes, a hesitant smile now on her lips. “You’ve got this.”

“I’ve got this.” She repeats.

“Okay, time to go!” Jim calls out from the other room. At this, El runs around you, her new overalls sliding down her legs, curls bouncing. “________, have you got the keys?”

“Yeah!” you exclaim, jangling them from your pocket. “Have you got Ellie’s bag?”

“I’ve got it!” She shouts, the sound of the sheriff’s wagon door slamming followed suit. You’re almost out of the door, and from the backseat, El makes the horn toot and hollers out the open window, “C’mon! I don’t want to be late!”

She’s not late – in fact, when you two walk her into the administration building with her, she’s run away as her class schedule is handed to her, off to walk to class with Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Max and Will. Mr. Clarke stills her running, and from the window in the wall, you see her smile is big, group of friends even bigger.

“Your daughter seems excited to be here, Mr. and Mrs. Hopper,” the older office lady smiles, handing you a copy of El’s class schedule.

You glance to Jim, and he to you, scrambling over your words, until you manage to say, “We’re not – I mean, we’re just –,”

She raises an eyebrow, and goes on to say, “School ends at three, and if we have any trouble, I’ll make sure to get Principle Coleman call.” She smiles once more, and looks at your hand, holding Jim’s, “Are you sure you two aren’t married?”

---

You’re at work, staring at the typewriter that’s screwed to the desk, waiting for the fingers attached to your creative soul to pick up something and translate it to words. But sitting there doesn’t help, and when you return from the coffee machine, you’re face to face with your boss, whose fingers are pawing through your reporter’s journal, eyeing the notes you’ve made over the last six months in its pages.

“Saw you were stuck, ________,” he places your notebook down, the cover thwacking the desk very un-quietly. “You’ve been all over Hawkins, and still, found nothing worth writing about.”

You nod, cradling the cup of hot coffee close to your chest. “That’s right, sir.”

He hums. “Maybe what you need to consider is something a little closer to home?” He asks, and with that, goes off on his way by Debbie the copier for his regular demands of the poor P.A.

You still. Closer to home? You think about how boring your home life is, until you realise how un-boring it is, and inspired, you sit, and over the next four hours of the work day, manage to churn out and edit something that could be read by the people of Hawkins.

---

I grew up alone. I suppose we’re never alone; we have a mother, a father, a community. My parents left each other when I was young, and my father worked nights when I was at school. People didn’t want to be my friend, since I was a loner. I had my books, I had my mind, I had my mind to write the passages for books to come.

When I was at college, my boyfriend was fighting in the end of the Vietnam War. When I was starting at the newspaper, my boyfriend was married to another woman. When I re-met my boyfriend, he had acquired the position of sheriff at Hawkins Police station. He had lost so much in his life, and when we met, not for the first time as gangly teenagers who wanted so much more than what fate would give us, but when we were adults, hardened by life in our own ways, brought into moulds by our own hardships, there was something there. That feeling of loneliness.

This was not a conventional love story. I never wanted to grow up to be in a cul-de-sac, to do what any of my relatives could have done. I am a woman, making decisions for myself, loving a man who can make decisions for himself. And together, we love our girl, who can make decisions very well for herself. Sometimes, family isn’t nuclear, with the happy little American love story where it’s all good and well. Family is two adults who found each other in their times of need, and a miracle child.

You see, together, you are not without hope. You just can’t be – two heads, two hearts are better than just one. Since this we have solved mysteries buried deep beneath the dirt under Hawkins, Indiana, and found something that wasn’t loneliness to bond ourselves.

“It’s, uh, pretty feminist,” your boss commented, glancing up from the type-written paper near the end of the working day, “Is this what you’re willing to submit?”

You nod.

“It’ll be printed for tomorrow.” He slides it into his pile, extinguishing a cigarette in a cup on his desk. “Keep an eye out, ________.”

---

You’re waking up slowly, gently, when there’s what feels like an earthquake. But no, there isn’t another disaster falling over Hawkins – instead, it’s El, bouncing on the bed, wearing the Star Wars t-shirt that you bought her when you took her to see Return of the Jedi. In her hands is a crumpled newspaper, scrunched by her hands. You glance beside you, to see what Jim makes of this morning tyranny, but he’s not beside you, snoring as usual. Instead, he’s behind El, watching the both of you.

“What is this, a bouncy house?” you ask, pushing yourself up from the covers. “What’s the news, Ellie?”

Her grin widens. “You’re famous, Mom!”

You’re caught on the word famous, and peering forward to see what your daughter has, you almost miss the word mom and you feel overwhelmed. But then you see on the newspaper page caught between El’s pre-teen fingers your name, and beneath it, your words. You feel faint suddenly, even though you’ve been awake for all of two minutes, and let out a breathy laugh.

“I’m famous?” you ask, pretending to peer closer at the page, and instead, take El in your arms, and tackle her to the bed. “How about I’m the luckiest lady in all of Hawkins!” you laugh, tickling your daughter’s side. She squirms, laughing, and from the doorway, so does Jim. “Come on, let’s have a big family hug.”

El laughs, and before you know it, you’re all sitting on the bed, cuddled up like you’re hiding from a snowstorm, but instead of it being bad, you’re all in a fit of laughter. When El excuses herself to call Mike on the walkie-talkie, Jim leans into your ear, whispering, “You have no idea how much I love you both.”

You raise a brow at that, replying, “I’m pretty sure you do, Chief.” You kiss his cheek, and glancing to the door, where El could appear any second, and murmur, “She called me Mom!”

[wolfsonian]

From Magazines to Zines

By Frank Luca, Wolfsonian Chief Librarian

Throughout November and December 2017 and January 2018, 10 teachers and 212 students from 9 Miami-Dade County schools visited The Wolfsonian–FIU to participate in the museum’s third edition of our Zines for Progress program. These visits included students from G. Holmes Braddock Senior High,…

All photographs courtesy of Zoe Welch

…Hialeah Gardens High School,…

…iPreparatory Academy,…

…José Martí MAST,…

…Miami Beach Senior High,…

…Miami Norland Senior High,…

…South Miami Senior High,…

…Southwest Miami Senior High,…

…and Terra Environmental Research Institute.

As was done in the previous year, the museum’s education program coordinator, Zoe Welch, brought each group of students up to the library for presentations that introduced them first to the history of zines. The students were afterwards exposed to various types of bindings, cover design and illustration, typography, artistic styles, photomontage, and unusual papers and materials that might be used in the creation of their own small-edition run of zines.

Finally, the students were encouraged to look at a display of thematically oriented materials specifically tailored to the subjects they and their classroom teachers had requested, before creating their own class zines.

Emerging as an abbreviated version of magazine, the “zine” is most commonly defined as a work of original (or appropriated) art, text, and images inexpensively produced by a single person or small group of individuals. Typically, a zine is reproduced using inexpensive and simple methods, and was helped by new technologies such as Xerox photocopying machines and desktop publishing software. Unlike the periodicals published by commercially driven companies and institutions that were intended to circulate to large audiences, zines were designed to reach out to and communicate with smaller, specific groups or subcultures. The content of a zine could take on a wide variety of formats ranging from handwritten, typed, and comic book-style text and imagery. Zines have dealt with a broad range of topics as well, including politics and poetry, personal and social issues, art and graphic design, and a host of taboo topics ignored by mainstream magazines.

Some of the first zine “prototypes” emerged in the United States during the 1930s. With nearly 600,000 youths dropping out of school, hopping freight trains, and hitching rides in a desperate search for work, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it a priority to address the problem of street kids and delinquency. Within a couple of months of assuming office, FDR enrolled 250,000 of these unemployed urban youths in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps situated across the country in state and national parks. In these camps, FDR’s “tree army” were given uniforms, were fed and housed in barracks, and worked planting trees, building roads and bridges, compensated with a monthly salary of $30. In their off-hours, the CCC boys were encouraged to take advantage of educational, vocational, and technical training programs designed to better their future employment prospects. To encourage their literacy skills, many CCC units self-published zines intended to circulate in a single camp using carbon paper and hand-cranked mimeograph machines.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift

The Wolfsonian holds a number of these CCC camp news bulletins. The cover page typically features some amateur artist drawings, while the contents include typed-up poetry, jokes and humorous cartoons, and sports news. The six or seven pages were most often joined with a simple staple binding.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift

In the 1930s, mainstream presses and publishers also facing an uncertain economic future churned out cheap, mass-produced “true crime” and science fiction “pulps.”

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The latter genre generated such fan mail and critiques by skeptical amateur science buffs, that the publishers began reprinting and recirculating their letters and addresses as fanzines. While zines (or their prototypes, then) originated during the Great Depression, they experienced a major revival in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1970s, spurred on by fans of the Punk Rock music scene.

The Miami-Dade students visiting The Wolfsonian were inspired by the design and format of magazines in our library to produce zines of their own. The students had the opportunity to look over some 100-year-old magazines and books with traditional sewn bindings and others with Orientalist silk ties.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchase, Acquisitions Fund

They also had the chance to see some modernist masterpieces with plastic and metal spiral bindings, and even an Italian Futurist book held together with aluminum bolts.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In addition to discussing different strategies for binding their zines, we also examined a variety of cover illustration designs, paying particular attention to typography and artistic styles ranging from realistic versus surrealist or abstract imagery, and techniques like collage and photomontage.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Loan

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

We also talked about the use of unconventional materials such as foils, plastics, textiles, and transparencies to attract the attention and enhance the experience of the reader.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In advance of each class visit, the participating teachers supplied us with a list of themes and subject matter chosen by the students. For each group, we painstakingly laid out materials from our collection that would reflect on the widely ranging issues they wished to explore in their own personalized zines.

Some students focused on the issue of body image and beauty culture.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Robert J. Young

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Environmental concerns was another issue brought up by the students. While our collection predates concerns with climate change and sea-level rise, we do have some materials dealing with the Dust Bowl—the greatest ecological crisis of the twentieth century—and Expo ’74, the first ecology-themed world’s fair.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Christopher DeNoon

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca

Animal cruelty, exploitation for entertainment, animal testing, and the fur trade were other popular subjects among the students.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Vicki Gold Levi Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Other students were interested in exploring how clothing manufacturers and the fashion industry have been able to manipulate and persuade people into buying certain brands.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While some students focused on the issue of bullying in general, others focused more specifically on LGBTQ issues and prejudices towards persons based on sexual orientation. The library holds a children’s book published just a year before U.S. intervention in the Second World War, for example, that noted that most bullies acted out to cover up their own insecurities and argued that the best way to handle the ultimate bully was to laugh at his pretensions.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Pamela K. Harer

The library had on display a number of gay, lesbian, and bisexual-themed “pulp” paperbacks from the early 1950s for these students to peruse.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

Given the prominence in the news of the Black Lives Matter movement, racism, racial stereotyping, racial injustice, and ethnic prejudices were popular themes with the visiting students as well. The Wolfsonian–FIU Library holds a wealth of material on such subjects.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of David Almeida & Gina Wouters

The Me Too movement appears to have generated some scholarly interest among the high school students, many of whom expressed interest in male chauvinism, gender inequality issues, the sexualizing and objectification of women, and gender-role stereotyping.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of David Almeida & Gina Wouters

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gifts of Francis Xavier Luca & Clara Helena Palacio Luca

The Wolfsonian gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Wells Fargo for the museum’s Zines for Progress program. You can search and view completed zines from past cycles at zines.wolfsonian.org.

[kurahieiritrjio]

Snippets for a Shingeki no Kyojin Story?

No idea whether or not this will go anywhere, Don’t even know if the story snippets I have so far are worth trying to turn into a real story. Would be interested in learning whether the idea is interesting or not.

Rebirth of The Green Queen: by kurahieiritrJIO

Synopsis: Marley's genocide kicks into motion, taking a heavy toll inside Paradis' three walls. All seems lost until a group of nations enraged with Marley's warmongering intervenes. Said new forces are led by supernatural powered beings called Celestial Kings. Can Eren survive the furious Celestial Kings plan for resurrecting Terrestria by uniting 9 titan spirits within his body?

NOTES: Nature Gods aka Celestial Kings = 10 nature kings total

Terrestria the Green Queen: Ymir Fritz is the only person ever attached to the complete “Green Queen.” Terrestria's spirit was shattered into 9 pieces while saving the planet from extinction. Her shards became the Titans who were enslaved by humanity. Powers include fertility of plants and healing when she is complete.

(Quetzi) Thunderbird the Lord of Storms. partnered to Major Scythes, who has no recalled birth name so took the name of her first power manifestation which was twin lightning scythes. Major Scythes was a slave who accidentally learned of being Thunderbird’s newest reincarnation human the most traumatic way imaginable. Major Scythes is a borderline serial killer because of her first memories of being a 7 year old whore of a pirate captain that specialized in human trafficking. Scythes is obsessed with defending the weak and downtrodden, and is most dangerous when children are threatened.

She's under the Coronal's command

Seiryū the Azure Dragon, Lord of Waters.  Partnered to Colonel

Suzaku the Phoenix-Lord of Wisdom  partnered to

Byakko the White Tiger-Lord of Winds,  partnered to

Genbu the Turtle-Lord of Earth,  partnered to

Huma the Firebird-Lord of Fire,  partnered to

Erytheo the Orthrus -two headed wolf (with multiple tails)- Lord of Death?,  partnered to

Memnos the Griffin-Lord of Beasts,  partnered to

Bellerophon the Chimera-Lord of Gravity?  partnered to

(may need to add Time and Space to the roster through one of the Kings, unless all of them have the talent?)

Historia had no illusions about how she would be received as she charged down the hallways of the military headquarters, her royal crown skewed from a previous tussle with the military police. Her hastily grabbed crown and scepter were useless if nobody lived to obey the new government at any rate. Although, the scepter did make a great bludgeon at need.

Part of Historia understood that the police were doing their job, and only wanted to seal her into an underground chamber to keep her alive for the population's peace of mind. However, the rest of her being screamed that her people were dying, and nobody would survive if she failed to reach her destination. Slamming into a brick wall because she was running too fast to make the turn, Historia grunted and flung herself toward the dark wooden doors that proclaimed her flight was nearing an end. Far as Historia was concerned, she was in a do or die situation. Puppet queen or not, she had to do something for the people she once protected as a member of the Survey Corp. She alone had the knowledge needed of their nation's hidden ultimate weapon, and how to wield it if they were to survive.

“Is it true that titans are still falling from the sky inside all our walls, Premier Zachary?” Historia shrieked while dodging the military policemen hot on her heels as she flung herself through the doors.

“Your Majesty, why aren't you inside the underground shelter?” Zachary snapped as he and Pyxis looked up from their perusal of a map littered with red, green, and tan pins.

“Stand down, Soldiers.” Pyxis barked at the cluster of panting military police who chased Historia inside.

“Are all three Walls under attack by titans that fell from the sky, Zachary?” Historia requested a second time, slamming her small hands onto the table top while glaring at the older man.

“War doesn't concern you, Majesty. Leave it to me and my Commanders to eliminate the enemy. You need to get into shelter. We cannot afford to lose our government's figure head.” Zachary rumbled in dismissal.

“If the population dies, my survival is meaningless, Primier! Not only that, but I know the secrets to the hidden weapon we have to stop this slaughter! My family created the Wall titans for this specific emergency!” Desperate to be heard by the military leader, Historia shouted at the pair.

Zachary's arm froze before he completed the silent order to remove her from the room. “How are they a weapon, Majesty?”

Dragging a deep breath into strained lungs, History spoke fast. “I know how to free the wall titans, and use them to destroy Marley's titans. Father made sure I knew all I needed to know when he was trying to persuade me to eat Eren because he has the Control titan. If I can get to Eren Jeager, we can save our people. So long as I'm with him, he'll be able to use the Royal family's command power to direct our titans into combat to save everyone.”

Pyxis hummed as he popped open his flask and took a deep swig. “It's worth a shot, Primier. Jeager and Arlelt are most likely exhausted from fighting titans since yesterday morning. I've heard that they were among the first fighters to engage when the first ones were dropped inside Wall Rose. They can't get to any of the gates to help anyone else at this rate. We're losing too many soldiers and taking heavy population losses. The Underground City is in an uproar with people fleeing the surface. Like I told you, all of our wall cannons are being blown to hell by soldiers inside those stick looking air machines every time we man them. The tops of the walls have already been compromised in several places. It's only a matter of time before the titans inside the walls are free to roam. The enemy is no doubt trying to take Jeager and Arlelt into custody as we speak, Dhalis.”

Zachery heaved a sigh, hand stroking through his beard. “If only I'd had sense enough, I would have put that boy to death so there wasn't anyone for the enemy to try and capture.”

A growl of frustration slipped out of Historia's throat before she could tamp it down. “Wrong! You would have handed the Attack Titan back to Marley on a platter! Each titan is bound to a specific bloodline, Primier. Obviously they controlled it before the Jeager family came into possession of it through eating the previous carrier. The only titan we'd still control would be the royal controller, and it's almost useless outside of ordering the Wall Titans to wake up and fight. Keeping Eren alive insured we gained control over four titans total. He's the only reason we have a fighting chance.”

Pyxis cleared his throat. “One of the titans isn't really under our control since she is a prisoner underground, Your Majesty.”

“Doesn't matter! Annie's not able to fight against us so long as she's trapped in that crystal. She sure isn't fighting against us while she's locked deep underground either.” Historia pointed out.

“Does anyone even know where Jeager is at this point?” Zachery tossed at the group.

Nile Dawk shook his head. “Last known location for his group was near Trost district. Arlelt was last seen heading toward Utopia district since it had the second largest group of titans dropped inside the walls I the first wave as far as anyone knows. He was racing to their aide in his titan form.”

Historia threw her crown onto the table. “Let me find Eren. Get me the fastest horse you've got, along with fighting gear, and I'll find Eren myself. I know we can turn things around if I can get to him in time, Primier. He'll be with Squad Captain Levi knowing him. Captain Levi never lets Eren out of his sight for long. I'll have our nation's best body guards with those two accompanying me.”

Pyxis chuckled, “Following the carnage straight to the boy is probably as good a plan as any in this situation. Get Christa Lenz some omni-directional gear and harness, Dawk. She's been an inactive member of the Survey Corps who's going back to active duty. I'm sure we can trust in her abilities.”

With a fast growing smile stretching her lips, Historia snapped to attention, hands flashing into the familiar salute of an active service member. She accepted the unspoken order in the Commander's voice as their eyes met. Historia Reiss did not exist once she stepped onto the battle field. Only the nobody girl who joined the most dangerous division of the military could succeed in reaching her comrades in their hour of need. A queen captured would be a huge liability to everyone, but Christa Lenz was easy to overlook.

Zachery sighed as his chin dipped to his chest, posture sagging. “Do it, Dawk. It's our only remaining option, even if it may be a long shot.”

~~oo0oo~~

Looking around Trost's remaining buildings, which were swarming with too many Titans for the remnants of a military force to take out, Levi knew there was nowhere they could go. After the number of air ships Levi had managed to count flew away in the distance, he understood that all three walls and the communities within were under siege. Farming communities were the most vulnerable as they had no military presence. Farmers had zero possibility of surviving this meaningless slaughter. Bile churned in Levi's guts as he fought to control his emotions, and focus on the here and now of the insane battle he and Eren were stuck fighting. Not even this important gate community was easy to secure for survivors with the air superiority involved.

Part of Levi wondered how Eren's father could fail to chronicle whatever the new flying machines were that Levi had noticed.  They were proving so deadly to the wall garrison soldiers that Levi found himself livid at having no warning that such things existed. Grisha mentioned the balloons, but not the flying stick canister looking machines. While Levi was gritting his teeth, he saw the last wall cannons get blown apart by weapons that were tied to the strange new flying machines. Like the big balloon shaped air ships, the previously undisclosed machines were buzzing so far above their positions that it felt as Marley was determined to mock them, especially Arlert's new role as the Collosal shifter in his own right.  

Levi had no idea what the weapons were, much less how they worked because he could not see them well enough to pick out any details despite being on Trost's clock tower. Even his keen eyes were unable to see more than the long triads of boards attached to what looked like a long, tapering cylinder in the center. The stick machines made massive noise as they flew past to continue tearing down the walls of Trost District. As if the balloons had not already dropped a lethal enough load of titans among the citizenry! With each attack, the walls crumbled more, and Levi could see a couple massive titan heads beginning to show in the distance. The protective walls were getting chipped off of the wall titans.

Lovely. The already shitty mess would get far smellier once the wall titans were liberated.

It was certain that the stick machines had the job of protecting the oblong balloons that kept dumping packages that exploded into titans as they fell from drastic heights. Unless they found a way to stop the smaller, crazier looking flying machines, the wall titans could replace every monster the military managed to kill. If only Eren was fresh enough to hurl boulders at the damned machines like Marley's Beast Titan! Then again, Levi had no idea if Eren was even capable of accuracy in throwing things, or how far he could reach.

Any survivors left were trapped like rats inside of any buildings containing underground basements, or the stone warehouses that the titans could not easily enter. Not that hiding would save lives long. Once they ran out of food and water, the population that managed to escape today would still die. It simply meant a lingering death since nobody had any means of escape. If anyone left the few basements in the area, they would end up torn apart by titan jaws since the monsters were congregating in those places.

Despite Jeager's determination, he was not immortal, nor indestructible. Exhaustion was getting deadly for both of them, and Levi knew they had to retreat if they were to have any chance of a comeback. Suicidal Bastard truly was a better fitting nickname than Humanity's Hope for the reckless little shit's actions of late. It was not so bad when Eren had started getting low on gas and shifted the first time. But the fool had pushed himself into fighting long enough for several titan transformations to crumble around himself at this point.

Unlike Eren, Levi had no qualms in admitting he had also surpassed his body's limitations. Their only hope to keep fighting in the future was to find shelter, eat, and recuperate. They had no other options if their strength was to return, alongside better reasoning skills. The teen did not have the capacity to understand his own limits. Stupid level stubborn, because he was all heart, was the only thing Eren still retained. Exasperating as the teen was proving, Levi could not find it within himself to fault the kid's need to save citizens.

Furthermore, Levi needed more gas if they were to have any chance of wading through another fight. Not like Jeager was able to dredge up more strength to transform any longer once Levi got his hands on his subordinate's neck. Another transformation was not plausible from where Levi stood. He shook his head over the latest, pathetic bait that Eren Jeager's determination had created. Eren's latest titan was so unstable that it steamed with every move. The seven to eight meter form trembled as the shifter swayed, a hand latching onto a damaged building to keep upright. The titan was so wobbly that Eren had trouble keeping it's feet firmly on the ground despite how it was dragging it's feet. Levi knew he had to chop his charge out of the crumbling titan body, and beat a quick retreat.

The argument Eren was sure to give was going to try what was left of Levi's flagging patience no less. Reality and Eren Jeager's stubborn obsessive fighting spirit were not going to see eye to eye any time soon. So Levi had to ram the facts down Eren's unwilling throat. Facts like how Eren's latest titan transformation was abysmal, scarce able to move due to how incomplete it's musculature looked. Therefore, Levi was stuck fighting off much livelier, and complete titans to keep Eren from being eaten with the titan body Levi dubbed Bait.

Using Eren's shifted body as an anchor, Levi swung upward using the energy gained from a short free fall off of the town's clock tower to reach the fool's shoulder. With no effort Levi landed on the shoulder of Eren's steaming titan form. “You sane still, Jeager?”

A lurch affected the Titan body as Eren fought to stay on his feet because of Levi's landing on the shell's shoulder. Steam expelling from the titan's mouth. The foul smelling fog was accompanied by an unsettling thready whine as Eren moved his head at a deeper angle to make eye contact. Or maybe Eren simply could not keep the thing's head held up any longer. Either answer was plausible and equally viable.

Of course the titan that Levi landed upon chose that moment to drop onto its knees. Experience told Levi that Eren was falling into a mindless beast space within his head. Eren still sort of recognized him, which was a source of relief for Levi because it kept Bait from trying to bite him. Desperate times had taught Levi to take any small favors the universe was willing to bestow.

Determined as Eren was to keep fighting, Levi knew he had far exceeded his abilities. Reckless and ferocious as Eren was when angered, the tiny titan body he made this time was all the proof Levi needed to drag his subordinate out of the pitiful wreckage. Considering how the Survey Corps 'Suicidal Bastard' kept going rabid on and off, rampaging to continue fighting, Eren had to be removed before this newest titan body destroyed him. Or worse, fused him into a mindless human eating glutton that wouldn't last fifteen minutes around the other titans in the area.

“Don't start bitching, Jeager. Get out here, or I'm cutting you out. Your choice.”

As an additional headache, Levi was certain he would end up dead beside the despair driven crazy now controlling the younger son of a bitch. Premier Zachery's long standing orders demanded that Levi be Eren's keeper, and executioner if needed so Levi had to keep his word. Fortunately, Levi had yet to see Eren attack any citizens, at least not on purpose. In Levi's opinion, Eren throwing titan heads around while dismantling the enemy was not an attack against humanity. Any humans unfortunate enough to be in the area most likely would have died without Eren fighting for all he was worth at any rate.

It was not as if Levi blamed Eren for having rage fits over the last day and a half. It was proof that Eren was more human than most citizens at his core. The growing body count of puked up human balls was sickening. Part of Levi wished they both had the stamina to continue with these reckless charges Eren started so long ago. Looking toward the ground while staying abreast of Eren's various titan forms was a nightmare at this point. Countless corpses of women, children, and men already disgorged was not something any decent human could stomach. It was senseless death that should not be happening.

“We can't afford for the enemy to eat you, Dumb shit!” Levi snapped when Eren tried to lift his titan's arm to offer resistance, or stand back up, and failed. “I'm taking you out. We're going to regroup.”

The broken sound that erupted from the titan shifter's throat was heart wrenching. Levi understood that Eren was mentally shredding himself the second he heard the sound. Eren was assuming he was a failure. Not that the crazy son of a bitch had failed; Levi knew beyond doubt the fool was anything but a failure after witnessing how many titans Eren had killed. If anything Eren had taken out more titans over the last day and night, plus into a new day than Levi probably had during his whole Survey Corps career. Which was saying something considering that Levi had the highest undisputed kill rate of the Survey Corps history.

Snorting in disgust, Levi focused his strength into his arms. With a fast whirling motion, he sliced through the gooey feeling titan skin, yanking a barely conscious Eren out of the decaying miniaturized body. Much to his irritation, Levi had to use on of his blades to shave off titan muscles from Eren's waist and legs because the shifter was too enmeshed with the body to be pulled free. The blade boxes and canisters refused to budge from the quagmire of titan goop that should have been muscles when Levi yanked Eren higher out of the gaping wound as the husk toppled. The gas and cabke feeds attached to Eren's back looked partially melted at a glance. Another complication that was enough to give Levi all new reasons to curse their situation. Hacking at the mess that clung to his blades like sticky taffy, Levi was forced to slice off the boxes with canisters so he could keep them both alive. Infuriating as it was to abandon the gear, Levi knew he had no way to get Eren flight worthy even if the gas canisters themselves appeared to be okay. Levi had to get Eren to a more secure site because the kid was so exhausted that he little more than an appetizer at the moment.

To stop rising despair, Levi shifted his thoughts to Eren's recent achievements. Anything to keep himself focused away from fast festering emotions of helpless rage. It was no longer Levi's honor to hold the highest kill rating being the first thing he focused on to curb his anger at Eren's last Titan form's charges having taken them so far from their team mates. The honor now belonged to Eren 'Humanity's Hope' Jeager. He could not deny how proud he was each time Eren charged into battle, and succeeded in smashing through multiple mindless titans with a vengeful roar. Countless times it really was Eren's reckless charges that gave civilians a second chance at escaping titan jaws. The boy had no idea how many of his own teammates his titan form had saved during this pitched war for survival.

The combat skills Eren used while in different titan bodies through the long battle had brought many titans down for good. Some toppled because of losing their heads, or Eren knocked them down and unleashing his feet, crushing necks so hard the titans heads popped off, and their napes were destroyed. Made Levi's job easier when Eren was in control of his rage. Yet the grueling fight supplied terrifying mishaps that leeched the leftovers of Levi's stamina in order to fulfill his duty of keeping Eren alive.

How many titans should Levi consider team kills due to Eren getting surrounded after charging away from their squad? When was the last time they had seen their squad mates for that matter? Time and space were reduced to a blur of Levi unleashing his blades in a deadly, whirling ballet that pushed his body to the limits with too little rest now. Either way, Levi had lost count of how many kills they had both earned. Between transforming into different sized titans, and then fighting as a regular soldier without a break to recover his stamina, Eren had gone far beyond expectations Levi held even for his own self. Perhaps the only person in the whole military who was more driven than Levi at the moment was Eren Jaeger.

The sight of a couple abnormals headed toward them at full speed sent a shiver of dread down Levi's spine. The abnormals charge having yanked his thoughts back to the present.

Levi yanked Eren's limp frame against his body. “Hold on tight, Brat.”

Feeling Eren's arms convulsively lock over his shoulder in an awkward parody of a hug, Levi launched off Bait's corpse. Cables shooting into a nearby building, Levi gritted his teeth over how unbalanced and slow their ascent was because of Eren's added weight. Worst of all, Eren's grip on his body was loosening enough for Levi to hiss, “Don't you dare pass out yet, Jeager.”

“Sorry, Sir.” Eren murmured, tightening his hold as best he could without altering their flight trajectory. They both knew that any jerky movements would end up wrecking Levi's center of balance.

With a tsk of frustration, Levi managed to land on a nearby roof without colliding with anything. Eren slid into a heap on the sloped tiles. If not for Levi grabbing him by his uniform's chest straps, the teen would have slid off the building the moment Eren's legs touched the shingles.

In dire situations like this, Levi was half tempted to murder Eren himself because of the constant stupid stunts that may yet lead to them both getting killed. Eren's exhaustion lessened his control over each titan form he forced himself to take. Driven by desperation to protect his people, Eren's reckless bravado became astounding for sheer craziness of the gambles taken. So far Levi had managed to save the suicidal idiot from his own reckless behavior, even as Eren's titan bodies had saved him numerous times. Yet Levi knew he was too tired to keep pulling off insane maneuvers. Top it off with his gear sporting low gas canisters, and Levi knew that finding a place to hide was the only viable option left. He had to get Eren to safety even if it meant knocking Eren out and strapping the kid to his own harness as dead weight.

The steam pouring out of Eren's latest titan was screening them from the abnormal titans eyes, but the reprieve would not last long. Yanking Eren up against a chimney, Levi pushed his tired mind to find a viable solution to compensate for Eren's full collapse. Leaving Eren behind was not an option, and yet the teen was looking downright skeletal from pushing his body beyond it's endurance inside the monster's form. It was not as if Eren could stay conscious and hold onto Levi's harness for an all out retreat using Levi's omni directional gear.

The non stop performance of brute strength brought out by Eren's obvious rage still felt downright miraculous to Levi. However, the squad captain knew the dumb shit was on the brink of a mental breakdown which had nothing to do with how small the last titan was compared to the normal. After forcing himself to keep fighting within his shifted body for close to three hours this round, Eren desperately needed food. It seemed Eren's body was forcing him into a well earned sleep no matter how bad things were getting.

Snorting in disgust, Levi saw nowhere within the immediate vicinity safe enough to allow Eren to recover his strength for another round of fighting. The Military Supply Depot was one of the few places in Trost made of stone. It was also the only place where Levi could refill his gas canisters and find Eren new omni-directional gear. At least they had the small blessing that Titans were downright stupid. It might be possible to use the homes for cover to reach the depot once Levi's gas supply was exhausted. So long as he could avoid detection, the titans would not smash the wooden homes to bits so they could devour any occupants lingering inside. Titans only seemed to breach windows whenever they saw the occupants movements, and that was the real problem with getting to the Depot with Eren on his back.

Furious and exhausted, Levi forced himself to calm. He reminded himself that Eren had expended incredible energy in fashioning a crystal wall to help the Survey Corps constrain a couple fair sized groups of titans so everyone in their group could kill them. The crystal walls may have been shoddy, but it also granted civilians time to hide as best they could. For all the good that the short lived crystal wall was when the gate rose and the panicked civilians rushed into more titans on the other side. They had managed to get many into a couple of the larger stone heavy Trost warehouse buildings, but far too many ended as titan snacks.

Everything the Survey Corps were fighting to achieve felt futile. Levi had lost count of the big balloon machines that kept dropping titans within the walls. The vile air machines mentioned in Grisha Jeager's journals could get high enough above the walls to evade Armin, Eren, and all the garrison cannons. The damned things were untouchable, and it infuriated Levi far more than Eren's ongoing suicidal charges almost getting them both murdered. At least Levi could understand Eren's hot headed fits happened because the teen was strained to the breaking point due to the obscene pressure placed upon his inexperienced shoulders by the government and masses alike.

Most of his time in the Survey Corps had ended with Eren being a major target, so always under lock and key for his own safety. The polar opposite of Eren's dream of fighting to save others. Having to be protected made it impossible for Eren to avenge his parents, or himself at first. Training with the titan body had allowed Eren to become a well honed weapon in his own right, as he had proven since this invasion began. Still, Marley was determined to capture and feed Eren to their prepared puppet of choice, and Levi was not going to allow that to happen.

Levi could respect Eren's motivation to fight. With things so out of control, Levi had chosen to stick close, but also let the boy throw his fits of fury because they were justified. So far none of the other shifters had arrived, and that meant Eren remained safe enough to vent his rage.

Another point of contention, Jeagar's gear needed to be replaced. Which meant Levi's best option might end with him killing the abnormals to steal the canisters from Eren's damaged gear to snatch up whatever gas remained in those tanks once the carcass stopped steaming too much to get near it. Not a pleasant prospect, and probably as suicidal a move as any of Eren's earlier titan transformed rampage.

“Great, your insanity is starting to infect me, Jeager.” Levi muttered at his charge.

Glancing down at the unconscious teen, Levi pondered what to do with Eren while his hand stayed tangled in Eren's leather chest harness. Leather straps that were thick enough to withstand the full weight of a soldier in flight and braking the hardest of free falls. An idea took form as Levi dropped to his knees beside Eren and yanked his boot off to get the closest leg strap free. The leg strap was long enough that it could be hooked into Eren's chest strap, and looped through his own harness. It was the only way to get them both out of danger.

Far as Levi could determine, he still had about a quarter tank of gas in each side. It was not a lot, but it should get them a lot closer to the resupply depot before they had to chance running on the ground, or roof tops. A thing Eren was incapable of doing at all, but if the tanks in Eren's gear were intact, it was possible to hook his own lines to the canisters. Levi knew Eren had at least two thirds full canisters which would get them a lot farther without making them both into titan bait.

A deep rolling grumble shook the surrounding windows of damaged buildings. Looking up as he finished freeing the first of Eren's leg straps from his belt, Levi saw hard boiling clouds racing into sight. As if things were not deadly enough, now a severe storm was about to unleash its wrath upon everyone still alive.

Lightning was coursing through the upper atmosphere in strange colored arrays. Never had Levi seen multicolored lightning during his decade within the Survey Corps, but he had only been above ground less than half his life. It was possible that the others were familiar with such lightning shows. Weather and titans was the 'Crazy Four Eyes' forte, not his. Levi wished Hanii was nearby to tell him what it meant. It was not as if Levi was any expert on weather above ground outside of how deadly things got when rain and fog rolled into the area. Scratch that thought. A glance at the twitching idiot Levi was trying to rescue was enough crazy to handle at the moment. Two of them together right now would end in Levi murdering them both. All Levi could do was hope things could not really get any worse than they already were considering the impossible situation. It was even possible that the rain might help some of the population evade their giant killers. Unless odd colored lightning meant some kind of monster storm that nobody could expect to survive was about to break what was left of their nation?

“Focus, Levi. Got to get this idiot out of here.”

Levi yanked Eren's second strap off of his limp foot. Lining it up to tie their bodies together even before getting the belt's notch free. The steam was dissipating faster, and that meant Levi was running out of time. The sound of boots pounding across a roof had Levi jerking his head toward the sound. A trio of soldiers were racing toward him and Eren. They were familiar but Levi had difficulty putting names to his own squad members after so many hours of unrelenting battle. It bothered Levi that he was getting so numb with fatigue that he could not recall his own squad's names.

“Captain Levi, Christa knows how to push the titans out of here.” Mikasa was shouting as the group closed on his position.

A soft grunt was all the response Levi gave as his fingers fumbled with the second strap he had to get off Eren's waist. No matter what the plan was, if Eren got eaten, making any kind of comeback was lost. With that fierce thought swimming through his mind, Levi continued with his appointed task of hooking Eren's leg straps through his upper chest harness and tightening everything down to make a sling that Levi could tie over his shoulders and anchor with his own waist belt.

More long duration thunder rolled over the town, booming pressure so heavy that the roof shingles rattled and writhed beneath Levi's knees. His team skidded to a stop next to him as Levi worked at a frantic pace to complete the harness to transport Eren to the Military Tower.

Mikasa and Kirschtein were babbling too fast for Levi to keep up with their argument. Furthermore, Levi was too hard pressed for time to listen to Mikasa's latest Eren centric panic attack. Cousin or not, Mikasa needed to get her head back into the game immediately. They did not have the time nor luxury for her mother hen moments right now.  

“How much gas do you three have left?” Levi barked loud enough to gain the attention of the rag tag group.

“I got refilled less than an hour ago. So I'm good, Captain.” Kirschtein responded.

“Explain what happened to Eren, Captain.” Mikasa snarled in softer toned retaliation.

“How much gas do you have, Ackerman?” Levi countered as a fresh wave of anger pumped much needed adrenaline through his system to somewhat peel off a few layers of fogginess from his mind.

As Levi glared his subordinate down, the air began palpably humming, with a swelling, high pitched whine underscored by a constant growling drone.

Mikasa finally buckled, “I've got half tanks. Christa is down to quarter tanks since she lost her horse and had to use her gear to get here.”

Jean dropped to his haunches beside Levi. “Captain, I'll take Jeager since I know I have enough gas, but I really think we better get moving.”

Levi felt his right eyebrow twitch over Kirschtein's comment. The man was a decent soldier, but he was not good enough to compensate for limp dead weight in the air. The younger man did not have the reflexes required to piggy back Eren. The only one who had any shot of getting Jeager out of there using omnidirectional gear was Levi himself.

“Strap him to my harness. If we can get Eren's canisters out of his latest titan, we can change out my canisters, Kirschtein. Eren didn't use them long before he was forced to transform so they probably have the most gas. I can compensate for the extra weight, and stay aloft because I've done it before. We can make it by swapping out Eren's canisters. But, I'll need you three to run interference until we reach the supply depot. Extra limp weight makes maneuvering difficult.”

“I'll get them, Captain.” Mikasa volunteered as she pulled her blades free and stepped toward the remains of Eren's titan. A titan corpse that the abnormals were chewing on.

Glancing up to the sky again, Levi wondered if lightning strikes could cause the eerie sound which was grating on his nerves. He knew it was not cannon fire because the sound was too consistent, and unlike anything he had encountered over his thirty two years. Perhaps his headache started his ears ringing. It was possible that Levi was tired enough for white noise to overwhelm his senses. His focus was bordering shot beyond recovery, so it would be Levi's luck to not notice a banshee rivaling screech from some titan charging them. Worst of all, with his vision blurring, it was also possible that Levi would not notice the enemy before they flew down the bitch's throat.

“How many times has Eren transformed, Captain?” Mikasa bellowed at him as she peered at the pitiful remains of the last transformation.

Levi recalled nicknaming the tiny titan Bait. It was a pitiful excuse for a titan. The pitiful creature had exposed ribs in a couple places, plus the leg and arm muscles were so malformed as to make it wobbly. Bait still served to lure a number of titans closer. Levi had killed all the titans that charged, so Bait had proven itself useful despite moving at a snail's pace. Before that was Suicidal Bastard, and earlier still was Stubborn idiot. The first transformation was classic Eren.

“Bait's the fourth one today.” Levi croaked once he recalled the varied titan editions.

Uhm, Sir? With all due respect . . .”

“Don't even finish, Kirschtein!” Levi uttered on a guttural note, dragging Eren with him as Levi caved to the desire to strike the back pedaling man.

“No, Sir! Wouldn't dream of it, Sir.” At least Jean was quick to lift his hands in surrender while hopping back several paces.

A hysterical female shriek beside his ear had Levi jerking away from the source. The sharp combination of movements almost sent Levi careening off the roof with Eren in tow. 'What else has gone bug fucked wrong?'

A hand smaller than his own was making frantic gestures toward Wall Maria territory. “What kind of machine is Marley throwing at us now, Captain Levi?”

Blinking to clear his vision, Levi followed the shuddering hand's direction with sluggish eyes. A large, dark colored monstrosity was moving over Wall Rose. The only comparison Levi could make about the machine's shape was that it looked somewhat like a slice of fruit pie with fruit slices slipping out of both sides. It was an ugly looking fruit pie slice with multiple fires blasting out of it's base no less.

Shaking his head, Levi rubbed his eyes, and the machine continued toward them at an astonishing speed. It was well above Wall Maria, so they had no chance of damaging the newest weapon to arrive. “Fuck if I know what they're called, Reiss. Balloons and flying sticks gets the point across.”

An awful honking shriek ruptured the air filling Levi's ears, followed by a throat clearing. “This is Airship Chimera's Nest. I am Ambassador Thadius Grineldsham of the One Hundred Nations Alliance. If anyone has survived this atrocity, please make us aware of your presence so we can rescue you. I repeat, we are here to rescue any survivors. Please, if you still live, give us a sign so we can send emergency sleds to collect you.”

“Do they think we're that stupid?” Jean snarled over Levi's shoulder. “The shape is different, but nobody has ever heard of any Alliance. It's got to be a Marley trap.”

Historia grabbed onto Eren, and closed her eyes. Their foreheads smacked together while the small woman held onto Eren as if her life depended on it. Heaving a sigh, Levi fought the desire to jerk the woman from his charge. Relief slid through Levi's veins as Historia's head reared back and looked up at the air ship.

“I found several mentions of the Alliance from memories trapped in the titan spirits that Eren contains. I can't get to very many memories because he's unconscious. One memory I found shows the Alliance forged a treaty that insured Marley and Paradis would have no contact with each other. Both nations would remain low technology adherants because of the constant warring that was happening over a century ago.”

“You're sure about that?” Jean asked as he shoved his hand into a saddlebag tied to his chest straps.

“Yes. The Alliance must have learned that Marley broke the no contact clause, and came to investigate. Father's library has a couple of books that talk about several member nations. Most of the information describes them as being a technologically superior group of nations ruled by families identified as Celestial Kings. Several Kingdoms have a supernatural creature for their national emblem. So Chimera must be the emblem of one of the Alliance Kingdom to designate which nation came to investigate.”

“A little late to start offering help if you ask me.” Jean growled while filling the flare gun. “So do we alert them to our location, or what?”

~~oo0oo~~

“Just stop already Mikasa! You can't save me no matter how hard you try!” Eren's furious voice rang through the trees, drawing Levi's attention.

“You're my family, and I won't stand by and do nothing while you get hurt, kidnapped, or killed!” Mikasa snapped in return.

Changing direction, Levi headed toward the duo who were yet again arguing. It was getting tiresome to hear. Considering how often Mikasa tried to take over Eren's life due to her overprotective nature, Levi had no doubts that the latest mishap caused by the woman's interference was fueling Eren's current tantrum. If not for Mikasa jumping into the battle between Eren's titan and Reiner's, Alert's plan would have been a success. Instead, Mikasa's reckless assault botched any hope of taking his titan powers this round.

Not that Levi was pleased with Alert's idea, but the young man's idea did make a strange kind of sense.

“I'm not a little kid, Mikasa! My time's running out as a shifter. I'm going to die either way. You can't prevent it from happening either. Armin's the one who was able to put the memories from his new titan into words, and figure out how to end this war for good. He figured out that we have to put the original Ymir back together which I felt but didn't understand. I've already got more than one titan inside me, so I'm the best choice. Our only hope is if I can put the original titan pieces back together before I die.” Eren's voice cracked and shifted in register halfway through.

[newstfionline]

A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling

By Ryan Dezember and Anne Steele, WSJ, Nov. 3, 2017

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.-- Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.

The world is running out of cassette tape.

National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.

The company says it has less than a year’s supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. “The best tape ever made,” boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. “People will hear a whole new product.”

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda insisted that “The Hamilton Mixtape,” a 23-track album based on the hit Broadway musical and released last year, be available in cassette format. Brooklyn post-punk trio Big Bliss’s cassette debut last year earned music-blog reviews and gas money on the band’s first tour, even though the musicians didn’t have a cassette player when the tape was released.

Metallica is a repeat customer of National Audio, and the company’s 45 employees have produced cassette soundtracks for installments of the movies “Star Wars” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” and a surprise release by the platinum pop act Twenty One Pilots. It left the factory in unmarked boxes.

Most customers are up-and-coming bands, hobbyists or eccentrics who order 50 to 500 copies at a time, including a man who claimed to have recorded the sound of grass growing, according to Mr. Stepp.

Mr. Stepp’s father sold reels of background music to restaurants and factories. The family started National Audio in 1969, buying an early type of tape and loading it into cartridges for radio stations. The company began selling cassettes a few years later.

When tapes took over the music business, outselling vinyl records by the early 1980s, National Audio stuck to the spoken word. The company produced continuing-education lessons for lawyers, magazines read aloud for the blind and blank cassettes.

For years, Joyce Meyer Ministries, an evangelical Christian group based in Fenton, Mo., ordered 250,000 blank tapes a week on which it dubbed sermons and self-help advice. Listeners of “How to Hear From God” and “Eat & Stay Thin” kept Mr. Stepp prowling for supplies long after most music fans switched to compact discs. When competitors scrapped their cassette equipment, National Audio would send a truck and offer pennies on the dollar.

“They were laughing as we drove away because they were putting in CD-replicating lines,” he says.

The joke was on them. Cassettes are cool again, particularly with listeners raised on earbuds, MP3s and streaming music. Sales are small but rising, according to Nielsen Music data.

The founders of Burger Records, an independent label run from a Southern California strip mall, grew fond of the cassette format a decade ago when their band, Thee Makeout Party, was touring in a van equipped with a cassette deck. The band had copied records to cassettes so they would have tunes to play on the road. They decided to sell their own music on cassette.

Burger has sold some 500,000 copies of about 1,000 different releases on cassette, ranging from new bands to reissued albums by Green Day and Weezer. Other labels chuckled at first. “When they realized they could make a buck or two on these things, they started doing it themselves,” says Burger co-founder Sean Bohrman.

Nostalgia and analog chic aside, cassettes solve two dilemmas: the high cost of making vinyl records and getting fans to buy digital downloads, particularly when bands are touring. A hundred cassettes packaged with download coupons can be made in a few weeks for a few hundred dollars, compared with months and thousands of dollars for vinyl. They often sell at retail for as little as $5 each.

“Plus, tapes fit in your breast pocket, which is pretty great,” says Mr. Miranda, the “Hamilton” composer.

National Audio got small orders from Burger and other record labels. Then Pearl Jam called. The Seattle rock band needed 15,000 copies for a 2011 box set. Smashing Pumpkins followed. Metallica wanted 20,000 replicas of its original demo tape.

Mr. Stepp’s company has had to rely on repurposed equipment, including an 80-year-old machine built to seal cigarette packs with cellophane. It was modified to wrap cassettes. National Audio has a Noah’s ark of spare parts to keep what Mr. Stepp calls its “orphaned” gear running.

“It’s the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer,” he says amid rows of whirring duplicators.

Tape-making is complicated. The process includes a finely calibrated slurry of metallic particles and polyurethane, miles of Mylar, 48 feet of ovens, a small amount of radioactivity and a very precise slicer. Employees broke an elevator while hauling in a 4,600-pound component that squeezes tape to a shine.

Mr. Stepp, who owns National Audio with his wife and adult children, hopes to ship the first cassettes made with the new tape by January. After that, he plans to start selling bulk tape to other cassette makers.

He is working the phones to promote the new product and take orders. Mr. Stepp says he treats every customer alike, whether they order 50 cassettes or 15,000, recalling that the company’s first order from Joyce Meyer Ministries brought in just $35.

“You never know who you’re dealing with or who that person will become,” he says.

[blackkudos]

Eddie Tolan

Thomas Edward "Eddie" Tolan (September 29, 1908 – January 30/31, 1967), nicknamed the "Midnight Express", was an American track and field athlete who competed in sprints. He set world records in the 100-yard dash and 100 meters event and Olympic records in the 100 meters and 200 meters events. He was the first non-Euro-American to receive the title of the "world's fastest human" after winning gold medals in the 100 and 200 meters events at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In March 1935, Tolan won the 75, 100 and 220-yard events at the World Professional Sprint Championships in Melbourne to become the first man to win both the amateur and professional world sprint championships. In his full career as a sprinter, Tolan won 300 races and lost only 7.

Early years

Tolan was born in Denver, Colorado, one of four children. Tolan's father was Thomas Tolan. The family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah when Tolan was young, and moved again to Detroit, Michigan in 1924, when Tolan was 15 years old. Tolan later recalled, "My father read about better opportunities for Negroes here, so he packed up Mom and the four kids and we came here."

Cass Tech High School

Tolan attended Cass Technical High School in Detroit where he was an outstanding football player and sprinter. While at Cass Tech, Tolan set state records in the 100 and 220-yard dashes. While still in high school, Tolan ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds and the 220-yard dash in 21.5 seconds. At age of 16, Tolan was a member of a two-man team from Cass Tech that won the 1925 National Interscholastic indoor meet in Chicago. He won his first sprint double at the state meet as a sophomore, and in 1927 he won the 100 and 220-yard dashes at the National Interscholastic Championship at Soldier Field in Chicago. Despite his accomplishments as a sprinter, Tolan's first love was football, and he often said "the six touchdowns he scored in one game as a 131-pound quarterback at Detroit's Cass Tech High School was his greatest thrill, rather than his double win in the Olympics."

University of Michigan

Football

Tolan was recruited by several major universities as a football player, but he chose the University of Michigan. There are differing accounts as to why Tolan never played on the varsity football team at Michigan. According to a published account in The Detroit News in 2002, Tolan joined the freshman football team as a freshman in 1927. At that time, no African-American had played on Michigan's varsity football team since George Jewett in the 1890s. Tolan was initially allowed to play, but on the third day of practice, the freshman football coach told him, "Some of the coaches are disagreeing on your chances. Some of them think that you shouldn't be allowed to play football. I'd be tickled to have you but I'm afraid I'm going to be outvoted." The Detroit News noted, that the freshman coach was outvoted: "They took away Eddie Tolan’s football uniform and handed him a track suit in exchange."

Other accounts indicate, it was an injury that prevented Tolan from playing football at Michigan. An Associated Press story on Tolan in 1958 stated: "He would have been a football great as a quarterback, had a knee injury in his junior year in high school not forced him to channel all his energies to track." In his obituary, the Associated Press reported that the coaches at Michigan "talked the pint-sized speedster into going out for track." Tolan was also quoted as saying, "The track team did a lot more traveling then, so I saw the opportunity to travel on a Pullman and see the country."

Big Ten and world sprint champion

At Michigan, Tolan ran track under the mentorship of two of the great sprinters of their generations. Michigan's head coach, Steve Farrell, was considered "the greatest professional footracer this country has ever known" in the 1880s and 1890s. And Michigan's assistant coach Charles B. Hoyt, who took over from Farrell in 1930, was rated "America's best sprinter" in 1913, but lost his opportunity to compete in the 1916 Olympics due to World War I.

As a sophomore in May 1929, Tolan broke the Big Ten Conference record and tied the world’s record for the 100 yard dash with a time of 9.6. Press coverage starting with this world record run, and throughout his career, focused on three features – Tolan's race, his eyeglasses, and his short stocky build. Tolan was one of the first African-Americans to have success in sprinting, and he raced with eyeglasses taped to his head. Various accounts put his height anywhere from 5 feet, 4 inches, to 5 feet, 7 inches. One writer noted that Tolan "looks like a church deacon." Another writer described Tolan's appearance this way:

"Tolan, known as the 'Midnight Express,' was five feet six inches (1.7 m) tall and weighed 130 pounds (59 kg). He smiled often, raced while chewing gum, and could be easily identified by a bandage around his left knee to protect an old football injury. In addition he wore horn-rimmed glasses held in place with adhesive tape."

Tolan's gum-chewing became part of his routine. He chewed gum before a race to relieve stress. After accidentally running with the gum in his mouth, Tolan found that he was chewing in sync with his stride. Tolan later began chewing gum as part of his routine, chewing the gum faster when he needed to accelerate his leg movements.

At the Big Ten championships in May 1930, Tolan broke the world's record in the 100-yard dash with a time of 9.5. Tolan's performance was accepted by the International Amateur Athletic Federation as the new official world's record.

Seven weeks after breaking the world's record in the 100-yard dash, Tolan also broke the world's record in the 100 meters race. Competing in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tolan shaved two-tenths of a second off the record with a time of 10-1/5 seconds. Track officials in Vancouver announced after the race, that Tolan's record-setting performance was "all the more remarkable in the fact that he ran uphill, the finish mark being thirty inches higher than the starting point."

Tolan's world-record performances in 1930 brought him international fame, as he became known as the "Midnight Express." In May 1931, Tolan again broke the world's record in the 100 meters event with a time of 10.3 seconds in Vancouver. Southern California sprinter Frank Wykoff jumped to a slight lead, but Tolan came from behind to pass Wykoff at the 100-yard mark.

Tolan graduated from the University of Michigan in 1931.

Double gold medals at the 1932 Summer Olympics

Lead-up to the Olympics

After graduating from Michigan, Tolan enrolled at West Virginia State College, where he did "graduate work preparatory to teaching and coaching at a Negro institution." Early in 1932, Tolan was not running at his prior level. Despite the slow start, Dean Cromwell, Chairman of the All American Board of Track and Field, predicted great things for Tolan in his column on 1932's "Olympic Prospects." Cromwell wrote of Tolan:

"Just as spring warms into summer Tolan slides from the class of mediocre sprinters to that of the champions. He is a slow starter, but when the weather gets warm so does Eddie, and off he goes."

While press reports regularly referred to Tolan as "stocky," Cromwell took issue with that characterization:

"Eddie is now 24 years of age, five feet six inches tall and weights about 130 pounds. Although he has always been termed ‘stocky’ by the press, a comparison of his weight and height will show that he cannot properly be so styled. He is well muscled, though, and in action gives the impression of great running power, with his arms and legs working smoothly and strongly in a machine piston-like manner."

The Olympic trials were held at Stanford University, and Ralph Metcalfe won both the 100 and 200 meters finals, with Tolan finishing second to Metcalfe in each case. The results meant that the top two American sprinters in the 1932 Olympics would for the first time be African-Americans. As a result, much of the press attention focused on race. Los Angeles Times sports columnist Braven Dyer wrote: "Metcalfe and Tolan make the ace of spades look positively pale by comparison … But how these boys can run … And they figure to do even better here than they did at Palo Alto because it's warmer now and they enjoy the heat."

100 meters race

The 100 meters contest at the 1932 Olympics was one of the closest races in Olympic history. Tolan broke the Olympic record in the first heat of the second round with a time of 10.4 seconds, but Metcalfe remained the favorite. In the finals, Japanese sprinter Takayoshi Yoshioka jumped out to a four-yard lead after 40 meters. Tolan passed Yoshioka at the 6 -meter mark and had a two-yard lead over Metcalfe at the 100-yard mark. But Metcalfe passed Tolan at the tape and appeared to the crowd to be the winner. Sports writer Maxwell Stiles described the last strides as follows:

"His powerful legs churning wildly, Metcalfe swept down upon little Tolan like an avenging angel full of fury. Tolan, his left knee in an elastic bandage and his glasses taped to his head near his ears, dug in for one last desperate stride in his effort to hold the lead. Just at the tape, Metcalfe rushed past Tolan and was well ahead a yard beyond the finish. Almost everyone thought Metcalfe had won."

It was hours later, after review of films taken with a "Kirby two-eyed camera," that officials were able to declare Tolan the winner with a time of 10.3 seconds. The films showed that Tolan and Metcalfe hit the finish line in a dead heat, but Tolan was declared the winner, because he had his entire torso past the line on the ground before Metcalfe.

200 meters race

The 200 meters race was held on the fourth day of competition, and this time the race was not close, as Tolan beat Metcalfe easily with an Olympic record time of 21.2 seconds – four-tenths of a second better than the prior record of 21.6 seconds. Tolan stumbled slightly with three yards to go, but righted himself and finished with a four-foot lead. With double wins in the 100 and 200 meters contests, Tolan was dubbed the "world's fastest human." Tolan was the first African-American to have that distinction, and press coverage of his Olympic wins focused on his race. The Associated Press called him the "spectacled little American Negro" and "the dusky little thunderbolt." Braven Dyer referred to him as "the stubby colored boy," and noted that "the chunky Detroit Negro" had defeated Arthur Jonath of Germany, "the white-skinned Teuton." Another writer described how the "little black man with horn-rimmed glasses" crossed the finish line, being chased by "a white man of America, George Simpson," and "a brother black, Ralph Metcalfe."

Commentators also noted, that the only other two sprinters to win double gold in the 100 and 200 meters races were also University of Michigan athletes, Ralph Craig and Archie Hahn.

Reaction to Tolan's Accomplishments

After the sprint competition concluded, a reporter interviewed Tolan and Metcalfe in their shared room at the Olympic Village. When Metcalfe teased Tolan for being lucky, Tolan replied, "Yeah, I had it all right – but it's 'bout time, Ralph; first little ol' luck I had in eight years!" Still in bed at noon wearing pajamas and with a stocking cap on his head, Tolan said he was "in the best condition of my life when the 200 meters final started," and he vowed to give his gold medals to his mother.

Back in Detroit, Mayor Frank Murphy appointed a reception committee to meet Tolan at the train station, and Michigan Governor Wilber M. Brucker declared September 6, 1932 as "Eddie Tolan Day" throughout the state. The governor issued a proclamation stating that Tolan had "brought honor to our commonwealth" and encouraging communities throughout the state to arrange ceremonies "as an expression of Michigan's pride in his achievement."

Tolan's mother noted, that she was proud of her son's accomplishments. She noted that, though she had worked hard as the sole provider for the family, it was worth it. She added, "If my menfolk could only find jobs I could ease up a bit and a mighty big worry would be off Eddie's mind."

In April 1936, Tolan, along with many other sports champions and stand outs, was honored at a banquet in Detroit, MI. This Banquet was the first celebration of Champions Day.

Vaudeville and hard times

Less than six months after winning Olympic gold medals and the title of the "world's fastest human," Tolan garnered national press when he fell on hard times. Syndicated columnist William H. Beatty wrote that "the heady wine of victory has turned overnight to vinegar" for Tolan. Tolan noted that, when he was met at the train station by a welcoming committee, his half-brother was collecting waste paper in the grass of the park in front of the train station. Tolan noted that his half-brother was "luckier than I am," because he had a job. His parents had both been unemployed for many months, and it was not until January 1933 that Tolan was able to get a low-paying job as a filing clerk in a county office. Tolan's lifetime dream of becoming a physician was waning, as he had been "unable to make enough to support himself and his parents."

Desperate to earn a living, Tolan "walked the streets of many cities, seeking work," and even briefly appeared in vaudeville in 1932 with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. They made a good team; Tolan had set world records for running forwards, and Robinson had set world's records for running backwards: 50 yards backward sprint (6 seconds), 75 yards backwards sprint (8.2 seconds), and 100 yards backwards sprint (13.2 seconds).

Because of his brief appearance in vaudeville, the Michigan Amateur Athletic Association stripped Tolan of his amateur status in June 1933. And in April 1934, Tolan's bad luck continued as an automobile he was driving struck and seriously injured an 80-year-old pedestrian.

Professional sprinting career

In November 1934, Tolan took a leave of absence from his job as assistant county registrar of deeds to compete in the Australian sprint program, a series of five professional races, including the Stawell Gift handicap. Tolan returned in April 1935 after having set new Australian records of 21.5 seconds in the 220-yard dash on a full curve track and 7.5 seconds for the 75-yard dash. He won the 75, 100, and 220-yard events at the World Professional Sprint Championships in March 1935 in Melbourne, and became the first man to win both the amateur and professional world sprint championships.

In his full career as a sprinter, Tolan won 300 races and lost only 7. Throughout his career as a sprinter, Tolan worked by a simple creed: "Start fast, run easily, stay in your lane and finish strong."

Civil service and teaching career

After returning from Australia, Tolan returned to his job in Detroit as a clerk to the Register of Deeds. Tolan worked at a variety of jobs in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1956, Tolan became a school teacher in physical and health education. He taught at the Irving Elementary School on Detroit's West Side for several years.

Death and family

Tolan never married. In 1965, Tolan's kidneys failed, and he was required to undergo weekly dialysis treatments for the rest of his life. In 1967, Tolan died from heart failure at age 58 at Detroit's Mt. Carmel Hospital, while undergoing one of his weekly treatments. At the time of his death, Jesse Owens paid him tribute in Jet magazine:

"When I was in high school, Eddie and Ralph (Metcalfe) were my idols. Eddie and I later became close friends. I used to live in Detroit and every time I'd go back Eddie was one of the first ones I’d look up."

Tolan was survived by his sisters, June Brown and Martha Lombard, and a brother, Hart H. Tolan. Though the two never met, Tolan was also a cousin of former Major League Baseball player Bobby Tolan. Eddie Tolan is interred at United Memorial Gardens in Plymouth, Michigan.

Honors and awards

In 1958, Tolan was inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame. He was one of the first 18 persons inducted. He was inducted into the University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor in 1980. Only 17 individuals were inducted into the Hall before Tolan.

Tolan was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Eddie Tolan was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1982.

Wikipedia

[booksinpublic]

Why we’re covering Russia

Please prepare to encounter an earth-shattering paradox that might just rip apart the fabric of space, time and modern American politics. Ready? Deep breath. Here we go.

I’m a journalist and I’m not bitter about the election.

Personally and professionally, I’m not attempting to change the results of the US Presidential election, sneak Hillary Clinton into office or otherwise disrupt Donald Trump’s road to the White House. I respect the decision that emerged after a year of hateful campaigning and fearful voting, and honestly, I’m not even that surprised by the outcome.

Personally, I am affronted and ashamed to have Donald Trump represent my country, and I’m afraid of what strange new havok his idiocy and ego might inflict upon the world. But, to be fair, I am afraid of every president.

As with every new person we proudly march into the Oval Office, I wonder how many people this president will kill. I wonder how, why and when his decisions will result in death, how large the scope will be, and I hope he ruminates seriously on his role in the entire affair. Because sending people to die and orchestrating the untimely murder of citizens across the world is one of the infallible, unavoidable aspects of being President of the United States, especially in an era of drone warfare, connected missiles and rapidly advancing weapons technology. People are going to die because of Donald Trump’s decisions, just as people died under Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and nearly every other president in history. Just as they would have died under Hillary Clinton.

I wonder how killing people will make Donald Trump feel. I wonder if it will change him.

But I digress.

Donald Trump is the President of the United States. This is a fact. As a citizen and especially as a journalist, I honor this fact and I’m not in the business of trying to change it single-handedly.

Which brings us to Russia.

B A C K  I N  T H E  U S S R

I would not be doing my job if I did not write about Russia’s well-documented cyber attacks on the US election process in 2016. Engadget would not be doing its job if we ignored the conclusions and evidence of multiple trusted intelligence agencies that Russia attacked the very foundation of US democracy right under our noses, while the world was watching.

Engadget is dedicated to discussing all of the ways technology influences our lives -- this includes its influence on the US political system. This includes hacking, especially on an international scale; especially from a country as power-hungry and dangerous as Russia.

Let’s be clear here: Russia is dangerous. Russia is the reason the war in Syria is so catastrophic that it has been called the worst humanitarian crisis since the Holocaust. Right now, Russia is helping bomb hospitals, civilians, children and entire cities in a nation already devastated by civil war. Russian president Vladimir Putin has shown willful disregard for international laws, not only by authorizing cyber attacks on the US, but also by invading his country’s neighbor, Crimea, and taking control of it by force. Putin’s actions have earned him a dedicated sub-heading on Wikipedia’s “List of journalists killed in Russia” page. Putin is dangerous. Russia is dangerous.

This isn’t a revelation. Frankly, the response to Russia’s intrusion into the US political system has been completely backward. Conservatives have decried Russia’s policies and actions for generations; Republicans rallied against the USSR so fiercely in the mid-1900s that they birthed McCarthyism and decades of anti-Communism crusades.

But somehow, today, the loudest defenders of Russia’s cyber attacks on the US election process are people who voted for Donald Trump, the Republican candidate. It’s baffling.

J O U R N A L I S M  T O D A Y

I only know the political leanings of these commenters because a pattern has emerged on my published articles about Russia, cyber warfare and fake news: It seems that every time I mention these topics, I’m accused of being a liberal cuck who’s attempting to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s victory. Even though these are straight news articles; even though they are clearly sourced, concisely written and contain no personal commentary.

Even then, in the comments I am suddenly transformed into the wider “mainstream media,” which I imagine as a beastly, bulbous worm oozing with kale-scented puss and covered in the plasma of a million aborted fetuses, quietly undulating in front of a computer playing Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches on an endless loop. I am suddenly part of a larger effort to remove Donald Trump from office and implement endless term limits for Barack (or Michelle) Obama; I am a snowflake who can’t get over the election; I am the absolute worst.

And it’s not just me. Anyone who writes about Russia on Engadget -- and across the web -- gets similar treatment. So, let’s take a moment to clear the air: There is no left-leaning, media-wide conspiracy to brainwash the American public.

Journalism is just like any other industry -- it’s composed of individuals, some of whom are liberal, some of whom are conservative and some of whom don’t give a damn. Plenty of reporters voted for Donald Trump (and no, we’re not talking about the bloggers at Breitbart who were contractually obligated to vote for him, donate to his campaign and kiss his gold-flecked slippers once a week), and plenty voted for Hillary Clinton. Across the broad field of journalism (again, this does not include tabloid sites like Breitbart or InfoWars), there is no conspiracy to skew facts in any particular direction.

Of course, I can not and do not speak for every journalist. I take my job seriously; I have a degree in journalism and I delight in thinking critically about its role in society. Freedom of the press is protected by the First Amendment for a reason -- it is a vital aspect of our country’s checks and balances. It ensures people in power can’t act without consequence. It is necessary and I am proud to be a part of this particular machine.

Furthermore, I’m proud to report for an outlet with a laser-focus on technology and all of the ways it impacts our lives. As Moore’s Law plays out before our eyes, technology is becoming increasingly relevant to every person on the planet. I delight in introducing new audiences to the fascinating worlds of AI, gadgetry, cyber security, video games and, yes, state-sponsored hacking.

F A K E  N E W S

I can hear the comments now: “No voting machines were hacked, no other systems involved in the elections were hacked. This is fake news at it's [sic] best.”

The thing is, comments like this (completely real) one have little basis in reality. I have never written an article claiming Russia hacked US voting machines, nor has any other journalist worth his or her salt. The easiest way to fact-check this claim is to read our stories.

I have also never written “fake news” (though I did get to the second round of interviews at The Onion like eight years ago). Fake news is not simply an article that you find upsetting or a report that makes someone you like -- or voted for -- look bad. There is a global fake-news industry churning away right now that is dedicated to writing incorrect and misleading stories about the US political system -- and we should be concerned about it.

When citizens can’t distinguish truth from a lie, we lose our power. It is impossible to make informed decisions in the voting booth, at town halls or on the streets without a consensus on the facts; we can’t change the system if we don’t first understand how it works. When fiction is treated as truth, there is no foundation for productive conversation and we lose the ability to reach a compromise. Democracy’s floor falls away beneath us.

It takes some work to write fake news, but it takes vastly more effort and expertise to spot trends, investigate, interview, verify and craft a true, in-depth report that stands up to public scrutiny. The process can take days, weeks, months or years. The process involves traveling to Baghdad, Manila, Delhi, Nice, Seoul and every other city across the globe; the process involves weeks away from family; the process gets people killed. And no, that’s not just in Russia.

This is what journalists do, every day, in pursuit of the truth. Journalists at CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, NPR and Engadget follow complex processes and a strict code of ethics -- all of which are currently under a microscope as the Trump campaign wages a war of words against the press and its freedoms.

I do contend that 24-hour news networks in particular provided a disservice to the American public this election cycle. While plenty of hard-hitting, verified reporting about the candidates came out in 2016, they couldn’t hold the country’s attention while BREAKING stories about Trump’s sexual proclivities dominated the television screen. Plus, Donald Trump’s election was a shock to plenty of seasoned journalists who put too much stock in pollsters and prediction models in an unprecedented campaign season.

This scrutiny means journalists are working harder today than before Election Day. And just like 2017 promises to be a great year for punk rock, it’s also looking like fertile ground for robust, system-shaking journalism.

Which, again, is not fake news. A recent episode of Planet Money offers brilliant insight into the machinery behind fake news, and I encourage anyone who’s ever lodged that term at a journalist to listen in.

At its heart, fake news is the complete opposite of journalism; it is the antithesis of the work I do every day. It makes my job harder.

It’s a good thing I’ve always loved a challenge.

P R O M I S E S

So, here we are.

I will continue to write about Russian cyber attacks on the US political system. Engadget will continue to cover every instance of hacking, nuclear armament, technological advancement and military upgrades to come out of Russia, the US or any other country with global influence. Covering technology as it infiltrates systems across the world is not only fascinating and important work; it’s our only job.

As a human, I will make mistakes. As a journalist, I will rectify and clarify those mistakes as quickly as possible, with complete transparency and in the interest of cultivating an informed audience. This is what separates my work from the world of fake news -- my goal is to inform; the goal of fake news is to generate quick outrage and clicks.

I will continue to act professionally and write the truth as far as we can know it for the benefit of every single person who reads my articles.

Even the ones calling me a liberal cuck.

Especially those ones.

[foursproutwealth-blog]

The Skripal Case Is Being Pushed Down The Memory Hole With Libya and Aleppo

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/the-skripal-case-is-being-pushed-down-the-memory-hole-with-libya-and-aleppo/

The Skripal Case Is Being Pushed Down The Memory Hole With Libya and Aleppo

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On the fourth of March, in the sleepy British cathedral town of Salisbury, an ex-spy named Sergei Skripal was poisoned by an assassin with the most deadly nerve agent known to man.

The Russian government was immediately blamed by a shocked and outraged world. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson assured the people of Great Britain that “There’s no doubt” that Moscow was responsible. In a large and sudden leap forward in cold war escalations, Russian diplomats were thrown out of countries all around the globe, including my own Australia, in a show of solidarity with the United Kingdom. It was the largest collective ejection of Russian diplomats in history.

Two months after his earth-shattering assassination, as the world stared spellbound at the weekend’s immensely popular PR spectacle of a royal wedding, Sergei Skripal was quietly discharged from the hospital he’d been staying at. The BBC reports that he is walking and approaching complete recovery.

Wait a second. Haven’t I seen this Python skit before?

So to recap, an ex-spy who had been retired and strategically irrelevant for years was reportedly poisoned by the Kremlin with Novichok, a scary Russian-sounding word which refers to a group of extremely deadly and fast-acting nerve agents that start shutting down the body’s muscles and respiratory system within 30 seconds to two minutes.

Except in the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia it was several hours with a leisurely stroll, a meal, and beers in between.

The poison was placed in Yulia Skripal’s suitcase. Actually no, they got that wrong, it was the air vents in their car. Wait, no, that doesn’t work either. Maybe it was administered via weaponized miniature drone! Wait, no, it wasthe family’s car door handle. Actually, scratch that, it was the front door of the house. Definitely the front door of the house. We’re absolutely sure. Either that or Sergei Skripal’s favorite Russian cereal. They were given 100 grams of Novichok. Wait, no, that’s ridiculous, we retract that. Okay, maybe we have no idea what happened. Oh hey, their pets were completely unaffected by the poison. Let’s incinerate them.

Oh, and Johnson’s claim that the Porton Down laboratory had assured him “There’s no doubt” that Russia was behind the poisoning? Turns out that was just a bald-faced lie; Porton Down said no such thing and it was never its job to make such an assessment. Johnson lied, and both the Foreign Office and British mainstream media attempted to cover it up; tweets were deleted, transcripts were re-written, and narratives were given a good spin of historic revisionism by asserting that the UK government’s unequivocal insistence that the Kremlin poisoned the Skripals had been merely a “suggestion”.

And now both Sergei and Yulia Skripal, alleged victims of a poisoning by highly trained assassins using the deadliest nerve agent ever created, are doing fine. 

But you’re still supposed to fear and hate Russia. Just don’t think too hard about it or remember too much.

Remember Aleppo?

I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t; corporate media outlets hardly ever talk about it anymore. It’s almost like they want us to forget the horror stories they told us about how the city that had been occupied by good, noble freedom fighters was about to be taken by an army of depraved psychopaths who wanted to rape women, burn children alive, and shoot civilians in their homes. Back at the tail end of 2016, though, it was all you ever heard about. The “fall of Aleppo”, they called it. If the west didn’t intervene to stop Damascus and Moscow from retaking East Aleppo from the good-hearted rebels, everyone there would be raped, tortured, and butchered by the soulless army of the Syrian government.

Well, Moscow and Damascus did recapture East Aleppo, and it turns out that everything we were told about it was a lie. The atrocities the Syrian Arab Army were accused of intending to commit proved to be completely unfounded, those “freedom fighters” were predominantly cruel Al Qaeda affiliates, and the city is now thriving and bustling with busy marketplaces. But after all the constant apocalyptic alarmism, the mass media outlets who’d been warning of all the horrific crimes against humanity which would surely be committed after the “fall of Aleppo” forgot all about the city once they were proven completely wrong about everything.

Aleppo was pushed down the memory hole. It’s a non-thing now. Turns out Gary Johnson was ahead of the curve.

How about Libya? Remember Libya? Libya’s that country that got pushed down the memory hole the second the western empire got the regime change it was after. Before Muammar Gaddafi was mutilated in the streets to the sadistic cackles of Hillary Clinton, we were all told with increasing urgency that humanitarian interventionism was needed because Gaddafi’s troops are doing evil things like taking Viagra to help them commit mass rapes against Libyan civilians. Now Gaddafi is dead, we know that both thecase for humanitarian interventionism and the Viagra-for-rape stories were lies, and Libya is a humanitarian disaster with an open slave trade after western interventionism created a failed state.

Where are all those cries for humanitarian interventionism in Libya now? Now that the nation is infinitely worse off than it was under Gaddafi?

Doesn’t matter. Memory hole.

Time and time again, we’re fed these deceitful narratives to manufacture support for the agendas of the western war machine, and when the truth begins to surface that we were lied to once again, the news churn moves on and we’re distracted with something else as the old narrative is shuffled back beyond the reach of memory.

Maybe a year or two later we wonder to ourselves “I wonder what ever happened with that major news story? I should google it,” but nothing comes up and most of us shrug and move on.

And now a very suspicious and possibly Christopher Steele-related silence has descended on the matter of the Skripals, to the point where Sergei himself can walk out of the hospital and barely cause a blip in the news, and nobody can talk to either of them but everyone pretends that’s perfectly normal. This case which points very clearly to a mountain of lies and cover-ups by the British government and its affiliates is now being shuffled out of the news cycle and replaced with vapid nonsense about Meghan’s dress and Trump’s latest obnoxious tweet.

“Unlike everybody else in the media, I have no intention of letting go of Salisbury because the international ramifications of the Salisbury poisoning affair are too grave to allow them to be pushed out of the news by a Royal Wedding, by Wimbledon or whatever else it is..” pic.twitter.com/7KScziA2M2

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) May 4, 2018

But we won’t let them forget. We won’t let the world forget that these steadily increasing imperialist escalations against Russia and its allies were given a hefty bump by lies about what happened in Salisbury. There are plenty of people on alternative media like me who will keep pointing at that big dark hole of unanswered questions and yelling “Hey! What about all those lies you guys told us about the Skripals?”

This one isn’t going down the memory hole, guys. There are some turds that just won’t flush. This one’s staying around forever. We’ll keep reminding everyone. We won’t let anyone forget.

[notsdlifter]

Addled Roots: Prologue

The Apocalypse Obsession

The apocalypse was a national obsession, you could say. People always talked about the end of the world. Every summer, Hollywood churned out blockbusters about robots pushing mankind to the brink of extinction. For a decade-long stretch, the most popular show on TV had zombie herds wandering across the country like the buffalo used to tromp across the Great Plains. People had fears galore: global warming, rising seas, super flus, super volcanoes, giant meteoroids, toxins in our food, air, and water. Y2K was supposed to signify the collapse. Then it was the end of the Mayan calendar. The sun itself was a massive flare away from frying all the electronics on the planet and sending us back to the Neolithic Age. It was just a matter of time before some flop-haired billionaire pushed us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The apocalypse was right around the corner and we were all chewing our fingernails off waiting for it to arrive. Oh, those were the good old days. 

If I could go back to 2018, I would be the Apocalypse’s Paul Revere. “People,” I’d warn, “The apocalypse isn’t coming… The apocalypse isn’t coming. IT’S ALREADY HERE!” 

Here is a quick history lesson. The “first beast” of the apocalypse was invented in Japan in 1893 when a chemist used western science to understand ancient Asian medicines. The Nazis gave a synthesized version of it to soldiers during World War II and the drug-crazed Wehrmacht blanketed half of Europe in a furious Blitzkrieg.  The tentacles of the beast spread across America in the 1950s. It started as a simple pick-me-up, a good time booster that beatnik poets used for fuel. Then it was outlawed in the 1970s by the American government relegating it to biker gangs and hardened drug users. By the late 1980s, Americans were making it in their bathtubs and houses were exploding from Ogunquit Maine to the salt flats of California. It shattered rural American communities like Little Boy’s blast flattened Hiroshima. Crystal Methamphetamine, is far and away the most abused drug in the history of the world. 

The Drug Epidemic

In late 2018, while America was deep in the throes of a quarter century old meth epidemic, another drug started to wreak its havoc. A “second beast”—if you will briefly indulge my hyperbole—had legitimate roots, and many got it by prescription and in pill form. It had a handful of names: oxy, roxy, fentanyl, black tar, china, chiva, smack, heroin… call it what you will. All of them were from the same family of opioids. Unlike its bastardized brother meth, opioids reached into all levels of society. It hit housewives just as hard as street users. Unsuspecting patients were prescribed the drug by their trusted family doctor for an injury only to begin the spiral of addiction. People bought it in the mail, off the shadow internet, and had it FedExed to their houses. Pill mills were seemingly in every strip mall in America. Opioids were everywhere, more ubiquitous than the Golden Arches of McDonalds. 

A syndemic is the study of two epidemics and how they interact. Imagine, if you will, two massive epidemics each wielding a crippling outcome of addiction in millions of people. On the one hand, you have the meth scourge, arguably one of the worst in world history.  On the other, you have the opioid crisis that was rumored to be so debilitating both economically and socially that it alone have removed America’s status as a superpower. Now what if both of those epidemics fed off each other and exponentially magnified the negative consequences? What if they were spinning at breakneck speeds in opposite directions in a social particle accelerator and smashed together? New elements are born that have unforeseen consequences. That is a syndemic effect. And that is exactly what happened to the Great U.S. of A. 

The opioid epidemic was sucked into areas that were already ravaged by meth like light hits a black hole. And in the pressure and darkness of those afflictions, something truly malevolent sprung from the track-marked carcasses of dying addicts.  There was an interaction, an unexpected agitator that spun people into a specific mindset. It wasn’t pure rage, not exactly, because there was a calculating aspect even though they moved with reckless abandonment. These addicts awoke from a figuratively dead sleep with the intent to murder. They had—to borrow a word from the legal community—a “depraved heart” and singular purpose. 

“Oh, you poor fuckers,” I’d say, “you should have seen it coming.” 

A Rash of Drug Overdoses

The addicts called it a “goofball.” It was a mixture of meth and heroin heated in a spoon. The high was a combination of the warm bath sedation of heroin and the frantic euphoria of IV meth. A high-low lethal amalgamation that some addicts described as a tearing in half of the soul. Overdoses skyrocketed. There was a public outcry and a flurry of class action lawsuits aimed at the manufacturers, distributors, and the physicians who wrote the scripts. A hundred thousand died in a three-month period. And, in this little bitty town in the middle of nowhere, there were a handful of ODs that didn’t stay dead.  

It all began in a spot between Denver and Saint Louis. I’m not sure if it happened when some hapless local queued up a “goofball” in a dirty spoon and put a match to it. But I do know that it started with a new synthesis of meth. It wasn’t more powerful than the Mexican meth cooked in super labs or more potent than Walter White’s mythical “baby blue.” But this meth, when it was mixed with an opioid and heated, grabbed peoples’ brains and never let them go. It dipped its tentacles deep into the gray matter and molded the perfect soldiers of the apocalypse.

The signs were everywhere. While people were helplessly plugged into their phones and sprouting roots into their couches binge watching Netflix, America was deteriorating like a bad case of meth mouth. The epidemic hit the rural Midwest first. Addicts showed signs of “the shakes.” Oh, dear God the shakes. These addicts were like normal meth fiends: the rotten teeth, the open sores, hallucinations, advanced aging, the insatiable desire to find the next fix… the whole kit and caboodle. But they appeared only at night in rural areas and in massive packs. They looked like your general run-of-the-mill meth heads but they were different. Really different. 

So, yeah, about the “goofballs”—turns out that was an apt nickname. Do you remember Looney Tunes when Bugs drank poison? His eyes bulged out, arms contorted in lighting fast poses. That was the cartoon version isolated to a single subject. The real-life shakes were this twitchy, spastic shuffle that was eerily coordinated across groups of people. They moved as a unit like nocturnal predators. Once the shakes came, they always packed up and hunting for the living, all while burning swaths of homes to the ground. And these things, these fucking drug beasts, could cut and move like NFL slot receivers. They were dead addicts, with only one key difference. They didn’t eat brains or human flesh. Though they were not alive, they were not undead either. They seemed to exist somewhere between the planes of alive and dead in some biological limbo. These “dead addicts” had only one purpose: to head out at night in large, fast moving packs to murder, burn, and infect. The screams and the flames spread across the country like a viral advertisement.

A year into the syndemic, as the shakes exploded across rural America, there were probably only twenty thousand dead addicts. That sounds like a lot, but they were spread out. The government might have handled things. The larger cities immediately put up fence lines, thick walls, and check points. Martial law and the army’s use of nighttime firing lines and shoot-on-sight strategies were effective for a time. Most places could have ridden out the fires and roving killing herds. But there were issues that no one fully understood. 

These dead addicts didn’t drag their feet and listlessly moan while shuffling toward a meal. They moved in predatory packs and tightly controlled formations.  After they hit an area, they rarely returned. And there are other things, too. They sent out small groups to test the strength of a wall or estimate the total firepower of a defensive position. When they strike, they did it with such an awesome display of force. Twenty thousand rapidly-moving, living corpses, all pressed into and over cement barriers while under a barrage of machine gun fire. The dead addicts scratched and bit and bleed in their frantic, flailing way. It was all so militaristic, like they had a general. And they retreated into dark areas to wait out the day hiding in older sewer lines, in abandoned houses, or just buried themselves in the dirt. Only the most fortified places are still standing, but even they will eventually fall.  

The Troubled Children

Right after the outbreak of the shakes, before shit went south, a new wrinkle appeared. Something started happening with the kids. They were always children of a certain age, slightly older than toddlers and not quite teenagers. You know kids in that horribly awkward stage of life? The big elbows, comically skinny legs, and bad hair. Almost always they were grade-schoolers somewhere between second and sixth grade. These kids became susceptible, open to control. There were many stories of grade-schoolers stopping in mid-stride, always with their head tilted slightly and a thousand-yard stare, before engaging in a brief fit of terrorism. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, they threw open gates. They went on violent rampages. They broke into weapon stashes and fuel depos with catastrophic results. A minute later, the kids would be sitting, sobbing, completely oblivious to the world. Utterly unaware of their acts. 

City leaders came up with various plans to deal with the children, all of them equally flawed: (1) isolate, (2) segregate, or (3) eliminate. That would have been a fine plan if talking about a rat infestation or coyotes killing calves. But these were kids. You do not fuck with people’s kids. The slightest insinuation that the government was planning to “deal” with the “kid problem” turned soccer moms into suicide bombers. I honestly believe that Martha Stewart would peel the skin off your face with a butter knife if you threatened her children. All hell broke loose, and it never stopped breaking. No place was safe. There was chaos inside the cities. It always seemed like any place was on the verge of collapse. In the countryside, there was a desperate horror. If the killing herds found you—and there were millions of dead addicts tediously searching everything—they would kill you. 

Token-Oak

All this aforementioned shit started in the little town of Token-Oak. My hometown. And I’d like to tell you that no one saw this behemoth coming, that it was some chemistry accident stumbled upon by a bathtub chef who unwittingly created the batch that brought the greatest military in world history to its knees. But there was one person who saw this whole damn thing decades before it started. 

Before the emergency declarations and mobilization of the national guard, she knew. Before the major cities were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with check points every thirty miles on major highways, she knew. Before all rural America became uninhabitable and uncrossable, my grandma knew what was coming. She knew it all the way back in the late 1980s, the first time we saw a meth addict in Token-Oak. She saw the fall and, in her own way, prepared me for what was coming. And everyone thought she was crazy. 

God, I should have seen it, too. It was always right in my face grabbing me by the ears throughout my life. As a kid in Token-Oak, the meth crisis had just taken hold with bathtub cooks springing up everywhere. When I moved away as an adolescent, I saw it increase a little more each time I returned to the town. Little pockets of the apocalypse—lab explosions, rampant murder, and disappearances—were all over Token-Oak. And as an adult that got trapped in that pit of hell, I was at ground zero when the syndemic started. I was in the eye of the hurricane, a silent circle as the ferocious winds of the storm tore the country apart. 

I don’t think we will ever make it back, not to normal anyway. Once the world has been saturated with enough blood, it has forever changed. After the whole scale slaughter of the American Indians, a nation of roads and laws and good Christian morality sprang up in their place. But underneath it all—waiting in the shiny new world—there was this bitterness, the cold reality that human beings are capable of the gravest infliction of suffering and pain. And that is why we were all so obsessed with the Apocalypse. Because deep down, we all knew it was coming. Because it had been here many times before. 

But what I know now is that we wanted it to come, too. And the thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought that we needed the apocalypse in many ways. A fresh start. A clean slate. Call it whatever you want, but millions felt that way before the collapse. 

My story is not the most exciting tale of the downfall—hell, you will find any account of the survivors from the shake attack on Chicago more riveting. It’s not the sexiest, it doesn’t have the best intel on the government response, though there is a great deal written in these pages about how to survive a night in America when they come for you. And they always come for you. But my story is the most complete of all the stories. I was a child in Token-Oak during the syndemic’s humble beginnings in the late 1980s. And, in a blind stroke of luck, I was a graduate assistant at the University of Chicago when the government first tested human brains for the shakes. I was the first person, due to my professional training and location, to recognize that there was a problem with certain American kids. And, somehow, I ended up back home on the day the syndemic officially began. I was at ground zero every step of the way. There is not another person alive or dead that can say the same thing. 

I never thought my life would end up like this. Not in a million years did I think a child from Token-Oak would be on the forefront of the apocalypse. There is a good chance that everyone will be dead soon. The spread has done nothing but intensify since the outbreak. Each passing month, another small pocket of resistance, another American city, succumbs to the killing herds. 

If I told you that I don’t know why I am writing this book, I’d be lying. It will probably never be read by another human being. There won’t be awards, no reading circles, it will not be published. And I can tell you that writing these pages at night nearly drowning in sounds of screaming and the gnashing of teeth has not been easy. But I write this nightly for selfish reasons. It keeps me alive, pushes me to fight on, to scrounge food and keep my weapons clean. Because in these pages, buried somewhere in my memory of the downfall, is a secret. Something hidden that I somehow overlooked. And maybe, if I dig deep enough, pull out my memories, I will find something that will beat these ravenous bastards straight back into hell. 

I am going to take you back to the beginning. All the way back to where it started and walk you through everything step by bloody step. I’ll start with the smartest woman—the most simultaneously ruthless and loving woman that ever lived. And even though we never talked about it, she knew. My Grandma knew it was coming and did her best to warn me.  “Oh, you poor fuckers” I’d say riding from city to city, “the APCOLYPSE IS HERE.” 

Robert Warrington, Ph.D.  Token-Oak, Winter of 2026 2556 days after the Syndemic

[hellogreenergrass]

People vs Place

Im in the process of reading two books, almost simultaneously. The one counters the other you see and I would veer into one side of my personality too much if I didn’t balance the books out. Become too much about “people” or too much about the wilds, the “place”. The first book is Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, a book about human civilisation, about us as this collective machine churning forward under the bleating mantra of “progress”. It talks less about the great achievements we have made, and more about the path of destruction each civilisation has left in its wake, from the Sumerians, to the Mayans, and the Easter Island folk. Of course the Easter Island folk. He is gearing us up to ask where will be tomorrow, as a civilisation. What is our end game? We roll relentlessly ‘forward’, all the time watching the ball rather than the game. And could that ever have been more true than right now, with our civilisation on the brink of… something. It could be one of many things: civil war as politics polarises our every opinion; nuclear war as two fat man-children wave their warhead-willies at each other; or an almighty natural disaster, as floods and winds, seas and sun batter our wildly short-sighted urban habitats. I dunno, it just feels like something is going to happen. Safe to say, the book whilst a must read, is really fucking depressing. And the weight of it is bearing on me. I said to Kristian last night that I used to only read novels and books less about people but more about place, or at most books by people who just walked around places (see Fiona Campbell in Africa for another good read, she used to bonk Ray Mears and he appears in a bush in the book!). But now I read politics day and night. I no longer subscribe to BBC Wildlife or National Geographic, but to the Washington Post and The Economist. I no longer live on the edge of a forest or the sea or a moor, but in a city. Granted, I found a tiny oasis of park and lake and live on the edge of that instead. But on one side where I have ducks, grebes, herons, owls, foxes and every native deciduous tree that can grow here, on the other I have a busy road churning with city traffic, airplanes overhead, sirens in the distance, litter instead of leaves. My flat could not be more of a metaphor for my life if I had planned it! Torn between my ambitions that keep me in cities and my desire to roam and live a wilder life. To make the metaphor more reflective, the “city side” has a hospital - hidden by trees – that houses a mental ward. On nice days people come outside and in between the rush of cars you hear the screaming and manic shrieking of the unwell…

So the other book is probably the main reason I am so tetchy right now. Its hit a nerve that has made me realise all of the above. Its called the Outrun by Amy Liptrot, an Orcadian who like others, left the Islands and moved South to London of all places. In London she found she constantly searched for the horizon and never found it, looking for ‘the edge’ of things all the time. I get that – Its been a decade since I left Cornwall and I still find myself doing it. Whilst South she developed a problem with drink and after a years of abuse has returned to the Orkneys to get better. She has moved out to Papay where she is holed up in an RSPB property (she was a “corncrake wife”) called Rose Cottage, and is documenting her recovery and inner revelations whilst talking us through everything about the island life: The seals, the skies, the ‘merry dancers’. All the while she is tuning into the tide and moon cycles, the stars, the weather. And I realised how detached I am from them here. We don’t get much weather in Birmingham, which is weird for me. I grew up on the Cornish coast, I’ve never lived somewhere so stable. If civilisation pacifies you into insignificance through the weight of our population size and the rituals of consumerism, then cities are the final nail in the lid, pacifying you from your very nature. Detaching you from the cycles of the world. Infrastructure making tides and weather and seasons irrelevant. Kristian and I grow stuff, keeping a tenuous thread of attachment to the cycles going. I’m about to clear out the aphid infested purple sprouting broccoli and plant the Autumn stocks for next Spring: Garlic and some Spring onions I think. We’ve had our first crop of apples on the trees I bought Krisitan for his birthday last year, and we recently slept overnight in the forest at Cannock Chase so we could fill as many tubs as the daylight would allow with blackberries. Little threads.

I wonder if I am homesick, but I don’t really have a home so don’t really know if that is it. Cornwall is kind of home, but I cant really go back for any length whilst my dad still exists there. Scandinavia is a close second, but the language barrier jars on me. Makes the place too much about the people all over again. I think about Scotland as an in-between, but don’t know what I would do for work up there. I do like the choice of communities in Birmingham though. I like cycling through the park and seeing the Asian guy doing tai-chi every morning in the bandstand, the catholic nuns basking in the sun on the benches, the burka clad women running in circuits with their white Nikes flashing out from under their black skirts. The three Sikh guys that stroll out together in deep conversation, turbans bowed into one another as they walk. The military fitness club, the yummy-mummies, the hooded lads draped over bikes and benches as they huddle over a smart phone. And then I remember how pointless it all is. How we are just little specks in a machine of civilisation. I don’t know them, they don’t know me. And if one of us ‘went’ tomorrow, it wouldn’t really matter. Nothing would change. I don’t really believe that the “butterfly flaps its wings” metaphor is applicable to humans. We are too many.

And that’s kind of where I have got myself too. I wonder if that’s the reason most people feel the need to be away somewhere remote: so that you are surrounded by fewer people in order to be more significant. On Signy, in Antarctica, our footsteps in the moss would last years. Here, on the tarmac, I leave none.

I wonder where my place is. So yeah. That old chestnut! 

[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

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[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

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[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

Related news:

> U.S. veteran Kerrey refuses to step down from Fulbright University Vietnam

> Bob Kerrey speaks out after Vietnamese anger at his role in Fulbright University

Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

[marketingadvisorvietnam]

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên https://www.ticvietnam.vn/forgetting-thanh-phong/

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Forgetting Thanh Phong

Vietnam grapples with the unsavory dilemma of having to close the book on a war crime to open a U.S.-backed school.

The small bus rumbling toward the south-eastern tip of Ben Tre Province was packed with fruit and farmers on a damp morning last October.

On the flat peninsula that stretched out from the road, mechanical paddles churned the brackish shrimp ponds replacing rice paddies in Thanh Phu District – the front line of Vietnam’s modern war with creeping seawater that promises to make life in this tough corner of the Mekong Delta tougher still.

Women checked messages on cell phones wrapped in plastic bags; salt filled the air as the bus neared its final stop, a parking lot where motorbike taximen stood ready to take foreigners on a brief loop of the tragedy that’s become synonymous with the place.

After a 15 minute drive into Thanh Phong, they stopped before a granite stele that stood between a beer distributor and a windowless shop that sold everything from shampoo to ice cream.

The low gate to the monument’s overgrown concrete courtyard sat ajar. Two frangipani trees perfumed the wet air, masking the scent of a lone papaya rotting in the weeds.

Rain had washed away most of the memorial’s gold lettering, but one could still make out the words:

This area was raided by the United States SEAL force led by Bob Kerrey on February 25, 1969. Despite the fact that there had been no shots fired by the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam, Kerrey’s team committed the brutal murder of civilians. They stormed into houses and slit the throats of the people inside, and then gathered others before executing them with machine guns at short range. Twenty-one civilians, including elders, women and children, were massacred barbarously.

The crossroads in Thanh Phong where a stele memorializes the Navy SEAL massacre that occurred on February 25, 1969. The monument specifically disputes Kerrey's claim that his men came under fire and responded by strafing the village before them. Instead, it alleges the unit known as "Kerrey's Raiders" rounded up and executed 21 unarmed civilians. Photos by VnExpress/Calvin Godfrey

Across the street, a group of fishermen sat on a porch, slapping cards on a plastic table, letting ice melt in their beer while the sounds of students at a nearby kindergarten filled the air.

No one knew who Kerrey was – only that he had come back to run a school, or some such.

And then a short man with a high voice named Quang Van Phuc stepped forward and held a hand out at his hip.

“I was this tall that night,” he said, before describing how he'd heard gunfire and screaming and ran into the darkness. “The next day we came back to the village; I remember they had piled all of the bodies and severed flesh on a bed.”

Phuc grew up hearing that the raid had been the fault of a local who left the village years before the massacre and led a Marine unit back to the area, long after Communist fighters had fled inland.

A 'distortion of history'

In May, the U.S. Secretary of State gathered reporters at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and announced Bob Kerrey would return to chair the Board of Trustees at the Fulbright University in Vietnam (FUV).

Three years prior, then-President Truong Tan Sang met personally with his counterpart in the White House and welcomed an initiative to build the school.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee later donated 60 hectares (148 acres) of land in a high-tech industrial zone that sits idle today; even the sunburnt security guards patrolling the odd mix of vacant lots and multi-national microchip factories say they have no idea when work would begin on the university campus.

Those close to the school have declined to speak about the controversy or what it means for FUV.

Billed on its website as “the first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry,” FUV has virtually disappeared from public discourse.

Individuals close to the project say they have already “moved on” from the discussion and expect John Kerry, the retiring U.S. Secretary of State, to return to Vietnam with good news before his term ends this month. Others have publicly floated the possibility of welcoming the first class this fall.

Vietnamese officials remained decidedly more reticent, until Tuesday, when Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan published a review of Vietnam's major media stories from the previous year.

In it, he dedicated significant space to what he described as “an unusual campaign for the appointment of Mr. Kerrey at Fulbright University.”

The minister described the effort to promote Kerrey’s appointment as an effort to distort history.

“Kerrey was a war veteran who directed and participated in a barbaric massacre of innocent civilians in Ben Tre Province during the American invasion of our country,” he wrote.

“There have been several articles in the mainstream media that not only sought to legitimize the appointment, but also conflated the tasks of a soldier with war crimes that violate international laws.”

The minister called the media campaign “extremely upsetting” because it had “hurt the spirit of innocent people who died because of such crimes.”

Tuan reminded his readers that Kerrey had confessed to the crimes, which were initially exposed by U.S. media.

“There is even proof of the event on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.”

Meanwhile, at the museum

The Ho Chi Minh City War Remnants Museum sits about two kilometers from the Rex Hotel and attracts over a million visitors per year, most of them foreign.

On a recent weekday, scores of tourists packed its halls and doorways; several huddled around a round concrete sewer on the second floor, where Bob Kerrey’s name hovered at the center of a blue plastic panel.

The panel says Kerrey and a team of Navy SEALs arrived in the village of Thanh Phong – 48 years ago next month – and murdered three children they found hiding in the sewer with knives.

Tourists at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. A sewer on the second floor of the museum contains a plaque at the center that claims three children hid in the concrete tube on the night of the raid and were murdered with knives when Kerrey's unit discovered them. The family only donated the sewer to the museum following the 40th anniversary of the killings.

On the opposite wall hangs the names of the other civilians who died that night; around the corner is an exhibit on the My Lai Massacre.

“It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public,” the panels read.

That’s not entirely right.

Kerrey received a Bronze Star medal for the Thanh Phong raid from then-President Richard Nixon. He only acknowledged the event had been a massacre when confronted with classified documents and an account from one of his men who said the squad had rounded up and executed the unarmed group of mostly women and children.

Two of Kerrey’s squad told reporters they stabbed an elderly man who stepped out of the first thatched hut they encountered; they either didn't remember or differed on what became of his wife and three grandchildren.

Before these messy narratives spilled into American papers, Kerrey gathered all but one of his fellow squad members to issue a joint statement alleging the victims had been caught in a crossfire between his men and unseen Viet Cong soldiers.

Huynh Ngoc Van, the director of the War Remnants Museum, recalled that when the news broke in Vietnam it inspired a flood of local newspaper accounts of the killings, many of which she considered “exaggerated.”

Van personally accompanied museum researchers to Thanh Phong to investigate the events.

She and members of her team spent years interviewing witnesses before a bereaved family finally agreed to donate the sewer where the three deceased children had hidden, following the 40th anniversary of their deaths.

“We had many Thanh Phongs in southern Vietnam,” said Van, who views the incident as unique only insofar as the events had been investigated and the perpetrators confronted.

Over the years Kerrey has apologized for the deaths (repeatedly and at length) while maintaining that he only ever ordered his men to return fire. In this way, he has done much more than his government, which never apologized for sending Kerrey and a group of other young men to a fishing village in the middle of the night with the name of a single Communist cadre they were supposed to find and kill.

In the flurry that followed Kerrey’s appointment, editorial writers all over the U.S. (including the journalist who initially exposed the massacre) offered unsolicited paths to redemption for Kerrey – some suggested he’d already earned the world’s forgiveness.

Kerrey himself has always bucked direction on how he ought to make amends in Vietnam.

“An apology has always felt insufficient,” he told local media in June. “It is like fish soup without the fish. And so I have tried to help the Vietnamese people when I can. By being a part of the effort to end the trading with the enemy act, normalizing relations, supporting expanded bilateral trade and aid, and especially supporting efforts to improve Vietnam's educational system through the Fulbright program.”

Kerrey did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but he publicly pledged to ignore calls that he resign his new post as late as June, the same month discussion of his appointment largely tapered off.

When asked whether he should take the job, the director of the War Remnants Museum went quiet.

“I thought a lot about this one,” Van said, before noting that Vietnamese culture requires students of all kinds to address senior school administrators by the respected term “teacher".

“This makes me … worried,” she said in English. “I think if Bob feels very sorry for what he’s done for the war he can support the Fulbright with money or he can support Thanh Phong, which is very poor until now.”

'Lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral'

Thanh Phong’s retired village chief Tran Van “Sau” Rung greeted reporters from his bed in a palm leaf extension built onto a wide pink tile home just a short motorbike ride from where the killing occurred.

A woman sewed needlepoint in his living room and children ran in and out of the house as Sau stood and swept his salt and pepper hair over his tall forehead in a manner not unlike Kerrey's.

The old soldier grew up in the low-lying farming area and said he’d had two choices: join the Southern Republic of Vietnam or join the Viet Cong.

“I chose the Viet Cong,” he said.

Tran Van Rung (AKA Sau Rung) was one of the first to arrive to the scene of the raid after the killing stopped.

After sustaining an injury while fighting in the surrounding districts, Sau says he received orders to lay low near Thanh Phong. In his estimation, no revolutionary soldier would have dared to occupy the coastal village itself.

The whole area, he said, had been stripped of vegetation by chemical defoliants and any man of fighting age found along the bare coastline would have immediately been captured or killed.

When government and U.S. patrols encountered a local French teacher here, he said, they carted him off.

“Luckily, they didn't kill him,” Sau said. “They put him in prison for a year; when he returned he took his whole family from the area because it was just too dangerous.”

Sau recalled that Kerrey’s squad had visited the area three times before the massacre.

He can still remember villagers streaming toward him in the final hours of the night in question. He and the other able-bodied men woke to the sounds of children wailing as they fled.

Sau and his men spent two hours finding the civilians safe places to sleep, before heading to surmise the casualties in Thanh Phong.

“I had enough experience in combat to know when the Americans had withdrawn,” he said.

Sau and his men quickly sifted through the corpses, piling dead children next to their mothers and covering the horror with straw mats.

“We didn’t want to stay,” he said. “We knew they’d come back.”

Then Sau found 12-year-old Bui Thi Luom weeping and peppered with shrapnel.

He carried the girl to a clinic in a nearby village, then went to sleep.

The next day, civilians returned to the area to bury the dead.

“Most of the families had lost everyone, so there was no one left to mourn them,” he said. “Besides, it was a war: you were lucky to get a burial, much less a funeral.”

He continues to keep a log containing the names of the victims and their birthdays. Whenever relatives return to the area, he helps inform them about what happened here.

Sau said Kerrey had an open invitation to come drink tea with him any time.

“Of course, I'd accept his apology,” he said. “But why ask me? I think it would be better for him to come and talk to the surviving relatives and, perhaps, offer some money to take care of the tombs of the dead.”

Meeting Bob Kerrey

The road to Bui Thi Luom's house turns to muddy sand long before you arrive – sand that seems to stick to everything for kilometers in any direction.

As the sun set over her small farm, the sole survivor of the massacre limped out onto her lopsided patio, heavyset in cheetah-print pajamas.

Kerrey’s Raiders, as the squad was known, killed Luom’s grandmother, four aunts and ten cousins—all women and children she slept with in an earthen dugout designed to shield them from harm.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying she’d kill Kerrey and his men if she had the chance.

But time, it seems, had softened those feelings.

“I don't have any bitterness toward Kerrey after all these years,” she told VnExpress International. “I was only 12 then; I’m almost dead now.”

Bui Thi Luom was 12-years old on the night of the raid and is considered the sole survivor of the violence that claimed her grandmother, 10 cousins and four aunts. She's pictured here at her home in Ben Tre Province.

Over the years, she’s explained to visiting reporters that the unit called her and her family out into the night and, after a brief conference, began shooting them.

Luom survived by ducking back into the dugout when the killing began.

“I have scars all over my body, and my knee injury is the largest one,” she said, rolling up a pant leg. “Sometimes I can still feel the pain.”

Sau told VnExpress International Luom grew up in an inland village with her mother.

When she was well enough, she began caring for the graves of those killed in the raid—something she considered her lifelong duty.

She now lives with her husband, niece, sister-in-law and older brother who collectively earn about $450-$650 per month, mostly from fishing.

“We don't have much land here to grow anything,” she said, gesturing to the dark brown soil around the house.

A few years ago, when her family moved here, Luom exhumed the bones of those killed and buried them at a nearby cemetery so she could clean the tombs and provide regular offerings to their spirits.

“I couldn't move the bodies of all the children because there were too many,” she said.

No American, she said, had ever come to say sorry to her. Luom, who first heard Kerrey’s name in 2001, knew very little about the controversy surrounding him or the land sitting idle outside Ho Chi Minh City.

She spoke cautiously, but at the conclusion of her interview she seemed to have made a decision.

“I want to meet Bob Kerrey and talk to him,” she said. “All my relatives are dead and it would be great if he could offer me something.”

Luom saw no reason to prevent him from opening a new university, but she doubted it would benefit her and her family in any way.

“I don't think my kids or grandkids would ever make it there,” she said. “They'll drop out of school around the eighth grade to start working.”

Nhung Nguyen contributed reporting to this story

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