Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 23:54:26 -0700
From: Recollection Books <recall-AT-eskimo.com>
Subject: Daily Bleed: THOMAS HART BENTON


Our fabulous Web Version:
http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/0415.htm

Text excerpts:

"As for me, I've chosen; I will be on the side of crime. &
I'll help children not to gain entrance into your houses, your
factories, your laws & holy sacraments, but to violate them."

                 — Jean Genet

APRIL 15

THOMAS HART BENTON
Heartland painter, political radical, free thinker.

AFRICAN FREEDOM DAY.

USA: TAX RESISTOR'S DAY.

USA: IRS Terrorists demand war tribute (Pay or Die).

CONVERSATIONS WITH A TAX COLLECTOR ABOUT POETRY

Your form
has a mass of questions:
'Have you traveled on business
or not?'
But suppose
I have
ridden to death a hundred Pegasi
in the last
15 years?
And here you have --
imagine my feelings! --
something
about servants
and assets.

But what if I am
simultaneously
a leader
and a servant
of the people
... Citizen tax collector
I'll cross out all the zeros
after the five
and pay the rest. I demand
as my right
an inch of ground
among
the poorest
workers and peasants

                    ---Mayakovsky


1285 - A Ghost dances at the wedding of Alexander III, King of
Scots, & Joleteta, daughter of the Count de Dreux, at Jedburgh.

1452 - Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci lives.

1715 - The Wamasees & Catawbas attack Charleston, South
Carolina, which leads to counter-attacks resulting in their
virtual extermination.

1755 - Samuel Johnson's magnum opus, “A Dictionary of the
English Language”, is published. He says: "Dictionaries are
like watches. The worst is better than none, & the best cannot
be expected to go quite true."
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/

1813 - US troops seize the Spanish fort at Mobile, thereby
invading & occupying the eastern half of West Florida. (The
western portion of the territory was annexed in 1810 to
"protect U.S. interests".)

1862 - Thomas Wentworth Higginson receives a letter from Emily
Dickinson containing four poems, which launches her "career."
Only a few are published in her lifetime.
http://www.sappho.com/poetry/e_dickin.htm

1874 - Let Freedom Ring?: After being defeated in his race for
governorship of Arkansas, Reconstructionist Joseph Brooks,
claiming a stolen election, forcibly took possession of the State
House.

1882 - Pierre Ramus (true name of Rudolf Grossman) lives
(1882-1942). Propagandist & Austrian anarchist writer.

1888 - Critic/poet Matthew Arnold, 65, dies in Liverpool.
http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/authors/arnold.html

1889 - Painter & radical Thomas Hart Benton lives.
http://www.nbmaa.org/HTML-Pages/Artists.html#b

1889 - Black labor leader & peace activist A. Philip Randolph
lives (president, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.)

Randolph believed that no permanent social change or reform
would happen in America without the direct, democratic
participation of those most affected by the injustice they
sought to change.
http://www.wimall.com/pullportermu/apri.html
http://www.worldbook.com/fun/aajourny/html/bh073.html
http://www.pbs.org/weta/apr/
http://www.wimall.com/pullportermu/index2.html

1889 - Louis Bertho lives (known as Jules Lepetit), Nantes.
French anarchist/syndicalist, reported missing after a trip to
Moscow.
http://perso.club-internet.fr/ytak/avril3.html#15

1898 - Blues vocalist great Bessie Smith lives, Chattanooga,
Tennessee.

"Gimme a pigfoot & a bottle of beer..."
"Gimme a reefer & a gang of gin..."
http://alt.venus.co.uk/weed/bessie/welcome.htm
http://www.redhotjazz.com/bessie.html

1899 - US: Theft of the Stanford University Axe.
http://stst.edgemedia.net/History/BayArea/AlamedaCounty/Berkeley/StanfordAxe/

1912 - “Titanic” sinks at 2:20am. Harry Elkins Widener goes
down clutching his 1598 edition of Bacon's “Essays”. Most
Americans think it is just a movie.

1915 - IWW union Agricultural Workers Organization forms in
Kansas, Missouri. http://iww.org/labor/

1919 - Start of victorious six-day strike across New England
by first women-led US union, Telephone Operators Department of
IBEW.

1921 - Einstein gives a lecture on temporal relativity.

1938 - César Vallejo dies, Paris, France. Left his native Peru
in 1923, & once expelled from Paris in 1930 as a political
militant. Kept involved with Peru by publishing in “Amauta”, a
journal established by his friend José Carlos Mariaátegui,
founder of the Peruvian Communist party.
  http://www3.rcp.net.pe/rcp/vallejo/index.htm

1940 - Phil Lesh bassist, lives. Plays great, lesh philling!

1942 - In Stockholm, Swedish writer Ludvig Nordström, dies.
Popular as a short story writer & novelist; wrote
“Landsortbohème” (1911, "Small-town Bohemia"); “Planeten
Markattan” (1937, "The Monkey Planet").

1951 - Beginning of first strike wave in fascist Spain,
beginning in the Basque country & spreading to Catalonia.
Workers from a number of different industries & cities
participate, with over 100,000 defying the government's order
to return to work.

1955 - Ray Kroc starts the McDonald's chain of fast food
restaurants.

                "You deserve a kroc today."

1959 - Makah Indians in Washington state recognized as
entitled to compensation for loss of halibut & seal hunting,
because of international treaty.

1960 - US: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
one of the main organizations of the civil rights movement,
forms. In the late 60s it becomes a black militant
organization & far from non-violent in position. Nearly 150
students from nine states met in North Carolina with Ella
Baker, James Lawson & Martin Luther King, Jr. By this time, in
mid April, over 50,000 students have participated in sit-ins.

1961 - Cuba: CIA invasion force lands at the Bay of Pigs. A
fiasco, defeated within two days.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/1857/

1963 - Greece: Mass rally after release of 2,000 arrested for
trying to hold Marathon peace march, Acropolis, Athens.

1967 - US: First mass burning of draft cards as 400,000 march
in New York City & 80,000 in San Francisco opposing the
Vietnam War. Culmination of  April 10-15th Vietnam Week
featuring draft card burnings & turn-ins & anti-draft
recruiter demonstrations all over the country. In NY addressed
by Martin Luther King, Jr., McKissick, Stokely Carmichael,
Benjamin Spock.
http://www.webcom.com/peaceact/history.html

1968 - US: "Spring Mobilization Committee To End the War in
Vietnam."

1969 - Several thousand welfare recipients march in New York
City to protest benefit cuts.

1970 - Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Rep. Gerald Ford
calls for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas. Ford will go on to become perhaps America's Greatest
President. Disputably able to chew gum & govern at the same time.

1970 - US: Police tear-gas anti-Vietnam War protesters
staffing flaming barricades which were set up to block access
to the University of Oregon in Eugene.

1971 - “Rolling Stone” reports that the Illinois Crime
Commission has issued a list of "drug oriented rock records."
Included are" "Lets Go Get Stoned," "A Whiter Shade of Pale" &
"White Rabbit."

1972 - US: April 15-28, the nation experiences a new wave of
antiwar protests on campuses & near military & defense-
industry installations -- with hundreds of arrests across the
country. This month has seen, recently, heavy US bombing of
North Vietnamese entering South Vietnam & demonstrators in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania turning out in support of  anti-war
activist Phil Berrigan & six co-defendants.

1974 - Kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst is filmed
participating in a bank robbery, along with 8 other members of
the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), in Sacramento, California.

1980 - Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre dies, Paris.

"I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers
marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like
stone.

I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness
of existence, & instead they taste like cheese.

I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. "
http://icemcfd.com/wayne/sartre-cookbook.html

1984 - Australia: 250,000 attend nuclear disarmament rallies
across the country.

1986 - Saint Jean Genet dies in Paris. French criminal, social
outcast later turned novelist & a leading figure in the avant-
garde theater & political radical.

At age 32, while in prison, he started writing his first
manuscript, “Our Lady of the Flowers”. It was discovered &
destroyed. Genet rewrote it from memory. It was smuggled out
of his cell & came to the attention of Cocteau & Sartre, who
lobbied vigorously for a pardon from a life-sentence.

Genet, like Artaud, believed the theatre should be an
incendiary event. He also portrayed the gay world openly,
without apology or explanation. Genet's sense of solidarity
was even stronger with thieves, & others of society's
dispossessed. In later life, he championed the causes of the
Black Panthers in the US &  Palestinian soldiers in Jordan &
Lebanon. His final work, “Un captif amoureux “ (Prisoner of
Love), is a record of his years spent with these two groups.

Jean Genet died in a hotel room of the same working class
district where he'd been abandoned as a child 75 years
earlier. He is buried in Morocco.
http://www.hglc.org/hglc/ew_genet.htm

1986 - US bombs Libya base.

1989 - Before a Liverpool/Nottingham Forest FA Cup semifinal
soccer match, 95 fans are crushed to death against a fence
surrounding the field as gatecrashers surge
into Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, England.

1996 - The rest of Jerry Garcia's ashes were scattered near
the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A small portion had
been scattered in the Ganges River in India 11 days ago.


"How can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its march
into the future, & all the nonsense about evolution &
progress? Why go forward, why live in time?"

                                         —  E.M.Cioran


---Auntie-Time 2001