White Supremacists for Obama, Black Separatists for McCain, Janis Ian For The End of The World
I'm not sure what bigger picture I'm to extract from this brief Esquire piece by David Peisner, but it's an interesting read. He interviews several white supremacists (the sheet-wearin', Hitler-lovin' kind) and a self-described black nationalist who advocates resegregation of black and white people within the US. Three of the white guys he interviewed want Obama to win, the black person wants McCain to win. Hardly a representative sample of either camp, but it's an unusual glimpse inside a way of thinking you may find foreign. Snip:
NAME: Erich GliebeWhy White Supremacists Support Barack Obama (Esquire, thanks vinsanity). Above, a screengrab of the National Alliance website, in which Mr. Gliebe identifies "mediocre singers" from the seventies like Janis Ian as one of the greatest threats to the future of the white race, and points to an album cover from her 1975 release "Between the Lines" as evidence.Who: Chairman, National Alliance
Likes: Third Reich, the movie Rocky
Dislikes: Integration, Jewish-controlled media
Career Highlights: Turning white-power record label, Resistance Records, into a million-dollar-a-year business juggernaut; an 8-0 record as a professional boxer under the nickname, "The Aryan Barbarian."
"Obama might be a better candidate for our cause because he’s racially conscious. One of our big things in the National Alliance is to raise the racial consciousness of our people. Young whites in universities, they’ve been stripped of any kind of racial identity. Obama may be a racist in a positive sense for his people--that will awaken a lot of the whites, knock some sense into them. They’ll see that non-white Americans are allowed to be proud of who they are, to be racially conscious, to talk about their people or their community without being attacked as being racist. Let’s face it, white people aren’t going to fight for their causes, for their kind with a white president. I don’t think McCain even acknowledges that a white race exists. He’s all about granting amnesty to illegal aliens. The fact he wants to keep us in wars in the Middle East for 100 years, that’s not a good thing. I give Obama credit, he seems to have stuck to his guns as far as pulling the troops out of Iraq. He’s a very intelligent man, an excellent speaker and has charisma. John McCain offers none of that. Perhaps the best thing for the white race is to have a black president. My only problem with Obama is perhaps he’s not black enough."
Incidentally, remember how earlier this year, SNL re-ran its first episode ever, hosted by George Carlin, on the occasion of his passing? Ms. Ian, surprise white supremacist enemy number one, was the musical guest. Her stripped-down acoustic performance was simple, moving, beautiful, and timeless. Video clip below: At Seventeen, from the aforementioned album. Consider it a unicorn chaser, and enjoy. It is, at heart, a song about being a stranger in a world that doesn't reward strangeness, and prevailing anyway. That's something the bigots can't take away from us.
the latest
latest episodes
Obama's "Big Communication" is reaching everyone...fringe to picket fences.
Check out the lesson from the Obama Infomercial that relates to more than just hate groups:
http://tinyurl.com/659krq
White supremacists for Obama and Black separatists for McCain just seems highly reactionary or like rebellion for the sake of rebellion.
@Ryan, I think some of the arguments have been along the lines of: an Obama presidency will hasten the coming of a race war, and that's what the white supremacists want.
Huh. I can see why wannabe-nazis would think using a rune for a logo is a good idea. But what made them choose one with the pictograph meaning "Elk"?
come the Apocalypse, when I am crowned and recognized, I intend to have a very public ceremony wherein I barbecue racist idiots of all colours and pronounce they all taste like pork. Everyone is invited.
Well, you just got MY vote for controlling post-apocalyptic dictator.
Best election evar.
President B. Hussein X is bringing all the crazies out of the woodwork. But this is hardly limited to the far right fringe groups.
Gateway Pundit
The LA Times has video of Obama toasting a former PLO operative at a Jew-bash but will not release the video. This is outrageous. Obviously, this video would do great damage to Obama who struggles with Jewish voters due to his circle of close anti-Semitic friends. Maybe this is the reason it is not being released?
On Freedom’s Wings
What an Obama presidency will change those words to is: The economy becomes redistribution of wealth, wars become Marshall Law here in America with boots on our streets and terrorists able to destroy us and abortion becomes Eugenics where only the best get to live.
Joe the not quite a plumber:
"a vote for Obama is a vote for the death to Israel."
And that is but a small sample of the craziness at such supposedly mainstream right wing sites like World News Daily or Town Hall.
Anyway, I have it on good authority that one of prez. Barry Hussein X's first acts will be to appoint Louis Farrakhan to the Department of Kill Whitey. Is that black enough?
If it gets him their vote, great. What will hopefully happen in reality is: those of us whites who actually aren't racist, which I like to imagine is the majority, will side with blacks and every other ethnic group against what will turn out to be a very small percentage of white supremacists. So, ideally, racists will be drawn out of the woodwork on all sides and their true colors will shine through, preferably in the form of criminal conspiracies and death threats the rest of the sane public can prosecute them for.
Man, all this racist talk makes me want to go to church. Can't we all just get along? I think I will partake of the all-you-can eat and drink communion at the local religious center tomorrow. It's Sunday, for God's sake.
Bergjylt, I'm probably missing your irony, but I believe the symbol is actually an inverted peace sign.
Which of course isn't a peace sign, it's a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) sign.
So perhaps they really, really like nukes. Like, fanboy style.
Oh and to just drive home that this insanity is mainstream I give you washed SNL member Victoria Jackson.
No more schadenfreude please, I'm full.
...Does Janis Ian even have a career anymore?
Noen, that link was.. wow.
she was doing comedy....right? Please? Please??
If it's not a Cobert-like use of satire then she was never really acing on SNL...Where do the person and persona separate?
Funny. She looks like a young Barbara Streisand to me.
She looks more and more like Winston Churchill every year. Winston, of course, made up for it with intelligence, wit and personality. All Victoria has is breasts, which means she's outnumbered three to two.
I feel like I'm living in someone's B-grade SciFi movie based on a script by P.K. Dick. Only the script writer is some second rate hack. Could someone please hack into the Reality mainframe and reset the registers? This sucker's going to crash.
We got Nazi's and assorted goons coming out from everywhere. Hannity interviews right wing racists, Fox has a graphic with guns pointing at Obama and celebs go on TV and drool all over the place. Man O' man.
I have a hunch that if the words above of Erich Gliebe were only slightly altered and attributed to someone of a another racial group many of the comments here about "hate speech" and "racism" would seem out of line. But that's the wonderful thing about labels isn't it. Make him a cultural ambassador or advocate and all is okay. Switch the label to racial suprimacists and you've create tension.
Xeni, FoetusNail posting from afar, you're exactly right. The real David Duke anti-Zionist white supremacists are anti-McCain who is a race traitor and under the control of Goldman Sachs and International Jewry. A vote for Obama is to awaken American whites to the threat of black power and hasten the coming race war. These people are really giving this crap too much thought. Check David Duke’s website or google Stormfront, IIRC.
That rune is the life rune used by Nazi’s on the grave markers of their war dead. The death rune looks like an arrow pointing upward and was used as the Waffen – SS grave marker, the two runes together were carved into the marker along with the soldier’s date of birth and the date he died.
My capcha was "Be Corrugated" I love those things.
Bergjylt and ark, the symbol is 'elhaz', or 'eolhaz' and it's traditional meaning is 'elk' as it is a graphic representation of elkhorns. its also the rune for 'sedgegrass' and one of the deeper meanings is 'protection'. as in, the blades of the sedgegrass, or horns of the elk provide protection. when contained in a cirle, the protection is focused to the worker. when inverted and encircled, its protection radiates outward for the good of all. one thing that really pisses me off is when groups like the aryan brotherhood or any white supremacist group takes the runes and twists them to their purpose, which was not as the norse intended them.
ah! something else to look up, thanks!
noen, i've been saying that for years! however, i'm sure pkd is twisting like a licorice stick down in his sarcophagus.
Janis Ian has a new book out and a new 2 CD "Best of..." collection as well. Nice timing, hate mongers!
PS: Victoria Jackson is completely coo-coo-crazy now.
Jack, Yeah. I checked her website-pretty nutty. Unless she's going for Any Kaufman style endurance on this "bit"...
"Andy" not "Any"
NIce work Minty!
I wonder if the CND ever knew about the similarity and dual meaning of their chosen logo.. The CND logo (peace sign) being a composite of the semaphor positions for c, n and d (I could never find the 'c' myself).
I think the white supremacist makes a great point.
Young white kids are going to start asking themselves why we don't have a month to celebrate white culture.
And when they go online to find out, they will be drawn to these neo-nazi websites, and possibly drawn in.
I think liberals have done a lot to help racism in America today.
Framing everything in terms of race, in the name of "Diversity", only polarizes us.
Also affirmative action doesn't help either.
Personally, I think that any kind of racial, or even ethnic pride, is the problem.
We should, as a culture, be moving away from these stupid labels.
Be proud of what you have accomplished, and what your principles are, don't be proud of your parents skin-tone, or where you were born.
Is it possible Victoria Jackson is just crafting herself as the Andrew Dice Clay — in drag — of politics? ''[T]hat guy in China'' is pretty funny. You know, like, ''That German guy with the little mustache.''
@mintphresh: I'll follow you to the degree that yes, it's elghaz ("elk", used to write [z]). The rest is modern-day invention, I'm afraid - we have some vague hints that runes have been used for mystical purposes, but nothing even vaguely like that.
..wait, maybe I'm showing a fabulous amount of ignorance here, but.. Jews aren't white?
I'm so confused.
djn, i beg to differ. from what i've seen and read, they have been used for magical working for over a thousand years.
Young white kids are going to start asking themselves why we don't have a month to celebrate white culture. And when they go online to find out, they will be drawn to these neo-nazi websites, and possibly drawn in.
Do you really not comprehend that the dominant culture suppresses all other cultures simply by virtue of ubiquity? And, seriously, I'm terrified to think of Scottish kids researching their clan tartans and ending up in Klan robes. I should probably ask Mark to kill that Welsh language thread before it becomes a Nazi recruiting tool.
I'll be glad when this is over, but it won't really be over, will it? The wedge has been driven to deeply this time, and it will take a lot of effort to recover from it.
At least with Willie Horton, we all went to school and work the next day regardless of how people voted.
The cost of this election has been very high.
and no matter the outcome of this election, i expect the cost will rise even more before it turns around.
Indeed, and who better to lead such a war than a well-tempered, anti-war constitutional scholar of mixed race? It's the last thing those namby-pamby liberals will expect!
Young white kids are going to start asking themselves why we don't have a month to celebrate white culture.
Implying that white people are too stupid to realize that every month is white history month? Racist against white people.
Antinous, tell him about how privilege is an opiate! It makes me swoon when you do that.
PS The sentence "Likes: Third Reich, the movie Rocky" is the best thing I've ever read.
Could someone tell me how the album cover to Between the Lines is evidence, even in the most ardent white supremacist's eyes, that folks like her are a threat to the future of the "white race"? All I see in the cover on the Wikipedia page is a picture of a black lady in a hat and a sweater standing in front of what looks like a lakeshore. I'm not exactly steeped in the culture of bigotry, but I don't see anything threatening to anyone in that photo--actually, I'd characterize the posture of the woman in the photo as "frightened" or "tenative" well before I'd say something like "threatening," or even "mildly peeved." Is it something to do with the fact that Janis Ian isn't the lady pictured, and that Ms. Ian indeed isn't black, and is also a lesbian?
@mintphresh: And yet there's no mention of it in any norse sources I've ever read - and wikipedia points me to 20th century literature as the origin of the theories of runic magic.
I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, but you'll have to dig up a decent source or two before I change my mind. ;-)
Arkizzle, man, I can't tell if you're serious re: Jews and whiteness, and therefore I don't know how to respond. Is this like when some of the British Boingers didn't know what Rosh Hashanah was?
@Antinous: Do a google search for "White Culture", or better yet, "White pride".
You tell me what comes up.
Why would some 12 year old, racially ambiguous white kid be inclined to search for that?
Maybe because he just got home from the obligatory asian pride and culture celebration at school, and now that he is seeing things in terms of race.
Maybe after every other minority is told to be proud of who they are, he wants to feel proud of who he is, too.
It's funny, these white power websites use exactly the same language that mainstream pride organizations use: "White Americans have accomplished great things" "You should be proud of being a White American" etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's stupid for anyone to be proud of their race, and even if it isn't directly racist, it still polarizes us and leads to racism.
These are the runes used by the Nazis and now by white supremacists. Every now and then you will see tattoos of these runes, now you know. The Tyr rune was used a a grave marker by the Waffen-SS.
http://www.geocities.com/vienna/strasse/8514/runes.html
Why does everything have to be a race issue. Let's just vote for the best candidate that is going to get us out of this mess we are in. Isn't that what we should be concentrating on?
Lauren, what's Rosh Hashanah? (asked for effect, I actually don't know but Google is my friend) But why would I, I don't presume anyone knows Bealtaine or Samhain outside of Ireland, or pagan circles.
Really though, I can only presume you are saying Jews aren't white. Fine, maybe they are not genetically European (if such a thing exists) , but I'm genuinely have trouble thinking of any Jews I know, or any I know from the media as "not white"..
Maybe I totally read your tone wrong, care to clarify?
I suppose that's the trouble with discrete skin-toning that actually doesn't exist beyond our prejudices.
My most pleasant and relaxing hobbies are four fathoms deeper than those racist motherfuckers' most well-planned arguments. Why would I even want to test my own patience by sitting still long enough for some blank-eyed, bumbling goon to explain his worldview to me?
But our modern age has allowed for other types to gather, like amputee fetishists and high school "vampires." So I guess this kind of crap fits right in there.
Loved the Janis Ian song. I remember playing that over and over when I was in college.
Arkizzle: check out http://www.bechollashon.org/
There are lots of Jews of color. Don't assume that the media defines us. But, for one, there is Yaphet Kotto--the actor from Homicide--Life on the Streets
Ezekiel'sDaughter,
I so fell into that trap. Not the "media defining us" bit, but Jewishness being defined as both a religion and a nationality ("nationality" is probably not the correct literal description).
Let me be very clear: Of course there are non-white members of the Jewish religion. No question there.
I was more referring to the nationality side of Jewishness. But here I must confess to not knowing whether the Jewish people (those who identify with a Jewish heritage, but not necessarily a religious one) share a common genetic ancestory or not. I suppose not, the more I consider it.
Frankly, this has always interested me, like people assuming you must be Jewish (religious or otherwise) if you are Israeli.
Just to illustrate a common confusion, see Carl Sagan, a secular humanist. Yet still he is referred to as being of Jewish heritage (and, unfairly, as a self-hating Jew, for rejecting religion).
Sorry for my ignorance, I should take the time..
@ DJN
The Poetic Edda by Snorri Sturluson dates back from around the 13th century and several of its myths mention the use of runes by the Norse gods as objects of power and for use in charms (especially the Hávamál story where Odin gains his power and knowledge).
But really, do some white supremacist group need an educated reason to choose any symbol? I'm sure they can just make up a meaning that seems cool to them. I'd be willing to bet their interpretation of the Algiz rune is pretty warped. After all, they make up/misinterpret a lot of other things.
Ezek'D
Thanks for the Be'chol Lashon link btw, very interesting.
...Did anyone noticed that the disemvowelled "fr bm" can be reemvowelled to say either:
"for Obama"
...or:
"for a bum"
or
"fire bomb"
or
"fear beam" (the latest top-secret crowd control device)
Arkizzle: Glad that you enjoyed the link. Yeah, Jewishness is defined both as a culture and as a religion. The definition is constantly evolving. :-)
These are certainly topsy turvy times. But the subjective reality is this: You can either tell that Obama is different - and for the people - or you are living a life of fear and unawareness. You either see that he represents hope - not utopian by any stretch - but a marker for a more inclusive and cooperative humanity. Or, you are unconcious and deathly afraid of opening yourself to your shadow side that poisons you - and the world around you.
To be me and you - or to be a butthead. That is the question.
Chck t: G t: www.btthdplc.cm
Vt fr sprm btthds lk Pln nd McCn t gt sss stmpd n thr hds. ll n gd fn, bt mks wckd sttmnt. Sprd th wrd!!
Phew! Then I'll be forgiven my confusion :)
Steady on there W.U.USA
That may be construed as spam and/or 'turf.
Sekino - you're technically correct, but what the new agers and nazis are doing is kind of like looking at the finger rather than where it's pointing. I'm not surprised in the case of the nazis, but I'd expect better even of new agers...
The names of the runes are derived from their names in the mnemonic poems and subsets one uses to learn them. Like an oral abc-book. The reasons runes turn up in the sources as "magic" is that the nordic cultures considered poetry to be magic. And as runes were used to write down magic charms, the "magicness" was thought to be contained in, passed on by and even contagious from the writing.
Sometimes, the mnemonic was used to make a rune stand in for a word (carving runes is hard work), and sometimes the runes were encoded so that only someone who knew the original verse would recognize the meaning. Early runologists might have gotten fanciful ideas from this. If only they'd bothered to ask some of those filthy peasants about it, they, and a lot of nazis, might have avoided looking like fools a century later...
Mackenzie,
Drop Teresa a note and explain what you're doing.
Mort,
Drop Teresa a note and explain what you're doing.
EzekielsDaughter & Lauren:
Let me belatedly point out the, possibly obvious, reason I even brought up the white/Jew thing. I had trouble with the headline "The Jewish Assault on White American Values" from the NA website above. I was having trouble disentangling Jews from 'white' and 'american'.
wakeupUSA,
It looks like you're here just to push your website. You can link to it on your profile page. Thanks.
Totally on Janis. The amazing SNL performance always reaches me, now just as much as ever. It's so authentic, tragic and dignified.
And reminds me of Tracy Chapman's first album.
Arkizzle: true...the headline is reminiscent of a time when Jews were included among the "darker races", along with Italians, Hispanics, Arabs and anyone who was not a WASP. The headline is puzzling and laughable now because it doesn't occur to most people that Jews weren't always 'white'.
All of those groups worked hard to become considered mainstream--or white.
I guess until the 50's and 60's, most Black folk were doing the same. Until they decided to agree with James Brown. (laugh) Accept me as Black and Proud or get out of my way.
Wake Up USA
That shit always sends a chill down my spine.
Deutschland Erwache
Ezek'D
Yeah, it really is laughable. When writing my above comments I almost used Greeks and Spanish as a supporting example of slighly darker skintone, but also clearly white/european origins.
Well, it seems I would have been just as wrong to those who like to segregate. How things can change, how differently people can see the same things.
..and thank god for James Brown, huh?
Arkizzle, I was totally not meaning to be snide, and I don't expect you to know about the specifics of Jewish culture. I just didn't realize until recently (the Rosh Hashanah thread here at Boing Boing) that non-Americans often didn't know about it, and it was kind of surprising to me!
To answer your question to the best of my abilities, there are sort of two ethnic strains of Jewishness: the Ashkenazi Jews, who are of European descent, and the Sephardic Jews, who are of African and Middle Eastern descent. So yes there are non-white Jews who aren't non-Jewish people of color that converted to the religion of Judaism.
As for the Ashkenazim, they often occupy a strange place in society, where they're certainly not non-white, but they aren't quite seen as fully white either, especially if they have Jewish-looking features (curly hair, aquiline nose, etc.). They usually function as white, but you will definitely hear people using "Jew" or "kike" as a genuine insult (whereas words like "wop" or "mick" are pretty much used only ironically now). Stereotypes about Jews controlling the media or the economy are much weaker than they used to be, but they still exist to a much larger extent and are much more harmful than stereotypes about, I don't know, drunken Irish folks or something. So, yeah, if Ashkenazi Jews are often regarded as not-quite-white by society at large, then it makes perfect sense for white supremacists to see them as completely non-white and therefore evil, threatening, or whatever. Especially if they're following in the footsteps of Hitler, who obviously saw the Jews as a separate race.
Lauren, thanks for taking the time to write that.
I wonder if the Jewish not-quite-white thing is mostly a WASP/American hang over. I can't say it'd be in my mind to consider Jewish people as any less within my general notion of white-end-of-the-scale cultures than Greek or Spanish people.
I can't say that so much for my parents generation, but I genuinely don't recognise it in my own contemporary circles.
Anyway, thanks again, and to EzekielsDaughter, for those thoughts. It's been educating.
Racists are hopeless; love is blind. In a few hundred or thousand years, we will all be dark skinned with dark hair and brown eyes, do the math. Talk about pissing into the wind. Their only hope is isolationism, which is another reason they oppose McCain, they want out of Iraq. Their dream is a walled and withdrawn America after casting out or killing everyone darker than a white Minnesotan in March.
Lauren O:
Geez! You're a bit confused about Sephardic Jews. They are from Spain/Portugal: the Iberian peninsula. This includes both the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain under the Alhambra decree of 1492, and from Portugal by order of King Manuel I in 1497. Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim, are Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Mizrahim accept the "Sephardic rite" as many non-Ashkenazi. Yemenite Jews are yet another group, sometimes grouped (by fellow Jews) with Mizrahim Jews, sometimes not.
I think you're giving too much credit to "white supremacists" to imagine that they follow any logic or reasoning at all.
a little more time, the genome is almost finished. Once it's done, everyone gets the flu and two weeks later, wakes up, oh, I don't know... shall we make it puce?
My uncle married a woman of Irish descent. Everybody liked her (more than any of our blood relatives), but it was definitely viewed as an exogamous marriage. When your ancestry is so British that you regard the Irish as mysterious foreigners, you known that you're inbred. Have I mentioned that I have several rare genetic disorders?
Tak, can you do polkadots?
takuan, what about mauve, or a classic teal?
Antinous, c'mon, we're exotic. No really.
Half my family is still drunk, and the other half is missing or dead. Ah, the luck of the Irish.
if a group of human orphans were raised apart and given no history, religious or supposedly cultural
indoctrination, would they create divisions?
Divisions of some kind are probably inevitable, hatred probably, alll animals commit murder.
We are far less violent than at any other time in history, as hard as that may be to believe.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
Cuvtixo, I've always heard Mizrahim and Sephardim grouped together, because the Jews from the Iberian peninsula are originally of African/Middle Eastern descent via the invasion of the Moors. But, yes, definitely you are correct in getting more specific about it.
Just realized, you would only be starting the whole mess over again. There would probably be some sort of peace for a short period, then enough murder to solidify alliances, then depending on the perceived strength of the alliances a period of calm, until a younger generation rose up to compete with the ruling alliance. I wonder how, when, or if they would develop religions. This sounds like a great experiment, the old soviet bloc still has lots of excess kids. Though it is probably impossible to find any that have not already met god.
well, you're probably right then, no help for it.`We'll have to sterilize the planet and`start again. Next time, no bloody mammals.
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/rove-appointee-sends-ugly-message-wo
dont worry tak. the planet only allows things to get to a certain point, then poof, on to the next grand experiment. usually takes between 16 and 200 million years. so we are probably due.
Sometimes the best thing you can do in a situation like this is give them exactly what they want: we should let the white supremacists have their own little island to inhabit-- eventually they'll be more inbred than the Amish, spelling the end of their little "civilization" and proving once and for all that "racial purity" isn't as great as they think.
(It would also be interesting to watch them try and start their superior civilization from scratch on an a desert island-- hey, you guys are the "master race", surely you can hack it! I imagine a monsoon wiping out their crops, and they blame it on "Jewish weather patterns.")
which is how to dispose of the Taliban. A dead end suicide sect, woman-hating, world hating, death seeking... all it ever needed was to be ignored and left to its own devices, to die out in one generation.
OM@12: Along with all the good career stuff Jack reported, Janis Ian has also been showing up at science fiction conventions, where she hangs out with the regulars, gets into good conversations, and displays a considerable knowledge of the genre.
I found out by talking to her that she reads and remembers hardcover indicia. That's rare.
Dequeued @28, 41: every month is White Culture Month, even February. Any white kid who can't figure that out is pretty thick. Any adult who can't figure that out is very thick indeed.
Antinous @33, you have made me imagine newfangled klansmen in plaid robes. It's awful. I'd rather they wore fabric printed with smileys.
RJ @46, I tell you sincerely that that was eloquently said.
Takuan @77: Yes. In fact, at one point the human race got down to a frighteningly small number of individuals. Whatever they were before, all that we are they invented afterward.
Ill Lich @84, there's a group living in Short Creek that's done exactly that.
You know it's a good candidate when a white supremacist has to concoct some wild rationale as to why it is alright to be a racist and still vote for an African American president. I think that this one is in the bag.
It's much more likely that the white supremacists were reacting to Janis Ian's song "Society's Child" (a song about interracial dating) rather than to "At Seventeen," but the video is a pretty neat reminder of that era. Her parents were Jewish radicals working in the civil rights movement, and it's not surprising that white supremacists saw her eloquence as a threat
I seem to remember that Janis Ian was quite shy of meeting the writers whose fan she is. Some of them were equally awestruck to be meeting her.
Mutual fan-gushing is fun to watch, even if you're a fan of both people!
I really don't care about this political dispute (I don't care a lot about democracy), but I would like to signal this marvellous french At seventeen cover by Mireille Mathieu, À dix-sept ans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I9NU0jc8Fs
There is also an another french adaptation for Claude François, much more bitter, but I can't find it anymore on any videonet, apart from this over-ridiculous Cloclo look-alike :
http://ma-tvideo.france2.fr/video/iLyROoafY_mN.html
Wow. You know your off the deep end when Bill O'Reilly is reeling you in.
"worse is better"
Or thats what W.A.R. Skinhead leader Metzger (who says he stole it from Lenin, or was that Trotsky?) always says. If your looking for a revolution, everything going to shit is a good sign.
Check and see if Janis will be giving a concert in your area--I attended one recently and it was the best performance I've seen in years (at a bargain price, too!). She is an absolutely stellar songwriter, and a wonderful musician and performer, too.
She mentioned during the concert that Woody Guthrie had a sticker on the front of his guitar: "This Machine Kills Fascists". If Janis is that threatening to those Aryan bozos, guess it must still hold true.