WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Radical Roots and the Conquest of the Democratic Party (Written 2005)
byVanderleunonSeptember 30, 2021
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, majoring in marijuana at the university, hanging out with the Progressive Labor Party, and skipping through the clouds of tear gas on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I was convinced that any war that would send my long-haired, sensitive, poetic and acid-tripping self off to wade through rice paddies in Vietnam just had to be wrong, wrong, wrong.
In those years it was easy to see the United States through red-tinted glasses. All you had to do was load a Chillum , roll another Giant Doobie, put Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” on the turntable, plug in the Bongomatic, and light everything up. Like so many others in that long-ago land of Nod-Out, this ritual was my major course of study.
Once this gentle ritual sufficiently soothed my tortured soul I’d often make my way (s l o w l y) to the daily Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) meeting for a righteous rap session on how “the man can’t bust our music or our movement.” Then I’d float my way back home to listen to my red-hot red-diaper girlfriend rhapsodize about her Worker’s Party parents and natter on about old Progressive Labor Party parties in New York that seemed to center not on politics but on heroin suppositories. She thought “those were the days.” She later became a lesbian therapist with a specialty in lesbian bed death, and she should know.
I wasn’t so sure that Amerikkka should be spelled with a ‘KKK’, but she had cool Communist credentials signed off on by no less than the dowager princess of the American Communist Party Bettina Aptheker, so I was inclined to go along with her drivel in order to get along with her. Living with a red-diaper princess who was on the steering committee of the VDC was, in those days at Berkeley, better than going steady with the Homecoming Queen.
In later life, my princess was due to come down in the world. The last I looked she was counseling latter-day lesbians suffering from Lesbian Bed Death; just another ordinary therapist wading through the muck of ordinary urban angst. Back then she was professionally oppressed by the fascist war machine and so was I. So was every other college-deferment clutching coward of my time. Fear and lust controlled us. She, and so many others, “said ‘Yes!’ to boys who said ‘No!’” so I memorized all the ways in which we were oppressed. She was always giving a test on this subject and I didn’t do so bad.
I also found that, like any good Berkeley radical, you needed — in this realm of unremitting oppressions so thick and so multiple that counting was foolish — to find some good friends; some very good friends both at home and abroad. And so you looked around, not so much for friends, but for enemies of your enemy, the oppressive AmeriKKKa. You looked around the world using the dubious intellectual filter: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
When you ran everything you said and did through the “Oppressive America ” filter you had no end of friends in the 60s and early 70s. Some of them even had guns, ammo, armies, armor, and nuclear weapons.
The “friends” of our slice of young America included, but were not limited to, The Soviet Union, The People’s Republic of China, Castro’s Cuba, and socialist and communist parties stretching across Europe and down through Mexico, Central, and South America. Elsewhere they included the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, the Red Army Faction… on and on until the international litany of political dementia girdled the globe in a seamless political landscape of perpetual Revolution, sexual and otherwise. You and your oppressed and draftable friends saw those groups and nations as “righteous.” You saw them not as the totalitarian serial killers they were, but as the secular saviors of civilization. They were, well, just very cool guys. They were “happening, bro.”
When you got done with feeling cool about those friendly states and organizations, you still weren’t out of friends. Instead, you just went on to the “enemies of your enemy” that were not necessarily rooted in real estate, but in the mind and the culture. These groups have been summed up in a stunning fashion by Paul Mann in his perceptive essay “Stupid Undergrounds.” They were
–take a deep breath —
Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, alternative colleges and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho- terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub- entrepreneurial dealers, derivative derivistes, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these…
That just about sums up the enemies of our enemy, AmeriKKKa, in the Vietnam era.
As you can see we had plenty of friends.
And they and we all grew older.
We survived and thrived.
We didn’t “sell out,” we bought in.
Some of us even grew up, but only a few.
For most of us — no matter what was our lot in later life — it would always be 1968. We so loved being “The Lost Boys.”
Although I was of — and among — many of the stupid undergrounds above, none of them are among my friends any longer. I have, alas, far fewer friends. Indeed, as my strange political odyssey of saying “Goodbye to all that” continues, old friends seem to melt away like the highland mist at high noon in the desert. It is sad, but still, with friends like those…
Over the five decades since 1968, the list of regimes dedicated to, and capable of, the destruction of the United States shrank. They either took a long dirt nap in the muck of history or are now shambling towards the graveyard of all other failed but deadly fascist ideologies. The political genius and destiny of the United States lies, after all, in the fact that we do not require you to be a friend. You simply have to not be an enemy.
The American Way is, after all, that nothing need be personal when it can just be business. One on one, Americans can be very warm, understanding and generous. But piss us off too much and we’ll bomb your cities to rubble. We don’t like business to be disrupted too much.
In all this, the world at large has gone forward and, all in all, improved for the better. The world seems, slowly, to be working out well for most of those people who have, as they say, “gotten with the program.”
But there remains a residual group of Americans who, although they batten off the program, don’t want to get with it at all — except when it comes time to buy a new Prius, take a vacation in Provance, or score a country home. They take pride in never having sold out, even as they buy in. They are “the Not-So-Great Generation.” They are my generation.
These dreary souls without a country have made prosperous lives for themselves in our local, state and national governments and politics. They are legion in the comfortable realms of academia, the entertainment world, and the media. Graying, they tint their hair. Flaccid, they siphon their cellulite. Balding, they tie what they have back in a ponytail and strut on impertube. Some even drive their hatefully capitalist Ferrari to their hatefully capitalist private jet and fly to their hatefully capitalist private home on the beach in Hawaii.
The long list of Paul Mann’s Stupid Undergrounds shows no signs of shortening. Fueled by the vapid culture of cool it gets longer by the day. And it is from within this expanding list of Stupid Undergrounds that the American Left of today draws not only its strength but its fresh and much younger converts.
If it were only the denizens of these fringe groups that supplied the ideological cannon fodder of the American Left, it would be a small matter to marginalize them since their very mindsets marginalize them from the square numbered “1.” Indeed, just a few years ago, they could only exist within the rarefied environment of on-campus humanities and ethnic-studies departments. Once removed from these hyperbaric chambers, their failure to thrive in the world outside — absent a position in various media companies and Washington Wonk Tanks — was assured. They were, if not really useful idiots, harmless idiots.
That is no longer the case. A very large and significant American institution has stripped to the buff, oiled up, and made its body politic freely available to the tender mercies and tough love of the American Left. Indeed, the capture of this group is the single significant achievement of the American Left in decades. With the elevation of Howard Dean, the canonization of Hillary Clinton, the sanctification of Ted Kennedy, the renovation of Nancy Pelosi, the self-defenestration of Barbara Boxer, and the deification of Barack H. Obama, it is clear that the political base of the American Left has now migrated from the fringes of our political arena to the dead center of the Democratic Party. And it is there to stay.
The American Left now controls the political party that calls upon the allegiance of nearly half of the country. It is the political party that is the Plantation Party of African-Americans. It is a party that holds its members now not with the plans of what it will do for them in the future, but with the fading memories of what it did for them in the past when it was a great and honorable party. With the control of the media, the Left can continue with its plan to brainwash their entire stupid half of the population in bit bleach.
The American Left will remain in control of this Party’s shell since it has brought with it not only its failed ideology and all the rag-tag constituents of the Stupid Undergrounds of America, but the very fuel source of these groups itself — Trump Hate. And on the Left today, Trump-Hate, more than money, is the new mother’s milk of our darkening politics.
The conquest of the Democratic Party by the American Left which has now been consolidated is, of course, bad news for the Democrats and for the country as a whole. A vital two or even three party system is essential to the long term balance of the Republic.
But this doesn’t bother the Leftists of the Democratic Party at all. They are too busy counting the loot. And there is loot to be had.
The American Left receives many things from their conquest, not the least of which is the damage it does, axiomatically, to the United States. They also receive money, lots of it; especially when you think of the low funding levels the American Left has had for most of its existence. Their plunder also includes electoral organizations — many — as well as access to local, state, and national unions in the public and private realms. Add in mailing lists tens of millions of names long as well as websites and online acolytes by the thousands.
Most important of all, the American Left now has open access and control over sitting Democrats in Washington and the state legislatures. With money and organizations to win elections, the American Left now has the power over elected Democrats to instruct them to support and advance some decidedly non-centrist, non-liberal, but classic Leftist agendas. In a very real sense, the conquest of the Democratic Party gives the American Left a base that it could never hope to win, and will now probably never win, at the ballot box.
This regrettable transformation of the Democratic Party makes the American Left much bigger than it ever thought it could be. Those who have lingered all these years in the thick bong smoke of the 60s now have their fantasy within their grasp. They have made the enemies of Trump and the MAGA moment and movement at home and abroad into their friends and it is, at last, “Springtime for Lefties!”
Of course, it is a crowning irony to note that the proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” was originally an Arab proverb, as were, indeed, the fuming chillums of 1968’s Not-So-Great-Generation.
Write this down all in one sitting Gerard? Almost stream of consciousness .
captfleeMarch 4, 2019, 11:02 AM
Gerard;
Tell It!
Good Lord, man! You are on fire today…
It will be interesting, indeed, if 2020 turns out to be 1972, redux. Albeit with some very different demographics. Being a half decade behind you, and having come up in the South, I missed the cutting edge revolutionary stuff that those of you in the Bay Area and the rotten apple marinated in, thus experienced the first half of the seventies as my “sixties”. As I recall. the bloom was off the rose by then, and it was difficult to be cynical enough, what with bombings all the time and lunatic groups like the SLA, an opera bouffe which nobody would buy if presented as fiction today.
Captflee… “You are on fire today…” well, it’s a bit soon and the ashes of Paradise are barely cold.
Of course, one of MY friends following the loss of my house in a fire sent me an email “Wow John! We didn’t know that your house was on fire! We thought that you were barbecuing dinner again.” So its all good. Touching on that subject, Gerard. I understand you intend to rebuild, if you’d like to pick my brain for anything on that subject I’m available. I paid the price for that expertise. The most important thing I learned was, “Don’t hire your brother-in-law as the contractor”.
I never got anywhere with the hippie chicks. The conservative girls on the other hand, more undergarments to deal with by and large, but very eager.
Today I’ve shed my democrat friends and correspondents. Mostly we just stopped talking, one (was my best man) after a violent verbal argument. I’m not sure if I’m south of the Mason/Dixon line or he is?
captfleeMarch 4, 2019, 7:19 PM
Evening, John, Gerard…
Please forgive my thoughtless reference to the late unpleasantness,… I’m not sure that the detonation of a small nuke over this area could get a proper fire going, what with last year’s 100+ inches of rain, so woodland fires have apparently slipped my mind. John, sorry to hear of your past fire loss.
As to the loss of friends during this long “cold civil war”, I lost the first of those over twenty years ago after having to show his new SJW girlfriend the door after her haranguing me for an hour about my retrograde political opinions, during which I could not help but think of Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado”. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” It has been my lifelong struggle to do my best to act as a gentleman at all times, the foundation of which rests upon not intentionally giving offense. I am too often unsuccessful. Our dear lefty friends do test one’s patience, though, no?
Aaaahhhhhh, the ladies, whether hippy chicks or girls next door; I think Brother Dave Gardner put it best, “Gratitude is riches, complaint is poverty, and the worst I ever had was wonderful.”
David SpenceMarch 5, 2019, 9:26 AM
Wow!!!
DANMarch 5, 2019, 5:24 PM
to john the river, didn’t know you are a paradisian, along with gvl. have a request for you or anyone else up there that’s familiar with lower neal road,below the spring house or where it used to be didn’t see it listed on fire map, kinda wondering if it got removed ? it was pretty solid back in the day. anyway a few miles south is a place that used to be know as the narrows, canyon on left side of road going south real close, above whats now the DUMP tho. come spring would appreciate greatly if someone would check out the canyon wall just below the rimrock, looking for sign of a cross approx.150ft x 75ft. if it’s there it would only be slightly greener grass on the slope, not sure if the fire made it that far south. here’s the deal,back in 86-87 sister & i had to clean up mom’s house after she passed & in the process discovered decades worth of OLD SEEDS, stuffed in drawers etc.some dateing back to early 19 hundreds, the oldtimers never threw away anything! all wrapped up in old newspaper envelopes & noted with special qualities etc. anyway we decided to release them all along with moms ashes on that hillside, 3 huge plastic garbage bags full of every seed you can think of spread out in the shape of a cross,took us hours, kinda for shits & giggles thinking if a fraction of them sprouted people would be scratching their heads wondering wtf? never made it back to check on it, thats my story & i’m sticking to it!! you’d be surprised that a bull durham sack of 1913 poppy seeds i brought back actually sprouted maybe 10 percent. cheers DAN
Dan
No, I’m on the other coast and my fire was 15 years ago.
Like the idea of planting those seeds in the shape of a cross. I wonder if Google maps would show anything on the satellite view?
DANMarch 6, 2019, 5:17 PM
JOHN THE RIVER thanks for getting back to me, maybe someone else in paradise area will pick up on this thread & in the spring have a look. would imagine the road to the dump will be busy as hell this year. your idea about google earth is worth a look but given the slope of the canyon not likely anything will show up but i will try it in a month or so. after all these years one might see a faint outline or slightly greener weeds/ grass.not a lot of real dirt on the lava caps in the area,nothing stays green long there anyway no water. but at the time it seemed a good plan, stay warm on the east coast CHEERS DAN
Yaakov in the YaakMarch 10, 2019, 10:00 AM
Reminds me of the title of the book I never wrote :
Smile On Your Broker: When the Flower Children Went To Seed
Gerard, my Mom and sister and I lived in Berkeley for just 2.5 years, but they were “formative years”.
My younger sister and I were kids, I was about 14ish. We moved north near Seattle after I finished 9th grade there. We were in Berkeley, I believe, when for the first time the goof balls covered up the top part of the C from the California School of the Deaf initials up on the hill above Berkeley. Voila! LSD. I think it made it into the local newspaper. Boy was that a “cool” stunt, eh? Between revering Claude Brown’s adventures in his book Manchild In the Promised Land, and the scene on Telegraph Ave., I managed to find myself quite confused as well as extremely naive by the time I was ready to get out of high school. The classic word for it from an earlier time would be “simpleton”, or as in the book of Proverbs, just “simple”.
Thankfully, the Lord Jesus got my attention in 1971, and shook some sense into me. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Matthew 7.3 “Never man spake like this man”! Take care, friend. I look forward to meeting you sometime.
gwbnycSeptember 30, 2021, 8:26 AM
Had a red diaper girlfriend.
An atheist of course, and hadn’t an answer for when I’d ask, “then why do you cry out ‘0h GOD oh GOD oh GOD’”?
This one has definitely stood the test of time. Thanks for the reminder. One tiny detail caught my eye: “Balding, they tie what they have back in a ponytail…” I’ve always thought a man with a ponytail did NOT look like a horse’s head.
JackSeptember 30, 2021, 8:51 AM
Dang, you guys move quickly and a very great read GVL. I thank God for you every day for the brilliance, imagination and clarity that you bring to such troubling subjects. I’m going to have to allocate time for a re-read though; so much there to think about. Excellent piece.
Vietnam was the last noble war fought by this country… they have all been corporate since then.
I ashamedly cheered my Son on as Sergeant of his Marine Corps Scout/Sniper STA Unit in Iraq decades ago. But he, soon aware of and shrugging off too late the youthful cause of his enlistment… and his fellow Marines found their war was not about Old Glory and America’s great experiment in Individual Liberties. He and his fellow Marines called themselves the “Exxon Division.”
Corporate. Cold. Balance Sheets. The false smiles of the Corporate Talking Heads and politicians. Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and all involved should be ashamed of themselves. The emptiness of value by the measure of money and power.
You ask… “Jack, how are you so convinced of these things?”
Like Rutger said in the depiction on American Digest from “Blade Runner…” “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near of the Tannhauser Gate.”
The above in a figurative sense… the below in the literal reality of my past…
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve jumped into the darkness of Zambia at two o’clock in the morning with 60 pounds of explosives in my drop pack. Watched a frightened, but still majestic and graceful family of giraffes gallop the African bush as I hung out the door of a helicopter flying by them at treetop level. Battled it out with terrorists mano a mano while neck deep in crocodile infested idle waters on the banks and sandbars of the Honde and Limpopo Rivers in Mozambique.”
And then if you still can’t believe me… read “Street Without Joy” by Frenchman Bernard Fall. Vietminh Communist communiques to their headquarters… “The people are not with us!”
Almost ALL of those ‘Liberation Fighters’ you have read about in Vietnam and Rhodesia and all other Communist Insurrections were Slave Soldiers. You cheered them on to the drumbeat of the Mainstream News Media and Leftist Entertainment agenda. You encouraged pure evil to win.
How do I know? Because 200 of them surrendered to us on one go of it after killing their hardcore Communist officers. I was paired up with one given his weapons back by the Rhodesians… all these black guys could think about was killing the Communists… and they energetically did so, pissed off that they’d been taken from their families and forced to fight for something none cared about for so long.
We couldn’t turn hardcore Communist prisoners over to them for the hideous torture they would do to them. The same as the black Rhodesian police and soldiers who had their families barbarically killed by these ‘Liberation Fighters.’ Their own tribe members. They would torture the Communists to death… they couldn’t get their hands on enough of them.
Why am I so convinced that I’m right!? Because I know the truth about that fuckup Che Guevara. How? One of the brave Green Berets of my Special Forces Chapter trained the Bolivian soldiers that hunted him down. Guevara… the ultimate Communist PsyOps creation. A barbaric fake and fraud that everyone who wears his likeness on a shirt or adorns their wall with a poster makes a fool of themselves by in their arrogant ignorance.
I know the reality of the lies you’ve been told… because “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate…”
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
As one member of our Commando wrote in later years: “That country (Rhodesia) has cast a long shadow over our lives, has it not?”
As one struggles to endure the daily mundane of life, I realize he is right. He wrote on…
“Rhodesia is a woman whose name is forever written upon our hearts – against whom no earthly flesh and blood of female can ever compete. We shed our blood, sweat, tears and the blood of others answering her siren call. Now that the winds and the rains have washed away the stench of the rotting corpses, we remember only the flair of our youth as we jousted lockstep with an opponent equally as determined to rid the world of us, as we him.”
“Anoma! Anoma! Anoma!” Swahili for “I am a poor man! I am a poor man! I am a poor man!”
“But I am a rich man and she (Rhodesia) has made me so. We loved her like no other. Oh, how I miss her and my friends so!”
What amazing words, from yet another one of the guys in my Commando who appeared so ignorant that I didn’t think he knew how to read, let alone capture the spirit of then with such eloquent words.
An American in Rhodesian Light Infantry, Support Commando 1977-79
“Vietnam was the last noble war fought by this country…” I always wondered why the US Military could not win the damn thing. In college after my 4 years in the USAF—all stateside—there were hundreds of Vietnam vets there whose take on that war was, by and large, the same. And their stories, the tales they would weave in Poly Sci and History classes! I learned more from them than from any book.
As for that POS Che: Not too many of those t-shirts to be seen here in Oklahoma City. But when I do see one, I have to stop myself from reaching for my pistol. Where Che and Fidel are now I rather doubt they are yucking it up over rum and cigars.
Mike,
I feel like I preach this to a stone wall.
I don’t think my life would be worthy of a movie. But many much more courageous common Rhodesian people and especially the farmers, wives and their children braved the real dangers and fought the real fight deserve a documentary of their bravery. Read about the honor roll of 600 farmers killed during the war.
I saw the butchery of some of the whites and many blacks that would not have been done to an animal. Old men and women, young men and women and their children and babies. I saw a beautiful young woman shot in the back laying on the rear lawn of their home through the back door of their farm house… their 3 or 4 year old child lying dead beside her as she tried to flee the terrorists. Their black nanny close to beaten to death trying to save their months old baby that they bayoneted to death on the farm house veranda. The army flew the nanny to Salisbury and a hospital that saved her life. They never found the husband… and God only knows what a horrible death he died. This is why I have no conscience about the killing there. Mentally ill ‘freedom fighters’ infected with the madness of Communism.
This was the Rhodesian’s homeland. Unlike me, they had no place to retreat to. The whole situation burns in me and my wife’s soul like acid. Look at that shyttehole now and what Communism has done to the people. It’s a dictatorship of gold plated Rolls Royces and starving blacks and whites… never hear about this, do you? You’re being spoon fed shytte and told it’s pudding.
Back then, if you supported the glossed over version of African Liberation Freedom Fighters as presented by the Mainstream News Media and their Entertainment Industry… you were sucker punched… or a fool. The same goes for the dribble they put out now. I came home ashamed of my country, Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young.
What I post is the truth of the matter… and wake up to what you’re being told now about America.
SOOOOOOOOOO…
I just want these Leftist and Communist pukes and especially their admirers who sit on the fence and have the inclination to think that what they advocate is for the good of people to know this…
THE COMMUNIST AGENDA IS ALL FRAUDULENT AND LIES. IT IS MEANT TO FUCK WITH THE LOGIC AND THE TRUTH IN YOUR MIND. IT IS PURE EVIL… IT DESTROYS HOPE AND GOES AGAINST THE BASIC HUMAN NATURE THAT WE ARE EACH INDIVIDUALS… WE ARE NOT MEANT TO LIVE IN A HUMAN ANT COLONY. THAT IS CONTRARY TO HUMAN NATURE.
COMMUNISM… YOU CAN VOTE YOUR WAY INTO IT… BUT YOU HAVE TO SHOOT YOUR WAY OUT OF IT.
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.”
“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.”
“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Theodore Dalrymple
My unsolicited opinion Gerard: This un would be good as first entry in the lead chapter your up and coming book.
Sets a mood and a pivot for words of a somewhat mature guy in CA looking back at youth in Paradise, 9/11 in NYC, dildo in the keys and, for a while uncomfortably settled in Seattle, & ect., & etc., & etc.
Now if we can just set it to music, teach some Crips & Bloods some dace steps, and it plays well in Hoboken, we just might have a Broadway hit, The Best Side Stories! 😉
OneGuySeptember 30, 2021, 1:29 PM
When I was 23 (65 years ago) I knew a very attractive read head with a body only seen in Playboy who was leaning/claiming/thinking she was lesbian. She would have sex with guys but typically one night stands and then swear off them. My first time with her I gave her half a dozen orgasms with some good oral (mostly good because it was 69). She would not call for a couple of days and then call talking sweetly and like a little girl. I would go see her and kind of play this game where I wouldn’t act like I wanted to have sex and she would get all kissy and touchy. And I would not seem to be interested and she would finally take off her clothes to force the issue, and believe me naked she forced every desire I ever had. She would literally beg for oral and I would insist on a little playing around first (she had great tits). and she would literally drip until I gave in and we asssumed the 69 position. I obliged and gave her as many big O’s as she could stand and she obliged me as well. I have no idea if she ever did finally go full lesbian.
One guy, Sounds like “You Were “That sexual revolution.
Just read you shit to my wife Carole, she laughed said, what a douche.
O well.
VI
OneGuyOctober 1, 2021, 8:43 AM
LOL! I get it. That’s part of growing old. I’m sure if my wife read it she would say the same thing. But remember when you were 20 something and you actually enjoyed life…
EX-Californian PeteOctober 1, 2021, 10:59 AM
So, you’re telling us that you couldn’t satisfy her with your pecker?
(Heh heh heh, just messing with ya)
OneGuyOctober 1, 2021, 2:33 PM
No I couldn’t. That’s why she wanted to be a lesbian. She had maybe 10-15 lovers and intercourse didn’t do it for her. But she loved oral.
I was thinking he may have written for Penthouse back in the 70’s. I think it was called Penthouse Forum? Its been awhile.
OneGuyOctober 1, 2021, 8:47 AM
That was the PG version. She was absolutely beautiful and after making love our first time she confided that she thought she was broken because her friends told her how good sex felt but she simply didn’t get there. That is why I thought maybe oral would do it for her and it did.
AbigailAdamsSeptember 30, 2021, 6:20 PM
Gerard, my friend, do you ever consider how incredibly lucky you are that you didn’t fall into the hands of those communists at The Peoples’ Temple? You may have known some folks who did.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, majoring in marijuana at the university, hanging out with the Progressive Labor Party, and skipping through the clouds of tear gas on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I was convinced that any war that would send my long-haired, sensitive, poetic and acid-tripping self off to wade through rice paddies in Vietnam just had to be wrong, wrong, wrong.
Gerard Van der Leun
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Write this down all in one sitting Gerard? Almost stream of consciousness .
Gerard;
Tell It!
Good Lord, man! You are on fire today…
It will be interesting, indeed, if 2020 turns out to be 1972, redux. Albeit with some very different demographics. Being a half decade behind you, and having come up in the South, I missed the cutting edge revolutionary stuff that those of you in the Bay Area and the rotten apple marinated in, thus experienced the first half of the seventies as my “sixties”. As I recall. the bloom was off the rose by then, and it was difficult to be cynical enough, what with bombings all the time and lunatic groups like the SLA, an opera bouffe which nobody would buy if presented as fiction today.
Captflee… “You are on fire today…” well, it’s a bit soon and the ashes of Paradise are barely cold.
Of course, one of MY friends following the loss of my house in a fire sent me an email “Wow John! We didn’t know that your house was on fire! We thought that you were barbecuing dinner again.” So its all good. Touching on that subject, Gerard. I understand you intend to rebuild, if you’d like to pick my brain for anything on that subject I’m available. I paid the price for that expertise. The most important thing I learned was, “Don’t hire your brother-in-law as the contractor”.
I never got anywhere with the hippie chicks. The conservative girls on the other hand, more undergarments to deal with by and large, but very eager.
Today I’ve shed my democrat friends and correspondents. Mostly we just stopped talking, one (was my best man) after a violent verbal argument. I’m not sure if I’m south of the Mason/Dixon line or he is?
Evening, John, Gerard…
Please forgive my thoughtless reference to the late unpleasantness,… I’m not sure that the detonation of a small nuke over this area could get a proper fire going, what with last year’s 100+ inches of rain, so woodland fires have apparently slipped my mind. John, sorry to hear of your past fire loss.
As to the loss of friends during this long “cold civil war”, I lost the first of those over twenty years ago after having to show his new SJW girlfriend the door after her haranguing me for an hour about my retrograde political opinions, during which I could not help but think of Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado”. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” It has been my lifelong struggle to do my best to act as a gentleman at all times, the foundation of which rests upon not intentionally giving offense. I am too often unsuccessful. Our dear lefty friends do test one’s patience, though, no?
Aaaahhhhhh, the ladies, whether hippy chicks or girls next door; I think Brother Dave Gardner put it best, “Gratitude is riches, complaint is poverty, and the worst I ever had was wonderful.”
Wow!!!
to john the river, didn’t know you are a paradisian, along with gvl. have a request for you or anyone else up there that’s familiar with lower neal road,below the spring house or where it used to be didn’t see it listed on fire map, kinda wondering if it got removed ? it was pretty solid back in the day. anyway a few miles south is a place that used to be know as the narrows, canyon on left side of road going south real close, above whats now the DUMP tho. come spring would appreciate greatly if someone would check out the canyon wall just below the rimrock, looking for sign of a cross approx.150ft x 75ft. if it’s there it would only be slightly greener grass on the slope, not sure if the fire made it that far south. here’s the deal,back in 86-87 sister & i had to clean up mom’s house after she passed & in the process discovered decades worth of OLD SEEDS, stuffed in drawers etc.some dateing back to early 19 hundreds, the oldtimers never threw away anything! all wrapped up in old newspaper envelopes & noted with special qualities etc. anyway we decided to release them all along with moms ashes on that hillside, 3 huge plastic garbage bags full of every seed you can think of spread out in the shape of a cross,took us hours, kinda for shits & giggles thinking if a fraction of them sprouted people would be scratching their heads wondering wtf? never made it back to check on it, thats my story & i’m sticking to it!! you’d be surprised that a bull durham sack of 1913 poppy seeds i brought back actually sprouted maybe 10 percent. cheers DAN
Dan
No, I’m on the other coast and my fire was 15 years ago.
Like the idea of planting those seeds in the shape of a cross. I wonder if Google maps would show anything on the satellite view?
JOHN THE RIVER thanks for getting back to me, maybe someone else in paradise area will pick up on this thread & in the spring have a look. would imagine the road to the dump will be busy as hell this year. your idea about google earth is worth a look but given the slope of the canyon not likely anything will show up but i will try it in a month or so. after all these years one might see a faint outline or slightly greener weeds/ grass.not a lot of real dirt on the lava caps in the area,nothing stays green long there anyway no water. but at the time it seemed a good plan, stay warm on the east coast CHEERS DAN
Reminds me of the title of the book I never wrote :
Smile On Your Broker: When the Flower Children Went To Seed
Gerard, my Mom and sister and I lived in Berkeley for just 2.5 years, but they were “formative years”.
My younger sister and I were kids, I was about 14ish. We moved north near Seattle after I finished 9th grade there. We were in Berkeley, I believe, when for the first time the goof balls covered up the top part of the C from the California School of the Deaf initials up on the hill above Berkeley. Voila! LSD. I think it made it into the local newspaper. Boy was that a “cool” stunt, eh? Between revering Claude Brown’s adventures in his book Manchild In the Promised Land, and the scene on Telegraph Ave., I managed to find myself quite confused as well as extremely naive by the time I was ready to get out of high school. The classic word for it from an earlier time would be “simpleton”, or as in the book of Proverbs, just “simple”.
Thankfully, the Lord Jesus got my attention in 1971, and shook some sense into me. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Matthew 7.3 “Never man spake like this man”! Take care, friend. I look forward to meeting you sometime.
Had a red diaper girlfriend.
An atheist of course, and hadn’t an answer for when I’d ask, “then why do you cry out ‘0h GOD oh GOD oh GOD’”?
This one has definitely stood the test of time. Thanks for the reminder. One tiny detail caught my eye: “Balding, they tie what they have back in a ponytail…” I’ve always thought a man with a ponytail did NOT look like a horse’s head.
Dang, you guys move quickly and a very great read GVL. I thank God for you every day for the brilliance, imagination and clarity that you bring to such troubling subjects. I’m going to have to allocate time for a re-read though; so much there to think about. Excellent piece.
Ladies & Gentlemen, Boys & Girls,
Vietnam was the last noble war fought by this country… they have all been corporate since then.
I ashamedly cheered my Son on as Sergeant of his Marine Corps Scout/Sniper STA Unit in Iraq decades ago. But he, soon aware of and shrugging off too late the youthful cause of his enlistment… and his fellow Marines found their war was not about Old Glory and America’s great experiment in Individual Liberties. He and his fellow Marines called themselves the “Exxon Division.”
Corporate. Cold. Balance Sheets. The false smiles of the Corporate Talking Heads and politicians. Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and all involved should be ashamed of themselves. The emptiness of value by the measure of money and power.
You ask… “Jack, how are you so convinced of these things?”
Like Rutger said in the depiction on American Digest from “Blade Runner…” “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near of the Tannhauser Gate.”
The above in a figurative sense… the below in the literal reality of my past…
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve jumped into the darkness of Zambia at two o’clock in the morning with 60 pounds of explosives in my drop pack. Watched a frightened, but still majestic and graceful family of giraffes gallop the African bush as I hung out the door of a helicopter flying by them at treetop level. Battled it out with terrorists mano a mano while neck deep in crocodile infested idle waters on the banks and sandbars of the Honde and Limpopo Rivers in Mozambique.”
And then if you still can’t believe me… read “Street Without Joy” by Frenchman Bernard Fall. Vietminh Communist communiques to their headquarters… “The people are not with us!”
Almost ALL of those ‘Liberation Fighters’ you have read about in Vietnam and Rhodesia and all other Communist Insurrections were Slave Soldiers. You cheered them on to the drumbeat of the Mainstream News Media and Leftist Entertainment agenda. You encouraged pure evil to win.
How do I know? Because 200 of them surrendered to us on one go of it after killing their hardcore Communist officers. I was paired up with one given his weapons back by the Rhodesians… all these black guys could think about was killing the Communists… and they energetically did so, pissed off that they’d been taken from their families and forced to fight for something none cared about for so long.
We couldn’t turn hardcore Communist prisoners over to them for the hideous torture they would do to them. The same as the black Rhodesian police and soldiers who had their families barbarically killed by these ‘Liberation Fighters.’ Their own tribe members. They would torture the Communists to death… they couldn’t get their hands on enough of them.
Why am I so convinced that I’m right!? Because I know the truth about that fuckup Che Guevara. How? One of the brave Green Berets of my Special Forces Chapter trained the Bolivian soldiers that hunted him down. Guevara… the ultimate Communist PsyOps creation. A barbaric fake and fraud that everyone who wears his likeness on a shirt or adorns their wall with a poster makes a fool of themselves by in their arrogant ignorance.
I know the reality of the lies you’ve been told… because “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate…”
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
As one member of our Commando wrote in later years: “That country (Rhodesia) has cast a long shadow over our lives, has it not?”
As one struggles to endure the daily mundane of life, I realize he is right. He wrote on…
“Rhodesia is a woman whose name is forever written upon our hearts – against whom no earthly flesh and blood of female can ever compete. We shed our blood, sweat, tears and the blood of others answering her siren call. Now that the winds and the rains have washed away the stench of the rotting corpses, we remember only the flair of our youth as we jousted lockstep with an opponent equally as determined to rid the world of us, as we him.”
“Anoma! Anoma! Anoma!” Swahili for “I am a poor man! I am a poor man! I am a poor man!”
“But I am a rich man and she (Rhodesia) has made me so. We loved her like no other. Oh, how I miss her and my friends so!”
What amazing words, from yet another one of the guys in my Commando who appeared so ignorant that I didn’t think he knew how to read, let alone capture the spirit of then with such eloquent words.
An American in Rhodesian Light Infantry, Support Commando 1977-79
Jack:
Your life deserves a movie.
“Vietnam was the last noble war fought by this country…” I always wondered why the US Military could not win the damn thing. In college after my 4 years in the USAF—all stateside—there were hundreds of Vietnam vets there whose take on that war was, by and large, the same. And their stories, the tales they would weave in Poly Sci and History classes! I learned more from them than from any book.
As for that POS Che: Not too many of those t-shirts to be seen here in Oklahoma City. But when I do see one, I have to stop myself from reaching for my pistol. Where Che and Fidel are now I rather doubt they are yucking it up over rum and cigars.
Mike,
I feel like I preach this to a stone wall.
I don’t think my life would be worthy of a movie. But many much more courageous common Rhodesian people and especially the farmers, wives and their children braved the real dangers and fought the real fight deserve a documentary of their bravery. Read about the honor roll of 600 farmers killed during the war.
I saw the butchery of some of the whites and many blacks that would not have been done to an animal. Old men and women, young men and women and their children and babies. I saw a beautiful young woman shot in the back laying on the rear lawn of their home through the back door of their farm house… their 3 or 4 year old child lying dead beside her as she tried to flee the terrorists. Their black nanny close to beaten to death trying to save their months old baby that they bayoneted to death on the farm house veranda. The army flew the nanny to Salisbury and a hospital that saved her life. They never found the husband… and God only knows what a horrible death he died. This is why I have no conscience about the killing there. Mentally ill ‘freedom fighters’ infected with the madness of Communism.
This was the Rhodesian’s homeland. Unlike me, they had no place to retreat to. The whole situation burns in me and my wife’s soul like acid. Look at that shyttehole now and what Communism has done to the people. It’s a dictatorship of gold plated Rolls Royces and starving blacks and whites… never hear about this, do you? You’re being spoon fed shytte and told it’s pudding.
Back then, if you supported the glossed over version of African Liberation Freedom Fighters as presented by the Mainstream News Media and their Entertainment Industry… you were sucker punched… or a fool. The same goes for the dribble they put out now. I came home ashamed of my country, Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young.
What I post is the truth of the matter… and wake up to what you’re being told now about America.
SOOOOOOOOOO…
I just want these Leftist and Communist pukes and especially their admirers who sit on the fence and have the inclination to think that what they advocate is for the good of people to know this…
THE COMMUNIST AGENDA IS ALL FRAUDULENT AND LIES. IT IS MEANT TO FUCK WITH THE LOGIC AND THE TRUTH IN YOUR MIND. IT IS PURE EVIL… IT DESTROYS HOPE AND GOES AGAINST THE BASIC HUMAN NATURE THAT WE ARE EACH INDIVIDUALS… WE ARE NOT MEANT TO LIVE IN A HUMAN ANT COLONY. THAT IS CONTRARY TO HUMAN NATURE.
COMMUNISM… YOU CAN VOTE YOUR WAY INTO IT… BUT YOU HAVE TO SHOOT YOUR WAY OUT OF IT.
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.”
“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.”
“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Theodore Dalrymple
My unsolicited opinion Gerard: This un would be good as first entry in the lead chapter your up and coming book.
Sets a mood and a pivot for words of a somewhat mature guy in CA looking back at youth in Paradise, 9/11 in NYC, dildo in the keys and, for a while uncomfortably settled in Seattle, & ect., & etc., & etc.
Now if we can just set it to music, teach some Crips & Bloods some dace steps, and it plays well in Hoboken, we just might have a Broadway hit, The Best Side Stories! 😉
When I was 23 (65 years ago) I knew a very attractive read head with a body only seen in Playboy who was leaning/claiming/thinking she was lesbian. She would have sex with guys but typically one night stands and then swear off them. My first time with her I gave her half a dozen orgasms with some good oral (mostly good because it was 69). She would not call for a couple of days and then call talking sweetly and like a little girl. I would go see her and kind of play this game where I wouldn’t act like I wanted to have sex and she would get all kissy and touchy. And I would not seem to be interested and she would finally take off her clothes to force the issue, and believe me naked she forced every desire I ever had. She would literally beg for oral and I would insist on a little playing around first (she had great tits). and she would literally drip until I gave in and we asssumed the 69 position. I obliged and gave her as many big O’s as she could stand and she obliged me as well. I have no idea if she ever did finally go full lesbian.
One guy, Sounds like “You Were “That sexual revolution.
Just read you shit to my wife Carole, she laughed said, what a douche.
O well.
VI
LOL! I get it. That’s part of growing old. I’m sure if my wife read it she would say the same thing. But remember when you were 20 something and you actually enjoyed life…
So, you’re telling us that you couldn’t satisfy her with your pecker?
(Heh heh heh, just messing with ya)
No I couldn’t. That’s why she wanted to be a lesbian. She had maybe 10-15 lovers and intercourse didn’t do it for her. But she loved oral.
Shouldn’t you be posting on Pornhub?
I was thinking he may have written for Penthouse back in the 70’s. I think it was called Penthouse Forum? Its been awhile.
That was the PG version. She was absolutely beautiful and after making love our first time she confided that she thought she was broken because her friends told her how good sex felt but she simply didn’t get there. That is why I thought maybe oral would do it for her and it did.
Gerard, my friend, do you ever consider how incredibly lucky you are that you didn’t fall into the hands of those communists at The Peoples’ Temple? You may have known some folks who did.