Remembering Wounded Knee

 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON REMEMBERS WOUNDED KNEE: 

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon; it was the only thing standing between his family and starvation. As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand-to-hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. The soldiers on a slight rise above the camp turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

But it is not December 29 that haunts me. It is the night of December 28, the night before the killing.

On December 28, there was still time to avert the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Big Foot—Sitanka—had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There, they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka's band marked the end of the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But, at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.

Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.

But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka's band, and it didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that his band was on its way to Pine Ridge anyway, and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.

By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration, and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.

And they celebrated, for they were heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again. In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Lakota encampment from a slight rise above the camp.

For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?

On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

St. Stephen's Day

 

TODAY IS ST. STEPHEN'S DAY:

 

GOOD KING WENCESLAS

 

"Good King Wen-ces-las looked out

On the Feast of Stephen,

Where the snow lay round about,

Deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shown the moon that night,

Tho' the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight,

Gath'ring winter fuel......

 

(Good King Wenceslas and his page gather food, drink, and pine logs for fuel and take them to the peasant's home...)

 

Therefore, everyone, be sure,

Wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now shall bless the poor,

Shall yourselves find blessing."

 

In Great Britain, this tradition of sharing the wealth has been secularized into Boxing Day, which this is. People prepare boxes of goodies for the less fortunate and pass them out.

 

It is a good tradition.

The Cruelest "Twilight Zone" Episode

 

The Cruelest Twilight Zone Episode

Eric Leif Davin

 

A local TV sub-channel airs episodes of the original “Twilight Zone” every late weeknight. Recently I caught the 1959 episode, “Time Enough at Last.” The episode is based on a 1953 story in “If” magazine by the female science fiction writer Lynn Venable. I’ve seen every episode of the series, both at the original airing time and since, so I’ve seen this episode several times. But, I always watch it again, because I think it’s perhaps the most memorable of many memorable episodes.

It stars Burgess Meredith as a meek, harmless, and sympathetic bookworm who is so nearly blind he needs thick eyeglasses to read the books he’s constantly, everywhere, reading. He’d love to talk about what he’s read, but he lives in a world of philistines, beginning with his wife and including his co-workers in the bank where he is a teller. No one is interested in talking about, or hearing about, the books he’s always reading.

One day, after he has retreated to the depths of the bank vault to eat his bag lunch and peruse the book he carried to work with him in privacy, his world suddenly changes. The nuclear war erupts that all the newspapers and radio broadcasts warned about. The entire city, nation, world (?) is wiped out. But, he is spared because he was in the bank vault reading his book.

He emerges to find only a ruined city. As he stumbles among the ruins, he comes to the public library. He goes inside and finds that the tens of thousands of books inside have been mostly preserved. He joyfully stacks the books in numbered piles and plans the weeks, months, years of pleasant undisturbed reading he now has ahead of him, now that he has “Time Enough At Last” to read everything he wants to read.

Then he bends over, his glasses slip from his face, and the lenses shatter on the pavement. The camera shows the world from his viewpoint, all fuzzy and unrecognizable, as he is almost blind without his glasses. Now, of course, he will never be able to read all those wonderful books he loves, and which he has stacked all around him. He collapses on the library’s steps and pitifully cries, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair!” And the story thus ends.

And, of course, it isn’t fair, as he has done absolutely nothing to deserve this fate. As I said, he is a meek and mild man, harmless, put upon by all around him who don’t share his love of reading. Our sympathies are entirely with him. This should not happen to him. It’s a cruel joke of the universe. Indeed, I think this is the cruelest “Twilight Zone” episode in the entire series.

Which is exactly why it is such a memorable episode.

Good stories, memorable stories, gut-wrenching stories, are about bad things happening to good people, ideally people who don’t deserve those bad things. We don’t care if bad things happen to bad people. They deserve their fates, and we feel that justice has been served. We nod approvingly, and quickly forget them.

But, when fate defeats good people, people we care about, even identify with, people who have done nothing to deserve their defeat, our guts are wrenched and we recoil at the injustice of the universe. And we remember it. That’s the reason we remember the sad love songs, the hurting love songs, most of all. That’s why the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet still touches us more than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote of the those young “star-crossed lovers.”

In Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” published in 2000, he said that a writer (and, thus, a reader) has to “love” his or her people. “There is no horror without love,” he said. This is because only if you love your people do you, the writer or the reader, care about what happens to those people.

And now, after watching “Time Enough At Last” again, I finally understand what he means. I always disliked this episode because of its gratuitous cruelty to an undeserving victim. But, I always remembered the episode vividly. And now I know why. I love that Burgess Meredith character. And so the horror – the undeserved horror – of what happens to him is unforgettable.

And this is no doubt why Rod Serling chose Lynn Venable’s story to dramatize as the cruelest “Twilight Zone” episode of them all.

 

Eric Leif Davin in "Galaxy's Edge"

 

SEVEN "GALAXY'S EDGE" ISSUES WITH STORIES BY ERIC LEIF DAVIN:

https://weightlessbooks.com/category/authors/eric-leif-davin/

 

Interview: The Desperate and the Dead

 

TALKING ABOUT ONE OF MY PIRATE NOVELS:

Eric Leif Davin is interviewed about his novel, "The Desperate and the Dead" in Dark Gothic Resurrected magazine. Here's the link:

http://emzbox.wordpress.com/tag/eric-l-davin/

 

On Writing & Inspiration

 

ERIC LEIF DAVIN ON WRITING & INSPIRATION:

https://www.facebook.com/JessicaBellaBold/videos/235322071780916

 

What Do You Want?

 Eventually, this clip will get to me, the last one to be interviewed. Just sitting on a bench in Squirrel Hill, enjoying the day....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL5xTj_zg7E

Lessons from the Great Depression

 

LESSONS FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION


During the 1932 presidential campaign, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Democratic challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood. There he unveiled the major pledge of his campaign. As president, he would "balance the budget."

 

As it happened, the economy was in such collapse it didn't matter what the Democratic challenger promised. He was guaranteed victory against the Republican incumbent, seen as responsible for the economic shambles.

 

Once in office, FDR discovered the only way out of the economic mess he'd inherited was through a big government economic stimulus program. So, he funded a number of such programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.

 

But, because FDR and most of Congress still believed the most important priority was "balancing the budget," none of these programs, known collectively as "The New Deal," were funded enough to completely pull the economy out of the Depression.

 

Yet they did bring about enough of a recovery so that things began to look better and, in 1936, the slight recovery helped FDR win a historic re-election landslide victory.

 

Encouraged by the margin of safety his re-election gave him, and the slight economic recovery, FDR decided it was now time to get serious about "balancing the budget." So, in his second term, he cut back on all the meager deficit stimulus spending he'd promoted.

 

The economy promptly relapsed into what historians call "The Roosevelt Recession" of 1937. His Republican opponents surged back to victory in the 1938 congressional elections and FDR's New Deal was effectively ended.

 

Meanwhile, the economy hobbled on to the end of the 1930s, only to be finally pulled out of the Great Depression by the massive government deficit spending required to win World War II.

 

FDR never did fulfill his Pittsburgh Promise to "balance the budget" and stop deficit spending. But the economy was booming -- and so no one cared about "balancing the budget" for many, many years.

• 
  

A Conversation with Curt Siodmak

 

MY CONVERSATION WITH LEGENDARY SF AUTHOR CURT SIODMAK: 

 

http://sfmagazines.com/?p=5592

The Prophetic Vision of Stephen Vincent Benet

 

THE PROPHETIC VISION OF STEPHEN VINCENT BENET: 

 

https://dreamforge.mywebportal.app/dreamforge/stories/show/the-prophetic-vision-of-stephen-vincent-benet-eric-leif-davin

Victor Jara of Chile

 

A CORRIDA FOR VICTOR JARA OF CHILE 

by Adrian Mitchell (Set to music & recorded by Arlo Guthrie)

 

Victor Jara of Chile 

Lived like a shooting star 

He fought for the people of Chile 

With his songs and his guitar.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

Victor Jara was a peasant 

Worked from a few years old 

He sat upon his father's plough 

And watched the earth unfold.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

When the neighbors had a wedding 

Or one of their children died 

His mother sang all night for them 

With Victor at her side. 

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

He grew to be a fighter 

Against the people's wrongs 

He listened to their grief and joy 

And turned them into songs.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

He sang about the copper miners 

And those who work the land 

He sang about the factory workers 

And they knew he was their man.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

He campaigned for Allende 

Working night and day 

He sang: take hold of your brother's hand 

The future begins today. 

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

The bloody generals seized Chile 

They arrested Victor then 

They caged him in a stadium 

With five thousand frightened men.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

Victor stood in the stadium 

He voice was brave and strong 

He sang for his fellow prisoners 

Till the guards cut short his song. 

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

They broke the bones in both his hands 

They beat his lovely head 

They tore him with electric shocks 

After two long days of torture they shot him dead. 

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

And now the Generals rule Chile 

And the British have their thanks 

For they rule with Hawker Hunters 

And they rule with Chieftain tanks.

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong.

 

Victor Jara of Chile 

Lived like a shooting star 

He fought for the people of Chile 

With his songs and his guitar. 

 

And his hands were gentle 

His hands were strong. 

 

 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=V4BdVB5t_Vg...

A Selection from my book, "Question Authority"

 A SELECTION FROM MY BOOK, "QUESTION AUTHORITY: WRITINGS FROM THE FREE SCHOOL MOVEMENT, 1971-1975," AVAILABLE ON AMAZON, Etc. 

 

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/11/19/christopher-jencks-does-he-lack-the/

G. Edward Pendray and the Invention of the Time Capsule

 

GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE, G. EDWARD PENDRAY, & THE INVENTION OF THE TIME CAPSULE

I was touring “The Castle” with inventor and captain of industry George Westinghouse, Jr., who not only invented the Westinghouse Air Brake, still found on all railroads, but also founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company to sell it. He also patented 360 other inventions and launched 60 companies, including the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Union Switch & Signal, and the forerunner of aerospace giant Rockwell International.

Actually, it wasn’t the real George Westinghouse. He died in 1914. It was a Westinghouse impersonator named Charles Ruch, but in his black top hat, Prince Albert coat, and with his white mutton chops, Ruch certainly looked like the real thing.

Meanwhile, “The Castle,” through which Ruch guided me, *was* the real thing. It was built by George Westinghouse in 1890 in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, about a 30-minute drive east of Pittsburgh. For nearly a century The Castle, a massive stone structure designed by noted architect H. H. Richardson, was the corporate headquarters of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, also located in Wilmerding. Intended to look like a medieval robber baron’s castle, some might say it was an entirely appropriate command center for a modern robber baron.

Charlie Ruch would not be among those. Charlie Ruch greatly admired George Westinghouse. That’s why Charlie impersonated Westinghouse when he conducted tours of The Castle and when he made appearances as his hero throughout Western Pennsylvania. Born and raised in the Pittsburgh area, Charlie Ruch graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1936. There he’d been a journalism major and had edited The Pitt News, the student newspaper. He began working at the Westinghouse Castle in 1938 as assistant editor of the company’s employee magazine. In 1942 he became its editor and he subsequently served as communications manager. In the years before his retirement in 1980, he was the Westinghouse director of personnel communications and community relations.

But Charlie Ruch never really retired. He stayed on at Westinghouse as a volunteer historian. In 1984 Charlie began impersonating George Westinghouse in order to raise awareness of the inventor’s achievements. By 1998, when Charlie died, he had impersonated George Westinghouse on 501 occasions.

It was Charlie who was the driving force behind the creation of the George Westinghouse Museum, which opened at The Castle in 1987. When I stepped into the Family Room of the Museum that day, I saw George Westinghouse himself, incarnated by Charlie Ruch, bent over his writing desk. He looked up from his papers, smiled, and welcomed me into “his” home. Then he led me on a tour, proudly pointing out the artifacts and memorabilia of the Westinghouse family, including furniture and Tiffany glassware from Solitude, the Pittsburgh home of George Westinghouse and his wife, Marguerite.

In the Appliance Room “Mr. Westinghouse” introduced me to a complete kitchen outfitted with Westinghouse appliances, including toasters, irons, mangels, coffee percolators, waffle makers, radios, washing machines and driers, and even an early Westinghouse sewing machine.

The Inventions Room held memorabilia relating to the 361 patents and inventions of George Westinghouse, including a model of a pioneering city-wide automatic telephone switching system.

I was most impressed, however, by the “Room of Achievement,” filled with an array of artifacts and photographs of products developed by companies founded by George Westinghouse. On one wall was a spectacular 12-foot-long oil painting of the Electric Company’s far-reaching East Pittsburgh Works in 1920. Displays ranged from a rifle made for the Russian army in World War I to the model car used in introducing a rapid transportation system of automated people-movers.

Of greatest interest to me in this room, however, were exact replicas of the twin time capsules buried by the Westinghouse Corporation at the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964. Both were 7.5-foot--long cigar-shaped metal cylinders. Unlike the ones in New York, however, these replicas had windows cut into the sides so you could see duplicates of all the objects crammed into the original capsules buried somewhere in New York. An adjacent plaque listed every item inside.

I stared at the time capsules, gleaming like torpedoes ready for launching. With “George Westinghouse” himself beside me, it was almost as if I’d travelled back in time to the 1939 World’s Fair and was standing beside the very first “time capsules.”

Preserving things for the future, of course, wasn’t exactly new in 1939. Cornerstones in buildings date back to antiquity and are often filled with coins and other memorabilia. But in 1922 Howard Carter discovered the millennia-old tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Perhaps the most famous archaeological discovery ever, the artifact-crammed tomb -- an unintended time capsule -- catapulted the obscure “King Tut” into international prominence.

The discovery also inspired Thornwell Jacobs, president of Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, with the idea of deliberately storing records and items for more than 6,000 years with a scheduled opening date. He eventually constructed a device to do so, which he called the “Crypt of Civilization,” at Oglethorpe University. He also publicized his idea in a notable 1936 Scientific American article.

Shortly thereafter, Westinghouse Electric Corporation was looking for something to promote the company at the 1939 World’s Fair. A Westinghouse publicist proposed that Westinghouse build and bury a similar “Crypt,” meant to be uncovered and opened in 5,000 years, at the Fair. However, the executive, who also coined the word “laundromat” to describe the Westinghouse washing machine, suggested a snappier label. He proposed that the “crypts” be called “time capsules.” The phrase gained currency almost overnight and stuck.

The Westinghouse publicist who proposed the idea of these time chambers, and named them, was G. (George) Edward Pendray, a rocket engineer and, under his own name and the name “Gawain Edwards,” also a science fiction writer. Pendray, who died from Parkinson’s Disease in 1987, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1901 and graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1924. A year later he earned a Master’s from Columbia University. He thereafter authored over 500 technical articles.

The same year he graduated from Columbia, Pendray joined the staff of The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter, later becoming its science editor. He left the paper in 1932 and was an editor at the Milk Research Council until joining the Westinghouse Electric Corp. in 1936 as assistant to the president. There he helped develop and administer the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search and kept the Westinghouse president from calling the 1939 time capsules “time bombs,” as he reportedly wanted to do. He left Westinghouse in 1945 to open his own industrial public relations firm, Pendray & Co., based in Bronxville, N.Y., where he was a senior partner until his retirement in 1971.

In 1929, New York publisher D. Appleton released Pendray’s only SF novel, "The Earth Tube," published under the Pendray name. It is a “Yellow Peril” future war story in which Asians tunnel under and conquer South America in a drive to invade America. The hero destroys the tunnel, in the process flooding South America (sorry ‘bout that!).

Perhaps it was this novel which brought Pendray to the attention of David Lasser, editor of Hugo Gernsback’s "Science Wonder Stories." In any case, Pendray soon appeared in Lasser’s magazine under the name of “Gawain Edwards.” He quickly published three stories for Lasser, including “A Rescue From Jupiter,” Science Wonder Stories, Feb.-March, 1930; “The Return From Jupiter,” Wonder Stories, March-April, 1931; and “A Mutiny in Space,” Wonder Stories, Sept., 1931.

More importantly, Pendray became the prime mover behind the American Interplanetary Society, responsible for much of its early rocket research.

The society was founded by David Lasser and his writers at an April 4, 1930 meeting in Pendray’s New York apartment. The writers elected Lasser as President and Pendray as Vice-President. When Lasser resigned in April, 1932, Pendray took over as President, serving in the capacity until April, 1934, when the society also changed its name to the American Rocket Society. Pendray continued his association with the society, serving as its Director from 1936-55.

In 1963 the society changed its name to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Pendray continued to serve as its public relations consultant. In 1945 Harper & Bros. published his The Coming Age of Rocket Power and in 1948 he edited the papers of rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, published by Prentice-Hall as Rocket Development: Liquid-Fuel Rocket Research, 1929-1941. He was chosen for the latter task by Goddard’s widow, Esther, as by then Pendray was recognized as one of the leading American experts on rocket research.

Looking down at the shiny time capsules Pendray was responsible for naming, I mentioned some of this history to Charlie. “Oh, yes, I remember Pendray, he was here at the Castle many times.”

I was excited to hear this. “What do you remember about Pendray?”

“His Van Dyke beard. No one wore beards in those days, but he had a very distinguished Van Dyke. We all talked about it. It made him look like a professor or an important scientist.”

I glanced at Charlie Ruch standing next to me. Every inch of him looked like George Westinghouse, important inventor and entrepreneur. But he wasn’t the real thing. He was just pretending. “Charlie,” I said, "Pendray didn't just look like someone important. He was the real thing.

The Forte Gelato Holiday

 

THE FORTE GELATO HOLIDAY

Bruno is Italian and lives across the street from us. Like all of the Italian immigrants in Bloomfield, he comes from the small town of Ateleta, in Italy’s Abruzzi region. When he was young he thought that winter lasted forever in America. That was because of what his grandfather and the other old men said when they came home to Ateleta. “It is when the Americans celebrate one of their biggest holidays,” his grandfather and the other old men told him. They said the Americans called it forte gelato, “the strong frost.”

A strange name for a holiday, Bruno and his young friends thought. Gelato was one of their favorite desserts, like a cold jello. And forte, pronounced “for-tay,” simply meant strong. So forte gelato meant a strong jello. But it could also mean a strong frost, as gelato also means something cold or frosty.

So, the old men told Bruno, the strongest frost in America comes right at the beginning of the summer month, July. And all of America celebrates the end of winter and the beginning of summer with fireworks and parades and picnics with hot dogs and hamburgers cooked outdoors on grills.

Bruno and his boyhood pals wondered why Americans paraded and cooked outdoors during the strongest frost. Americans must be very different from Italians, they thought. And America must be a very strange land, to have winter last so long, and to be so strong, even up until the fourth day of July, which was the day on which Americans always celebrated the strong frost.

Yes, Bruno and his pals agreed, a strange land. They would have to see it for themselves, and marvel at the strong frost, forte gelato, when Americans celebrated the birthday of their country.

MORE SORROWS & DELIGHTS

 

MY NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION -- "MORE SORROWS & DELIGHTS" -- HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED: 

 

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1105403068/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=more+sorrows+and+delights&link_code=qs&qid=1625290294&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1

QUESTION AUTHORITY: Writings From the Free School Movement, 1971-1975

 

QUESTION AUTHORITY: WRITINGS FROM THE FREE SCHOOL MOVEMENT, 1971-1975.

This is my newest book, a collection my writings in various publications pertaining to my involvement in the early Seventies Free School Movement. That Movement was part of that era's larger movement for peace, social justice, feminism, anti-racism, and economic equality.

The book is available on Amazon and Lulu.com and, at any moment, on Barnes and Noble.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1304700542/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=eric+leif+davin&link_code=qs&qid=1625088003&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1

 

Tarzana, California

 The entire town of Tarzana, California, is built on the former estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. However, few people there know that, which is a sad commentary on the durability of literary fame, or perhaps any type of fame.

Consider the story about it told by David Morrell, creator of Rambo, from his book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing:

"John Whalen wrote an article for The Washington Times in which he described his visit to Tarzana, California. That town, 20 miles north of Los Angeles, got its name because Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, owned a large ranch there. In the 1920s Burroughs began subdividing the property into residential lots until finally the community of Tarzana was created. In a bizarre odyssey, John wandered the streets of the town, trying to find someone who knew where Burroughs had lived. “Edgar who?” and “I don’t read books” were typical of the answers he received. Few people knew that Tarzana had been named after Tarzan, and some didn’t even know who Tarzan was. After repeated efforts, John came to a small low house concealed behind a big tree, crammed between a furniture store and a transmission shop. The house was where Burroughs had written his Tarzan stories. The urn containing the author’s ashes had been buried under the tree, but no one knew exactly where. After taking some photographs, John paused at the gate and peered back at the obscured house. “I felt very strange standing in the middle of a town named after the fictional creation of a man whose name was totally unknown to most of the people living there.”

Sic transit gloria.

How the Rich Avoid Taxes

 

THE RICH DON'T PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES:

ProPublica took the top 25 wealthiest Americans and compared how much their wealth grew with how much they paid in taxes. From 2014 to 2018, they paid taxes equal to 3.4% of their wealth gain. Rest of us pay c. %14. Some pay far less. Warren Buffet pays about 10-cents in taxes on every $100 of his wealth. You pay far more. How come?

Jeff Bezos paid zero taxes for two years. In 2011 he reported earned income so low, the government owed HIM money and paid him over $4,000 in the child benefit. How come?

Elon Musk paid zero taxes also, yet can build his own space fleet to supply the International Space Station. How come?

The report goes on and on, outrageous case after outrageous case.

How come?

None of these ultra-rich did anything illegal. Nor did they have, as commonly assumed, armies of high-paid tax lawyers who knew all the arcane loopholes. You don't need fancy knowledge to do what they do.

This is because our tax structure is built so that the ultra-rich are entirely outside the system. Our tax system taxes wages, which almost all of us must have to survive. The ultra-rich don't have much, or any, wages to tax. Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, the medium by which you and I are communicating, earns a salary of $1 (ONE DOLLAR) per year. How can he survive doing that?

Because the rich live off their wealth, not their wages or other taxable income. The federal government, the IRS, does not tax their wealth, their homes, their yachts, their Wall Street stocks, no matter how many billions these may amount to. (If they sell their stocks, they pay a capital gains tax..... but only the stupid rich sell their stocks..... and they don't remain ultra-rich for long.)

Instead, the ultra-rich go to banks and use their many gazillions as collateral for loans. Banks are glad to loan to them.... and the interest they pay on the loans are far lower than their fair tax rate would be.

So, now they have many billions to live on.... Jeff Bezos is building a yacht to supply his $500 million much bigger yacht. Or they use the loan to buy and invest. Bezos paid half that yacht amount, $200 million, to buy the Washington Post.

And, guess what? THE IRS DOES NOT TAX LOANS! NO MATTER HOW MANY BILLIONS IT MAY COME TO.

And then you keep on doing things like this, simply rolling over your loans, until you die..... and then you can find other ways to make sure your heirs avoid estate taxes and inherit the bulk of your wealth.

So, the mantra is BUY, BORROW, DIE...... you can't avoid death..... but you can certainly avoid taxes..... and all legally.

You too can follow their lead, especially if you inherit some wealth to begin with. Invest in stocks. Use that as collateral for bank loans. Live off the loans or use them to buy newspapers. And keep on doing it until you die. This is how the rich get rich and stay rich.

Something wrong with our entire tax structure here!

Alternative History

 

Adventures in Alternative History

Eric Leif Davin

 

ericdavin@hotmail.com

 

Winston S. Churchill, yes the British PM, wrote a great piece of alternative history where he speculated on what the United States, and the world, would have looked like, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” (Yes, that’s correct.)

 

The story appears in If It Had Happened Otherwise, edited by Sir John C. Square, published in the UK in 1972 & by St. Martin’s Press in the USA in 1974. It was perhaps the first, certainly a pioneering, alternative history anthology. Other speculations include: “If the Moors in Spain Had Won,” by Philip Guedalla; “If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary, Queen of Scots,” by G.K. Chesterton; “If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness,” by Andre Maurois; “If Drouet’s Cart Had Stuck,” by Hilaire Belloc; “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America,” by H.A.L. Fisher; “If Byron Had Become King of Greece,” by Sir Harold Nicolson; “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln,” by Milton Waldman; “If the Emperor Frederick Had Not Had Cancer,” by Emil Ludwig; “If It Had Been Discovered in 1930 That Bacon Really Did Write Shakespeare,” by Sir John Squire; “If the General Strike Had Succeeded,” by Ronald Knox; “If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo,” by Sir George Trevelyan; and “If Archduke Ferdinand Had Not Loved His Wife,” by A.J.P. Taylor. A distinguished roster and fascinating thought experiments.

 

My own contribution to the alternative history genre, “Avenging Angel,” can be found in Far Frontiers, edited by Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen, Summer, 1985, reprinted in The Fantastic Civil War, edited by Frank McSherry, Jr., Baen Books, 1991. In it, the Confederacy develops a V-2 type rocket which takes out President Lincoln and almost his entire Cabinet at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural in March, 1865.

 

I had no idea Baen Books had reprinted my story until I chanced upon the above mentioned Civil War anthology in the university bookstore. Cool! I thought. Wonder who’s in it? I picked up the book and glanced down the TOC: “For the Love of Barbara Allen,” by Robert E. Howard; “Bring the Jubilee,” by Ward Moore; “The Valley Was Still,” by Manley Wade Wellman; “The Long Drum Roll,” by Harry Turtledove; “Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air,” by Jack Finney; “Quarks at Appomattox,” by Charles L. Harness; “Time’s Arrow,” by Jack McDevitt....

 

Oh, yeah, I thought, I gotta get this! Hey? What’s this? “Avenging Angel,” by Eric L. Davin? That’s my story! McSherry never asked to publish my story!  And I never sent it to him! And he certainly didn’t pay me for it!

 

I quickly turned to the copyright page and found this instruction after the notice saying my story had first appeared in Far Frontiers: “The author is asked to contact Baen Books to receive payment which is being held for him.”

 

I sent proof of my identity to Baen Books and Martin H. Greenberg (the power behind the throne) quickly sent me a nice check, along with a contract for me to sign and return. Sweet! But Greenberg didn’t send me a contributor’s copy of the book, darn it!

 

Education Reform, Then and Now

 

NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED IN AMERICAN EDUCATION IN THE LAST HALF-CENTURY. HERE'S WHAT I WAS SAYING WAY BACK THEN:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/11/19/christopher-jencks-does-he-lack-the/

 

Crucible of Freedom

 

DEFINITIVE POLITICAL HISTORY OF PITTSBURGH REGION FROM 1914-1960:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739145722/Crucible-of-Freedom-Workers'-Democracy-in-the-Industrial-Heartland-1914%E2%80%931960

A Song for Charon

 

TO BE PUBLISHED SOON: My story, "A Song for Charon," will be published in a new charity anthology. $30 for the paperback edition. The proceeds will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society:

http://rawdogscreaming.com/cover-reveal-like-sunshine-after-rain/

 

We Are All Leaders

 

"WE ARE ALL LEADERS" NOW IN PAPERBACK FOR 25!

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/47czc6ch9780252022432.html

 

 

Memories of November 22, 1963

 

MEMORIES OF NOV. 22, 1963:

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2013/11/17/Memories-of-an-awful-day/stories/201311170061

 

Invisible Class

 Here's *one* reason it's so difficult for most of us to believe we live in a class society. Although we live in an economic oligarchy, with massive and faceless corporations & bureaucracies controlling our lives, we also live in a political democracy, where everyone is theoretically "equal." It is this political equality that helps befuddle us into blindness to the economic inequality of our lives. This is one reason people are mystified by the question, "What class do you belong to?" and find it so hard to answer. After a moment of puzzlement they say, "Why, we're *all* middle-class in America, aren't we?"