Lefty Extremists....They were right, We are right.....go see the pics

[AnnInLa]

"Have you ever had an embarrassing friend? You know, that guy who is deeply cool but a little uncouth or unkempt. For all his brilliance, insight, and understanding maybe his shoes are sometimes untied, his clothes a bit rumpled, or his shirttails hanging out."

(the above is the beginning of a great diary at kos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/16/135644/137

it's amusing as hell, and chock full of pictures of lefty extremists,
from the 60's to the present. those of us "of a certain age" will be glad to revisit the gurus we once knew and loved.)

A really interesting diary if you consider yourself one of the lefty extremists. Oh, and BTW, the extremists were right about everything. We have a lot to live up to.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

1. Great article........

thanks for posting.

[laststeamtrain]

2. Right on.

Wally Wood
"Disneyland Memorial Orgy"
Poster, 1967

One of the original Mad Magazine illustrators, Wally Wood published this poster in The Realist, an underground newsletter, in 1967. An inside source at Disney told Realist editor Paul Krassner that the company chose not to sue to avoid drawing attention to what could ultimately be a losing battle. However, Disney was not so reluctant when an entrepreneur pirated the drawing and sold it as a black light poster. The blatantly commercial nature of the bootleg--as well as its potential to reach an audience far larger than the Realist--prompted Disney to file a lawsuit, which was ultimately settled out of court.

[AnnInLa]

4. OMG....You have broken my little heart

with that blasphemous cartoon. You burst my disney bubble. That's the most vicious misrepresentation of my old friends that I have ever seen.

I love it.

[laststeamtrain]

19. Here's a link to the wiki article on Krassner. Worth looking into...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krassner

The guy's still around. Posts at HuffPo sometimes.

Official site w/ color version of Poster:http://paulkrassner.com/

[Blue_Tires]

5. lol at that!

[FogerRox]

10. Great poster, why..... you have only one heart, I made it 2.

[laststeamtrain]

16. Thank you! I appreciate it.

[happydreams]

13. ROFL!!

That is hilarious. I'm saving it and handing out a copy to every hate-mongering zipperhead neo-conartist I meet!!

:rofl:

[Edweird]

15. LOL my dad had one of those... Black velvet black light poster..

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Peace, brother!

[GoneOffShore]

6. I went and looked

All those people are my heroes.

they missed a couple though

Woody Guthrie

Joe Hill

Emma Goldman

[HCE SuiGeneris]

7. Yeah -- us extremists.

Conformity is not all it's cracked up to be. Loved the article!
:hippie:

[Dhalgren]

8. Kick ass, Ann! Great article...

[NewJeffCT]

9. thanks for posting the link - I had written a LTTE on this

But, it never got published. :-(

Not nearly as lengthy or as eloquent as that, but I was asking that when people like Michael Moore & Ted Kennedy spoke out against Bush & the Iraq War 4 years ago, they were vilified in the media. I'm sure at least some prominent folks on the left likely got death threats, as is par for the course... so, my letter was asking, now that they have been proven right, where is their apology?

[Hamlette]

11. whoa! What a trip.

A walk down memory lane.

[Kurovski]

12. Terrific article. Very enjoyable.

I liked how it was pointed out that the Right-Wingers embrace their extremists, while far-lefties are scorned and ragged-upon even within the left.

Can it all merely be a matter of grooming and presentation?:-)

K&R.

[nolabels]

14. "lefty extremists"? them just seem like ordinary people who exceled...........

under extraordinary circumstances to me. Like is there anybody out there who would agree that them kind of people are made and not born (their mother would know). I would like to salute them for answering the calling and following their heart but also for them to feel that they are good and normal people who would want to be normal just like any of the rest of us.

The left crushed a few of them because some could not distinguish the celebrity from the person.

Have a heart and treat all the people flowers like all the other people flowers, there is much beauty in all of them, you just have to be prepared to look with the eye of the beholder

[Elwood P Dowd]

17. Johnny Cash

A fave of mine since I first heard him in the 50s.


Cash was inspired by the movements of the 1960s and spent months reading about the plight of Native Americans. The result was his record Bitter Tears and the song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," the true story of a Pima Indian who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima in World War Two, but faced bigotry and rejection when he came home. In the end, "He died drunk one mornin’/Alone in the land he fought to save/Two inches of water in a lonely ditch/Was a grave for Ira Hayes."

The song rose to number three on the country charts, but many programmers refused to play it. In disgust, Johnny took out a full-page ad in Billboard that read, "‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine. So is Rochester-Harlem-Birmingham and Vietnam. Where’s your guts?"

He crossed musical boundaries as well, playing Bob Dylan’s songs when it was unheard of for a country singer to play folk music. At the height of his career in 1971, Cash used his TV show as a platform for antiwar protest singers like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.

He performed "Man in Black" on the show. "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/But is there because he’s a victim of the times."


A story told by Kris Kristofferson probably best sums up Johnny Cash. "I opened for John in Philadelphia a few years ago, and I dedicated a song to Mumia Abu-Jamal," Kristofferson told Rolling Stone magazine in 2000. "The police at the show went ballistic. After I came off, they said that I had to go out and make an apology. I felt pretty bad, because it was John’s show. But John heard about it and said to me, ‘Listen, you don’t need to apologize for nothin’. I want you to come out at the end of the show and do "Why Me" with me.’ So I went out and sang with him. John just refuses to compromise."

[AnnInLa]

18. Thanks for all of the interesting info on Cash

I had not known most of that....I am more impressed with him than ever. And, I have been a KK fan since forever.

I hope we both end up in rock-and-roll-heaven.

[Elwood P Dowd]

21. I just copied and pasted from the kos story (nm)

.

[Greyhound]

26. Check out Eastwood's film "Flags or our Fathers", on DVD now. It deals with this very topic

It does show how nothing much has changed, they used the survivors of that terrible ordeal to raise money, and then cast them aside. None of the three ever got their due and Ira, due to the fact that he was a decent man and a Native American, was hit especially hard. It gives a glimpse into the horror of that war and how everybody was so dramatically affected by it. The rulers even twisted those men's experiences to their own ends, denying what really happened to everybody during that dark time.

I may be hyper-sensitive to it because of all the family that I had that went through it, but it made me cry.

[Breeze54]

20. "advice to the uptight, the moderates, and the centrists is: lighten the fuck up."

snip-->

"Some of our moderate and more centrist brethren need to come down from their high horses.

My advice to the uptight, the moderates, and the centrists is:

Take a deep breath, wiggle your hips, and lighten the fuck up.

Stop being so superficial and judgmental.

Stop caring what the wingnuts think of you.

Quit letting them set the agenda and call the shots.

Take that Overton window and give it a hard shove to the left."



lmao! I couldn't agree more!

Thanks for posting this but he missed a lot of people and a lot of women!!

A few of those names....

Medea Benjamin, Starhawk, Jodie Evans, Diane Wilson , and approximately 100
other women kicked off CODEPINK on November 17, 2002.
http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=47

Cindy Sheehan ...

[EVDebs]

22. E V Deb's platform was eventually adopted by the D's & R's

and he polled about a million votes for Pres from a jail cell. Go figure.

The Left is really Right (correct).

[bread_and_roses]

23. Thanks! brings back memories. And yes. (n/t)

[Cerridwen]

24. Kickin' back to the top of the page.....n/t

[Greyhound]

25. Must... not... let... this... sink...

A :kick: and a Big Recommendation for this!

I know that many here, and amerikans in general, would rather pretend it were not so, but this is the reality that so many profess to advocate, the so-called reality-based society!

Keep fighting the power!

[gratefultobelib]

27. Like visiting old friends. I read every word. And I wonder why I spend so much time on DU!

[PassingFair]

28. K & R ! Thank you for an enjoyable and POSITIVE read!

:)

[Greyhound]

29. West Coast Prime-Time KICK

:kick:

[OneBlueSky]

30. the ONLY thing that will save this nation and the planet is a progressive/leftist approach . . .

to the critical problems facing us, and to human society in general . . . if we continue with unregulated capitalism and right wing Christianity as our guiding forces, we are doomed, doomed, doomed . . .

[Greyhound]

31. New day, new kick, and we are still the ones who've always been right.

Always have been, always will be.:kick:

[Bitwit1234]

32. LIBERAL IS

One who believes in the rights of the human man. One whose belief is to support the needy and uphold those rights for everyone, even those against us. Two of the things that everyone in the world should do and we would have 99% less conflict and war.

[graywarrior]

33. Up against the wall, muthafukkas!

Great article.

[BluePatriot]

34. Wow, what a good article...

K&R

[Clark2008]

35. You know - for all the blathering about how "awful" the South

and mid-West are on this board.... most of the "radical lefties" seem to be Southerners or mid-Westerners by birth.

Ahem..

:loveya:

[Irishonly]

36. Great Article

What a trip down memory lane. BTW, when hasn't the left been right on any important issue?

[John Q. Citizen]

37. A very good read. It's a shame that being right and a buck and a quarter

will get you a cup of coffee at most non-starbucks coffee sellers. The satisfaction comes from not living your life asleep.

I recall my mom, a moderate bohemian and defiantly not a hippie by generational and group self identified standards, but a natural allie, said at some point back in the 80's that one thing she had appreciated about the hippy's was that as a result, she could go downtown to run errands and not have to curl her hair first.

I thought that in itself was a kind of proof of the impact that the renaissance/social revolution that was the 60's had on general culture.

As Stephen Gaskin is quoted in the OP link as saying...

"We were right about the war in Vietnam. Just like we said, it was all a big lie cooked up by the CIA and the military-industrial complex to enrich a lot of fat cat assholes at the expense of thousands of American families and millions of Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese families. We were right when we said it was illegal, immoral, and just plain wrong."

Our problem is that being right isn't enough. We need to be in power. Otherwise, we will just end up being right all over again.

[AnnInLa]

38. How dare you

be profound?

"Our problem is that being right isn't enough. We need to be in power. Otherwise, we will just end up being right all over again."

[John Q. Citizen]

43. Oh, I dare all right. Not that

being profound is any more difficult than being right.

During Viet Nam it took a long time for enough people to say "enough" for it to finally sink in. This time it's much faster. Many more people are much quicker to oppose this war.

Still, there were a lot of people in powerful places who wanted this war at the time it started, and they are all thinking overtime on how to minimize the political fallout of the Iraqi failure. Meanwhile, back in Iraq....And that's the same as it always was, during Viet Nam or now. A mess.

[EVDebs]

41. Who will become the next Gen Smedley D. Butler ? insider somewhere....nt

[Larry Ogg]

39. This is a great tribute to some really great heroes, blessed are the peace makers,

blessed are the lefties. What kind of world would it be if they were running it?

[jwirr]

40. Thanks, that puts us in good company then and now.

[tabasco]

42. Kick!

:kick:

[mark414]

44. they left out Huey Newton and Co.

or maybe i missed it...i just browsed through pretty quick - no pictures at least

those guys did things that are STILL having an effect

RIP Huey and all the other fallen Panthers

[Blue_Tires]

45. ttt

[AnnInLa]

46. Well, I see now that at Kos, someone has a diary up

opposing this diary that we liked so much. The second diary tells everything the extreme-left did wrong, and why.

Why can't they let us have our heroes?