“Let them call me rebel & welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/commonsense/

Shelley in his sonnet "England in 1819," called him "an old, mad, blind, despised, & dying king."

Poet-laureate Robert Southey penned a shamelessly adulatory elegy, "A Vision of Judgment," not only envisioning the King's triumphal entry into Glory but in the Preface condemned Lord Byron as the leader of what Southey deemed a "Satanic" school of poetry.

Byron retaliated in his masterpiece, "The Vision of Judgment," in which George's soul goes on trial at the Pearly Gates. Southey is the real butt of the satire.

1834 -- US: Chesapeake & Ohio Canal workers riot. Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jackson sends troops, the first use of American troops to suppress a labor dispute. Posse Comitatus be damned.
http://www.strawberryfieldsinc.com/

1845 -- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" first appears, in the "New York Evening Mirror." It can be viewed as a comic masterpiece. Imagine a despondent man sitting on a cold December night, lamenting his lost Lenore. A bird trained to talk, or at least to say one word, comes in. Every question that the narrator asks can be answered tragically by that one word.

Collage by SaintMeister James Koehnline




1860 -- Anton Chekhov lives, Taganrog, Russia (Jan 17 Old Style). In 1904, the year he dies, his last play, The Cherry Orchard, opens at the Moscow Art Theater (his 44th birthday).

"It is hard at first to believe a playwright who comes to us & says, "the schoolteacher & the two stenographers next door to where you live in Fort Dodge — these are the real archetypes."

But until we have learned this — & most of us will never learn it, however many Chekhov plays we see; not really, not deep in the bowels of compassion, but only as we learn things in books — we will never learn to approach life with the beginnings of wisdom: with that wisdom so characteristic of Sophocles."

— Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tsehov.htm

The dead include 90 women & children. After the slaughter, some soldiers went through the Indian village raping women & using axes to bash in the heads of women & children who were already dying of wounds.

Of the six major Indian massacres in the Far West, from Bear River in 1863 to Wounded Knee in 1890, the Bear River Massacre resulted in the most victims.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/
http://www.onlineutah.com/bearrivermassacre.shtml

1880 -- Film comedian W.C. Fields (William Claude Dukenfield) lives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We also show him born on 4/9/1879.

"Taint a fit night out for man nor beast..."

1900 -- US: American Baseball League forms, consisting of Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, & Minneapolis.



1904 -- US: First college "letterman's club" started. AlphaRalpha, hmmmmmmmm...guess which letter we favor....



1905 -- US: Trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd, who shot two women friends & chopped the bodies up to transport them to Los Angeles by train in 1931 only to be tripped up by a nosy baggage clerk, lives, Oxford, Indiana. Sent to a mental hospital, from which she escapes at least six times. Probably looking for her baggage. Trunks of Blood, see http://members.cox.net/eddotcom/judd.htm


1905 -- Viña Delmar lives. American novelist, best known for Bad Girl, a good book according to Bleedster Robert B.

So now she is not just obscure, but three kinds of obscure. That's quite an accomplishment, for someone who, once upon a time, was one of the symbols of her time....

"I never learned how Viña Delmar's Bad Girl came out, but the title more or less gave it away. The heroine had to decide whether to sleep with her fiancé before they got married, & I am sure that she did, or the novel would have been called Good Girl."

— Charles Willeford, I Was Looking For A Street (1988)

A strong people do not need a government       — Emiliano Zapata

The town of Mexicali is taken, under control of Simon Berthold & Jose Maria Leyva. Tijuana falls next, & the revolution extends to the other provinces. This libertarian revolution remains little-known, being eclipsed by the exploits of Villa & Zapata. [Details / context]

Nineteen witnesses see an officer named Benoit fire the fatal shot, but strike leaders Joseph Ettor & the poet/anarchist Arturo Giovannitti, three miles away at the time, are arrested & held for eight months as accessories. The city will declare martial law & bring in 22 extra militia companies.

For more than nine weeks, strikers will not waver, even when 18-year-old Syrian worker John Rami is killed, when Annie Welzenbach & her two teenage sisters are arrested & dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, or when 200 police draw their clubs on February 19th & go after 100 women pickets, knocking them to the ground & beating them.

...I want a song that's satirical,
& putting the mere into miracle.
Sing me a song with social significance,
Or you can sing till you're blue,
It must be packed with social fact
Or I won't love you...

Sing me a song with social significance,
There's nothing else that will do.
It must be dense with common sense
Or I won't love you.

       — "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance" by Harold Rome (1937)
From the 1937 hit musical revue, "Pins & Needles," performed by rank & file members of the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union); "Pins & Needles" was Broadway's longest-running show until "Oklahoma."

[Details / context]

In London, Emma Goldman continues her efforts to expose the Bolsheviks as betrayers of the revolution & violators of civil liberties, a task made more difficult & more urgent by the return of a British trade union delegation that reports favorably on conditions in the Soviet Union.

"I am a redneck myself, born & bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe & the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors."

       — from "In defense of the Redneck", Abbey's Road

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/AbbeyEdward.htm



1927 -- Second movement of Charles Ives' "Symphony No. 4" premiers, NYC.


1928 -- Canada: Family members visit from the US to see Emma Goldman before she departs for France; a farewell banquet is held in her honor today. As she anticipates writing her autobiography, Emma asks a wider circle of friends to loan her her past correspondence to refresh her memory.



1929 -- Seeing Eye Guide Dog Organization forms. By acclamation the eyes have it.


1933 -- Germany: Mass demonstrations throughout the country as workers protest Adolf Hitler's nomination as German Chancellor. He assumes office tomorrow.



1936 -- US: Sit-down strike helps establish United Rubber Workers as a national union, Akron, Ohio.



1939 -- Australia: Feminist/anarchist Germaine Greer, the "Untamed Shrew," a ratbag (‘being tuppence in the quid’) lives.

Greer was associated with the Sydney Libertarians till 1966, then went to England.

The Female Eunuch was published in 1970. In an interview published in the literary magazine, 'Overland', in 1972 she says

"I'm an anarchist still, but I'd say now I am an anarchist communist which I wasn't then."

[Details / context]

---

Militants in Germany were being arrested & killed by the Nazi's. Michael Delissen from Munchengladbach was beaten to death by the Gestapo in December 1936. Anton Rosinke from Dusseldorf was murdered in February 1937.

Arrests in 1937 brought the number of members of the outlawed FAUD (anarcho-syndicalist Free Union of German Workers) in Gestapo clutches to 89.

It took a year to build the case against them. These male & female comrades were charged with "preparing acts of high treason" & were brought before the courts in January & February of 1938.

The Duisburg lathe-operator, Emil Mahnert, according to the testimony of four other inmates, was hurled from two storys up by a police torturer. Ernst Holtznagel was dispatched to the notorious 999 punishment battalion, where he was killed.

[Details / context]

---

"We are Stalinists!
There is our pride! Stalinists!
There is the Legion of Honor of our time!"

— Pablo Neruda,
quoted in "Strange Defeat: The Chilean Revolution 1973", (Point Blank!, 1973)

The Arkansas state legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken after he calls the state "the apex of moronia."

Mencken got one right, just missed a bunch of others.

http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html

1964 -- US: Most lopsided high-school basketball score — 211-29 (Louisiana).



1964 -- Mein Führer I CAN WALK !! Mein Führer I CAN WALK !!
Let 'Er Rip?: Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, premieres.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050206011225/wso.williams.edu/~mhacker/strangelove/

A Union Oil Company drill strikes a deposit of high-pressure natural gas five miles off the Santa Barbara coast.

Millions of gallons of "California crude" are sent spewing over the seaside. Tens of thousands of birds & whole populations of marine life are wiped out before the drilling hole is plugged up with cement, temporarily containing the flow (see also 12 February).

Vietnam War veteran & author of arguably the best book of fiction to emerge from that war, The Short-Timers. Founder of the the Cafe Cafard.

The Observer (London):

Anarchist band sell song to General Motors for $70,000 — but give the money to activists' campaign against the firm

It is the world's biggest car-maker, boasting a turnover of £120 billion last year. Sales of Vauxhall & Pontiac cars have propelled General Motors to the top of the auto industry. So when executives heard a song called 'Pass it Along', they immediately wanted to use it as the sort of 'youthful & hip' tune that perfectly suited the image their new adverts sought to reinforce.

But what they didn't know was that the British band in question — Chumbawamba — were lifelong anarchists opposed to big corporations like GM.

IndyMedia said it would use some of the money for 'corporate-jamming actions', publicising the flaws of firms such as GM. At CorpWatch, the money is powering an internet campaign against GM & corporate globalisation.

Australia: Airports begin using electronic photo-matching (of faces to passport photos).
http://www.koehnline.com/terror.html
http://www.metacannibal.net/brave_new_world/

3000 --

A Prayer for the Traveler

by Edward Abbey

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into & above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples & castles & poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch & monkeys howl, through miasmal & mysterious swamps & down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes & pinnacles & grottos of endless stone, & down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come & go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful & more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

http://www.abbeyweb.net/abbey.html



3001 --

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes & disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Anti-Authoritarian / Anarchist Encyclopedia

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