John, I see your Hal Crowther rant and raise you this Memorial Day column offered by two of the “independent media makers” at the Chapel Hill cell of indymedia.org. (Note: the article contains offensive language.)
For those who don’t know, this organization styles itself as a “non-corporate, anti-authoritarian collective of North Carolina independent media makers and media outlets, and serves as the local organizing unit of the global Indymedia network,” and sees itself as “a network of activists that are committed to using media and journalism as a tool for promoting egalitarian change.” It’s a recipe for articles such as the one above, and for submissions bashing U.S. soldiers as “babykilling” “dumb asses” fighting for “dickS halburton oil stealing money grubing zio-nazis” and so forth. Which for some reason even the sympathetic mainstream media decline to air.
Happily, the site also includes a link to a poem read at the State Capitol this Memorial holiday weekend, which has now become the latest to make my “Roses are red, poems that blew” file. Here’s my favorite part:
For my immigrant uncle enslaved to the Mount Olive Pickle Company
They pickled his joy; they pickled his laughter
They pickled his freedom long before that.
