Thinking about the latest regarding Cesar Chavez--and men

Thinking more about the latest information regarding Cesar Chavez, the more I am of the view that, once again, it comes down to us men. More pointedly, one has to say that post WWII US society was, in its first twenty-five years, highly misogynistic--and even "wink-wink" supportive of male physical abuse and worse against women. That this culture affected Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and JFK, among so many other prominent men in business and politics, shows how pervasive this all was. The behaviors also went across political ideologies, and across ethnicities and races--as anyone who has ever read Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Isabella Allende, Julia Alvarez, and Arundhati Roy can attest.

There is a recent oral history book from Clara Bingham, "The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973," which contains interviews with various women who were either drawn into politics from somewhere else (such as Billie Jean King), or directly active in various Sixties political movements. My now late Uncle Mitch/Moishe had sent the book upon its release to our daughter, but she did not receive it until just after she had set sail for the UK. He offered to pay for shipping it to her, but she quite correctly begged off having something else to carry around. I, of course, took the time to read the book. The book shows how often Sixties radical men behaved badly, as in "Me Make Revolution, You Have Sex With Me When I Want." The misogyny on display is shocking to read, even as one recalls such language and behavior being so prevalent then. When analyzing male behaviors through this lens, one sees the Sixties and Seventies were not a break, but a continuation of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich described about the late 1940s through 1960, in her magisterial, "The Hearts of Men." Ehrenrich's book turns on its head the idea that feminism destroyed the nuclear family. Instead, Ehrenreich's book exposes how "Playboy Culture" in the dawn of the 1950s influenced men to leave behind bonds of family, sexually exploit women, and then blame women for demanding equal rights when the men left their wives for office secretaries or someone men somehow met at a bar.

 
The still-new Bingham book proves, once again, that there was a reason for the rise of modern feminism, as there was a grave contradiction at the heart of even the mostly male youngish radicals demanding liberation, which was the failure/refusal to apply that liberation on behalf of women and girls--and specifically be liberated from male domination. Bingham's book helps us better understand why there were "consciousness-raising" seminars and meetings for women starting the late 1960s and early 1970s, as our nation's culture was so deeply ingrained that women should accept male aggressiveness, condescension, and ultimately domination. These consciousness-raising sessions first demanded unlearning before re-learning could begin.

I was born in 1957. I therefore came of age in the mid to late 1970s, which was still immersed within a culture ingrained with "Yes" means "Maybe" and males being trained by other men, and some women, to overcome female sexual resistance. For those who knew me, I was essentially a nerdy wallflower, interested in going to a college library to read up on public policy issues and history, listening to music constantly at home, and going to progressive rock and jazz concerts. My friends had to drag me out to disco places, where I didn't like to dance, or, for that matter, drink alcohol. However, I definitely accepted as "normal" the ideas of the time with regard to how heterosexual cis men and women behaved toward each other. What reinforced much of my wallflowerness was something I could not really talk about with anyone, which was my reading the works of Ellen Willis, Susan Brownsmiller, Germaine Greer, and Andrea Dworkin in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. I recognized the hypocrisies and violence which women feminist writers exposed between male rhetoric or claims and male behaviors.

Working in a public library in the mid through late 1970s, I also read Cosmopolitan magazine (under Helen Gurley Brown's editorship), which gave some nods to those women (well, not Dworkin), but also reveled in 1970s sexuality that looked liberating, but was more liberating for men. I initially forgot that I further read, starting from its first issue as a fifteen year old in 1972, Ms. Magazine, which my Mom was a charter subscriber. It was all certainly confusing to me as a young man. Anyway, by the dawn of the 1980s, I began to wonder, Why aren't more women lesbians, considering how badly we men actually behave towards women? I couldn't, and still can't, blame women in the least.

 
Nonetheless, I believe that the first sexual harassment cases in the late 1980s, and, then trends within the past decade have finally begun to have an effect on our cultural attitudes and behaviors. It is why we now see the problems with John Hughes and other films from the 1980s, for example. More ominously, however, what we are seeing now is a grooming cultural backlash worse than what Susan Faludi reported in her book, "Backlash" (1991), which remains compelling reading in understanding the rhetoric and policies Republicans especially are pushing at this moment. Project 2025 and the Manosphere in social media and YouTube have became explicit in demanding an end to no-fault divorce, putting women into spaces where having babies becomes the only option and, in actuality, a requirement, and attacking all gender diversities from trans to gay to self-confident women doing "men's jobs." For any woman voting Republican and who thinks, "Oh, this would stop if trans people were put back into closets and shameful positions," that is making a serious error. Such an attitude reminds me of Zionist Jews who thought joining in with respect to Islamophobia would stop with Islamophobia. It is wrong to engage in Islamophobia in any event, but even self-interest should be at least considered if one fails the morality test.

What should be clear right now is the right wing has an agenda, and it is not about liberation except for the upper class men who tend to dominate the rest of us. Part of that agenda is restoring male power over women so we as a society can begin again to say, "A Man's Home is his Castle." That phrase has essentially disappeared. However, fascist systems rely on telling working class and poor men across ethnicities and races that, no matter how much the boss at work, and political leaders, will dominate us men, the rest of us men can dominate our wives and children at home.

Tradition is a tricky thing--and often a really bad thing. We really need to move forward with our learning, wisdom, and recognition that invidious discriminations hold back the best in our society. What we have learned is how men, even revered progressive men from more than half a century ago, all had feet of clay at one level or other levels. I am not, however, saying remove them from our memories. Their best values they proclaimed must still guide us forward, even if they failed at and betrayed following those values. For me, this is not so different from recognizing how so many of our nation's 18th Century revolutionists and constitutional male framers owned other people, and treated women as property. And too many women of the late 18th Century and 1960s and 1970s not only accepted the constrictions women faced in that time, but were willing to reinforce the constrictions to varying degrees.* The exceptions in these historical times remain rare, and, even then, one finds troubling language that shows the effects of the larger hypocritical trends within western culture. (And here is where we must face male behaviors on a global scale. I wonder how many know that Chairman Mao was a serial sexual abuser of younger women in the last decade or so of leadership, and possibly before. And Ghandi had some weird rituals which involved sleeping with his younger nieces, not his wife, to test his commitment to celibacy. As I say, Men.).

What we need to face is that, whether it is armed shootings, wars, or domestic violence, men are far more the issue than women. Still, when it comes to war, we now have women politicians who love war as much as the men who love war--and we now understand better how southern white women enslavers were too often brutal, in order to show they were as strong as men. This should remind us that, given a matriarchal version of patriarchal power, I can see a lot of women behaving badly because, after all, it is human beings we are talking about. This is all another reason I root for us, as a species, to get on a path toward the 24th Century and Star Trek Communism. It will take a long time, but maybe can we start with social democracy, and continuing to liberate people to have sexual autonomy. And I say this as one who is still, to this day, squeamish about all of the latter. I just think my political and economic radicalism demands I think more openly and kindly about how other people wish to define themselves, including as sexual beings.

* Considering how relatively recent Chavez is to our time, and considering his conduct with multiple women over time, I totally support this decision by the city of Albuquerque. I also think the State of CA should remove the holiday for Chavez and change it for Dolores Huerta, the true hero of the era of 1960s farmworker activism. 

Thinking about the limits of the Frankfurt School in the context of Gaza and the death of Habermas

For me, the Frankfurt School has been near the bottom of my intellectual go-to's, just above French Marxists and French post-modernists. I have found many of them unreadable and often unbearable. The exception among the French postmodernists has been Foucault, who did extraordinary scholarly work in factually analyzing the way in which prisons and schools developed, and opened new vistas to understand gender and sexuality. Among the Frankfurt school, the only individual who has long impressed me is the late Walter Benjamin, which I think is because I found him more literary-oriented than philosophically-oriented. Among the Frankfurt school philosophers, the one person I thought had some fleeting merit was Jurgen Habermas.

 
In light of Habermas' death a few days ago, I went to Wikipedia to ask myself, Why did I ever like this guy, considering his ridiculously tone-deaf reaction to the events in Israel on October 7, 2023 (see below)?

 
What I found at Wiki was that, in various political controversies in the past, particularly about the then-"new" German historians trying to whitewash German Nazism from German history as some evil aberration, Habermas was outstanding in denouncing that. I also tended to agree with him about the adolescent sophistry of Jacques Derrida's attack on the search for meaning. I further admired Habermas' gallant, though still insufficiently persuasive, attempt to find something of value among the wreckage of the philosophical writings of Martin Hiedegger in light of Hiedegger's going so relatively easy toward Nazism.

In fact, outside of the penetratingly outstanding 1944 Theodore Adorno/Max Horkheimer work, "Dialectic of Enlightenment," the school's only strength for me has been when its writers veer toward what EP Thompson identifies as British empiricism. Overall, for me, the entire Frankfurt School is inferior, in my not-humble view, to British empiricism. As Thompson wrote in his great 200 plus page essay, "The Poverty of Theory," British empiricism demands theory must yield to facts, evidence, and reason. British empiricism has long meant there is far less any coherent theory of justice than that justice is most often found in particular circumstances where facts and perspectives are analyzed. What is so wonderful about British empiricism is it is a way of thinking that allows one to criticize the British philosophers who expounded the theory, and expose their hypocrisies and sometimes crimes if they were involved in government (ahem, John Locke for starters).

The problem with the Frankfurt School writers is how they appear to work overtime to justify theories rather than center their analyses around facts and questioning different people's perspectives. Their flaws are also why I have no use really at all for most French philosophers, whether Louis Althusser or Jean-Paul Sarte (As an aside, give me Simone de Beauvoir any day as her experiences as an intelligent woman among men allowed her to escape the fatal flaws that make for French male dominated philosophers).

Even when I find myself affirmatively nodding to a Habermas essay or tried to read a book of his, I found my agreement stemmed from me saying, "Keep going, Jurgen! You are almost getting to Hume and EP Thompson!"

This is why I was not surprised when Habermas and two other persons signed their "Principles of Solidarity" in November 2023, a set of "principles" that may as well come from an ADL press release. What appalled me most in the document was the first sentence in the second paragraph, which reads: "The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back." That Habermas showed complete ignorance of the 2017 Hamas charter, paragraph 16, is outrageous. He also showed no awareness of the fact that Mashal and Haniyeh, the two main Hamas political leaders in this still unfolding century, were saying since 2006 what is in the 2017 Hamas charter, and that, despite continuing to say what they said, successive Israeli governments contemptuously ignored them. This is damning for a man claiming an intellectual's mantle. It is doubly ridiculous for Habermas to sign onto such a statement when we know how Israel has worked with ISIS-affiliated groups to undermine the Syrian government and has used ISIS-affiliated fighters to kill Gazans in Gaza under the guise of killing Hamas fighters. And not to mention how the Israelis continued a cynical game with Hamas and are properly said to have fostered the development of Hamas as a way to undermine the secular-oriented PLO back in the 1980s.

For a man claiming the mantle of intellectualism to not know what I think should be basic historical facts is precisely why I consider the Frankfurt school to be of no value for anyone wanting to become more engaged and enlightened. Chomsky's now exposed failure was a personal failure, which is separate from his compellingly detailed analyses from the 1960s forward to the aughts. Habermas' failure, however, is a failure to engage factually with a situation and his thinking he could coast on his theories based only on what he wishes to believe about something outside of his lived experience in Germany in the 20th Century. In other words, he obviously has not closely followed unfolding events over decades in Israel, the occupied territories, and the Middle East region.

EP Thompson, a Marxian thinker who understood ironies in history, was not a perfect being. However, Thompson understood that facts matter and empathy for the oppressed included those oppressed by the nation in which he lived his life. Had Thompson lived till now (he died in 1993), he would be standing with the left in Britain and would understand the need to oppose Israel's genocidal, imperial, and apartheid-driven conduct.

The sooner we forget most of the Frankfurt school, the better. Throw them to the side the way one should throw Louis Althusser and Derrida to the side.

The Uncles in My Life, but Particularly the Coolest of My Cool Uncles, the Legendary Maurice Julius "Mitch" Freedman (1939-2026)

My Coolest Uncle, Maurice Julius Freedman, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six, in his eighty-seventh year. To this day, every one of my living high school and college friends say that my Uncle Moishe (as my Grandmother Sylvia had called him and my Dad, Mom, Sister, and I called him) was the coolest of my very cool uncles.  

Growing up, I was privileged to have had six uncles and four grand-uncles. Four of these uncles and two of these grand-uncles lived in the vicinity of New Jersey, my childhood state, at various times. They each had very different personalities. There is the still-living Jock Uncle, ten years my senior, who played high school football and at the University of North Carolina--until a knee injury ended what could have been a potential pro career, though he modestly denies the pro career part. This Uncle loved and still loves football and, to this day, loves Elvis Presley. He even looked a little like Elvis, and I remember meeting him as a six or seven year old, and how he lifted me and threw me in the air (I was a skinny and light kid), which I loved.  This Uncle also loved telling my high school friends and me the greatest and funniest stories of his band of young, mostly Italian guys who were not quite Jets (definitely not Sharks) in Carteret, New Jersey. Their high school and immediate post-high school hijinks remain the stuff of legend.

There was also my Partying and Sports-Fan Uncle, my Uncle Bernie. Now departed, he, along with my brilliant, funny, musically-talented and literary minded Aunt Cathy, always hosted bar-b-que, Super Bowl and New Year's Eve parties. He adored my Aunt, who was my mother's sister, and took her on cruises and trips to various places. Uncle Bernie was the fun-time guy who took me, with his three boys, my very cool and funny cousins, on camping trips, as well as visits to West Point and Cooperstown, the latter place to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

He and the Jock Uncle were the Sports Guys. If you wanted to talk with the Jock and Partying Uncles, you better know what was happening with at least professional football, baseball, and basketball (though they both stopped watching the NBA in the 1970s, while I became and remain fanatical about it). They knew their sports as well as any regular caller to sports radio talk shows and the sports hosts themselves. 

The other nearby Uncle, in my teen years at least, and still going strong in Florida, is my Hippie Vietnam Vet Uncle. In the early to mid 1970s, I would bump into him at rock concerts I was attending. For example, we met up serendipitously at a Grateful Dead concert in 1972, Pink Floyd in 1973, and Beach Boys/Poco in 1974, among a few other concerts. He has always been a happy-go-lucky personality, and a guy who, when you were with him, would always be laughing with you. He remains a truly kindly soul.

My grand-uncles, Nick and Carmen, were the guys who were barely employed, and somehow made money from time to time "at the track." Late in my Uncle Nick's life, I learned that Nick, more than Carmen, made money doing "juice" work for the Mob, which meant they beat up people who owed money to the Mob (with juice meaning blood, of course). They were not, however, in the Mob. They only did freelance work. Carmen was a relative family man, with multiple marriages, but also did some work as a plumber. Nick, however, nearly always had something vague going on. He was already infamous in the family for going to jail in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and not snitching, which always made him reliable to mobsters. Both he and Carmenooch, as the latter was sometimes known, were veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and World War II (in fact all my grandmothers' four brothers fought in WWII). Nick's most steady job came in the late 1960s through early 1970s as the  manager of the mob-run Continental Baths, where he hired a young Bette Midler and young Barry Manilow. The Baths were a gay hangout, though straights went there, too. At the dawn of the 1970s, it was Nick who broke my mother's and Aunt Cathy's hearts when he told them in colorful anti-gay language that Rock Hudson was a homosexual. In his old age, Nick told me that the Mob told him he could not steal more than 5% of the box office receipts--or else. Therefore, Nick only stole 4% of the receipts to be safe, and was careful to never go over 4%. 

My Grand-Uncle Nick was also apparently nasty and likely worse to Bette Midler such that I would never blame her, if I met her, that she would yell or punch me for being the grand-nephew of Nick Russo/Rizzo (he used both names, though only the latter was his birth name). The irony is, though, my parents, sister, and I have always revered, and still do, the Divine Ms. M. Anyway, Nick either quit or left the position at the time the Continental Baths started their decline around 1974 or 1975. From there, he had spotty employment, and I would see him most often in his last years in Las Vegas, Nevada, when I would visit my grandparents who moved there in the 1970s for painting contracting and hotel service work, and then retired there in the 1980s. He died around 1991, saying to me in his last days that he had slept with a lot of women, and therefore had no regrets. It was a profound statement for him to make because I had read already that Aldous Huxley had once said philanderers were the only men he ever knew who, on their deathbeds, did not have regrets about what they did not do. 

MY UNCLE WHO MOST INFLUENCED MY INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT: MITCH FREEDMAN, LIBRARIAN EXTRAORDINAIRE

However, the uncle I was closest to over the past almost six decades was Uncle Moishe, the name his mother, my grandmother Sylvia Cassif Freedman, called him--though he has been known to the rest of the world in his adult years as "Mitch Freedman." When this Coolest Uncle would introduce me at various functions I was invited to with him, he would introduce me as his nephew, but then say I was the "real" Mitch Freedman. That is because my Uncle had taken on the name "Mitch" when he and his then young wife, Hermene, moved to UC Berkeley around 1960 for what was supposed to be his seeking a PhD in Philosophy.  My Uncle ended up crashing out of Philosophy because he had too much trouble reading Kant in the original German. Under his wife's threat to leave him (they later divorced in the early 1980s), he switched to Library Studies, where he graduated from Berkeley at the top or near top of his class in 1965. 

My Uncle thereafter went on to become one of the three most important librarians of the last half century who took libraries from the card catalog to the online catalog, and, along the way, became American Library Association president just after 9/11/2001 events. He was always the political activist, at the edge of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley in 1964, but much more a centered political activist as a librarian fighting for union rights for public and private library workers, challenging censorship of books and people, and showing up to protest a variety of things that make us angry and frustrated at how far short the US falls from the ideals we are taught in civics classes and lie to ourselves about. He even has a Wikipedia page. See here.

I think it is clear at this point why I might have personally been closest to my Uncle Mitch/Moishe.

When I was still in elementary school and starting middle school, I was not close to my uncle. He openly told my parents, right in front of me, that he worried about me watching too much television. He would say, "How is Mitchell ever going to become reader if he only watches television?" My mother would say that I read well at school, and had time to grow up and develop an interest in outside reading. She would say I loved reading Dr. Suess and Maurice Sendak, and Hardy Boys mysteries. Despite my actively playing stickball, kickball, football, and lots of bike riding around the neighborhood, however, I did watch four to six hours of television a day through my early teens before listening to music became my passion. By age seven, I had memorized the TV Guide so my folks would never have to consult it. They would ask what was on television for that night, and I would proceed to tell them what was on six of the seven channels from the NYC area (PBS was in its infancy and simply didn't count yet), knowing every single prime time show. I also was a major Soupy Sales fan, and loved the Winchell-Mahoney Hour. And of course Looney Tunes, where I perfected my memorizing dialogue--and also trying to learn to become a cartoonist, which my mother squelched as ridiculous. Oh well. Anyway, I once had to correct the local newspaper for publishing out of date tv show information in its newspaper. In my seven year old handwriting, I not only told them where they were wrong, but provided them a template how to redo their section. In one of those "Isn't America great?" moments, the newspaper updated its format and began to correctly list what was on every night. :)

I also loved comedy albums. I memorized the songs comedian-singers Allen Sherman and Tom Lehrer wrote and sang, and listened to Bob Newhart, the First Family Vaughn Meader records, Flip Wilson, and Bill Cosby, among others.

But unbeknownst to my Uncle, I was reading even more than the children's books. As my parents also knew, I was reading Mad Magazine first and foremost from the age of seven. Consistent with my curious mind, I took the time to consult with sources in our home to understand the many Mad Magazine references. This included my parents, as well. My mother loves to tell the story of an eight-year-old Mitchell reading Mad Magazine, and suddenly asking, "Mom, what is S-E-X?" My mother replied, "It's nothing you need to know. It's just a word for what adults do but children should never do." Somehow I accepted that answer without further questioning, which shows how much I revered my parents' word. I also remember asking around that time--1965--why the astronauts who went into space did not find God. My mother replied, "He's hiding." I can't believe I accepted that answer, but I did for years--until I was about thirteen and then, at fourteen, starting to read Bertrand Russell and the New York Review of Books (NYRB). But I get ahead of myself except to say, both Russell and the NYRB were sources courtesy of Uncle Moishe. 

Our home, however, was highly literate. We had scattered books and encyclopedias, mostly in our attic, but we also had regular and continuing subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, two daily newspapers, and one weekly newspaper. Starting in second grade, I read those newspapers and magazines, and at least skimmed or sometimes studied the books, and definitely the encyclopedias. By the time I was twelve in 1969, I had become deeply influenced by television, radio, and print media. I used to beg my mother to let me stay up late to watch "The Twilight Zone," in its last year or so, and then religiously in reruns. In the late 1960s, I also religiously watched "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on CBS, and, around 1970, began watching Bill Buckley's "Firing Line" on PBS plus another PBS show called "The Advocates." These programs complimented the Smothers' show as I began to learn about public policy and the art of debate. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero in our home, and then RFK, had politicized me as I thought, What the heck is going on in our nation, and how can we get ourselves on a better track. After RFK's assassination, I rode my bike to the next town (Rahway) rail station to watch the funeral train go past to Washington D.C. and began to wonder how the U.S. future was going to change because of RFK's assassination. Yes, it was that moment I began wondering about alternate timelines, having already been immersed in the Twilight Zone and reading about a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. Around age fourteen and fifteen, I watched the famed and controversial show, "The Great American Dream Machine."

We were, though, still a Cold War Suburban Liberal home. It was a home where nobody drank alcohol, nobody smoked, and we were a tight knit and loving family. We were a family which revered FDR and JFK, and where we did not understand why my Uncle Moishe hated Hubert Humphrey so much. Also, we didn't understand why so many of our Italian relatives were racist and voted for George Wallace in 1968.

As I searched for books and old magazines in our attic, around 1970, I found several issues of Paul Krassner's "The Realist." My Uncle had paid for a subscription for my father--though my father found it definitely not to his taste. I of course had found "National Lampoon," too, and "The Realist" was a lost treasure. 

One evening, around 1969 or 1970, I was watching David Frost on television interview Bill Cosby (!). I, like most of the U.S. population at the time, loved Cosby. In the interview, Cosby mentioned his main influence had been Lenny Bruce. I turned to my mom, who was watching with me, and asked, "Who is Lenny Bruce?" My mother replied, "Ask your Uncle Moishe. He loves Lenny Bruce. He was a 'sick' comic--and you'd probably like him. He might be dead, though." 

Well! That was as great an incentive as any nerdy twelve-year-old needed. I immediately called my Uncle, who at the time lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My Uncle told me about Lenny Bruce, his untimely death from drugs in 1966, and that I should find at least one of his comedy albums. I did, and I was hooked! I also found, at a bookstore, a book that had transcribed nearly all of Bruce's routines. That book became a Bible for me. I soon memorized most, if not all, of the book. To this day, I will sometimes recall a Lenny Bruce line or routine in the midst of something happening or someone saying something else. I should add that, over the years, particularly in this century, my Uncle would call me to say how he referenced a Lenny line in a conversation with someone but the person didn't understand the reference--so he had to call me, tell me the context, and enjoy a laugh at his Brucian witticism. 

Anyway, my Uncle found he liked talking with this precocious and curious-for-learning pre-teen. Knowing I loved music, and had learned some music theory through playing the accordion (bleh!), my Uncle, still in Minnesota, began to introduce me to his favorite bebop jazzers. These included the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, a favorite of his, Lester Young (a major individual favorite besides Clifford Brown), Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Pops Louis Armstrong, and others, of course. He winced at my early love for Dave Brubeck, but forgave me--and I still love Brubeck. 

When I was thirteen, in 1970, for my Bar Mitzvah gift, my Uncle got me a subscription to I.F. Stone's then Bi-Weekly, which I devoured. Then, in 1971, when I was fourteen, Stone retired his then-bi-weekly, and switched subscribers to the New York Review of Books. That is how I began to read that magazine with the big dictionary a family friend had bought me for my bar mitzvah to understand the vocabulary of that post-graduate level journal. I continue to subscribe to and read the NYRB fifty-five years later. For years, I could only talk with my Uncle about what I had read in the NYRB, which was a lifeline for me to have anyone to talk with about the articles there. Every issue remains one where one learns something. It is the only non-formal academic journal where one may say that, with the exception perhaps of "The American Prospect."

When I was fourteen, my Uncle bought, and sent to me, two Bertrand Russell books, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (a book of essays) and the "History of Western Philosophy." I did not read the latter until college, but skimmed it. I (the word again) devoured "Why I am Not a Christian." This book immediately turned me into a First Cause/Jeffersonian Deist, and then later, Agnostic/Atheist. In going through my Father's archive of documents, photos, and paraphernalia concerning my Uncle yesterday with my mother, I learned that, in my Uncle's office, he had two posters of men he revered, Bertrand Russell and Lenny Bruce. I have had the same Lenny poster I purchased at a store in N.Y.C. since I was about fifteen.  It graces my main bookshelf room in our home, though my wife hates the poster--and my children's friends thought it was a poster of Billy Joel. :)

My Uncle also introduced me to "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," an "underground" comic by Gilbert Shelton, which led me to Robert Crumb and the world of "underground" comics. And no, the recent "Freak Brothers" animated series is awful, and I would never recommend it. 

My Uncle, visiting the N.J./N.Y.C. area in 1971, took me to see the Julian Barry play, "Lenny," with Cliff Gorman. When my Uncle and Aunt Hermene moved back home to Westfield, New Jersey, my Uncle began taking me to concerts, including Frank Sinatra. He also once took me on a trip to see the Strand Bookstore in N.Y.C. When I learned to drive, it was great for me to be invited over to their home to listen to jazz, and sometimes, he would try to like the progressive rock I loved by then. Yes, I had found FM radio, WNEW-FM 102.7 in particular, through a cool neighborhood guy a couple of years older than me. This began to culturally radicalize me on top of the Uncle's influences. I became a progressive rock fanatic, and went to at least fifty prog rock concerts in the 1970s, and another twenty-five jazz or other music concerts in that decade. 

One may think, and ask me, "Did you smoke pot or do drugs?" The answer was and remains a definite "No!" I had no use for drinking alcohol or smoking anything. And hard drugs? No way! My Uncle, however, at that time, indulged a bit in marijuana. I remember, one time, when I visited him in 1972 or 1973 in Minnesota, my Uncle reluctantly took me, on my begging, to see "Harold and Maude," which had been continuously playing at the Westgate movie theater. The theater eventually showed the film for at least two years straight. I had missed the film in the initial run, and always wanted to see it. He took me, but he decided to get high watching the film. My memory is he fell asleep during the film. :) I of course loved the film and would see it at least twenty-five times in revival theaters in the 1970s and early 1980s until I could buy the VHS and then DVD. However, I admit I have become wistful about the film, and have much more sympathy for the beautiful, though still flawed, mother, who simply was unable to understand her son because she didn't know how to relate to him. I have a very much opposite relationship with my mother, who I speak with and see every day. I add this singular fact for her sake as she is still going strong at ninety-one and will likely read this part at least. LOL.

Anyway, my Uncle was a very deep and abiding influence over the years for me, as I expect this shows. I have separately always been proud of his many accomplishments in the library field, and as a person. I was also honored to be a guest at multiple American Library Association (ALA) conventions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Through him I met the sainted Barbara Ehrenreich, who I consider the greatest public intellectual mind of the past half century, as she was broader in her writing and thinking than Chomsky, and far more open to speak with. See here for my personal story with Ehrenreich when I was trying to find a publisher for my eventually-published alternative history novel about RFK and the U.S.  I should also mention his activities also landed him on the right-wing "Discover the Networks." See here.  One should be known by one's enemies, I suppose. :)

This morning, I was trying to find the poem my Uncle wrote in his late teens in honor of Clifford Brown, who died in a car accident in 1956. I used to keep it inside one of my Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet albums. I can't find it yet, but it may be in a box in our garage, as with things like that. My Dad, who is in hospice right now, took the blow of his younger brother's passing better when I said, "Dad, you really have been a great archivist for your brother. It is the greatest gift you could leave him for his legacy." I am also going to try and find some of the videos my Dad took of his brother's various award ceremonies my father attended, and maybe a few of my uncle's local cable interview show he had when he was the head of the Westchester Library System from 1982 to 2005. 

I offer my love to my cousins Jenna, Susan, Danna, and Jesse, and my Aunt Paula, my Uncle's second wife and now widow, and will always say my Uncle Moishe was, among my family members, my most abiding influence on my intellectual development. I will miss him dearly. I am comforted, however, knowing his legacy in the world of libraries will live on, and knowing too how many librarian activists have been influenced by his example and his leadership in the library field.  If I'm wrong and there is something called Heaven, I am sure he is running around trying to find Clifford Brown, Lenny Bruce, and Bertrand Russell right now. And yes, they will be there if God is as loving and caring as people like to say. 

I also end this blog post with a link to what my Uncle often told me was his favorite Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet work, "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You." He said "Sweet Clifford," as Brown was known among his fan base, had a trumpet sound that was sweeter than any other living trumpet player of his time.