Last night Joan Baez patted me on the cheek. Yes: this Joan Baez, who opened for Martin Luther King, Jr., who was at Woodstock, who introduced Bob Dylan to the world, who has been fighting for justice at home and abroad more or less nonstop all her life.
This is some cruise we are on.
Earlier yesterday, I semi-marched with more than 100 others on the nice little Cayman Islands building that is estimated to house 18,000 corporations in 18,000 teensy-tiny post office boxes . . . semi-marched because I’m just not good at crowds and chanting (Hey hey! Ho ho! Tax evaders have to go!), though I respect and often admire those who are. Strictly speaking, tax evaders beat taxes by violating the law, which I have no idea whether any of those 18,000 do; tax avoiders merely beat taxes by finding loopholes that they, or their predecessors, managed to insert into the law. So they’re doing nothing illegal; just grounding their often aggressive patriotism in the tradition of “no taxation without representation!” while somehow ignoring the fact that for the last couple of centuries we have had representation, which has led us to tax ourselves to finance wars (until today’s uber-patriotic Republicans decided to finance them with deficits), interstate highways, social safety nets, moon landings, Marshall Plans, college aid, and so much more that helped us to end the 20th Century the envy of the world.
In between my semi-marching and the pat on my cheek I got to hear a panel on the Arab Spring (with strong participation from an audience member who holds dual US and Iranian citizenship and another who is Egyptian) . . . and then an interview conducted by Victor Navasky, who (among so much else) 41 years ago was the young New York Times Sunday Magazine editor who worked with Merle Miller to publish his ground-breaking (and just re-released in paperback) cover story, “On Being Different.” The interview had nothing to do with that, it was with Jack O’Dell, who is not Irish, who ran the voter registration and direct mail fundraising efforts for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (he is now 89).
This is some cruise we are on.
This morning we appear to be in Honduras. Gotta run.
