WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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We open with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock with “The Star Spangled Banner.”
While there are any number of powerful songs we might use tonight, especially from the late 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, this one seems to me most necessary. A black man, a trained paratrooper of the US Army, on a right-handed electric guitar, playing it upside down and left-handed, interpreting a National Anthem that is pro-war in intent, and yet pro-revolution; that is an anthem of a slave nation written by a supporter of slavery. And its full lyrics are never sung as part of public events because there is a more complete and honest history there that would be exposed.
But as we must find out for ourselves, descriptions and definitions of patriotism, in songs or in official histories, are written by the masters of war.
Today’s GUEST, H. Bruce Franklin, was once a tugboat mate and then an Air Force navigator and intelligence officer. He is now and has been for more than half a century a progressive activist and renowned historian and author. His nineteen books and hundreds of articles have won him top awards for lifetime achievement in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature, and marine ecology. He retired in 2016 from a 30 year career as a professor at Rutgers University in Newark.
His latest book is Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War published by Rutgers University Press. It is memoir, history, and analysis artfully woven together in the service of revelation.
Growing up during the Second World War, Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.
Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.
RELATED
“American Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16, 2014
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and American Militarism; Or, How We Lost World War II,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 3, 2014.
“American Memory of the Vietnam War in the Epoch of the Forever War,” Keynote Address, A3M Reunion, Stanford/Palo Alto, May 17, 2014.
“Trump’s Space Force Is Insane,” Foreign Policy Journal.com, August 22, 2018
MUSIC
“The Star Spangled Banner” performed by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock
“I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish performed at Woodstock
“Untitled Protest” by Country Joe McDonald
“Agent Orange” by Country Joe McDonald
“Masters of War” by Bob Dylan
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
