My Way IS the High Way

Family Dog Values

Summer of Love

Rock Art Rocks Art

Feed your head. Find somebody to love. Take another piece of my heart. Gimme an F.

Everybody remembers something about San Francisco in the ‘sixties.

Even if they weren’t there, magazine covers with swirly Day-Glo graphics, dancing nymphets, flowing hair cascading down naked backs, bell bottom Levis, flowers, beads, and peace signs told them something was happening there. And of course, there was the music.

If I picked up on any of it from newsstands in Madrid, Spain, my junior year “abroad,” that would've been all I knew about happenings back in the US of A, circa 1965. I’d gone native, with my leather wine bota and guitar-playing Spanish boyfriend, and thus had nary a clue. Which is to say, I missed the bus. As it turns out, the bus didn’t miss me. But that’s another story we’ll get to in due course. Suffice to say I was woefully unprepared for that massive dose of LSD my first week back in Boulder, Colorado, senior year.

By 1967 my best gal (aka roomie) and I were not only hip to the hippie happenings, we made a pilgrimage to San Francisco over Spring Break. We missed the main action, arriving after the January 14 Gathering of the Tribes / Human Be-In and too early for the Summer of Love, which "officially" began in June. The inside scoop on that timing, however, is a little different. According to author and historian Dennis McNally, "The Summer of Love was not really Summer ’67, but the Fall (as everybody in SF knows, the time of good weather) of ’66, when there was a small (certainly less than a thousand) and very cool psychedelic community going on."

So in truth, we were far from the only ones who missed the real action. At least I managed to score a virginal white lace mini dress to commemorate my San Francisco Spring of Love. And I was just reminded that we also acquired nicknames: Hippie and Bean Bag.

Summertime, and the living was not easy.

Behind the music beat America’s heart of darkness – 27 million young men living under a gruesome Sword of Damocles called The Draft. Mere fodder for a voracious war machine, between 1964 and 1973, 2.2 million teenagers were forced into war in Vietnam by their parents’ generation. Thousands more signed up to avoid the draft. The ultimate Catch 22: Sign up for war to avoid being forced to sign up for war.

Only 100 years earlier, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 that was assumed to free the slaves, kicked off another 100 years of systemic racism and subjugation by replacing slavery with the Convict Lease program, which begat the police system to arrest and jail freed slaves for loitering and then rent them out to be worked to death. The Convict Labor System begat Jim Crow laws, which begat the war on drugs - all adding up to incarceration of Black people and Slavery By Another Name. We thought we were woke by supporting Civil Rights. Little did we know how much worse it really was. On top of that heavy karma, in our DNA we carried a Trail of Tears.

Early on, the Beats and the Blacks raged against the machine in music, poetry, books and art. THE BEATS BEGAT THE PRANKSTERS who heralded the Hippies on a coast-to-coast psychedelic bus called Furthur - all of it fueled by a burning desire to wage art. All of it fueling the primal scream of rock & roll.

Death of the Hippie

On October 6, 1967 a full-blown and very public funeral, complete with casket, was held to commemorate the "death" of the hippie. This was an attempt by the original psychedelic community to dissuade national media from further catastrophic attention; to stem the tide of hard drugs and crime that had flooded the Haight by April. About the time Hippie and Bean Bag turned up for Spring Break.

Right after graduation from the University of Colorado in 1967, I went to work at the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. (thanks to a more subtle form of parental manipulation.) Located in the soon-to-be-infamous Watergate office building, I answered letters to President Lyndon B. Johnson and served as his brother's secretary. While I worked for LBJ at the DNC, I also marched against the war in Vietnam along with all my friends. I lit candles outside the White House while more radical protesters “levitated” the Pentagon. I also had tea in the White House as a guest of Sam Houston Johnson, the President's brother. As my Plus One, I took my Dad. So there we were, just the three of us - me, Daddy and "Uncle Sam" - awkwardly sipping tea on the White House balcony overlooking the Washington Monument across a park-like lawn.

CHEAP THRILLS came out the Summer of 1968, the year both Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Having seen the best mind of our generation spattered across the back seat of a Dallas convertible five years earlier, these murders served to remind us - starkly - that forces of darkness were out to destroy any utopian dream we might still cling to. It was the same Summer that Chicago police bashed in anti-war protesters' heads at the Democratic National Convention (where I happened to be working.) Meanwhile, the psychedelic music scene was picking up steam and so was opposition to the war.

December 6, 1969, brought us Altamont in hellish counterpoint to Woodstock four months earlier. Asked whether Altamont signaled the end of the ‘sixties, Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, replied, “Well, it was December.”

Rock Art Rocks Art

In the Summer 2021 edition of Haight Street Voice, Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir talks about the Summer of Love.

“The whole thing about the Haight-Ashbury, it had cheap rents back in that day and the artist community took advantage of that. They all fell together. It was a students’ ghetto, a struggling artists’ ghetto – and it was a lot of fun.”

It wasn’t just bands like Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane that came together, and even lived together in The City back then. Their visual counterparts, artists like R. Crumb, Randy Tuten, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse also came together and created an exciting new art form.

Featuring fluorescent colors, collages, weed culture and weird graphics, psychedelic art was created to go with the new form of music aborning in local clubs and dance halls all over California.

In Northern California and the Bay Area, it was popping up in joints like the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, where The Charlatans of San Francisco took up residence in their Wild West Victorian velvet finery; the Matrix in San Francisco, where Jefferson Airplane performed as the house band; and the Avalon Ballroom, run by the Family Dog’s beloved Chet Helms, where Big Brother and the Holding Company was house band.

Down the San Mateo Peninsula in small towns like Palo Alto, things were happening in pizza parlors, coffee houses, and joints Jerry Garcia of the then-Warlocks called "divorcees bars."

Psychedelicized artists cranked out concert posters, album covers, underground comics and magazines; they created mind-blowing light shows, murals, and a famous psychedelic bus named Furthur – bound to blow minds from coast to coast.

They spread word about shows at venues all over town, as well as the large outdoor gatherings that were catching national attention.

Many brilliant, if slightly unintelligible (and now highly valuable) posters were collaborations by artists like Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, whose collages often included bits of “borrowed” art, like maybe a page torn from a library art book - only to serve a higher artistic purpose, of course.

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."

~ Cesar A. Cruz

We all dealt with the Kennedy assassination (which happened two months after my mother's sudden death and one day before my 19th birthday) in our own way.

While I dove head-first into the party school lifestyle, it was handled more creatively in psychedelic San Francisco. Darby Slick (author of the song Don't You Want Somebody to Love? in his book by the same title) put it this way:

"The President's name was Lyndon Johnson, and we hated him; we had gone to hear the Beatles play, but someone had axe murdered them all, so the promoter was presenting Kate Smith instead. Who could have followed Jack Kennedy?

"...Johnson seemed the prototypical southern politician, essentially dirty. We hated his personality, let alone his ideas. His plan of wonderment for America was called the Great Society, so we took this name, and said, 'We, we hippie-freak, drug addicts, we are your Great Society.' A few people didn't understand, and thought we were stuck up, which of course we were, but not in the unsubtle way of calling yourself 'great' publicly. It was an ugly name to us, like calling yourself dog shit, and we wore it with a sense of 'fuck you to Madison Avenue.'...

".... Actually, almost all hippie band people wanted changes so sweeping that they would be tantamount to revolution; drugs, and a kind of passive resistance, rather than guns, would be instruments of the rebellion. We would not try to topple your society, we would simply walk away, figuratively, and build our own. Yours would blow itself up, or collapse from having all of its weight in the facade."

I should mention that about this time my father casually informed me that the hippie thing out there in Berkeley and San Francisco was tantamount to the Chinese Red Guards. Which tells you all you need to know about how the CIA saw hippie culture and how they justified whatever they would do to destroy it. (Keeping in mind that in the name of anti-communism, nothing was off the table. Absolutely nothing,)

And then there were the Acid Tests.

Acid Tests

Rock Art Rocks Art

Family Dog Presents

The early Saturday night parties at "Kesey's place" in 1965 featured the CIA’s own high-grade Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) straight from Sandoz Labs in Switzerland.

The acid escaped the confines of government funded laboratory experiments at Stanford University, thanks to the initiative of author and original Merry Prankster, Ken Kesey.

Kesey liberated a massive amount of the world-altering substance the minute he got a chance. You could call that the Original Prank.

Kesey participated in the early lab tests, understood the value of the psychedelic experience, wrote ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST inspired by it, and created a new form of literature in the process.

The parties also featured music by The Warlocks - precursor to Grateful Dead - as participants as much as performers. Indeed, there were times performance was not possible.

"When we fell in with the Acid Tests we started having the most fun we had ever had." - Jerry Garcia, Blank on Blank

* * *

I mean, the Grateful Dead is, as a movement, as a thing, it's still growing, it's still intact, the community is still there. And I see it all as a part of the 1960s counterculture reaction to what was going on in the world.

~ Trixie Garcia, April 16, 2021

Over fifty years later, Trixie Garcia, daughter of Jerry and Carolyn "MG" Garcia, launched the latest family project, Garcia Hand Picked Cannabis.

That's right, folks. A weed company. What could be more perfect? And in keeping with Grateful Dead tradition, she launched it in the parking lot of a cannabis dispensary.

Also in keeping with GD tradition, Garcia Hand Picked Cannabis donates a portion of the proceeds to charity.

"I just try to open the door and share what I can with as many people as possible, because, my opinion, this music, and this culture is a benefit to humanity in general. So that's my job. I feel like, that's how I can sleep at night...by having charitable portions of the profits go to the environment, or the Roadie Fund or something like that, because it really is about inclusion and fun and love.

Family Dog Presents

"Family Values" of the Rabid Right

Family Dog Presents

May the Baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind.

~ Family Dog Productions

Chet Helms of the Family Dog ran the Avalon Ballroom. He also managed Big Brother and the Holding Company. In 1966, Big Brother needed “a strong vocalist,” so Chet sent for his buddy, Janis Joplin of Lubbock, Texas.

The original Family Dog poster, THE BLUES PROJECT with THE GREAT SOCIETY by Wes Wilson, publicized the first Family Dog show at the Avalon Ballroom, April 22-23, 1966. The concert featured The Blues Project as well as The Great Society – Grace Slick’s first band, with her husband Jerry Slick on drums and Jerry’s brother Darby Slick on guitar.

Other than rock & roll radio, psychedelic posters were the means of communication for local kids who needed to know who was playing at which venue every weekend, because every weekend something outrageous was going on. With a little planning and five or ten bucks, you could dash from club to club and see at least four of the greatest psychedelic rock bands in the world.

Posters were plastered on telephone poles all over San Francisco touting upcoming star-studded shows (and wily collectors snatched them down as fast as they went up.) Venues often featured two bands each night:

Jimi Hendrix. The Great Society. Jefferson Airplane. Santana. Grateful Dead. Country Joe and the Fish. The Charlatans. Quicksilver Messenger Service. Sly and the Family Stone. Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks. Sons of Champlin….

Today those posters are collectors’ items and there is a lucrative international business in vintage rock posters – lovingly curated, exquisitely framed, still beautiful. Many of them worth hundreds of dollars, if not thousands.

"Family Values" of the Rabid Right

Cut to: 1992 Presidential election.

President George H. W. Bush runs for re-election against challenger Bill Clinton.

Unable to control his party, Bush allows rabid right-wingnuts Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan to dominate the 1992 National GOP (Grand Old Party) Convention, where they spew an endless barrage of racist, anti-woman, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-welfare and vicious anti-Clinton rhetoric they pass off as “family values.”

An August 27, 1992 New York Times article by Michael Kelly entitled Republicans Rethink “Family Values” states, “After the national convention's acidic assaults on the Democratic nominee, his wife and his party failed to restore Mr. Bush to parity with Mr. Clinton in public-opinion polls, Republican strategists are saying the economy, not "family values," is the central issue, and they are trying to distance Mr. Bush from some of the harsh words spoken on his behalf.”

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign blithely proclaims, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In a September 21, 1992 New York Times article entitled, Issues – Family Values, Bush Tries to Recoup From Harsh Tone on ‘Values,’ it’s clear they went too far, forcing moderate GOP members to backpedal as fast as their pasty white legs could pump:

“Having loosed some of the more ferocious dogs of political war to attack Bill Clinton and the Democrats on such intimate matters as God, family and the sort of woman Mr. Clinton married, officials of President Bush's campaign are now trying to change the subject -- or at least the tone of the discussion.”

GOP Chicken-Shit Two-Step

“Instead, it seems clear, the Republicans will continue what has evolved as a two-step tactic that Democrats criticize as disingenuous, slashing at Mr. Clinton through the words of surrogates and, when backlash threatens, disavowing the troublesome remarks...”

“...remarks made last weekend by the House Minority Whip, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, to the effect that the family life of Woody Allen represented a sort of Democratic ideal.”

They set the stage for trumpism.

But first they set the stage for some good old fashioned hippie fun.

Family Dog Values

"Family Values" of the Rabid Right

Good Old Fashioned Hippie Fun

In popular poster-making tradition, San Francisco native Steve Brown (former 1960s rock & roll DJ “OB Jetty” of KPRI San Diego radio fame, Grateful Dead Records production coordinator 1972–1978, Vietnam Veteran, and current independent video and filmmaker) co-opted the Family Dog image from the original poster, replaced the word “presents” with "values" on its banner and staked a new claim on the slogan.

“I colored Chet Helms' original 1965 San Francisco concert production logo and added some patriotic stars,” explained Brown.

“Annie Harlow and I made many different colored versions and Linda Kelly (creator of the Haight Street Voice) helped post them on poles up and down Haight Street – back when it was still allowed.”

As Annie tells it, "GHW Bush was campaigning on 'Family Values' that were anti-choice BS. Somehow Steve and I jagged on 'Family Dog Values' as a more appropriate alternative message.

"He and I printed out the logo then hand colored them. We planned to plaster Haight and Linda Kelly joined us for that. We had a fucking blast thinking this was the true American value system.... Family Dog Values. I'd say we still adhere to FDV!"

“These posters may have helped Bill Clinton to beat George Bush, because people like and value their family dogs,” stated Brown deadpan.

Re-birth or Repeat?

Back in the Haigh-Ashbury, there’s a renaissance a-rumblin’.

You can feel it in the air and see it in the revitalized shops and restaurants. You can also see plenty of evidence of what went wrong the first time.

In his Haight Street Voice interview with Editor in Chief Linda Kelly, Bob Weir says, “The problem with the Haight-Ashbury that was unsolvable was that it was infested with people who wanted to get in on the free love and the drugs. And the drug dealers came and the criminal element came, and overnight it turned from an artists’ ghetto to just a shit stew.”

And that’s the challenge. How to prevent the shit stew that destroyed the Spirit of the Summer of Love from doing it again, when the detritus from the first time litters the streets to this day? In fact, Dr. Dave Smith, founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic says it’s worse now. So what “Family Dog Values” will help make the renaissance a success?

Bob Weir lays down the bottom line: Community. Artists. CHEAP RENT.

Bill Clinton also nailed it in 1992 with his campaign slogan, It’s the economy, stupid.

So let’s be clear: You don’t get an artist community without cheap rent. It’s that fucking simple.

It’s the Stupid Economy

Look around you. What do you see? You see human beings living on the street, their worldly possessions strewn about in disarray. Every city in America. It seems almost laughable at this point to mention that we are the richest country in the world. Not with millions of people living on the goddamn sidewalk, we’re not.

Yes, there are kids with their dogs taking up space on those same sidewalks, but I’m not talking about them or their journey right now. Their life is still in front of them. I wish them well.

I’m talking about old folks. Sick, elderly, destitute human beings whose journey landed them smack in the middle of a concrete jungle without any options whatsoever. Without even the proverbial pot to piss in.

The other day, as I made my way around an ancient couple who had claimed a few squares of sidewalk on Haight Street with what was left of their belongings, I was almost annoyed at the nuisance they created. This morning I woke up realizing that is their statement: Look at us. SEE US. And for Christ’s sake, DO SOMETHING.

I could go off on any number of tangents here, but I’ve already been too long-winded so let’s bring it all back home.

The Haight Street Voice, which helped inspire this piece, promotes “local journalism with a global perspective.”

Using that as a jumping off place, let’s look at this situation from both angles: local and global.

Local vs Global

Re-birth or Repeat?

When I think local, I think community: People coming together to take care of each other and create whatever they were put on Earth to create. It’s pretty simple.

When I think global, I can’t help but picture a giant overloaded cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I’m not even sure what that means but taking it one step furthur (farthur?) I can’t help but wonder, given the advanced technology at their fingertips, whether Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk could see that elderly couple living on the Haight Street sidewalk from space.

I can’t help but think there’s a connection.

I can’t help but think it’s a reason the not-so-simple part of this equation is cheap rent.

"And the reason it happened in the Haight,” says author Dennis McNally, who is currently writing a book about the deeper historical background of the Haight scene of the ‘60s and the broader Anglo-American counterculture of the era, “was that it was the home of really, really cheap rents. That was because the morons who ran the Interstate Highway program (and city planners) had decided to run a freeway up Fell Street (which borders the Panhandle, where the bands first played) and then through Golden Gate Park so that everyone could drive through the city to Marin 10 minutes faster.

"As we all know, their dastardly plan failed, thanks to sane resistance."

And voila! Another essential ingredient in building and maintaining a community where artists and the elderly can survive: sane resistance. No mean feat.

Getting back to the Bob Weir interview, let’s take a good look at the dark side of Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love: it was infested with people who wanted to get in on the free love and the drugs. And the drug dealers came and the criminal element came.

Forget the free love thing. That’s dead. AIDS killed it and COVID buried it. But the drugs, drug dealers and criminal element are still here. That’s a problem. And that problem has an even darker underbelly that we’ll delve into elsewhere in this rag.

Right now, let’s focus on some simple stuff like “Eat local, think global.”

Right now, let’s focus on some folks who are working their hearts out for their community, keeping the Spirit alive.

Dr. Dave Smith exemplifies the Spirit of the Summer of Love with Health Right 360 – natural progeny of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (which he founded) merged with Walden House (providing mental health and substance use disorder services for teens and others since 1969, also founded in the Haight.)

For the record, it was the Haight-Ashbury Free Alcohol Abuse Treatment Center that saved my life over forty years ago. Without their help, I would not now be regaling you with my words. Thank you, Dr. Dave. I should have found a way to say this to you in person by now.

Also for the record: A community where artists, the elderly and youth can survive requires free health care and substance abuse treatment. Now more than ever.

Haight Street Voice

Re-birth or Repeat?

Haight Street Voice

Local Journalism with a Global Perspective

The reason I know about the other people I’m about to mention is Linda Kelly. She might make it look like it’s all unicorns and rainbows, but the woman puts an enormous amount of time, creative energy and love into the Haight Street Voice. Not to mention her own money.

The colorful mini-magazine available in shops in the neighborhood, or by subscription, is only the tip of the iceberg. The online version features extended interviews, plus podcasts that go deeper.

There you will find all three parts of the Bob Weir interview, which is extremely entertaining, along with many other rare exchanges. Dig deeper and you’ll find authors Dennis McNally (DESOLATE ANGEL, A LONG STRANGE TRIP, ON HIGHWAY 61 and more) and Joel Selvin (THE HAIGHT: LOVE, ROCK, and REVOLUTION; ALTAMONT, HOLLYWOOD EDEN and more) waxing poetic on the history and future of the Haight.

You will hear author Peggy Caserta

(I RAN INTO SOME TROUBLE) (is that a great title or what?) who created bell-bottom Levis and outfitted many of San Francisco's iconic bands, including her great and good friend Janis Joplin, in her famous Haight-Ashbury boutique Mnasidika. There is some seriously good stuff there, including yet another essential ingredient in a community where artists can thrive: support of creative young businesswomen by righteous locally-based corporations.

Thanks to HSV, I got to meet Nancy Gille of San Francisco Heritage in person and learn the history of the beautiful Doolan Larson building at 557 Ashbury Street. I got to gaze at the ceiling with “earthquake cracks” in the finish, and the patina on the kitchen walls – every brush stroke described with so much love I could weep.

Without Haight Street Voice I’d never know that Robert Emmons keeps a “Fresh Flower Power” flower stand outside his shop, “Haight & Ashbury,” or that some of the local street kids have taken it upon themselves to look out for Robert and that very special corner, where they also happen to have taken up residence.

Between you and me, that’s probably because Linda Kelly showed them some recognition and respect, asking only the same in return. She also gave them Bob Weir’s message:

You found your home. Now keep it clean and make it pretty.

As for Broke-Ass Stuart, I did know about him because I’ve been on his mailing list for years. But check him out. He’s got a lot of good stuff to say about what it takes to build and keep a community where artists, the elderly and blue collar workers can survive - with a unique take on the role of labor unions and trade publications.

Love on Haight

Bonus Track: "Conservative Values" of Georgia GOP

Haight Street Voice

Sunny Powers at Love on Haight embodies the Spirit of the Summer of Love, literally from head to toe.

She found her home and boy did she make it pretty!

Most spectacularly, she has commissioned local artists Ellie Paisley and Aaron Brooks (@ellie.paisley & @abrooksart) to paint the outside of the iconic building at Haight and Masonic, bringing joy and brilliant color to her corner of the ‘hood.

Inside the store, she sells clothing designed by local artists, including Ellie Paisley and Aaron Brooks. Again, she might make it look like it’s all tie-dye and sparkles, but she puts everything and more into her creation and her community.

“I have a feeling the Haight will come back,” says Bob Weir. “The Haight is the land of renaissance. It’s got some sort of magnetism about it.”

Besides that magnetism, it's also going to need students, artists, cheap rent, sane resistance to the greedheads and forces of darkness, free health care and drug treatment, unions, trade publications, historical preservation, women business owners (men too) and the support of a few righteous corporations like Levi Strauss.

To that end, both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are giving something back, now that they've got weightlessness under their belts: Musk, with his $50,000 Boxabl houses and Bezos with $200 million in donations through his Courage and Civility Award - its first two winners being CNN political analyst Van Jones and celebrity chef José Andrés. Maybe the Haight can attract some of that generosity.

And why not? After all, to quote Joel Selvin, “The Haight-Ashbury hippie is one of the most enduring American archetypes since the cowboy and Indian…. The last heroic moment in our culture.”

Bonus Track: "Conservative Values" of Georgia GOP

Cut to: Special Senate election Georgia 2020

Both Senate seats are up for grabs and it looks like the 1992 GOP Brain Trust has programmed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler for the fight.

Kelly Loeffler is the richest senator in America. Her husband runs the stock exchange.

Wearing a bless-your-heart smirk and a twelve-hundred-dollar hairpiece, the GOP strapped her to a sclerotic circus elephant El Cid-like and sent her into battle armed with all the nasty jabs they could later disavow, if necessary.

(At least in the olden days they actually found it necessary to disavow the worst of the worst. Nowadays, they make folk heroes out of them and use them for fundraising. In that regard, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene makes Loeffler look like Granny’s birthday picnic.)

In her debate with Democratic challenger Rev. Rafael Warnock, Loeffler comes across as valedictorian at Mean Girl Academy, predicting two opposing visions for America: The American Dream vs Radical Socialism. She recites right-wing buzzwords robot-like in answer to every question. Her answers come across as the disembodied poetics of a depraved reactionary:

“Black Lives Matter is fascist. Open borders. Open jails. More shutdowns. Taxed into bankruptcy. Government health care. Take away our freedoms. Right to life. Second Amendment. School choice. Radical Socialist. High taxes. Radical liberal. Fidel Castro. Called cops thugs and gangsters. Agent of change. Radical liberal. More lockdowns. Open borders. Defund police. Withdraw military. Marxism, redistribution of income, dark liberal money. Government health care. Russia hoax distracted us from addressing the virus (bitch, please.)”

While reminding us ad nauseam that she was “blessed to live the American Dream,” she never misses a chance to throw in a racist dog-whistle about her opponent, an African American Democrat. “He’s never created a job in his life,” sounds like code for “shiftless n-word” to me.

Refusing to answer questions, she brushes them aside by starting each reply with, “Look, my opponent is…” as if the actual question couldn’t possibly matter in light of the revelation she’s about to drop. Then she launches back into her laundry list of buzzwords and dog whistles. She has the cojones to warn that Democrats would pack the court even as Republicans are actually packing the court.

The nastiest cut of all comes when she snaps, “I’m not going to be lectured by (the “uppity n-word” is silent…) a man who uses the bible to support abortion. Bingo! Even worse than an uppity n-word.

Democracy is not something you have. It's something you DO.

~ "Granny D" via Brian Hassett, author, BLISSFULLY RAVAGED IN DEMOCRACY

The Election was held Tuesday, January 5, 2021. Rev. Warnock won in a close race, ending the GOP stranglehold on the Senate and making Vice President Kamala Harris the tie breaker. Which means we’ve got less than two years to get shit done before midterm elections have a chance to upset that delicate balance, both in the Senate and the House. Tick tock.