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| Hard Hat Riot of 1970 |
On this day in
1891, Russian-born author, mystic and
spear-point of the Theosophical movement Helena Petrovna Blavatsky passes away at the tender age of sixty. In her own time, few would have hazarded a guess as to the tremendous impact her life and work would have on the century to come.
***
Born on this day in
1911, blues-man
Robert Johnson. At some point during his early twenties, Johnson allegedly sold his soul to
Satan in exchange for musical virtuosity. With a grand total of twenty-nine songs recorded during a grand total of two sessions, this Mississippi native became the progenitor - via the young working class white men of England who so loved his stuff - of
the Blues.
Thomas Pynchon, one of America's greatest post-war novelists and one of the handful of world-class writers with bona-fide parapolitical credibility, was born in Long Island on this day in
1937. Of his major works,
V. is an impressive arrival,
The Crying of Lot 49 is a stone hoot,
Gravity's Rainbow is an encyclopaedic, mind-bending masterpiece,
Vineland is a hippy's delight,
Mason & Dixon defies categorization,
Against the Day remains mostly unread and
Inherent Vice is like
The Big Lebowski meets... well... Thomas Pynchon! He remains the only person to ever have a Pulitzer Prize revoked after
The Powers That Be decided their panel of judges should never have rewarded such an "unreadable" and "obscene" work of literature. This, of course, was the highest possible compliment those decrepit old fools could have paid it.
On this day in
1970, one of the strangest confrontations in American post-war history takes place in Lower Manhattan when roughly 200 construction workers, allegedly acting on orders from the
AFL-CIO, attack a thousand demonstrators protesting the
Kent State shootings, the invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Seventy people are injured and six arrested in the fracas, which was dubbed the
Hard Hat Riot by the media of the day. The incident served as a stark underline to the deep, essentially unbridgeable divisions between the Old Left, which was mostly labor-oriented, and the New Left, which focused more intensely on identity politics. This also happens to be one of the main themes in the aforementioned
Thomas Pynchon novel
Vineland.
On this day in
1980, the
World Health Organization announces that the deadly disease of
smallpox has been wiped off the face of the Earth… except for a few large boxes of the stuff stored at various bio-weapon labs in the USA and elsewhere, of course.
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