The Doors, The War Against Afghanistan And Marianne Williamson

The great Barbara Lee (D-Oakland)

I met the Doors in 1967 when they were recording their first album in New York. They had a residency in a tiny, little known club under the 59th Street bridge, Ondine's and I went… every night. I became friends with Morrison-- we were the only two people around crazy enough to use DMT-- and I invited the band to play at Stony Brook, where I was chairman of the Student Activities Board, after the summer break. I offered them $400, thinking a Doors concert would be a lovely way to welcome everyone back to campus. I met Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne, kids around my age, at a Velvets show on St. Marks place and I gave Tim the opening slot for The Doors show. In the interim "Light My Fire" was released and became a smash and some of the students thought I was brilliant. Not all though. The president of the sophomore class, thought I had wasted $400 in student fees. You can't please everybody. He started a petition to impeach me. It failed. The people who voted to impeach probably weren't happy that I brought the Dead, the Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Otis Redding, Big Brother, the Byrds, or any of that stuff to the campus. In retrospective, though, everyone loved the concert series at Stony Brook.

Today, a majority of Americans-- finally-- are ready to admit the war against Afghanistan was a mistake. "For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001," reported Gallup this morning, "Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake as to say it was not." It took a lot longer for the majority of Americans to realize that than it did for them to realize that U.S. attacks on Korea, Vietnam and Iraq were mistakes-- 13 years in Afghanistan, only 5 months in Korea, 2 years in 'Nam, and a year in Iraq. Barbara Lee (D-CA), however, realized it before it even started. In fact, Barbara Lee was the only Member of Congress to realize it-- or at least to act on that realization by voting NO. On September 14, 2001, just before midnight, the House voted to give Bush and Cheney the authorization to attack Afghanistan. It passed 420-1.

Barbara Lee is pretty well marginalized by our political elite today and the people who brought us the disastrous war are lionized and rewarded. Even among Democrats, who came to the realization sooner than others that attacking and destroying Afghanistan was a mistake, Lee hasn't been honored or respected. When a corrupt shit-head, Joe Crowley-- in fact, the single most corrupt Member of the House Democratic caucus-- decided it was time for him to climb the House leadership ladder by running for vice chair of the caucus, a position that puts him on the road to the Speakership, he ran against Barbara Lee. His support-- from fellow corruptionists, many of whom he had bribed-- was so solid that Barbara withdrew before the vote.

Crowley, of course, had voted for the attack on Afghanistan. He was wrong; Lee was right. But he got the job. Things ended better for me. The Doors and Hendrix and The Dead and all those bands I booked at my school before they were "big," got big. I wound up the president of what they called "a major label"-- and was well-rewarded for being right then and right about punk rock in the late '70s when other record company executives were laughing at it and behaving just like Joe Crowley. Is the Democratic Party doomed? Absolutely… just useless. How could anyone even think about voting for a Democrat-- not just a bottom of the barrel Democrat like Wendy Greuel, but even the best the Democratic Party has to offer, like Ted Lieu-- when there's an independent alternative along the lines of Bernie Sanders. This is from an OpEd yesterday by Marianne Williamson, the independent progressive running for the CA-33 seat Henry Waxman is abandoning.

The fact that a few self-appointed arbiters of who-gets-to-run-and-who-gets-to-play - whether in the area of politics, education, economics or anything else - know they have it in the bag because they hang out with others in the same gang, and they own the system, and they control the media, and they go to the same dinner parties, does not mean that we cannot disenthrall ourselves of their mental filter. And that is all, I assure you, that keeps the lock in place. It is not their money, or even their connections, that makes them masters of our universe. It is the simple fact that we are not laughing at them, but are lining up for their approval instead.

So regardless of whether or not you agree with my political vision, plan to vote for me or support my candidacy, I hope you will join me in recognizing that something is fundamentally wrong when any group of people, including any political party, thinks it's theirs to decide who will be taken seriously, who will have a shot at power, and who will be considered a viable candidate.

That is not their job. That is your job. And if you do agree with my politics and you do wish to see me in office, I hope you will write more of your friends to tell them about my candidacy than you might have; post my website more times on your social media than you might have; and give a couple more bucks to the campaign than you might have. We're trying to penetrate a system here, and it is dense. It is energetic. And it is not amused by free thinkers.