27-01-2013, 06:45 PM
When I revisit Autumn Too Long, I wade into a deep and dark memory pool. I live again my earliest meetings with George Michael Evica, and I bear witness to the idealism and naivete of a young writer who was about to have his most basic conceptions of political and cultural realities challenged and all but obliterated.
I recently came across my copy of The Gun that Didn't Smoke, an important yet criminally overlooked essay by Walter F. Graf and Richard R.Bartholomew. In it, the authors write kindly of Autumn Too Long, which I believe was brought to their attention by George Michael. I post their evaluation below not to stroke my ego, but rather to remind us of the extraordinary levels of thought and depths of insight evident in early, long-lost work by the best second- and third generation JFK researchers.
Not to be missed is the spot-on term coined by Messrs. Graf and Bartholomew to describe so many of us whose work appears on DPF:
"conspiracy resistors"
The entire piece is available at http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/gtds_4.html .
In a worthy example of poetic justice, the title chosen by JFK-assassination activist Charles Drago for his novel about the assassination, Autumn Too Long, echoes the semiotic use of Verlaine's "Chanson d'Automne" as a call to arms for the French resistance. Drago further earned the Verlaine comparison in a speech to an international gathering of conspiracy resistors in Dallas during the 33rd anniversary of the assassination: "As far as the search for justice in the case of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is concerned, there has been no progress whatsoever...Our reluctance to end formally the `conspiracy/no conspiracy' debate among ourselves amounts to an act of collective cowardice...Our fear of the truth is motivated by the unspoken realization that the death of America's moral authority as a civilized nation is depicted in Z[apruder-film]-frame 313...The absence of moral outrage in our work (with few notable exceptions) is the death knell of our work...We are at war with the murderers of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and with their accessories after the fact; if we are to have the slightest chance of winning that war, we had better begin to think of ourselves and to act in terms of our most appropriate role models: the Viet Cong." In his "Plea For the Declaration of War," Drago wrote: "Who are we? We are the Sioux -- of AIM. We are the Jews -- of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We are the Viet Cong -- of Tet. We must know ourselves to be freedom fighters." The Drago-Verlaine comparison is made more poetically just by a personal revelation from former CIA Director and former U.S. President George Bush. At the end of his presidency, just prior to the Academy Awards presentation, Bush told reporters that his favorite movie was the film adaptation of Cornelius Ryan's book, The Longest Day, which highlights Verlaine's coded verse. That seemingly innocent choice is, at best, sardonic given Bush's strange biography regarding the JFK assassination and his odd family history regarding fascism. "During a visit to Auschwitz in 1987," wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, "what came out of Bush's mouth was, `Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?'" Since Sept., 1995, Bush has spoken at several high-profile events sponsored by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon on three continents. The former president has received speaking fees totaling in the millions from Moon's Unification Church. In Jul., 1996, in Washington, speaking at a Moon-sponsored conference, Bush praised The Washington Times, a newspaper founded by Moon, for fostering "sanity." He added that Moon's new paper in Argentina, Tiempos del Mundo, "is going to do the same thing." According to Frederick Clarkson's book, Eternal Hostility, Unification Church operatives "have been close to neo-fascist movements all over the world." The former president lives in Houston and can be subpoenaed under ARCA, which, ironically, Bush himself signed into law. (November In Dallas 1996 Conference Program [JFK/Lancer Productions & Publications, 1996] p. 15. Charles R. Drago, "In the Blossom of Our Sins: An Eleventh Hour Plea For War and Its Absolutions," The Fourth Decade, May, 1997, pp. 4, 6.
I recently came across my copy of The Gun that Didn't Smoke, an important yet criminally overlooked essay by Walter F. Graf and Richard R.Bartholomew. In it, the authors write kindly of Autumn Too Long, which I believe was brought to their attention by George Michael. I post their evaluation below not to stroke my ego, but rather to remind us of the extraordinary levels of thought and depths of insight evident in early, long-lost work by the best second- and third generation JFK researchers.
Not to be missed is the spot-on term coined by Messrs. Graf and Bartholomew to describe so many of us whose work appears on DPF:
"conspiracy resistors"
The entire piece is available at http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/gtds_4.html .
In a worthy example of poetic justice, the title chosen by JFK-assassination activist Charles Drago for his novel about the assassination, Autumn Too Long, echoes the semiotic use of Verlaine's "Chanson d'Automne" as a call to arms for the French resistance. Drago further earned the Verlaine comparison in a speech to an international gathering of conspiracy resistors in Dallas during the 33rd anniversary of the assassination: "As far as the search for justice in the case of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is concerned, there has been no progress whatsoever...Our reluctance to end formally the `conspiracy/no conspiracy' debate among ourselves amounts to an act of collective cowardice...Our fear of the truth is motivated by the unspoken realization that the death of America's moral authority as a civilized nation is depicted in Z[apruder-film]-frame 313...The absence of moral outrage in our work (with few notable exceptions) is the death knell of our work...We are at war with the murderers of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and with their accessories after the fact; if we are to have the slightest chance of winning that war, we had better begin to think of ourselves and to act in terms of our most appropriate role models: the Viet Cong." In his "Plea For the Declaration of War," Drago wrote: "Who are we? We are the Sioux -- of AIM. We are the Jews -- of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We are the Viet Cong -- of Tet. We must know ourselves to be freedom fighters." The Drago-Verlaine comparison is made more poetically just by a personal revelation from former CIA Director and former U.S. President George Bush. At the end of his presidency, just prior to the Academy Awards presentation, Bush told reporters that his favorite movie was the film adaptation of Cornelius Ryan's book, The Longest Day, which highlights Verlaine's coded verse. That seemingly innocent choice is, at best, sardonic given Bush's strange biography regarding the JFK assassination and his odd family history regarding fascism. "During a visit to Auschwitz in 1987," wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, "what came out of Bush's mouth was, `Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?'" Since Sept., 1995, Bush has spoken at several high-profile events sponsored by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon on three continents. The former president has received speaking fees totaling in the millions from Moon's Unification Church. In Jul., 1996, in Washington, speaking at a Moon-sponsored conference, Bush praised The Washington Times, a newspaper founded by Moon, for fostering "sanity." He added that Moon's new paper in Argentina, Tiempos del Mundo, "is going to do the same thing." According to Frederick Clarkson's book, Eternal Hostility, Unification Church operatives "have been close to neo-fascist movements all over the world." The former president lives in Houston and can be subpoenaed under ARCA, which, ironically, Bush himself signed into law. (November In Dallas 1996 Conference Program [JFK/Lancer Productions & Publications, 1996] p. 15. Charles R. Drago, "In the Blossom of Our Sins: An Eleventh Hour Plea For War and Its Absolutions," The Fourth Decade, May, 1997, pp. 4, 6.