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Salon has a good article on the excellent film The Weather Underground. I know a lot of my friends are frustrated, and rightly so, by the Bush government's invasions of foreign countries, by its ongoing class war, by its shifty modus operandi and the media's general failure to report it. But the movie, among other things, reminds us that this isn't the only bad time America's had:

The Tet Offensive, beginning in January -- during which the North Vietnamese briefly occupied the U.S. Embassy in Saigon -- made clear that we were not only not winning the war, we might be losing it. In March, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, under the command of Lt. William Calley, massacred more than 300 unarmed civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

In April, the same month Rudd led the student uprising at Columbia, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and black neighborhoods in more than 100 cities exploded in violent outrage. In May, the student-worker rebellion in Paris brought Charles de Gaulle's government to the brink of collapse. In June, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who seemed likely to become the next president and had vowed to end the war, was assassinated in Los Angeles. In August, the shattered Democrats held their convention in Chicago and were upstaged by pitched street battles between radical demonstrators and Mayor Richard Daley's thuglike police force, while halfway around the world a different set of thugs, commanding Soviet tanks, rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" reform movement.

All that in eight months.

And yet, most of us survived. Most of us are better off. It's not exactly soothing like a lullaby, but: Things can be very bad and still get better. Things can get better this time, too.

Re the "Current Music": My iPod's shuffle play can be downright spooky.

gig report

For background: I've been sick all week. Cold symptoms or maybe an unknown allergy, but whatever, it's been nasty. And my last couple of gigs were already pretty dispiriting, so I was dreading tonight a little bit. Fortunately I was better enough by this morning that I didn't have to call off the show--although I was still a little stuffed up and my voice was in bad shape.

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