The Right-Wing Removes Historical Photographs
It's Saturday afternoon , March 22, 2025, 15:17, and I've added a little bit about Spring, and Pickles of the North has added her segment she did on the program about the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. And, yes, the entire program got on the air this week. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We're hoping that the main studio computer at WBAI doesn't crap out again this week. We talked a lot about the Trump Administration's attack on people who do not fit in with the white supremacist and Christian Nationalist crowd that are i making an effort to destroy this country. We also celebrated Spring as we usually do, with the help of The Beatles. I plan to update this Web page soon, so it might be worthwhile to check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday April 9, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
Program Note: There was a problem with the March 15, program. The main computer used to queue up audio files for airing re-booted in the middle of the night and nobody present at the station had the password to log into it and get the software that plays the recorded programs running again. We want to thank Habte Selassie and Ian Forrest of Labbrish, which airs before our program, and WBAI Ops Staffer Reggie Jackson for working together to find a way around the disabled computer and for getting the March 15, program on the air. Most of the program aired, much of what did not air was pitching, although listeners did miss out on the brilliant 29 second outtro we did last week. So thanks to those other overnight WBAI people for getting us on the air. I have to say that WBAI Management needs to do something about this problem with the computer rebooting all of a sudden in the middle of the night. Other computers and servers don't do that so often.
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Trump's Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office has issued a memo mandating a digital content refresh,
requiring officials to take all practicable steps
to remove articles and other media that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
from the Defense Department's Web site and from social media accounts. As a result a lot of Web pages and captions have been taken down including ones about Jackie Robinson who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball when he began to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and Major General Charles Calvin Rogers, a Medal of Honor recipient who was Black, and even a photograph of Sergeant William Harvey Carney who won a Medal of Honor in the Civil War was removed. Some of these have since been put back.
The presence of Ira Hayes triggered the removal of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph and caption of the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi on the Japanese held island of Iwo Jima on February 23rd, 1945, by six U.S. Marines. The photograph was taken down because it identified PFC Hayes as a Pima Indian and one of the Navajo code talkers of the Pacific Theater of Operations in World War II. This was part of a big DEI
purge that the Pentagon is going through. A whole bunch of articles about the Navajo code talkers, who were very important contributors to the American victory at Iwo Jima and other battles in the Pacific theater of the Second World War, were also removed. Photographs, captions and texts that reference Black, Hispanic, native American and female military personnel have been scoured from the Web sites, as well as references to LGBT+∞ people.
So this is just the racist, sexist and homophobic crap from the MAGA crowd. Donnie Bonespur
Trump and Leon Skum are awful people and this stuff has to be stopped. They can't be allowed to erase history.
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Spring is indeed here. The Vernal Equinox for the northern hemisphere occurred last Thursday morning, March 20, 2025, at 5:01 AM, so about 48 hours ago. The Sun is setting after seven PM now; this is good. We invoked one of our long time traditions on this program.
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Pickles here, with some news about the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which was deliberately built in 1904, with the border between two small towns, Stanstead Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont, running right through it. It was deliberately built that way by its wealthy American benefactor Margaret Stewart Haskell, as a testament to and to further promote good will and comradeship between the people of the two border towns, and to commemorate her late husband. For over 100 years people of both countries have been taking out books and going to shows, walking through the front door which is in the US, with Canadian patrons then walking back down the side walk to go back to Canada. Currently the door on the Canadian side is used as an emergency exit. Patrol agents just make sure you walk back on the sidewalk to the country you came from.
There are many places where the 5,525 mile/8,891 kilometer long border cuts through Indigenous land, rivers, lakes, the streets of small towns, even some of their buildings like the Haskell. But it was built deliberately so as to promote comradeship and cooperation.
According to an article on the CBC Web site by Benjamin Shingler, starting October 1st Canadians will no longer be allowed to enter the building without first going through an inspection at a border station. The US federal government has arbitrarily decided that only people entering from the US side of the border can have free access to all of the building, including the Canadian side. The point of the building is that it is a neutral space to be in together without having to be inspected by either Canadian or US border patrols. The claim is that there is an increase in illicit cross border activity
in the building. There have been few incidents of this in all of the building's 120 year history.
The thing that may have brought all of this on was a visit a few weeks ago by Kristi Noem, the Secretary for Homeland Security, who descended upon the building with a posse of federal agents. According to the employees who witnessed this and the president of the library's board of trustees, who was also present, the Secretary walked up to the tape on the library floor showing the border line, said USA number one
then stepped over the tape onto the Canadian side and said, the 51st state
. She did this at least three times. The board and concerned townspeople from Stanstead and Derby Line are dismayed and upset and are figuring out what to do. I hope they put in another door on the Canadian side so Canadians can enter freely again. This is the way schoolyard bullies behave. The Haskell patrons of Stanstead Quebec and Derby Line Vermont are standing together to keep this cross country heritage site true to its roots.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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