Outsider’s Reverie
Leslie Evans
Leslie Evans grew up in a home steeped in the lore of ghostly apparitions, spirit guides, star charts, and the astral plane. His parents met at a seance conducted by a dead thirteenth century crusader. In high school he called himself an outsider, beginning a quest for mystic experience. At Los Angeles City College he organized a student political party with black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga.
In 1961 he was recruited to the Socialist Workers Party, American followers of Leon Trotsky. Over the next twenty years he rose to serve as managing editor of the English news service of the Trotskyist Fourth International, under Joseph Hansen, who had been Trotsky’s secretary and had captured Trotsky’s assassin. He was editor of the party’s theoretical magazine and the group’s China specialist, where he befriended Peng Shu-tse, an early leader of the Chinese Communist Party who once outranked Mao Zedong.
In the 1960s the SWP masterminded anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that brought more protesters to Washington, D.C., than the entire city population. He chronicles the party’s growth in the mass antiwar movement, then its implosion in the early 1980s when younger party leaders turned on the old guard and staked their future on winning influence with Fidel Castro. Evans spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, two of them working in the iron mines. In later years he worked as web journalist for UCLA’s International Institute, and carried out assignments for the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
