Montana Slaves to Fashion

Yesterday took a lot of clothes. My wife and I started early, dressed up for the funeral of the young grandson of a dear friend who lost a tragic battle with luekemia. It was an open casket sort of ceremony which I have absolutely no use for and I sat glancing uneasily at the poor child, the flowers and pictures and incredibly ornate casket. I don't like looking at dead people and promise not to put my family through that.

Then it is off with the fancy duds and into our longjohns, parkas and gloves for a stop-the-surge march in below zero weather. Had close to a hundred die hard dissenters working a busy intersection in Missoula Montana. Some hecklers tried to explain how our freedom to undermine our country was being fought for by the soldiers in Iraq but the logic frankly escapes me. Another woman freaked out, jumped out of her car and demanded we stop parading our "flag-draped coffin" around. She said her son was in the Army and could not be allowed to see it. She was super agitated and her demand provided a bit of an ethical dilemna. I favored respecting her intense feelings of distress and obvious fear by losing the prop but a great case could be made that a greater good would be our attempt at protecting her and her son by the dramatic use of this symbol of every mothers fear.

Following that frostbitten foray we stripped down to our most casual play clothes for some food , drink and entertainment, in this case some great reggae provided by the Wailers. The clouds of pungent ,sweet smoke reminded me that the rasta cult is an ageless phenomena, young and old alike singing out the great Marley hits word for word and rocking to the joyful back beat. Every soul in the venerable Wilma Theatre was on their feet for the encore and the band seemed energized despite the fact they are doomed to playing the exact same iconic anthems night after night to white people throughout middle America.

In 1908 the basement of the Wilma housed the IWW headquarters from which a valient free-speech battle was fought. The local businesses had passed a city ordinance banning these socialists and labor organizers from speaking on the street corners as they organized loggers,miners and other workers. Elizibeth Gurley Flynn, her husband Jack Jones, St.John, and Frank Little ( who was to hang from a lampost in Butte eight years later) all came to the city and four of them spent 15 days in jail before the city relented.