It’s Ray Day in the United States of Anxiety. Or Rays Day.
It is, at least, in the small corner populated by the few people who occasionally read this blog. For the third straight day the sun’s brilliant rays pour down upon Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the penultimate town on the walk Bruce Henry and I took across the commonwealth from Provincetown in 2018 wearing phosphorescent “9/11 TRUTH” signs fore and aft. (Bruce doesn’t read this blog unless prompted to by me — although he came up with its website address name, https://www.x-ma911truthwalk.com.)
Readers are hereby* invited to take a few minutes away from post-election uncertainties and continuing Covid-19 uncertainties (and economic uncertainties and Earth-warming uncertainties) to consider some Rays.
Briefly, and in order of their mental appearance this morning:
* James Earl Ray, the small-time criminal framed for the government assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The framing was successful until the work of the valiant Atty. William F. Pepper got him posthumously exonerated by a Memphis jury in 1999. Ray was finally exonerated even in the pages of The Washington Post. (See Pepper’s book The Plot to Kill King [Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.]) (The New York Times still clings to the hoary lie that Ray did the deed rather than just serve as an elaborately set-up patsy. And the rest of the media stays mum.)
* David Ray Griffin,** author of at least 10 books laying to waste establishment accounts of the 9/11 false-flag mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, any one of which books will reward readers not previously acquainted with Griffin.
* Ray Bradbury, whose short story “Rocket Man” inspired Elton John to write and perform his “Rocket Man” (Listen to it HERE or HERE) in 1972. (Books by Bradbury, best known for the novel Fahrenheit 451, are available in most libraries.) (Pepper’s and Griffin’s are not, but can be borrowed though interlibrary loan.)
* Ray Girard, a slightly senior (to me) and slightly wild (especially compared to me) colleague at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette the two summers I worked there. We shared an apartment in Marlborough the first summer, when I met Phil Ochs (1940 – 1976) through the grooves of his then-new 1966 album “Phil Ochs in Concert” owned by Ray.
* Ray Lamont, a sports reporter for the Berkshire Eagle in the 1970s (when I first knew him) who ended his career several newspapers later as top editor of the Beverly Times; he retired there shortly before his death this year. Jovial, loving, thoughtful and frequently stammering, after work Ray would sometimes lead everyone (or many) present at Del Gallo’s in a few stanzas of what he said was the Soviet Union’s national anthem (“Dong DONG dong da dong dong, dong dong da dong dong …” — no one knew the words***) before or after we had sung a verse of the Marseilles (everyone knew some of the words).
* Ray (for Remo) Del Gallo, second-generation proprietor of Del Gallo’s Restaurant, a former Pittsfield mayor, and soft-spoken counselor to many.
— Mark Channing Miller
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* President Trump said yesterday he “hereby” declared victory in Michigan, to which NPR’s Mara Liasson reminded listeners that “it doesn’t work that way.”
** Pathetically, Wikipedia opens its biography of Griffin with “an American 9/11 conspiracy theorist[2] and retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology.”
*** Sticklers will say what we actually sang was “Dulng DULNG dulng da dulng dulng, dulng dulng da dulng dulng ….” But maybe it wasn’t in fact the Soviet Union’s national anthem. Music and lyrics to that are HERE.