Holy Batman, Robin ... it's May Day!!

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my land,
the delicate waist of America.

It rechristened its territories
as the ‘Banana Republics’
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes,
who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
Abolished independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of flies. …

.

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda(/nəˈruːdə/; Spanish: [ˈpaβlo neˈɾuða]), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair(1924). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

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Rumored murder and exhumation

In June 2013, a Chilean judge ordered that an investigation be launched, following suggestions that Neruda had been killed by the Pinochet regime for his pro-Allende stance and political views. Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, stated that doctors had administered poison as the poet was preparing to go into exile. In December 2011 Chile's Communist Party asked Chilean Judge Mario Carroza to order the exhumation of the remains of the poet. Carroza had been conducting probes into hundreds of deaths allegedly connected to abuses of Pinochet's regime from 1973 to 1990.[53][56] Carroza's inquiry during 2011–12 uncovered enough evidence to order the exhumation in April 2013.[57] Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean lawyer who was leading the push for a full investigation, commented: "We have world-class labs from India, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Sweden, they have all offered to do the lab work for free." The Pablo Neruda Foundation fought the exhumation under the grounds that the Araya's claims were unbelievable.

In June 2013 a court order was issued to find the man who allegedly poisoned Neruda. Police were investigating Michael Townley, who was facing trial for the killings of General Carlos Prats (Buenos Aires, 1974), and ex Chancellor Orlando Letelier (Washington, 1976).

Test results were released on 8 November 2013 of the seven-month investigation by a 15-member forensic team. Patricio Bustos, the head of Chile's medical legal service, stated "No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda's death" at the time.[60] However, Carroza said that he was waiting for the results of the last scientific tests conducted in May (2015), which found that Neruda was infected with the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which can be highly toxic and result in death if modified.

A team of 16 international experts lead by Spanish forensic specialist Aurelio Luna from the University of Murcia announced on 20 October 2017 that "from analysis of the data we cannot accept that the poet had been in an imminent situation of death at the moment of entering the hospital" and that death from prostate cancer was not likely at the moment when he died. The team also discovered something in Neruda's remains that could possibly be a laboratory-cultivated bacteria. The results of their continuing analysis are expected in 2018.

Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

The Brief Origins of May Day
By Eric Chase

1841 : First emigrant wagon train leaves Independence, Missouri, for California

1844 : Whig convention nominates Henry Clay as presidential candidate. Clay served three different terms as Speaker of the House of Representatives and was also Secretary of State from 1825 to 1829. He forged compromises that held off civil war for decades.

1863 : Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, 29,000 injured or died

1863 : Confederate "National Flag" replaces "Stars & Bars"; Confederate congress passes resolution to kill black soldiers

1867 Reconstruction of South begins, black voter registration ETC

1884 : Moses Walker became 1st African American player in major league baseball in US

1884 : Proclamation of the demand for eight-hour workday in the United States.

1886 : US general strike for 8-hour working day begins

1923 : Hitler and Ernst Rohm attempt to break up socialist May Day demonstrates, inviting Nazis from as far away as Nuremberg to take part in the violence

1926 : Leroy "Satchel" Paige makes pitching debut in Negro Southern League

1937 : US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Neutrality Act, banning travel on belligerent ships and imposes an arms embargo on warring nations

1939 : Batman comics hit the street

1941 : The first "Code Talkers" are specially recruited by the Marines to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater, they provide an unbreakable combat voice communications code.

1948 : Senator Glen Taylor (D–Idaho) was arrested on this day in Birmingham, Alabama, for attempting to hold a racially integrated campaign rally. He was then the candidate for Vice President on the Progressive Party ticket with presidential candidate Henry Wallace. Taylor is possibly the only sitting member of the Senate ever arrested for a protest activity, and most likely the only person arrested while a candidate for president or vice-president to have been arrested. After being arrested, Taylor was held in jail in the custody of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, who became internationally infamous for his brutal actions against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham.

1960 : An American U–2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union near Sverdlovsk. The Soviet Union captured the pilot Francis Gary Powers which prompted continuing deterioration in relations between the US and the Soviet Union.

1961 : Pulitzer prize awarded to Harper Lee for her novel "To Kill a Mockingbird"

1971 : Amtrak went into service, to provide inter city passenger train services. All Amtrak's preferred stock is owned by the U.S. federal government.

1973 : About one and a half million workers joined the TUC call for a one-day strike in protest at the government's pay restraint policy and price rises. The biggest effect was in the transport industry including the railways which forced many others to stay home because they could not get to work.

2001 : Thomas E. Blanton Jr. became the second ex-Ku Klux Klansman to be convicted in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by members of a Ku Klux Klan group in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing of the African-American church resulted in the deaths of four girls.

2012 : Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered across the US to stage a day of protest for International Workers' Day. Thousands of people gathered in New York, Oakland, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago to peacefully protest, marking the first major protest since police disabled the movement's camps across the country in late 2011.

John Flynn is an American singer-songwriter and activist known for his powerful music and tireless efforts on behalf of “the lost and the lonely, the shackled and scarred”. His career has embodied an authentic troubadour odyssey that moved legendary folk DJ Gene Shay to call Flynn "the most quintessential folk singer in my life", and Andrew L. Braunfeld of the Philadelphia Folk Festival to say, "It has been disappointing that the world of folk music has not, during the last half century, been creating many new heroes. John Flynn is a notable exception, and is worthy of our respect as he follows the paths of Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Kris Kristofferson."

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How's May Day treating you? Got a singer-songwriter who speaks to you?