Book Description:
Memoir / Politics / Viet Nam War / Spirituality / Witchcraft: <P>The image of a young, clean cut, athletic man burning his draft card while standing atop a sound truck outside the Armed Forces Induction Center in New York City on October 15, 1965 is perhaps the most dramatic and enduring portrait of early resistance to the Vietnam War. <P>Thirty five years later, David Miller's concise and provocative memoir revisits that historic moment and describes the personal/political motivation surrounding his act of defiance, including his subsequent trial and imprisonment. <P>In the ensuing thirty years, Mr. Miller helped raise four daughters, continued a life of political activism, and embarked upon a transformative journey to ecofeminist witchcraft. <P>Then, with inspiration and insight from the Mayan sacred ballgame, the author's life threads of ballplaying, non violent political action, and witchcraft combined to reveal the underlying sexual meaning of our American sacrificial warrior ballgame culture. Shown to be spiritual cousins, the blood ball game of the Mayans and the blood sport games of football, basketball, and baseball both usurp the creation powers of women and nature and hide the symbols of these powers in a yearly cycle of cosmic ballgames controlled by men in a hierarchy of competitive aggression. David Miller's remedy for the patriarchal ballgame dance, under which we labour grievously, is a non competitive, seasonal dance with the sun, moon, stars, earth, and one another. <P>Historic, timely, and prophetic, I Didn't Know God Made Honky Tonk Communists is an antidote to a worldwide obsession with the 'greatness' of sacrifice in war. Here, we are reminded of the vision and sacrifice of those, in and out of the military, who looked at the reality of the Vietnam War and said, 'Hell, no.'
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