A Song of Love
(for ELG) My dad, who served as an MP in Okinawa just after the war, had strong views on inter-racial dating, because of all the mixed-race babies he saw there, half-breed bastards, he called them, rejected by the Okinawans, and ignored by the American GIs who’d fathered them. As his teenaged son in the late 1960s, I caught the brunt of his strong opinions, and I gave him back as good as I got. I called him a “racist,” a “small-minded thug,” an “unenlightened primitive,” and I really got abusive when he raised the issue with one of my personal heroes, John Lennon, who was then scandalously courting Yoko Ono. “When he leaves her,” my dad sneered at me one night in the Famous cafeteria in Bensonhurst, “and they... Read more...
