The high point of presidents' speeches on Memorial days is usually a determination to make America and world safer as a tribute to fallen soldiers. But that statement has been made over and over again. It was made four months before 9/11. Yet peace continues to elude America and world.

As regards this, French playwright Moliere said: "Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make world a better place." Was he right? Let UN scribe Kofi Annan answer. "I think most frustrating part is that we all know what's wrong and what needs to be done, but we often can't act upon it," he says. That is an admission of failure supreme. The secretary-general and Bill Clinton for example, saw impending genocide in Rwanda. (80,000 slaughtered in 100 days—worse than what Adolph Hitler did to Jews.) Yet they refused to act. (I have said elsewhere that that world body should be scrapped.)

But is past any guide? According to William Shakespeare, "What is past is prologue." The cause of past world pogrom should have provided an insight to our leaders not to repeat history. However, it is not so. Kofi Annan again agrees: "At times, when incredible things are happening and we want to awaken conscience of world, no one wants to move because of bad experiences in past." See what's happening in Iraq now. See what Israel is doing to Hamas' leaders in Palestine—murder in broad daylight. Yet hands of members of world body are tied. One authority said that history is a tale of unfulfilled expectations and failed dreams. This is because we are searching for peace with wrong tools.

When two kings quoted earlier in CHASING SHADOWS! did not see Inferno, terrorist, they decided to shoot and bomb his spirit parents: Hatred, Oppression, Frustration, Injustice, Mistrust, Fear, and Enmity. But these spirits are immune to guns and bombs of these men. The assault fails and Inferno is free to set world on fire. The book is therefore a pure allegory alluding to ineffectual results of violence to thwart violence.

If we do not eradicate these monsters that breed war and terror, killings would continue, and veterans would have fought and died in vain. And Memorial days would continue to come and go. Presidents would give Demosthenian and Ciceronian speeches and exit. But death and gravedom—the ultimate winners—would forever dog our heels, heels of our wives, and that of our children.

ARTHUR ‘ZULU is an editor, book reviewer, and published author. BOOKS PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/21013 CHASING SHADOWS!: A Dream http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/10975 HOW TO WRITE A BEST-SELLER

Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other. "Man," he said to me once, coming off an especially vigorous set. "In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another."

And I have to say that I agreed with him.

This was, after all, a period in history when "restrictions" of every conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to (with moon shot) very law of gravity, were successfully being challenged. If you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary's "atomic" level of consciousness, and if you could call a girl you'd been set up with on a blind date and she might say, "Let's 'ball' first and then I'll see if I want to have dinner with you," you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of a revolution in human nature itself was taking place.

And some of us who regarded Western values as both cause of all ill (had they not brought us to brink of annihilation with hydrogen bomb?), and principle impediment to such a transformation, saw new black music as leading way, as veritable embodiment of what Herbert Marcuse called "the revolution of unrepression."

In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock—the other musical phenomenon of period—were not uncommon.

I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, Michigan activist, poet and author of Guitar Army.

John took position that rock was true "music of revolution."

No, I argued, rock did stand against technocratic, Faustian western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate sensual and mystical. But in these respects it only caught up to where jazz had always been. In contrast to what some of younger black musicians were up to—the purging of white elements African music had picked up in America—rock was simply first hip white popular music.

Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing sentiment of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western disciplines—by going "outside," as musicians termed it, of Western procedures and methods and letting music find its own natural order and form—got to an actualization of what true revolution would be. Rock's lyrics, I said, promoted, in many instances, idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically rock remained bound to very traditions and conventions that its lyrics railed against and audience never got a demonstration or experience of authentic spiritual communion. Rock's lyrics were undermined and attenuated in very act of their expression by system used to express them. The new jazz, on other hand, achieved freedom not just from purely formal structures of western musical systems, but, implicitly, from emotional and social ethos in which those structures originated.

As I say, it was a heady time.

Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine form just barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist altogether as a revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic movements of epoch with which it shared faith that a new kind of human being would surface once all structure and authority that wasn’t internal in origin was rejected, free jazz was ultimately ambushed by its naiveté.

But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an ongoing impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it to, it did (however contrary to its original ambition), expand vocabulary and field of options available to mainstream jazz musicians. And while they function today in what are essentially universes of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray, Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are still very much around and continuing to discover surprise and marvelous.

Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as harbingers of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians continue to produce musical miracles as a matter of course. For an especially vivid demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of his live performances—what he would call "exchanges of energy"—with drummers like Max Roach or Elvin Jones.

In a bad time in every department of culture, a time of rampant—often willful—mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.