The Crow takes flight again

An early issue of The Carrion Crow (October 14, 1790)

No one really knows when the Carrion Crow began. Instances of it have appeared throughout history, always surfacing in times of trouble. My first involvement with the Crow began in 1967, while I was attending the University of Hawaii. Most of my friends were politically active locals, and one day we decided to start publishing the Crow. It was one of the first of its kind in Hawaii, obviously "underground", and a true exercise in newspaper anarchy. It had no real publishing schedule, and although originally (and optimistically) planned as a weekly, often months would pass without an issue. A war was going on then too, and much of the Crow's energy had to do with opposition to the course of the War in Viet Nam. But this Crow was a stange bird indeed. We were often critized for making fun of friends on the left (even when our jibes were very gentle) and because the Crow never had a completely fixed point-of-view. Looking back, it might be described as a humorously political mixture of The Weekly World News and Paul Krassner's The Realist, from a Hawaiian point of view...Each issue was different, depending on who wanted to be involved. No one was safe from criticism, not even myself. The university saw its last issue of the Carrion Crow in May of 1968, just as the campus erupted into protest. I have very fond memories of distributing the Crow as the Bachman Hall sit-in proceeded, and I even had copies with me in jail! And all these years later, I have often met those who were affected by this little publication--amused and sometimes inspired. One former sailor told me of secretly passing around copies aboard a U.S. Naval vessel in Pearl Harbor, and how much vicarious pleasure it gave to the sailors on their way to an uncertain future. The Crow could have been so much more, but what it was wasn't bad for the time.
Now these times cry out for the Crow's revival. Who knows where this may lead...