Click On Title For Link To Associated Press story on Obama's Afghan War Budget.
The Democratic Party-controlled United States has passed the Obama Administration's Afghan/Iraq supplementary war budget. I repost my comments from May 15, 2009 after the United States House of Representatives originally passed the budget. I stand by those comments.
*******************
This Is Not Your Father’s War- But It May Be Your Children’s- Obama’s Afghan War- Vote No With Both Hands On The War Budget!
President withholds torture photos as national security measure. President revives military tribunals. Congress gets ready to pass President’s supplementary Afghan/Iraq war budgets. Correct me if I am wrong but is this May 15, 2008 or May 15, 2009. These are headlines formerly associated with the Cheney/Bush Administration. For those who are ready to shed a few dogmatic illusions the contours of the Age of Obama are starting to come into focus. And it isn’t pretty. The streets are not for dreaming now. Read on.
Commentary
Sometime soon, perhaps as this commentary is being written on Friday May 15, 2007, the Democrat Party-controlled Congress will have passed the latest supplemental war budget appropriations asked for by the Obama Administration (actually more that they asked for, nice right?). I have already noted previously in a commentary earlier this year, as this issue surfaced, that such supplementary war budgets were a hallmark of the …Bush Administration. But we will let that little issue pass because the “big deal” here is how little opposition (and press coverage) there has been now that the “good guys” are in charge. The epitome of such servile non-opposition (Ouch! Sorry for this awkward expression.) is exemplified by the lack on efforts to oppose this war budget by the so-called “anti-war’ Progressive Democratic Caucus. The “highlight” of Democratic opposition centers on a bill by left-liberal Massachusetts Democratic Congressman James McGovern to “require” the Pentagon to come up with an “exit” strategy for Afghanistan by the end of this year. So much for the vaunted parliamentary opposition. Hence the title of the headline of this commentary.
Such innocuous and, frankly, baffling legislation does not even come close to rising to the occasions in the past where the likes of Congressman McGovern at least voted against the war budget. If Congressman McGovern represents the most extreme left expression within the Democratic Party on war issues, and I believe that he does, one hardly needs a crystal ball to realize that the already almost eight year American presence in Afghanistan has just gotten a lot longer. Add to that the recent decisions to have “Shoot first, and let god sort the rest out” General McChrystal replace the old-line armchair General McKiernan and you now know why at the very beginning of this Obama Administration I stated that he has staked his place in history on the outcome of that war. For those who despair that their children will be fighting in Afghanistan I do have a simple solution. Fight around this slogan- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan (and Iraq). Do it for the kids.
********
House Passes War Funds As 51 Democrats Dissent
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 15, 2009
The House passed a bill yesterday that would provide more than $96 billion in funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through Sept. 30, as President Obama had requested, but a bloc of 51 Democrats opposed it.
Democratic opponents are accusing Obama of the same charge they leveled against his predecessor: escalating a war without a clear exit strategy.
The bill passed 368 to 60, with 200 Democrats and all but nine Republicans supporting it.
Democratic opponents did not attack Obama by name, but some likened his increase of 21,000 troops and billions of dollars to win the war in Afghanistan to President George W. Bush's efforts in Iraq.
"When George Bush was president, I was on this floor saying we need an exit strategy," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). "The same applies with Afghanistan. I'm tired of wars with no deadlines, no exits and no ends."
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who also voted against the bill, said that "this bill simply amplifies and extends failed policies."
The vote came the same day that another part of Obama's security agenda -- closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- drew criticism from his party. The Democratic-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bill that includes $50 million to close the prison, as Obama promised during the campaign.
But the measure bans Obama from using the money to bring any of the 241 detainees to the United States, a move that administration officials have suggested might be necessary to get other countries to accept prisoners. The measure also requires the administration present Congress with a detailed plan on closing the prison before the money can be used.
Senate Democratic leaders criticized Obama for not having presented such a plan, as Republicans continue to highlight the issue and accuse the administration of putting Americans at risk with its proposal to bring potential terrorists to the United States.
Obama defended his strategy for Afghanistan in a meeting late last month with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of more than 70 liberal members, many of whom opposed the funding bill. But most House Democrats indicated they want to give Obama's strategy a chance to succeed.
"The questions that were not being asked are now being asked," said Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who voted for the supplemental funding.
House Democratic leaders refused to back an effort by McGovern and other antiwar legislators that would require Obama to provide Congress a detailed exit strategy for Afghanistan by the end of the year.
Some Democratic senators, particularly Russell Feingold (Wis.), have also criticized Obama's proposal, but the funding is expected to be approved there, possibly as soon as next week. Republicans have said they might oppose increased funding for the International Monetary Fund, a request that has been inserted in the Senate version.
Some liberal activist groups, such as MoveOn.org, which sharply criticized Bush's efforts to increase troops in Iraq two years ago, have said little about Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan.
The failed effort to amend the House bill illustrated the ineffectiveness of some of the House's most liberal members. While the caucus of conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs has effectively blocked some of Obama's proposals, such as a ban on assault weapons, liberal Democrats have struggled with two of their biggest priorities: establishing a commission to investigate allegations of violations by the Bush administration; and greater reductions of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
McGovern said he remains concerned about Obama's policy in Afghanistan but is not sure exactly what he and others could do.
"I like Barack Obama; I thank God he's president; I think he will be a great president," McGovern said. "But sometimes great presidents make mistakes."
Friday, May 22, 2009
Lenin On The Three Sources Of Marxism
Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Workers Vanguard No. 937
22 May 2009
“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
By V.I. Lenin
(From the Archives of Marxism)
V.I. Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” which we reprint below, was first published in March 1913 in the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, who, along with Friedrich Engels, founded scientific socialism. The following translation is taken from Volume 19 of the Collected Works of Lenin (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1963).
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect.” And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts, that we shall outline in brief.
I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute,” undermine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.
II
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
III
When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Workers Vanguard No. 937
22 May 2009
“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
By V.I. Lenin
(From the Archives of Marxism)
V.I. Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” which we reprint below, was first published in March 1913 in the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, who, along with Friedrich Engels, founded scientific socialism. The following translation is taken from Volume 19 of the Collected Works of Lenin (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1963).
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect.” And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts, that we shall outline in brief.
I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute,” undermine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.
II
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
III
When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
*When Clio Goes Tone Deaf...
Click On Title To Link To Clio Wikipedia Webpage.
Commentary
On any given day I like, no, I love to write political commentary, write a review about some lesson to be derived from an aspect of our leftist political history or make a point on some cultural remnant left by our forebears. However, every once in a while, and this period is one of them, Clio goes tone deaf on me and leaves me high and dry when I try to write something that makes sense to me, if not to the reader. Damn, the music of history that is seemingly always ringing in my ears has abandoned me. The old muse is indeed fickle.
No one, including this writer, expects that everything that comes to mind is unalloyed gold. I note that many of the political writers that I regard highly had, on occasion, the same problem. For example, Leon Trotsky’s “History Of The Russian Revolution” not only contains a million insightful comments and lessons but has an almost musical flow as one turns each page. Clio was smiling, no question. Other of Trotsky’s writings, especially concerning the internal struggles with his co-thinkers to create a new revolutionary cadre after the political demise of the Communist International in the 1930’s, seem forced by comparison.
Or take “Doctor Gonzo”, Hunter S. Thompson, in his various writings on the demise of one Richard Nixon, at one time President of The United States and common criminal, for “Rolling Stone” in the early 1970’s. Again, one could hear the notes almost fly off the page. By the time he got to Bill Clinton old Clio had gone on vacation and Hunter was praying for Ralph Steadman to create enough weirdly insightful political art to cover up the scarcity of the script. Not a pretty place to be, for sure. I, however, share that same trough today.
Frankly, what I need to do is get off the heavy political/cultural treadmill and just rip through some half-baked screed. The following is just such an effort. There is a little historical method to the madness though, even in this. Recently I have been reading about the various reform movements that swept through America in the age of Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century. I have written about some of them in this space on previous occasions like the critically important stirrings of the anti-slavery movement, the religious fervor that “burnt out” the East and headed west during the Second Great Awakening, the temperance movement and the struggle for woman’s suffrage.
In that same vane, but generally overlooked, and rightfully so, were various health fads that blossomed at the time, including the one ‘discussed’ here, around the virtues of a graham flour diet. Hell, we have been bombarded with every other possible health fad why not resurrect an old standby. Moreover, it gives me a topic for today-thanks for the life line Doctor Graham.
Do Not Go Gently…
… with Jim F., Class of 1964, in mind.
Okay, I am, once again, on my high horse today. I have heard enough, in fact more than enough, whining from fellow classmates that I have been in contact with as we get ready for our 45th high school reunion (ouch!) and others of my contemporaries from the “Generation of’68” about the aches and pains of becoming ‘a certain age’. If I hear one more story about a knee replacement or other transformative surgery I will go screaming to that good night. The same goes for descriptions of the CVS-worthy litany of the contents of an average medicine cabinet. Come on, after a life time of booze, dope and wild times what did you expect? For those of us who have not lived right, lo these many years, the chickens have come home to roost. But I have a cure. Make that THE cure.
No I am not, at this late date, selling the virtues of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or any of a thousand and one religious cures we are daily bombarded with. You knew, or at least I hope you knew, I wasn’t going to go that route. That question, in any case, is each individual’s prerogative and I have no need to interfere there. Nor am I going to go on and on about the wonders of liposuction, botox, chin lifts, buttocks tuckers, stomach flatteners and the like. Damn, have we come to that? And I certainly do not want to inflame the air with talk of existentialism or some other secular philosophies that tell you to accept your fate with your head down. You knew that, as well. No, I am here to give the glad tidings, unadorned. Simply put- two words-Graham crackers. No, do not reach for the reading glasses, your eyes do not deceive you- graham crackers is what I said.
Hear me out on this. I am no “snake oil” salesman, nor do I have stock in Nabisco (moreover their products are not ‘true’ graham). So, please do not start jabbering to me about how faddish that diet was- in about 1830. I know that it has been around a while. And please do not start carping about how wasn’t this healthful substance a ‘magic elixir’, or some such, that Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalist protégés praised to high heaven back in Brook Farm days. Well, I frankly admit, as with any such movement, some of those guys went over the top, especially that wacky Bronson Alcott. Irresponsible zealots are always with us. Please, please do not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Doctor Graham simply insisted that what our dietary intake consisted of was important and that a generous amount of graham flour in the system was good for us. Moreover, in order to avoid some of the mistakes of the earlier movement, in the age of the Internet we can now Google to find an almost infinite variety of uses and helpful recipes. Admit it, right now your head is swirling thinking about how nice it would be to have a few crackers and a nice cold glass of milk (fat-free or 1%, of course). Admit also; you loved those graham crumb-crusted pies your grandmother used to make. Case closed.
If people have been mistaking you for your father’s brother or mother’s sister lately then this is your salvation. So scurry down to your local Whole Foods or other natural food store and begin to fight your way back to health. Let me finish with this testimonial. I used to regularly be compared in appearance to George Bush, Sr. Now I am being asked whether Brad Pitts is my twin brother. Or is it Robert Redford? …..Oh well, that too is part of the aging process.
Commentary
On any given day I like, no, I love to write political commentary, write a review about some lesson to be derived from an aspect of our leftist political history or make a point on some cultural remnant left by our forebears. However, every once in a while, and this period is one of them, Clio goes tone deaf on me and leaves me high and dry when I try to write something that makes sense to me, if not to the reader. Damn, the music of history that is seemingly always ringing in my ears has abandoned me. The old muse is indeed fickle.
No one, including this writer, expects that everything that comes to mind is unalloyed gold. I note that many of the political writers that I regard highly had, on occasion, the same problem. For example, Leon Trotsky’s “History Of The Russian Revolution” not only contains a million insightful comments and lessons but has an almost musical flow as one turns each page. Clio was smiling, no question. Other of Trotsky’s writings, especially concerning the internal struggles with his co-thinkers to create a new revolutionary cadre after the political demise of the Communist International in the 1930’s, seem forced by comparison.
Or take “Doctor Gonzo”, Hunter S. Thompson, in his various writings on the demise of one Richard Nixon, at one time President of The United States and common criminal, for “Rolling Stone” in the early 1970’s. Again, one could hear the notes almost fly off the page. By the time he got to Bill Clinton old Clio had gone on vacation and Hunter was praying for Ralph Steadman to create enough weirdly insightful political art to cover up the scarcity of the script. Not a pretty place to be, for sure. I, however, share that same trough today.
Frankly, what I need to do is get off the heavy political/cultural treadmill and just rip through some half-baked screed. The following is just such an effort. There is a little historical method to the madness though, even in this. Recently I have been reading about the various reform movements that swept through America in the age of Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century. I have written about some of them in this space on previous occasions like the critically important stirrings of the anti-slavery movement, the religious fervor that “burnt out” the East and headed west during the Second Great Awakening, the temperance movement and the struggle for woman’s suffrage.
In that same vane, but generally overlooked, and rightfully so, were various health fads that blossomed at the time, including the one ‘discussed’ here, around the virtues of a graham flour diet. Hell, we have been bombarded with every other possible health fad why not resurrect an old standby. Moreover, it gives me a topic for today-thanks for the life line Doctor Graham.
Do Not Go Gently…
… with Jim F., Class of 1964, in mind.
Okay, I am, once again, on my high horse today. I have heard enough, in fact more than enough, whining from fellow classmates that I have been in contact with as we get ready for our 45th high school reunion (ouch!) and others of my contemporaries from the “Generation of’68” about the aches and pains of becoming ‘a certain age’. If I hear one more story about a knee replacement or other transformative surgery I will go screaming to that good night. The same goes for descriptions of the CVS-worthy litany of the contents of an average medicine cabinet. Come on, after a life time of booze, dope and wild times what did you expect? For those of us who have not lived right, lo these many years, the chickens have come home to roost. But I have a cure. Make that THE cure.
No I am not, at this late date, selling the virtues of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or any of a thousand and one religious cures we are daily bombarded with. You knew, or at least I hope you knew, I wasn’t going to go that route. That question, in any case, is each individual’s prerogative and I have no need to interfere there. Nor am I going to go on and on about the wonders of liposuction, botox, chin lifts, buttocks tuckers, stomach flatteners and the like. Damn, have we come to that? And I certainly do not want to inflame the air with talk of existentialism or some other secular philosophies that tell you to accept your fate with your head down. You knew that, as well. No, I am here to give the glad tidings, unadorned. Simply put- two words-Graham crackers. No, do not reach for the reading glasses, your eyes do not deceive you- graham crackers is what I said.
Hear me out on this. I am no “snake oil” salesman, nor do I have stock in Nabisco (moreover their products are not ‘true’ graham). So, please do not start jabbering to me about how faddish that diet was- in about 1830. I know that it has been around a while. And please do not start carping about how wasn’t this healthful substance a ‘magic elixir’, or some such, that Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalist protégés praised to high heaven back in Brook Farm days. Well, I frankly admit, as with any such movement, some of those guys went over the top, especially that wacky Bronson Alcott. Irresponsible zealots are always with us. Please, please do not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Doctor Graham simply insisted that what our dietary intake consisted of was important and that a generous amount of graham flour in the system was good for us. Moreover, in order to avoid some of the mistakes of the earlier movement, in the age of the Internet we can now Google to find an almost infinite variety of uses and helpful recipes. Admit it, right now your head is swirling thinking about how nice it would be to have a few crackers and a nice cold glass of milk (fat-free or 1%, of course). Admit also; you loved those graham crumb-crusted pies your grandmother used to make. Case closed.
If people have been mistaking you for your father’s brother or mother’s sister lately then this is your salvation. So scurry down to your local Whole Foods or other natural food store and begin to fight your way back to health. Let me finish with this testimonial. I used to regularly be compared in appearance to George Bush, Sr. Now I am being asked whether Brad Pitts is my twin brother. Or is it Robert Redford? …..Oh well, that too is part of the aging process.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
*Austin City Inner Limits- The Blues Addiction (Thankfully) Of Clifford Antone And The “Antone’s” Experience
Click on title to link to YouTube film clip of Eddie Taylor and Sunnyland Slim, two of the blues artists featured on this DVD review. This, my friends, is blues history down at the base.
DVD Review
Antone’s: Home Of The Blues, Clifford Antone and a huge cast of legendary male and female blues players, old and new, Etc. Film Productions, 2006
Get this DVD. Hold on a minute. Doesn’t this reviewer usually wait until he gives 101reasons why the reader should (or should not) spend time, money and energy on a reviewed item? Get this DVD. Why? This writer has strewn this space with more examples of historically important moments, events or personalities in music and other arts, general human culture and politics than one can shake a stick at. What drives this work is an attempt to give notice to the sometimes unknown (or not well-known) sources and support system for the kind of things that interest him. The blues interests him. And if one views this little gem of a DVD about the efforts of the late Clifford Antone, who for over thirty years was the pivotal figure in the Austin, Texas blues (and other genre) scene, then one will understand what I am trying to get at in these reviews.
Look, these days the popularity of the blues is at one of its lower points. Others forms of entertainment, including the rise and continued dominance of the variants of the hip-hop tradition among the young, the passing or retirement of the post-World War II legendary electric blues players that formed the transmission belt from the early rural blues tradition and dwindling number of us who still value this quintessential form of American music has taken it toll. As this DVD rather graphically, lovingly and with a bit of humor points out the role of “keeper of the flame” is, as they say, a hard dollar.
Yet beginning in 1975 (another low blues point) Clifford Antone and his friends did exactly that. This documentary is filled with the exploits, great and small, that went into that task, including the usual “talking head” commentary that one expects (and here wants) in this kind of documentary). Now “Antone’s” in Austin, Texas does for the blues tradition what the promoters of mountain music in Ashville, North Carolina or the owners of Club Passim (now non-profit) and Caffe Lena’s did for folk music in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Saratoga, New York have done to ‘keep the flame alive’ in these important musical traditions. But even more than that Clifford Antone and friends, seemingly, connected with every important living blues tradition of the last half of the 20th century. There are probably few places in America where the Muddy Waters/Howlin’ Wolf tradition (in the person of legendary guitarist Hubert Sumelin) could meet Stevie Ray and Jimmy Vaughn, Doug Sahm, the Thunderbirds and a host of other Texas talent- and it worked. Get this DVD. Oops, I said that already, didn’t I.
Illinois Blues - Sunnyland Slim lyrics
Boys, I'm walkin' an thinkin'
Woo-ooo!
But I ain't doin' myself no good
Woo-ooo!
I'm walkin' an thinkin'
Woo!
But I ain't doin' myself no good
Yoo-hoo-hoo!
The one I love
Woo-ooo!
Done left the neighborhood
Well, I hate to hear
Woo!
That Illinois Central, blow
Woo!
I hate to hear
Woo!
That Illinois Central, blow
Woo-hoo!
It fly on just like
Woo!
It won't be back no mo-oh-ore'
'Well, alright let me hear ya, Mr. Davis'
'Play it for me one time'
'You know what I'm talkin' about'
'Lord, have mercy, man have it'
'Lord, have mercy!'
'That low part, Mr. Ransom
You know what I'm talkin' about'
'Play it, man'
'Ah, mercy, mercy, mercy!'
'That makes me get homesick
sho' enough, now'
I wanna tell you people
Woo-ooo!
What the Illinois Central will do
Woo-hoo!
I wanna tell you people
Woo!
What the Illinois Central will do
Woo-hoo!
It'll steal your woman
Woo-hoo!
And blow back after you
I have tried to give up
Woo!
But it's a hard old thing to do
(I'll show you!)
Woo-hoo!
I have tried to give the girl up
Woo!
But it's a hard old thing to do
Woo!
So, I just keep on drinkin', John Davis
Woo!
Because I just can't believe it's through.
DVD Review
Antone’s: Home Of The Blues, Clifford Antone and a huge cast of legendary male and female blues players, old and new, Etc. Film Productions, 2006
Get this DVD. Hold on a minute. Doesn’t this reviewer usually wait until he gives 101reasons why the reader should (or should not) spend time, money and energy on a reviewed item? Get this DVD. Why? This writer has strewn this space with more examples of historically important moments, events or personalities in music and other arts, general human culture and politics than one can shake a stick at. What drives this work is an attempt to give notice to the sometimes unknown (or not well-known) sources and support system for the kind of things that interest him. The blues interests him. And if one views this little gem of a DVD about the efforts of the late Clifford Antone, who for over thirty years was the pivotal figure in the Austin, Texas blues (and other genre) scene, then one will understand what I am trying to get at in these reviews.
Look, these days the popularity of the blues is at one of its lower points. Others forms of entertainment, including the rise and continued dominance of the variants of the hip-hop tradition among the young, the passing or retirement of the post-World War II legendary electric blues players that formed the transmission belt from the early rural blues tradition and dwindling number of us who still value this quintessential form of American music has taken it toll. As this DVD rather graphically, lovingly and with a bit of humor points out the role of “keeper of the flame” is, as they say, a hard dollar.
Yet beginning in 1975 (another low blues point) Clifford Antone and his friends did exactly that. This documentary is filled with the exploits, great and small, that went into that task, including the usual “talking head” commentary that one expects (and here wants) in this kind of documentary). Now “Antone’s” in Austin, Texas does for the blues tradition what the promoters of mountain music in Ashville, North Carolina or the owners of Club Passim (now non-profit) and Caffe Lena’s did for folk music in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Saratoga, New York have done to ‘keep the flame alive’ in these important musical traditions. But even more than that Clifford Antone and friends, seemingly, connected with every important living blues tradition of the last half of the 20th century. There are probably few places in America where the Muddy Waters/Howlin’ Wolf tradition (in the person of legendary guitarist Hubert Sumelin) could meet Stevie Ray and Jimmy Vaughn, Doug Sahm, the Thunderbirds and a host of other Texas talent- and it worked. Get this DVD. Oops, I said that already, didn’t I.
Illinois Blues - Sunnyland Slim lyrics
Boys, I'm walkin' an thinkin'
Woo-ooo!
But I ain't doin' myself no good
Woo-ooo!
I'm walkin' an thinkin'
Woo!
But I ain't doin' myself no good
Yoo-hoo-hoo!
The one I love
Woo-ooo!
Done left the neighborhood
Well, I hate to hear
Woo!
That Illinois Central, blow
Woo!
I hate to hear
Woo!
That Illinois Central, blow
Woo-hoo!
It fly on just like
Woo!
It won't be back no mo-oh-ore'
'Well, alright let me hear ya, Mr. Davis'
'Play it for me one time'
'You know what I'm talkin' about'
'Lord, have mercy, man have it'
'Lord, have mercy!'
'That low part, Mr. Ransom
You know what I'm talkin' about'
'Play it, man'
'Ah, mercy, mercy, mercy!'
'That makes me get homesick
sho' enough, now'
I wanna tell you people
Woo-ooo!
What the Illinois Central will do
Woo-hoo!
I wanna tell you people
Woo!
What the Illinois Central will do
Woo-hoo!
It'll steal your woman
Woo-hoo!
And blow back after you
I have tried to give up
Woo!
But it's a hard old thing to do
(I'll show you!)
Woo-hoo!
I have tried to give the girl up
Woo!
But it's a hard old thing to do
Woo!
So, I just keep on drinkin', John Davis
Woo!
Because I just can't believe it's through.
*Bottom Rail On Top?- Playwright August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"
Click On Title To Link To August Wilson Home page.
Play Review
Seven Guitars (1948), August Wilson, Theater Communications Group, New York, 2007
Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.
Strangely, although I was familiar with the name of the playwright August Wilson and was aware that he had produced a number of plays that were performed at a college-sponsored repertory theater here in Boston I had not seen or read his plays prior to reading the Terkel interview. Naturally when I read there that one of the plays being discussed was entitled "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" about the legendary female blues singer from the 1920's I ran out to get a copy of the play. That play has been reviewed elsewhere in this space but as is my habit when I read an author who "speaks" to me I grab everything I can by him or her to see where they are going with the work. This is doubly true in the case of Brother Wilson as his work is purposefully structured as an integrated cycle, and as an intensive dramatic look at the black historical experience of the 20th century that has driven a lot of my own above-mentioned political activism.
The action of this play takes place in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh (Wilson's home town) in 1948. This, moreover, is the fifth and thus the middle play in the century cycle. Both these facts are important in understanding the tensions of the play. One of Terkel's oral histories is entitled "The Good War", about the trials and tribulations of those on all sides of the conflict in World War II and from all strata in the American experience of that war. Implicit in Terkel's use of quotation marks around the words in his title is that, on reflection and with time the expectations from that war might not be all they were made out to be. That, at least, jibes with my own sense of the dilemma that confronted those who fought the war. I believe that Wilson also is reflecting on that understanding in this work since some promises were made to black people then that "their boats would also rise" after their key role in industry on the home front and in the ranks of the (segregated) army.
The story line, as seems to be axiomatic with Wilson, is fairly straight forward if the issues presented and the dialogue spoken that convey those issues are much more complex. Army veteran Floyd has some musical talent and heads out to try his luck in the Mecca (for migrating southern blacks)- Chicago and has just had a hit. However, through the well-known vagaries of American racial life, as filtered through common black experience, he hasn't been able to cash in on his success. So, to avoid being the classic `one hit' Johnnie who clutter the cultural landscape of America, Floyd sets out to re-conquer Chicago on his terms- if he can just get that guitar out of hock, get that band together, get that woman (Vera) to believe in him and his ability to succeed and if he can avoid the "cutthroats" (literally) out to cut him down to size all will be well. Floyd fails, and that failure is a metaphor for the black condition in the 1940's. Maybe things will turn out better later but "the dream" is still on hold here. This, my friends, is powerful, powerful stuff beyond what I can describe to you here in this short summary.
Wilson's conceptual framework, as I have mentioned previously in a review of his "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", is impeccable. Placing the scene in 1940's Pittsburgh permits him to give a bird's eye view of that great migration of blacks out of the south in the post-World War I period at a time when they are shaking off those roots (as exemplified by the nice contrast in the play between the old time thinking Miss Tilley's with her ill-fated rooster and Louise and Vera ). Floyd, Red Carter and Canewell, among others (including Ruby, recently arrived from the South) are now "assimilated". Moreover, Wilson is able to succinctly draw in the questions of white racism (powerfully so in the story of Floyd's agent, Mr. T. H. Hall), black self-help , black hatred of whites (Hedley's tirades), black self-hatred, black illusion (that the `lifting' of the white boats was going to end, for blacks, the seemingly permanent Great Depression), black pride (through the link with past black historical figures and with the then current hero, Joe Louis), the influence of the black church (good or bad), black folk wisdom (as portrayed by Canewell, who is more grounded in his memories of his southern roots than the others) and, in the end, the rage behind black on black violence (Hedley) resulting from a world that not was not made by the characters in this play but took no notice of their long suppressed rage that turned in on itself.
And all the time while one is reading the play one is struck by the music of the dialogue, it's always the blues. I posed a question in the review of "Ma Rainey" asking, plaintively, "what are the blues?". That is, apparently, to be my theme in reviewing the body of Brother Wilson's work. I will let the last line of that review stand here. "So if anyone asks you what the blues are you now know what to say- read and see Mr. Wilson's play(s)".
Play Review
Seven Guitars (1948), August Wilson, Theater Communications Group, New York, 2007
Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.
Strangely, although I was familiar with the name of the playwright August Wilson and was aware that he had produced a number of plays that were performed at a college-sponsored repertory theater here in Boston I had not seen or read his plays prior to reading the Terkel interview. Naturally when I read there that one of the plays being discussed was entitled "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" about the legendary female blues singer from the 1920's I ran out to get a copy of the play. That play has been reviewed elsewhere in this space but as is my habit when I read an author who "speaks" to me I grab everything I can by him or her to see where they are going with the work. This is doubly true in the case of Brother Wilson as his work is purposefully structured as an integrated cycle, and as an intensive dramatic look at the black historical experience of the 20th century that has driven a lot of my own above-mentioned political activism.
The action of this play takes place in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh (Wilson's home town) in 1948. This, moreover, is the fifth and thus the middle play in the century cycle. Both these facts are important in understanding the tensions of the play. One of Terkel's oral histories is entitled "The Good War", about the trials and tribulations of those on all sides of the conflict in World War II and from all strata in the American experience of that war. Implicit in Terkel's use of quotation marks around the words in his title is that, on reflection and with time the expectations from that war might not be all they were made out to be. That, at least, jibes with my own sense of the dilemma that confronted those who fought the war. I believe that Wilson also is reflecting on that understanding in this work since some promises were made to black people then that "their boats would also rise" after their key role in industry on the home front and in the ranks of the (segregated) army.
The story line, as seems to be axiomatic with Wilson, is fairly straight forward if the issues presented and the dialogue spoken that convey those issues are much more complex. Army veteran Floyd has some musical talent and heads out to try his luck in the Mecca (for migrating southern blacks)- Chicago and has just had a hit. However, through the well-known vagaries of American racial life, as filtered through common black experience, he hasn't been able to cash in on his success. So, to avoid being the classic `one hit' Johnnie who clutter the cultural landscape of America, Floyd sets out to re-conquer Chicago on his terms- if he can just get that guitar out of hock, get that band together, get that woman (Vera) to believe in him and his ability to succeed and if he can avoid the "cutthroats" (literally) out to cut him down to size all will be well. Floyd fails, and that failure is a metaphor for the black condition in the 1940's. Maybe things will turn out better later but "the dream" is still on hold here. This, my friends, is powerful, powerful stuff beyond what I can describe to you here in this short summary.
Wilson's conceptual framework, as I have mentioned previously in a review of his "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", is impeccable. Placing the scene in 1940's Pittsburgh permits him to give a bird's eye view of that great migration of blacks out of the south in the post-World War I period at a time when they are shaking off those roots (as exemplified by the nice contrast in the play between the old time thinking Miss Tilley's with her ill-fated rooster and Louise and Vera ). Floyd, Red Carter and Canewell, among others (including Ruby, recently arrived from the South) are now "assimilated". Moreover, Wilson is able to succinctly draw in the questions of white racism (powerfully so in the story of Floyd's agent, Mr. T. H. Hall), black self-help , black hatred of whites (Hedley's tirades), black self-hatred, black illusion (that the `lifting' of the white boats was going to end, for blacks, the seemingly permanent Great Depression), black pride (through the link with past black historical figures and with the then current hero, Joe Louis), the influence of the black church (good or bad), black folk wisdom (as portrayed by Canewell, who is more grounded in his memories of his southern roots than the others) and, in the end, the rage behind black on black violence (Hedley) resulting from a world that not was not made by the characters in this play but took no notice of their long suppressed rage that turned in on itself.
And all the time while one is reading the play one is struck by the music of the dialogue, it's always the blues. I posed a question in the review of "Ma Rainey" asking, plaintively, "what are the blues?". That is, apparently, to be my theme in reviewing the body of Brother Wilson's work. I will let the last line of that review stand here. "So if anyone asks you what the blues are you now know what to say- read and see Mr. Wilson's play(s)".
Monday, May 18, 2009
*Free Troy Davis- Down With The Death Penalty!
Guest Commentary
This news item is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. I add my voice to this chorus. Free Troy Davis! Down With the Death Penalty!
Death Penalty Appeal Denied
Free Troy Davis!
On April 16, a federal appeals court in Atlanta turned down a petition for habeas corpus by Troy Davis, who was framed up and convicted in 1991 for the killing of a cop. Davis, who was just two hours away from execution last September, is again facing legal lynching.
In refusing to even consider the overwhelming evidence of Davis’s innocence, the federal court relied on Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which virtually eliminated the right of habeas corpus appeal for those sentenced to death in state courts. This law has also been the pretext for the federal courts’ refusal to hear evidence of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence. Davis has until May 16 to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the same racist court that refused to consider his case last October. In the 1993 case of Leonel Herrera, the Supreme Court declared that execution of an innocent man did not violate the Constitution. The following May 2 protest letter was sent by the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—to Georgia governor George Ervin Perdue.
We are again writing to protest the threatened execution of Troy Anthony Davis. On April 16, in a two to one decision, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals grotesquely denied Davis’s appeal despite the massive evidence that he is innocent. His legal lynching is now stayed for 30 days, pending an appeal to the pro-death penalty U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr. Davis’s conviction was based on the testimony of “eyewitnesses” who were intimidated by policemen to falsely implicate him in the death of a white off-duty police officer. Seven of the nine prosecution witnesses have since recanted, several citing police misconduct. Evidence has shown that one of those still maintaining his original testimony is himself a suspect in the killing. The dissenting judge in the recent federal court decision said that the execution of Davis, “in the face of a significant amount of the proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence,” was “unconscionable.”
Thousands of protests worldwide, including from Amnesty International and the Vatican, have railed against the execution of Troy Davis. The death penalty is cruel and barbaric. In the United States it is the racist legacy of centuries of slavery: it is the lynch rope made legal. We once again demand this racist atrocity be stopped and that Troy Davis be freed.
This news item is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. I add my voice to this chorus. Free Troy Davis! Down With the Death Penalty!
Death Penalty Appeal Denied
Free Troy Davis!
On April 16, a federal appeals court in Atlanta turned down a petition for habeas corpus by Troy Davis, who was framed up and convicted in 1991 for the killing of a cop. Davis, who was just two hours away from execution last September, is again facing legal lynching.
In refusing to even consider the overwhelming evidence of Davis’s innocence, the federal court relied on Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which virtually eliminated the right of habeas corpus appeal for those sentenced to death in state courts. This law has also been the pretext for the federal courts’ refusal to hear evidence of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence. Davis has until May 16 to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the same racist court that refused to consider his case last October. In the 1993 case of Leonel Herrera, the Supreme Court declared that execution of an innocent man did not violate the Constitution. The following May 2 protest letter was sent by the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—to Georgia governor George Ervin Perdue.
We are again writing to protest the threatened execution of Troy Anthony Davis. On April 16, in a two to one decision, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals grotesquely denied Davis’s appeal despite the massive evidence that he is innocent. His legal lynching is now stayed for 30 days, pending an appeal to the pro-death penalty U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr. Davis’s conviction was based on the testimony of “eyewitnesses” who were intimidated by policemen to falsely implicate him in the death of a white off-duty police officer. Seven of the nine prosecution witnesses have since recanted, several citing police misconduct. Evidence has shown that one of those still maintaining his original testimony is himself a suspect in the killing. The dissenting judge in the recent federal court decision said that the execution of Davis, “in the face of a significant amount of the proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence,” was “unconscionable.”
Thousands of protests worldwide, including from Amnesty International and the Vatican, have railed against the execution of Troy Davis. The death penalty is cruel and barbaric. In the United States it is the racist legacy of centuries of slavery: it is the lynch rope made legal. We once again demand this racist atrocity be stopped and that Troy Davis be freed.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
*Better Days Are Coming?-"Never Should Have Been No Too Early"-Playwright August Wilson's "Fences"
Click On Title to Link To August Wilson Home page.
Play/Book Review
Fences, August Wilson, New American Library, New York, 1986
The first couple of paragraphs of this review have been used as introduction to other August Wilson Century Cycle plays as well.
Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.
Strangely, although I was familiar with the name of the playwright August Wilson and was aware that he had produced a number of plays that were performed at a college-sponsored repertory theater here in Boston I had not seen or read his plays prior to reading the Terkel interview. Naturally when I read there that one of the plays being discussed was entitled "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" about the legendary female blues singer from the 1920's I ran out to get a copy of the play. That play has been reviewed elsewhere in this space but as is my habit when I read an author who "speaks" to me I grab everything I can by him or her to see where they are going with the work. This is doubly true in the case of Brother Wilson as his work is purposefully structured as an integrated cycle, and as an intensive dramatic look at the black historical experience of the 20th century that has driven a lot of my own above-mentioned political activism.
The action of this play takes place in the mid-1950's in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh (Wilson's home town) as do most of the plays in the cycle. This is the sixth play in the cycle and the first to reflect that notion that some profound changes were in the offing for black people, not all of them good and not all for the better. Both these facts are important in understanding the tensions of the play. Although Wilson's plays are almost exclusively centered in black life as it is lived in the neighborhood the various trials and tribulations of blacks elsewhere are woven into his story line. The white world, for the most part, except as represented by amorphous outside forces that have the access and control of the resources that blacks need to survive and break out of racial isolation are on the sidelines here. And that is as it should be in these plays on the black experience. Moreover, this truly reflects how it has been (and how it still is, notwithstanding the Obamaid) in that outer world.
I labelled this entry with the headline "Better Days Are Coming?" purposefully including the question mark. Surely, some progress toward the goal of racial equality, if not nearly enough, has been made over the last half century since the time period of this play. That is not the question. The real question is posed by the main character, Troy Maxton, who in his time was something of an exceptional baseball player, but who "came too early" to have it change the fortunes of his life. His reply: "ain't nothing should have ever been too early". Wilson hits the nail on the head here. After that remark nothing else really needs to be said.
Wilson's conceptual framework, as I have mentioned previously in a review of his "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", is impeccable. Placing the scene in 1950's Pittsburgh permits him to give a bird's eye view of that great migration of blacks out of the South in the post-World War II period at a time when they are shaking off those old subservient southern roots. Wilson is also able to succinctly draw in the questions of white racism (obliquely here), black self-help (as in building that damn fence) , black hatred of whites, black self-hatred, black illusion (that the `lifting' of the white boats was going to end, for blacks, the seemingly permanent Great Depression), black pride (through the link with past black historical figures and with the then current hero, Jackie Robinson, although Troy has some cutting remarks on the status of that figure), the influence of the black church (good or bad), black folk wisdom (as portrayed by Jim Bono, who is more grounded in his memories of his southern roots than the others) and, in the end, the rage just below the surface of black existence (as portrayed here by Troy's mentally ill brother Gabriel, a character who epitomizes one of the tragic aspects of black male existence) resulting from a world that not was not made by the characters in this play but took no notice of their long suppressed rage that turned in on itself.
Unlike some of the earlier play, however, there is a little ray of hope in the character of Troy's son (by his wife Rose) Cory whose struggle for his own identity with his father and the world is a sub-theme here. As always, if you get a chance go see this play but, please, at least read it. Read the whole cycle.
Play/Book Review
Fences, August Wilson, New American Library, New York, 1986
The first couple of paragraphs of this review have been used as introduction to other August Wilson Century Cycle plays as well.
Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.
Strangely, although I was familiar with the name of the playwright August Wilson and was aware that he had produced a number of plays that were performed at a college-sponsored repertory theater here in Boston I had not seen or read his plays prior to reading the Terkel interview. Naturally when I read there that one of the plays being discussed was entitled "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" about the legendary female blues singer from the 1920's I ran out to get a copy of the play. That play has been reviewed elsewhere in this space but as is my habit when I read an author who "speaks" to me I grab everything I can by him or her to see where they are going with the work. This is doubly true in the case of Brother Wilson as his work is purposefully structured as an integrated cycle, and as an intensive dramatic look at the black historical experience of the 20th century that has driven a lot of my own above-mentioned political activism.
The action of this play takes place in the mid-1950's in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh (Wilson's home town) as do most of the plays in the cycle. This is the sixth play in the cycle and the first to reflect that notion that some profound changes were in the offing for black people, not all of them good and not all for the better. Both these facts are important in understanding the tensions of the play. Although Wilson's plays are almost exclusively centered in black life as it is lived in the neighborhood the various trials and tribulations of blacks elsewhere are woven into his story line. The white world, for the most part, except as represented by amorphous outside forces that have the access and control of the resources that blacks need to survive and break out of racial isolation are on the sidelines here. And that is as it should be in these plays on the black experience. Moreover, this truly reflects how it has been (and how it still is, notwithstanding the Obamaid) in that outer world.
I labelled this entry with the headline "Better Days Are Coming?" purposefully including the question mark. Surely, some progress toward the goal of racial equality, if not nearly enough, has been made over the last half century since the time period of this play. That is not the question. The real question is posed by the main character, Troy Maxton, who in his time was something of an exceptional baseball player, but who "came too early" to have it change the fortunes of his life. His reply: "ain't nothing should have ever been too early". Wilson hits the nail on the head here. After that remark nothing else really needs to be said.
Wilson's conceptual framework, as I have mentioned previously in a review of his "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", is impeccable. Placing the scene in 1950's Pittsburgh permits him to give a bird's eye view of that great migration of blacks out of the South in the post-World War II period at a time when they are shaking off those old subservient southern roots. Wilson is also able to succinctly draw in the questions of white racism (obliquely here), black self-help (as in building that damn fence) , black hatred of whites, black self-hatred, black illusion (that the `lifting' of the white boats was going to end, for blacks, the seemingly permanent Great Depression), black pride (through the link with past black historical figures and with the then current hero, Jackie Robinson, although Troy has some cutting remarks on the status of that figure), the influence of the black church (good or bad), black folk wisdom (as portrayed by Jim Bono, who is more grounded in his memories of his southern roots than the others) and, in the end, the rage just below the surface of black existence (as portrayed here by Troy's mentally ill brother Gabriel, a character who epitomizes one of the tragic aspects of black male existence) resulting from a world that not was not made by the characters in this play but took no notice of their long suppressed rage that turned in on itself.
Unlike some of the earlier play, however, there is a little ray of hope in the character of Troy's son (by his wife Rose) Cory whose struggle for his own identity with his father and the world is a sub-theme here. As always, if you get a chance go see this play but, please, at least read it. Read the whole cycle.
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