Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mark Dinning performing his teen tear-jerker, Teen Angel to set an "appropriate" mood for this post.
The Last Waltz, Indeed
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
Note: The term “last waltz” of the title of this piece is used as a simple expression of the truth. The life, or better, half-life of this sketch came about originally through reviewing, a few years ago, a long-running series of “Oldies But Goodies” CDs from the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of my coming of age time. After reviewing ten of these things I found out that the series was even longer, fifteen in all. Rather than turning myself into some local hospital for a cure and the good effects of some oldies twelve-step program to restore my soul health plugged on. Plugged on, plugged on intrepidly, with the full knowledge that such things had their saturation point.
After all how much could one rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those of us who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those treasured compilations. How many times, after all, can one read about wallflowers (their invisibleness and dread of dreads not winding up like them even if it meant casting off friendships with every known nerdish future, doctor, engineer and lawyer in town, sighs (Ahs, and otherwise), certain shes (or hes for shes) the real point of reviewing any such compilations, the crepe paper-etched moonlight glow on high school dance night (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!
Or so I thought until my old friend, my old mad monk, merry prankster, stone freak, summer of love (1967 version) compadre from Olde Saco up in Maine, Josh Breslin. Yes, that Josh Breslin, or rather Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who have read his by-line over the years in half the unread radical chic or alterative vision publications in this country, called me up in a frenzy just after I had finally completed the last damn review. And as usual when he calls up in the dead of night it was “girl” trouble, if that is the appropriate way to say it for sixty-somethings.
His frenzied three in the morning problem? Josh’s Old Saco High School Class of 1967 was going to have its fortieth reunion, and through the now weathered Mainiac grapevine he found out that some middle school (then junior high) sweetheart, Lucy Dubois (Olde Saco was, and is a central gathering spot for French-Canadians and French Canadian Americans, including Josh’s old mother, Delores, nee LeBlanc), was going to show and he needed a refresher on the old time tunes. More importantly, he continued on to explain why he, madcap love ‘em and leave Josh in that summer of love 1967, and beyond, including a not forgotten “theft” of my girlfriend at the time, Butterfly Swirl (ya it was that kind of time), still had a “crush” on Ms. Dubois and what was he going to do about it come reunion night. So the following is just a little mood music from Josh’s backward trek.
********
No question that those of us who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable forty or fifty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation like the ones Peter Paul has been satanically reviewing but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. Just don’t tell Lucy that, okay. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. I had to drop more guys from the old neighborhood over on Albemarle, the projects, who later made good just because I didn’t want the guilt by association wallflower nerd label tagged around my neck. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, maybe now too, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
But what about the now seeming mandatory question that Peter Paul made a point of asking in those dimwitted reviews he is so proud of, the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that I really want to talk about. Or rather about Lucy Dubois’ (I won’t use her married name because she still lives up around Olde Saco and has, many, many family connections around, including a couple of giant economy-sized brothers). The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumble-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here the 1960 Mark Dinning tune Teen Angel fills the bill, or filled Lucy’s bill. Hey, I did really like this one too, especially the soulful, sorrowful timing and voice intonation. Yes, I know, I know the lyrics are, well, not life-enhancing and apparently the Laura or Lorraine who ill-advisedly ran back to that car stuck on the railroad track was none too bright. Not for some cheapjack high school ring that would not survive more than few hand-washings and that, moreover, Lance or Larry had already previously given (and taken back) from half the girls in the school. Yes, I also know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences). I did, didn’t you?
Well Lucy showed up that class reunion night as expected, as expected as she told me once she heard that I was coming back for the night. Damn, she still held me in thrall. Upon seeing her once again across the room I almost could smell that faint-edged scent, some lilac and dreams, bed sheet dream, scent, that always travelled around with her and drove me (and other guys too, no question) to distraction. And what song did we, Josh Breslin and Lucy Dubois, trot out to on that wintry November reunion night? Come on now, guess.
*************
....and a trip down memory lane.
MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel
(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)
Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please
Saturday, February 18, 2012
The Latest From The “Occupy May Day" FaceBook Page- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May Day Facebook Page website. Occupy May Day has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Out In the Be-Bop 1950s Night- Josh Learns Love 101 The Hard Way
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Chuck Berry performing his rock and roll classic, Maybelline.
CD Review
The Golden Age Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Volume 10, various artists including Chuck Berry, Ace Records, Ltd., 2002
Scene brought to mind by the photo that graces the cover of this CD: Friday night, maybe Saturday, but probably not because that day is real date night, not girls night out time waster like Friday night. If it is summer- it’s school’s out jail-break out time and by the look of the cherry two-toned pink convertible fully down it is a no rain summer day turn into night. And it could be any night, except definitely not a Saturday date night, because the three vixens, 1950s style vixens okay, sitting side by side in the front seat of that chariot would not be wasting their time on that night girls cruising the Olde Saco beach night but would be busy holding off some sidewalk Lothario, or kind of, half kind of, holding off said mad man, down at the “submarine” races Squaw Rock end of the beach.
Ya, it had to be Friday night because this threesome have just come from Jimmy Jack’s Diner on old Main Street (really Route One but everybody calls it Main Street, well, to be from Main street okay). And right now Jimmy Jack’s, the local teen heaven place of earthly delights (read: boys for girls, girls for boys, whatever), is zero, nothing but a zero because the place is filled with grandpas and grandmas having their weekly thrill minute on Jimmy Jack’s Friday night special platter or touristas looking for some relief from the sand and sun. Squaresville. Try back later when the rubes vacate the premises and the jukebox jumps with the latest from The Coasters, Searchin’, and stuff like that.
So off goes our threesome, kind of hungry, but not the kind of hungry that Jimmy Jack’s can do anything about. And if Jimmy Jack’s had turned into zero then the only other place to be was down at the fringes of Olde Saco Beach. No, not the Squaw Rock end, that’s for later successes, for the midnight ‘til dawn fighting off the lotharios patrol. Right now our damsels- in-distress are headed for Larry’s Loop (everybody, every under twenty-one body and maybe a few older too, knows where that is and if you don’t just ask around and someone will tell you because that’s not the real name of the place. The real name is some rube name, some general from the Civil War or Spanish-American War, or something). The loop is where everything kind of starts out-from the ancient mating rituals (only slightly updated with the advent of the automobile) to the midnight hour doings just mentioned, the fame “submarine races,” to the dark hour “chicken” runs.
Yes, the girls are on the prowl. Oh they have names, Marge, Jo (short for Joann), and Barb (short for, come on now, you know). And they are just average, or just kind of average for looks although they all have plenty of personality but what gives them cachet, gives any just average girl cachet in the Olde Saco scheme of things, hell, maybe everywhere that has enough teenagers to make a difference, is that father-bought boss cherry 1956 two-tone pink convertible. That is their entrée into the loop night. And so plenty of guys, guys with cars and without, especially without are giving them plenty of once overs and making some calculations about where the night might be headed. See, no body goes to the loop, including our three young ladies, without something in mind, something to do with sex if you really couldn’t figure that out and just had to know for sure. Just don’t go there otherwise. It is written in stone. So while strikeouts are not uncommon, not uncommon at all, everybody knows the score.
And that includes one Joshua Lawrence Breslin, fifteen, but who looks older, and who is just now standing dead-ass against Stu Miller’s cherry ’57 fire red Chevy that has all the girls crying for a ride(and getting in line, Stu’s line). Josh is Stu’s “shot-gun” this night (and many others) every since Josh stepped aside and let Stu go full-bore with a local Lolita that Josh was working on.
“Hey, girls looking for me?” Josh yells out as our threesome ritualistically slowly goes by that hell fire Chevy. The car stops and Marge yells back, “Maybe, got any friends?” ‘No, I’m traveling solo tonight,” answered Josh. Now Josh not only looks a little older but is just enough good looking to be sweet candy to this set of girls and so someone, not Marge, yells back, “Come on, maybe you’ll bring us luck.” And so Josh splits from his fire red perch and jumps over into the back seat of the convertible just as Roy Orbison comes over the car radio blasting his cool-hand Ooby Dooby.
And all the while Josh is steaming thoughts that with three chances he is sure, sure as hell, sure as Larry’s Loop hell to get lucky himself, never mind bringing luck.
And that is the funny part, although not for Josh. Somehow having Josh, king of the two-toned pink convertible night in the backseat acted as a deterrent to other guys making a move on the girls. Like maybe he was a younger brother keeping sacred guard overt the harem or something. Or maybe it wasn’t in the cards that night for just kind of ordinary girls to get some Squaw Rock action. But the way they talked among themselves upfront and to him he knew, he knew just as sure as he was born, that they were hungry and so he suggested they go down to Squaw Rock and see what happened. They all agreed in unison.
See though when this carload got there and after a lot of hemming and hawing they couldn’t decide who was going to “be” with Josh (although in his mind his had an idea, a crude, vulgar, but inspired idea to “be” with all three of them). He could see that they were toying with the idea themselves but then just as quickly gave it up when Hank Bowen and his girlfriend showed up a few yards away. No it wasn’t going to work. So our boy Josh learned a serious lesson that night. The next time you see three dames in a boss convertible avert your eyes and be silent, silent as the ocean night.
CD Review
The Golden Age Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Volume 10, various artists including Chuck Berry, Ace Records, Ltd., 2002
Scene brought to mind by the photo that graces the cover of this CD: Friday night, maybe Saturday, but probably not because that day is real date night, not girls night out time waster like Friday night. If it is summer- it’s school’s out jail-break out time and by the look of the cherry two-toned pink convertible fully down it is a no rain summer day turn into night. And it could be any night, except definitely not a Saturday date night, because the three vixens, 1950s style vixens okay, sitting side by side in the front seat of that chariot would not be wasting their time on that night girls cruising the Olde Saco beach night but would be busy holding off some sidewalk Lothario, or kind of, half kind of, holding off said mad man, down at the “submarine” races Squaw Rock end of the beach.
Ya, it had to be Friday night because this threesome have just come from Jimmy Jack’s Diner on old Main Street (really Route One but everybody calls it Main Street, well, to be from Main street okay). And right now Jimmy Jack’s, the local teen heaven place of earthly delights (read: boys for girls, girls for boys, whatever), is zero, nothing but a zero because the place is filled with grandpas and grandmas having their weekly thrill minute on Jimmy Jack’s Friday night special platter or touristas looking for some relief from the sand and sun. Squaresville. Try back later when the rubes vacate the premises and the jukebox jumps with the latest from The Coasters, Searchin’, and stuff like that.
So off goes our threesome, kind of hungry, but not the kind of hungry that Jimmy Jack’s can do anything about. And if Jimmy Jack’s had turned into zero then the only other place to be was down at the fringes of Olde Saco Beach. No, not the Squaw Rock end, that’s for later successes, for the midnight ‘til dawn fighting off the lotharios patrol. Right now our damsels- in-distress are headed for Larry’s Loop (everybody, every under twenty-one body and maybe a few older too, knows where that is and if you don’t just ask around and someone will tell you because that’s not the real name of the place. The real name is some rube name, some general from the Civil War or Spanish-American War, or something). The loop is where everything kind of starts out-from the ancient mating rituals (only slightly updated with the advent of the automobile) to the midnight hour doings just mentioned, the fame “submarine races,” to the dark hour “chicken” runs.
Yes, the girls are on the prowl. Oh they have names, Marge, Jo (short for Joann), and Barb (short for, come on now, you know). And they are just average, or just kind of average for looks although they all have plenty of personality but what gives them cachet, gives any just average girl cachet in the Olde Saco scheme of things, hell, maybe everywhere that has enough teenagers to make a difference, is that father-bought boss cherry 1956 two-tone pink convertible. That is their entrée into the loop night. And so plenty of guys, guys with cars and without, especially without are giving them plenty of once overs and making some calculations about where the night might be headed. See, no body goes to the loop, including our three young ladies, without something in mind, something to do with sex if you really couldn’t figure that out and just had to know for sure. Just don’t go there otherwise. It is written in stone. So while strikeouts are not uncommon, not uncommon at all, everybody knows the score.
And that includes one Joshua Lawrence Breslin, fifteen, but who looks older, and who is just now standing dead-ass against Stu Miller’s cherry ’57 fire red Chevy that has all the girls crying for a ride(and getting in line, Stu’s line). Josh is Stu’s “shot-gun” this night (and many others) every since Josh stepped aside and let Stu go full-bore with a local Lolita that Josh was working on.
“Hey, girls looking for me?” Josh yells out as our threesome ritualistically slowly goes by that hell fire Chevy. The car stops and Marge yells back, “Maybe, got any friends?” ‘No, I’m traveling solo tonight,” answered Josh. Now Josh not only looks a little older but is just enough good looking to be sweet candy to this set of girls and so someone, not Marge, yells back, “Come on, maybe you’ll bring us luck.” And so Josh splits from his fire red perch and jumps over into the back seat of the convertible just as Roy Orbison comes over the car radio blasting his cool-hand Ooby Dooby.
And all the while Josh is steaming thoughts that with three chances he is sure, sure as hell, sure as Larry’s Loop hell to get lucky himself, never mind bringing luck.
And that is the funny part, although not for Josh. Somehow having Josh, king of the two-toned pink convertible night in the backseat acted as a deterrent to other guys making a move on the girls. Like maybe he was a younger brother keeping sacred guard overt the harem or something. Or maybe it wasn’t in the cards that night for just kind of ordinary girls to get some Squaw Rock action. But the way they talked among themselves upfront and to him he knew, he knew just as sure as he was born, that they were hungry and so he suggested they go down to Squaw Rock and see what happened. They all agreed in unison.
See though when this carload got there and after a lot of hemming and hawing they couldn’t decide who was going to “be” with Josh (although in his mind his had an idea, a crude, vulgar, but inspired idea to “be” with all three of them). He could see that they were toying with the idea themselves but then just as quickly gave it up when Hank Bowen and his girlfriend showed up a few yards away. No it wasn’t going to work. So our boy Josh learned a serious lesson that night. The next time you see three dames in a boss convertible avert your eyes and be silent, silent as the ocean night.
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
A Call To Action-1st Mass Occupy General Assembly-Occupy Groups in the Greater Boston Area-UNITE! Change Of Meeting Place
Click on the headline to link to the Mass Occupy Facebook page.
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
When: Saturday, February 18, 2012 Time: 12:00pm until 4:00pm
Where: Boston Teachers Union Hall, 180 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, Massachusetts
Child Care will be provided.
Fight MBTA Fare Hikes and Cuts!
Other proposals on the proposed agenda include:
• International Women's Day action
• March 1st Solidarity actions for public education
• May 1st General strike actions
• Time will be allotted for all proposals.
Facebook link: htrps://www.facebook.com/events/177231922382590/
Just When You Thought It Was Safe To… Be-Bop-No Doo-Wop-Redux
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Capris performing There's A Moon Out Tonight.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
Confused by the headline? Don’t be. All it does is refer to a previous seemingly endless series of Oldies But GoodiesCD reviews in this space a while back. (Cold war, red scare, jail break-out 1950s-1960s , there at the creation, there when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Wanda and their brethren were young and hungry and we were too, oldies but goodies, just so you know.) That gargantuan task required sifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle.
Christ who am I kidding I was ready for the sweet safe confines of some convalescent home just to ‘dry out” a little and prepare myself for yet another twelve-step “recovery” program and I hadn’t even gotten to 1960 before I went off the deep end. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot and was done with it. Praise be and all of that. I would rather cover six non-descript American presidential campaigns straight up than go through that again. Make that seven presidential campaigns, including that of some dingbat over in New Hampshire named “Red Bucket” whose “campaign” consists of mocking everybody who even has pretensions to the vaunted oval office.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much could we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs, others have died, mercifully died, and gone to YouTube heaven to be clicked “like” by about three people, including the up-loader, and probably “Red Bucket”) in the reviewed compilations. How many times could one read about guys with two social left feet (and I won’t even mention geeky clothes and shoes brought on by an onslaught of, well, family poverty in my case), the social conventions of dancing close (and not being hip to mouthwash and deodorant wisdom, although very hip to that fragrance a certain she was wearing, that maddening come hither fragrance), wallflowers (and their invisibleness) , the avoidance of wallflower-dom (at all costs, including cutting loose on long time friendships with geeky future lawyers, professors and doctors, jesus) , meaningful sighs (ho-hum), meaningless sighs (ah, gee), the longings, eternal longings from tween to twenty, for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes for those of the opposite sex then, or maybe even same sex but that was a book sealed with seven seals, maybe more ), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought. Bastante.
Well now I have “recovered” enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arm’s length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in those oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. Of course that begs a question. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song of the times-doo-wop variation. The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumble-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or like before he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
P.S. Okay, okay I’ll “confess” but only because I know that if don’t somebody, maybe even someone who was at one of those damn dances, will pry it out of me with some mean and evil method of torture. And if there is one thing in life that I have had enough of after a long career in the public prints, even if they were mainly alternative rags and trendy radical chic reads, is threats of public exposure and other ill-advised methods of “getting the truth out.” Yes, I took dancing lessons to try to cover up those two social left feet.
But wait! It wasn’t just some generic moonbeam boy meets girl thing but for “her.” Her being in this case, one Lydia MacAdams, and yes, if that name sounds familiar, from the MacAdams Textiles family. The ones who seemingly make every towel placed in every hotel in America, and maybe beyond for all I know. Lydia was a granddaughter of the founder, although I never did quite catch the full details on the exact relationship. The MacAdams mills used to be located in Olde Saco, Maine where I grew to manhood and employed most of the town, including my father, before they headed south for cheaper labor from what I remember. The Lydia branch stayed put in Olde Saco over on Elm Street where all the fancy Victorians were located (and still are, more recently refurbished for old-time house crazies).
Lydia and I went to Olde Saco East Junior High School (now Middle School) together and first met in art class in eighth grade. We used to talk, serious and funny talk, all the time. I never did anything about it that year, although I think that Lydia expected me to ask her out. Maybe it was me just wishing but that’s what I thought then. Of course “asking out” (read: date, okay) meant going after school over to Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street just down from East for something to eat but really to listen to Jimmy Jack’s jukebox that had all the latest be-bop rock, doo wop hits and stuff like that on it. Like I said I never got that far. Why. Well that’s where coming from the “wrong side of the tracks” comes in, the Albemarle “projects” wrong side of the tracks over in back of the old mills. No dough, okay. And no dough meant no go with Lydia in my head.
So that is where the dancing lessons came in. I caddied over at the Olde Saco Country Club all summer to save up money to take lessons (and for dough in case I got Jimmy Jack’s lucky). Why? Well two whys. One to “ be ready” for the Olde Saco High freshmen mixer in October when I was planning to take dead-aim at Lydia for the last dance of the night. The last slow dance, see. Two, because one Lydia MacAdams was also taking dance lessons at Miss Jean’s over on Atlantic Avenue. Do not ask how I found that out I will not tell and you can torture me all you want on that one.
But do feel free to ask about this though. The first day, the very first day of dance class after school in September just after we entered august Olde Saco High, Lydia came up to me and said, no commanded, that whether or not I thought she had two left feet because I had not asked her to the mixer, we, she and I, were going to dance the last dance. She also said she hoped that it would be that dreamy There’s A Moon Out Tonight that she loved to play on Jimmy Jack’s jukebox. Well, what’s a fellow to do when he is “commanded” to do something by Lydia MacAdams. I can still smell that maddening come hither fragrance she wore that mixer night as we danced the night away so close it would have taken an army to separate us.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
Confused by the headline? Don’t be. All it does is refer to a previous seemingly endless series of Oldies But GoodiesCD reviews in this space a while back. (Cold war, red scare, jail break-out 1950s-1960s , there at the creation, there when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Wanda and their brethren were young and hungry and we were too, oldies but goodies, just so you know.) That gargantuan task required sifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle.
Christ who am I kidding I was ready for the sweet safe confines of some convalescent home just to ‘dry out” a little and prepare myself for yet another twelve-step “recovery” program and I hadn’t even gotten to 1960 before I went off the deep end. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot and was done with it. Praise be and all of that. I would rather cover six non-descript American presidential campaigns straight up than go through that again. Make that seven presidential campaigns, including that of some dingbat over in New Hampshire named “Red Bucket” whose “campaign” consists of mocking everybody who even has pretensions to the vaunted oval office.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much could we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs, others have died, mercifully died, and gone to YouTube heaven to be clicked “like” by about three people, including the up-loader, and probably “Red Bucket”) in the reviewed compilations. How many times could one read about guys with two social left feet (and I won’t even mention geeky clothes and shoes brought on by an onslaught of, well, family poverty in my case), the social conventions of dancing close (and not being hip to mouthwash and deodorant wisdom, although very hip to that fragrance a certain she was wearing, that maddening come hither fragrance), wallflowers (and their invisibleness) , the avoidance of wallflower-dom (at all costs, including cutting loose on long time friendships with geeky future lawyers, professors and doctors, jesus) , meaningful sighs (ho-hum), meaningless sighs (ah, gee), the longings, eternal longings from tween to twenty, for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes for those of the opposite sex then, or maybe even same sex but that was a book sealed with seven seals, maybe more ), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought. Bastante.
Well now I have “recovered” enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arm’s length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in those oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. Of course that begs a question. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song of the times-doo-wop variation. The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumble-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or like before he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
P.S. Okay, okay I’ll “confess” but only because I know that if don’t somebody, maybe even someone who was at one of those damn dances, will pry it out of me with some mean and evil method of torture. And if there is one thing in life that I have had enough of after a long career in the public prints, even if they were mainly alternative rags and trendy radical chic reads, is threats of public exposure and other ill-advised methods of “getting the truth out.” Yes, I took dancing lessons to try to cover up those two social left feet.
But wait! It wasn’t just some generic moonbeam boy meets girl thing but for “her.” Her being in this case, one Lydia MacAdams, and yes, if that name sounds familiar, from the MacAdams Textiles family. The ones who seemingly make every towel placed in every hotel in America, and maybe beyond for all I know. Lydia was a granddaughter of the founder, although I never did quite catch the full details on the exact relationship. The MacAdams mills used to be located in Olde Saco, Maine where I grew to manhood and employed most of the town, including my father, before they headed south for cheaper labor from what I remember. The Lydia branch stayed put in Olde Saco over on Elm Street where all the fancy Victorians were located (and still are, more recently refurbished for old-time house crazies).
Lydia and I went to Olde Saco East Junior High School (now Middle School) together and first met in art class in eighth grade. We used to talk, serious and funny talk, all the time. I never did anything about it that year, although I think that Lydia expected me to ask her out. Maybe it was me just wishing but that’s what I thought then. Of course “asking out” (read: date, okay) meant going after school over to Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street just down from East for something to eat but really to listen to Jimmy Jack’s jukebox that had all the latest be-bop rock, doo wop hits and stuff like that on it. Like I said I never got that far. Why. Well that’s where coming from the “wrong side of the tracks” comes in, the Albemarle “projects” wrong side of the tracks over in back of the old mills. No dough, okay. And no dough meant no go with Lydia in my head.
So that is where the dancing lessons came in. I caddied over at the Olde Saco Country Club all summer to save up money to take lessons (and for dough in case I got Jimmy Jack’s lucky). Why? Well two whys. One to “ be ready” for the Olde Saco High freshmen mixer in October when I was planning to take dead-aim at Lydia for the last dance of the night. The last slow dance, see. Two, because one Lydia MacAdams was also taking dance lessons at Miss Jean’s over on Atlantic Avenue. Do not ask how I found that out I will not tell and you can torture me all you want on that one.
But do feel free to ask about this though. The first day, the very first day of dance class after school in September just after we entered august Olde Saco High, Lydia came up to me and said, no commanded, that whether or not I thought she had two left feet because I had not asked her to the mixer, we, she and I, were going to dance the last dance. She also said she hoped that it would be that dreamy There’s A Moon Out Tonight that she loved to play on Jimmy Jack’s jukebox. Well, what’s a fellow to do when he is “commanded” to do something by Lydia MacAdams. I can still smell that maddening come hither fragrance she wore that mixer night as we danced the night away so close it would have taken an army to separate us.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
“We don’t want the word peace connected with the word veteran”-paraphrase of a remark by an official parade organizer- “Oh ya, well well watch this”- All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veterans For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick’s PEACE Parade on Sunday March 18th in South Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade Facebook page.
Markin comment:
As if I needed any extra push to join in this VFP action I have reposted a blog that pretty clearly explains why I am always ready to march with the VFPers.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
************
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade
Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland was a man of peace. Saint Patrick's Day should be a day to celebrate Saint Patrick and the Irish Heritage of Boston and the contributions of the Irish throughout American history. In Boston the parade should be a day to celebrate the changes in our culture, the ethnic, religious diversity, points of views and politics of our great City of Boston. For on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Saint Patrick Day parades have been held in Boston since 1737 (Unofficial parades). In 1901 Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in the City of Boston. Because of the coincidence of the proximity of the two holidays the celebrations were combined and for the past forty years the Allied War Veterans Council have been organizing the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, turning what should be the celebration of Saint Patrick, the Irish Heritage and History into a military parade.
In 2011, the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade submitted an application to march in the traditional Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Veterans For Peace is a national veterans organization with 130 chapters across the country. The Smedley Butler Brigade has over 200 members locally. It's members range from veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and the Afghanistan War. All Veterans For Peace wanted to do was to march in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and carry their flags and banners. Their application was denied by the "Allied War Council". When the organizer of the parade, Phil Wuschke, was asked why their application was denied, he stated, "Because they did not want to have the word peace associated with the word Veteran". They were also told that they were too political, as if the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and other activities surrounding the parade are not political.
Veterans For Peace subsequently filed for their own permit for the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade. Seventeen years ago, the gay and bisexual community (GLBT) had also applied to march in the parade and like the veterans were denied. GBLT sued the Allied War Council and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the Hurley Decision, named after Wacko Hurley, the ruler supreme of the parade. This decision states that who ever is organizing the parade has the right to say who is in and who can be excluded from the parade, no questions asked. Even though the City of Boston will spend in excess of $300,000.00 in support of this parade, they have no say in who can be in the parade. The Saint Patrick's Day Parade should be sponsored by the City of Boston and not a private group, who have secretive, private meetings, not open to the public and who practice discrimination and exclusion.
In the case of Veterans For Peace, if you are carrying a gun or drive a tank you can be in the parade, if you are a veteran of the US Military and carrying a peace symbol, you are excluded. Once Veterans For Peace had their parade permit in hand the first group they reached out to was the gay and bisexual community in Boston. "You were not allowed to walk in their parade seventeen years ago, how would you like to walk in our parade" The response was immediate and Join the Impact, one of many GLBT organizations in the Boston area enthusiastically joined the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, the alternative peoples parade. Because of another Massachusetts's Court decision the "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. With only three weeks to organize the parade when it steped off this little parade had over 500 participants, grand marshals, a Duck Boat, a band, veterans, peace groups, church groups, GBLT groups, labor groups and more. It was a wonderful parade and was very warmly welcomed by the residents of South Boston.
This year, once again, Veterans For Peace submitted an application to the "Allied War Council" for the inclusion of the small "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" into the larger parade. Once again the Veterans were denied;
"Your application has been reviewed, we refer you to the Supreme Court ruling on June 19,1995your application to participate in the March 18,2012 Saint Patrick's Day Parade had been denied"
No reason given as to why, just denied. This should be unacceptable to every citizen of Boston, especially the politicians who will be flocking to the Breakfast and Roast on March 18th. This kind of exclusion should not be condoned nor supported by anyone in the City of Boston, especially our elected political leaders.
Just in case the Allied War Council has not noticed, South Boston is no longer a strictly Irish Catholic community. In fact the Irish are no longer a majority in South Boston. The community is much more diverse in 2012 in ethnicity, life styles, religion, points of view and politics then it was forty years ago. Times have changed, the City has changed, the population has changed, social norms have changed. People are much more accepting of those that may be different, have a different religion, customs or ideas. We are a much more inclusive society, everyone that is except the antiquated Allied War Veterans.
It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be inclusive of these differing groups. It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be reflective of the changes in our culture. It is time for this parade to include groups of differing life styles, points of views and politics or the City of Boston should take back this parade. There is no place in Boston or anywhere in this country for bigotry, hatred, censorship, discrimination and exclusion. This should be a day of celebration, for all the peoples of the great City of Boston to come together, to celebrate Saint Patrick and our Irish History and Heritage. In 2012 this parade should be inclusive and also celebrate what makes us Americans, what makes this country great, our multi-ethnic diversity, differing life-styles, religious affiliations, differing politics and points of views. All of us should wear the green, no one should be excluded, since on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Markin comment:
As if I needed any extra push to join in this VFP action I have reposted a blog that pretty clearly explains why I am always ready to march with the VFPers.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
************
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade
Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland was a man of peace. Saint Patrick's Day should be a day to celebrate Saint Patrick and the Irish Heritage of Boston and the contributions of the Irish throughout American history. In Boston the parade should be a day to celebrate the changes in our culture, the ethnic, religious diversity, points of views and politics of our great City of Boston. For on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Saint Patrick Day parades have been held in Boston since 1737 (Unofficial parades). In 1901 Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in the City of Boston. Because of the coincidence of the proximity of the two holidays the celebrations were combined and for the past forty years the Allied War Veterans Council have been organizing the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, turning what should be the celebration of Saint Patrick, the Irish Heritage and History into a military parade.
In 2011, the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade submitted an application to march in the traditional Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Veterans For Peace is a national veterans organization with 130 chapters across the country. The Smedley Butler Brigade has over 200 members locally. It's members range from veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and the Afghanistan War. All Veterans For Peace wanted to do was to march in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and carry their flags and banners. Their application was denied by the "Allied War Council". When the organizer of the parade, Phil Wuschke, was asked why their application was denied, he stated, "Because they did not want to have the word peace associated with the word Veteran". They were also told that they were too political, as if the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and other activities surrounding the parade are not political.
Veterans For Peace subsequently filed for their own permit for the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade. Seventeen years ago, the gay and bisexual community (GLBT) had also applied to march in the parade and like the veterans were denied. GBLT sued the Allied War Council and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the Hurley Decision, named after Wacko Hurley, the ruler supreme of the parade. This decision states that who ever is organizing the parade has the right to say who is in and who can be excluded from the parade, no questions asked. Even though the City of Boston will spend in excess of $300,000.00 in support of this parade, they have no say in who can be in the parade. The Saint Patrick's Day Parade should be sponsored by the City of Boston and not a private group, who have secretive, private meetings, not open to the public and who practice discrimination and exclusion.
In the case of Veterans For Peace, if you are carrying a gun or drive a tank you can be in the parade, if you are a veteran of the US Military and carrying a peace symbol, you are excluded. Once Veterans For Peace had their parade permit in hand the first group they reached out to was the gay and bisexual community in Boston. "You were not allowed to walk in their parade seventeen years ago, how would you like to walk in our parade" The response was immediate and Join the Impact, one of many GLBT organizations in the Boston area enthusiastically joined the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, the alternative peoples parade. Because of another Massachusetts's Court decision the "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. With only three weeks to organize the parade when it steped off this little parade had over 500 participants, grand marshals, a Duck Boat, a band, veterans, peace groups, church groups, GBLT groups, labor groups and more. It was a wonderful parade and was very warmly welcomed by the residents of South Boston.
This year, once again, Veterans For Peace submitted an application to the "Allied War Council" for the inclusion of the small "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" into the larger parade. Once again the Veterans were denied;
"Your application has been reviewed, we refer you to the Supreme Court ruling on June 19,1995your application to participate in the March 18,2012 Saint Patrick's Day Parade had been denied"
No reason given as to why, just denied. This should be unacceptable to every citizen of Boston, especially the politicians who will be flocking to the Breakfast and Roast on March 18th. This kind of exclusion should not be condoned nor supported by anyone in the City of Boston, especially our elected political leaders.
Just in case the Allied War Council has not noticed, South Boston is no longer a strictly Irish Catholic community. In fact the Irish are no longer a majority in South Boston. The community is much more diverse in 2012 in ethnicity, life styles, religion, points of view and politics then it was forty years ago. Times have changed, the City has changed, the population has changed, social norms have changed. People are much more accepting of those that may be different, have a different religion, customs or ideas. We are a much more inclusive society, everyone that is except the antiquated Allied War Veterans.
It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be inclusive of these differing groups. It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be reflective of the changes in our culture. It is time for this parade to include groups of differing life styles, points of views and politics or the City of Boston should take back this parade. There is no place in Boston or anywhere in this country for bigotry, hatred, censorship, discrimination and exclusion. This should be a day of celebration, for all the peoples of the great City of Boston to come together, to celebrate Saint Patrick and our Irish History and Heritage. In 2012 this parade should be inclusive and also celebrate what makes us Americans, what makes this country great, our multi-ethnic diversity, differing life-styles, religious affiliations, differing politics and points of views. All of us should wear the green, no one should be excluded, since on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Victory To The Greek Workers- Build Workers Councils Now-Fight For A Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to an Socialist Alternative (CWI)website analysis of the pre-revolutionary situation in Greece.
Markin comment:
The situation in Greece today cries out to high heaven for a revolution and a revolutionary party to intervene and lead the damn thing. Enough of one day general strikes. General strikes only pose the question of power, of dual power. Who shall rule. We say labor must rule. Strike the final blow. Back to the communist road. The Greek workers are just this minute the vanguard, yes, terrible word to some, vanguard of the international working class struggle. Forward to victory.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010-Repost from American Left History blog
*Be Still My Heart- On Calling For The Greek Communist Parties And Trade Unions To Take Power
Markin comment:
On May 10, 2010 I posted an entry on the situation in Greece in response to a post from the International Marxist Tendency’s Greek section’s analysis of the tasks that confront revolutionaries today. I agreed with the comment in the post that general strikes were of limited value if they did not, at some point, pose the question of who shall rule- working people or the capitalists. I went further and proposed two propaganda points that revolutionaries in Greece, and their supporters internationally, should be fighting for. Right now.
The first point revolved around the fight to create workers councils, committees of action or factory committees in order to fight for a revolutionary perspective. That program, the specifics which are better to left to those on the ground, needs to include refusal to pay the capitalists debts, under whatever guise, defense of the hard fought social welfare gains of the past, the struggle against the current government’s austerity program, the fight against any taint of popular frontism (opposition to alliances, at this critical juncture, with non-working class forces where the working class is the donkey and the small capitalist parties are the riders), and prepare to pose the question of who shall rule. Thus there is plenty of work that needs to be started now while the working masses are mobilized and in a furor over the current situation.
The second point, which flows out of the first, is the call for the Communist parties and trade unions to take power in their own right and in the interest of the working class. Now, clearly, and this is where some confusion has entered the picture, this is TODAY a propaganda call but is a concrete way to pose the question of who shall rule. Of course, we revolutionaries should have no illusions in the Stalinists and ex-Stalinists who run those parties and who, in previous times, have lived very comfortably with their various popular front, anti-monopolist strategies that preserve capitalism. However, today those organizations call for anti-governmental action and are listened to by the masses in the streets.
The point is to call their political bluff, carefully, but insistently. In that sense we are talking over the heads of the leaders to their social bases. Now that tactic is always proper for revolutionaries to gain authority but today we have to have a more concrete way to do so. In short, call on the Greek labor militants to call on their parties and unions to take power. And if not, then follow us. This is not some exotic formula from nowhere but reflects the sometimes painful experience, at least since the European revolutions of 1848.
Note: I headed today’s headline with the expression “be still my heart” for a reason. It has been a very long time since we have been able to, even propagandistically, call for workers parties on the European continent to take power. Especially, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for Stalinist (reformed or otherwise) parties to do so. Frankly, I did not think, as a practical matter, that I would be making such a call in Europe again in my lifetime. All proportions guarded, this may be the first wave of a new revolutionary upsurge on that continent. But, hell, its nice just to be able to, rationally, make that political call. In any case, the old utopian dream of a serious capitalist United States of Europe is getting ready to go into the dustbin of history. Let’s replace it with a Socialist Federation of Europe- and Greece today is the “epicenter”. SYRIZA-KKE to power!
Markin comment:
The situation in Greece today cries out to high heaven for a revolution and a revolutionary party to intervene and lead the damn thing. Enough of one day general strikes. General strikes only pose the question of power, of dual power. Who shall rule. We say labor must rule. Strike the final blow. Back to the communist road. The Greek workers are just this minute the vanguard, yes, terrible word to some, vanguard of the international working class struggle. Forward to victory.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010-Repost from American Left History blog
*Be Still My Heart- On Calling For The Greek Communist Parties And Trade Unions To Take Power
Markin comment:
On May 10, 2010 I posted an entry on the situation in Greece in response to a post from the International Marxist Tendency’s Greek section’s analysis of the tasks that confront revolutionaries today. I agreed with the comment in the post that general strikes were of limited value if they did not, at some point, pose the question of who shall rule- working people or the capitalists. I went further and proposed two propaganda points that revolutionaries in Greece, and their supporters internationally, should be fighting for. Right now.
The first point revolved around the fight to create workers councils, committees of action or factory committees in order to fight for a revolutionary perspective. That program, the specifics which are better to left to those on the ground, needs to include refusal to pay the capitalists debts, under whatever guise, defense of the hard fought social welfare gains of the past, the struggle against the current government’s austerity program, the fight against any taint of popular frontism (opposition to alliances, at this critical juncture, with non-working class forces where the working class is the donkey and the small capitalist parties are the riders), and prepare to pose the question of who shall rule. Thus there is plenty of work that needs to be started now while the working masses are mobilized and in a furor over the current situation.
The second point, which flows out of the first, is the call for the Communist parties and trade unions to take power in their own right and in the interest of the working class. Now, clearly, and this is where some confusion has entered the picture, this is TODAY a propaganda call but is a concrete way to pose the question of who shall rule. Of course, we revolutionaries should have no illusions in the Stalinists and ex-Stalinists who run those parties and who, in previous times, have lived very comfortably with their various popular front, anti-monopolist strategies that preserve capitalism. However, today those organizations call for anti-governmental action and are listened to by the masses in the streets.
The point is to call their political bluff, carefully, but insistently. In that sense we are talking over the heads of the leaders to their social bases. Now that tactic is always proper for revolutionaries to gain authority but today we have to have a more concrete way to do so. In short, call on the Greek labor militants to call on their parties and unions to take power. And if not, then follow us. This is not some exotic formula from nowhere but reflects the sometimes painful experience, at least since the European revolutions of 1848.
Note: I headed today’s headline with the expression “be still my heart” for a reason. It has been a very long time since we have been able to, even propagandistically, call for workers parties on the European continent to take power. Especially, after the demise of the Soviet Union, for Stalinist (reformed or otherwise) parties to do so. Frankly, I did not think, as a practical matter, that I would be making such a call in Europe again in my lifetime. All proportions guarded, this may be the first wave of a new revolutionary upsurge on that continent. But, hell, its nice just to be able to, rationally, make that political call. In any case, the old utopian dream of a serious capitalist United States of Europe is getting ready to go into the dustbin of history. Let’s replace it with a Socialist Federation of Europe- and Greece today is the “epicenter”. SYRIZA-KKE to power!
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
Click on the headline to link to the United National Antiwar Coalition website for details on workshops, directions, registration and accommodations.
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis Climate Crisis and War oo Women and War oo War at Home on Black Community oo War on the U.S.-Mexico Border oc Islamophobia as a Tool of War oo War and Labor's Fight Back oo Defense of Iran oo Afghanistan after Ten Years of Occupation oo Is the U.S. Really Withdrawing from Iraq? oo War on Pakistan oo Updates on Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen oo What Next for the Arab Spring? oo Occupation of Haiti oo U.S. Intervention in Honduras, Colombia, and the rest of Latin America x> Drone Warfare and Weapons in Space oo Fight for Our Right to Protest oo Civil Liberties oo Guantanamo, Torture and Rendition oo U.S. Combat Troops Involved in New Scramble for Africa oo Somalia oc Control of Media oo Imperialism oc Nonviolence & Direct Action oo Palestine: UN Recognized Statehood or Civil Resistance oc Breaking the Siege of Gaza & Ending Occupation oo Veterans Rights oo Immigrant Rights and War °o No War, No Warming oo Bring Our War $$ Home Campaigns.
www.unacpeace.org
**************
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis
www.unacpeace.org
**************
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Oops!- A Couple Of Days Late- In Honor Of Charles Darwin's Birthday-The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression
Workers Vanguard No. 854 16 September 2005
The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression
Hail Charles Darwin!
If ever there were an argument against "intelligent design," it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they're stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the "E" word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt "pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!
A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed "think tanks" (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The "Wedge Document," an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" (New York Times, 21 August).
For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the "original intent" of the slave owning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, "women's lib" and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.
Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.
A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding "scientific" justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people "far below" whites "in the scale of created beings" and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate "races." The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amid curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:
"Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modification' is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.
"To the organizations here filing as amid curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man's quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority."
The Materialist View of History
Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:
"The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change."
—Science and History (1954)
Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:
"The revolutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level."
—"Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism," WVNo. 797, 14 February 2003
Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the "social Darwinists" who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term "survival of the fittest" as "scientific" evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, "Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.... Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!"
Evolution is not "progressive," nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word "evolution" because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist "scientific" illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term "descent with modification" and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): "Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn't care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought."
Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the "Academia" to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Segur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:
"Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an 'apostle of dirt worship'."
Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.
Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the "intelligent design" argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book's theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:
"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" (Pocono Record, 28 August).
Darwin's discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:
"Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically.... In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years."
Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been "concealed by an overgrowth of ideology." As Engels remarked in his 1883 "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx":
"The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."
Engels drew directly on Darwin's work in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man." Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, "the hand had become free," allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:
"Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion."
The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and "all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind." So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.
Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
You Can't Fight Republicans with Democrats
While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word "om" is hidden in the word "communism"?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposes of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site's banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.
It's not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, "A Debate Over Darwin," makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Parry opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute's purpose by accepting the logic of Bush's demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.
We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler"), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):
"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."
Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of "all the news that's fit to print" in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of "intelligent design" was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the "little guy."
The "culture wars" in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton's 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.
These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the "lesser evil" is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to "end welfare as we know it," by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being "born again" from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against "godless Communism."
Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions
America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, "Hispanics may be of any race." Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.
America's other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.
Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight "godless Communism," immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the "World's Christian Fundamentals Association" was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic "crimes against society" and "conspiracies against the government," and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.
The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that "education today is chained to the devil's throne," Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against "the old bastard theory of evolution." Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:
"Thousands attended Men's Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies' Night. The newspaper reported that '15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God's glory' on Negro Night. An equal number of 'Kluxers'— some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night."
That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation's capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn't as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.
John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee's statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being "finally, the highest type of all." A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the "feebleminded" through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed "eugenically unfit." In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for "poor white trash," black people and immigrants.
Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, "Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons."
John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan's religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment."
Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God's gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.
What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists." They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in "the thousand-year reign of Christ." Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in "Welcome to Doomsday" (New York Review of Books, 24 March):
"Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
"I'm not making this up."
Communism = America's Last Best Hope
Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution's philosophy of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism. The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.
The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.
Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas' Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state's anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools' Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson's constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin's theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as "anachronistic."
So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today's deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.
Leningrad's Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what's changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.
Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that "communism is dead." With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world's, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for "democracy," the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.
Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.
The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie's own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can't be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.
To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn't possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin's theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.
The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression
Hail Charles Darwin!
If ever there were an argument against "intelligent design," it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they're stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the "E" word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt "pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom." Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!
A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed "think tanks" (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The "Wedge Document," an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" (New York Times, 21 August).
For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the "original intent" of the slave owning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, "women's lib" and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.
Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.
A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding "scientific" justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people "far below" whites "in the scale of created beings" and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate "races." The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amid curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:
"Evolution, the science of man's 'descent with modification' is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical 'special' status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.
"To the organizations here filing as amid curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man's quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority."
The Materialist View of History
Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:
"The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change."
—Science and History (1954)
Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:
"The revolutionary aspect of Darwin's idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level."
—"Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism," WVNo. 797, 14 February 2003
Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the "social Darwinists" who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term "survival of the fittest" as "scientific" evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, "Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.... Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!"
Evolution is not "progressive," nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word "evolution" because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist "scientific" illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term "descent with modification" and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): "Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn't care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought."
Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the "Academia" to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Segur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:
"Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an 'apostle of dirt worship'."
Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.
Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the "intelligent design" argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book's theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:
"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" (Pocono Record, 28 August).
Darwin's discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:
"Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically.... In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years."
Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been "concealed by an overgrowth of ideology." As Engels remarked in his 1883 "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx":
"The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."
Engels drew directly on Darwin's work in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man." Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, "the hand had become free," allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:
"Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion."
The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and "all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind." So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.
Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
You Can't Fight Republicans with Democrats
While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word "om" is hidden in the word "communism"?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposes of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site's banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.
It's not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, "A Debate Over Darwin," makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Parry opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute's purpose by accepting the logic of Bush's demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.
We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler"), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):
"Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being."
Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of "all the news that's fit to print" in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of "intelligent design" was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the "little guy."
The "culture wars" in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton's 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.
These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the "lesser evil" is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to "end welfare as we know it," by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being "born again" from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against "godless Communism."
Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions
America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, "Hispanics may be of any race." Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.
America's other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.
Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight "godless Communism," immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the "World's Christian Fundamentals Association" was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic "crimes against society" and "conspiracies against the government," and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.
The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that "education today is chained to the devil's throne," Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against "the old bastard theory of evolution." Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:
"Thousands attended Men's Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies' Night. The newspaper reported that '15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God's glory' on Negro Night. An equal number of 'Kluxers'— some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night."
That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation's capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn't as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.
John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee's statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being "finally, the highest type of all." A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the "feebleminded" through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed "eugenically unfit." In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for "poor white trash," black people and immigrants.
Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, "Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons."
John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan's religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment."
Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God's gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.
What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists." They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in "the thousand-year reign of Christ." Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in "Welcome to Doomsday" (New York Review of Books, 24 March):
"Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
"I'm not making this up."
Communism = America's Last Best Hope
Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution's philosophy of "liberty, equality, fraternity" was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism. The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.
The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.
Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas' Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state's anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools' Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson's constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin's theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as "anachronistic."
So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today's deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.
Leningrad's Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what's changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.
Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that "communism is dead." With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world's, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for "democracy," the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.
Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.
The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie's own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can't be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.
To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn't possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin's theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.
Entering Olde Saco High, 1960-For The Olde Saco East Junior High School (Middle School) Class Of 1960
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mark Dinning performing his teen tear-jerker, Teen Angel to set an "appropriate" mood for this post.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco High School Class of 1964, comment:
Funny, here I am, finally, finally after what seemed like an endless heat-waved, eternal August dog day’d, book-devoured, summer. Standing, nervously standing, waiting with one foot on the sturdy granite-chiseled steps, ready at a moment’s notice from any teacher’s beck and call, to climb up to the second floor main entrance of old Olde Saco High (that’s in Maine for the non-Mainiacs, and if you don’t know Olde Saco you never will be a Mainiac and even if you do know if you were not born here you won’t be either. That’s how it is, and that’s how we like it). An entrance flanked by huge concrete spheres on each side, which are made to order for me to think that I too have the weight of the world on my shoulders this sunny day. And those doors, by the way, as if the spheres are not portentous enough, are also flanked by two scroll-worked concrete columns, or maybe they are gargoyle-faced, my eyes are a little bleary right now, who give the place a more fearsome look than is really necessary but today, today of all days, every little omen has its evil meaning, evil for me that is.
Here I am anyway, pensive (giving myself the best of it, okay, nice wrap-around-your soul word too, okay), head hanging down, deep in thought, deep in scared, get the nurse fast, if necessary, nausea-provoking thought, standing around, a little impatiently surly as is my “style” (that “style” I picked up a few years back in elementary school down in the Olde Saco “projects” over on Albemarle, after seeing James Dean or someone like that strike the pose, and it stuck). Anyway it’s now about 7:00 AM, maybe a little after, and like I say my eyes have been playing tricks on me all morning and I can’t seem to focus, as I wait for the first school bell to sound on this first Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960.
No big deal right, we have all done it many times by now it should be easy. Year after year, old August dog days turn into shorter, cooler September come hither young wanna-be learner days. Nothing to get nervous about, nothing to it. (Did I say that already?) Especially the first day, a half day, a “gimme” day, really, one of the few out of one hundred and eighty, count ‘em, and mainly used for filling out the one thousand and one pieces of paper about who you are, where you live, who you live with, and who to call in case you take some nasty fall in gym trying to do a double twist-something on the gym mat (and trying to impress in the process some girl over on the other side of the gym with your prowess, hope she is not looking juts then) or a wrestled double-hammer lock grip on some poor, equally benighted fellow student that goes awry like actually happened to me last year in eighth grade. Hey, they were still talking about that one in the Olde Saco East Junior High locker rooms at the end of the year, I hear.
Or, more ominously, they want that information so that if you cross-up one, or more, of your mean-spirited, ill-disposed, never-could have-been-young-and-troubled, ancient, Plato or Socrates ancient from the look of some of them, teachers and your parents (embarrassed, steaming, vengeful Ma really, in our neighborhoods) need to be called in to confer about “your problem,” your problem that you will grow out of with a few days of after school “help.” Please.
This “gimme” day (let’s just call it that okay, it will help settle me down) will be spent reading off, battered, monotone home room teacher-reading off, the also one thousand and one rules; no lateness to school under penalty of being placed in the stocks, Pilgrim-style, no illness absences short of the plague, if you have it, not a family member, and then only if you have a (presumably sanitized) doctor’s note; no cutting classes to explore the great American day streets at some nearby corner variety store, or mercy, Olde Saco Downs, one-horse Olde Saco Downs also under severe penalty; no (unauthorized) talking in class (but they will mark it down if you don't authorize talk, jesus); no giving guff (ya, no guff, right) to your teachers, fellow students, staff, the resident mouse or your kid brother, if you have a kid brother; no writing on walls, in books, and only on occasion on an (authorized) writing pad; no(get this one, I couldn’t believe this one over at East) cutting in line for the school lunch (the school lunch, Christ, as poor as we are in our family we at least have the dignity not to pine for, much less cut in line for, those beauties: the American chop suey done several different ways to cover the week, including a stint as baloney and cheese sandwiches, I swear); no off-hand rough-necking (or just plain, ordinary necking, either); no excessive use of the “lav” (you know what that is, enough said), and certainly no smoking, drinking or using any other illegal (for kids) substances.
Oh, ya, and don’t forget to follow, unquestioningly, those mean-spirited, ill-disposed teachers that I spoke of before, if there is a fire emergency. And here’s a better one, in case of an off-hand atomic bomb attack go, quickly and quietly, to the nearest fall-out shelter down in the bowels of the old school. That’s what we practiced over at East. At least, I hope they don’t try that old gag and have us practice getting under our desks in such an emergency like in elementary school. Christ, I would rather take my chances, above desk, thank you. And… need I go on, you can listen to the rest when you get to homeroom I am just giving you the highlights, the year after year, memory highlights.
And if that isn’t enough, the reading of the rules and the gathering of more intelligence about you than the FBI or the CIA would need we then proceed to the ritualistic passing out of the books, large and small. (placing book covers on each, naturally, name, year, subject and book number safety placed in insert). All of them covered against the elements, your own sloth, and the battlefield school lunch room, that humongous science book that has every known idea from the ancient four furies of the air to nuclear fission, that math book that has some Pythagorean properties of its own, the social studies books to chart out human progress (and back-sliding) from stone age-cave times on up, and, precious, precious English book (I hope we do Shakespeare this year, I heard we do, that guy knew how to write a good story, same with that Salinger book I read during the summer). Still easy stuff though, for the first day.
Ya, but this will put a different spin on it for you, well, a little different spin anyway. Today I start in the “bigs”, at least the bigs of the handful-countable big events of my short, sweet life. Today I am starting my freshman year at hallowed old Olde Saco High (can you say old Olde, well you know what I mean) and I am as nervous as a kitten. Don’t tell me you weren’t just a little, little, tiny bit scared when you went from the cocoon-like warmth (or so it seemed compared to the “bigs”) of junior high over to the high school, whatever high school it was. Come on now, I’m going to call you out on it. Particularly those Easties who, after all, have been here before, unlike me who came out of the "projects" on the other side of town, and moved back to Olde Saco High after the "long march" move to the new East Junior High in 1958 so I don't know the ropes here at all.
They, especially those sweet girl Easties, including a certain she that I am severely "crushed up" on, in their cashmere sweaters and jumpers or whatever you call them, are nevertheless standing on these same steps, as we exchange nods of recognition, and are here just as early as I am, fretting their own frets, fighting their own inner demons, and just hoping and praying or whatever kids do when they are “on the ropes” to survive the day, or just to not get rolled over on day one.
And see, here is what you also don’t know, know yet anyway. I’ve caught Frank’s disease. You never heard of it, probably, and don’t bother to go look it up in some medical dictionary at the Caleb Brewster Public Library, or some other library, it’s not there. What it amount to is the old time high school, any high school, version of the anxiety-driven cold sweats. Now I know some of you know Frank, and some of you don’t, but I told his story to you before, the story about his big, hot, “dog day” August mission to get picnic fixings, including special stuff, like Kennedy’s potato salad, for his grandmother. That’s the Frank I’m talking about, my best junior high friend, Frank.
Part of that story, for those who don’t know it, mentioned what Frank was thinking when he got near battle-worn Olde Saco High on his journey to the Downs back in August. I’m repeating; repeating at least the important parts here, for those who are clueless:
“Frank (and I) had, just a couple of months before, graduated from East Junior High School and so along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit of anxiety was starting to form in Frank’s head about being a “little fish in a big pond” freshman come September as he passed by. Especially, a proto-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it “style” over there at East. That "style" involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long chino-panted, plaid flannel-shirted, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to mankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading…”
And that is why, when the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” I spent the summer this year, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at East called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you that was my pose, what do you want; I just wanted to see what he was talking about. In any case, I ain’t no commie, although I don’t know what the big deal is, I ain't turning anybody in, and the stuff is hard reading anyway. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knows Jack Kennedy, and is crazy for old-time guys like Jackson),and Catcher In The Rye by that Salinger guy I mentioned before (Holden is me, me to a tee).
Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out, test me on it, I am ready. Here's why. I intend, and I swear I intend to even on this first nothing (what did I call it before?-"gimme", ya) day of this new school year in this new school in this new decade to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, girl-chasing Frankie, who knows every arcane fact that mankind has produced and has told it to every girl who will listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Frankie, my buddy of buddies, mad monk, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. Now I want to try out my new “style”
See, that’s why on this Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960, this 7:00 AM, or a little after, Wednesday after Labor Day, I have Frank’s disease. He harped on it so much before opening of school that I woke up about 5:00 AM this morning, maybe earlier, but I know it was still dark, with the cold sweats. I tossed and turned for a while about what my “style”, what my place in the sun was going to be, and I just had to get up. I’ll tell you about the opening day getting up ritual stuff later, some other time, but right now I am worried, worried as hell, about my “style”, or should I say lack of style over at East. That will tell you a lot about why I woke up this morning before the birds.
Who am I kidding. You know that those cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, last night was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" I have kind of sneaked around mentioning as I have been talking, talking my head off just now to keep the jitters down. I just saw her, saw her with the other Eastie girls on the other side of the steps, and so I am going to have to say a little something about it. See, last year, late, toward the end of school I started talking to this Lydia MacAdams, yes, from the MacAdams family that ran the textile mills here in Olde Saco for eons and who employed my father and a million other fathers around here and then just headed south for the cheaper labor I heard. This is one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And it was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what matterd to me, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when I sat next to her in art class and we talked, talked our heads off.
But I never did anything about it, not then anyway although I had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because I wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she expected me to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students, and for freshmen in high school too because we don't have licenses to drive cars, in Olde Saco being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Diner (no, not the one of Atlantic Avenue, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Main is what I am talking about). I was just too shy and uncertain to do it.
Why? Well you might as well know right now I come from the wrong side of the tracks in this old town, over in the Albamarle projects and she, well like I said comes from the MacAdams family that lives over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when I figured if I studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff I like anyway, then this year I might just be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry in this burg does.
....Suddenly, a bell rings, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, are on the move, especially those Easties that I had nodded to before as I take those steps, two at a time. Too late to worry about style, or anything else, now. We are off to the wars; I will make my place in the sun as I go along, on the fly. But guess who just kind of brushed against me and gave me one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as we raced up those funky granite steps. On the fly, indeed.
********
....and a trip down memory lane.
MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel
(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)
Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please
Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco High School Class of 1964, comment:
Funny, here I am, finally, finally after what seemed like an endless heat-waved, eternal August dog day’d, book-devoured, summer. Standing, nervously standing, waiting with one foot on the sturdy granite-chiseled steps, ready at a moment’s notice from any teacher’s beck and call, to climb up to the second floor main entrance of old Olde Saco High (that’s in Maine for the non-Mainiacs, and if you don’t know Olde Saco you never will be a Mainiac and even if you do know if you were not born here you won’t be either. That’s how it is, and that’s how we like it). An entrance flanked by huge concrete spheres on each side, which are made to order for me to think that I too have the weight of the world on my shoulders this sunny day. And those doors, by the way, as if the spheres are not portentous enough, are also flanked by two scroll-worked concrete columns, or maybe they are gargoyle-faced, my eyes are a little bleary right now, who give the place a more fearsome look than is really necessary but today, today of all days, every little omen has its evil meaning, evil for me that is.
Here I am anyway, pensive (giving myself the best of it, okay, nice wrap-around-your soul word too, okay), head hanging down, deep in thought, deep in scared, get the nurse fast, if necessary, nausea-provoking thought, standing around, a little impatiently surly as is my “style” (that “style” I picked up a few years back in elementary school down in the Olde Saco “projects” over on Albemarle, after seeing James Dean or someone like that strike the pose, and it stuck). Anyway it’s now about 7:00 AM, maybe a little after, and like I say my eyes have been playing tricks on me all morning and I can’t seem to focus, as I wait for the first school bell to sound on this first Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960.
No big deal right, we have all done it many times by now it should be easy. Year after year, old August dog days turn into shorter, cooler September come hither young wanna-be learner days. Nothing to get nervous about, nothing to it. (Did I say that already?) Especially the first day, a half day, a “gimme” day, really, one of the few out of one hundred and eighty, count ‘em, and mainly used for filling out the one thousand and one pieces of paper about who you are, where you live, who you live with, and who to call in case you take some nasty fall in gym trying to do a double twist-something on the gym mat (and trying to impress in the process some girl over on the other side of the gym with your prowess, hope she is not looking juts then) or a wrestled double-hammer lock grip on some poor, equally benighted fellow student that goes awry like actually happened to me last year in eighth grade. Hey, they were still talking about that one in the Olde Saco East Junior High locker rooms at the end of the year, I hear.
Or, more ominously, they want that information so that if you cross-up one, or more, of your mean-spirited, ill-disposed, never-could have-been-young-and-troubled, ancient, Plato or Socrates ancient from the look of some of them, teachers and your parents (embarrassed, steaming, vengeful Ma really, in our neighborhoods) need to be called in to confer about “your problem,” your problem that you will grow out of with a few days of after school “help.” Please.
This “gimme” day (let’s just call it that okay, it will help settle me down) will be spent reading off, battered, monotone home room teacher-reading off, the also one thousand and one rules; no lateness to school under penalty of being placed in the stocks, Pilgrim-style, no illness absences short of the plague, if you have it, not a family member, and then only if you have a (presumably sanitized) doctor’s note; no cutting classes to explore the great American day streets at some nearby corner variety store, or mercy, Olde Saco Downs, one-horse Olde Saco Downs also under severe penalty; no (unauthorized) talking in class (but they will mark it down if you don't authorize talk, jesus); no giving guff (ya, no guff, right) to your teachers, fellow students, staff, the resident mouse or your kid brother, if you have a kid brother; no writing on walls, in books, and only on occasion on an (authorized) writing pad; no(get this one, I couldn’t believe this one over at East) cutting in line for the school lunch (the school lunch, Christ, as poor as we are in our family we at least have the dignity not to pine for, much less cut in line for, those beauties: the American chop suey done several different ways to cover the week, including a stint as baloney and cheese sandwiches, I swear); no off-hand rough-necking (or just plain, ordinary necking, either); no excessive use of the “lav” (you know what that is, enough said), and certainly no smoking, drinking or using any other illegal (for kids) substances.
Oh, ya, and don’t forget to follow, unquestioningly, those mean-spirited, ill-disposed teachers that I spoke of before, if there is a fire emergency. And here’s a better one, in case of an off-hand atomic bomb attack go, quickly and quietly, to the nearest fall-out shelter down in the bowels of the old school. That’s what we practiced over at East. At least, I hope they don’t try that old gag and have us practice getting under our desks in such an emergency like in elementary school. Christ, I would rather take my chances, above desk, thank you. And… need I go on, you can listen to the rest when you get to homeroom I am just giving you the highlights, the year after year, memory highlights.
And if that isn’t enough, the reading of the rules and the gathering of more intelligence about you than the FBI or the CIA would need we then proceed to the ritualistic passing out of the books, large and small. (placing book covers on each, naturally, name, year, subject and book number safety placed in insert). All of them covered against the elements, your own sloth, and the battlefield school lunch room, that humongous science book that has every known idea from the ancient four furies of the air to nuclear fission, that math book that has some Pythagorean properties of its own, the social studies books to chart out human progress (and back-sliding) from stone age-cave times on up, and, precious, precious English book (I hope we do Shakespeare this year, I heard we do, that guy knew how to write a good story, same with that Salinger book I read during the summer). Still easy stuff though, for the first day.
Ya, but this will put a different spin on it for you, well, a little different spin anyway. Today I start in the “bigs”, at least the bigs of the handful-countable big events of my short, sweet life. Today I am starting my freshman year at hallowed old Olde Saco High (can you say old Olde, well you know what I mean) and I am as nervous as a kitten. Don’t tell me you weren’t just a little, little, tiny bit scared when you went from the cocoon-like warmth (or so it seemed compared to the “bigs”) of junior high over to the high school, whatever high school it was. Come on now, I’m going to call you out on it. Particularly those Easties who, after all, have been here before, unlike me who came out of the "projects" on the other side of town, and moved back to Olde Saco High after the "long march" move to the new East Junior High in 1958 so I don't know the ropes here at all.
They, especially those sweet girl Easties, including a certain she that I am severely "crushed up" on, in their cashmere sweaters and jumpers or whatever you call them, are nevertheless standing on these same steps, as we exchange nods of recognition, and are here just as early as I am, fretting their own frets, fighting their own inner demons, and just hoping and praying or whatever kids do when they are “on the ropes” to survive the day, or just to not get rolled over on day one.
And see, here is what you also don’t know, know yet anyway. I’ve caught Frank’s disease. You never heard of it, probably, and don’t bother to go look it up in some medical dictionary at the Caleb Brewster Public Library, or some other library, it’s not there. What it amount to is the old time high school, any high school, version of the anxiety-driven cold sweats. Now I know some of you know Frank, and some of you don’t, but I told his story to you before, the story about his big, hot, “dog day” August mission to get picnic fixings, including special stuff, like Kennedy’s potato salad, for his grandmother. That’s the Frank I’m talking about, my best junior high friend, Frank.
Part of that story, for those who don’t know it, mentioned what Frank was thinking when he got near battle-worn Olde Saco High on his journey to the Downs back in August. I’m repeating; repeating at least the important parts here, for those who are clueless:
“Frank (and I) had, just a couple of months before, graduated from East Junior High School and so along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit of anxiety was starting to form in Frank’s head about being a “little fish in a big pond” freshman come September as he passed by. Especially, a proto-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it “style” over there at East. That "style" involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long chino-panted, plaid flannel-shirted, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to mankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading…”
And that is why, when the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” I spent the summer this year, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at East called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you that was my pose, what do you want; I just wanted to see what he was talking about. In any case, I ain’t no commie, although I don’t know what the big deal is, I ain't turning anybody in, and the stuff is hard reading anyway. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knows Jack Kennedy, and is crazy for old-time guys like Jackson),and Catcher In The Rye by that Salinger guy I mentioned before (Holden is me, me to a tee).
Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out, test me on it, I am ready. Here's why. I intend, and I swear I intend to even on this first nothing (what did I call it before?-"gimme", ya) day of this new school year in this new school in this new decade to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, girl-chasing Frankie, who knows every arcane fact that mankind has produced and has told it to every girl who will listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Frankie, my buddy of buddies, mad monk, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. Now I want to try out my new “style”
See, that’s why on this Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960, this 7:00 AM, or a little after, Wednesday after Labor Day, I have Frank’s disease. He harped on it so much before opening of school that I woke up about 5:00 AM this morning, maybe earlier, but I know it was still dark, with the cold sweats. I tossed and turned for a while about what my “style”, what my place in the sun was going to be, and I just had to get up. I’ll tell you about the opening day getting up ritual stuff later, some other time, but right now I am worried, worried as hell, about my “style”, or should I say lack of style over at East. That will tell you a lot about why I woke up this morning before the birds.
Who am I kidding. You know that those cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, last night was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" I have kind of sneaked around mentioning as I have been talking, talking my head off just now to keep the jitters down. I just saw her, saw her with the other Eastie girls on the other side of the steps, and so I am going to have to say a little something about it. See, last year, late, toward the end of school I started talking to this Lydia MacAdams, yes, from the MacAdams family that ran the textile mills here in Olde Saco for eons and who employed my father and a million other fathers around here and then just headed south for the cheaper labor I heard. This is one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And it was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what matterd to me, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when I sat next to her in art class and we talked, talked our heads off.
But I never did anything about it, not then anyway although I had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because I wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she expected me to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students, and for freshmen in high school too because we don't have licenses to drive cars, in Olde Saco being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Diner (no, not the one of Atlantic Avenue, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Main is what I am talking about). I was just too shy and uncertain to do it.
Why? Well you might as well know right now I come from the wrong side of the tracks in this old town, over in the Albamarle projects and she, well like I said comes from the MacAdams family that lives over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when I figured if I studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff I like anyway, then this year I might just be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry in this burg does.
....Suddenly, a bell rings, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, are on the move, especially those Easties that I had nodded to before as I take those steps, two at a time. Too late to worry about style, or anything else, now. We are off to the wars; I will make my place in the sun as I go along, on the fly. But guess who just kind of brushed against me and gave me one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as we raced up those funky granite steps. On the fly, indeed.
********
....and a trip down memory lane.
MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel
(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)
Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please
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