Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for martin Scorsese’s film, Hugo.
Hugo, starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Jude Law. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Paramount Pictures, 2011
A film about film-making, or about a slice of life of the history of film-making and filmmakers, must always be an appealing subject for any director, and especially for a quirky and historically-immersed director like Martin Scorsese. We are all children of the film age (including Hugo and the other children who pop up in this film) and thus it was interesting to see as the “plot” unfolded how film began to be used the movies as a modern metaphor for humankind’s imaginations, of its dreams and of the process of going from disbelief to the suspension of disbelief that is part of any film experience, including this film.
As for the film itself, based on an adaptation of novelistic treatment of the wonder of discovery, of invention, and of pure fantasy inherent in trying to make dreams come to life it works pretty well. And to place that challenge in the hands of a child just adds to the effect. One might argue, and should, that the length of the film including its little redundancies (the constant background shots of the railroad station and it inhabitants) could reasonably have been shorter by about fifteen minutes. And, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that it really does take film’s magical suspension of disbelief techniques to take a plot that is centered in Paris while the cast speaks the Queen’s English making one think that we could have been in the center of London just as easily. Other than those minor points this film was entertaining. And isn’t that what film should be all about. That is what its founders thought anyway.
Monday, August 20, 2012
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.
Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these 1950s days of classic rock and roll sketches, those king hell king corner boy-in chief Frankie Riley-induced sketches that I have been forced to do, forced by pressed memory to do if you are asking for a reason. Or maybe, as a reason anyway, just to unwind after raging against the awry-struck world we live in, or the coming big sleep night. And if you don’t know the routine here is a quick primer. Start out with a tip of the hat to the fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is, makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then move on to the part that is befuddled (my befuddled) by today’s teenage-hood and its tribal customs, mores, and language. And then I go, presto, scampering back to my own “safe” teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this sketch is no different from the established pattern, except, today we decipher the 1950s golden age of the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses), the essential ingredient in that scene, that drive this one.
See, this sketch is driven , almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs that I have been checking out lately in search of that 1950s good night. In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory that caught my eye. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot,” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If one really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food at that, off a tray strapped to the door while seated in their cherry, “boss," 1959 Chevy.
Beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home a few cars over), and above all there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where this entire sketch gets mixed together.
Of course, just like another time when I was discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” made me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Ya, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.
Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she entered, she always in the end entered into these things? Yes, I see, looking back at my notes that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Roy’s Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie had really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation on more than one occasion to no avail) he was nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not so much for his looks as they were just kind of Steve McQueen okay. What made them they go for him was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose , midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And it was not just “beat’ girls that liked to be around him either as you will find out.
Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the... (Oh, forget the divine, quotation marks or not) Joanne had had their 207th (that number, or close, since 8th grade lovebirds) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)
Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (Yah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). What I didn’t know was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser, had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was enamored of his patter (or so I heard later). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine. And here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl) and Frankie once again had hit pay dirt. The not so funny thing was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home anyway I could while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.
Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I got a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).
Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it. Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said when Frankie first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.
The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, a second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if you could rob the cradle with Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and had lied about her age because she had been embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. (More “aunts” than you would have suspected got unexpected visits from errant nieces than you could shake a stick at in those days when bastardry had a greater social stigma.)
Moreover, somewhere along the line Sandy and her cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, had been looking for a way to take revenge on Joanne and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. An ironic slight smile, a little response to some off-hand patter, and maybe a little sway and he fell, fell easy. So for a long time Frankie was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles who might have seen him with Sandy to secrecy.
Here is the best part though. One night I was walking into Skip’s Record Shop looking for some new record as Sandy was walking out. She stopped me to inquire about whether Frankie and Joanne were back together. I answered yes with a shrug. Then she told me her version of that Saturday night saga I have just related. It matched up pretty well with what Frankie had told me so I asked her whether she was going to do anything to break up our lovebirds. She laughed and told me (in confidence) that she had no intention in the world of doing anything about that. She had, after all that brute of a husband, who might take out Frankie, and her. Besides and here is where women, married or single, are something else. All she really wanted out of Frankie was the knowledge that she could take him away from Joanne any time she wanted to. And, added in, to make Frankie sweat about Joanne finding out. I’m telling you this one in strictest confidence even now. Don’t tell Joanne or Frankie. Ever.
Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these 1950s days of classic rock and roll sketches, those king hell king corner boy-in chief Frankie Riley-induced sketches that I have been forced to do, forced by pressed memory to do if you are asking for a reason. Or maybe, as a reason anyway, just to unwind after raging against the awry-struck world we live in, or the coming big sleep night. And if you don’t know the routine here is a quick primer. Start out with a tip of the hat to the fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is, makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then move on to the part that is befuddled (my befuddled) by today’s teenage-hood and its tribal customs, mores, and language. And then I go, presto, scampering back to my own “safe” teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this sketch is no different from the established pattern, except, today we decipher the 1950s golden age of the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses), the essential ingredient in that scene, that drive this one.
See, this sketch is driven , almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs that I have been checking out lately in search of that 1950s good night. In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory that caught my eye. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot,” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If one really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food at that, off a tray strapped to the door while seated in their cherry, “boss," 1959 Chevy.
Beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home a few cars over), and above all there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where this entire sketch gets mixed together.
Of course, just like another time when I was discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” made me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Ya, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.
Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she entered, she always in the end entered into these things? Yes, I see, looking back at my notes that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Roy’s Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie had really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation on more than one occasion to no avail) he was nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not so much for his looks as they were just kind of Steve McQueen okay. What made them they go for him was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose , midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And it was not just “beat’ girls that liked to be around him either as you will find out.
Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the... (Oh, forget the divine, quotation marks or not) Joanne had had their 207th (that number, or close, since 8th grade lovebirds) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)
Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (Yah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). What I didn’t know was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser, had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was enamored of his patter (or so I heard later). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine. And here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl) and Frankie once again had hit pay dirt. The not so funny thing was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home anyway I could while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.
Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I got a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).
Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it. Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said when Frankie first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.
The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, a second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if you could rob the cradle with Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and had lied about her age because she had been embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. (More “aunts” than you would have suspected got unexpected visits from errant nieces than you could shake a stick at in those days when bastardry had a greater social stigma.)
Moreover, somewhere along the line Sandy and her cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, had been looking for a way to take revenge on Joanne and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. An ironic slight smile, a little response to some off-hand patter, and maybe a little sway and he fell, fell easy. So for a long time Frankie was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles who might have seen him with Sandy to secrecy.
Here is the best part though. One night I was walking into Skip’s Record Shop looking for some new record as Sandy was walking out. She stopped me to inquire about whether Frankie and Joanne were back together. I answered yes with a shrug. Then she told me her version of that Saturday night saga I have just related. It matched up pretty well with what Frankie had told me so I asked her whether she was going to do anything to break up our lovebirds. She laughed and told me (in confidence) that she had no intention in the world of doing anything about that. She had, after all that brute of a husband, who might take out Frankie, and her. Besides and here is where women, married or single, are something else. All she really wanted out of Frankie was the knowledge that she could take him away from Joanne any time she wanted to. And, added in, to make Frankie sweat about Joanne finding out. I’m telling you this one in strictest confidence even now. Don’t tell Joanne or Frankie. Ever.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
From "OCCUPY HOMES MASSACHUSETTS"- No Homeowner Need Stand Alone!-Organize Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Quincy website for more information about Occupy Homes MA.
Stand Together-Occupy Homes Ma-Stop 'the banksters' Foreclosures and Evictions
OCCUPY HOMES MA
Next Meeting Scheduled For Tufts Library, Broad Street, Weymouth, August 21 2012-6:00 PM- Check out directions and details on our Facebook page-Occupy Homes MA.
WANT ASSISTANCE OR MORE INFORMATION?
OccupyHomesMA@gmail.com
617-249-4359
*********
Are you facing FORECLOSURE?- YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
Stand up with other homeowners who are fighting with us.
Want more information?
Contact us by email at OccupyHomesMA@gmail.com
or call us at 617-249-4359
The homeowner's meeting is intended to be a support group
specifically for those in the foreclosure process.
ATTEND A HOMEOWNERS MEETING TO
Develop Solidarity and Support:
We urge people to leave their shame at the door. We work to end the stigma and isolation of individual foreclosure and eviction cases by uniting homeowners.
Learn Your Rights:
You don't have to move just because the bank says so. We empower people to know their rights and advocate for themselves.
Organize with Occupy Homes MA:
Community members and activists are ready to stand with you. Let’s build mass resistance to defend your home and break the stranglehold the big banks have on our neighborhoods.
************
Want to get involved?
Participate!
Fight back! A movement working for the 99% must be shaped and formed by all those who participate. All decisions on the direction and scope of the struggle are democratic.
Organize!
Build powerful communities! Identify issues affecting our neighborhoods, and work together on solutions.
Mobilize!
The best tool of the 99% is our numbers, and our ability to work together. Plan public actions, protests, and home defense.
Educate!
Become educated and teach others about the nature of the foreclosure crisis, and ways empowered communities can begin to solve it.
************
Excerpt from...
Keeping House: Local Organizations Collaborate to Help Boston Residents Stay in Their Home Post-Foreclosure
Noelle Swan Spare Change News
When Jeril Richardson checked out of the hospital after he was hit by a car in 2009, he returned home to find that his landlord had not been keeping up with mortgage payments and the bank was foreclosing on his Hyde Park home.
Canvassers knocking on his door told him about City Life Vida Urbana, a community organization that would help him to fight to stay in his home. Nearly three years later, Richardson still lives in the house, pays rent to the bank, and is saving to purchase the property.
Every weekend, students and community volunteers from Project No One Leaves hit the streets in an effort to reach tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure to inform them of their rights during and after the foreclosure.
"We try to get there before eviction agents come knocking and telling them to leave immediately," said Chris Larson, senior at Tufts University who helped to coordinate a chapter of No One Leaves at Tufts.
In recent years, keeping up with new foreclosures has become a daunting task, said Chas Hamilton, a third-year law student and current president of the board for Project No One Leaves at Harvard Law School. "In a given week, there might be 30 new foreclosures listed in Boston proper."
"Then there are properties that they did not get to in weeks past because canvassers ran out of time, people weren't home, or their just weren't enough cars to get to all of the neighborhoods." Volunteers for No One Leaves chart foreclosure postings listed in local newspapers and real estate publications.
Listings are grouped into geographic zones of the city and mapped out. Each week, a dozen or so volunteers gather at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau in Cambridge, split up into groups of two to five depending on the number of cars available, and try to get out to as many properties as they can in three hours.
"The real message that we try to deliver is that foreclosure is not the end. It's the beginning of this very long battle," Larson said.
http://sparechangenews.net/news/keeping-house-
local-organizations-collaborate-help-boston-residents-
stay-their-home-post-forecl
********
WHY Occupy Homes MA?
OCCUPY OUR HOMES
Far too many homeowners are facing foreclosure. The need is greater than the capacity to help. City Life along with a team from Harvard Law is mentoring Occupy Homes MA as we create this new chapter to help homeowners on the South Shore. We are here to:
STOP FORECLOSURES
This is a people's movement that is building across Massachusetts. Homeowners did not create the crisis we are in, and homeowners are no longer going to face the shame of foreclosure and eviction alone. We are here to:
STOP EVICTIONS
The police should serve and protect the 99%, not assist the big banks with eviction. We will organize the community and resist eviction. Knowledge is power; they cannot easily put you out on the street - we want to help you, we won't let them!
HOUSING IS A HUMAN
There are 18 million empty homes in the U.S.
Help us, to help you by saying: "NOT MY HOME!"
Stand Together-Occupy Homes Ma-Stop 'the banksters' Foreclosures and Evictions
OCCUPY HOMES MA
Next Meeting Scheduled For Tufts Library, Broad Street, Weymouth, August 21 2012-6:00 PM- Check out directions and details on our Facebook page-Occupy Homes MA.
WANT ASSISTANCE OR MORE INFORMATION?
OccupyHomesMA@gmail.com
617-249-4359
*********
Are you facing FORECLOSURE?- YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
Stand up with other homeowners who are fighting with us.
Want more information?
Contact us by email at OccupyHomesMA@gmail.com
or call us at 617-249-4359
The homeowner's meeting is intended to be a support group
specifically for those in the foreclosure process.
ATTEND A HOMEOWNERS MEETING TO
Develop Solidarity and Support:
We urge people to leave their shame at the door. We work to end the stigma and isolation of individual foreclosure and eviction cases by uniting homeowners.
Learn Your Rights:
You don't have to move just because the bank says so. We empower people to know their rights and advocate for themselves.
Organize with Occupy Homes MA:
Community members and activists are ready to stand with you. Let’s build mass resistance to defend your home and break the stranglehold the big banks have on our neighborhoods.
************
Want to get involved?
Participate!
Fight back! A movement working for the 99% must be shaped and formed by all those who participate. All decisions on the direction and scope of the struggle are democratic.
Organize!
Build powerful communities! Identify issues affecting our neighborhoods, and work together on solutions.
Mobilize!
The best tool of the 99% is our numbers, and our ability to work together. Plan public actions, protests, and home defense.
Educate!
Become educated and teach others about the nature of the foreclosure crisis, and ways empowered communities can begin to solve it.
************
Excerpt from...
Keeping House: Local Organizations Collaborate to Help Boston Residents Stay in Their Home Post-Foreclosure
Noelle Swan Spare Change News
When Jeril Richardson checked out of the hospital after he was hit by a car in 2009, he returned home to find that his landlord had not been keeping up with mortgage payments and the bank was foreclosing on his Hyde Park home.
Canvassers knocking on his door told him about City Life Vida Urbana, a community organization that would help him to fight to stay in his home. Nearly three years later, Richardson still lives in the house, pays rent to the bank, and is saving to purchase the property.
Every weekend, students and community volunteers from Project No One Leaves hit the streets in an effort to reach tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure to inform them of their rights during and after the foreclosure.
"We try to get there before eviction agents come knocking and telling them to leave immediately," said Chris Larson, senior at Tufts University who helped to coordinate a chapter of No One Leaves at Tufts.
In recent years, keeping up with new foreclosures has become a daunting task, said Chas Hamilton, a third-year law student and current president of the board for Project No One Leaves at Harvard Law School. "In a given week, there might be 30 new foreclosures listed in Boston proper."
"Then there are properties that they did not get to in weeks past because canvassers ran out of time, people weren't home, or their just weren't enough cars to get to all of the neighborhoods." Volunteers for No One Leaves chart foreclosure postings listed in local newspapers and real estate publications.
Listings are grouped into geographic zones of the city and mapped out. Each week, a dozen or so volunteers gather at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau in Cambridge, split up into groups of two to five depending on the number of cars available, and try to get out to as many properties as they can in three hours.
"The real message that we try to deliver is that foreclosure is not the end. It's the beginning of this very long battle," Larson said.
http://sparechangenews.net/news/keeping-house-
local-organizations-collaborate-help-boston-residents-
stay-their-home-post-forecl
********
WHY Occupy Homes MA?
OCCUPY OUR HOMES
Far too many homeowners are facing foreclosure. The need is greater than the capacity to help. City Life along with a team from Harvard Law is mentoring Occupy Homes MA as we create this new chapter to help homeowners on the South Shore. We are here to:
STOP FORECLOSURES
This is a people's movement that is building across Massachusetts. Homeowners did not create the crisis we are in, and homeowners are no longer going to face the shame of foreclosure and eviction alone. We are here to:
STOP EVICTIONS
The police should serve and protect the 99%, not assist the big banks with eviction. We will organize the community and resist eviction. Knowledge is power; they cannot easily put you out on the street - we want to help you, we won't let them!
HOUSING IS A HUMAN
There are 18 million empty homes in the U.S.
Help us, to help you by saying: "NOT MY HOME!"
Silencing Dissent in America-by Stephen Lendman
Silencing Dissent in America-by Stephen Lendman
18 Aug 2012
Freedom in America is endangered. Bipartisan complicity plans destroying it altogether.
America is on a fast track toward tyranny and ruin. Police state laws threaten everyone.
Increasingly dissent is marginalized. It's not tolerated. Resistance is called dangerous to national security.
Federal authorities target activists. So do militarized local police. No holds barred tactics are employed.
In October 2010, the Center for Constitutional Rights said:
"The growing threat to the right to dissent has been demonstrated in the U.S. government's efforts to silence speech, and criminalize and target peaceful movements."
"These efforts are becoming more aggressive, emboldened further by the Supreme Court's increasingly conservative decisions, for instance regarding material support in the form of humanitarian aid to so-called terrorist organizations."
Howard Zinn called dissent "the highest form of patriotism." Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler's book "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty First Century America" discusses what everyone needs to know.
It explores how activism and dissent are targeted. Demonstrations are attacked and disrupted. Protesters are called terrorists. They're arrested and jailed for expressing constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment and other rights.
Authorities claim they give "material support" to perceived enemies. "Hell No" provides advice on dealing with a menu of police state practices.
American's First Amendment guarantees free expression, a free press, the right to peacefully assemble, free exercise of religion, and right to petition government for redress of grievances.
Without these rights, all others are at risk. They've been fast eroding in America for years en route to eliminating them altogether. Forgotten are numerous Supreme Court decisions upholding free expression and assembly rights.
In Edwards v. South Carolina (1963), the Court ruled against state authorities for prohibiting protesters from marching for civil rights.
In Cox v. Louisiana (1965), the Court held that state government cannot employ "breach of the peace" statutes against protesters engaging in peaceful demonstrations by claiming they may incite violence.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court ruled government can't punish inflammatory speech unless it's "directed" to incite lawless action.
In Texas v. Johnson (1989), Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion, saying:
In Wooley v. Maynard (1977), the Court upheld "the right of individuals to hold a point of view different from the majority" with respect to "idea(s) they find morally objectionable."
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
Post-9/11, dissent has been increasingly marginalized.
In October 2008, so-called (Attorney General Michael) Mukasey/(FBI Director Robert) Mueller Guidelines gave federal authorities "flexibility (to) protect the Nation from terrorist threats."
Consolidated new rules include criminal and national security issues. Surveillance restrictions were eased. Domestic spying became institutionalized. Constitutional rights are ignored.
"War on terror" authority escalated FBI abuses. Intrusive surveillance tools used against alleged spies now target ordinary Americans. Mukasey/Mueller Guidelines underwent four separate changes. Each one increased FBI surveillance powers.
Tactics include intrusive spying, commercial database data retrieval, paid informants infiltrating groups or targeting individuals on false pretenses, and letting covert unidentified agents conduct "pretext" interviews for information.
Mukasey/Mueller Guidelines left ordinary Americans increasingly vulnerable to abuse. Anyone may be investigated for any reason or none at all.
Authorization permits surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and other social justice groups. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists are targeted. Any organization or individual is vulnerable. Anything goes is now policy. Obama is more repressive than Bush.
Data mining collects vast amounts of information on ordinary Americans. How it's used, who knows. Against targeted individuals and groups, it's used abusively.
Everything is fair game. Personal records of all kinds are obtained. Activities are closely monitored. So-called "suspicious activity reports" allege possible criminal activity.
The USA Patriot Act authorized so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). They expanded the FBI's authority to obtain personal customer records from ISPs, financial institutions, credit companies, and other sources without prior court approval.
Innocent people are targeted. Virtually anything in public or private records can be gotten. "Gag" orders prevent targeted individuals or groups from revealing the information demanded. NSL use continues increasing exponentially.
Lawful rights are violated in numerous ways. Classic police state tactics are used. No one's safe when authorities act this way. Freedom is perilously close to vanishing. Mueller has virtual carte blanche authority.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters have been targeted and criminalized. Constitutional rights are violated. Beatings and other forms of excessive force are used. Nonviolent protests are called terrorism.
Patriot Act provisions criminalized dissent. Innocent people are arrested, indicted and imprisoned. "Terrorist profiles" let FBI and local police investigate anyone for any reason. Obama and congressional allies sold out constituents for Wall Street and other monied interests.
Obama escalated repressive Bush practices. The Oregorian newspaper reported that heavily armed FBI units raided homes of OWS protesters in Seattle and Olympia, WA and Portland, OR over the last month.
Actions have been ongoing since early July. Authorities claim violent crimes are being investigated. Eyewitnesses report dozens of FBI agents in body armor and military fatigues armed with assault rifles involved.
One witness said:
In fact, nonviolent activists were targeted, terrorized, and criminalized. At issue is engaging in constitutionally protected protests. Militarized FBI agents used stun grenades and battering rams. Victims were pulled out of bed at gunpoint.
Personal possessions were seized. They included computers, suspect literature and other materials in written or electronic form, cell phones, thumb drives, and clothing with political slogans.
False charges remain sealed. Fundamental rights are criminalized. Post-9/11, similar raids were conducted. At issue is political dissent as well as America's ongoing war on Islam.
Disproportionate force is used. Victims were handcuffed while homes were searched. Arrests weren't made, but about six protesters were subpoenaed to appear before grand juries.
On August 1, Dennison Williams and Leah Plante read a statement outside a Portland, OR courthouse, saying:
Williams and Plante said they'll invoke the Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer grand jury questions.
America's Grand Jury System
They're convened to determine possible probable cause to return indictments. Critics say they rubber stamp aggressive prosecutions.
Federally, they have extraordinary investigative powers. Prosecutors abuse them to manipulate proceedings for outcomes they wish. Victims are vulnerable to bogus indictments. The Fifth Amendment requires grand jury indictments for federal criminal charges.
Prosecutors have extraordinary discretion. They choose witnesses, grant selective immunity, and do nearly all questioning.
Proceedings are conducted in secret. No one may disclose what goes on unless ordered to do so judicially. Anyone may be subpoenaed. Answering questions is mandated unless special privilege is granted. For example: lawyer/client confidentiality or self-incrimination.
Lawyers can't intervene to help clients while testifying. Double jeopardy doesn't apply to grand juries, but without indictments, prosecutors need Criminal Division Attorney General permission to try again. Victims have no protections against false witness testimonies perhaps gotten for leniency on existing or threatened charges.
Prosecutors routinely want grand jury indictments. The system is rigged to get them. Targeted victims are defenseless. Many innocent people languish wrongfully in prison. Justice is routinely denied.
Numerous past incidents occurred. In September 2010, administration ordered raids targeted Chicago and Minneapolis anti-war/pro-Palestinian activists. Arrests weren't made, but homes were ransacked. Computers, cell phones, books, photos, correspondence, papers, and other possessions were seized.
Twenty-three victims were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries. Activists were again targeted during NATO's May invasion. False terror plots were claimed. Activist homes were raided. Five victims faced terrorism-related charges.
Numerous other arrests were made. Everyone charged is innocent. Police brutality was reported. Most injuries were from baton head and body blows. Over two dozen were hospitalized for broken bones, concussions, knocked out teeth, and open wounds requiring stitches.
NATO arrives nowhere peacefully. Obama officials and local police wage war on dissent. Legal restraints don't apply for anyone charged with alleged terrorism or conspiracy to commit it. Abolition of constitutional rights shows what everyone faces.
It's the wrong time to be activist in America. Doing so means possible indictment, prosecution, and imprisonment for doing the right thing.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
18 Aug 2012
Freedom in America is endangered. Bipartisan complicity plans destroying it altogether.
America is on a fast track toward tyranny and ruin. Police state laws threaten everyone.
Increasingly dissent is marginalized. It's not tolerated. Resistance is called dangerous to national security.
Federal authorities target activists. So do militarized local police. No holds barred tactics are employed.
In October 2010, the Center for Constitutional Rights said:
"The growing threat to the right to dissent has been demonstrated in the U.S. government's efforts to silence speech, and criminalize and target peaceful movements."
"These efforts are becoming more aggressive, emboldened further by the Supreme Court's increasingly conservative decisions, for instance regarding material support in the form of humanitarian aid to so-called terrorist organizations."
Howard Zinn called dissent "the highest form of patriotism." Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler's book "Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty First Century America" discusses what everyone needs to know.
It explores how activism and dissent are targeted. Demonstrations are attacked and disrupted. Protesters are called terrorists. They're arrested and jailed for expressing constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment and other rights.
Authorities claim they give "material support" to perceived enemies. "Hell No" provides advice on dealing with a menu of police state practices.
American's First Amendment guarantees free expression, a free press, the right to peacefully assemble, free exercise of religion, and right to petition government for redress of grievances.
Without these rights, all others are at risk. They've been fast eroding in America for years en route to eliminating them altogether. Forgotten are numerous Supreme Court decisions upholding free expression and assembly rights.
In Edwards v. South Carolina (1963), the Court ruled against state authorities for prohibiting protesters from marching for civil rights.
In Cox v. Louisiana (1965), the Court held that state government cannot employ "breach of the peace" statutes against protesters engaging in peaceful demonstrations by claiming they may incite violence.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court ruled government can't punish inflammatory speech unless it's "directed" to incite lawless action.
In Texas v. Johnson (1989), Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion, saying:
"(I)f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable."
In Wooley v. Maynard (1977), the Court upheld "the right of individuals to hold a point of view different from the majority" with respect to "idea(s) they find morally objectionable."
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Article 20(1) states:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."
Article 29(2) states:
"In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society."
Post-9/11, dissent has been increasingly marginalized.
In October 2008, so-called (Attorney General Michael) Mukasey/(FBI Director Robert) Mueller Guidelines gave federal authorities "flexibility (to) protect the Nation from terrorist threats."
Consolidated new rules include criminal and national security issues. Surveillance restrictions were eased. Domestic spying became institutionalized. Constitutional rights are ignored.
"War on terror" authority escalated FBI abuses. Intrusive surveillance tools used against alleged spies now target ordinary Americans. Mukasey/Mueller Guidelines underwent four separate changes. Each one increased FBI surveillance powers.
Tactics include intrusive spying, commercial database data retrieval, paid informants infiltrating groups or targeting individuals on false pretenses, and letting covert unidentified agents conduct "pretext" interviews for information.
Mukasey/Mueller Guidelines left ordinary Americans increasingly vulnerable to abuse. Anyone may be investigated for any reason or none at all.
Authorization permits surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and other social justice groups. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists are targeted. Any organization or individual is vulnerable. Anything goes is now policy. Obama is more repressive than Bush.
Data mining collects vast amounts of information on ordinary Americans. How it's used, who knows. Against targeted individuals and groups, it's used abusively.
Everything is fair game. Personal records of all kinds are obtained. Activities are closely monitored. So-called "suspicious activity reports" allege possible criminal activity.
The USA Patriot Act authorized so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). They expanded the FBI's authority to obtain personal customer records from ISPs, financial institutions, credit companies, and other sources without prior court approval.
Innocent people are targeted. Virtually anything in public or private records can be gotten. "Gag" orders prevent targeted individuals or groups from revealing the information demanded. NSL use continues increasing exponentially.
Lawful rights are violated in numerous ways. Classic police state tactics are used. No one's safe when authorities act this way. Freedom is perilously close to vanishing. Mueller has virtual carte blanche authority.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters have been targeted and criminalized. Constitutional rights are violated. Beatings and other forms of excessive force are used. Nonviolent protests are called terrorism.
Patriot Act provisions criminalized dissent. Innocent people are arrested, indicted and imprisoned. "Terrorist profiles" let FBI and local police investigate anyone for any reason. Obama and congressional allies sold out constituents for Wall Street and other monied interests.
Obama escalated repressive Bush practices. The Oregorian newspaper reported that heavily armed FBI units raided homes of OWS protesters in Seattle and Olympia, WA and Portland, OR over the last month.
Actions have been ongoing since early July. Authorities claim violent crimes are being investigated. Eyewitnesses report dozens of FBI agents in body armor and military fatigues armed with assault rifles involved.
One witness said:
"I just heard lots of pounding at 6 o'clock, and I got up and I saw the whole thing. I saw them screaming to get in. They were using the battering ram, and then finally the door just opened."
FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele told the Oregonian"
"The warrants are sealed, and I anticipate they will remain sealed."
Authorities alleged searches were for "anti-government or anarchist literature or materials," as well as "documentation and communications related to the offenses, including but not limited to notes, diagrams, letters, diary and journal entries, address books, and other documentation in written or electronic form."
In fact, nonviolent activists were targeted, terrorized, and criminalized. At issue is engaging in constitutionally protected protests. Militarized FBI agents used stun grenades and battering rams. Victims were pulled out of bed at gunpoint.
Personal possessions were seized. They included computers, suspect literature and other materials in written or electronic form, cell phones, thumb drives, and clothing with political slogans.
False charges remain sealed. Fundamental rights are criminalized. Post-9/11, similar raids were conducted. At issue is political dissent as well as America's ongoing war on Islam.
Disproportionate force is used. Victims were handcuffed while homes were searched. Arrests weren't made, but about six protesters were subpoenaed to appear before grand juries.
On August 1, Dennison Williams and Leah Plante read a statement outside a Portland, OR courthouse, saying:
"This grand jury is a tool of political repression. It is attempting to turn individuals against each other by coercing those subpoenaed to testify against their communities."
"The secret nature of grand jury proceedings creates mistrust and can undermine solidarity. And imprisoning us takes us from our loved ones and our responsibilities."
Williams and Plante said they'll invoke the Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer grand jury questions.
America's Grand Jury System
They're convened to determine possible probable cause to return indictments. Critics say they rubber stamp aggressive prosecutions.
Federally, they have extraordinary investigative powers. Prosecutors abuse them to manipulate proceedings for outcomes they wish. Victims are vulnerable to bogus indictments. The Fifth Amendment requires grand jury indictments for federal criminal charges.
Prosecutors have extraordinary discretion. They choose witnesses, grant selective immunity, and do nearly all questioning.
Proceedings are conducted in secret. No one may disclose what goes on unless ordered to do so judicially. Anyone may be subpoenaed. Answering questions is mandated unless special privilege is granted. For example: lawyer/client confidentiality or self-incrimination.
Lawyers can't intervene to help clients while testifying. Double jeopardy doesn't apply to grand juries, but without indictments, prosecutors need Criminal Division Attorney General permission to try again. Victims have no protections against false witness testimonies perhaps gotten for leniency on existing or threatened charges.
Prosecutors routinely want grand jury indictments. The system is rigged to get them. Targeted victims are defenseless. Many innocent people languish wrongfully in prison. Justice is routinely denied.
Numerous past incidents occurred. In September 2010, administration ordered raids targeted Chicago and Minneapolis anti-war/pro-Palestinian activists. Arrests weren't made, but homes were ransacked. Computers, cell phones, books, photos, correspondence, papers, and other possessions were seized.
Twenty-three victims were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries. Activists were again targeted during NATO's May invasion. False terror plots were claimed. Activist homes were raided. Five victims faced terrorism-related charges.
Numerous other arrests were made. Everyone charged is innocent. Police brutality was reported. Most injuries were from baton head and body blows. Over two dozen were hospitalized for broken bones, concussions, knocked out teeth, and open wounds requiring stitches.
NATO arrives nowhere peacefully. Obama officials and local police wage war on dissent. Legal restraints don't apply for anyone charged with alleged terrorism or conspiracy to commit it. Abolition of constitutional rights shows what everyone faces.
It's the wrong time to be activist in America. Doing so means possible indictment, prosecution, and imprisonment for doing the right thing.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
Julian Assange: Political Refugee -by Stephen Lendman
Julian Assange: Political Refugee -by Stephen Lendman
19 Aug 2012
International law protects refugees and asylum seekers.
Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calls them:
"A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."
Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them.
To gain legal protection, they must:
• be outside their country of origin;
• fear persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.
Immihelp.com calls asylum and refugee status "closely related." They differ "only in the place where a person asks for asylum status."
Refugee status is asked for outside countries of origin. "However, all people who are granted asylum status must meet the definition of a refugee."
Assange is entitled to political refugee rights. Britain won't grant them.
Ecuador granted him political asylum. His fears are well-founded. If Britain extradites him to Sweden, he'll be sent to America. He'll be unjustly prosecuted for whistleblowing. He'll face many years in prison or capital punishment.
An earlier New York Times report said a secret grand jury convened. At issue is charging Assange with espionage under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Doing so contradicts the law's intent. It doesn't deter Justice Department officials from using it. It passed shortly after America's entry into WW I. Over time it's been amended numerous times.
Originally it prohibited interfering with US military operations, supporting the nation's enemies, promoting insubordination in the ranks, or obstructing military recruitment.
In 1921, its most controversial provisions were repealed. In 2010, Bradley Manning was charged under the Act. Technically its under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). It includes parts of the US Code.
Allegedly a sealed Assange indictment is ready to be made public whenever Washington wishes to do so. Espionage Act violations will be charged.
America twists legal meanings to serve its interests. Bogus charges facilitate hanging innocent victims out to dry. Headlines portray Assange as public enemy number one. He won't get a moment's peace.
Asylum isn't freedom. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said London won't grant safe passage. Britain's Foreign Office said:
"We are determined to carry out our legal obligation to see Julian Assange extradited to Sweden."
"We will not allow Mr. Assange safe passage out of the UK, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so. The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum."
"It is far from a universally accepted concept: the United Kingdom is not a party to any legal instruments, which require us to recognize the grant of diplomatic asylum by a foreign embassy in this country."
Hague added in part:
"We are disappointed by the statement by Ecuador’s Foreign Minister today that Ecuador has offered political asylum to Julian Assange."
"Under our law, with Mr. Assange having exhausted all options of appeal, the British authorities are under a binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden."
"We must carry out that obligation and of course we fully intend to do so. The Ecuadorian Government's decision this afternoon does not change that in any way."
"Nor does it change the current circumstances in any way. We remain committed to a diplomatic solution that allows us to carry out our obligations as a nation under the Extradition Act."
"The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Hague omitted saying Britain spurns international law principles repeatedly. Like America, other NATO nations, and Israel, it operates extrajudicially.
On August 19, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) will hold an extraordinary meeting in Ecuador. Assange's situation will be discussed.
Britain and Ecuador are at impasse. Resolution may not come soon. Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's London embassy. WikiLeaks posted his statement on its Twitter page, saying:
"It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from prosecution, but a courageous, independent Latin American nation."
At issue is how to get there safely. More on that below.
Peru holds UNASUR's rotating presidency. A statement released on its foreign ministry website says:
"The Foreign Ministry of Peru lets public opinion know that, in concordance with the statutory responsibilities of the temporary presidency of UNASUR, at the behest of the Republic of Ecuador and after consulting member states, an extraordinary meeting of the Counsel of Foreign Ministers of the Union has been convened on Sunday August 19 in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador."
"The meeting has been requested with the intention of considering the situation raised at the embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom."
On August 24, Organization of American States (OAS) voted to meet in Washington. At issue is discussing Ecuador's granting Assange asylum. Twenty-three members voted in favor of the meeting. America, Canada, and Trinidad and Tobago opposed the resolution. Five nations abstained. Another three were absent.
OAS secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza said convening isn't about Assange per se. It's to discuss "the problem posed by the threat or warning made to Ecuador by the possibility of an intervention into its embassy in London."
"The issue that concerns us is the inviolability of diplomatic missions of all members of this organization, something that is of interest to all of us."
What OAS will accomplish is doubtful. It largely defers to US interests. Its history is long and shameful. Chartered to "promote democratic institutions," it defiled them for decades.
Previous leaders include a rogue's gallery of regional despots. They include father and son Duvalier in Haiti, fascist Rios Montt in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, an array of Mexican despots, Fujimori and others like him in Peru, Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, and other death squad rulers in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere in the region.
Instead of combatting terrorism, they practiced it. In countries like Haiti, Honduras and Colombia little changed. Whether or not they'll support Ecuador remains unclear. Perhaps so if they're worried about their own security.
Assange saw his native Australia spurn him when he's most in need. Instead of condemning UK bullying and refusal to grant safe passage, Prime Minister Julia Gillard cynically claimed she can't help.
It's none of Australia's business, she suggested. All nations are obligated to protect their citizens. International law requires it. Core tenets include the right to life and humane treatment. It holds abroad as well at home. Consular support is responsible when domestic help isn't available.
In 2010, Gillard called releasing diplomatic cables "grossly irresponsible" and "illegal." No matter that state secrets weren't revealed. Information at most was embarrassing, not harmful. Australia supports Washington's imperium. It's complicit with Obama officials intent to prosecute and imprison Assange.
On August 17, the UK Telegraph headlined "WikiLeaks: Julian Assange will take Britain to the 'World Court,' " saying:
In 1998, Baltasar Garzon indicted Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. He now represents Assange. He's a political refugee, he said. Ecuador granted him asylum status. Britain is obligated to honor it.
"They have to comply with diplomatic and legal obligations under the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and respect the sovereignty of a country that has granted asylum."
"If Britain doesn't comply with its obligations, we will go before International Court of Justice to demand that Britain complies with its obligations because there is a person who runs the risk of being persecuted politically."
Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He provides Assange legal advice. He denounced Britain, saying:
"They overstepped, looked like bullies, and made (things) into a big-power versus small power conflict."
Britain should "back off." So should America. Both countries should obey international law and respect Assange's status. "He has a legal right to asylum under the refugee convention."
"Under the UN declarations, there cannot be any adverse consequences for countries granting asylum. It’s considered a humanitarian act."
British officials act like "bullies" for Washington.
On August 16, British MP George Galloway slammed his government for supporting Washington's intent to crucify Assange. He called Sweden's bogus sex charges cover to ship him to America. He hit hard explaining:
"Is there anyone out there that thinks that Britain is doing this, would do that because of charges of sexual misconduct in Sweden? Is there anybody out there really thinks that?"
"Or is it more likely that Britain has done this and will perhaps do the rest in the service of the United States of America, which is salivating at the possibility of getting their hands on the man who with WikiLeaks embarrassed American and British imperialism in front of the whole world?"
On June 20, a Washington Post editorial headlined "Asylum for Julian Assange?" saying:
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is "a small-time South American autocrat." Chavez "has been his political mentor." He boosted his political influence by granting Assange an interview. He hosted a popular Russia Today program.
A litany of canards followed. The Post made spurious anti-Correa accusations. It dismissively ignored likely US extradition, espionage charges and imprisonment. Guilt or innocence doesn't matter.
It acted like Obama's spokesman. It said US-Ecuadorian trade relations may suffer. "If Mr. Correa seeks to appoint himself America's chief Latin American enemy and Julian Assange's protector….it's not hard to imagine the outcome."
It's simple knowing which side the Post favors. It consistently supports US imperial interests. It's firm against whatever compromises them. It's comfortable about policies harming others. It cheerleads America's war machine. So do other Western media scoundrels.
A Final Comment
On August 16, the London Guardian published ways Assange might leave Britain freely. They range from diplomatic status to smuggling him out. Ideas discussed include:
(1) Giving Assange a diplomatic passport. They facilitate travel but don't confer immunity.
(2) Granting him diplomatic status. Doing so immunizes him from prosecution. Article 29 of the Vienna Convention states:
19 Aug 2012
International law protects refugees and asylum seekers.
Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calls them:
"A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."
Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them.
To gain legal protection, they must:
• be outside their country of origin;
• fear persecution;
• be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
• fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
• pose no danger to others.
Immihelp.com calls asylum and refugee status "closely related." They differ "only in the place where a person asks for asylum status."
Refugee status is asked for outside countries of origin. "However, all people who are granted asylum status must meet the definition of a refugee."
Assange is entitled to political refugee rights. Britain won't grant them.
Ecuador granted him political asylum. His fears are well-founded. If Britain extradites him to Sweden, he'll be sent to America. He'll be unjustly prosecuted for whistleblowing. He'll face many years in prison or capital punishment.
An earlier New York Times report said a secret grand jury convened. At issue is charging Assange with espionage under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Doing so contradicts the law's intent. It doesn't deter Justice Department officials from using it. It passed shortly after America's entry into WW I. Over time it's been amended numerous times.
Originally it prohibited interfering with US military operations, supporting the nation's enemies, promoting insubordination in the ranks, or obstructing military recruitment.
In 1921, its most controversial provisions were repealed. In 2010, Bradley Manning was charged under the Act. Technically its under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). It includes parts of the US Code.
Allegedly a sealed Assange indictment is ready to be made public whenever Washington wishes to do so. Espionage Act violations will be charged.
America twists legal meanings to serve its interests. Bogus charges facilitate hanging innocent victims out to dry. Headlines portray Assange as public enemy number one. He won't get a moment's peace.
Asylum isn't freedom. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said London won't grant safe passage. Britain's Foreign Office said:
"We are determined to carry out our legal obligation to see Julian Assange extradited to Sweden."
"We will not allow Mr. Assange safe passage out of the UK, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so. The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum."
"It is far from a universally accepted concept: the United Kingdom is not a party to any legal instruments, which require us to recognize the grant of diplomatic asylum by a foreign embassy in this country."
Hague added in part:
"We are disappointed by the statement by Ecuador’s Foreign Minister today that Ecuador has offered political asylum to Julian Assange."
"Under our law, with Mr. Assange having exhausted all options of appeal, the British authorities are under a binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden."
"We must carry out that obligation and of course we fully intend to do so. The Ecuadorian Government's decision this afternoon does not change that in any way."
"Nor does it change the current circumstances in any way. We remain committed to a diplomatic solution that allows us to carry out our obligations as a nation under the Extradition Act."
"The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Hague omitted saying Britain spurns international law principles repeatedly. Like America, other NATO nations, and Israel, it operates extrajudicially.
On August 19, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) will hold an extraordinary meeting in Ecuador. Assange's situation will be discussed.
Britain and Ecuador are at impasse. Resolution may not come soon. Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's London embassy. WikiLeaks posted his statement on its Twitter page, saying:
"It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from prosecution, but a courageous, independent Latin American nation."
At issue is how to get there safely. More on that below.
Peru holds UNASUR's rotating presidency. A statement released on its foreign ministry website says:
"The Foreign Ministry of Peru lets public opinion know that, in concordance with the statutory responsibilities of the temporary presidency of UNASUR, at the behest of the Republic of Ecuador and after consulting member states, an extraordinary meeting of the Counsel of Foreign Ministers of the Union has been convened on Sunday August 19 in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador."
"The meeting has been requested with the intention of considering the situation raised at the embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom."
On August 24, Organization of American States (OAS) voted to meet in Washington. At issue is discussing Ecuador's granting Assange asylum. Twenty-three members voted in favor of the meeting. America, Canada, and Trinidad and Tobago opposed the resolution. Five nations abstained. Another three were absent.
OAS secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza said convening isn't about Assange per se. It's to discuss "the problem posed by the threat or warning made to Ecuador by the possibility of an intervention into its embassy in London."
"The issue that concerns us is the inviolability of diplomatic missions of all members of this organization, something that is of interest to all of us."
What OAS will accomplish is doubtful. It largely defers to US interests. Its history is long and shameful. Chartered to "promote democratic institutions," it defiled them for decades.
Previous leaders include a rogue's gallery of regional despots. They include father and son Duvalier in Haiti, fascist Rios Montt in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, an array of Mexican despots, Fujimori and others like him in Peru, Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, and other death squad rulers in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere in the region.
Instead of combatting terrorism, they practiced it. In countries like Haiti, Honduras and Colombia little changed. Whether or not they'll support Ecuador remains unclear. Perhaps so if they're worried about their own security.
Assange saw his native Australia spurn him when he's most in need. Instead of condemning UK bullying and refusal to grant safe passage, Prime Minister Julia Gillard cynically claimed she can't help.
It's none of Australia's business, she suggested. All nations are obligated to protect their citizens. International law requires it. Core tenets include the right to life and humane treatment. It holds abroad as well at home. Consular support is responsible when domestic help isn't available.
In 2010, Gillard called releasing diplomatic cables "grossly irresponsible" and "illegal." No matter that state secrets weren't revealed. Information at most was embarrassing, not harmful. Australia supports Washington's imperium. It's complicit with Obama officials intent to prosecute and imprison Assange.
On August 17, the UK Telegraph headlined "WikiLeaks: Julian Assange will take Britain to the 'World Court,' " saying:
In 1998, Baltasar Garzon indicted Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. He now represents Assange. He's a political refugee, he said. Ecuador granted him asylum status. Britain is obligated to honor it.
"They have to comply with diplomatic and legal obligations under the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and respect the sovereignty of a country that has granted asylum."
"If Britain doesn't comply with its obligations, we will go before International Court of Justice to demand that Britain complies with its obligations because there is a person who runs the risk of being persecuted politically."
Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He provides Assange legal advice. He denounced Britain, saying:
"They overstepped, looked like bullies, and made (things) into a big-power versus small power conflict."
Britain should "back off." So should America. Both countries should obey international law and respect Assange's status. "He has a legal right to asylum under the refugee convention."
"Under the UN declarations, there cannot be any adverse consequences for countries granting asylum. It’s considered a humanitarian act."
British officials act like "bullies" for Washington.
On August 16, British MP George Galloway slammed his government for supporting Washington's intent to crucify Assange. He called Sweden's bogus sex charges cover to ship him to America. He hit hard explaining:
"Is there anyone out there that thinks that Britain is doing this, would do that because of charges of sexual misconduct in Sweden? Is there anybody out there really thinks that?"
"Or is it more likely that Britain has done this and will perhaps do the rest in the service of the United States of America, which is salivating at the possibility of getting their hands on the man who with WikiLeaks embarrassed American and British imperialism in front of the whole world?"
On June 20, a Washington Post editorial headlined "Asylum for Julian Assange?" saying:
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is "a small-time South American autocrat." Chavez "has been his political mentor." He boosted his political influence by granting Assange an interview. He hosted a popular Russia Today program.
A litany of canards followed. The Post made spurious anti-Correa accusations. It dismissively ignored likely US extradition, espionage charges and imprisonment. Guilt or innocence doesn't matter.
It acted like Obama's spokesman. It said US-Ecuadorian trade relations may suffer. "If Mr. Correa seeks to appoint himself America's chief Latin American enemy and Julian Assange's protector….it's not hard to imagine the outcome."
It's simple knowing which side the Post favors. It consistently supports US imperial interests. It's firm against whatever compromises them. It's comfortable about policies harming others. It cheerleads America's war machine. So do other Western media scoundrels.
A Final Comment
On August 16, the London Guardian published ways Assange might leave Britain freely. They range from diplomatic status to smuggling him out. Ideas discussed include:
(1) Giving Assange a diplomatic passport. They facilitate travel but don't confer immunity.
(2) Granting him diplomatic status. Doing so immunizes him from prosecution. Article 29 of the Vienna Convention states:
"The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest or detention. The receiving state shall treat him with due respect and shall take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on his person, freedom or dignity."
At the same time, nations are obligated to respect each other's laws. According to former UK Foreign Office lawyer Joanne Foakes:
"In principle, a state can freely appoint anyone as a member of its mission, apart from its head of mission."
"But if they were to seek to do so now, it would be an obvious device to evade the laws of the receiving state, the UK. In these circumstances the UK may feel justified in repudiating such an appointment."
(3) Diplomatic vehicles can't be searched. Provide one for transport to London's international airport. At issue is getting on, off, onboard an aircraft, safely out of British airspace, and not intercepted by US warplanes en route to Ecuador.
(4) Smuggle him out or use a crate, bag or other container. The Vienna Convention says "diplomatic bag(s) shall not be opened or detained." They can be scanned or subjected to thermal imaging. Body heat would reveal something live. Britain might demand to know what.
Other alternatives include diplomacy, pro-Assange world opinion, other nations and British MPs speaking out on his behalf, perhaps a favorable World Court decision, UK embarrassment, or maybe after months of standoff its government deciding it's not worth the fuss, bother, or row.
For now, Assange remains in limbo. Determined Ecuadorean ingenuity and commitment are needed to save him.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Prescott Breslin’s Stardust Memories War
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hoagy Carmichael performing Stardust to set the mood for this piece.
He was scared, Prescott Breslin was scared. Scared more than he had ever been at any time in his life over the last forty years, at any time since that 1942 night his 1st Marine Division unit, his Bravo company, stationed out in just being built Camp Pendleton, California had gotten orders to move out west the next day, west to the Jap dotted island of the World War II hard fighting west. And while that scare was prospective his current scare was real, life-threatening real. Several days before he had had pains, heart pains so severe he thought, and his wife Delores thought too, that was the end right then and there. Somehow she had gotten help, gotten help that had gotten him to Portland General Hospital, and gotten him there in time for some heart surgery to work him back to life, for now.
And that for now, and that scared about the end had driven a very private Prescott Breslin to call in his kindred (his old time Appalachia word for his family and others), his available kindred to come and, well, he might not have put it this way, comfort him (and Delores). Thus on the morning of April 16th 1983 I, Josh Breslin, his youngest son, and his only daughter, Lissette, were sitting by his home-side bed up in Olde Saco, Maine listening to him tell some stuff about his life, stuff that neither of us had ever heard much about from this hither-to-fore distant father figure.
While he was having his say he asked to have his favorite music, the music of his generation, the one that had survived (just barely) the Great Depression of the 1930s and had fought (or like Delores had anxiously awaited behind) the hard island and continent battles of World War II playing on the record player in the background.
I, mistakenly, thumbing through the dusty pile of LP records had put on Rosemary Clooney’s Come On To My House, a song I had heard wafting through the house on the radio on the now long gone WMEX, his station of choice out of Portland in those days. He yelled, or what passed for yelling in his condition, that he did not want to hear that rock and roll stuff from the 1950s and made it very clear (as he always did on the not many occasions when he made a big deal out of his wants) that 1950, maybe 1952, was the cutoff date for the background music that he wanted played. This told me already that two things were going to happen.
One, that we were not to be entertained by any stories of his life, or of our family life after that time and, two, that he was going to continue to mourn, now apparently to the grave, that his two older sons, Lawrence James (named after his father) and Daniel Francis (named after my mother’s father) were not there at his bedside then. And the reason that those two sons, my brothers whom I too missed, were not available was that Larry was just at that moment serving yet another five to ten stretch for an armed robbery in Bar Harbor (a cheap jack gas station of all places, jesus) up at Shawshank Prison. And Danny had left home heading west (what west, and how far, he did not tell me when he left) in 1966 and had not been seen, or heard of, by the family since despite some serious efforts by Dad to find him.
See, as will become apparent as Prescott Breslin tells his story, or the parts that he wanted told, told by me his son who had made a fair living out of writing up such stories over the previous ten years or so, he was a simple man, with simple values, simple wants, and a simple code. Therefore a most complex man in our go-go times. Larry, Danny and I were his children, his kin, so right or wrong, good or bad, that was it (and Lissette too, but as he told me once many years before when we were in one of our more talkative phases, he never really did understood women, except Delores, and so by the age of puberty Lissette had kind of been a blur to him. She, on the other hand, as was evident that morning between the tears and laughter, worshipped the ground he walked on and, and while I had had my tiffs with him, who was to say she was wrong).
That they (and I) caused him more heartbreak than any simple man should have to endure did not matter, we were his kids, his boys okay, and that was that. So if you sense that Larry and Danny were in the room that April morning and if you sense that the old man just wanted to remember ahead to the early 1950s and no further before the whole thing went awry for him (and Delores) for that reason then that is just about right. And if you hear Lena Horne’ soulful, wistful long gone times past voice singing Stormy Weather to beat away the 1940s blues night that is just about right too. Prescott Breslin expressed himself satisfied when I finally found that gem and placed it on the turntable.
I, by the way, must have eaten up about half of his record collection that day even with many replays of his very most favorite tunes (and some jointly connected with Delores youth favorites). Certainly Lena’s Stormy Weather got several plays as did Tangerine, a mother favorite, Sentimental Journey, a slew of Inkspots stuff, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, and Whispering Trees, The Mills Brothers, especially Paper Doll, another mother favorite. A couple of Andrews Sisters things for laughs and, of course their song of songs (or one of them) done by Hoagy Carmichael, I think it was his version, Stardust.
Here though is what he had to say that morning (and after some rest, and lunch, that afternoon) as best I could take it down in my teared-up notebook:
He, at first, kept coming back coming back a few times, to his current frail heart condition and how that brush with death had triggered thoughts about the last time he knew, knew for sure, that he was scared, hard scared. In his in his laconic way he just kept saying he remembered that he was scared, scared silly, and he didn’t care who knew about it. Rugged hills and hollows born, Appalachia mountain Kentucky hard-scrabble farm born, fear hid under the rug, or somewhere else born he was still scared. He, Prescott Breslin, just weeks, maybe a couple of months if he counted it up, out of those hills and hollows, was scared because his unit, his semper fi 1st Marine Corps Division unit had just received orders to head out in the morning, head out west.
He remembered that he was sitting by himself that night before in the make-shift Quonset hut PX at a picnic table munching coffee and cakes and thinking west could only mean the Pacific islands that dotted the way to Japan. Some units had already gone out, gone out quickly all through early 1942 and as 1943 approached all hell was breaking loose with men and material heading west; just like in the old time pioneer west if he had thought about it that way then.
[Prescott Breslin, even forty years later, in relating this story to us would not give the precise day that his unit left California just in case some Nips or Chinks (Prescott’s terms) might be lurking around and could use the information in the future. He was certainly a man of his Great Depression/World War II times. JLB]
Sitting with that cup of black coffee (hell, he said, nobody back home ever had it any other way besides who had extra milk or cream left over for such fixings, and black was fine anyway) and cruller donut (he had grown to love this donut business after a lifetime of his Ma’s old patched-up bread pudding and sunken baking soda-laden cakes) he was not thinking about pioneer west stuff, or even, after he bit into the cruller, scared thoughts so much but about how life was funny. Not funny to have a laugh over but just the way the cards were dealt funny. It might have been the sugar, or it might have been the caffeine but his started to think about all the stuff that he hadn’t done, and some stuff he had done, to keep the thoughts of the days ahead in check.
First off though was his pride in being one of the best troopers in his training unit down at Parris Island, and then his assigned unit at Pendleton. It wasn’t so much that it came natural to him, although coming from the hard rock country didn’t hurt when they went out into the “boonies” on those twenty mile full-pack hikes or when he busted out number one on the rifle range with that silly M-I pop gun. It was more that, at first, guys, yankee city guys from Boston and New York, or northern farm boys anyway, laughed at him about his back mountain drawl, about his not knowing about donuts, about not knowing about how to handle a folk and spoon right and all kinds of yankee stuff that didn’t make sense to him, or them when he asked them to explain what they meant and why.
After a while, after a ton of callouses and blisters, after a ton of KP, after half a ton of pranks, and after about eight weeks of showing guys, yankee guys and farm boys, that he could be depended on if something happened to them they were practically competing to have him as their “buddy.” More than one guy said, said straight out, when they got the news of the move out that as long as Prescott Breslin was going along with them he wasn’t quite so scared. Here was the kicker though, the one that made him beam. A couple of days before they got orders they had all chipped in to by him drinks at the enlisted men’s club to show their appreciation AND a dozen donuts, assorted, the next morning. Still sitting at that piney table Prescott Breslin was scared.
While he was thinking an odd-scared thought or two somebody, a guy he didn’t recognize sitting with a nice- looking tanned Oceanside girl, at another table had gotten up to put some nickels in the jukebox and he, still thinking about life’s ups and downs, could hear the strains of I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire and that song got him kind of choked up at first. He then laughed, not a funny laugh, as he listened to the lyrics and thought that he sure didn’t want to, and hadn’t, set the world on fire. He sure hadn’t.
Getting into the heart of the song, the lonely guy misery part, he hadn’t a girl left behind to think of him while he was away blasting Pacific islands to smithereens. Out there, out there in sunny California, he had had not too much luck finding a girl, not much luck at all really. The girls seemed too fast for him, to ready to dismiss his back mountain drawl and write him down as a damn hillbilly. One time at the Surfside Grille in Oceanside where all the guys went when they had passes he met a girl, a pretty girl who liked his looks she said, liked his black hair, and brown eyes. She nevertheless told him flat out once she found out where he was from that she would pass him by. Why? Well, she, herself was from some podunk okie town and now that she was a California girl she was thinking of becoming a blonde and had definitely shaken the dust off her of okie kind of boys. She wanted, and she said this flat out too, a movie star soldier boy like Robert Taylor. Jesus, women, California women.
[We all laughed at that one. I because two of my three wives had come from there although neither were blonde and neither had been from Podunk but had been born and bred California women. I too though could shout to the high heavens about the perfidies of California women, transplants or born and bred. Lissette’s first husband had been from there as well and he had run back there when things got tough between them and married his high school sweetheart on the rebound. So change the gender and that explained Lissette’s laugh. Dad laughed at his own story but I think I could detect just the slightest anguish as he was probably thinking about whether Danny had perhaps married a California woman and maybe had some things to say about that.]
Sure, back home, he had had a few nibbles, a couple of girls from Prestonsburg and Hazard, girls with nice looks and manners and who couldn’t complain of his drawl. But nothing serious happened, nothing serious because from about age fourteen all the girls where he came from, even Prestonsburg girls, got all moony over being married and, in order to get from under being embedded in their own large families, start families of their own. He had wanted no part of that, not at twenty, no way. But he got just a little melancholy, taking another sip of that sweet black coffee, when he thought that he might never have a chance to get married. Never have a family of his own to take care of him in his old age, if he had an old age.
[He welled up a little as he mentioned that last thought. He was probably thinking that Larry would never be a comfort to him or Delores now that he had spent a good part of his adult life behind bars and hadn’t learned to keep out of jail. And that Danny would probably never come back after all this time and that I, who had my own fair share of estrangements and non-talkative period with him (and Delores), was at best a fifty-fifty proposition. Whether he factored Lissette into his thoughts that day was another matter but probably not, she was still probably that long ago blur, that blur who worshipped him.]
Mainly though he thought that night about the things he did had done over the previous few years before he had enlisted and wished that he had had more time to do some more of them. Hell, it wasn’t nothing big, nothing to set the world on fire, but it was his life. His life, six or seven years before, once he knew the score, knew the hard-scrabble Kentuck farm score, and that if he didn’t want nothing but hard calloused hands and looking eighty at forty (like his pa and grandpa) he had better hit the highway. Since there were twelve kids at home, and only enough to feed about eight right nobody (except Ma, he later, much too much later, found out) missed him when he set out for Lexington one dark night. He got a ride from Colonel Eddie (not really a colonel but everybody with two bucks for a genuine certificate called himself that) the local long-haul driver who was always looking for company on his runs west, and knew how to keep quiet when a guy asked him to about stuff like where he was going, and why.
And he also thought about how once he got to Lexington, after a few crop-picking and dish-washing jobs to keep him alive in the city, he met up with a couple of guys, Doc and Hank, at Lucy’s Diner who wanted form a band and make some money playing what they called the coal-dust circuit. He played a fair guitar for a kid, had a decent voice that had become deeper and more tuneful as he aged, and best of all he knew all the old-timey songs that the hills and hollows folks wanted to hear. Boy, did he know them all. Stuff like Tom Doulas, Ommie Wise, and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies.
[With some Inkspot tune playing softly in the background he nevertheless started to sing Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart and sounded pretty damn good for a guy in his condition. You could see, see just for a moment, that Kentuck Sheik boy who had all the young girls, the young Prestonsburg and Hazard girls ordering dresses through some mail order catalogue just to be pretty on Saturday night barn dance time. And, hell, easily see how my own mother could have fallen for him, fallen hard for him, when they first met at Old Orchard’s Starlight Ballroom back in 1943 or 44.]
A couple of weeks later with some practice, a small stake, and lots of dreams, they hit the back road Saturday night places where the locals held their weekly barn dances (complete with plenty of moonshine to liven things up). Sometimes they, now known as the Kentuck Sheiks (that sheik name had been made popular a few years before and you just added your state name in front and you had a genuine band name), passed the hat, sometimes when there was no dough they just took a couple of days room and board for their troubles.
He remembered too the time that through some white lightning connections, some Moonshine Johnnie, the king of the illegal local whiskey ring, or whatever the liquid was by the time it got boiled down, packaged, and run through the hills and hollows just in front of the revenue agents, the Sheiks got to play before a crowd in his hometown of Hazard. And they were billed on flyers, handbills, and posters as the Kentuck Sheiks featuring Prescott Breslin. Moonshine Johnnie’s idea was that he would throw a free Saturday barn dance down at Farmer Ben’s, a place where locals had been having their weekly dances since, well, since there was a Hazard as far as anybody knew. Johnnie wanted to introduce those who didn’t know to his product, or who knew and had a thirst. In short to move product, be an outstanding citizen, and listen to the mountain-etched music just like any other hillbilly.
The Sheiks were to pass the hat like they had done at a hundred such gatherings and with a hometown boy on the stage they expected a little extra haul. Additionally, Johnnie, just in case the cash haul was short, threw in five jugs of his premium liquor for the boys. That addition proved to be my father’s undoing. The art of drinking hard liquor, hard still-made liquor takes some cultivation, some time to get used to it. Young men need to grow into it with age like drinking wine is for some Europeans. The night of the barn dance, that Saturday afternoon really, he had started drinking a steady stream out of the jug so that by show time his was in good form (as were Doc and Hank partners), and as far as the show went they were a great success. As far as the show part went.
But this was just flat-out the wrong night to develop his whiskey skills. Just before the dance, while the band was setting up and checking things out, Becky Price, an old Hazard sweetheart came up and started to rekindle some flame. Becky sure did look fine that night he thought with a pretty, frilly store-bought dress (really Montgomery Ward catalogue bought he found out later) and her hair done up in ribbons. She had heard he was playing that night and had gotten herself all pretty for him. They talked some then and some at intermission and agreed to meet after the dance at Lance’s Diner over on Route 5 when he was finished packing up after the show.
But that is where the liquor proved to be a demon. After the show, things packed up, he decided to take a little curse off the liquor in his system by having a couple more hits at the jug. After the second swallow he just keeled over dead drunk. When he woke up the next morning the boys were up front in their sedan, Doc driving, while he laid across the back seat as they headed for a show in Steubenville, Ohio. Poor Becky, he hoped she didn’t wait long that night.
[We laughed again although I noticed that his sweet Delores, my mother, didn’t laugh quite so heartily on this story. She had, if asked, her own stories to tell about fending off a couple of Olde Saco girlfriends who were also taken by his black hair, brown eyes and fine uniform look and who, unlike her, were willing “to do” it, if necessary to win his favor. This information only came to me much later when she was ready for me to tell her story.]
That band job lasted for about a year or so, maybe a little bit more, but then times got so bad about 1937 or 38 that three guys just couldn’t make it on bread and butter, literally. So he got off the road, headed back home, and started to work in Mr. Peabody’s coal mines (not every mine was owned by the Peabody Coal Company as he was at pains to inform his fellow platoon members when they had asked what he did in the “real world” but that is what everybody called it around home when a guy went into the mines).
Now even a hills and hollows boy who grew up in that hard –scrabble country but who grew up on a farm needed to adjust to the hard times in the mines. The early hours, the wash up time that was unpaid for adding to the long day, the damn coal dust, the noise, the deafening noise, from the machines drilling against god’s ancient rock, and the sweat, the infernal sweat even on cold days once you got down in the pits. After a couple of months he adjusted to the routine, got to know real coal-miners who were the third or fourth generation going down there, and got some respect when he told the boys that they were not getting paid nearly enough for the tough work they did for the damn Johnson Coal Company. The boys listened, and knowing Kentucky coalfields traditions, hell Harlan, bloody Harlan, was just down the road they prepared to strike one time. Somehow the company got wind of it and offered a small raise and paid wash-up time just to keep the production moving. That was enough, enough then with plenty of guys out of work, and plenty of guys, scabs, guys from the outside, with hungry mouths to feed, but still scabs, ready to cross the lines if anything happened.
There he was though stuck in the mines, the damn black-lung mines (his mother cried every time he came home at night looking, well, looking like a damn nigra, and coughing the dust out half the night) when the news of the Japs hitting Pearl came over the radio and guys, guys like him, all over the country, were lined up three, maybe more, deep, to enlist. Funny though he could, having worked his way up a little in the mines, have gotten a vital industries draft deferral and been sitting right then in the Prestonsburg hotel with some pretty town girl drinking real store-bought liquor and working up his courage to ask her up into his room. But no, on December 9, 1941 he had gone to Prestonsburg and enlisted in the Marines right on the dotted line. And he never looked back.
Scared, scared to death, or not, sitting at that wooden table having a second cruller and a third cup of mud Private First Class Prescott Breslin thought it over for a minute. He then said to himself, hell, between shoveling coal for Mr. Peabody forever and fighting the damn Japs I’ll take the Japs. And that made him just a little less scared as someone walked up and put another nickel in the jukebox to play If I Didn’t Care.
[After relating that last pearl of wisdom, which my father had actually imparted to me a long time ago when I was about seventeen or eighteen after I had asked him about his uniform that was hanging in a back closet, he expressed a wish for a little rest before lunch. The following is what he had to say in the afternoon after lunch. Of course he was still tired, a little groggy and disoriented from the mix of medications and so he rambled more, at times a lot more, in the afternoon and went back and forth on subjects. He still though adamantly refused somewhere in that deep Breslin reservoir of hurt to go much beyond the early 1950s. And of course he, as he had done in the morning, kept asking me to put his beloved 1940s songs on the record player. I had just put Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing on and that triggered a story that my mother had told him when they first met at the Starlight Ballroom in Old Orchard. Like I said the afternoon just rambled on but this one will tell anybody a lot about my mother and father, their love, and why they had endured in Olde Saco, foreign territory for him, through thick and thin.]
Your mother had had just enough of Elizabeth LaCroix, Aunt Betty, and her tangled love life with your mother’s brother, Jean. [Always called in proper F-C speak, Jeanbon.] Every other week, it seemed, Betty was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint it starts with an s and ends with an x. [Lissette and my mother blushed but he just plowed ahead and after noticing their discomfort he said that he was well past having to be polite about thing now that he was facing the grim reaper (his words) one on one.]
See Betty and your mother were seniors at Olde Saco High School in 1937. Let me add that they were, and the yearbook photos don’t lie, were both dark-haired French-Canadian [F-C remember?] American beauties, dewy roses like only those with forbears from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex was naturally in the equation, in the eternal boy-girl, Betty-Jean, equation. And for your mother too, since about fourteen when she learned that she could, with just a little effort, get the guys stirring, stirring over thoughts about dewy roses and other material matters. But this is strictly, well almost strictly, a Betty-Jean story so we will leave the Delores-smitten guys to stew. [He laughed a victor’s laugh at that one.]
The friction between your mother and Betty, or rather her momentary wrath at Betty, was centered on the hard fact that in a few months the girls would be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduated and those who, for one reason or another didn’t. And, graduation or not, the next step was marriage. That was just, as I well know, the established working class and religious ethos of the town, the F-C-inspired culture, and the times. Get out of your parents’ overburdened house and into your own small cold-water flat, maybe over on Fourteenth Street by the river, and dream of your own small white picket fence future house, maybe on Atlantic Avenue toward the ocean. And that cycle, as I also found out although I could never do much about it, had been established for a long while.
It seemed that although Betty and Jean had been an “item” for only a few months that Betty had this Saturday night I am talking about had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, and never make-up with dear Jean fight. And like I said whether the year was 1037, 1537, or 1937 the issue, to put it straight now that I’ve already said it, was sex, or rather to use the latest craze saying then “doing it.” Really though, the real crux of the matter, was that she wanted to wait until that cold- water flat marriage, and not before, no way before, to give in to your uncle, one Jean Claude LeBlanc.
Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state in 1935, Jean, was all for “doing the do” right then as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty that Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach. And Jean had almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she was so anxious and the hour was so late that she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus. [More womanly blushes]
You don’t get my drift. Okay, let me go by the numbers. Boy (really man since Jean has already graduated from Olde Saco and been working as a high-grade machine mechanic at the MacAdams Textile Mill over on Main Street for a while then. That defined man in these parts) meets girl. Boy (man) takes girl here and there in his new, well fairly new, Studebaker and they cap the night off watching the fishes swim down at the close-by beach (at the secluded far end, the Squaw Rock end, known by one and all as, well just known for being secluded, okay). Girl successfully holds off boy (man). Got it. [Jesus Dad we all know about Squaw Rock and that stuff although nothing was said while he was speaking.]
But how do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it, tried to get one Betty La Croix in the mood. Take one guess. Backing up the ocean swells and moonlight in the mood department is one Benny Goodman and his gang on that car radio, providing that heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the walls of Jericho down that I mentioned before. A little Buddha Swings at the right moment will go a long way. So Benny did his part.
[After a little break to take his afternoon medication my father moved on to tell this one. I thought it sounded kind of familiar some of the details anyway. And it was, partially because it was his version of a story my mother had told to me about their courting days when she was in one of her expansive non-blaspheming Josh Breslin to hell and say seven novenas moods. The story had something, actually little, to do with my oldest brother Larry and so my father told it in such a way that even with Larry now serving his third (or was it fourth ) stretch in Shawshank you could tell that he was still the old man’s favorite. It was okay with me by then, and had been for a long time. That was just the old man and his hard and fast loyalties, likes and prejudices.]
“Lawrence Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute,” yelled your mother, Mother Breslin to you then if I recall. I think you kids called her that then over some scheme you Josh had devised to show contemptuous respect or something, and it included the yelled at Larry. She was always honey to me as I never bought into that Mother thing you kept pestering me about, that sounded too much like some Ste. Brigitte’s nun thing to me. I though was only the mother-supporting father to the boy being yelled at just that minute. Just as, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Larry’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WMEX air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Our song, or one of them. Our forever memory song.
As a result, the proposed rant was halted, momentarily halted, as Delores flashed back and began to speak of the night in 1943 over at the Starlight Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach when she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right here in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl) and one Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, me, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while our boys were off fighting. We hit it off right away, made Far Away Places our song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and we could get our dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although we never specified a number. [My mother silently nodded in agreement with some kind of smile on her face.] The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a not from hunger breathe.
As Bing finished up your mother snapped back into the reality of the Larry hands on the wall moment, the two by four reality, of our make due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house housing-hungry returning vets and give us a leg up that we had lived in way too long. Add on the further reality that my job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure as there were rumors circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Larry, Danny, Joshua, and most recently still in the cradle Lissette. And four is enough, more than enough thank you.
But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes started singing Little White Lies right after Bing she fell back again to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around the next corner when we first started out together . And just as I saw she was winding up to blast young Larry , his forever dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended to before, I sensed that her thoughts had returned to her Prince Charming, me, the Starlight Ballroom 1943, and our song. Our forever memory song. She then said, “We’ll get by.” Yes, we would get by. [Plenty of sniffles and Kleenex all around.]
[I could tell my father was getting tired, he started looking a little gray around the eyes and had a drowsy look, a look of the medications wearing off. I, we, offered to leave and let him rest, and he agreed after this one last story he felt he needed to get straight on. The story about his military uniform in that old back closet that I had asked about when I was a kid getting ready for college and how he had basically dismissed me out of hand ]
Josh was a curious kid even when he was little. Not curious about everything in the world just that minute, although more than one teacher had noted on his early childhood reports cards that little characteristic, but curious about my military uniform, my faded, drab, slightly moth-eaten army dress uniform, World War II version, of course. That curiousness came not from, like the usual, some Josh daydream curiosity but the result, the this minute result, of having come across my suit in an attic closet as he was preparing to store his own not used, not much used, or merely out-of-fashion, excess clothing against time. And that time was the time of his imminent departure for State University and his first extended time away from home.
Funny Josh knew that I had been in World War II, had gotten some medals for my service as was apparent from the fruit salad on the uniform, and that I had spent a little time, he was not exactly sure on the time but his mother had told him 1950 when he asked, in the Veterans Hospital for an undisclosed ailment. But he had not heard anything beyond those bare facts from me. Never. And his mother had insistently shh-ed him away whenever he tried to bring it up.
Oh sure Josh had been sick unto death back in the 1950s when the kitchen radio, tuned into WMEX exclusively to old-time World War II parent music. I can remember the battles like they were yesterday. To the exclusion of any serious rock music of his like Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard and Jerry Lee, but that was parents just being parents and kicking up old torches. Especially when Frank Sinatra sang I’ll Be Seeing You, or his mother would laugh whimsically when The Andrew Sisters performed Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy or The Mills Brothers would croon Till Then. But we never discussed that war, nor was it discussed when my cronies, and fellow veterans, came over to play our weekly card games until dawn.
I guess after having spied the uniform Josh decided it was time to ask those questions, those curiosity questions. Later, he said, it would be too late, he would be too busy raising a family of his own, or he would be doing his own military service, although he hoped not on that count. It just didn’t figure into his plans, and that was that. So with a deep breathe one evening, one Friday evening after dinner, when I would not be distracted by thoughts of next day work, or Saturday night card games, his asked the big question. And I answered- “I did what a lot of guys did, not more not less, I did it the best way I could, I saw some things, some tough things, I survived and that’s all that there is to say.” And I said it in such a way that there was no torture too severe, no hole too deep, and no hell too hot to get more than that out of me.
Later that evening, still shell-shocked I guess at my response, as he prepared to go out with his boys for one last Olde Saco fling before heading to State, he could hear his mother softy sobbing while we listened on the living room phonograph to Martha Tilton warble I’ll Walk Alone, The Ink Spots heavenly harmonize on I’ll Get By, Doris Day songbird Sentimental Journey, Vaughn Monroe sentimentally stir When The Lights Go on Again, and Harry James orchestrate through It’s Been A Long, Long Time. I hope Josh understood, understood as well as an eighteen year old boy could understand such things, that it was those songs that had gotten his mother and me through the war, and its aftermath. And that was all he had to know about the damn war. [And I did understand although not that night, or not for many nights after.]
[After that last one instead of calling it a day my father got a little morose after thinking about those songs and maybe when he thought about how he never did provide my mother with that white picket fence future house on Atlantic Avenue, never did partake of the great golden age that he had promised and could not make good on in a world that he too had no say in. He then blurted this out of the blue.]
Jesus, it had been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill kept screaming at us (and also to not trespass under penalty of arrest, christ,) and I still hadn’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I didn’t even have a high school diploma to do anything but some logging work up North when they needed extra crews. I remember talking about my plight to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between us, and between many guys on those same stools, took place, of course, at Millie’s Diner right across the street from that damn closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.
Just then I stopped talking and started just staring into space, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as I thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that first came creeping through my brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, told me the plant was shutting down and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from my eastern Kentucky roots. Hearing the announcement there was just a second of self-doubt but now sitting on this unemployed stool thoughts started ringing incessantly in my brain.
Why the hell had I fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl [my mother, the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles], stayed up North after the war when I knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that I had worked in my youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, boys with Delores and a couple of years before his sweet daughter , Lissette . Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.
[We actually call ourselves Mainiacs with pride, we hicks, and it wasn’t really because my father was from the south that he was insulted although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years.]
The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. I reached, suddenly, into my pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and playedWill The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that my late, long-gone mother sang to me on her knee when I was just a ragamuffin young boy.
That got me to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when twelve kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girls stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.
Then I thought about the Saturday night barn dances where I cut quite a figure with the girls when I was in my teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. I was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Moonshine Johnnie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And I heard, just like then on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances. As Millie asked me for the third time, “More coffee?” I came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, I said no to myself with that same kind of December 1941 resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again I let out my breathe and said to myself one more time- Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and I would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.
Just then through the door Jim LaCroix yelled, “Hey, Prescott, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up north for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, I was going too.
[A couple of years after that, maybe three, Larry got picked by the cops stealing some onyx rings at Sid Smith’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco. Shortly after that Danny started to wander off for days at a time with no explanation. After, well, after that the Breslin kids madness just took over.]
*********
In honor of Prescott Lee Breslin, 1917-1985, Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater , and perhaps, other Olde Saco fathers too.
He was scared, Prescott Breslin was scared. Scared more than he had ever been at any time in his life over the last forty years, at any time since that 1942 night his 1st Marine Division unit, his Bravo company, stationed out in just being built Camp Pendleton, California had gotten orders to move out west the next day, west to the Jap dotted island of the World War II hard fighting west. And while that scare was prospective his current scare was real, life-threatening real. Several days before he had had pains, heart pains so severe he thought, and his wife Delores thought too, that was the end right then and there. Somehow she had gotten help, gotten help that had gotten him to Portland General Hospital, and gotten him there in time for some heart surgery to work him back to life, for now.
And that for now, and that scared about the end had driven a very private Prescott Breslin to call in his kindred (his old time Appalachia word for his family and others), his available kindred to come and, well, he might not have put it this way, comfort him (and Delores). Thus on the morning of April 16th 1983 I, Josh Breslin, his youngest son, and his only daughter, Lissette, were sitting by his home-side bed up in Olde Saco, Maine listening to him tell some stuff about his life, stuff that neither of us had ever heard much about from this hither-to-fore distant father figure.
While he was having his say he asked to have his favorite music, the music of his generation, the one that had survived (just barely) the Great Depression of the 1930s and had fought (or like Delores had anxiously awaited behind) the hard island and continent battles of World War II playing on the record player in the background.
I, mistakenly, thumbing through the dusty pile of LP records had put on Rosemary Clooney’s Come On To My House, a song I had heard wafting through the house on the radio on the now long gone WMEX, his station of choice out of Portland in those days. He yelled, or what passed for yelling in his condition, that he did not want to hear that rock and roll stuff from the 1950s and made it very clear (as he always did on the not many occasions when he made a big deal out of his wants) that 1950, maybe 1952, was the cutoff date for the background music that he wanted played. This told me already that two things were going to happen.
One, that we were not to be entertained by any stories of his life, or of our family life after that time and, two, that he was going to continue to mourn, now apparently to the grave, that his two older sons, Lawrence James (named after his father) and Daniel Francis (named after my mother’s father) were not there at his bedside then. And the reason that those two sons, my brothers whom I too missed, were not available was that Larry was just at that moment serving yet another five to ten stretch for an armed robbery in Bar Harbor (a cheap jack gas station of all places, jesus) up at Shawshank Prison. And Danny had left home heading west (what west, and how far, he did not tell me when he left) in 1966 and had not been seen, or heard of, by the family since despite some serious efforts by Dad to find him.
See, as will become apparent as Prescott Breslin tells his story, or the parts that he wanted told, told by me his son who had made a fair living out of writing up such stories over the previous ten years or so, he was a simple man, with simple values, simple wants, and a simple code. Therefore a most complex man in our go-go times. Larry, Danny and I were his children, his kin, so right or wrong, good or bad, that was it (and Lissette too, but as he told me once many years before when we were in one of our more talkative phases, he never really did understood women, except Delores, and so by the age of puberty Lissette had kind of been a blur to him. She, on the other hand, as was evident that morning between the tears and laughter, worshipped the ground he walked on and, and while I had had my tiffs with him, who was to say she was wrong).
That they (and I) caused him more heartbreak than any simple man should have to endure did not matter, we were his kids, his boys okay, and that was that. So if you sense that Larry and Danny were in the room that April morning and if you sense that the old man just wanted to remember ahead to the early 1950s and no further before the whole thing went awry for him (and Delores) for that reason then that is just about right. And if you hear Lena Horne’ soulful, wistful long gone times past voice singing Stormy Weather to beat away the 1940s blues night that is just about right too. Prescott Breslin expressed himself satisfied when I finally found that gem and placed it on the turntable.
I, by the way, must have eaten up about half of his record collection that day even with many replays of his very most favorite tunes (and some jointly connected with Delores youth favorites). Certainly Lena’s Stormy Weather got several plays as did Tangerine, a mother favorite, Sentimental Journey, a slew of Inkspots stuff, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, and Whispering Trees, The Mills Brothers, especially Paper Doll, another mother favorite. A couple of Andrews Sisters things for laughs and, of course their song of songs (or one of them) done by Hoagy Carmichael, I think it was his version, Stardust.
Here though is what he had to say that morning (and after some rest, and lunch, that afternoon) as best I could take it down in my teared-up notebook:
He, at first, kept coming back coming back a few times, to his current frail heart condition and how that brush with death had triggered thoughts about the last time he knew, knew for sure, that he was scared, hard scared. In his in his laconic way he just kept saying he remembered that he was scared, scared silly, and he didn’t care who knew about it. Rugged hills and hollows born, Appalachia mountain Kentucky hard-scrabble farm born, fear hid under the rug, or somewhere else born he was still scared. He, Prescott Breslin, just weeks, maybe a couple of months if he counted it up, out of those hills and hollows, was scared because his unit, his semper fi 1st Marine Corps Division unit had just received orders to head out in the morning, head out west.
He remembered that he was sitting by himself that night before in the make-shift Quonset hut PX at a picnic table munching coffee and cakes and thinking west could only mean the Pacific islands that dotted the way to Japan. Some units had already gone out, gone out quickly all through early 1942 and as 1943 approached all hell was breaking loose with men and material heading west; just like in the old time pioneer west if he had thought about it that way then.
[Prescott Breslin, even forty years later, in relating this story to us would not give the precise day that his unit left California just in case some Nips or Chinks (Prescott’s terms) might be lurking around and could use the information in the future. He was certainly a man of his Great Depression/World War II times. JLB]
Sitting with that cup of black coffee (hell, he said, nobody back home ever had it any other way besides who had extra milk or cream left over for such fixings, and black was fine anyway) and cruller donut (he had grown to love this donut business after a lifetime of his Ma’s old patched-up bread pudding and sunken baking soda-laden cakes) he was not thinking about pioneer west stuff, or even, after he bit into the cruller, scared thoughts so much but about how life was funny. Not funny to have a laugh over but just the way the cards were dealt funny. It might have been the sugar, or it might have been the caffeine but his started to think about all the stuff that he hadn’t done, and some stuff he had done, to keep the thoughts of the days ahead in check.
First off though was his pride in being one of the best troopers in his training unit down at Parris Island, and then his assigned unit at Pendleton. It wasn’t so much that it came natural to him, although coming from the hard rock country didn’t hurt when they went out into the “boonies” on those twenty mile full-pack hikes or when he busted out number one on the rifle range with that silly M-I pop gun. It was more that, at first, guys, yankee city guys from Boston and New York, or northern farm boys anyway, laughed at him about his back mountain drawl, about his not knowing about donuts, about not knowing about how to handle a folk and spoon right and all kinds of yankee stuff that didn’t make sense to him, or them when he asked them to explain what they meant and why.
After a while, after a ton of callouses and blisters, after a ton of KP, after half a ton of pranks, and after about eight weeks of showing guys, yankee guys and farm boys, that he could be depended on if something happened to them they were practically competing to have him as their “buddy.” More than one guy said, said straight out, when they got the news of the move out that as long as Prescott Breslin was going along with them he wasn’t quite so scared. Here was the kicker though, the one that made him beam. A couple of days before they got orders they had all chipped in to by him drinks at the enlisted men’s club to show their appreciation AND a dozen donuts, assorted, the next morning. Still sitting at that piney table Prescott Breslin was scared.
While he was thinking an odd-scared thought or two somebody, a guy he didn’t recognize sitting with a nice- looking tanned Oceanside girl, at another table had gotten up to put some nickels in the jukebox and he, still thinking about life’s ups and downs, could hear the strains of I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire and that song got him kind of choked up at first. He then laughed, not a funny laugh, as he listened to the lyrics and thought that he sure didn’t want to, and hadn’t, set the world on fire. He sure hadn’t.
Getting into the heart of the song, the lonely guy misery part, he hadn’t a girl left behind to think of him while he was away blasting Pacific islands to smithereens. Out there, out there in sunny California, he had had not too much luck finding a girl, not much luck at all really. The girls seemed too fast for him, to ready to dismiss his back mountain drawl and write him down as a damn hillbilly. One time at the Surfside Grille in Oceanside where all the guys went when they had passes he met a girl, a pretty girl who liked his looks she said, liked his black hair, and brown eyes. She nevertheless told him flat out once she found out where he was from that she would pass him by. Why? Well, she, herself was from some podunk okie town and now that she was a California girl she was thinking of becoming a blonde and had definitely shaken the dust off her of okie kind of boys. She wanted, and she said this flat out too, a movie star soldier boy like Robert Taylor. Jesus, women, California women.
[We all laughed at that one. I because two of my three wives had come from there although neither were blonde and neither had been from Podunk but had been born and bred California women. I too though could shout to the high heavens about the perfidies of California women, transplants or born and bred. Lissette’s first husband had been from there as well and he had run back there when things got tough between them and married his high school sweetheart on the rebound. So change the gender and that explained Lissette’s laugh. Dad laughed at his own story but I think I could detect just the slightest anguish as he was probably thinking about whether Danny had perhaps married a California woman and maybe had some things to say about that.]
Sure, back home, he had had a few nibbles, a couple of girls from Prestonsburg and Hazard, girls with nice looks and manners and who couldn’t complain of his drawl. But nothing serious happened, nothing serious because from about age fourteen all the girls where he came from, even Prestonsburg girls, got all moony over being married and, in order to get from under being embedded in their own large families, start families of their own. He had wanted no part of that, not at twenty, no way. But he got just a little melancholy, taking another sip of that sweet black coffee, when he thought that he might never have a chance to get married. Never have a family of his own to take care of him in his old age, if he had an old age.
[He welled up a little as he mentioned that last thought. He was probably thinking that Larry would never be a comfort to him or Delores now that he had spent a good part of his adult life behind bars and hadn’t learned to keep out of jail. And that Danny would probably never come back after all this time and that I, who had my own fair share of estrangements and non-talkative period with him (and Delores), was at best a fifty-fifty proposition. Whether he factored Lissette into his thoughts that day was another matter but probably not, she was still probably that long ago blur, that blur who worshipped him.]
Mainly though he thought that night about the things he did had done over the previous few years before he had enlisted and wished that he had had more time to do some more of them. Hell, it wasn’t nothing big, nothing to set the world on fire, but it was his life. His life, six or seven years before, once he knew the score, knew the hard-scrabble Kentuck farm score, and that if he didn’t want nothing but hard calloused hands and looking eighty at forty (like his pa and grandpa) he had better hit the highway. Since there were twelve kids at home, and only enough to feed about eight right nobody (except Ma, he later, much too much later, found out) missed him when he set out for Lexington one dark night. He got a ride from Colonel Eddie (not really a colonel but everybody with two bucks for a genuine certificate called himself that) the local long-haul driver who was always looking for company on his runs west, and knew how to keep quiet when a guy asked him to about stuff like where he was going, and why.
And he also thought about how once he got to Lexington, after a few crop-picking and dish-washing jobs to keep him alive in the city, he met up with a couple of guys, Doc and Hank, at Lucy’s Diner who wanted form a band and make some money playing what they called the coal-dust circuit. He played a fair guitar for a kid, had a decent voice that had become deeper and more tuneful as he aged, and best of all he knew all the old-timey songs that the hills and hollows folks wanted to hear. Boy, did he know them all. Stuff like Tom Doulas, Ommie Wise, and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies.
[With some Inkspot tune playing softly in the background he nevertheless started to sing Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart and sounded pretty damn good for a guy in his condition. You could see, see just for a moment, that Kentuck Sheik boy who had all the young girls, the young Prestonsburg and Hazard girls ordering dresses through some mail order catalogue just to be pretty on Saturday night barn dance time. And, hell, easily see how my own mother could have fallen for him, fallen hard for him, when they first met at Old Orchard’s Starlight Ballroom back in 1943 or 44.]
A couple of weeks later with some practice, a small stake, and lots of dreams, they hit the back road Saturday night places where the locals held their weekly barn dances (complete with plenty of moonshine to liven things up). Sometimes they, now known as the Kentuck Sheiks (that sheik name had been made popular a few years before and you just added your state name in front and you had a genuine band name), passed the hat, sometimes when there was no dough they just took a couple of days room and board for their troubles.
He remembered too the time that through some white lightning connections, some Moonshine Johnnie, the king of the illegal local whiskey ring, or whatever the liquid was by the time it got boiled down, packaged, and run through the hills and hollows just in front of the revenue agents, the Sheiks got to play before a crowd in his hometown of Hazard. And they were billed on flyers, handbills, and posters as the Kentuck Sheiks featuring Prescott Breslin. Moonshine Johnnie’s idea was that he would throw a free Saturday barn dance down at Farmer Ben’s, a place where locals had been having their weekly dances since, well, since there was a Hazard as far as anybody knew. Johnnie wanted to introduce those who didn’t know to his product, or who knew and had a thirst. In short to move product, be an outstanding citizen, and listen to the mountain-etched music just like any other hillbilly.
The Sheiks were to pass the hat like they had done at a hundred such gatherings and with a hometown boy on the stage they expected a little extra haul. Additionally, Johnnie, just in case the cash haul was short, threw in five jugs of his premium liquor for the boys. That addition proved to be my father’s undoing. The art of drinking hard liquor, hard still-made liquor takes some cultivation, some time to get used to it. Young men need to grow into it with age like drinking wine is for some Europeans. The night of the barn dance, that Saturday afternoon really, he had started drinking a steady stream out of the jug so that by show time his was in good form (as were Doc and Hank partners), and as far as the show went they were a great success. As far as the show part went.
But this was just flat-out the wrong night to develop his whiskey skills. Just before the dance, while the band was setting up and checking things out, Becky Price, an old Hazard sweetheart came up and started to rekindle some flame. Becky sure did look fine that night he thought with a pretty, frilly store-bought dress (really Montgomery Ward catalogue bought he found out later) and her hair done up in ribbons. She had heard he was playing that night and had gotten herself all pretty for him. They talked some then and some at intermission and agreed to meet after the dance at Lance’s Diner over on Route 5 when he was finished packing up after the show.
But that is where the liquor proved to be a demon. After the show, things packed up, he decided to take a little curse off the liquor in his system by having a couple more hits at the jug. After the second swallow he just keeled over dead drunk. When he woke up the next morning the boys were up front in their sedan, Doc driving, while he laid across the back seat as they headed for a show in Steubenville, Ohio. Poor Becky, he hoped she didn’t wait long that night.
[We laughed again although I noticed that his sweet Delores, my mother, didn’t laugh quite so heartily on this story. She had, if asked, her own stories to tell about fending off a couple of Olde Saco girlfriends who were also taken by his black hair, brown eyes and fine uniform look and who, unlike her, were willing “to do” it, if necessary to win his favor. This information only came to me much later when she was ready for me to tell her story.]
That band job lasted for about a year or so, maybe a little bit more, but then times got so bad about 1937 or 38 that three guys just couldn’t make it on bread and butter, literally. So he got off the road, headed back home, and started to work in Mr. Peabody’s coal mines (not every mine was owned by the Peabody Coal Company as he was at pains to inform his fellow platoon members when they had asked what he did in the “real world” but that is what everybody called it around home when a guy went into the mines).
Now even a hills and hollows boy who grew up in that hard –scrabble country but who grew up on a farm needed to adjust to the hard times in the mines. The early hours, the wash up time that was unpaid for adding to the long day, the damn coal dust, the noise, the deafening noise, from the machines drilling against god’s ancient rock, and the sweat, the infernal sweat even on cold days once you got down in the pits. After a couple of months he adjusted to the routine, got to know real coal-miners who were the third or fourth generation going down there, and got some respect when he told the boys that they were not getting paid nearly enough for the tough work they did for the damn Johnson Coal Company. The boys listened, and knowing Kentucky coalfields traditions, hell Harlan, bloody Harlan, was just down the road they prepared to strike one time. Somehow the company got wind of it and offered a small raise and paid wash-up time just to keep the production moving. That was enough, enough then with plenty of guys out of work, and plenty of guys, scabs, guys from the outside, with hungry mouths to feed, but still scabs, ready to cross the lines if anything happened.
There he was though stuck in the mines, the damn black-lung mines (his mother cried every time he came home at night looking, well, looking like a damn nigra, and coughing the dust out half the night) when the news of the Japs hitting Pearl came over the radio and guys, guys like him, all over the country, were lined up three, maybe more, deep, to enlist. Funny though he could, having worked his way up a little in the mines, have gotten a vital industries draft deferral and been sitting right then in the Prestonsburg hotel with some pretty town girl drinking real store-bought liquor and working up his courage to ask her up into his room. But no, on December 9, 1941 he had gone to Prestonsburg and enlisted in the Marines right on the dotted line. And he never looked back.
Scared, scared to death, or not, sitting at that wooden table having a second cruller and a third cup of mud Private First Class Prescott Breslin thought it over for a minute. He then said to himself, hell, between shoveling coal for Mr. Peabody forever and fighting the damn Japs I’ll take the Japs. And that made him just a little less scared as someone walked up and put another nickel in the jukebox to play If I Didn’t Care.
[After relating that last pearl of wisdom, which my father had actually imparted to me a long time ago when I was about seventeen or eighteen after I had asked him about his uniform that was hanging in a back closet, he expressed a wish for a little rest before lunch. The following is what he had to say in the afternoon after lunch. Of course he was still tired, a little groggy and disoriented from the mix of medications and so he rambled more, at times a lot more, in the afternoon and went back and forth on subjects. He still though adamantly refused somewhere in that deep Breslin reservoir of hurt to go much beyond the early 1950s. And of course he, as he had done in the morning, kept asking me to put his beloved 1940s songs on the record player. I had just put Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing on and that triggered a story that my mother had told him when they first met at the Starlight Ballroom in Old Orchard. Like I said the afternoon just rambled on but this one will tell anybody a lot about my mother and father, their love, and why they had endured in Olde Saco, foreign territory for him, through thick and thin.]
Your mother had had just enough of Elizabeth LaCroix, Aunt Betty, and her tangled love life with your mother’s brother, Jean. [Always called in proper F-C speak, Jeanbon.] Every other week, it seemed, Betty was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint it starts with an s and ends with an x. [Lissette and my mother blushed but he just plowed ahead and after noticing their discomfort he said that he was well past having to be polite about thing now that he was facing the grim reaper (his words) one on one.]
See Betty and your mother were seniors at Olde Saco High School in 1937. Let me add that they were, and the yearbook photos don’t lie, were both dark-haired French-Canadian [F-C remember?] American beauties, dewy roses like only those with forbears from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex was naturally in the equation, in the eternal boy-girl, Betty-Jean, equation. And for your mother too, since about fourteen when she learned that she could, with just a little effort, get the guys stirring, stirring over thoughts about dewy roses and other material matters. But this is strictly, well almost strictly, a Betty-Jean story so we will leave the Delores-smitten guys to stew. [He laughed a victor’s laugh at that one.]
The friction between your mother and Betty, or rather her momentary wrath at Betty, was centered on the hard fact that in a few months the girls would be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduated and those who, for one reason or another didn’t. And, graduation or not, the next step was marriage. That was just, as I well know, the established working class and religious ethos of the town, the F-C-inspired culture, and the times. Get out of your parents’ overburdened house and into your own small cold-water flat, maybe over on Fourteenth Street by the river, and dream of your own small white picket fence future house, maybe on Atlantic Avenue toward the ocean. And that cycle, as I also found out although I could never do much about it, had been established for a long while.
It seemed that although Betty and Jean had been an “item” for only a few months that Betty had this Saturday night I am talking about had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, and never make-up with dear Jean fight. And like I said whether the year was 1037, 1537, or 1937 the issue, to put it straight now that I’ve already said it, was sex, or rather to use the latest craze saying then “doing it.” Really though, the real crux of the matter, was that she wanted to wait until that cold- water flat marriage, and not before, no way before, to give in to your uncle, one Jean Claude LeBlanc.
Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state in 1935, Jean, was all for “doing the do” right then as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty that Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach. And Jean had almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she was so anxious and the hour was so late that she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus. [More womanly blushes]
You don’t get my drift. Okay, let me go by the numbers. Boy (really man since Jean has already graduated from Olde Saco and been working as a high-grade machine mechanic at the MacAdams Textile Mill over on Main Street for a while then. That defined man in these parts) meets girl. Boy (man) takes girl here and there in his new, well fairly new, Studebaker and they cap the night off watching the fishes swim down at the close-by beach (at the secluded far end, the Squaw Rock end, known by one and all as, well just known for being secluded, okay). Girl successfully holds off boy (man). Got it. [Jesus Dad we all know about Squaw Rock and that stuff although nothing was said while he was speaking.]
But how do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it, tried to get one Betty La Croix in the mood. Take one guess. Backing up the ocean swells and moonlight in the mood department is one Benny Goodman and his gang on that car radio, providing that heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the walls of Jericho down that I mentioned before. A little Buddha Swings at the right moment will go a long way. So Benny did his part.
[After a little break to take his afternoon medication my father moved on to tell this one. I thought it sounded kind of familiar some of the details anyway. And it was, partially because it was his version of a story my mother had told to me about their courting days when she was in one of her expansive non-blaspheming Josh Breslin to hell and say seven novenas moods. The story had something, actually little, to do with my oldest brother Larry and so my father told it in such a way that even with Larry now serving his third (or was it fourth ) stretch in Shawshank you could tell that he was still the old man’s favorite. It was okay with me by then, and had been for a long time. That was just the old man and his hard and fast loyalties, likes and prejudices.]
“Lawrence Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute,” yelled your mother, Mother Breslin to you then if I recall. I think you kids called her that then over some scheme you Josh had devised to show contemptuous respect or something, and it included the yelled at Larry. She was always honey to me as I never bought into that Mother thing you kept pestering me about, that sounded too much like some Ste. Brigitte’s nun thing to me. I though was only the mother-supporting father to the boy being yelled at just that minute. Just as, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Larry’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WMEX air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Our song, or one of them. Our forever memory song.
As a result, the proposed rant was halted, momentarily halted, as Delores flashed back and began to speak of the night in 1943 over at the Starlight Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach when she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right here in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl) and one Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, me, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while our boys were off fighting. We hit it off right away, made Far Away Places our song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and we could get our dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although we never specified a number. [My mother silently nodded in agreement with some kind of smile on her face.] The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a not from hunger breathe.
As Bing finished up your mother snapped back into the reality of the Larry hands on the wall moment, the two by four reality, of our make due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house housing-hungry returning vets and give us a leg up that we had lived in way too long. Add on the further reality that my job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure as there were rumors circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Larry, Danny, Joshua, and most recently still in the cradle Lissette. And four is enough, more than enough thank you.
But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes started singing Little White Lies right after Bing she fell back again to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around the next corner when we first started out together . And just as I saw she was winding up to blast young Larry , his forever dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended to before, I sensed that her thoughts had returned to her Prince Charming, me, the Starlight Ballroom 1943, and our song. Our forever memory song. She then said, “We’ll get by.” Yes, we would get by. [Plenty of sniffles and Kleenex all around.]
[I could tell my father was getting tired, he started looking a little gray around the eyes and had a drowsy look, a look of the medications wearing off. I, we, offered to leave and let him rest, and he agreed after this one last story he felt he needed to get straight on. The story about his military uniform in that old back closet that I had asked about when I was a kid getting ready for college and how he had basically dismissed me out of hand ]
Josh was a curious kid even when he was little. Not curious about everything in the world just that minute, although more than one teacher had noted on his early childhood reports cards that little characteristic, but curious about my military uniform, my faded, drab, slightly moth-eaten army dress uniform, World War II version, of course. That curiousness came not from, like the usual, some Josh daydream curiosity but the result, the this minute result, of having come across my suit in an attic closet as he was preparing to store his own not used, not much used, or merely out-of-fashion, excess clothing against time. And that time was the time of his imminent departure for State University and his first extended time away from home.
Funny Josh knew that I had been in World War II, had gotten some medals for my service as was apparent from the fruit salad on the uniform, and that I had spent a little time, he was not exactly sure on the time but his mother had told him 1950 when he asked, in the Veterans Hospital for an undisclosed ailment. But he had not heard anything beyond those bare facts from me. Never. And his mother had insistently shh-ed him away whenever he tried to bring it up.
Oh sure Josh had been sick unto death back in the 1950s when the kitchen radio, tuned into WMEX exclusively to old-time World War II parent music. I can remember the battles like they were yesterday. To the exclusion of any serious rock music of his like Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard and Jerry Lee, but that was parents just being parents and kicking up old torches. Especially when Frank Sinatra sang I’ll Be Seeing You, or his mother would laugh whimsically when The Andrew Sisters performed Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy or The Mills Brothers would croon Till Then. But we never discussed that war, nor was it discussed when my cronies, and fellow veterans, came over to play our weekly card games until dawn.
I guess after having spied the uniform Josh decided it was time to ask those questions, those curiosity questions. Later, he said, it would be too late, he would be too busy raising a family of his own, or he would be doing his own military service, although he hoped not on that count. It just didn’t figure into his plans, and that was that. So with a deep breathe one evening, one Friday evening after dinner, when I would not be distracted by thoughts of next day work, or Saturday night card games, his asked the big question. And I answered- “I did what a lot of guys did, not more not less, I did it the best way I could, I saw some things, some tough things, I survived and that’s all that there is to say.” And I said it in such a way that there was no torture too severe, no hole too deep, and no hell too hot to get more than that out of me.
Later that evening, still shell-shocked I guess at my response, as he prepared to go out with his boys for one last Olde Saco fling before heading to State, he could hear his mother softy sobbing while we listened on the living room phonograph to Martha Tilton warble I’ll Walk Alone, The Ink Spots heavenly harmonize on I’ll Get By, Doris Day songbird Sentimental Journey, Vaughn Monroe sentimentally stir When The Lights Go on Again, and Harry James orchestrate through It’s Been A Long, Long Time. I hope Josh understood, understood as well as an eighteen year old boy could understand such things, that it was those songs that had gotten his mother and me through the war, and its aftermath. And that was all he had to know about the damn war. [And I did understand although not that night, or not for many nights after.]
[After that last one instead of calling it a day my father got a little morose after thinking about those songs and maybe when he thought about how he never did provide my mother with that white picket fence future house on Atlantic Avenue, never did partake of the great golden age that he had promised and could not make good on in a world that he too had no say in. He then blurted this out of the blue.]
Jesus, it had been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill kept screaming at us (and also to not trespass under penalty of arrest, christ,) and I still hadn’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I didn’t even have a high school diploma to do anything but some logging work up North when they needed extra crews. I remember talking about my plight to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between us, and between many guys on those same stools, took place, of course, at Millie’s Diner right across the street from that damn closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.
Just then I stopped talking and started just staring into space, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as I thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that first came creeping through my brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, told me the plant was shutting down and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from my eastern Kentucky roots. Hearing the announcement there was just a second of self-doubt but now sitting on this unemployed stool thoughts started ringing incessantly in my brain.
Why the hell had I fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl [my mother, the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles], stayed up North after the war when I knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that I had worked in my youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, boys with Delores and a couple of years before his sweet daughter , Lissette . Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.
[We actually call ourselves Mainiacs with pride, we hicks, and it wasn’t really because my father was from the south that he was insulted although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years.]
The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. I reached, suddenly, into my pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and playedWill The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that my late, long-gone mother sang to me on her knee when I was just a ragamuffin young boy.
That got me to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when twelve kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girls stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.
Then I thought about the Saturday night barn dances where I cut quite a figure with the girls when I was in my teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. I was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Moonshine Johnnie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And I heard, just like then on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances. As Millie asked me for the third time, “More coffee?” I came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, I said no to myself with that same kind of December 1941 resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again I let out my breathe and said to myself one more time- Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and I would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.
Just then through the door Jim LaCroix yelled, “Hey, Prescott, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up north for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, I was going too.
[A couple of years after that, maybe three, Larry got picked by the cops stealing some onyx rings at Sid Smith’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco. Shortly after that Danny started to wander off for days at a time with no explanation. After, well, after that the Breslin kids madness just took over.]
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In honor of Prescott Lee Breslin, 1917-1985, Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater , and perhaps, other Olde Saco fathers too.
Vamos a redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para liberar privado Bradley Manning-Presidente Perdón Obama Bradley Manning-¡Cada plaza del casco En Estados Unidos (y el mundo) A Bradley Manning Square de Boston a Berkeley para nosotros Berlin-Join In Davis Square, Somerville-The Stand-Out Es Todos los miércoles de 4:00-5:00 pm
comentario Markin:
The Private Bradley Manning caso se encamina a un juicio pleno invierno. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyamos su causa debe redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Durante los últimos meses se ha producido una semana de espera en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Davis Square Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Bradley Manning Square durante la duración del stand-out 's) en Somerville viernes por la tarde, pero tenemos desde 04 de julio 2012 cambió la hora y el dÃa a 4:00-17:00 los miércoles. Esta posición de salida tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construirlo con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a empezar un semanario de Apoyo a Bradley Manning espera en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston, Berkeley o BerlÃn. Y por favor, firma la petición para su liberación, ya sea en persona oa través de la Red de Apoyo a Bradley Manning. He puesto una parada de Manning y Manning Square sitio web a continuación.
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Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Square sitio web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
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Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa del soldado Manning en stand-outs, marchas y mÃtines. Nosotros los de la internacional movimiento contra la guerra no fueron capaces de hacer mucho para afectar a la Bush-Obama Iraq calendario guerra o, a partir de ahora, el Afganistán, pero podemos salvar el héroe de una de esa guerra, soldado estadounidense Bradley Manning privado. El caso Manning legal y soldado Manning como un individuo excepcionalmente valiente, puede y debe servir para reunir a todos aquellos que buscan una forma concreta de expresar su indignación contra la guerra a las continuas atrocidades polÃticas estadounidenses de guerra imperiales. El mensaje siguiente puede servir como justificación para continuar mi (y su) apoyo a esta honorable denunciante.
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Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y en la defensa de, soldado Bradley Manning.
Me paro en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Estos bits preciosas de información filtrados a Wikileaks sobre los soldados estadounidenses que cometen atrocidades de la guerra en Irak como una crónica en la cinta conocida en YouTube como "Asesinato Colateral" y el Irak y Afganistán Diarios de Guerra. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en los ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayorÃa de la gente que sabe del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras guerras encabezadas por Estados Unidos en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco más fácil en estos dÃas sombra sabiendo que soldado Manning podrÃa haber expuesto lo que todos sabÃan, o deberÃan haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y las justificaciones que la guerra de Afganistán se basaba en una casa Flim-flam de cartas. Imperialismo norteamericano pistolero Flim-Flam castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning privado, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirme a sà misma como algo de "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning ha sido mantenido en la solidaridad en Quantico, a otros lugares, y ahora en el Fuerte Leavenworth en Kansas durante más de dos años, y ha estado detenido sin juicio durante más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas para tratar de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuoso aunque no inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira de más de cuarenta años.
Muchos de nosotros nos hemos vuelto un poco habituado a los constantes casos de conducta tortuosa bota militar por parte de los militares estadounidenses en lugares como Guantánamo, Bagram y otros lugares de la seguridad nacional infierno caja negra frente a los extranjeros. También hemos habituado, o al menos ya no sorprende, cuando los ciudadanos estadounidenses civiles están sujetos a este tipo de acciones, y más probable de muerte. Sin embargo, las acusaciones como las recientes de prisión conducta tortuosa tolerada por alta autoridad militar (véase las alegaciones y de movimiento para destituir cargado en el sitio web de Bradley Manning Support Network) por Private civil de Manning abogado defensor Coombs David dejar claro, esos actos no se limitan a ciudadanos extranjeros y ciudadanos estadounidenses civiles. La tortura del soldado Manning, un soldado estadounidense, el gobierno estadounidense deberÃa darnos a todos una pausa. Y deberÃa habernos gritando a los cielos en busca de su liberación.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el dÃa de este valiente soldado es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con orgulloso soldado Manning hasta ese gran dÃa.
Insto a todos a firmar la petición pidiendo a los militares estadounidenses para liberar a soldado Bradley Manning, ya sea aquà o en la página web Bradley Manning Support Network. Y si no podemos obtener soldado Manning liberado de esa manera Insto a todos a comenzar una campaña en su área para exigir al presidente Barack Obama, o quien sea presidente, mientras soldado Manning está encarcelado, perdonar a este valiente soldado. El presidente de Estados Unidos tiene la autoridad constitucional para conceder indultos a los culpables e inocentes, condenados y quienes enfrentan cargos. Pido al Presidente Obama a perdonar soldado Manning ahora.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos fuera de Irán! Manning Free Private Ahora! Presidente Obama Manning Perdón privado!
The Private Bradley Manning caso se encamina a un juicio pleno invierno. Aquellos de nosotros que apoyamos su causa debe redoblar nuestros esfuerzos para asegurar su libertad. Durante los últimos meses se ha producido una semana de espera en el área metropolitana de Boston frente a la Davis Square Redline MBTA parada (rebautizada Bradley Manning Square durante la duración del stand-out 's) en Somerville viernes por la tarde, pero tenemos desde 04 de julio 2012 cambió la hora y el dÃa a 4:00-17:00 los miércoles. Esta posición de salida tiene, por decir lo menos, ha sido muy poca asistencia. Tenemos que construirlo con más seguidores presentes. Por favor, únase a nosotros cuando pueda. O mejor aún si usted no puede unirse a empezar un semanario de Apoyo a Bradley Manning espera en algún lugar en su ciudad ya sea en el área de Boston, Berkeley o BerlÃn. Y por favor, firma la petición para su liberación, ya sea en persona oa través de la Red de Apoyo a Bradley Manning. He puesto una parada de Manning y Manning Square sitio web a continuación.
********
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning Square sitio web
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
**********
Los siguientes son comentarios que se han centrado en los últimos tiempos para conseguir apoyo para la causa del soldado Manning en stand-outs, marchas y mÃtines. Nosotros los de la internacional movimiento contra la guerra no fueron capaces de hacer mucho para afectar a la Bush-Obama Iraq calendario guerra o, a partir de ahora, el Afganistán, pero podemos salvar el héroe de una de esa guerra, soldado estadounidense Bradley Manning privado. El caso Manning legal y soldado Manning como un individuo excepcionalmente valiente, puede y debe servir para reunir a todos aquellos que buscan una forma concreta de expresar su indignación contra la guerra a las continuas atrocidades polÃticas estadounidenses de guerra imperiales. El mensaje siguiente puede servir como justificación para continuar mi (y su) apoyo a esta honorable denunciante.
*********
Veteranos por la Paz se yergue en la solidaridad y en la defensa de, soldado Bradley Manning.
Me paro en solidaridad con las supuestas acciones de soldado Bradley Manning en sacar a la luz, sólo un poco de luz, algunos de los nefastos hechos relacionados con la guerra de este gobierno, el gobierno de Bush y Obama. Estos bits preciosas de información filtrados a Wikileaks sobre los soldados estadounidenses que cometen atrocidades de la guerra en Irak como una crónica en la cinta conocida en YouTube como "Asesinato Colateral" y el Irak y Afganistán Diarios de Guerra. Si lo hiciera tales actos no son delito. Ningún crimen en absoluto en los ojos o en los ojos de la gran mayorÃa de la gente que sabe del caso y de su importancia como un acto individual de resistencia a las injustas y bárbaras guerras encabezadas por Estados Unidos en Irak y Afganistán. Duermo un poco más fácil en estos dÃas sombra sabiendo que soldado Manning podrÃa haber expuesto lo que todos sabÃan, o deberÃan haber sabido, la guerra de Irak y las justificaciones que la guerra de Afganistán se basaba en una casa Flim-flam de cartas. Imperialismo norteamericano pistolero Flim-Flam castillo de naipes, pero las tarjetas, sin embargo.
Estoy de pie en solidaridad con el soldado Bradley Manning, porque estoy indignado por el trato dado a Manning privado, presumiblemente un hombre inocente, por un gobierno que afirme a sà misma como algo de "faro" del mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning ha sido mantenido en la solidaridad en Quantico, a otros lugares, y ahora en el Fuerte Leavenworth en Kansas durante más de dos años, y ha estado detenido sin juicio durante más tiempo, ya que el gobierno y sus fuerzas armadas para tratar de pegar un caso juntos. Los militares y sus secuaces en el Departamento de Justicia, se han vuelto más tortuoso aunque no inteligente desde que era un soldado en la mira de más de cuarenta años.
Muchos de nosotros nos hemos vuelto un poco habituado a los constantes casos de conducta tortuosa bota militar por parte de los militares estadounidenses en lugares como Guantánamo, Bagram y otros lugares de la seguridad nacional infierno caja negra frente a los extranjeros. También hemos habituado, o al menos ya no sorprende, cuando los ciudadanos estadounidenses civiles están sujetos a este tipo de acciones, y más probable de muerte. Sin embargo, las acusaciones como las recientes de prisión conducta tortuosa tolerada por alta autoridad militar (véase las alegaciones y de movimiento para destituir cargado en el sitio web de Bradley Manning Support Network) por Private civil de Manning abogado defensor Coombs David dejar claro, esos actos no se limitan a ciudadanos extranjeros y ciudadanos estadounidenses civiles. La tortura del soldado Manning, un soldado estadounidense, el gobierno estadounidense deberÃa darnos a todos una pausa. Y deberÃa habernos gritando a los cielos en busca de su liberación.
Estas son razones más que suficientes para estar en solidaridad con el soldado Manning y lo será hasta el dÃa de este valiente soldado es liberado por sus carceleros. Y voy a seguir para estar en solidaridad con orgulloso soldado Manning hasta ese gran dÃa.
Insto a todos a firmar la petición pidiendo a los militares estadounidenses para liberar a soldado Bradley Manning, ya sea aquà o en la página web Bradley Manning Support Network. Y si no podemos obtener soldado Manning liberado de esa manera Insto a todos a comenzar una campaña en su área para exigir al presidente Barack Obama, o quien sea presidente, mientras soldado Manning está encarcelado, perdonar a este valiente soldado. El presidente de Estados Unidos tiene la autoridad constitucional para conceder indultos a los culpables e inocentes, condenados y quienes enfrentan cargos. Pido al Presidente Obama a perdonar soldado Manning ahora.
La retirada inmediata e incondicional de todas las tropas estadounidenses / Allied y mercenarios de Afganistán! Manos fuera de Irán! Manning Free Private Ahora! Presidente Obama Manning Perdón privado!
Vamos redobrar nossos esforços para libertar Privada Bradley Manning-presidente Perdão Obama Bradley Manning-Faça cada praça da cidade em América (e do mundo) Um Bradley Manning Praça de Boston para Berkeley para Berlim-se juntar a nós Davis Square, Somerville-O Stand-Out Toda quarta-feira é de 4:00 - 17:00
comentário Markin:
The Private Bradley Manning caso caminha para um julgamento do inverno. Aqueles de nós que apóiam sua causa deve redobrar os nossos esforços para assegurar sua liberdade. Para os últimos meses tem havido um semanário destaca-se na Grande Boston em frente da Davis Square Redline MBTA parada (rebatizada de Bradley Manning Praça para a duração do stand-out) em Somerville nas tardes de sexta-feira, mas temos desde 04 de julho de 2012 mudou o tempo eo dia-a-04:00 - 17:00 à s quartas-feiras. Este stand-out tem, para dizer o mÃnimo, foi muito pouco frequentado. Precisamos construir-se com mais adeptos presentes. Junte-se a nós quando você puder. Ou melhor ainda, se você não pode se juntar a nós iniciar um Suporte Bradley Manning semanal destaca-se em algum lugar em sua cidade se é na área de Boston, Berkeley ou Berlim. E, por favor assine a petição para a sua libertação, seja pessoalmente ou através da Rede de Apoio Bradley Manning. Eu tenho colocado links para a Rede Manning e Manning website Praça abaixo.
********
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning website Praça
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
**********
A seguir, são observações que venho focando tarde para construir o apoio para a causa de Manning Privado em stand-outs, passeatas e comÃcios. Nós do movimento anti-guerra internacional não foram capazes de fazer muito para afetar o Bush-Obama Iraque calendário guerra ou, a partir de agora, o Afeganistão um, mas podemos salvar o herói de um de que a guerra, soldado americano Bradley Manning privada. O caso Manning legal, e Manning Privado como um indivÃduo excepcionalmente corajoso, pode e deve servir para reunir todos aqueles que procuram uma forma concreta de expressar sua indignação contra a guerra nas contÃnuas atrozes polÃticas de guerra americanos imperiais. A mensagem abaixo pode servir como justificativa para continuar o meu apoio (e seu) para este denunciante honrosa.
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Veteranos pela Paz orgulhosamente está em solidariedade e em defesa de, Private Bradley Manning.
Eu estou em solidariedade com as alegadas acções de Private Bradley Manning em trazer à luz, apenas um pouco de luz, alguns dos nefastos relacionados com a guerra ações deste governo, sob Bush e Obama. Esses pedaços preciosos de informação que vazou para Wikileaks sobre soldados americanos cometendo atrocidades da guerra no Iraque como narrado na fita conhecida no YouTube como "Assassinato Colateral" e do Iraque e diários de guerra afegãos. Se ele fez tais atos não são crime. Nenhum crime em tudo nos meus olhos ou aos olhos da grande maioria de pessoas que sabem do caso e da sua importância como um ato individual de resistência para os injustos e bárbaro americano lideradas guerras no Iraque e no Afeganistão. Durmo um pouco de sombra mais fácil nos dias de hoje, sabendo que Manning privada pode ter exposto o que todos sabiam, ou deviam saber, a guerra do Iraque e as justificações de guerra afegãos repousava sobre uma casa flim-flam de cartas. Imperialismo norte-americano arma em punho casa flim-flam de cartões, mas os cartões, no entanto.
Eu estou em pé em solidariedade com Privado Bradley Manning porque estou indignada com o tratamento dado a Manning privados, presumivelmente um homem inocente, por um governo que alega-se ser algum "farol" do mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning foi realizada em solidariedade em Quantico, outros locais, e agora, em Fort Leavenworth no Kansas há mais de dois anos, e foi detido sem julgamento por mais tempo, como o governo e os seus militares tentam colar um caso juntos. O militar, e seus capangas do Departamento de Justiça, ter chegado mais tortuoso embora não mais inteligente desde que eu era um soldado em sua mira mais de quarenta anos atrás.
Muitos de nós nos tornamos um pouco acostumados com os constantes casos de bota comportamento tortuoso por parte dos militares americanos em lugares como Guantánamo, Bagram e outros locais de segurança nacional buraco da caixa negra contra os estrangeiros. Nós também nos tornamos acostumados, ou pelo menos já não surpreso, quando cidadãos americanos civis estão sujeitos a tais ações, e mais provável de morte. No entanto, as alegações como recentes de pré-julgamento conduta torturante tolerada pela autoridade militar de alta (ver as alegações e de movimento para destituir cobrado no site da Rede Bradley Manning Support) pela Privado civil de Manning advogado de defesa David Coombs deixar claro, estes actos não se limitam à estrangeiros e cidadãos americanos civis. A tortura de Manning e privado, um soldado americano, pelo governo americano deve dar a todos nós uma pausa. E deve ter-nos gritando para os céus para a sua libertação.
Estas são razões mais do que suficientes para se solidarizar com Manning privada e será até o dia deste bravo soldado é libertado por seus carcereiros. E eu vou continuar a se solidarizar com orgulho Manning privada até o grande dia.
exorto todos a assinar a petição exortando os militares americanos a livre Privada Bradley Manning seja aqui ou no site da Rede de Apoio Bradley Manning. E se não podemos chegar Manning Privada libertou dessa forma peço a todos para começar uma campanha em sua área de chamar o presidente Barack Obama, ou quem quer que seja presidente, enquanto Manning está preso e privado, para perdoar este soldado valente. O presidente americano tem a autoridade constitucional para conceder perdão ao culpado e inocente, o condenado e as acusações que enfrentam. Eu chamo ao Presidente Obama para perdoar Manning privados agora.
Retirada incondicional imediata de todas as tropas dos EUA / Aliados e mercenários do Afeganistão! Hands Off Irã! Manning Privado Grátis Agora! Presidente Manning Perdão Obama privada!
The Private Bradley Manning caso caminha para um julgamento do inverno. Aqueles de nós que apóiam sua causa deve redobrar os nossos esforços para assegurar sua liberdade. Para os últimos meses tem havido um semanário destaca-se na Grande Boston em frente da Davis Square Redline MBTA parada (rebatizada de Bradley Manning Praça para a duração do stand-out) em Somerville nas tardes de sexta-feira, mas temos desde 04 de julho de 2012 mudou o tempo eo dia-a-04:00 - 17:00 à s quartas-feiras. Este stand-out tem, para dizer o mÃnimo, foi muito pouco frequentado. Precisamos construir-se com mais adeptos presentes. Junte-se a nós quando você puder. Ou melhor ainda, se você não pode se juntar a nós iniciar um Suporte Bradley Manning semanal destaca-se em algum lugar em sua cidade se é na área de Boston, Berkeley ou Berlim. E, por favor assine a petição para a sua libertação, seja pessoalmente ou através da Rede de Apoio Bradley Manning. Eu tenho colocado links para a Rede Manning e Manning website Praça abaixo.
********
Bradley Manning Support Network
http://www.bradleymanning.org/~~V
Manning website Praça
http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
**********
A seguir, são observações que venho focando tarde para construir o apoio para a causa de Manning Privado em stand-outs, passeatas e comÃcios. Nós do movimento anti-guerra internacional não foram capazes de fazer muito para afetar o Bush-Obama Iraque calendário guerra ou, a partir de agora, o Afeganistão um, mas podemos salvar o herói de um de que a guerra, soldado americano Bradley Manning privada. O caso Manning legal, e Manning Privado como um indivÃduo excepcionalmente corajoso, pode e deve servir para reunir todos aqueles que procuram uma forma concreta de expressar sua indignação contra a guerra nas contÃnuas atrozes polÃticas de guerra americanos imperiais. A mensagem abaixo pode servir como justificativa para continuar o meu apoio (e seu) para este denunciante honrosa.
*********
Veteranos pela Paz orgulhosamente está em solidariedade e em defesa de, Private Bradley Manning.
Eu estou em solidariedade com as alegadas acções de Private Bradley Manning em trazer à luz, apenas um pouco de luz, alguns dos nefastos relacionados com a guerra ações deste governo, sob Bush e Obama. Esses pedaços preciosos de informação que vazou para Wikileaks sobre soldados americanos cometendo atrocidades da guerra no Iraque como narrado na fita conhecida no YouTube como "Assassinato Colateral" e do Iraque e diários de guerra afegãos. Se ele fez tais atos não são crime. Nenhum crime em tudo nos meus olhos ou aos olhos da grande maioria de pessoas que sabem do caso e da sua importância como um ato individual de resistência para os injustos e bárbaro americano lideradas guerras no Iraque e no Afeganistão. Durmo um pouco de sombra mais fácil nos dias de hoje, sabendo que Manning privada pode ter exposto o que todos sabiam, ou deviam saber, a guerra do Iraque e as justificações de guerra afegãos repousava sobre uma casa flim-flam de cartas. Imperialismo norte-americano arma em punho casa flim-flam de cartões, mas os cartões, no entanto.
Eu estou em pé em solidariedade com Privado Bradley Manning porque estou indignada com o tratamento dado a Manning privados, presumivelmente um homem inocente, por um governo que alega-se ser algum "farol" do mundo civilizado. Bradley Manning foi realizada em solidariedade em Quantico, outros locais, e agora, em Fort Leavenworth no Kansas há mais de dois anos, e foi detido sem julgamento por mais tempo, como o governo e os seus militares tentam colar um caso juntos. O militar, e seus capangas do Departamento de Justiça, ter chegado mais tortuoso embora não mais inteligente desde que eu era um soldado em sua mira mais de quarenta anos atrás.
Muitos de nós nos tornamos um pouco acostumados com os constantes casos de bota comportamento tortuoso por parte dos militares americanos em lugares como Guantánamo, Bagram e outros locais de segurança nacional buraco da caixa negra contra os estrangeiros. Nós também nos tornamos acostumados, ou pelo menos já não surpreso, quando cidadãos americanos civis estão sujeitos a tais ações, e mais provável de morte. No entanto, as alegações como recentes de pré-julgamento conduta torturante tolerada pela autoridade militar de alta (ver as alegações e de movimento para destituir cobrado no site da Rede Bradley Manning Support) pela Privado civil de Manning advogado de defesa David Coombs deixar claro, estes actos não se limitam à estrangeiros e cidadãos americanos civis. A tortura de Manning e privado, um soldado americano, pelo governo americano deve dar a todos nós uma pausa. E deve ter-nos gritando para os céus para a sua libertação.
Estas são razões mais do que suficientes para se solidarizar com Manning privada e será até o dia deste bravo soldado é libertado por seus carcereiros. E eu vou continuar a se solidarizar com orgulho Manning privada até o grande dia.
exorto todos a assinar a petição exortando os militares americanos a livre Privada Bradley Manning seja aqui ou no site da Rede de Apoio Bradley Manning. E se não podemos chegar Manning Privada libertou dessa forma peço a todos para começar uma campanha em sua área de chamar o presidente Barack Obama, ou quem quer que seja presidente, enquanto Manning está preso e privado, para perdoar este soldado valente. O presidente americano tem a autoridade constitucional para conceder perdão ao culpado e inocente, o condenado e as acusações que enfrentam. Eu chamo ao Presidente Obama para perdoar Manning privados agora.
Retirada incondicional imediata de todas as tropas dos EUA / Aliados e mercenários do Afeganistão! Hands Off Irã! Manning Privado Grátis Agora! Presidente Manning Perdão Obama privada!
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