This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Monday, May 20, 2013
***Johnny Prescott’s Itch- With
Kudos To Mister Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
He had the itch. John Prescott had
the itch and he had it bad, especially since his eyes flamed up consumed with
hell-bend flames when he saw Elvis performing live on the Ed Sullivan Showone
Sunday night. And he had it so bad that he had missed, unbeknownst to his
parents who would have been crestfallen and, perhaps, enraged, his last few
piano lessons. Sure, he covered his butt by having saxophonist Sid Stein,
drummer Eddie Shore, and bass player Kenny Jackson from his improvisational
school jazz combo, The G-Clefs (yah, I know, a well-thought out name for a
musical group) come by his house to pick him up. While standing at the Prescott
door parents and sidemen went through the “well aren’t things looking up for
you boys,” and “they seem to be” scene without missing a beat. But as soon as
Kenny’s 1954 Nash Rambler turned the corner of Walnut Street Johnny was a
long-gone daddy, a walking daddy, real long-gone. And where he was long-gone
but not forlorn to was Sally Ann’s Music Shop over on the far end of West Main
Street.
Now the beauty of Sally Ann’s was
that it was, well, Sally Ann’s, a small shop that was well off the main drag,
and therefore no a likely place where any snooping eyes, ears or voices that
would report to said staid Prescott parents when Johnny went in or out of the
place. Everyone, moreover, knew Sally Ann’s was nothing but a run-down, past
its prime place and if you really wanted all the best 45s, and musical
instrument stuff then every self-respecting teenager hit the tracks for Benny’s
Music Emporium right downtown and only about a quick five-minute walk from
North Clintondale High where Johnny and the combo served their high school
time, impatiently served their high school time.
But Sally Ann had, aside from that secluded
locale and a tell-no-tales-attitude, something Johnny could use. She had a
primo Les Paul Fender-bender guitar in stock just like the one Gene Vincent
used that she was willing to let clandestine Johnny play when he came by. And
she had something else Johnny could use, or maybe better Sally Ann could use.
She had an A-Number One ear for guys who knew how to make music, any kind of
music and had the bead on Johnny, no question. See Sally Ann was looking for
one more glory flame, one more Clintondale shine moment, and who knows maybe
she believed she could work some Colonel Parker magic and so Johnny Prescott
was king of the Sally Ann day.
King, that is, until James and
Martha Prescott spotted the other G-Clefs (Kenny, Sid, Eddie) coming out of the
Dean Music School minus Johnny, minus a “don’t know where he is, sir,” Johnny.
And Mr. Dean, Johnny’s piano instructor, was clueless as well, believing
Johnny’s telephone story about having to work for the past few weeks and so
lessons were to be held in abeyance. Something was definitely wrong if Mr.
Dean, the man who more than anyone else recognized Johnny’s raw musical talent
in about the third grade had lost Johnny's confidence.
But the Prescotts got wise to
Johnny’s whereabouts in a hurry because flutist Mary Jane Galvin, also coming
out the school just then and overhearing the commotion about Johnny’s
whereabouts, decided to get even with one John Prescott by, let’s call a thing
by its right name, snitching on him and disclosed that she had seen him earlier
in the day when she walked into Sally Ann’s looking for an old Benny Goodman
record that featured Peggy Lee and which Benny’s Emporium, crazed rock ‘n’ rock
hub Benny’s, would not dream of carrying, or even have space for.
The details of the actual physical
confrontation with Johnny by his parents (with Mr. Dean in tow) are not very
relevant to our little story. What is necessary to detail is the shock and
chagrin that James and Martha exhibited on hearing of Johnny’s itch, his itch
to be the be-bop, long-gone walking daddy of the rock ‘n’ roll night. Christ,
Mr. Dean almost had a heart attack on the spot when he heard that Johnny had,
and we will quote here, “lowered himself to play such nonsense,” and gone over
to the enemy of music. As mentioned earlier Mr. Dean, before he opened his
music school, had been the roving music teacher for the Clintondale elementary
school and had spotted Johnny’s natural feel for music early on. He also knew,
knew somewhere is his sacred musical bones, that Johnny’s talents, his
care-free piano talents in particular, could not be harnessed to classical
programs, the Bachs, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff, so that he had encouraged
Johnny to work his magic through be-bop jazz then in high fashion, and with a
long pedigree in American musical life. When he approached the Prescotts about
coordinating efforts to drive Johnny’s talents by lessons his big pitch had
been that his jazz ear would assure him of steady work when he came of age,
came of age in the mid-1950s.
This last point should not be
underestimated in winning the Prescotts over. James worked, when there was
work, as a welder, over at the shipyards in Adamsville, and Martha previously
solely a housewife, in order to pay for those lessons (and be a good and caring
mother to boot) had taken on a job filling jelly donuts (and other donut stuff)
at one of the first of the Dandy Donuts shops that were spreading over the
greater Clintondale area. Christ, filling donuts. No wonder they were
chagrined, or worse.
Previously both parents were proud,
proud as peacocks, when Johnny really did show that promise that Mr. Dean saw
early on. Especially when Johnny would inevitably be called to lead any musical
assemblage at school and later when, at Mr. Dean’s urging, he formed the G-Clef
and began to make small amounts of money at parties and other functions.
Rock‘n’ rock did not fit in, fit in at all in that Prescott world. Then damn
Elvis came into view and corrupted Johnny’s morals, or something like that.
Shouldn’t the authorities do something about it?
Johnny and his parents worked out a
truce, well kind of a truce, kind of a truce for a while. And that kind of a
truce for a while is where old Sally Ann entered in again. See, Johnny had so
much raw rock talent that she persuaded him to have his boys (yes, Kenny, Sid
and Eddy in case you forgot) come by and accompany him on some rock stuff. And
because Johnny (not Sally Ann, old Aunt Sally by then) was loved, loved in the
musical sense if not in the human affection sense by the other boys they
followed along. Truth to tell they were getting the itch too, a little.
And that little itch turned into a
very big itch indeed when at that very same dime-dropper, Mary Jane Galvin’s
sweet sixteen party concert (yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl), the G-Clefs
finished one of their covers, Dizzy’s Salt Peanuts with some rock riffs.
The kids started to get up, started dancing in front of their seats and to the
shock of the parents and Mary Jane (yes, Mary Jane was that kind of girl),
including the senior Prescotts, were crazy for the music. And Johnny’s fellow
G-Clefs noticed, noticed very quickly that all kinds of foxy frails (girls,
okay), girls who had previously spent much time ignoring their existences, came
up all dream-eyed and asked them, well, asked them stuff, boy-girl stuff.
Oh, the Sally Ann part, the real Sally Ann part not just the
idea of putting the rock band together. Well, she talked her talk to the
headmaster over at North Clintondale High (an old classmate, Clintondale Class
of 1925, and flame from what the boys later heard) and got the boys a paying
gig at the upcoming school Spring Frolics. And the money was more than
the G-Clefs, the avant guarde G-Clefs made in a month of jazz club appearances,
to speak nothing of girls attached to them. So now the senior Prescotts are
happy, well, as happy as parents can be over rock‘n’ roll. And from what I hear
Johnny and the Rocking Ramrods were going, courtesy of Aunt Sally, naturally,
to be playing at the Gloversville Fair that summer. Be-bop-a-Lula indeed.
***Out In The American Neon Wilderness Night- Josie’s Story
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
This is the way Josie, Josie Little, an old flame, told her story late one bluesy, rainy Cambridge bar stool Saturday night in the late 1970s, the Miller Hi-Life sign flickering on and off in the background, a story of a trip she had taken with her first love up north in the early 1970s when their love was still in early bloom. A story out in the neon wilderness.
*******
… Allan [that first love] was crazy to go to Neil’s Harbor and Peggy’s Cove up in Cape Breton and could hardly wait to get on the road out of Halifax and push north. We were however also somewhat behind in our schedule, our rough schedule, to try to head west to California and then south to Mexico before the winter set in. But we had been taken by the beauty, the hills rising above the ocean along the road that encircled the whole place ,and the separate circle that enveloped Cape Breton, Nova Scotia beyond that Arcadia French exile notion further south, and also the provincial parks, unlike the local parks in the states were cheap, were well kept-up, provided firework and hearths, and had decent showers facilities except in the few “primitive” sites we were confronted with at certain points where you had to backpack in and take your chances, ugh. Not taken in though so much by the ocean view aspect, we were both heartily getting tired of endless seas, endless looking at seas, although not of walking them, sitting and listening to the ocean, or making love as the waves rolled in when we had the chance. His thing was to chart things like the furthest point in all directions we hit on the trip, how many of this and that we saw, how many that and this things we did, he was a real numbers and geography guy. Not where those places were in the world , no, so he could said, sometimes brag, brag a little, but mostly say, well, he had been this far in case somebody might think he was a rube if he hadn’t been far enough from home.
That notion was funny too because Allan’s politics made him definitely not a rube, his political passions that he was suppressing a little on the trip for my sake. He was always talking, and doing something about which is where we were beginning to differ, about the struggle against the American government in Vietnam, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the fate of the Palestinians, the one major point where I, a half-hearted Zionist, daughter of Zionists, and he would have a few blow-ups including one night back in Boston before the trip when we, drunk and stoned, were at some party which was being attended, although neither of us knew that was it who they were , by something like the central committee of the Zionist movement in Boston. They were raising money for something in Israel, and he started talking his liberation talk, talking about the Irgun gang, about the King David Hotel, about Deir Yessin, Jesus, stuff even I didn’t know about. He got heated, got heated at me, most of all, for half-defending the infidels at the party, or just their right to support Israel, something like that, so when we got to my place, we weren’t living together then he was living in commune down the road, I threw him out, after we probably woke up half of the student ghetto in Boston.
Then around four o’clock I was missing my sweet walking daddy [her pet name for Allan]and called him up to come back over, he said he didn’t want to, didn’t want to because he was sleepy, and we had another row over that. He, when I propositioned him, propositioned him with a little secret thing that I did to him in bed, a thing that as he said he had heard on some blue song, maybe David Bromberg, maybe Muddy Waters I don’t remember, that “curled his toes,” he came over, but it was not a good night, not a good omen at all.
It’s funny on that rube thing too because I was, and he later admitted that he was too, very provincial, not in the sense of being some hayseed thing out in Iowa but provincial in the way we interpreted Saul Steinberg’s funny New Yorker cover, the one where his map of America started in Manhattan big and then the rest of America was put in about one inch of space. I related to that and would tell him, at his request, endless things, odd-ball things, about the vagaries of growing up in Manhattan, about what I had seen there, and done. He said he felt the same about Boston and maybe that is why he had to have charts and lists and a stuff like that, his stuff in the world.
My thing in Peggy’s Cove though was, besides the great view and friendly huge immense rocks we could sit on and get splashed by the sea and feel clean, that since that was the eastern most point of our trip (and we thought at the time it would be the northernmost as well) we could stay in a bed and breakfast place. Indoors with an indoor shower, private, not wait in line, or anything like that like out in the woods. And we did, did find one, just off the main road, Mrs. Miller’s Bed and Breakfast. And if thename of that place and the name of the woman who ran it sounded like something out of about 1947 then you would be right because that is exactly what it was like, and what she was like. Of course out in the provinces, the gentle provinces, among the folk who live in the little off-the-road places, the places where times stands still, they depend on the travelling peoples of the world who want to see great natural beauty, and relax against the craziness of the world to make their, what did Allan call it, their harsh lonely winter tide-me-over money, in season. But these people, and we ran into many, on the outskirts of civilization have their toleration limits, and have their own mores, and good for them.
Except not good for us, almost. Mrs. Miller wanted to know if we were married, and we, thinking we were in Boston or New York, said, well no, and, essentially, what of it. She kind of flipped out and did not want to let us stay in her “home.” So we, tired from a long day on the road, some time spent in the rock-bound sea sun, and not sure where the next B&B was, if any, started back-tracking, started talking about our travels, about our tires, about our using this trip to see if we should get married. (That contribution was by me so you could see Allan’s blarney side rubbing off.) She didn’t like it but, as a good Christian woman, she had to welcome us. It was close though, very close. See too though we intended that this indoor scene would allow us to have a freshen up shower, have a nice dinner, maybe some wine to get a little high (we had no intention of doing pot, no way), and then some serious gentle sex. We were both tired of hard-scrabble dirt, of rocks, of fleas, gnats and every other bug taking the edge off our love-making. So we had to debate whether to do this deed in this good Christian woman’s house. We did but we did it so quietly that I thought that this was the way that they are forced to do it in Chinese villages and working- class neighborhoods where everybody was packed in together. But here is the best part, the next morning Mrs. Miller made the best pancake-waffle-eggs-anyway you wanted them-ham-hash-home fries- muffins-juice-and whatever for us the best breakfast we had ever had we both agreed. And to top it off a big old fresh-baked blueberry pie for us to eat on our travels. A good Christian angel woman, indeed, she has her place reserved in heaven, if such a place is worthy.
Although I lived the island of Manhattan growing up I never had an occasion to ride the Staten Island ferry which people who don’t come from Manhattan don’t understand, especially since it was only a nickel. Allan said that his mother told him when she was a girl that she would take boat from Boston down to New York via the Cape Cod Canal and the two things he remembered that she went on and on about were the cheap jack Automat, the cafeteria where you inserted coins and got your food via the cubicles, a far out thing in the 1930s I guess, and the ride on the cheap Staten Island ferry (and a grand view of downtown Manhattan from the Staten Island side). So he told me that first time we went down to New York City together to face the fireworks from my parents about us living together and me having a goy boyfriend and they wouldn’t, no way, let us stay together in my room he actually spent the night riding the ferry back and forth, a very cheap way to keep out of the cold and away from harm and cops' eyes. So when we made the turn past Neil’s Harbor and headed west, the first real west move we made the trip he said let’s take the ferry over to Prince Edward Island and so we did and while it was interesting to be on the water with our funny old Datsun it wasn’t anything like the big deal he made of it. Let’s put it this way I still haven’t taken the Staten Island ferry. Now Prince Edward Island certainly had its charm, small fishing and farming villages dotted the highway around the island, but even I was getting a little antsy about moving on to see some different scenery from the boats and cows.
The one thing that sticks out though was this incredible beach on the north side of the island, this Brackley Beach which extended from miles jutting out into the Saint Lawrence River, and which, if you can believe this, that far up north had no qualms about allowing nude bathing. We were kind of shocked but I said to Allan I was game, although I had a swim suit along. Allan was kind of funny about that though, some Irish Catholic working-class hang-up about public exposure, or something. He used to hang around the various water spots we landed on with a light weight long sleeve shirt, his jeans and sandals, he refused to wear a bathing suit, and as it turned out didn’t even have one with him. This all-purpose get-up thing was he said because of the bugs that really did seem to draw a bee-line to him. That day though I coaxed him out of his jeans and all when I whispered in his ear that I was kind of horny, horny like down in Maine and maybe I was up for giving him a little something to “curl his toes.” That perked him up as we headed to some private area of the dunes, put down a big towel, maybe a small blanket and I went to work on him. See I knew how to get to him, although it wasn’t all tough to do, not then.
“Flow river flow, down to the sea,” a phrase from The Ballad Of Easy Riderby the Byrds, I think, is what Allan kept practically chanting as we drifted down the Saint Lawrence River headed to Quebec City. But along the way we stopped at seemingly twenty different towns, Trois this and that kind of towns, three river places, all the same as far as I was concerned, but one I will give you as my little road story because it really could stand in for all of them. See all these river towns had, like a lot of towns we had seen, a small main street, a few stores, maybe a library, a school showing here and there, and all had churches, but not the New England big steeple white simple church gathering in the pious brethren on Sunday to hear some big top theology from some learned Harvard-trained minister, something like that but stone-etched imposing cathedral like edifices with plenty of artwork , devotional stuff, and dank, dark, and smelling of death, or really the readiness for death that the Catholics are always hankering for. Really though just like the New England pine-box churches once you have seen one you have pretty much seen all you need to see about the damn things.
And I would have left it at that but something about the whole sanctified, sacred, scented scene, kind of took Allan off his moorings. Like I said before he was off the church thing but like he also said such things when so intense die hard, die out only after some kind of sacred exorcism, and so that is how he schemed (schemed in the good sense of planning something out) to do a mock exorcism at the church in Trois Rivieres, a couple of hundred miles from Quebec City. Now this was not some churchy thing he was thinking of but rather as was our thing then, a little sexual escapade. See his idea was that we would do some hanky-panky in that dark church (dark, like the white steeple churches because the brethren were deep in work on the farms or in the cotton mill that provided some work for the town folk). So we snuck over to the chapel I guess you call it, Allan did know what it was like maybe he knew that was the best place , although he swore, swore after we were done that he had never done it there, or even though about it until the ride down the Saint Lawrence.
I was afraid to take my clothes off, and I said I wouldn’t so we settled on me giving him some head, but he said that for once we would use a condom and leave it there as a burnt offering for the sins of the world. I don’t usually like condoms (rubbers) in my mouth because they taste funky but this time I kind of didn’t notice it some much because frankly, as we got started I got so turned on by the idea we were doing it in church, a sacred place, that I just went about my work, and I could tell by his little moanings that Allan was appreciating my efforts, although after a bit I started thinking about how maybe we should “do the do” (our little term for our love-making courtesy of a Howlin’ Wolf song) and I suggested that to him but once he got into my head thing that usually was what he wanted. Well, he came, after I had given him the best blow job I think I had ever given him until then, and least he had a big grin on his face after I took the condom off and we placed it carefully in front of the altar. I told him I was still turned on and so we went back to that secluded area and did our “do the do,” twice. I would tell you more, a couple of little extra things we did, but I can tell you are getting turned on a little and so I will leave it at that.
After the farms, fields and rivers coming down the Saint Lawrence all of a sudden out of the river mist, out of the river turn around Ile de Orleans there came into view the great fortress city of Quebec City, a city that we both confessed that we knew about mainly from the Plains of Abraham, bloody deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe in some 18thcentury part of the world- wide battle between the British and French for world supremacy, for the ports, the commercial ports of entry. Quebec to me though was mainly a matter of about ten million churches, Gallic Roman Catholic churches fit for the lame, halt and crippled it seemed by their names or names associated with each parish, with all grey stone, all gothic, all forbidding, foreboding and frankly hostile, hostile to whatever Jewish identity I felt, felt being among those who not that long ago (and maybe they still did) called my people Christ-killers and did stuff about it. Allan, a long lapsed Catholic ,lapsed since about fourteen when he started reading some stuff , some stuff by Jews like Karl Marx and Sartre, and feeling out of sorts and oppressed by the Catholic-ness of the place (except for those bloody plains of Abraham alongside the Saint Lawrence that were really beautiful), for his own reasons, stated categorically that he would defend me, my honor, the bones of my forbears, even my fussy parents, if anybody, anybody under cloak of clerical authority, or just any lay person who got crazy, tried any rough stuff on me and mine, and that kept me in check (and made me love him even more, and ready then to show him some decidedly non-Catholic loving out of wedlock, and out of procreation’s way too).
Also despite the architectural beauty of the city, the gothic old time sense of some very much earlier age, some age when men and women were not afraid to come out and face the wilds, the hostile Indians, the even more hostile wildlife and stake their claim to new world riches and pay homage to the providence that spared those who survived put paid to that good wind by those incredible churches, nunneries and chapels (and the vast number of personal to service them), the current crop of French-Canadians who just then dominated the very nationalistic scene were short with Anglos, including sympathetic Anglos like us. This was the heyday of the Quebec independence movement and the tensions were still in the air against the Anglo government which had at one point declared martial law in the province. The way this feeling came out was when we would go into restaurant in Old Town and try to order lunch or something (admittedly my high school and first year of college long past French and later Allan’s Spanish in Mexico were too Anglo to fake anybody out that we were anything but Americanos) and be snubbed at every turn, deliberately snubbed by waiters, slumming while students like was almost universal then, maybe now too, who you could overhear speaking perfectly usable English among themselves when they wanted to make some obscure point. Allan would get on his high horse with me and while he wasn’t happy about snubs, or any other of the small change hurts of people, people like his Irish forbears, who couldn’t respond to their oppression any other way was more tolerate than I was toward what he called his fellahin brethren .
I asked him, asked him seriously one time when we were driving out of Quebec City toward Montreal, what he meant by fellahin. Had he heard or seen the word in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road where he wrote about it as part of his trip in southern California in describing the people in the night after hard day fields places, the mex places, where he and his lady of the time, his little mex whore, their mores, his kindred? Allan said no he had learned it in seventh- grade at Hull Junior High School when some history teacher, a Jewish guy if he remembered correctly, held the class in awe with stories about the struggles on th eland in the Middle East with the Palestinians, including labor Zionists, and he had held the word like a lot of odd-ball words that interested him in his head since then. What he meant, maybe like Kerouac, and like that history teacher too, was life’s dispossessed, those left behind in the dust who, until their judgment day (not that foolish religious one) when they were liberated, maybe generations later, would forget that bondage times but until then he wanted to be very indulgence toward them, even if we got poor wait staff service, ouch.
*******
After that last piece Josie then said she was getting tired, she had had too many scotches and had previously taken a few too many puffs off a proffered joint and didn’t want to talk about Allan anymore that night. She asked if I wanted to take her home. In the cab she ruefully whispered that the trip was their beginning, the real beginning, and every once in a while although she could no longer be with him, no way, there was just too much sorrow between them, on wind-swept nights, or when she was near some ocean, or some raggedy scruffy guy selling some left-wing newspaper passed by her she would get misty about her sweet walking daddy. She said I would have to know that, know that up front on that rainy, sad, bluesy night. And that was our beginning…
Sunday, May 19, 2013
CHOCKY AR LA-The Plays Of Sean O'Casey
Minute Book Review
THREE PLAYS: JUNO AND
THE PAYCOCK, THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN’ THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS, SEAN O’CASY, ST.
MARTIN’S PRESS, NEW YORK,
1981
The history of Ireland is replete with ‘times of troubles’,
no question about that. The particular ‘ time of troubles’ that the master
Anglo- Irish socialist playwright Sean O’Caseytakes on in these three classic and best known of his plays is the time
from the Easter Uprising in 1916 to the time of the lesser known Civil War
battles between Free Staters and die-hard Republicans in 1921-22. Needless to
say they were all classified as tragedies by O’Casey. What qualified O’Casey to do much more than provide
yeoman’s cultural service to this period? Well, for one he helped organize the
famous James Connolly-led Irish Citizen’s Army that took part in the heroic
Easter Uprising in 1916. For another, O’Casey was a true son of the Dublin tenements where
the action of the three plays takes place. He KNEW the ‘shawlie’ environment
and the language of despair, duplicity and treachery that is the lot of the
desperately poor. Finally, as an Anglo- Irishman he had that very fine ear for
the English language that we have come to cherish from the long line of Irish
poets and playwrights who have graced our culture. That said, please read about
this period in Irish history but also please read these plays if you want to
put that history in proper perspective- in short, to understand why the hell
the British had to go then from Ireland and need to go now. Below are capsule
summaries of the three plays.
Juno and the Paycock- the Boyles, the central characters in
this play, have benefited from the creation of the Free State but at a cost, namely the
incapacity of their son. Their daughter has seemingly better prospects, but
that will remain to be seen. The device that holds this play together is the
hope of good fortune that allegedly is coming under the terms of a relative of
Captain Boyle’s’ will. The ebb and flow of events around that fortune drives
the drama as does the fickleness of the tenement crowd who gather to ‘benefit’
from it. There is also a very lively and, from this distance, seemingly
stereotyped camaraderie between the Captain and his ‘boyo’ Joxer.
The Shadow of a Gunman- the gun has always played, and
continues to play, an important part in the Irish liberation struggle. That premise
was no different in 1920 than it is today. Whether the gun alone, in the
absence of a socialist political program, can create the WorkersRepublic
that O’Casey strove for is a separate question. What is interesting here is
what happens, literally, when by mistake and misdirection, a couple of
free-flooding Irish males of indeterminate character and politics are assumed
to be gunmen but are not. It is not giving anything in the play away to state
that the real heroine of this action is a woman, Minnie, who in her own
patriotic republican way takes the situation as good coin. The Minnies of this
world may not lead the revolution but you sure as hell cannot have one without them
(and their preparedness to sacrifice).
The Plough and the Stars- There was a time when to even say
the words plough and stars brought a little tear to this reviewer’s eye. Well
he is a big boy now but the question posed here between duty to the liberation
struggle in 1916 and its consequences on the one hand and, for lack of a better
word, romance on the other is still one to br reckoned with. That it had such tragic
consequences for the young tenement couple Jack and Nora only underlines the problem
of love and war in real life, as on the stage.
ON THE QUESTION OF
MULICULTURALISM
COMMENTARY
RECENT HARVARD STUDY
PRODUCES DISTURBING RESULTS
As a professed socialist I know that our ultimate aim is to
mix the various peoples of the world, their institutions and the way they look
at the world in order to benefit humankind as a whole. In short, we are
decidedly in favor of the concept that has entered into the political
vocabulary as multiculturalism.With
this proviso –we know that the material basis for such solidarities as
expressed above require a totally different form of social organization and use
of ‘social’ capital than currently exists. Nevertheless we support
multilingualism, international acts of solidarity and ‘diversity’ cultural
events as steps in the right direction. We have no interest in the
‘superiority’ of one language over another, one race over another, one nation
over another or one culture over another.
That said, a recent study concerning this very question of
multiculturalism has been the subject of some agony by liberals and delight by
conservatives. Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard, well-known for his now
classic study of the breakdown of civil solidarity in America in “Bowling
Alone”, has concluded a massive long time survey that indicates that the more heterogeneous
a society (like the United States, for example) the less likely that the various
social, ethnic and racial groups that make up that society will coalesce and
work together to create a greater unitary civil society. Of course, as a
quintessential liberal these conclusions have frightened the good professor and
he has been campaigning to lessen the impact of his study. Conservatives,
obviously, delight in these conclusions and will use this information to deny
the value of affirmative action, immigration, bilingualism, etc.
We, however, will take the study for what it is worth. As a good
indicator, for an academic study, of how far we have to go to get to those
goals mentioned in the first paragraph. Whether the sociological methodology
behind Professor Putnam’s work is politically reliable is an open question.
Some of it seems to be the same old academic ‘hat trick’ methodology that,
unfortunately for the professor, went astray when confronted with political and
social reality. And that is the point. Liberals, through such programs as
affirmative action, changes in the educational curriculum and the mere fact of
celebrating diversity through recognition of various cultural events formerly
neglected, truly believe that these actions would make a multicultural society.
In short, if everyone made nice things would be nice. Even an off hand look at
the social composition of most educational institutions in America - including
ones of higher learning, housing patterns and cultural events could have confirmed
the professor’s thesis without the paperwork. The only significant place,
important for us, where there is mingling is in the workplace. That is to the
good. And that is added confirmation about why we have to organize those
workplaces for socialism.
Boston Common-May 18, 2013:
Boston human rights activists held a vigil/speakout
as part of international protests to shut down Guantanamo prison; in support of the Guantanamo prisoner hunger strike.
Boston,Mass.-May 18, 2013:
This weekend is one of global protests to shut
down Guantanamo prison, where most of
the prisoners have been on a long hunger
strike to protest their indefinite detention
without trial or due process-victims of the US
war on terror that has gone horribly wrong.
About 20 protesters held a vigil/speakout
in Boston, Mass., outside Park Street subway
station; this was today, May 18.
The call was to make Obama keep his 2008
campaign promise to close Guantanamo.
It was organized by The Committee For Peace And Human
Rights-Boston, who hold a weekly anti-war vigil
at the same time/location as today's protest;
also Veterans For Peace and Women's International
League For Peace And Freedom(WILPF)helped organize
this protest as well.
Here are links to a short video and some photos of the protest,
(if not highlighted, copy and paste links in your
browser)--
VIDEO: http://youtu.be/ZJdH7sBbA-w
May 8, 2013, Times Square, NYC, Photo credit Julia Reinhart
LYNNE STEWART SHOULD BE FREE!
Together we will create a public presence in front of the very courts that persecuted Lynne Stewart. We will stand for love, courage and solidarity to make the call for
Last May, some 18 anti-racist militants broke up a gathering of fascists in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, five of the anti-fascist fighters were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three-and-a-half to six years on charges of “armed violence.” (See “Freedom Now for Tinley Park 5!” WV No. 1018, 22 February.)
The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee stand by these militants and call on workers, leftists and anti-racist fighters to demand freedom for the Tinley Park Five. The fascists are a deadly threat to the integrated labor movement, which should be in the forefront of efforts to crush them in the egg. Four of the five who were sentenced—Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin and Alex Stuck—have agreed to receive $25 monthly stipends the PDC sends to class-war prisoners. The PDC program, which includes additional gifts during the holiday season, serves not merely to alleviate some of the harshness of incarceration but also as a message of solidarity from those outside prison walls.
The courage of the Tinley Park defendants was seen in their principled response to the government vendetta. Each of the five was initially charged with 37 felony counts, including armed violence, property damage and mob action. The cops and prosecutors applied continuous pressure to try to get them to give up names of those involved in sending the fascists scattering, which the five steadfastly refused to do. Unable to meet the exorbitant bonds, which ranged up to $250,000, they spent seven months in Cook County Jail. Facing the prospect of up to another year behind bars awaiting trial, they accepted a non-cooperating agreement in which each pleaded guilty to three counts of armed violence in return for guarantees of time off for good behavior.
In their letters agreeing to receive PDC stipends, the four expressed appreciation for the contributions and also for the issues of Class-Struggle Defense Notes and Workers Vanguard that they have received. One noted that his fellow inmates lined up to read the WV article about their case.
Initiated in 1986, the stipend program takes as its model that of the International Labor Defense (ILD), affiliated to the early Communist Party, which provided stipends to over 100 prisoners of the class war. As James P. Cannon, founder and first secretary of the ILD, wrote, “The class conscious worker accords to the class war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem” (“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender [September 1926]). Past PDC recipients worldwide include an Irish Republican Socialist Party militant, members of the British National Union of Mineworkers and members of the U.S. miners, Teamsters and Steelworkers unions. Now, the Tinley Park anti-fascists are joined in the program with America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, former Black Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter and imprisoned members of the Philadelphia MOVE commune.
We urge WV readers to contribute to the stipend program by sending checks payable to the PDC and earmarked “prisoners stipends fund” to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Station, New York, NY 10013-0099. Letters to the Tinley Park Five can be sent to: Alex Stuck M34020, 2600 N. Brinton Avenue, Dixon, IL 61021; Cody Sutherlin M34021, 13423 E. 1150th Avenue, Robinson, IL 62454; Dylan Sutherlin M34022, P.O. Box 7711, Centralia, IL 62801; Jason Sutherlin M34023, 100 Hillcrest Rd., East Moline, IL 61244; John Tucker M34024, P.O. Box 900, Taylorville, IL 62568.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
For nearly a year, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase, and Brian Jacob Church have been locked away in Cook County Jail, facing possible 40-year prison stretches on an array of “terrorism” and other trumped-up charges, with bail set at $1.5 million each. Last spring, these Occupy activists traveled from Florida to Chicago in the lead-up to protests against a May 20 summit of the U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. The city was under a virtual state of siege orchestrated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with thousands of National Guardsmen, troops and cops mobilized to shield the summit from over 10,000 protesters. On May 16, Betterly, Chase and Church—now known as the NATO 3—were arrested for a supposed plot to make four Molotov cocktails and hurl them at police stations and other targets. The highly publicized arrests were part of a campaign to brand the protests as violent, in order to chill opposition to the NATO war criminals who have the blood of untold thousands in Afghanistan and elsewhere on their hands.
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a 21 May 2012 protest letter to the Cook County State’s Attorney (printed in WV No. 1003, 25 May 2012), “The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a classic case of police entrapment and provocation.” The arrests came less than a week after the defendants had posted a video on YouTube of a Chicago cop who had pulled their car over, threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you.”
In January, the NATO 3’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the “terrorism” charges on constitutional grounds. The defense motion paints a chilling picture of how undercover cops known as Mo and Gloves tried every trick in the book to set the activists up:
“Despite a more than two-week continuing effort by the undercover Chicago police officers posing as fellow members of Occupy to entice and encourage the defendants to carry out some criminal act, the defendants never did anything.... It was only in desperation, after two weeks of nothing to show for their undercover infiltration of the defendants, and the untold resources expended to facilitate those efforts, that the police suggested at least some bottles of gasoline [Molotov cocktails] be put together. The defendants never discussed a specific plan of what to do with these bottles, let alone a plan to use them to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian population. In fact, the bottles were always in possession of the under-cover police who suggested their own provocative ideas for how to use the bottles.”
Just moments after the bottles were filled with gasoline, the undercover cops sent a prearranged signal, and the police then raided the apartment with guns drawn. They proceeded to ransack the place, confiscating computers, cellphones and political literature.
The NATO 3 were not the only activists set up and slapped with felony charges prior to the military summit. Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark Neiweem were charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat” and “attempted possession of an incendiary device” respectively. Both took non-cooperating plea deals and remain imprisoned. In all, over 100 anti-NATO protesters were arrested, from pacifist liberals to anarchoid activists. Also arrested during the weekend of the May 20 protest were the Tinley Park 5, anti-fascists who have been convicted for helping break up a white-supremacist gathering in a Chicago suburb (see accompanying article).
On March 27, Judge Thaddeus Wilson denied the NATO 3’s defense motion to dismiss, in a court hearing that was clearly designed to intimidate the defendants and everyone who came out on their behalf. Observers noted that while the judge announced his ruling, the defendants were held in a separate room, sealed off by soundproof glass and away from their supporters, with an armed, uniformed cop for each of them. Meanwhile, four armed cops sat in the audience. “It’s what a lot of scholars and people who pay attention to national security call the ‘new normal’,” said Thomas Durkin, a lawyer for Chase. In simple terms, the “new normal” is a creeping police state.
As the NATO 3’s motion pointed out, the Illinois statutory definition of terrorism is so vague and broad that it could include “labor strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.” Ever since the inception of the “war on terror” in 2001, we have warned that while the first targets were mainly immigrants, particularly Muslims and those from the Near East, the ultimate targets would be the labor movement, black people, the left and anyone who would dare to protest the depredations of U.S. imperialism, at home or abroad. And indeed, leftist political activity of many stripes has increasingly become a focal point of “anti-terror” repression.
In 2008, a host of undercover agents wormed their way into the organizing of protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, entrapping activists on “terrorism” charges. One agent later infiltrated the Minneapolis branch of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO—publishers of Fight Back!). This led in 2010 to FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas against 23 leftists and trade unionists in Chicago and Minneapolis, many of them FRSO supporters, as part of a witchhunting investigation falsely identifying solidarity efforts on behalf of Palestinian and Colombian leftists with “material support to terrorism.” Last November, four Cleveland supporters of the populist Occupy movement received prison terms ranging from six to eleven and a half years for a plot concocted by an FBI informant. Meanwhile police “red squads,” which had largely gone underground in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, have resurfaced in many cities under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
A dangerous vise is being tightened around political protest in this country. First Amendment rights and other civil liberties are shredded in the name of “homeland security,” while the state’s moles and rats cook up felonious “plots” aimed at luring political dissenters close enough to slap charges on them. This is a concerted, bipartisan effort. The use of anti-terror laws against leftists has accelerated under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. From San Francisco, Oakland and Portland to Minneapolis, Chicago and Cleveland, it has been Democratic Party mayors who have led the crackdowns and witchhunts aimed at Occupy and other protesters.
The NATO 3 are scheduled for trial on September 16. The PDC, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, calls on the left and labor movements to join in demanding: Drop all the charges now! The PDC has donated $200 to the legal defense of the NATO 3 and encourages others to do the same. Donations can be made at https://www.wepay.com/donations/nato-5-defense.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell
Leonard Peltier is known throughout the world as one of the most prominent political prisoners in the United States. His 37 years of incarceration due to his courageous activism in the American Indian Movement (AIM) has come to symbolize the U.S. rulers’ racist repression of the country’s indigenous people, survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression.
Peltier emerged as a Native American leader in the late 1960s. In response to the hideous oppression he experienced and saw all around him, he became involved in struggles for Native American rights and joined AIM. It was in his capacity as a trusted AIM activist that he came to assist the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the mid 1970s. AIM came into the government’s crosshairs because it was attempting to combat the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the Feds and the energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in western South Dakota. The hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI turned Pine Ridge into a war zone as they trained and armed thugs to terrorize and crush Indian activists. Between 1973 and 1976, these forces carried out more than 300 attacks, killing at least 69 people.
In June 1975, 250 FBI and BIA agents, SWAT police and local vigilantes descended on Pine Ridge and precipitated a shootout. Two FBI agents were killed, and Peltier and three others were charged. All charges were dropped against one AIM activist, and two others were acquitted as jurors stated that they did not believe “much of anything” said by government witnesses and that it seemed “pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense” against the murderous FBI-led assault.
The government then went into overdrive to assure a conviction against Peltier. His trial was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, a city with strong bias against Native Americans. The prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that Peltier’s gun could not have been used in the shootings while the trial judge ruled out any possibility of another acquittal on grounds of self-defense by refusing to allow any evidence of government terror against Pine Ridge activists. In April 1977, Peltier was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Successive court proceedings have laid bare the evidence of Peltier’s innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents.” In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury could have acquitted Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had been made available. In 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, “Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.” Nevertheless, in August 2009 the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s request for parole, declaring that Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For Peltier, who is now 68 years old, this in effect was a declaration by the state that this courageous man will die in prison.
The long trail of injustice against Leonard Peltier has been documented in the film Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, and in Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Decades of unjust imprisonment have not only robbed him of the prime years of his life. They have also taken a devastating toll on his physical well-being as he suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition. We join millions around the world in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier now!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
With black neighborhoods still simmering over the cop killing of
16-year-old Kimani Gray last month in Brooklyn, testimony in the “stop and
frisk” class-action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York continued this week
in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Filed by the Center for Constitutional
Rights (CCR) in 2008, the suit seeks to have aspects of the NYPD’s
stop-and-frisk policies ruled unconstitutional. On April 1, New York state
senator Eric Adams, a former cop, testified that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
told him in a closed-door meeting that stop-and-frisk is intended to “instill
fear” in black and Latino youth. Earlier, the court heard a tape recording
submitted by Bronx police officer Pedro Serrano in which a deputy inspector told
him to target “male blacks 14 to 21.”
None of this is news to ghetto and barrio youth in this city, who
already know that they are overwhelmingly the targets of cop terror on the
streets. It is right to fight against stop-and-frisk, which recalls the “black
codes,” derived from slavery, that were central to Jim Crow—the earlier form of
the segregation that is embedded in American capitalism. It’s degrading and
humiliating, and deadly. Last year Bronx teenager Ramarley Graham was gunned
down in his own home after he tried to elude cops to avoid jail time for the
small amount of marijuana he was carrying. Cops said Kimani Gray adjusted his
waistband “in a suspicious manner” before they shot him in the streets of East
Flatbush in Brooklyn.
With a pretext of searching for guns and drugs, police routinely
harass minority youth who, if they so much as ask why they are being stopped,
find themselves screamed at with racist slurs and slammed against the wall or
forced to the ground, often enough with guns pointed at their heads. Since
Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, there have been more than five million
stop-and-frisks. How this goes down can be seen in eight blocks of Brooklyn
known as the Brownsville Houses, where police blanket the streets every night.
Between January 2006 and March 2010, the NYPD made nearly 52,000 stops
there—that’s nearly one stop per year for every one of the 14,000 residents of
the area. The name of everyone stopped—arrested or not—was logged into a police
database.
Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over the Floyd
case, ruled in January that elements of stop-and-frisk as practiced in the Bronx
are unconstitutional but then lifted her ban shortly afterward. If she rules for
the cops, they will no doubt feel more emboldened as they mete out their daily
dose of racist brutality. If she rules against the NYPD, stripping this practice
of its legal license, the cops will no doubt move to repackage their systematic
abuse. As William Bratton recently blurted out: “For any city to say they don’t
do stop-and-frisk…I’m sorry, they don’t know what the hell they are talking
about. Every police department in America does it.” Bratton ought to know. He
ran police departments in Boston, New York and Los Angeles and now is acting as
a “consultant” to the Oakland cops.
The history of the CCR suit itself shows that there should be no
illusions in judicial restraint of the cops. Floyd is a sequel to the
Daniels, et al.v.the City of New York suit brought by the
CCR in 1999 after New York City erupted in protest over the slaying of Amadou
Diallo, a black African immigrant gunned down by the cops in a hail of 41
bullets. That suit challenged NYPD racial profiling and sought to disband the
Street Crime Unit (SCU) that killed Diallo. The case was settled in 2003 when
the City agreed to break up the SCU and to require that the NYPD “monitor”
itself and have officers fill out forms documenting all stop-and-frisk
encounters. It was because the cops showed “significant non-compliance” with the
settlement that the CCR filed the new suit.
The New York Spartacist League joined with those who poured onto
the streets of East Flatbush last month in outrage over the gunning down of
Kimani Gray and in the face of a cop lockdown of the area. We demand the
dropping of all charges against those who have protested stop-and-frisk,
including Revolutionary Communist Party supporter Noche DÃaz, who faces more
than four years in prison. We also demand that all charges stemming from
protests against the killing of Kimani Gray be dropped. As we explained in
“Kimani Gray Killed in Cold Blood by NYPD” (WV No. 1020, 22 March), the
police are the guard dogs of racist American capitalism. There will be no end to
the terror they mete out until the working class carries out a socialist
revolution that overturns the entire system of capitalist exploitation, and with
that the special oppression of black people that lies in its bedrock.
In the five weeks of the Floyd trial so far, a variety of
protesters have packed the court, including gay rights activists and Muslims who
have themselves been victims of NYPD harassment. Also turning out are the four
leading Democratic candidates in this year’s mayoral race—in other words, those
running to be the cops’ top boss as Bloomberg ends his reign. Their concern is
the tarnishing of the NYPD’s credentials, requiring the application of some
cosmetic “reform” to appease public anger and to make the cops more effective as
a force of repression.
At a March 19 mayoral forum in Queens, the leading Democratic
contender, City Council speaker Christine Quinn, trumpeted a proposal that had
been raised by councilmen Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander for a police
inspector general to “help the NYPD work more efficiently and effectively.” A
spokesman for Communities United for Police Reform claims that this “would be an
important first step in ensuring New Yorkers have faith that the NYPD is
accountable for their actions” (Amsterdam News, 11 April). NYC already
has a 13-person civilian review board (that goes back decades), a police
corruption commission and other “control” mechanisms. Yet racist killings of
minority youth continue unabated, as does the coast-to-coast mass incarceration
of those the racist rulers consider a “surplus” population.
The cops and courts work together as part of the bourgeois state
apparatus that represses the working class and the ghetto and barrio poor in
order to maintain capitalist rule and profits. This elementary Marxist
understanding is obscured by the reformist leftists and liberals who peddle
fantasies of police behavior modification. Thus an article on the International
Socialist Organization’s SocialistWorker.org Web site (26 March), titled
“Stop-and-Frisk on Trial,” breathlessly reports that the Manhattan trial “could
possibly set legal precedent in regards to racial profiling.” What the cops
think about such “precedent” was expressed a few decades ago by the notorious
Frank Rizzo, who told a court magistrate when he was chief of the Philadelphia
police, “All right, you’re the boss in here, but we’re the boss on the
street.”
In “End Stop and Frisk Now!” Socialist Alternative (June
2012) raised the timeworn reformist call to “place law enforcement and public
safety under democratic community control.” The working class and the oppressed
will never “control” the police, who are the instruments of the capitalist class
that rules this society. The Socialist Alternative outfit tramples on this truth
by portraying the cops, whose job is to suppress class and social struggle, as
part of the working class.
This suicidal notion is also sold by the pro-capitalist trade-union
bureaucracy. When NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 defied the New York
state Taylor Law and went on strike in December 2005, then-president of Local
100, Roger Toussaint, invited Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president
Patrick Lynch to speak on the union platform. The cops showed their true colors
by enforcing a court injunction against the strike, leading to the arrest of
Toussaint himself. The multiracial membership of Local 100 is no stranger to
stop-and-frisk and other facets of police terror. The father of Sean Bell, a
young black man who was killed in a firestorm of cop bullets in 2006 on the
night before his wedding, is a TWU retiree.
Unions like the TWU have enormous potential social power that could
be unleashed in defense not only of its own members but of the ghetto and barrio
masses. But that potential is sapped by the loyalty of the union officialdom to
the capitalist profit system and the state power that enforces it, particularly
in its Democratic Party face. Current Local 100 officials helped build a rally
in March for greater gun control, denouncing “gun violence.” This campaign gives
credence to one of the cops’ major pretexts for stop-and-frisk
harassment—purported gun possession—while also reinforcing the notion that the
capitalist state must have a monopoly on weapons. In the face of the drive to
strengthen gun control following the December killings in Newtown, Connecticut,
we stress the importance for working people to defend the population’s right to
bear arms. We fight as well to decriminalize drugs as a necessary part of the
struggle against the racist “war on drugs.”
Stop-and-frisk is no aberration but a particularly glaring
expression of the systematic, organized violence that defines the capitalist
state. The working class needs a leadership that understands that this machinery
of racist capitalist rule cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the
workers, minorities and the poor but must be smashed through proletarian
revolution. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building the revolutionary
workers party that is the necessary instrument to lead the exploited and
oppressed in the fight for workers rule.
***Tales of
the Class Struggle, Part Two-With Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s TravelsIn Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sullivan’s Travels, starring Joel
McCrea, Veronica Lake, directed by Preston Sturges, 1941
Scene: The times, the tail end of
the Great Depression times (the 1930s one not the more recent one), sent a lot
of things topsy-turvy, set a lot of people who were complacent and well-healed
to thinking that something should be done about something (all the while
enjoying their something without missing a beat). Take this guy Joel Sullivan,
yah, Joel Sullivan the great comedic film director, the guy who got famous in a
hurry with the film All That Stuff.One day, out of the blue, Joel developed a
conscience or maybe he had one, undeveloped, and a quick look around got him
thinking that the way the world was going to hell in a hand-basket that he ought
to do something about it. Of course a guy who was born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, a guy who started life on third base and thought that was where the
starting line was for everybody, would be hard pressed to figure out what was
to be done since all he knew was dough and making dough doing silly movies. Then
he came up with the bright idea that he had to immerse himself among the dregs
of society, down there on skid row, down there in the in the tramp, hobo, bum railroad
jungles, down there on the mean streets of broken dreams to get a feel for life.
And so he did, so he did against
great opposition from his fleet of film advisors, against his financial advisers and,
well, against his woman. Of course no Mayfair swell was going to travel the mean
street of Hollywood, (oops) the mean streets of Depression America alone. Certainly not when you can have a fetching woman
with blond hair stumbling and fumbling over her right eye like his latest
paramour Veronica, Veronica Smith, who despite her fetchingness was strictly
from cheap street and knew a ton of stuff about those streets of broken dreams.
So with Veronica in tow they were off, off to find the soul of the American
hard times.
Hard times at every turn, hard
times down at the railroad sidings, hard times in the Sally’s (Salvation Army
of blessed memory) flop houses, hard times in the soup kitchens, hard times,
well, just hard times all around. And our brother of the road Joel can’t quite
figure out what he could do about it, except to make films, socially redeeming
films not that tinsel town fluff he had been spewing forth. Then things went a
little haywire for the suffering brother. He left his Veronica back in some Podunk
town to keep her out of harm’s, some place where no hobos need stop and went
off on his own. Went off to find the great hobo night.
And our boy found it, found out
what it was like to go hungry a few days when even the soup lines were empty,
when he found himself between towns and had to sleep out in the open, when he
found out that the hobo camps were not places of good fellowship where kindred
took care of each other. He learned that the hard way when one night he had his
serviceable walkable shoes stolen from right off his feet and he was left bare-footed
for a while and one another night when he was jack-rolled for the dollar and
change he had in his pockets. Veronica, nobody, ever told him, ever could tell
him except those who had been there, there in the depths, that down at the
edges of society life ain’t pretty. Life is every man for himself and that is
the facts jack, straight up. So it came as no surprise, although it brought
Veronica nothing but sadness for years afterward, when they found Joel
Sullivan, yah, Joel Sullivan the great boy film director face down in some dry riverbed
out in Kansas beaten almost to a pulp a few weeks after he set off on his great
adventure.
Now some film director, some real
movie guy, someone who knew about how to make a pleasing movie out of Joel’s’ adventures
might have had Joel and Veronica immerged in hobo life as a lark, might have
even had them flea-bitten, hungry, sleeping in some low-life jungle camp, and then
miraculously transformed back in the good life like in some fairy tale. And that
might in fact make a very spiffy movie especially if it was cast right. But out
there in the mean streets, out there on the edge, out there at the tip of the
class struggle that would not play, would not draw a laugh.
Memorial Day for Peace
May 27, 2013, 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park
105 Atlantic Ave.
Boston, Massachusetts
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action and United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 27, 2013
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. There will be veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
