| |||||||||||||
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Monday, November 11, 2013
***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots – That’s When Your Heartache Begins …
**********
…it wasn’t always about the struggle against some big societal hurts, against food hunger or that gnawing hunger, want hunger that eats away at a woman or man, it wasn’t always about what to do next to keep body and soul together, it wasn’t always about desperate heroic deeds ahead in places nobody had ever heard, it wasn’t always about what to do, or not do, about fighting the night-takers of the world, it wasn’t always desperately waiting for news, waiting for the other shoe to drop about Johnny, Jimmy or Leroy. A lot of that was for those older coming of age youth but for the younger ones, the ones left to put nickels and dimes in Doc’s Drugstore jukebox (or name your jukebox location), it looked a lot like stuff that had been going on ever since some guy, some old guy from what everybody head, invented teenage-hood several decades before. And so it was with him, him and his hidden desire, virginal desire, maybe, maybe not, such things were kept on the QT then, for her, and the way she disturbed his dreams, disturbed his night.
It all started like all such things started no need to detail every little point like the story hadn’t been told before, hadn’t been told since Adams and Eve, maybe before. He spied her all black hair and freshness, she gave a furtive glance his way, maybe in class at school, maybe at Doc’s when some dreamy song came on the jukebox, or maybe in the back row of church, the possibilities were endless. They talked and they did their mating dance. They went out together, boy-girl together, made out, maybe more, but like I said such things were closely held. Had their favorite song, favorite spot (down at the far end of Squaw Rock, okay), favorite everything that there could be a favorite for. Then the hammer came down. See, that furtive glance she gave him was to get Billy mad, Billy who had split them up and who was now contrite, was back in her field of vision, and so he, well, to put it in cold hard teen talk, was yesterday’s news. Yes, yesterday’s news and wandering, constantly wandering down at Squaw Rock, wondering.
Yes, wondering like some fool, like some kid fool and he almost ready to go, after summer’s end if he can survive this hurt, to his senior year in high school and then off to join brothers and fathers in that great big shooting gallery oversea (his preference, like his older brothers, to go west, go west to get those Japs, those beasts, after Pearl). But now kid hurt, kid hurt wondering how his old corner- boy, corner boy, junior high school version and so harmless standing older guys-like against Mom and Pops’ Variety Store until Mom and Pop chase them away, or they had to do homework, Billy, could cut him that way, could come back and take her away with the snap of his fingers when he knew for a blessed fact that he was just playing with her, playing with her fragile heart…
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting, Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr. Frank Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.
Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,” decidedly not your parents’ or grandparents’ (please, please do not say great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, who, in the words of brother Bobby quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their youth dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from, survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies, three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest, the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in. Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on its last legs. Hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink. Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts. And that day not him, not him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos) were dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the land of “milk and honey.” Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell, any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs, Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.
The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big, well big band, replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren ,no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare (nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to do a thing about it. Banished, all such things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II. A time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before, had taken their number when they were called. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell in line.
Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny. Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else. Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines, many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god forsaken piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board, hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers were not afraid, or should have been) but who gave a good accounting of themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires, keeping the womenfolk happy.
All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every war, who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, Always, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, Sentimental Journey, songs that spoke of true love, their true love that would out last the ages, would carrying them through that life together if they could ever keep those damn night-takers at bay, songs about faraway places, We’ll Meet Again, Til Then, songs that spoke of future sorrows, future partings, future returnings (always implying though that maybe there would be no return), future sacrifices, future morale-builders, songs about keeping lamp- lights burning, songs to give meeting to that personal sacrifice, to keep the womenfolk, to keep her from fretting her life away waiting for that dreaded other drop, songs about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them.
Songs to make the best out of the situation about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, that small white house with the white picket fence (maybe needing a little painting, maybe they could do that together), kids, maybe a new car once in a while you know the stuff that keeps average joes alive in sullen foxholes, sea-sick troop transports, freezing cargo planes, keeps them good and alive. Hell, songs, White Cliffs Of Dover songs, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened, drawing closer, getting all, uh, moony-eyed, and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, wet behind the ears, with that white paper service cap at some obscure angle and now smudged white jacket implying that he was in the service too, told them to leave he was closing up they held out for one last tune. Then, well-fortified with swoony feelings they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, if near a pond, the back forty, if near the back forty, the hills, you know, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, do I have draw you a map, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, Harry James, Benny, the Dorsey boys, Bing, Frank, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, and on and on wafted (nice word, huh) through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized possession centered in the small square living room of my growing up house amid the squalor of falling roof tiles, a broken window or two patched up with cardboard and tape, a front door that would not shut, rooms with second-hand sofas, mattresses, chairs, desks, tables, mildewy towels, corroded sinks, barely serviceable bathtubs, and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs. My broken down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held with masking tape in need of panes, no proof needed, overgrown lawn in need of cutting of a shack (there is literally no other way to describe it, then or in its current condition) of a too small, much too small for four growing boys and two parents, house. The no room to breathe, no space but shared space, the from hunger look of all the denizens, the stink of my father’s war wounds that would not heal, the stink of too many people in too small a house, excuse me shack. The noise, damn the noise from the nearby railroad, putting paid to wrong side of the tracks-dom worst of all. Jesus.
That wrong side of the tracks shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack houses, too small to fit big Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams. Small dreams of Johnny or Jimmy getting on the force (cops, okay), and Lorrie and Pamela getting those secure City Hall jobs in the steno pool until some bright prospect came by and threw a ring at them but in the meantime shack life, and small faded dreams. Funny, no, ironic but these tumbled-down shacks which seemingly would fall with a first serious wind represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such unnamed weirdness then I just cried out in some fit of angst, cried out against that railroad noise, and that sour smell of sweat) the great good desire of those warriors, and almost to a man they had served, and their war brides who had waited, had fretted while waiting, to latch onto a piece of golden age America.
And take their struggle survival music from Doc’s jukebox, from the Starlight Ballroom, from WDJA, with them as if to validate their sweet memory dreams, their youthful innocence before the guys got caught up, caught up close and personal, the ugliness of war, the things they would not speak of unto the grave, and the gals not asking, not asking for all the money in the world but sensing that he, they, had changed, had lost some youthful thing. That radio, that priceless radio console taking pride of place, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard radio station manager knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the basics for the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and brides.
My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting generation, drove me crazy then, mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. As far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.
********
"That's When Your Heartaches Begin"
If you find your sweetheart
in the arms of a friend
That's when your heartaches begin
When dreams of a lifetime
must come to an end
That's when your heartaches begin
Love is a thing
you never can share
If you bring a friend
into your love affair
That's the end of your sweetheart,
that's the end of your friend
That's when your heartaches begin
in the arms of a friend
That's when your heartaches begin
When dreams of a lifetime
must come to an end
That's when your heartaches begin
Love is a thing
you never can share
If you bring a friend
into your love affair
That's the end of your sweetheart,
that's the end of your friend
That's when your heartaches begin
***A
Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day-Monday November 11, 2013 - Immediate,
Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria!
Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
Back on Veterans Day 2010 I happened to be at the Boston Common located just off the downtown section when I came across some white flags, maybe twenty, waving in the distance over near when Charles Street intersects Beacon Street (the main street of the famous Beacon Hill section of Boston). Since I was heading that way I decided to check out what those flags were all about. Upon investigation I found that the white flags also contained in black outline a peace dove symbol and the words Veterans for Peace. Yah, sign me up, my kind of guys and gals. So, to make a long story short, I marched with the contingent that year in their spot behind, and not part of, the official parade sponsored by the city (the reason for that separation will be described in more detail below) and have marched each year since, including this year. Previously in promoting and commemorating this peace event I have recycled my sketch from 2010 out of laziness, hubris, or the basic sameness of the yearly event. I have updated that sketch a bit here to reflect on this year’s event.
**********
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, and socialist causes in my long political life. Some large, many small but both necessary. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have, like I have, “switched” over to the other side, have gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace and what to do about it, have exposed the better angels of their nature after the long hard thrust of war, and preparations for war have lost their allure, and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon.
From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days (the days when even guys like the present Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry had to march in the streets to allay their angers and hurts) I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them out of the barracks, off the bases, and into the streets as happened a little as the Vietnam War moved relentlessly onward ) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, don’t do a bookish analysis, complete with footnotes, of the imperial system and their cog part in it, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (the infamous “battle of the barstool,” no, battles) and donning the old overstuffed moth-eaten uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened in 2010 (and this year) as well. What also happened in Boston this year as in 2010 (and other years but I had not been involved in prior marches) was that the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one, one o’clock in the afternoon in downtown Boston near the Common.
Previous to 2010 there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events so all I know is that were some heated disputes) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long, maybe before, as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois parties’ pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set in 2010 and this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated that year, if you can believe this, from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. This year by a phalanx of Boston Police motorcycle cops. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one on every occasion.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicked old world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers in 2010 and this year well, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we again this year formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart.
That response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these fellow vets would go beyond then “bring the troops home” and pacific vigil tactics and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from everywhere, embrace a more studied response to the nature of war policy “in the belly of the beast” then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today, like at that first white flag sighting in 2010 I was very glad to be fighting for our socialist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
Click
below to link to the Veterans For Peace
Facebook page for the latest news on what anti-war front the organization
is working on.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Veterans-For-Peace/49422026153
Peter
Paul Markin comment:
Back on Veterans Day 2010 I happened to be at the Boston Common located just off the downtown section when I came across some white flags, maybe twenty, waving in the distance over near when Charles Street intersects Beacon Street (the main street of the famous Beacon Hill section of Boston). Since I was heading that way I decided to check out what those flags were all about. Upon investigation I found that the white flags also contained in black outline a peace dove symbol and the words Veterans for Peace. Yah, sign me up, my kind of guys and gals. So, to make a long story short, I marched with the contingent that year in their spot behind, and not part of, the official parade sponsored by the city (the reason for that separation will be described in more detail below) and have marched each year since, including this year. Previously in promoting and commemorating this peace event I have recycled my sketch from 2010 out of laziness, hubris, or the basic sameness of the yearly event. I have updated that sketch a bit here to reflect on this year’s event.
**********
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, and socialist causes in my long political life. Some large, many small but both necessary. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have, like I have, “switched” over to the other side, have gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace and what to do about it, have exposed the better angels of their nature after the long hard thrust of war, and preparations for war have lost their allure, and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon.
From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days (the days when even guys like the present Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry had to march in the streets to allay their angers and hurts) I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them out of the barracks, off the bases, and into the streets as happened a little as the Vietnam War moved relentlessly onward ) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, don’t do a bookish analysis, complete with footnotes, of the imperial system and their cog part in it, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (the infamous “battle of the barstool,” no, battles) and donning the old overstuffed moth-eaten uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened in 2010 (and this year) as well. What also happened in Boston this year as in 2010 (and other years but I had not been involved in prior marches) was that the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one, one o’clock in the afternoon in downtown Boston near the Common.
Previous to 2010 there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events so all I know is that were some heated disputes) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long, maybe before, as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois parties’ pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set in 2010 and this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated that year, if you can believe this, from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. This year by a phalanx of Boston Police motorcycle cops. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one on every occasion.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicked old world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers in 2010 and this year well, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we again this year formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart.
That response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these fellow vets would go beyond then “bring the troops home” and pacific vigil tactics and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from everywhere, embrace a more studied response to the nature of war policy “in the belly of the beast” then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today, like at that first white flag sighting in 2010 I was very glad to be fighting for our socialist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution-Socialist Revolution Is the Only Way Out
Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
*************
Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
*************
|
Workers Vanguard No. 1005
|
6 July 2012
|
 |
| ||
TROTSKY
|
LENIN
|
Socialist Revolution Is the Only Way Out
(Quote of the Week)
Writing during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Leon Trotsky
underlined that only workers revolution can put an end to the privation and
social regression endemic to the decaying capitalist profit system. The need to
build revolutionary workers parties based on this understanding is graphically
underscored by the current economic crisis, as the capitalists and their
governments attempt to force greater austerity down the throats of working
people.
The first and most important premise of a revolutionary situation
is the most intense sharpening of the contradictions between the productive
forces and the property relations. The nation stops going forward.
The arrest in the economic development and, even more, its regression signify
that the capitalist system of production is definitely worn out and must give
way to the socialist system.
The present crisis, which encompasses all countries and thrusts the
economy back decades, has definitely pushed the bourgeois system to absurdity.
If, at the dawn of capitalism, ignorant and starving workers broke machines,
today it is the capitalists themselves who destroy machines and factories. The
further maintenance of the private ownership of the means of production
threatens humanity with degeneration and barbarism.
The basis of society is economic. That basis is ripe for socialism
in a double sense: modern technology has advanced to a point where it can assure
a high standard of living to the nation and to all humanity; but the capitalist
property system, which has outlived itself, dooms the masses to ever-increasing
poverty and suffering.
The fundamental premise of socialism—that is, the economic
premise—has already been present for some time. But capitalism will not
disappear from the scene automatically. Only the working class can
seize the forces of production from the stranglehold of the exploiters. History
places this task squarely before us. If the proletariat is, for one reason or
another, incapable of routing the bourgeoisie and of seizing power—if it is, for
example, paralyzed by its own parties and trade unions—the continued decay of
economy and civilization will follow, calamities will pile up, despair and
prostration will engulf the masses, and capitalism—decrepit, decayed,
rotting—will strangle the people with increasing strength, and will thrust them
into the abyss of a new war. Other than the socialist revolution, there is
no way out.
—Leon Trotsky, “Once Again, Whither France?” (March 1935)
Sunday, November 10, 2013
***Out In The Train Smoke And Dreams 2000s Night – Denzel Washington’ “Unstoppable”-A Film Review
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and onward ) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident to boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard- master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and onward ) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident to boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard- master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Shake, Rattle and Roll- Big Joe Turner Is In The House- A CD Review
A YouTube film clip of Big Joe Turner performing his classic birth of rock ‘n’ roll song, Shake , Rattle and Roll.
CD Review
Big Joe Turner’s Greatest Hits, Big Joe Turner, 1991
A few years ago there was a little controversy about whether songs like Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll or some early Elvis Presley tunes like Hound Dog or It’s All Right, Mama represented the genesis of rock and roll. That might be an interesting discussion for musicologists with time on their hands but if you really want to know the answer listen here. If you do not find the base line here for all later classic rock then I am afraid it is lost in the mist of time. Musical trends draw from many influences but the rhythm and blues of the early 1950’s seems to have been the real jump point for the turn to rock. Just look who covered the thing-yeah ,Elvis, Jerry Lee and Bill Haley.
This compilation, that is moreover technically competent, is a case study for the above stated propositions. It all comes together here on Blues in the Night. The two parts of Around the Clock Blues are nice. As is Blues on Central Avenue.
A YouTube film clip of Big Joe Turner performing his classic birth of rock ‘n’ roll song, Shake , Rattle and Roll.
CD Review
Big Joe Turner’s Greatest Hits, Big Joe Turner, 1991
A few years ago there was a little controversy about whether songs like Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll or some early Elvis Presley tunes like Hound Dog or It’s All Right, Mama represented the genesis of rock and roll. That might be an interesting discussion for musicologists with time on their hands but if you really want to know the answer listen here. If you do not find the base line here for all later classic rock then I am afraid it is lost in the mist of time. Musical trends draw from many influences but the rhythm and blues of the early 1950’s seems to have been the real jump point for the turn to rock. Just look who covered the thing-yeah ,Elvis, Jerry Lee and Bill Haley.
This compilation, that is moreover technically competent, is a case study for the above stated propositions. It all comes together here on Blues in the Night. The two parts of Around the Clock Blues are nice. As is Blues on Central Avenue.
***Out In The Be-Bop 1980s Folk Blues Revival Night- The 1980 American Folk Blues Festival- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Chicago blues legend Howlin’ Wolf performing the Robert Johnson/Elmore James electric blues classic, Dust My Broom.
CD Review
American Folk Blues Festival ‘80, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982
This review was originally written for the American Folk Blues Festival ’64 CD reflecting a time when some of us first strongly imbibed those finely-hewed big blues night notes when we were looking, well, looking for something to explain that unspeakable hurt, alienation and angst as we travelled from teen-hood to young adult-hood in the early 1960s be-bop night. Of course by the 1980s that folk blues, or any blues, minute was long over for all but aficionados, and the life-long searchers. So rather than write a new screed that would not reflect the spirit of the genre as we were introduced to it I am keeping the old review. Except to say that many of the1960s CD participants were no longer on the scene by then, except those like Hubert Sumlin who had joined Howlin’ Wolf as a kid. So the old shoes are filled here by younger musicians who sat at the feet of the masters and were carrying on the blues on right down to their shoes to a new generation. Hopefully.
******
Let’s go by the numbers, the musical year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worst), and just let it go from there. After a musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s where we put up with some awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff we stepped right into the hard rock and roll of the Rolling Stones and later groups that based their early work on the blues, the American etched blues. You cannot listen to early Stones with thinking about Little Red Rooster, Baby Don’t Go, Hoochie Goochie Man, and a million other Chess Record classics. Go figure.
Yes, go figure. Go figure that much of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, Chicago mainly, but those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it, the old country blues from down in the Delta, the North Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) came from. All of this is just around about way to pay tribute to the roots, or one of the significant roots, of our generational genre. Hell Elvis, Jerry Lee, and you know for sure that Chuck was listening, listening hard, at the juke joint doors when Saturday night turned into Sunday. And then they listened to the sanctified music that was meant to wash away that Devil’s music blues. But never quite did.
But more than that search for roots business it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues Festival of 1980, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s search for roots to explain our angst and alienation, including the search for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our mid-1950s brains like an, well like an atomic bomb, we lost sight of where the music had come from. We just wanted to dance, or think we could dance so we could more smoothly be around that certain she (or he for she) without having to learn the fox trot or some old fogey dance. And not have to get sweaty-palms, strange-smelling breathe close and be cool at the same time.
More importantly we didn’t “hit the books” to find out what happened to those who created the music that once was the staple of hip music. It was only after we figured out the social graces stuff and needed to do more than dance cool with that certain she (oh yes, and he for she) that we went root hunting. And guess what? Some of the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just waiting to be “discovered,” or really rediscovered.
That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early 1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon, and the “max daddy of them all,” Howlin’ Wolf. This is history, maybe not world-shaking, change-the course-of civilization history but a very important slice of the people’s history. Listen up.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Chicago blues legend Howlin’ Wolf performing the Robert Johnson/Elmore James electric blues classic, Dust My Broom.
CD Review
American Folk Blues Festival ‘80, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982
This review was originally written for the American Folk Blues Festival ’64 CD reflecting a time when some of us first strongly imbibed those finely-hewed big blues night notes when we were looking, well, looking for something to explain that unspeakable hurt, alienation and angst as we travelled from teen-hood to young adult-hood in the early 1960s be-bop night. Of course by the 1980s that folk blues, or any blues, minute was long over for all but aficionados, and the life-long searchers. So rather than write a new screed that would not reflect the spirit of the genre as we were introduced to it I am keeping the old review. Except to say that many of the1960s CD participants were no longer on the scene by then, except those like Hubert Sumlin who had joined Howlin’ Wolf as a kid. So the old shoes are filled here by younger musicians who sat at the feet of the masters and were carrying on the blues on right down to their shoes to a new generation. Hopefully.
******
Let’s go by the numbers, the musical year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worst), and just let it go from there. After a musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s where we put up with some awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff we stepped right into the hard rock and roll of the Rolling Stones and later groups that based their early work on the blues, the American etched blues. You cannot listen to early Stones with thinking about Little Red Rooster, Baby Don’t Go, Hoochie Goochie Man, and a million other Chess Record classics. Go figure.
Yes, go figure. Go figure that much of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, Chicago mainly, but those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it, the old country blues from down in the Delta, the North Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) came from. All of this is just around about way to pay tribute to the roots, or one of the significant roots, of our generational genre. Hell Elvis, Jerry Lee, and you know for sure that Chuck was listening, listening hard, at the juke joint doors when Saturday night turned into Sunday. And then they listened to the sanctified music that was meant to wash away that Devil’s music blues. But never quite did.
But more than that search for roots business it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues Festival of 1980, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s search for roots to explain our angst and alienation, including the search for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our mid-1950s brains like an, well like an atomic bomb, we lost sight of where the music had come from. We just wanted to dance, or think we could dance so we could more smoothly be around that certain she (or he for she) without having to learn the fox trot or some old fogey dance. And not have to get sweaty-palms, strange-smelling breathe close and be cool at the same time.
More importantly we didn’t “hit the books” to find out what happened to those who created the music that once was the staple of hip music. It was only after we figured out the social graces stuff and needed to do more than dance cool with that certain she (oh yes, and he for she) that we went root hunting. And guess what? Some of the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just waiting to be “discovered,” or really rediscovered.
That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early 1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon, and the “max daddy of them all,” Howlin’ Wolf. This is history, maybe not world-shaking, change-the course-of civilization history but a very important slice of the people’s history. Listen up.
Please print, sign & mail
|
||
Corportations not people petitionPassMassAmendment.org
|
||
Casino petitionhttp://www.5signatures.com/this site will walk you thru the steps |
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BostonUNAC" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bostonunac+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
| 2013-nov-14-print-sign-send.gif 25 KB |
| 2013-nov 14-petition-pma.gif 54 KB |
| 2013-nov-14-pma-petition.gif 82 KB |
| 2013-11-14-casino-petition.gif 72 KB |
***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Folk
Blues Revival Night- The 1964 American Folk Blues Festival- A CD Review-Take Two
A YouTube film clip of the
Robert Johnson/Elmore James electric blues classic, Dust My Broom.
Howlin’ Wolf holding forth on Little Red Rooster
The Rolling Stones sitting at the
feet of the master playing How Many More Years
CD Review
American Folk Blues Festival ‘64, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982
American Folk Blues Festival ‘64, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982
Let’s go by the numbers, the musical
year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical
age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the
mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worst), just kids trying to figure stuff
out, mainly sex stuff, or rather boy-girl stuff mostly, but also, for some of
us anyway our place in the sun, small
dream stuff, and let’s just let it go at that. The music, that music “spoke” of
jail-break, or the tip of it, from our parents’ mushy music, and maybe from a
lot more things but that was later. Later after a musical counter-revolution in
the late 1950s engineered by those very same parents. In collusion, there is no
other way to put it, with the record company executives who were freaked out,
cut off junior and missy’s record-buying allowance freaked out, by their
negative response, to the jungle music, devil’s music, degenerate music and you
can fill in whatever your own parents labelled it. We had to put up with some
awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff, stuff that today is totally
forgettable, bobby-soxer, teary-eyed lost guy stuff, and worst, before we
stepped right into back into hard rock and roll, The hard beat of the Rolling Stones and later groups, the British
invasion of the 1960s groups plus American groups that finally got hip to one
of the key roots to rock ‘n’ roll’s development, that early work on the blues,
the American- etched blues. You cannot listen to early Stones with thinking
about Little Red Rooster, Baby Don’t Go, Hoochie Goochie Man, and a
million other Chess Record classics. Hell even the Beatles were crazy to cover
some of that music. Go figure.
Yes, go figure. Go figure that much
of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, meaning
electric blues, Chicago mainly (Kansas
City and Detroit some too, wherever blacks and white hipsters were looking for
up-to-date music and not that down home stuff. Not knowing, or conveniently
forgetting that those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it,
the old country blues from down in the Mister James Crow Delta, the North
Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip
Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) and white poor boy
players came from. It is not until the next generation that the guys were born
in northern cities.
All of this is just around about way
to pay tribute to the roots, or one of the significant roots, of our generational
genre. Hell Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl, and you know for sure that Chuck, Ike and
Bo were listening, listening hard, at the juke joint doors when Saturday night liquor
and women turned into Sunday righteousness. And then they listened to the
sanctified music that was meant to wash away that Devil’s music blues. But
never quite did.
But more than that search for the roots
of rock business it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues
Festival of 1964, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s
search for meaning to explain our angst and alienation, including the search
for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our mid-1950s brains like
an, well like an atomic bomb, we lost sight of where the music had come from.
We just wanted to dance, or think we could dance so we could more smoothly be
around that certain she (or he for she) without having to learn the fox- trot
or some old fogey dance. And not have to get sweaty-palms, strange-smelling
breathe close and be cool at the same time.
More importantly we didn’t “hit the
books” back then, probably didn’t enough knowledge or concern to ask the
questions, unlike later, to find out what happened to those who created the
music that once was the staple of hip music. It was only after we figured out
the social graces stuff and needed to do more than dance cool with that certain
she (oh yes, and he for she) that we went roots hunting. And guess what? Some
of the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago
or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just
waiting to be “discovered,” or really rediscovered.
That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival
when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early
1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes,
Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of
course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson,
the legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon, and the “max daddy of them
all,” Howlin’ Wolf. This is history, maybe not world-shaking, change-the
course-of civilization history but a very important slice of the people’s
history. Listen up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)