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, November 18, 2013
15th
Annual Boston Transgender Day of Remembrance: Community Speak-Out
&Vigil
Boston,
MA -Each
November 20, the worldwide transgender community turns its attention to its
family, friends and loved ones lost to violence and prejudice. A tradition
inspired by the Allston, MA vigil for slain transgender woman Rita Hester in
1998, this day has become the worldwide rallying point for a community long
under siege.
On
Sunday November 17th 2013, from 4:00-7:00pm folks will gather in St
Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral at 138 Tremont Street in downtown for a program of
speakers, community speak out, and a candlelight vigil on the Common. This free
program begins at 4 pm and concludes with a reception featuring hot drinks and
food. Doors at 3:30 pm.
Boston’s
Transgender and LGB communities extend a warm welcome to all who would like to
attend this important event to memorialize and celebrate the lives of those we
have lost, underscore the serious suffering in our communities and rejoice in
our strength and survival. No persons should be subjected to violence because of
their gender identity or expression. No persons should be denied the basic
rights that enable their safety and security. No one should consider taking
their own life to escape harassment and bullying.
Please
join with us on this day to remember and celebrate those who are gone, whatever
the cause of their departure. This event will benefit the Transgender Emergency
Fund, which provides assistance to low-income transgender people across
Massachusetts and the Transgender Clinic at the Boston Health Care for the
Homeless Program which helps homeless transgender individuals improve and
maintain their health.
Sponsors
include the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, The Network/La Red
TransCEND Boston, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, The Crossing,
Boston Alliance of GLBT Youth, Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality,
Black & Pink and more.
Event
Background:
Fourteen
years ago at this time, Boston’s LGBT community recoiled in horror at the
discovery of the latest victim of transphobic violence. Rita Hester, a popular
figure in the local rock ‘n roll scene, who also happened to be a transsexual,
had been found brutally stabbed to death in her Brighton apartment. A local
community of queer activists, rockers, family, friends and allies – over 250 of
them – came together and held a speak-out and candlelight vigil in Rita’s honor,
forming a human stream of light winding its way through Rita’s old Allston
stomping grounds. One year later, a memorial vigil was held in San Francisco;
the following year Boston and a few other cities joined in, and this year
hundreds of observances will be held in dozens of countries. Boston’s
transgender communities remember local victims Chanelle Pickett, Debra Forte,
Monique Thomas, Georgette Hart, Denise Pugliesi, Monique Rogers, Lisa Daniels,
CJ Garber, and Rita Hester. There have been many more, mostly uncounted and
unnoticed by all but their friends and family. Organized by the all-volunteer
Boston Transgender Day of Remembrance Organizing Committee.
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- Soviet Democracy and Workers Rule 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. 1012
9 November 2012
TROTSKY
LENIN
Soviet Democracy and Workers Rule
(Quote of the Week)
As with the current presidential election, the exploited and the
poor in the U.S. are asked every four years to vote for a representative of the
capitalist ruling class who will oversee their oppression. Addressing American
workers following the 1917 workers revolution in Russia, whose 95th anniversary
we celebrate this month, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin denounced the fraud of
democracy under capitalist rule, counterposing to it the workers democracy
instituted by the soviet regime as part of the fight to establish a worldwide
socialist order.
The Soviets of Workers and Peasants are a new type of
state, a new and higher type of democracy, a form of the
proletarian dictatorship, a means of administering the state
without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.
For the first time democracy is here serving the people, the working people, and
has ceased to be democracy for the rich as it still is in all bourgeois
republics, even the most democratic. For the first time, the people are
grappling, on a scale involving one hundred million, with the problem of
implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and semi-proletariat—a problem
which, if not solved, makes socialism out of the question....
The old bourgeois-democratic constitutions waxed eloquent about
formal equality and right of assembly; but our proletarian and peasant Soviet
Constitution casts aside the hypocrisy of formal equality. When the bourgeois
republicans overturned thrones they did not worry about formal equality between
monarchists and republicans. When it is a matter of overthrowing the
bourgeoisie, only traitors or idiots can demand formal equality of rights for
the bourgeoisie. “Freedom of assembly” for workers and peasants is not worth a
farthing when the best buildings belong to the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have
confiscated all the good buildings in town and country from the
rich and have transferred all of them to the workers and peasants
for their unions and meetings. This is our freedom
of assembly—for the working people! This is the meaning and content of our
Soviet, our socialist Constitution!
—V.I. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers” (August 1918)
Sunday, November 17, 2013
***Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage
A YouTube's Film Clip Of Reverend Gary Davis Performing On Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest".
CD Review
Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000
I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of Stefan Grossman’s Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.
Stick out songs here are the much-covered "Samson and Delilah", "Cocaine Blues" (from when it was legal, of course, although still sinful, naturally), "Twelve Keys To The City" and the gospelly "Blow Gabriel" and “Who Shall Deliver Poor Me”
Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover
Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.
REV. GARY DAVIS
Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at the beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved. ******* Blow, Gabriel, Blow Lyrics
[RENO] Brothers and sisters, we are here tonight to fight the devil... Do you hear that playin'?
[COMPANY] Yes, we hear that playin'!
[RENO] Do you know who's playin'?
[COMPANY] No, who is that playin'?
[RENO] Well, it's Gabriel, Gabriel playin'! Gabriel, Gabriel sayin' "Will you be ready to go When I blow my horn?"
Oh, blow, Gabriel, blow,
***Songs To While The Time By- The
Roots Is The Toots- Jesse Winchester’s Yankee
Lady
A YouTube clip to give some flavor to
this subject.
…she came
like the wind out of Texas, out of the Panhandle,what did she, they, call it, that wind, oh
yeah, the blue norther’, came out spouting Goethe, Schiller, and blessed
Hoderlin, came north to get out of that wind and away from, well, away from a
lot of stuff that those who looked to the 1960s as a jail-break were trying to
get away from. Came north all blue eyes, all something out of Botticelli’s
fevered mind,all long hair, braided,
ethereal, simple dress as bespoke the times, all pearls of wisdom (remember
those German poet-kings) all, well, fetching if not classically beautiful and
all soul. All soul ready for a mate, ready to teach a man a few simple truths
if he could stand them.
So they
began, began their time together she teaching him bread-baking, yogurt-
producing, crocheting, the many ways of sex, all the manly arts and he eagerly learned them, learned
too some wisdom from her plainsong voice. They lived by the sea in a cabin, by
the sea off the coast of Maine, Maine with its own winds, and she worked, and
he worked sometimes, and they walked beaches, and made things from scratch,
lived like some pioneer forbears making the western trek. And she, Texas-born,
an orphan, grew to love him, and he her, and the spring birds proclaimed that
simple fact.
Then one day
he got the urge for going like he had, unknown to her, a million times before,
had what he called his Mexican urge, Mexico of the mind, to head south or west
it did not matter, and so he left. Left in a fit of hubris, and she Texas- born
held back her tears. And, later much later knowing that he had made a mistake,
had taken the wrong road, wondered, wondered whether she still sang that
plainsong, still lived by that sea…
One of the damn things about growing older is that those iconic figures, in this case one of those iconic music figures, that got us through our youth, continue to pass from the scene. News has just arrived via his website that the singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester is ill. Jesse had a very promising career cut somewhat short by a little thing called the Vietnam War. He felt, as others did at the time, that it was better to be a war resister and go into Canadian political exile, than be part of the American imperial military machine. While I would disagree, in retrospect, with that decision I still personally respect those who made a very hard choice. Harder, much harder, than most kids today have to face, thankfully.
But it was the music that he made, the songs that he wrote, that made many of our days backs then. A song like Glory To The Day set just the right tempo. Better still, Yankee Lady, better because we all had our yankee ladies (or men) back then, or wished for them, whether they came from Vermont or Texas, for that matter. Ya, the “old lady,” rain pouring off some woe-begotten roof, a little booze, a little dope, and a lot of music wafting through the room as we tried to take our places in the sun. Tried to make sense out of a world that we did not create, and did not like. Be well, Brother Winchester, be well.
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution-The Class Struggle and the Fight Against Reformism 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. 1011
26 October 2012
TROTSKY
LENIN
The Class Struggle and the Fight Against Reformism
The explosion of strikes in South Africa points to both the
combativity of the proletariat and the role of the pro-capitalist union
bureaucracy in subordinating the workers to the bourgeois state. In the 1938
founding document of the Fourth International, commonly known as the
Transitional Program, revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky stressed the need for
communist intervention into the wide range of class struggles in order to forge
revolutionary workers parties worldwide.
The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all
kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material
interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in
mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit
of militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the
unions to the bourgeois state and bind the proletariat to “compulsory
arbitration” and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist but
also “democratic.” Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is
successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the
Stalinist bureaucracy....
At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely rejects and
condemns trade union fetishism, equally characteristic of trade unionists and
syndicalists.
(a) Trade unions do not offer, and, in line with their task,
composition, and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer, a finished
revolutionary program; in consequence, they cannot replace the
party. The building of national revolutionary parties as sections
of the Fourth International is the central task of the transitional epoch.
(b) Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20
to 25 percent of the working class, and, at that, predominantly the more skilled
and better-paid layers. The more oppressed majority of the working class is
drawn only episodically into the struggle, during a period of exceptional
upsurges in the labor movement. During such moments it is necessary to create
organizations ad hoc, embracing the whole fighting mass: strike committees,
factory committees, and, finally, soviets.
(c) As organizations expressive of the top layers of the
proletariat, trade unions, as witnessed by all past historical experience,
including the fresh experience of the anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain,
developed powerful tendencies toward compromise with the bourgeois-democratic
regime. In periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade
unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it
harmless. This is already occurring during the period of simple strikes,
especially in the case of the mass sit-down strikes which shake the principle of
bourgeois property. In time of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is
plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become
bourgeois ministers.
—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of
the Fourth International” (1938)
***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And
World War II- From Deep In The Songbook- Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo…
…
he had to laugh, laugh out loud although the deathly rattling of the freight
car that he was just then riding, riding as a non-paying customer, would drown
that laughter from any ears, if there were any ears open among his fellow
“passengers” strewn about the bare wooded floor of their “room.” The reason for
his witless fit of laughter was the knowledge that last year, the year of our
Lord 1933, he had had money, plenty of money, for a Pullman sleeper to ride
west in. And had done so on one business trip. Now here he was a year later, all
credit used up, all checks bounced, all flophouses fled without room -rent
payment, all Sally soup-lines unwelcomed to him, all job opportunities lost to
him since the world was filled, no, over-filled, with ex-stockbrokers, take a
number, brother, all sweethearts moved on to the next still employed
stockbroker and he heading west, ever west on the floor of this damn freight
train. As he rolled up a vagrant newspaper to serve as a make-shift pillow for
his tired head he held to a glimmer of hope that his luck would change once he
hit the Pacific, or whatever west he was destined for. Held too to that notion
that maybe next year he could join the Mayfair swells, the businessmen, and
just plain tourists on one of those comfortable Pullman sleepers…
*******
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, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd
teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold
war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at
times, or whether we cared, music was as
dear a thing to them as to us, their sons and daughters, who were in the throes
of finding our own very different musical identities. As well, whether we knew
it or not, knew what sacred place the music of the late 1930s and 1940s, swing,
be-bop swing, be-bop flat-out, show tunes, you know jitter-bug stuff, and the
like held in their youthful hearts that was the music, their getting through
the tough times music, that went wafting through the house on the radio, on
record player, or for some the television, of many of those of us who
constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68. And some of us will pass
to the beyond clueless as to what our forebears were attuned to when they came
of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which they too had not created,
and had no say in creating.
Yes they were crazy for the swing and sway of bespectacled Benny
Goodman blowing that clarinet like some angel- herald letting the world
know,if it did know already, that it
did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not
swing, with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, better with, better with, swaying
slightly lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Why Don’t You Do Right vowing he would
do just that for a smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Harry
James with or without the orchestra , better with, blowing Gabriel’s horn,
knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some Starlight Ballroom in
Kansas City blasting the joint with his You
Made Me Love You to the top of the charts. Elegant Duke Ellington with or
without Mr. Johnny Hodges blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in
some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas, on Taking The ‘A’ Train. Tommy Dorsey all banded up if there is such a
word making eyes misty with I’ll Never
Smile Again. Jimmy Dorsey too with
his own aggregation wailing Tangerine that
had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with
or without fanfare, Glenn Miller, with or without those damn glasses, taking
that Sentimental Journey before his
too soon last journey. Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday, Lady Day, with or without the
blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues
away with that throaty thing she had, that meaningful pause, yeah, Lady Sings The Blues. Miss Lena Horne
with or without stormy weather making grown men cry (women too) when she
reached that high note fretting about her long gone man, Jesus. Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting going for that Old Black Magic. Mr. Vaughn Monroe with
or without goalposts. Mr. Billy Eckstine, too. Mr. Frank Sinatra doing a
million songs fronting for the Dorseys and anybody who wanted to rise in that
swinging world, with or without a horde of bobbysoxers breaking down his doors,
putting everybody else to shame (and later too). The Inkspots, always with that
spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, doing teary I’ll Get By or If I Didn’tCare. The Mills Brothers with or without those paper
dolls. The Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops
with or without whatever they were doing with or without. Mr. Cole Porter, with
or without the boys, writing the bejesus out ofTin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes. Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the
flag, ditto Mr. Porter. And Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother,
creating Summertime and a thousand
other catchy tunes. Yeah, their survival music.
We 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 could not bear to hear that
music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that
stuff was cool. 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 time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a
jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid
Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their
gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time
we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads
down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy
and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a
nightmare that they were trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those
loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to
soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Please, please, please if we must
die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.
We were moreover, some of us any way and I like to think the
best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, ready to cross our own swords with
the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby,
sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear, quoting from Alfred Lord
Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded
by the new dispensation and slogged through that decade whether it was in the 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 were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent
who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down
quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for,
desperately searched for, 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 their newer
world, their struggles to satisfy their
hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their
youththey dreamed by on cold winter
nights and hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music, the get by the tough times
in the cities, on the farms, out in the wide spaces, of the hard born generation
that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away when the winds gathered like
some ancient locust curse to cleanse the earth and leave, leave nothing except
silt and coughs. All land worthless no crops could stand the beating, the
bankers fearful that the croppers would just leave taking whatever was left and
the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable. They drifted west,
west as far as California if the old buggy held up and they had enough gas in
the tank, not knowing what some old time professor, from Harvard I think, knew
about the frontier that it had been swallowed up, been staked out long ago and
too bad. Not knowing as well what some old time Okie balladeer knew that if you
did not have the dough California was just another Okie/Arkie bust.
Survived empty bowls, empty plates, wondering where the next
meal would come from, many times, too many times from some Sally soup-line,
some praise the lord before thy shall eat soup-line. Survived that serious
hunger want that deprives a man, a woman, of dignity scratching for roots like
some porcine beast in some back alley lot, too weak to go on but too weak to
stop as well. Survived, if not west, then no sugar bowl city street urchin corner
boy hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, always with that vagrant foot up
against some brick-laid wall, killing time, killing some dreams,sleeping under soot-lined railroad trestles,
on splintered park benches newspapers for a pillow’s rest (one eye open for
swarming festering jack-rollers and club-wielding sadistic cops), and hard
bench bus stations (ditto jack-rollers and cops).Survive the time of the madness just then
beating the tom-toms of war and degradation coming from a hungry want-infested Europe
filled with venom, those drums heralding the time of the night-takers casting a
shadow over the darkened world, portending the plainsong of the time of the
long knives, outlawing dreams for the duration.
Building up a pretty list of those wants on cold nights ,
name them, food, shelter, sex, two- bits in the pocket, name those hungers,
success, dignity, not having to struggle against the want night. Building that
phantom list while among tree-lined Hudson River “hobo jungle” riverside fires
stoked by fugitives, brethren, the fellahin of the world, upstream from the
clogged city, upstream from clogged city prying eyes and prickly cops, cities clogged
with broken dreams, or worse of late no dreams, and not enough food to go
around, not enough work either and that ate at him, her more that the food
hungers. Down in dusty arroyos, parched, no water, no agua aqui senor, lo
siento, as they, the bracero brethren, passed the water jug between them and
pointed him west, west you cannot stay here gringo, no way. Under forsaken silver-plated
bridges, steel beams to rest a weary head, rolled blanket for his pillow,
trying to keep the winds at bay. Survived
god knows how by taking the nearest freight west, some smoke and dreams
freight, sleeping on some straw-scratched floor, plugging ears with napkins to
drown out the rattling rails and deep sleep snores. Taking 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 young as he was,
desperate as he was, penniless as he was, 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 sullen dreaded bastard rent- collector (the landlords do not
dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff, his damn
auction, and the streets are closing in. (What did the Sheriff care that all
meager life-times possessions were street-ward bound he was paid by the item
tossed.) 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, not even hot water for the weekly bath, 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, get that bindle stick
together, grab that slow moving freight before she picks up steam, watch out
for the “bulls” 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
curbthat gnawinghungry 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
andtake 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- doorhobo 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, andwoe-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 like all the neighborhood large
brood mothers, harried by the bleak wanting prospects of the day with four
growing boys and not enough, nor enough food, not enough, well, just not enough
and leave it at that. Maybe bewildered is a better expression for her plight,
for her wartime young marriage adventure not wanting to be left with only a
memory of my father if things went wrong in the Pacific. As so she took to turning
the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine
would chase her immediate sorrows away. Yea, a quick boost of their songs
was called for, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs before he
shipped out. Those songsembedded deep in memory, wistful young memory,
or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her
appointed household rounds. And whether she won or lost the day’s bout with not
enough, with some ill-winded message from some bill due, seemingly always some
four boy hurt, some bad father work news, the list of her daily sorrows and
trepidations could have stretched to infinity she perked up, swayed even to
those tunes.
That stuff, that mother dream stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer, Peggy Lee, Helen Morgan, Margaret Whiting, maybe
even a sneak Billie thrown in bleeding all over the floor drove me crazy
thenSome she bleeding with the pain
ofher thwarted loves, her man hurts,
her wanderings in search of something in this funny old world, her waitings,
waiting for the good times, waiting in line for the rations, waiting, waiting
alone mind you, for her man to come home, come home whole from some place whose
name she could not pronounce, they should have called it the waiting generation,
just flat-out 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 (not
the old torn down Doc’s of their generation over on Billings Road if that is
what you are thinking). As far as I know Doc (the son of their Doc), knowing
his demographics as well as that radio executive at WDJA, 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 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.
********
CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOOGlenn Miller - from "Sun Valley Serenade" - words
by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren
Pardon me, boy Is that the
Chattanooga choo choo? Track twenty-nine Boy, you can gimme a shine I
can afford To board a Chattanooga choo choo I've got my fare And just a
trifle to spare
You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to
four Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore Dinner in the
diner Nothing could be finer Than to have your ham an' eggs in
Carolina
When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar Then you
know that Tennessee is not very far Shovel all the coal in Gotta keep it
rollin' Woo, woo, Chattanooga there you are
There's gonna be A
certain party at the station Satin and lace I used to call "funny
face" She's gonna cry Until I tell her that I'll never roam So
Chattanooga choo choo Won't you choo-choo me home? Chattanooga choo
choo Won't you choo-choo me home?
