***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -In The Time Before The Rock ‘n’ Roll Jailbreak –They Shoot CD Players, Don’t They?

 

 

 

 

CD Review

The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, Volume II, various artists, CBS Records, 1986

Some people ask; although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s classic rock ‘n’ roll. Of course there was and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities, jazz as it got be-bopped and took to swing, certainly rhythm and blues, north and south and rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South. What it owes little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. That seems to me a different trend and one that is reflected in this CD under review, The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which is really about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Let’s be clear about that.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, and listened to swing, jitterbuggery things and swooned over big bands, swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that is reflected in this compilation and which, I think rightly, I was ready to shoot my CD player over once I heard it as I announced in the headline.

No, this is music that reflects, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word can exist) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On this compilation Harbor Lights is done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad of Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. And it only gets worst from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said.
*******
Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights
They only told me we were parting
Those same old harbor lights
That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights
How could I help it?
Tears were starting.
Good-bye to golden nights
Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,
And kiss you just once more.
But you were on the ship,
And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights
For all the while my heart keeps praying
That someday harbor lights
Will bring you back to me.

 

 

 

***Out In The 1940s Noir Night- With Blonde Ice In Mind-Redux

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Les Lewis, who knew her best, who had been her benighted lover, probably summed her up best, summed up the late Claire Summers, when he said he didn’t really know her at all, that he had no idea what made her tick, if anything. He added that as time went on and he got more of a sense of her outrageousness, of her outrageous demands and her wanting habits he realized that she had no moral compass, no moral core at all. That was the point where he started using the term “Blonde Ice” when speaking of her, although that did not stop him from being entrapped, ensnared, and enthralled by her. No way, not even when the bodies, male bodies, started piling up before his eyes. What did he say once, oh yah, she went through her men so fast she didn’t have time to have her initials embroidered on their sets of towels. Yah, Claire, Blonde Ice, take your pick, had a good run while it lasted, a damn good run. Maybe, though it’s best to go through the story so you will know how close, if you were a man, you were to falling in her clutches.                

Claire’s story, the story she told anyway, to her fellows in the Frisco Gazette newsroom where she held forth as the society page editor, was that she was from nowhere USA like a lot of young people who migrated West after the war, World War Two for those who are asking, and that she was from hunger, from the cheap mean streets of that from nowhere that she had come from. She made it plain, plain as day, to everybody, no, to every guy in the place, and elsewhere that the from hunger thing was strictly in the past and that if anybody wanted to keep company with her they better have dough, big dough, and connections to the Mayfair swells, or leave her alone. That didn’t stop anybody, any guy, in the newsroom, or elsewhere from taking a run at her, a hard run. See she was blonde, young, with a good shape, and pleasing, publicly pleasing, like a kitten. A kitten that would scratch your eyes out as soon as look at you but that came later.    

Here is how Claire operated, operated up front and in public, to give you an idea of what she was capable of when she had her wanting habits on. Les Lewis, the editorial page writer, you might have since his by-line if you got the Gazette was, well, smitten by her, and she by him in a calculating sort of way. And so while she was waiting for the next best thing they stuck together. And only for that amount of time. A while later, maybe six, eight, months later this Carl Castle, a self-made millionaire took a run at her. He didn’t have to run hard, not hard at all because all she saw was dollar signs. So she dumped Les, forthwith, and married Carl and his money. But see here is where she, hell, maybe all dames, went screwy. She wanted to keep Les around as a stand-by, keep him around for those nights when Carl was away on business, or she just wanted an off-hand romp.  Needless to say a guy who was a self-made millionaire didn’t get that kale by being a stooge, even for a dame. So when Carl caught on to Claire’s act, caught on during their honeymoon for chrissakes, he dropped her like a hot potato. 

Or rather he would have if he had had the chance. But Claire, clear-eyed Claire, was not giving up the gravy train after what she had been through and so she wasted him with a pair of slugs, wasted him before he could cut her out. Here is the beauty of it though she set the scene up like Carl had committed suicide. Nice touch. And that kept the wolves, the legal wolves, away for a while. And here is a nicer touch she took right up with Les like nothing had happened. And he was so gone on her that he bought into her fantasy.

Of course Les for Claire was just a safe harbor until she could snare something else, and you know she did. That is how strong her wanting habits were. So the next best that came along was a high-priced lawyer, Stan Lewin, yes, that Stan Lewin the big corporate lawyer for Ajax Consolidated. A big catch. So Les was out the door, or half-way out the door, again. Poor sap, he had it bad, as bad as man could have it for a woman and still be on two feet. Maybe he was getting just a little wise, because around that time he started referring to her as Blonde Ice around the office. Little good it did him once Stan announced that he and Mrs. Castle were to be wedded. 

Those wedding plans though were Claire ‘s undoing. Somehow someone had  gotten to Stan and  put a bug in his ear about Claire’s virtue and so he called the whole thing off. Mistake, Stan mistake, a big one. See you couldn’t do something like that to Claire once she had her plans set, set in stone apparently. And so Stan went underground, six feet under.  And here again is the beauty of her mind she let Les take the fall for it. You know the jealous lover in the background routine. Set Les up for the big sent-off. And didn’t bat an eyelash. Evil, sheer evil.        

Les, and his fellows, by this point were no fools and could see a certain pattern to Claire’s behavior, and so they were ready to move heaven and earth to get Les out from under a murder rap. However they were saved the effort by a very strange occurrence. Apparently back in nowhere Claire had been married, a child-bride it seemed, to some farmer in Utah, or someplace like that. This farmer, Clyde Smythe read about Carl Castle’s demise and the accompanying picture of his widow, his own dear wife. He headed to Frisco, armed, armed and filled with righteous indignation. And that righteous indignation put one Blonde Ice on ice. RIP.      

Oh yah, it later came out that Claire had killed a couple of other guys on her way up. One a guy who was pimping her off doing tricks on the cheap streets of Reno and she blasted him one night when he was wasted on some dope. The newsies figured that was when she developed the taste for the rooty-toot-toot to solve her problems. The other guy was a guy from Vegas who knew that she had wasted her pimp and was trying to blackmail her. Bad idea, very bad.  So maybe she did have her comeuppance when Clyde showed up to even things out for mankind before it ran out of men. But don’t tell Les that, okay. He goes out to Garden Grove Cemetery every week to visit her grave. Some guys have it bad, real bad, and some dames, good or evil, make them that way.  

 

 

 

***Phillip Marlowe Lives-Redux- The 1980s Television Series

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, television series starring Powers Boothe, 1983

Sure I have been on a Phillip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from 1930s and 1940s which feature the tough guy, seen-it-all private detective. Those novels ranging fromThe Big Sleep to Payback (seven in all) pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town. A time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its’ high and low life without a map. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, his forever tilting after windmills for one thing or another, usually a dame in trouble but not always, always playing by his own rules, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.

Some of those traits, and Chandler’s early character development of Marlowe, were first written in some short stories in the 1930s collected in one volume called Trouble Is My Business (the original twelve story volume not the more recent four story volume or the Library of America volume). Those twelve short stories were presented in a British television series in 1983 under the title Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, the DVD under review, starring Powers Boothe as out intrepid P.I. And while, for my money, it is always better with Chandler, and fellow crime novel pioneer Dashiell Hammett, to read their works to get a real flavor of how he presented Marlowe over time this series is worth watching.

Of course there have been many Marlowes starting with the king hell king Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart, in The Big Sleep and working through such Hollywood stars as Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elliot Gould. Powers Boothe fits somewhere in the middle of that tribe, maybe being just a little too handsome and a little too nonchalant to be a top shelf Marlowe. Still, like every Marlowe, he intrepidly works his way through the twelve story set tangling with bad guys, bad women, good women, competent and incompetent cops, guys on the take, lamos, loses , drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters. The normal bill of fare for any Marlowe worth his salt. Remember though read the twelve stories first and then watch this series which, except for additional tough guy and world-weary dialogue, is faithful to the plot line of those stories.

You’ve got that right brother, trouble, trouble with a capital T is Raymond Chandler’s classic hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe’s business. We have followed old Phillip Marlowe through thick and thin in this space in the seven Raymond Chandler-created full-length novels. Our intrepid private eye, private dick, shamus, gumshoe or whatever you call a guy that, privately, and for too little dough scrapes off other peoples’ dirt, and does it not badly at that, in your neighborhood. And kept his code of honor intact, well mostly intact, as he, for example, tried to spare an old man some anguish, some wild daughters anguish in The Big Sleep, or tried to find gigantic Moose’s Velma, Velma who did not want to be found, not by Moose anyway, in Farewell, My Lovely or find that foolish old timey coin in The High Window despite his client’s ill-winded manners.And on it went.

But see not all trouble, trouble with a capital T or not, is worthy of the world historic Chandler Marlowe treatment dished out in full detail like in those seven novels. Sometimes the caper to be solved or case to be squared is of a lesser magnitude and so we have the Raymond Chandler compilation under review, Trouble Is My Business, to, well, shed some light on Marlowe’s lesser cases. Not that they were necessarily any easier to solve, or that he didn’t take as many bumps on the head or guns in his ribs as the longer pieces but there were fewer moving parts to deal with. So a few cases could be lumped together, four in all, as a kind of sampler for those who might not have grown up in the 1940s and 1950s enthralled by the Marlowe mystique.

Take the title story, Troubles Is My Business, where a high-roller, a Mayfair swell, for his own purposes, hires Marlowe second-hand to get some dame, some cash-craving dame, a gold-digger, to lay off his son, his adopted son, to keep an eye on him, and keep him away from those addicted roulette tables that he has made his home , and squash those markers that a certain mobster, a California mobster transplanted from back East holds until that son inherits a cool few million. Naturally Marlowe tries to do an end-around by getting to the dame, getting her to lay off the son. And naturally as well that ill-bred son winds up dead, very dead, in that dame’s apartment. All signs point to the dame or the mobster or both but it only takes our boy about fifty pages to figure out what evil forces are working the scenes. And without giving anything away, once again we are going to have our noses rubbed in the hard fact that the rich, the very rich really, as F. Scott Fitzgerald used to say, are different from you and me, and get away with a hell of a lot more than you and me.

Another story, Finger Man, where Marlowe I am sure with some qualms found himself before a D.A.s grand jury telling all he knows about the nefarious doings of one set of “connected” politicians and their criminal consorts in trying to run everything that moved in some Pacific Coast town. And for his troubles he got set up, set up bad taking a long- time friend down with him before the dust cleared. Naturally a dame, a red-headed dame which tells you a little how bad things were, was knee-deep in the set-up and it almost worked except the bad guys (crooks and politicians alike) left too many moving parts to their plan and Marlowe was able to skate right through the trap. Although, as usual, he took his fair share of bumps on the head, shots fired at him, cigarette smoked and stubbed out, and dips into that bottom desk drawer whiskey bottle that will die an easy death before he is through with it.

Or how about this one, Goldfish, another in a long line of tales about searching for that El Dorado, that pot of gold, except this time it is pearls, the Leander pearls no less, and they are not in the ocean but are loose in the land as a result of a very heavy robbery where guys were killed and others guys got sent up to the big house for their efforts. But here is the kicker-the guy who would know where those pearls are, the guy who stole them and did his time to keep them, isn’t talking, is as quiet as a mouse about their whereabouts. Until Marlowe, and a nefarious pack of chiselers and other grifters, get hot on his trail. This one is a little off-balanced though since the dame who figures here is nothing but a desperado out of the Bonnie and Clyde mold and not one of gallant Marlowe’s frails. Of course she has company and as the number of those in for a cut dwindle due to various eternal departures inflicted many ways but mainly by the old equalizer , the gun,a precious one, Marlowe, is left to figure where those damn pearls are so he can get the reward for their return from the eager insurance company. Hint: strangely enough gold fish actually do enter into this one at the end. Go figure.

Or finally this one, Red Wind, a case taking us back to home ground Los Angeles and a case that our boy was not even looking for, he was just out for a quick beer before dipping into that desk drawer whiskey bottle, or something like that. And damn if pearls weren’t involved in this one too, although they came with a scent this time, perfume, sandalwood, so you know there will be trouble for Marlowe to keep his mind on business. Yah, old Marlowe was just minding his own business when trouble hit him square in the face. A little off-hand bump off of a guy who was looking for a gal, among other things, smelling of sandalwood in order sell her back some young girl pearls that some flyboy war hero gave her back in the day. And that little action led to a another murder, some blackmail, revelations of some matrimonial duplicity, a few scuffles with the cops, good and bad, and the usual assortment of bumps and slugs Marlowe seems drawn to like a moth to flame. Yes, in this one he is back on his horse tilting at windmills for a dame, and not even going under the sheets with her. Jesus.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote this selection of short Marlowe stories. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

[Hammett, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Sam, who come to think of it like Marlowe, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, although not an assortment of Hollywood women but one up north in Frisco town.]

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes. Or noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.

The list of such descriptive language goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down on your fragile head. (That spill your guts thing, by the way a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of doing, except when it suited his purposes. No cop or gangster could force anything out of him, and they tried, believe me they tried. ) He had come from them, from the cops, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny- ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s code of honor.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.

 

peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org Mon, Feb 24, 2014 03:52 PM

Here’s an easy quiz for you. According to an article in the Washington Post over the weekend , the Obama Administration is considering four options regarding leaving U.S.  troops in Afghanistan after the end of this year. What do you think the number should be? A.      10,000 (favored by U.S. military commanders, unsurprisingly) B.      A somewhat smaller number, unspecified C.      3,000 D.      Zero Tell the president you want all our troops home, with none left behind in Afghanistan. It’s long past time to end America’s longest war. In the words of the late, great Pete Seeger (a longtime Peace Action member): “If you love this land of the free, Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home, Bring ‘em back from overseas, Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home!” Peacefully Yours, Kevin Martin Executive Director Peace Action P.S. After you email the president, please click here and tell your friends to do the same. Take Action: Email the President and tell him leave no troops behind in Afghanistan. CONNECT TO US:  Find us on Facebook  Follow us on Twitter  Read our blog  Contact us You are subscribed to Peace Action's Action Alert Network. You can unsubscribe here.

Heroic Wikileaks Whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning ‘s Fight For Freedom Will Again Be Remembered At The Fourth Annual Veterans For Peace-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston On March 16, 2014

 

 

We will be forming up at the corner of D Street and West Fourth in South Boston (take Redline MBTA to Broadway Station-walk up four blocks and then left) at 1 PM for a 2 PM step-off (note time change). Supporters of Chelsea Manning will be out in force distributing informational leaflets and stickers as well as encouraging participants to sign the Amnesty International and Private Manning Support Network petitions calling on President Barack Obama to pardon her. We will not leave our sister behind        
********
President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

   

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The 1960s Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

Ten–A Nation Of One’s Own?

Jackson Pulley had been doing his Saturday morning soapbox spiel in the environs of Lenox Avenue and 125^th Street in high Harlem up in New Jack City for as long as anyone could remember. Some grandmothers would tell their grandchildren whom they were minding or raising as their own while passing by doing the Saturday morning shopping that they could remember when their own grandmothers of blessed memory had taken them to that very same Saturday shopping not to listen to, not to be bothered by Jackson’s big boom voice, and of his hand-held mic that could be heard far above and below the avenue. And Jackson Pulley’s spiel had not changed much since he had first given voice to his project back in the late 1920s. His basis idea was that the black people in America, his people, his sweated, kicked around, abused beautiful people, due to the white man’s inherent racism, needed a country, a nation of their own. He would moreover argue his conceptions through good times and bad, against all comers, from old black knight scoundrel Marcus Garvey through the Communist party turns for and against the black nation, through the “new negro” stuff in the 1950s through to the Doctor King and Malcolm X knock down drag out fight and right up until recently when the Black Panthers gave the idea of a black nation a whirl for a while. Old Jackson kept his main idea front and center and would as the “false” challengers arose kick them like tin cans down the road.

Jackson had had no truck with old black knight Marcus Garvey seeing in him just another black hustler working the ignorant West Indies immigrant black janitors and black maids and down and out southern slave-branded sharecroppers out of their hard earned dough. He had been right as rain on that man when he first started seeing that blacks needed a new homeland. The pivotal event though that drove him to his position was seeing one of his own kin lynched right after World War I down in the great state of Georgia while the whites watched with red-heat passion bordering on lunacy. Later before heading north he bore the full brunt of Mister James Crow and his equally savage ways. No, it was time to separate, long past time.

He had had some respect for the Communist Party and their black nation idea. In fact he had been in a study circle with some brothers in the African Blood Brotherhood before some of them went over to the party. He could not go with them since he refused to belong to an organization that allowed whites in. Besides those reds didn’t follow that black nation policy except when they wanted to use it to recruit blacks in hard times. That “new negro” stuff was a joke as far as he was concerned, something out of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” and just another way to buy off the natural leaders of black people. Stuff them harmlessly out of the way like some old time Toms. He got serious when Malcolm X arose like a phoenix out of the ashes but he had no truck with Elijah Mohammed seeing him as a less clever Marcus Garvey with all that religious mumbo-jumbo that never did anybody any good. Just another fast-talking preacher hustle, except not Baptist hustle like he knew growing up. The Black Panthers of course demanded respect, respect as black warriors ready to stick their necks out for the black community, but they had been taking a beating of late trying to stay in America, in the cities. Were taking a beating from whitey and his bad ass cops who went crazy when he saw black men with guns ready to defend their own. Still they were righteous and had an idea of what black people needed to get the hell off the eight-ball.

When pressed Jackson like he was this Saturday by a young black brother who seemed to want to know more details about how it would work he would say that what blacks should fight for is a place like Idaho, a place with lots of land and far away from the vast majority of whites. Although he himself had never been there he was sure it would do, and equally sure once black people had had enough of the white man (and increasingly woman) on their necks they would be flocking there. But the young man seemed to say by the shrug of his shoulders like one grandmother said as she passed Jackson Pulley and his soapbox for the hundredth time to her grandchildren “Don’t pay old Jackson any never mind.”…

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.