Sunday, November 16, 2014

Why The Caged Bird Raps




Markin comment:

On the face of the matter it would seem improbable, very improbable, that a leading voice of the hip-hop nation today, j. cole, and an old reprobate communist mired in be-bop 1950s youthful memories would have any points of intersection. And if it hadn’t been for happenstance that I ran into a young woman, Kelly, at a political event and mentioned to her that I was somewhat bewildered by the lack of political focus in today’s music and she mentioned some of j. cole’s stuff that she was crazy about it still would have been so. Naturally, since I am also in the midst of a craze of my own in trying to present archival material from the 1960s and 1970s concerning youth work among the leftist groups of the time, I checked out some of his lyrics.
The distance between a young black man growing up in the ‘hood of Fayetteville, North Carolina in the recent past, post-civil rights marches time, “post-racial” time and a 1950s be-bop rock white kid growing up in “the projects” turns out not to be so far after all. The connection: a simple lyric taken from j. cole’s Dolla and a Dream about how his mother, blessed mother of course, had to sew patches on his pants “to make do” when he was young. No heavy message needed there. I remember, and have written about, my own hand-me-down patched non-fashionista childhood. Now this lyric may no represent the “high” communist theory that we communist propagandists thrive on but if we can’t get to those kids, those ‘hood, barrio, projects kids who are also basically living on hand-me-downs, then we are going to have a very hard time trying to fight for our communist future, and theirs.




Maya Angelou's poetry and lyrics meet hip-hop beats on the new album Caged Bird Songs.i i
Maya Angelou's poetry and lyrics meet hip-hop beats on the new album Caged Bird Songs. Maya Angelou's poetry and lyrics meet hip-hop beats on the new album Caged Bird Songs. Chester Higgins /Courtesy of the artist hide caption
itoggle caption Chester Higgins /Courtesy of the artist
Maya Angelou's poetry and lyrics meet hip-hop beats on the new album Caged Bird Songs.
Chester Higgins /Courtesy of the artist
Maya Angelou: poet, singer, dancer, painter, Grammy winner — and now, hip-hop artist.
The new album Caged Bird Songs takes its title from Angelou's 1969 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. One of the last projects Angelou worked on before her passing in May, it blends some of her most famous poems and lyrics with hip hop beats.
Music producer Shawn Rivera said he was first inspired to put Angelou's words to music back in 2007 — and through a friend of a friend, he heard that she liked the idea. Still, it was years before he actually met Angelou, at her 80th birthday party.
"I said, 'Excuse me, Dr. Angelou, do you mind if I take a photograph with you?' " Rivera remembers. "She said, 'If you will stand with me, do not pose.' And I'm like, wow. I knew she was telling me to be myself, and we just kind of clicked right away from that point."
Rivera says that, while the project might surprise even devoted readers and fans, the collaboration reveals something inherent to Angelou's writing.
"When you read the poems on the page, they can be interpreted rhythmically by the reader," Rivera says. "But when Dr. Angelou reads them, there's no doubt that she was coming from the place of rhythm. ... You can tell the rhythms were implied already. She already was the first lady of hip-hop."
Angelou had released spoken word albums before — and won three Grammys for them. But her grandson, Colin Johnson, says this latest project shows Angelou in a new light.
"Some people can look at Grandma as a really heavy, kind of heady type of person. You know, really deep. But she liked to have fun," he says. "She was a fun person. She gave the best parties, too, by the way — I mean, hands down, the best."
He says that putting Angelou's words to hip-hop is a way to bring his grandmother's messages to a new generation. "One of the things that she speaks to, for me at least, is our humanity and where we can go as a people coming together," he says. "It's a valuable message, no matter what generation. And I want that message to continue on for many different years."

Bob Dylan’s ‘Basement Tapes’ And The Birth Of Rock ‘N’ Roll Americana

"The Basement Tapes" cover. (Courtesy, Sony)

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The first thing that needs to be kept in mind is that Bob Dylan never set out to make an album called “The Basement Tapes.” The second thing that now needs to be considered is that the official 1975 Columbia Records release called “The Basement Tapes,” as enjoyable and even mesmerizing an album as it was when it first came out, should no longer be thought of as representative of what we’ve always talked about when we talk about “The Basement Tapes.”
But now we have “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11,” a monumental collection of 138 tracks spread over six CDs, all recorded in 1967 in three locations, including one basement, in and around Woodstock, N.Y. That’s more than half the songs the Beatles recorded in their entire career, and likely more than the entire output of many a band, including the Doors, Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana.


Bob Dylan is performing at the Orpheum Theatre Friday night.


Those who collect “unofficial” recordings have heard most but not all of this before. But as presented here, we now have a much more complete picture — with never-before-heard tracks and much better sound — of what Bob Dylan and the musicians who would become The Band were up to in these casual music-making sessions, which organist and all-around tech-guy Garth Hudson had the good sense to capture on reel-to-reel tape.
The full impact of this set is nothing less than astonishing. As many have suspected, and as we can now confirm, the songs on “The Basement Tapes” are the missing link between what came before and what came after. They certainly help make sense of what came soon after — the quiet acoustic country of Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding,” the smooth country-pop of “Nashville Skyline,” the exploration of folk and country standards and songs by his contemporaries on “Self Portrait” — but they even help contextualize oddities like the Tex-Mex flavor of “Romance in Durango” on the album “Desire,” the folk and blues cover albums of the early-1990s and the whole roots-rocking live approach of the last three decades or so. For this reason alone, anyone with more than just a casual interest in Dylan will want to hear these recordings. (If your interest is limited only to the casual — to a few greatest hits albums and “Blood on the Tracks” — you can probably skip it.)
It’s been said that “alt-country” and “Americana” were birthed in the basement, years before anyone used those terms. Dylan and company infused the music they played — new Bob Dylan songs, old Dylan songs and plenty of old folk, blues, gospel and country songs, plus songs by contemporary songwriters – with traditional musical values blended with the energy and anarchy of rock ‘n’ roll. For this reason, those — Dylan fan or otherwise — who identify strongly with the alt-country sound of the past 20 years, popularized by bands like Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks and Wilco, would do well to listen to the sounds that first emanated from the basement. It’s kind of like reading the Bible after you’ve already found religion.
The songs on “The Basement Tapes” are recorded with varying degrees of care. Some are freewheeling, improvisatory throwaways, with Dylan obviously making up the lyrics as he delivers them and musicians interjecting or audibly cracking each other up. There are moments of tough listening — accidental feedback here, scratchiness there or basement murk. But there are also moments of inspiration, and near-perfect renditions of songs that were recorded as publishing demos, meant for his publishing company to prod the interest of other artists in recording new Dylan compositions, at a time when Dylan had no immediate plans for a new album or tour.
This worked to a significant extent — Manfred Mann, Brian Auger’s Trinity, the Byrds and even the Four Tops, among many others, had hits with their versions of some of these songs, insuring a steady flow of royalties to Dylan and company.
The Band. (Elliot Landy)
The Band. (Elliot Landy)
“The Basement Tapes” documents Dylan and company — the incredibly talented multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and, toward the end of the year, Levon Helm, who would soon collectively become The Band — on a journey through repertory — old folk, blues and, significantly, contemporary folk, rock and country. Surprises abound — their funky version of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter” pops out like something recorded at Stax/Volt studios in Memphis rather than in Nashville. “What’s It Gonna Be When It Comes Up” and “Confidential” telegraph Dylan’s fondness for the sort of lounge-jazz and Sinatra-like crooning he’s incorporated into his current performance aesthetic (and, reportedly, his next studio album).
As much as this is a Bob Dylan relic, what we also have here is the rare documentation of a new rock group developing its own aesthetic. Just a few years earlier, as the Hawks, the musicians here were a scorching rockabilly and R&B bar band, first in the service of Ronnie Hawkins and then briefly on their own. Dylan liked what he heard and drafted them for his world-conquering tour of 1965-‘66 — where their main job was to “play [f***] loud!,” and they proved to be the perfect foil for Dylan’s plugged-in rock ‘n’ roll. The deep musical camaraderie heard here, as well as the broad command of American idioms in the service of a new, funky style of roots-rock, in many ways will find their complete realization in the work of The Band.
Bob Dylan and The Band performing at a Woody Guthrie memorial concert in 1968, his first since the motorcycle accident. Rick Danko is left, Robbie Robertson right.  (AP)
Bob Dylan and The Band performing at a Woody Guthrie memorial concert in 1968, his first since the motorcycle accident. Rick Danko is left, Robbie Robertson right. (AP)
The book that comes with the deluxe box set includes a photo of one of the original tape reel labels that reads, “Bob and Band Having Fun.” Nothing more accurately summarizes the overall feel, approach and intention of what happened in the basement. And therein is a lesson for all would-be musicians, as well as an invitation to all would-be listeners: Join the party. There’s never been another one like it, and there never will be one again.
Seth Rogovoy is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner 2009).
People’s Climate March-Toxic Fumes from Eco-Socialists

From The Archives

On Earth Day 2010- Fight For Our Communist Future-Fight For The Communist Program

Markin comment:

At a time when climate change and other ecologically-driven disasters confront us on an almost daily basis those who seriously want to make this good, green Earth a more environmentally- friendly place better starting to consider the historic aims of communist agenda again as put forth by our forbears, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. This Earth is too precious to be left in the hands of the rapacious international capitalist order. We, desperately, need the central planning principle to organize the whole Earth for the benefit of the many, not the few. Get ready to fight to take it back, by any means necessary. But get ready.



Workers Vanguard No. 1055






































31 October 2014
 
People’s Climate March-Toxic Fumes from Eco-Socialists
 

Upwards of 400,000 people wound their way through the streets of New York City on September 21 in a heavily stage-managed affair dubbed the People’s Climate March. Coming just prior to yet another United Nations confab on climate change, the procession gave pride of place to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and an assortment of bourgeois VIPs. Organizers, sky-high over the throngs clamoring for “climate action,” gushed: “We are moving towards a brighter and more just future.” Some future. Within 24 hours, the U.S. imperialists were raining death and destruction on Syria; at home, killer cops getting started on a busy week had gunned down two mentally ill men in separate states. Meanwhile, working people are still drowning in a sea of debt. The march did manage to make a mark, mainly by leaving behind a sizable trail of litter for sanitation workers to clean up.
Among the hundreds of diverse organizations that lent their names to the initiative were outfits espousing eco-socialism, demonstrating once again that this moniker is shorthand for grafting the most vapid anti-capitalist verbiage onto the bourgeois environmentalist agenda. Demanding climate action, as the eco-socialists do, is to urge the capitalist rulers to make some adjustments on energy-related matters. Genuine Marxists have an altogether different audience to set in motion for an altogether different purpose. That is the working class, the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away capitalism and its many ravages through socialist revolution.
Standing out among the brood of eco-socialists at the march was the System Change Not Climate Change (SCNCC) coalition. Its activists embraced the “big tent” event with the zeal of true-green acolytes, serving on the People’s Climate March Host Committee. When a few radical liberals in the milieu, such as journalists Chris Hedges and Arun Gupta, bemoaned the openly corporate character of the march, elements in the SCNCC, centered in the International Socialist Organization (ISO), rushed to its defense.
The critics did not exactly have to turn over a lot of rocks to get the dirt on the main forces behind the march, the liberal activist groups 350.org and Avaaz. The Rockefellers are well known to have funneled sizable sums into the coffers of 350.org; ditto billionaire George Soros and Avaaz (the global counterpart of his U.S.-based MoveOn.org). These two Democratic Party stalwart organizations, with their deep pockets, connections and market-based schemes to reduce carbon emissions, are out to fertilize the growth of green capitalism, although admittedly Avaaz has other pursuits, such as agitating for U.S. military intervention first in Libya and now Syria.
Well aware of the potential for profit-making, some of the largest companies on the planet, Big Oil not excluded, issued a blizzard of climate solidarity statements pledging more support for renewable energy and greener supply chains, timed to coincide with the UN meeting. At that gathering, Barack Obama invoked the march in order to sanctimoniously wag his finger at China on the need to “answer the call.” Behind such efforts to chastise Beijing stands the imperialist drive for counterrevolution in the largest remaining country where capitalist rule has been overthrown. Meanwhile, the loudest climate alarm heard in bourgeois circles over the last month was sounded not by the parading masses but by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who openly fretted over the national security threats it posed.
“What puts bankers and hipsters in the same march?” was the tagline of an Avaaz-funded ad in NYC subways. Well, the bankers have visions of the piles of money to be made and also probably would not mind something like seawalls to protect lower Manhattan. Hipsters, as always, are attracted to fashionable causes. Many are moved by the countless dire predictions of the consequences of a warming world. Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain. As long as the capitalist order is not shattered and replaced with workers rule, the vast bulk of humanity will be at the mercy of the drive for profit, which breeds mass impoverishment and insecurity, threatens ever more outbreaks of war and runs counter to any attempt to rationally organize society to deal with the vagaries of nature.
There certainly is no mystery as to what put the eco-socialists of the ISO and its SCNCC umbrella in the march. In his Socialist Worker (25 September) riposte “Against the Climate March Cynics,” ISO honcho Paul D’Amato goes through great contortions to dress up the demonstration as something more than a one-day street fair, even paraphrasing an online liberal handbook titled “Why Protest Events Are Not a Waste of Time.” Among other things, D’Amato sings the praises of 350.org and its founder Bill McKibben for having initiated a series of protests at a time when a Democrat sits in the White House and most liberal organizations refrain from such activity for fear of rocking the boat. Left unsaid, those protests, which the ISO habitually endorses, were designed to stiffen the resolve of the Obama administration. In its SCNCC activities, the ISO also closely collaborates with the small-time capitalist Green Party, and continues to run candidates on that ticket.
The ISO’s making common cause with bourgeois elements does not make the climate march “cynics” right. To the contrary, they offer the same politics, only cloaked in somewhat more militant guise. Chris Hedges, for example, wrote of the need to “turn from a liberal agenda of reform to embrace a radical agenda of revolt” (“The Last Gasp of Climate Change Liberals,” truthdig.com, 31 August). What he had in mind was the next day’s 3,000-strong “Flood Wall Street” rally, where he helped fire up activists before they eventually sat down in civil disobedience for several hours on either side of the iconic bronze bull.
Truth be told, there is no dichotomy between the People’s Climate March and Flood Wall Street; the two are part of the same political ecosystem. Indeed, the Occupy-style protest to “stop capitalism, end the climate crisis” simply bore moral witness to the fat cats and big wigs on the shortcomings of current bourgeois energy policy. Hence, the plaudits of NYC mayor Bill de Blasio afterwards. Environmentalism is still bourgeois politics when shorn of well-oiled PR machines and the active participation of the bourgeoisie or its paid representatives.
The centrist Internationalist Group (IG) intimated otherwise in a leaflet titled “The Great ‘People’s Climate March’ Scam” that it distributed at the event. The IG emphatically announced: “The whole thing is a gigantic scam, a public relations stunt masquerading as social activism.” What scam? The march was, as advertised from the outset, an exercise in lobbying for the environmentalist cause. In a transparent effort to cater to anti-corporate opinions in the “climate justice” milieu, the IG borrows heavily from the green march critics, beginning with the plaint that it lacked concrete demands. So what? The entire purpose of climate activism is to advise the bourgeoisie on how best to fuel its economy. Tellingly, the pseudo-Marxist IG offers not a word of criticism of environmentalism or its eco-socialist variant.
In fact, the actual scam is the very idea of eco-socialism. The main enemy for the left-wing eco forces is carbon, and implacable hostility to fossil fuels is a must; environmental degradation, especially that linked to climate change, trumps the exploitation of man by man and all other ills of class-divided society. According to this approach, for humanity to survive, progressive people must convince world leaders to shift economies away from carbon now, a recipe that inevitably entails cutting back personal consumption. In this project, sections of the bourgeoisie are ready and willing partners.
In contrast, the main enemy for revolutionary socialists is the tiny class of capitalist exploiters who organize production to maximize profit, not to meet human need. Implacable hostility to the U.S. capitalist rulers, who have trampled underfoot working people and the oppressed the world over, is a must. Environmental degradation is just one of a host of problems, many far more pressing, linked to the workings of the capitalist system: unemployment, extreme poverty, mass starvation, uncontrolled epidemics and imperialist military adventures and conquest, to list a few. For humanity to survive (and thrive), the working class must seize power and expropriate the bourgeoisie, which would set the stage for a flourishing of the productive forces in a worldwide planned economy and the general satisfaction of want.
In putting forward a threadbare anti-capitalism, the eco-socialists present the capitalist system as an engine of perpetual growth. Much the opposite is the case. Anarchic and crisis-ridden, production for private profit actually is a brake on development. The same inherent features of capitalism that reinforce material scarcity across the globe are barriers to addressing climate change on the necessary world scale. When the workers are running society, it might prove necessary to harness fossil fuels for a period of time to lift everyone out of backwardness. Only in the context of an international socialist economy that relegates hunger and poverty to the past can a rational plan be hammered out to modulate climate change and minimize its human toll.
The Russian Revolution Showed the Way
 


Workers Vanguard No. 1055
31 October 2014
TROTSKY
LENIN
The Russian Revolution Showed the Way
(Quote of the Week)
Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the working class in Russia overthrew the rule of the capitalist exploiters and seized power on 7 November 1917 (25 October 1917 by the Julian calendar used in Russia at the time). In marking the 17th anniversary of the Revolution, the U.S. Trotskyists explained how that world-historic victory gave flesh and blood to the program of revolutionary Marxism.
The Bolshevik revolution was the decisive factor in taking the disputes between the Left and Right wings in the labor movement out of the realm of academic discussion and bringing them down to the solid soil of practical reality. If it is true that the establishment of the first successful workers’ state revived and reinforced the undistorted doctrines of Marx and Engels, then only because it demonstrated in life that far from being obsolete and applicable only to the middle of the last century, they were the indispensable weapons of the modern proletarian struggle for emancipation from wage slavery. The revolution, taking place as it did in a backward agricultural country, underscored the fact that the only consistently progressive class in modern world society is the proletariat. By what the latter accomplished for formerly oppressed racial and national minorities, and for the peasant millions—freedom and development immeasurably greater than that ever effected for similar groups by the bourgeoisie even in its most revolutionary period—it confirmed all previous theoretical affirmation that no section of the population can free itself and be guaranteed a progressive evolution save under the leadership of the working class. The October victory brought forward sharply the tremendous importance of the revolutionary party as the leader of the working class, without which it is a headless, inchoate mass, condemned to spontaneous but finally futile assaults upon its class enemy.
In the broader social sense, the contributions of the Bolshevik revolution are equally deathless. Under a thousand handicaps, it nevertheless refuted the bourgeois canard that the working class is unable to manage the affairs of society, that the scrubwoman must wash floors and the banker direct the government because of qualities inherent in each of them. The veritable torrent of initiative, resourcefulness, talent released from the midst of the “dark masses” when the revolution broke down even the first few barriers of traditional class repression, shows that a new Golden Age undreamed of by Pericles is held in store for humanity under communism. Shut off from the advantages of world intercourse enjoyed by capitalism, the Soviet state nevertheless established the fact that only in a socialist order is security and plenty possible for all; that even in the transitional period leading to socialism, crises and economic difficulties are due not to a plethora, to an overproduction of the means of life and comfort which the masses cannot share—a condition which is the distinguishing mark of capitalism—but to a shortage in production attendant upon the growing pains of a new order hemmed in by stifling capitalist walls. With all the vast technical superiority and advantages of experience on its side, capitalism still is unable to produce in any way but anarchically, whereas only the working class in power has been able to undertake and carry through planning in economic life with a success which is grudgingly acknowledged even by its astonished foes.
—“The Russian Revolution 17 Years After,” New International (November 1934)
 
Fake-Socialist Clowns and the Bourgeois Electoral Circus

Workers Vanguard No. 1055
31 October 2014
 
Fake-Socialist Clowns and the Bourgeois Electoral Circus
 
Many may not have noticed, but next week elections will be taking place across the country. With surprising perception, New York Times columnist David Brooks captured the population’s mood: “Giddy with disinterest. Tingling with unconscious ennui. Quivering with apathy.”
With good reason. The “hope and change” promised by Barack Obama that drew millions of disaffected blacks, Latinos and youth to the polls six years ago—the prospect of ending the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, closing the Guantánamo torture chamber and improving the living standards of working people—has proven to be less than hollow. The U.S. has embarked on yet another imperialist assault in the Near East, Guantánamo thrives, repression and surveillance under the “war on terror” have fresh legs. Workers and the poor continue to get ground down despite the “great recovery.” Millions across the country are scrambling to get by, one paycheck ahead of eviction, often working two or three jobs to make ends meet, standing in lines of thousands at job fairs offering employment for a hundred at most. And once again they are offered the chance to select between the two parties of capital, Democratic and Republican, that oversee their misery. The Republican candidates openly revel in their pain, hoping to seal greater electoral victories by disenfranchising poor and black people through voter ID laws. The Democrats, who pretend to be different, also carry out anti-labor, anti-black, anti-immigrant programs.
Obama’s job approval rating is around 40 percent, while for Congress it is a mere 12 percent. Even the usual election burlesque has fallen short this time around. No “legitimate rape” quips from Republican anti-abortion crazies, no railing against Obamacare “death panels.” This time, the Republicans have launched an ad campaign claiming that they “are people too” with slogans like “Republicans are Black,” “Republicans Recycle” and “Republicans Have Feelings.” As for the Democrats, besides keeping the president away, their candidates’ main election strategy is to declare: “I’m not the other guy.”
Most people couldn’t care less whether the Democrats maintain control of the Senate, which is the main issue on tap. Not so the AFL-CIO tops and other pro-capitalist labor statesmen who yet again are stumping for the Democrats. The union bureaucrats’ lie that the Democrats are “friends of labor” is central to their whole program of class collaboration, tying labor to its class enemy and sapping its fighting strength.
As black people continue to be gunned down by the cops across the country, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the brutal suppression of protests that followed revealed the real face of racist capitalist America. A New York Times (14 September) editorial, focused on drumming up the Democratic vote, chastised the town’s black residents for low voter turnout, proclaiming, “The cost of nonparticipation was a City Council wholly unrepresentative of the town’s population.” Al Sharpton and other black Democrats similarly berated black people in Ferguson, sending out the message that their oppression was their own damn fault.
Amid the widespread disillusion and disaffection with the Democratic Party, a number of reformist groups on the left have thrown their hats into the ring. Still flush with excitement over the election of Socialist Alternative’s (SAlt) Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council last year, they are waging liberal reform campaigns either under their own banner or by supporting or joining bourgeois third-party tickets. None of these efforts represent, even in a partial manner, the independent class interests of the proletariat.
V.I. Lenin, leader of the Russian October Revolution, captured the fraud of capitalist democracy in his 1918 polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”
It is the means by which the bourgeoisie disguises its rule with the appearance of a popular mandate.
There is a crying need for hard class struggle against the rapacious capitalist rulers. However, in the absence of such struggle and with the working class lacking its own organized political expression, disaffection can go in many different directions, from political apathy to racist, anti-immigrant scapegoating to voters once again holding their nose and voting for the “lesser evil” Democrats. As revolutionary Marxists, our purpose is to translate discontent among the toiling masses into an understanding that the working class needs its own party, one that champions the cause of all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers revolution.
Refurbishing Liberal Illusions
In New York, International Socialist Organization (ISO) member Brian Jones is running for lieutenant governor on the small-time capitalist Green Party ticket headed by the Solidarity group’s Howie Hawkins. The ISO also endorses civil rights lawyer Dan Siegel, a bourgeois politician currently disaffected with the Democrats, for Oakland mayor. A similar politician in Chicago, the self-described socialist Jorge Mújica, is backed by a coalition of left organizations. SAlt’s Jess Spear is running for a seat in the Washington state legislature.
In no way do any of these campaigns represent a break from bourgeois politics. Each puts forward at best a wish list of liberal measures—$15 minimum wage, police reform, rent control, increased taxes for the rich, environmental protection—variants of which have been bandied about by Democratic Party candidates as well. So housebroken are these “independent” campaigns that they utter not a peep of opposition to the bombings of Syria and Iraq or any other depredations of U.S. imperialism. A particular lowlight of this electoral season is the support on the left for the “socialist” candidate for Milwaukee sheriff (see page 11).
The ISO exemplifies how for the reformists “independence” from the Democrats is little more than a mask that one can wear or discard as suits the moment. In backing Siegel, the ISO exalts his “consistent progressive message,” even as it complains that Siegel has not made his supposed break with the Democrats central to his campaign (socialistworker.org, 21 October). In fact, he only separated from the Democratic Party in January, after falling out with current mayor Jean Quan. At that time, Siegel, an attorney known for representing the family of Alan Blueford, a victim of racist cop terror, declared: “I’m not antipolice.” He calls for doubling the number of cops on the street, i.e., putting more racist killer cops in the ghetto. The ISO admits the obvious point that his policing plan means “more potentially deadly interactions between cops and young people of color.” Not that this would stop the ISO’s efforts on behalf of this “fighter for social justice.”
SAlt plays the same game by shining up the credentials of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” who caucuses with the Democrats and votes the Democratic Party line. SAlt fervently urges Sanders to run an independent campaign for president in 2016. Not even the ISO can stomach Sanders, with his support to Israel’s recent offensive against the Palestinian people in Gaza and his votes for the U.S. military budget. Describing Siegel, Sanders or the Green Party as “independent” makes it no more so than sprinkling some juniper berries in 16 ounces of water gives you a pint of gin.
Red-White-and-Blue Greens
The role of the Green Party is no different than that of other “progressive” third parties historically: to channel the discontented back into the fold of the Democrats. The ISO/Green campaign in New York State is entirely compatible with Democratic politics. A Hawkins campaign press statement of October 23 trumpets endorsements from NYC Democratic Party outfits like the Downtown Independent Democrats, who stated, “Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones are aligned with the Democratic values we support.”
The campaign also boasts of the endorsement from the “venerable” Village Independent Democrats (VID), the first time this group has supported a third-party candidate. Hawkins/Jones pay special homage to the VID as “best known” for “starting Ed Koch’s political career.” As mayor, Koch was a voice of white petty-bourgeois rage against black people and labor. The Koch years laid a trail of horrors, beginning with the legions of black people killed by the cops—among them 67-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs and 25-year-old artist Michael Stewart. For Koch, the high point of his tenure was strong-arming labor during the eleven-day transit strike in 1980, during which he was conspicuous in whipping up racist animosity against the heavily black and immigrant transit workers union.
It is no skin off the Democrats’ nose to salute the Green campaign. The Green Party program to which the ISO has signed on calls to “repair the plummeting opinion of the United States” abroad and bemoans the “grave imbalance” between U.S. citizens and their rulers for creating “an imminent danger to our security and national and global social stability.” The Green “alternative” is for the ravages of U.S. imperialism to be adorned by the blue helmets of the United Nations, a den of imperialist thieves, their accomplices and their victims. Its program baldly declares, “The U.S. is obligated to render military assistance or service under U.N. command to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions.” Washington agrees. It was under a UN resolution that the starvation sanctions were enforced against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s and the U.S. and British invaders were recognized in 2003 as “occupying powers.”
Any radical youth possibly attracted to the Hawkins/Jones ticket should consider its support from Ralph Nader, the keynote speaker at a recent campaign rally. Nader’s current shtick is to bring together the Tea Party with the left against the “two-party tyranny.” Well, he has support from the left, including the ISO and SAlt, which both backed his presidential candidacies in 2000 and 2004. As for the right, Nader openly embraces virulently racist, homophobic, anti-abortion Tea Party nuts as “authentic libertarian conservatives.”
Class vs. Class
We oppose on principle support to any capitalist party and stand for the complete political independence of the working class. We recognize that there are times when the intervention of revolutionaries into the parliamentary/electoral arena can provide a useful platform to put forward the Marxist program. This can include the revolutionary party standing its own candidates for legislative office and/or offering critical support to working-class organizations that draw even a crude class line. The misnamed “independent” campaigns championed by the fake socialists merit plenty of criticism—but no support.
All of the current left campaigns cloak themselves in the short-lived Occupy movement’s mantra the “99 percent” versus the “1 percent,” a false construct that promotes the myth that everyone from the unemployed, shopkeepers, students and the police to wage workers share common interests. Predictably, as the 2012 presidential elections neared, the amorphous populist movement, which was wedded to pressuring the government for piecemeal reforms, in the main ended up occupying the Democrats’ campaign to re-elect Obama.
We start from the Marxist understanding that society is divided into two main classes. The bourgeoisie is the tiny group of families that owns the banks, industry, mines, newspapers, telecommunications; the proletariat is the large section of society that must sell its labor power to the capitalists in order to live. The labor of the working class creates the profits pocketed by the obscenely rich owners. The interests of these two classes are diametrically counterposed—they cannot be reconciled. Social gains and political reforms that have benefited workers and the oppressed were not won through the ballot or in the courtroom, but were the product of tumultuous class and social struggle. By the same token, the capitalist rulers will seek to dismantle these gains, which must be defended by class-struggle methods.
The revolutionary workers party that must be built in this country will be forged through combating the illusion that the exploited and oppressed can advance their causes through reform of the capitalist state, including through the agency of capitalist third parties. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote in his 1912 article “The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections” concerning the bourgeois Bull Moose progressives of Theodore Roosevelt:
“We shall save capitalism by reforms, says that party. We shall grant the most progressive factory legislation. We shall establish state control over all the trusts (in the U.S.A. that means over all industries!). We shall establish state control over them to eliminate poverty and enable everybody to earn a ‘decent’ wage. We shall establish ‘social and industrial justice.’ We revere all reforms—the only ‘reform’ we don’t want is expropriation of the capitalists!
Labor Tops Derail Anger, Promote Democrats-Government Junks Philly Teachers Contract-Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!

Workers Vanguard No. 1055
 



31 October 2014
 
Labor Tops Derail Anger, Promote Democrats-Government Junks Philly Teachers Contract
Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!
 
In a move aimed at crippling the Philadelphia teachers union, the state School Reform Commission (SRC) that runs Philly schools voted 5-0 on October 6 to rip up the union contract. For 21 months the SRC had dragged out negotiations with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), which represents 16,000 public school teachers and support staff, seeking to squeeze deeper concessions than the compliant PFT tops had already volunteered. The state board, which has run the local school system since 2001, expects to save $50 million it pays into the union-run health care plan and force teachers to pay hefty premiums (up to $200 a month for some) for an inferior plan. Every public workers union contract in Pennsylvania will be on the chopping block if the SRC gets away with nullifying a collective bargaining agreement by fiat.
Many parents and students as well as teachers and the city’s unions were furious over the SRC action, the latest offensive in a nationwide war against teachers unions. The decision was termed an “ambush” after the supposedly public hearing was held virtually unannounced. By its own reckoning, the board had already closed 31 schools in a district where half the students are black and most are poor, shedding librarians, nurses and music teachers and cutting basic education to the bone. Others put the number of closed schools much higher, with the jobs of more than 4,000 unionized custodians, bus drivers and cafeteria workers being axed in the last couple of years.
In the days following the cancellation of the contract, protests culminated in a 3,000-strong PFT-led demonstration at rush hour on October 16 that shut down North Broad Street, the city’s main artery. Protesters then filed into school district headquarters and packed the first SRC meeting held since its salvo against the teachers. Earlier, students at several high schools had walked out of school in protest.
The SRC’s attempt to tear up the contract with the union is outrageous enough to have prompted the city’s union tops to hold two meetings at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 98 hall where they mooted the possibility of a one-day general strike. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer (16 October), “Labor leaders debated the wisdom of asking members of all area unions—laborers, electricians, communications workers, janitors, nurses, bus drivers, city employees—to walk off their jobs to protest the SRC’s decision.” But PFT president Jerry Jordan “told the group that he wanted to exhaust legal remedies first.”
Shelving the strike weapon, the union officials decided to dedicate their efforts to voting out Republican governor Tom Corbett on November 4 in favor of Democrat Tom Wolf—the same class-collaborationist strategy of looking for friendly capitalist politicians that has crippled the labor movement. The big October 16 rally was filled with signs calling to vote for Wolf and “Crush Corbett.”
But even the talk of a general strike made people take notice. On October 20, the teachers union won a temporary injunction in Common Pleas court blocking the SRC from scrapping its contract, which remains in effect. But this settles nothing. Solidarity in action from the city union movement must be brought to bear in defense of the teachers, who are forbidden to strike by the same state laws that imposed SRC control on Philadelphia schools and whose pay has been frozen since August 2013. The union bureaucrats who debated calling a citywide strike know that such hard class struggle would entail a head-on collision with not only the Republican state house but also the Democratic Philadelphia city administration. It also means going up against the courts, which like the cops and prisons are a core component of the state repressive apparatus that serves the rule of the capitalist exploiters.
Union-busting against the teachers is a bipartisan effort. Appointed by Governor Corbett, the current SRC chairman, William Green, is a stock trader as well as a corporate lawyer who represented top Fortune 500 companies. Corbett’s broadside against the teachers was calculated to shore up his losing campaign for re-election. His unpopularity is in part due to more than a billion dollars in cuts he has made to public education. His challenger, Wolf, is a folksy moderate who has pledged to restore education funding and to ensure “accountability” of charter schools, the favored vehicle for siphoning off public monies into private hands and busting teachers unions. Democrats running for office often posture as friends of the working people, but in office they do the bidding of the ruling class as do the Republicans. A Democrat drew up the plans for the creation of the SRC in 1998. In 2001, the Democratic mayor worked with the Republican governor to trigger the SRC takeover of Philadelphia schools in evident reprisal for a teachers strike in 2000.
Philadelphia’s current black Democratic mayor, Michael Nutter, was elected with heavy support from the PFT. He holds sway over a city of deindustrialization marked by impoverished inner city neighborhoods, segregated and underfunded schools and crumbling infrastructure and services. These desperate conditions are enforced by Philly’s infamously racist police force. Nutter is just one of the political overseers of a system that has fewer and fewer decent jobs to offer young workers, which for the ruling class means less reason to spend money on education. This brutal fact stands behind the attacks on teachers across the country and the demands that they “share in the sacrifice.” It points to the need to overthrow the capitalist system, which cares only for its profits and throws millions of youth, especially minorities, on the scrapheap.
Philadelphia is a union town where sanitation and other city workers have a history of hard labor struggle. But here as elsewhere in this country, the rulers have been emboldened by decades of union givebacks. The only way forward is through mobilizing the power of the working class at the head of all the oppressed in battle against its class enemy. That struggle will bring forth the new leadership that the unions require, one based on working-class independence from the bosses’ state and their political parties. A revolutionary party is the indispensable factor for a successful working-class conquest of power, replacing the class rule of the bourgeoisie by a revolutionary workers government.
Kurdish Leaders Join Imperialist Onslaught-Down With U.S. War Against ISIS!


Workers Vanguard No. 1055
31 October 2014
 
Kurdish Leaders Join Imperialist Onslaught-Down With U.S. War Against ISIS!
 
The U.S. bombing of reactionary ISIS forces in Syria is the latest episode in the imperialist wars and occupations that have laid waste to Iraq and other parts of the Near East and touched off spiraling communal and ethnic bloodletting. Since the start of U.S. operations against ISIS in northern Iraq on August 8, scores of civilians as well as hundreds of fighters have been killed. Cynically launched in the name of “humanitarian” assistance to Shiites, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and others threatened by the ISIS cutthroats, the imperialist onslaught is aimed at reinforcing the U.S. hold over the Near East, with the Obama administration offering the prospect of many more years of war. It is the duty of class-conscious workers everywhere, particularly in the U.S., to oppose the bombing campaign and all other wars and occupations carried out by the imperialists. Hands off Iraq and Syria! All U.S. forces out of the Near East!
After the initial airstrikes by the U.S. in northern Iraq, we declared: “Any force, however unsavory, that attacks, repels or otherwise impedes U.S. forces strikes a blow in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed” (“U.S. Out of Iraq! No Intervention in Syria!” WV No. 1051, 5 September). However, in the reactionary, mainly Sunni-Shi’ite communal conflicts in Iraq and Syria, the world’s toilers had no side.
Since then, Iraqi government forces and Kurdish pesh merga in Iraq are again conducting joint military operations with the U.S., as they did for years under the occupation. More recently, Syrian Kurdish nationalists have also sealed a treacherous alliance with the U.S. in the battle over Kobani in northern Syria, acting as the imperialists’ bomb spotters and otherwise coordinating military movements. The fact that all these forces are “boots on the ground” for imperialist intervention means that revolutionary Marxists have a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and their proxies, including the Syrian Kurdish nationalists, the pesh merga, the Baghdad government and its Shi’ite militias.
In the case of Kobani, on September 16 its predominantly Kurdish population came under siege by ISIS, forcing more than 200,000 people to flee across the border to Turkey. Pitted against ISIS were the Kurdish Democratic Union Party and its military wing, the People’s Protection Committees (YPG), which are affiliated to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) based in Turkey. Then in early October Washington decided to make a stand in Kobani, with the YPG offering its services. The Wall Street Journal (October 21) reported: “A Syrian Kurdish general in a joint operations center in northern Iraq delivered daily battlefield intelligence reports to U.S. military planners.” According to a YPG spokesman, several Americans and dozens of Europeans are fighting alongside them in Kobani.
It goes without saying that we internationalist communists are die-hard enemies of the ultra-reactionary social and political program of ISIS, whose methods of rooting out “apostates” amount to mass slaughter. We condemn communal atrocities on all sides. ISIS is itself the imperialists’ creation, having emerged out of the intercommunal slaughter triggered by the U.S. occupation. It counts as precursors those who cut their teeth as jihadis in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Washington could very well switch to supporting ISIS under certain conditions—for example, against the Assad regime in Syria, which is decidedly not a part of the U.S. military alliance despite its best efforts.
But ISIS today is in battle against the local tools of U.S. imperialism, the main enemy of the world’s working people. A setback for the U.S. in Syria might give pause to Washington in its military adventures, including by encouraging opposition at home. Such opposition adds to the tinder that must be ignited in class struggle against the capitalist rulers who, in their quest for ever greater profits, beat down the workers, black people and immigrants.
We uphold the right of national self-determination for the Kurdish people, who are oppressed by the bourgeois regimes in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. However, in Iraq and Syria today as in Iraq after 2003, when the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan enrolled as adjuncts of the U.S. occupation, the nationalist parties have subordinated the struggle for Kurdish national rights to their role as imperialist proxies. Championing the Kurds in the current conflict can only mean lending support to imperialist plunder. And their collaboration with the imperialists is antithetical to the cause of Kurdish national liberation, which can only be achieved through the proletarian overthrow of the four capitalist states in the region and the forging of a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan.
Protests called by Kurdish nationalist groups in Germany, Australia and elsewhere have backed U.S. airstrikes in Syria and demanded that the imperialists supply the Syrian Kurds with arms. These calls have been echoed by many reformist leftists around the world, giving credence to the “humanitarian” cover for the imperialist onslaught. Thus, the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France and some leaders of the Left Party in Germany (not to mention the bourgeois German Greens) have called on their respective capitalist governments to arm the Kurds in Kobani.
Thousands have also demonstrated at the PKK’s call in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey to pressure the Erdogan regime to militarily support the struggle in Kobani. More than 30 protesters have been killed by cops and Islamist thugs. To date, Erdogan has refrained from joining the fragile U.S.-led coalition that includes Britain, France and Australia as well as Saudi Arabia and other Near Eastern countries. For the Turkish government, the main enemies in Syria are the Assad regime and the Kurds. Strong-armed by the Obama White House, Ankara is letting Iraqi pesh merga transit Turkey into Kobani, where Erdogan hopes they will help police the groups aligned with the PKK.
By selling their souls to the imperialists as well as to various regional bourgeois regimes, Kurdish leaders help perpetuate the divide-and-rule stratagems that inevitably inflame communal, national and religious tensions and serve to reinforce the oppression of the Kurdish masses. A glaring example was the murderous U.S. military assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja in 2004, in which Kurdish fighters played a prominent role. Aimed at a largely Sunni population, the siege of Falluja helped fuel the rise of the Sunni-based ISIS insurgency. Inevitably, the Kurdish people will again pay for the crimes of their leaders.
The perpetual cycle of wars, occupations and communal bloodletting in the Near East, with its promise of more years of slaughter and devastation, is a glaring demonstration of the barbarity of the capitalist world order in which the U.S. rulers hold predominant power. The goal of Marxists in the belly of the imperialist beast is to instill in the U.S. proletariat the understanding that it has the social power and historic interest to destroy capitalist-imperialist rule from within, through socialist revolution. To realize this task requires forging a revolutionary workers party committed to the struggle for workers rule over the entire planet.

***Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s- Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop


 

A YouTube film clip of Johnny Ace performing his classic Pledging My Love.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman



No question if you were alive in the 1950s in America, and maybe in other countries too for all I know but I think that this is truly an American phenomenon, alive meaning of course if you were young, say between twelve and twenty- five no older because then you hovered too close to being parents and hence, well hence, square the golden age of the automobile met the golden age of al fresco dining, okay, okay low end pre-Big Mac dining. Sorry, I got carried away. Golden Age eating outdoors, well, not really outdoors but in your Golden Age automobile at the local drive-in restaurant (not drive through like today but that may have been true too).

See the idea was that a young guy, maybe a guy who was a wiz at fixing up cars and who had retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or Dodge or some nerdy young guy who had two left hands and had borrowed his father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring his date to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in that car all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. And be seen in that “boss” car or in the case of the father-borrowed car just to be seen with his date. Be seen by the million and one young guys, maybe guys who were also wizzes at fixing up cars and who had also retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or ‘59 Dodge or some nerdy young guys who had two left hands and had borrowed their father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring their dates to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in those cars all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. Also to be seen and to be placed in the high school pecking order accordingly. Or if not in high school (but also not over twenty-five remember) to be paid homage for surviving that chore, and for knowing the ropes, knowing the signposts in the drive-in restaurant night.     

Once my old friend Jack Lowell had put golden age automobile and golden age dining out together one night, really early one morning, when he was feeling a little melancholy for the old days, and when he had had too much whiskey, all that needed to be added was to say that Eddie, Eddie Connell, would have been out, out once again some night, some weekend night more than likely with his everlovin’ Ginny, Virginia Stone, in the Clintondale 1950s be-bop night, having a little something to eat at the Adventure Car Hop, that burgers and fries eternal youth night out dining combo (did I mention a Coke or Pepsi, if I did not then those were the standard drinks to wash those hard-hearted burgers and those fat-saturated fries down) after a hard night of dancing to the local rockers down in Hullsville and afterward a bout down at Adamsville Beach located a couple of towns over and so filled with Clintondale and other young couples seeking some privacy from watchful town eyes, in the “submarine race” watching night.

Jack had good reason to want to talk about his best friend back then Eddie, about his “boss” ’57 two-toned, white and green, Chevy, and especially about his girl, his Ginny, since in the love wars Ginny had thrown him over for Eddie, had chosen Eddie’s souped-up car over Jack’s walking feet when the deal went down. Yeah, Eddie and Jack had still remained friends, had still been simpatico despite the girl mess-up. See just before the Ginny swap Jack had taken Ellen Riley, formerly the head cheer-leader at Clintondale High back in 1955, the year they all, Jack, Eddie, Ginny, and Ellen if you are keeping count, had graduated away from Eddie. So all was fair in love and war.  Although Jack had thought it was just slightly unfair that Ellen had subsequently thrown him over, Jack the struggling college student with no dough and no car just like he had been in high school, for a guy from Hullsville because she did not want to wait to get married until after he graduated and she empathically was tired unto death of walking (or worse, riding that clunky old Eastern Transit bus which was always late and did not run after midnight just in case they had something going down at the beach or after the Hullsville dance got out) when her father handed down car had gone to the graveyard and they had no car between them.       

But maybe Jack had better fill a candid world in on a couple of things to back up why he wanted to talk about Eddie and Ginny that night. Was feeling just a little pang after all those years for having let Ginny go so easily. Jack and Eddie had known each other since the old days at Clintondale North Elementary and had been through thick and thin together (that “thin” usually revolved around girls, starting with Rosalind in the fifth grade who had eventually thrown them both over for a kid, Ricky Kelly, Jesus, wimpy Ricky Kelly, in the sixth grade). In high school they had drifted apart for a while when Eddie decided that since he was no student that he would take up automotive mechanics and Jack with two left hands pursued the college course. Drifted apart until come sixteen Eddie, who proved to be a an ace mechanic, a natural, had fixed up some old Hudson that he found in the junkyard and made it a “boss” (Jack adamantly refused to define that term “boss” for that candid world since some things are, or should be, self-evident). That vehicle had been a “fox” lure (girls, okay) all through high school for both young men, except those times when Eddie wanted to take his girl of the week to Adamsville Beach and wanted to use the back seat alone with said honey.  And then go to the Adventure Car Hop for a little something to eat before taking her home.

That all worked well enough in high school since neither young man had any serious relationships. Then after high school the workaday world hit Eddie and he took a job at Duggan Brothers Garage and Jack went off to the local college, Gloversville State, on a scholarship while continuing to live at home. One night when Jack was a sophomore at Gloversville he and Eddie, Eddie with the ’57 “boss” Chevy then, went to a rock and roll dance down in Hullsville arranged for those still under twenty-one and who could not legally drink (of course there was more booze than you could shake a stick at out in the parking lot which faced Hullsville Beach but that is a another story) and that is where Jack met Ginny, a former classmate whom he had not known in school because, well, because as she told him that night she did not then have anything to do with “corner boys,” so had met her, had talked to her, had danced with her and afterward they and Eddie and a girl he picked up at the dance, not Ellen, had gone to the Adventure Car Hop for the first time together to grab a bite to eat before going home. Strangely Ginny, although she grew up in Clintondale, had never been there before considering it nothing but a male “hang-out” scene (which at some level Jack admitted to her was true).

And so started the love affair between Jack and Ginny, although according to Jack the thing had many rocky moments from the start on the question of Jack, poor boy Jack, not having his own car, having to either double-date with Eddie, whom she did not like then, or worse, walk when Eddie had his back seat wanting habits on. And her carping at Jack for not wanting to quit college to get married and start a family right away (Ginny had not gone on to school after high school and went to work in Boston for John Hancock Insurance where she was moving up in the organization). And that went on for a while. Meanwhile Eddie had taken up with Ellen, whom he had not known in high school either, nor had Jack, because as she told Eddie “she was into football players with a future, not grease monkeys.” She saw the error of her ways when she had brought her car in for repairs and Eddie worked on the car, and on her. She was going to Adamsville Junior College right down the road but she saw something in Eddie, for a while. Then, although they all had double-dated together she “hit” on Sam one night, wound up going to bed with him a few weeks later down in Cape Cod, where she shared a cottage with six other college classmates for the summer, when Eddie had to go out of town for a couple of weeks to a GM training school and that was that.                       

Of course once the news got around, and in small city Clintondale that did not take long, especially with those summer roommates of hers, of Jack and Ellen to reach Ginny, and Eddie all bets were off. Ginny brushed Jack off with a solo telephone call to him in which she terminated their affair after about three sentences with a “I don’t want to discuss it further, I want to end this conversation,” yeah, the big brush-off. Ellen told Eddie that they were done and while he feigned being hurt about it the truth was that he had not been all that happy with her of late, thought she was drifting away from him when she decided against his protests to go in on that summer cottage. And so they parted, although Eddie was a little sore at Jack for a while, as usual when they mixed it up with their women. One day Eddie saw Ginny waiting for the bus, that damn Eastern Transport bus, one afternoon and took her on the “rebound” (although don’t expect him to use that word about or around Ginny, just don’t). Ginny, for her part, decided that Eddie wasn’t so bad after all, and he did have that “boss” car and when they talked about it one night after they had hit the silk sheets was not adverse to the idea of marriage. And so their thing went in the Clintondale night for a while. Let’s hone in on what Eddie and Ginny were up to that long ago night Jack talked about when he got the blues about the old days, okay.  

 

 

 

“Two hamburgers, all the trimmings, two fries, two Cokes, Sissy,” rasped half-whispering Eddie Connell to Adventure Car Hop number one primo car hop Sissy Jordan. Eddie and Sissy had known each other forever. Sissy had been Eddie’s girlfriend back in junior high days, back in eight-grade at Clintondale South Junior High when he learned a thing or two about girls, about girl charms and girl bewilderments. And Sissy had been his instructor, although like all such early bracings with the opposite sex there was as much misinformation and confusion as intimacy since nobody, no parent, no teacher, and no preacher was cluing any kids in, except some lame talk about the birds and the bees, kids’ stuff. Things, as happens all the time in teen love, had not worked out between them. Had not worked out as well because by ninth grade blossoming Sissy was to be found sitting in the front seat of senior football halfback Jimmy Jenkin’s two-toned souped-up Hudson and Sissy had no time for mere boys then. Such is life.   

For those who know not of Adventure Car Hop places or car hops here is a quick primer. These drive-in restaurants in the 1950s were of a piece, all glitter in the night (they lost a lot of allure seen passing by in the day and could have been any diner USA at those hours), all neon lights aglow that could be seen from a mile away as you headed out Route 3 from Clintondale Center, a small shopping area eventually replaced as the place to shop by the Gloversville Mall. The neon lights spelling out Adventure Car Hop super-imposed on an outline of a comely car hop also in neon meant, well, meant adventure, mystery, oh hell, sex. So any given Friday or Saturday night and in summer almost any night you would see the place packed with all kinds of youth cars in each striped slot. In summer the walkers, and almost every kid, girl or boy, had done the walk there before coming of car age could sit and eat their meals on the wooden picnic tables the management provided. In winter they could go inside and sit at the vinyl-cushioned booths and order their meals while listening to the latest hits on the jukebox. Or if single, and that was rare, there were swiveling red vinyl-topped stools to sit at. Sit at and view Mel, Lenny, or Benny (the owner) pulling short order cook duty behind a metallic counter and view as well, get an eyeful if you thought about it, of the really comely car hops doing their frenetic best to keep up with the orders (and since space was at a premium avoid bumping into each other with big orders of drinks on their trays). Really thought if you went from Bangor to LaJolla you would see the same basic set-up so you would never have to worry about a place to go at night at least anywhere in America where ill-disposed parents would not be found in those precincts. 

The Adventure Car Hop, the only such place in town and therefore a magnet for everybody from about twelve to twenty-something was (now long gone and the site of a small office park)  nothing but an old time drive-in restaurant where the car hop personally took your order from you while you were  sitting in your “boss” car. Hopefully boss car, although the lot the night Jack thought about how Eddie and Ginny graced the place had been filled with dads’ borrowed cars, strictly not boss, not boss at all.  Sitting with your “boss” girl (you had better have called her that or the next week she would be somebody else’s “boss” honey). And the place became a rite of passage for Jack’s youngest brother Sam several years later even though the family had moved to Adamsville by then.  That luscious car hop would return to you after, well, it depended on how busy it was, and just then around midnight this was Adventure Car Hop busy time, with your order on a tray which attached to your door. By the way families, parents alone without children, or anybody else over twenty-something either gave the place a wide berth or only went there during the day when no self-respecting young person, with or without a car or a date, would be seen dead there, certainly not to eat the food. Jesus no. 

Now Sissy, a little older then than most Clintondale car hops at twenty-two, had turned into nothing but a career waitress, a foxy one still, but a waitress which was all a car hop really was. Except most car hops at Adventure Car Hop were "slumming” through senior-hood at Clintondale High or were freshman at some local college and were just trying to make some extra money for this and that while being beautiful. Because, and there was no scientific proof for this, but none was needed, at Adventure Car Hop in the year 1959 every car hop had been a fox (that beautiful just mentioned), a double fox on some nights, in their red short shorts, tight white blouses, and funny-shaped red and white box hats. And Sissy topped the list. Here though is where Sissy made a wrong turn, made her a career waitress (and made Eddie feel sorry for her, or at least sorry for losing her instruction back in ninth grade to some damn old football player). She had let Jimmy Jenkins have his way with her too many times, too many unprotected times (again in the ignorance 1950s, in Clintondale at least, the fine points of contraception, or even cautious use of rubbers was a book sealed with seven seals mostly), and when she was a senior at Clintondale High back in 1955 (and Jimmy was up at State U playing football and also having off-hand quite ignorant sex with a few adoring college girlfriends on the side). So that year she had had to drop out of school to have a baby (Jack said they called it “gone to Aunt Ella’s” and once a girl was not seen for a while someone would use that term and that was all that was needed to be said, except the occasional sighing about a good girl gone wrong or scorn from the prissy girls who allegedly were saving “it” for marriage). But see Jimmy, caddish Jimmy, left Sissy in the lurch, would not marry her or provide for the child (what the hell he was a student, he had no dough even if he had been willing to do the honorable thing, which he was not) and so she never went back to finish up after that visit to Aunt Ella. She had latched onto the job at Adventure Car Hop to support her child since Benny could have cared less about her maternal status as long as she showed those long legs, those firm breasts, those ruby-red lips and those dazzling blue eyes to great effect in those shorts and tight blouse that kept the boys coming in, even the boys with dates. Yeah, so he could care less for as long as she could keep eyes turned her way. But the story, an old story in town since there were a couple of “role models,” Jenny and Delores working at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on East Main who followed this career path after having children out of wedlock. And thus all the signs told that career waitress was to be Sissy’s fate, maybe not at that place but probably she would wind up at Jimmy Jack’s or some truck stop diner on the outside of town with a trying too hard too tight steam-sweated uniform, stubby pencil in her hair, a wad of gum in her mouth, still fending off, mostly fending off except when she got the urge or felt lonely for a man, lonesome trucker advances.          

But back to the 1959 be-bop night, the be-bop Friday or Saturday night when those car hops, those foxes, were magnets for every guy with a car, a boss one or a father’s car it did not matter but without girls filling the seats, especially the front seat, hoping against hope for a moment with one of those car hops. And for car guys with girls in those front seats looking to show off their girls, claiming they were foxier, while sneaking furtive glances toward the bustling car hops, even than the car hops, if that was possible, and it usually wasn’t. Although under no conditions let them know that if you wanted a date next week and not the freeze-out not home treatment. More importantly, to show off their “boss cars.” And playing, playing loudly for all within one hundred yards to hear, their souped-up car radio complexes, turned nightly in rock heaven’s WJDA, the radio station choice of everyone under the age of thirty.

As Jack honed in on that remembrance night on Eddie's super-duplex speaker combo The Dell-Vikings were singing their hit, Black Slacks, and some walkers were crooning along to the tune. Yes, if you can believe this, some guys and girls, some lame guys and girls, not junior high kids who couldn’t drive anyway but over sixteen high school students actually walked to the Adventure Car Hop to grab something to eat after the Clintondale Majestic Theater let out. They, of course, ate at the thoughtfully provided picnic tables although their orders were still taken by Sissy’s leggy brigade. Nicely served by those tip-hungry car hops just like real customers with a glimmer of nighttime social standing, although they were still nothing but lamos in the real night social order.

But, getting back to Eddie and Ginny, see Sissy would have known something that you and I would not have known, could not have known, just by the way Eddie placed his order as The Falcon’s doo wop serenade, Your So Fine, blared away from his radio in the fading night. Sissy knew because, being a fox she had had plenty of experience knowing the drive-in restaurant protocol after the battles had subsided down at Adamsville or Hullsville Beach “submarine watching” night, including with Eddie in the days, the junior high days when she and Eddie were nothing but lamo car-less walkers. And what she knew was that Eddie and Ginny, who had been nothing but a “stick” when Eddie and she were an item, a stick being a girl, a twelve or thirteen year old junior high school girl with no “shape,” unlike Sissy who did have a shape, although no question, no question even to Sissy Ginny had a shape now, not as good as hers but a shape good enough to keep Eddie snagged, had been "doing it” down at Hullsville Beach. Doing “it” after spending the early part of the evening at the Surf, the local rock dance hall for those over twenty-one (and where liquor was served). The tip-off: Eddie’s request for all the trimmings on his hamburgers. All the trimmings in this case being mustard, ketchup, pickles, lettuce, and here is the clincher, onions. Yes, Eddie and Ginny are done with love’s chores for the evening and can now revert to primal culinary needs without rancor, or concern.

Sissy had to laugh at how ritualized, although she would never have used such a word herself, may have not been up on her sociological jargon, to describe what was going on in the youthful night life in Clintondale (including the really just slightly older set like the clients of the Surf rock club, Eddie and Ginny, who had learned the ropes at Adventure Car Hop way back when). If a couple came early, say eight o’clock, they never ordered onions, no way, the night still held too much promise. The walkers, well, the walkers you couldn’t tell, especially the young walkers like she and Eddie in the old days, but usually they didn’t have enough sense to say “no onions.” And then there were the Eddies and Ginnys floating in around two, or three, in the morning, “done” (and the reader knows what “done” is now), starving, maybe a little drunk and ready to devour Benny’s (who was doing short order duty that night since Mel had called in sick, “rum” sick Benny called it) cardboard hamburgers, deep-fried, fat-saturated French fries, and diluted soda (known locally as tonic, go figure) as long as those burgers had onions, many onions on them. And as we turn off this scene to the strains of Johnny Ace crooning Pledging My Love on Eddie’s car radio competing just now with a car further over with The Elegants’ Little Star Sissy had just place the tray on Eddie’s side of the car and had brought his order and placed it on the tray, with all the trimmings.

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets, musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….            

  THE WAR FILMS O living pictures of the dead, O songs without a sound, O fellowship whose phantom tread Hallows a phantom ground-- How in a gleam have these revealed The faith we had not found. We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven, We have passed by God on earth: His seven sins and his sorrows seven, His wayworn mood and mirth, Like a ragged cloak have hid from us The secret of his birth. Brother of men, when now I see The lads go forth in line, Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me As for thy bread and wine; Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me To take their death for mine. _Henry Newbolt_