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

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those 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 saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and 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, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; 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. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts 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, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

Dr Dan Todman considers how remembrance and memorialisation have been used by nations and communities to negotiate the overwhelming losses of World War One.

Soldiers of the Magre who fell for their country in the world war 1914-1918

Publication printed in 1919 in Italy commemorating the soldiers from the small town of Magrè who died in the war.

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Free from known copyright restrictions

The scale and nature of the First World War both required and complicated its remembrance. The war was an immensely complex event. It was global in its reach, generated extremes of experience and emotion, and involved conflicts within as well as between nations. On the battlefronts, millions were left disabled or dead in prolonged battles of attrition. Many of those who died had no known grave. At home, societies underwent immense pressures: mass bereavement and prolonged separation, invasion and occupation, shortages and starvation, rebellion and revolution. But there was also a strong sense of living through a historic moment that needed to be recorded. What the war meant and how it would be remembered in the future were both matters of concern whilst the fighting was still going on, and remained so during the uneasy peace that came after.

The war’s changing meanings

In every combatant country, the war’s meanings changed as it was fought, and remained subject to debate after it had finished. Individuals and communities tried to work out what was happening to them and sought recognition of their sacrifices. Politicians, generals and governments attempted to justify losses and enthuse their populations for greater endeavours. Churches, charities and local civic leaders played an active role: providing solace by explaining the purpose of suffering was both a responsibility and a reinforcement of their position in society. Journalists, manufacturers, designers, sculptors, writers and publishers all responded to war as a creative stimulus and a commercial opportunity. Some of these responses were extremely modern in form, others reached back to more traditional representations of war, sacrifice and heroism in the search for comfort and understanding.

- See more at: http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/remembrance-and-memorials#sthash.QRj4gn4T.dpuf

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

 

Several years ago, I guess about three years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery. In short, those who would come by on Sunday and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines but held back from further commitment. Now as we head into 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially the banks who led the way downhill) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama with might and main is still intact. The needs of working people although now widely discussed (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations) have not been ameliorated. All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          

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No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
 

It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

 

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China have broken the third world countryside. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

For The Legendary Rock Record Producer John Fry Who Has Passed On …

 

Frank Jackman

Back in the day, back in the time of what is now called the classic age of rock and roll, back starting in the early 1950s, guys and gals would go to small record studios in places like Memphis, Chicago and Detroit to record their work, if it was good enough. Hoping against hope (against oblivion hope and would accept, do you hear me, accept in a heartbeat a one hit johnnie or janie fate if it came to that just as long as they were on vinyl). Those small record companies were the life-blood or early rock and guys like Sam Philips, Leonard Chess and the like, including the late John Fry honored here would weed out the good from the bad and give the good a leg up. So not all those who loved rock and roll, who wanted to see it succeed (and make a little dough too, naturally) were in front of the microphone. Guys like Fry did the hard work of producing quality recordings and he and his label was known for that quality, and for an ear for the next great thing coming out. Kudos, brother, kudos.          

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow  (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.

That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

From The Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Website

Click below to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

http://www.mcadp.org/

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Markin comment:

I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Committee’s strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.

Here is another way to deal with both the question of the death penalty and of political prisoners from an old time socialist perspective taken from a book review of  James P. Cannon's Notebooks Of An Agitator:

I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.

The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.

It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.

I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.

Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.

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Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears."

last lines from The Lonseome Death Of Hattie Carroll, another case of an injustice against black people. - Bob Dylan
, 1963

Markin comment (posted September 22, 2011):

Look, after almost half a century of fighting every kind of progressive political struggle I have no Pollyanna-ish notion that in our fight for a “newer world” most of the time we are “tilting at windmills.” Even a cursory look at the history of our struggles brings that hard fact home. However some defeats in the class struggle, particularly the struggle to abolish the barbaric, racist death penalty in the United States, hit home harder than others. For some time now the fight to stop the execution of Troy Davis has galvanized this abolition movement into action. His callous execution by the State of Georgia, despite an international mobilization to stop the execution and grant him freedom, is such a defeat.

On the question of the death penalty, moreover, we do not grant the state the right to judicially murder the innocent or the guilty. But clearly Brother Davis was innocent. We will also not forget that hard fact. And we will not forget Brother Davis’ dignity and demeanor as he faced what he knew was a deck stacked against him. And, most importantly, we will not forgot to honor Brother Davis the best way we can by redoubling our efforts to abolition the racist, barbaric death penalty everywhere, for all time. Forward.

Additional Markin comment posted September 23, 2011:

No question the execution on September 21, 2011 by the State of Georgia of Troy Anthony Davis hit me, and not me alone, hard. For just a brief moment that night, when he was granted a temporary stay pending a last minute appeal before the United States Supreme Court just minutes before his 7:00PM execution, I thought that we might have achieved a thimbleful of justice in this wicked old world. But it was not to be and so we battle on. Troy Davis shall now be honored in our pantheon along with the Haymarket Martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others. While Brother Davis may have not been a hard politico like the others just mentioned his fight to abolish the death penalty for himself and for future Troys places him in that company. Honor Troy Davis- Fight To The Finish Against The Barbaric Racist Death Penalty!
 

Foodie’s Delight-Jon Favreau’s Chef

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Chef, starring Jon Favreau, Soffa Vergara, Emjay Anthony, directed and written by Jon Favreau, 2014    

Iron Chef, Chopped Chef, Sou Chef, Zen Master Chef, Chef de Cuisine, hell, salad chef and even dishwashers have grabbed a new found respect in the world of the professions ever since the food craze, fine food mainly, of the last decade or so had swept America (elsewhere too but we will stick to America on this one). Hell, there is even a new awkward and rather obtuse word added to the vernacular over the trend, foodie (ugh! okay). So it was kind of inevitable that a movie audience tired of watching lawyers, doctors, politicians and super-heroes, real or imagined, would be treated a film based on this new trend, the film under simply titled Chef.

Ordinarily the professional chef is well hidden in the back of the house along with his or her staff and the other auxiliary components that make up a restaurant, especially a fine dining restaurant. In this film we find those previously vague figures who work long and odd hours, devote themselves to serving the best meals possible, and trying to keep their weight down and their drinking habits in check have lives and dreams outside of the sweaty hectic kitchen and that is what drives this film.

Our chef du jour is one Carl Caspar (played by the person who wrote and directed the film, Jon Favreau) who is like lots of chefs concerned with providing good food and also being the master of his or her domain, the kitchen. Naturally like any organization there is a certain power structure when the chef works for somebody else while waiting on that dream of owning his or her own restaurant. So that provides one tension (especially when the owner is played by over the top Dustan Hoffman one of many known stars  in a film with many cameo performances by big stars who must sense this food thing will illuminate their careers). But the big dust-up is between Chef Carl and the local blogger and food critic out in Los Angeles who has panned Chef Carl’s latest efforts. Panned him mercilessly when all Chef Carl wanted to do was showcase his own work and that controversy between boss, critic and chef lead to Chef Carl leaving his cushy job.

Of course the trials and tribulations of any professional are thin gruel for a film of a couple of hours so there is another story-line to draw you in, or rather two parts of a story-line. One is all about owning your own shop and Chef Carl by hook or by crook goes about that task with a vengeance when after he left that cushy fine dining job his options got significantly reduced and he wound up making a go of the latest craze in fast food dining-the food truck. Not just any haphazard food but specializing in cubanos and other culinary delights reflecting his Miami birth and his ex-wife’s Cuban-American heritage (played by Soffa Vergara) who helped set him up with the truck (via an ex-husband of hers). Chef Carl would turn out so successful in that enterprise that even the bastard food blogger who had previously panned him wanted to back him into his very own restaurant.

The other part of the story-line is his renewed relationship with his young son (played by Emjay Anthony) who has chaffed under the strain of his parents’ divorce and his overworked father’s lack of attention to him. That food truck and a cross-country trip from Miami (Little Havana, naturally) to the West Coast is something of a coming of age for both of them. And drives his parents back together. Check this one out.                  

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

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those 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 saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and 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, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; 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. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts 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, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

Disenchantment For some, whose emotional pain was often excruciating, such accounts were superficial flimflam. For these survivors, whether soldiers or civilians, the war had transcended previous notions of reality and thus undermined all official explanation, indeed all external truth. Only personal experience remained. The upshot, projected by the title of C E Montague’s war memoir of 1922, was Disenchantment, a profound and festering disillusionment with the world that had produced and waged the war. In this mindset, against the backdrop of the machine massacres of Flanders, Verdun, and the Somme, humour turned absurd, art increasingly provocative, and music decidedly experimental. In literature, too, old forms no longer sufficed. Even language was called into question. T S Eliot doubted its ability to capture essence; Franz Kafka termed it a lie; e e cummings, the American poet who had been an ambulance driver with the French, regarded all standard rules of writing, from grammar to punctuation to the capitalisation of his own name, as fatuous restrictions, and Ernest Hemingway said famously in A Farewell to Arms (1929) that ‘abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene’: only place names now possessed dignity. All the old slogans and values had been shattered as if hit by a monstrous artillery shell. Images ‘Diary of a Dead Officer’: diary and poems by Arthur Graeme West, who enlisted in 1915 and was killed in 1917. The diary is one of the first published realistic accounts of life in the trenches. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen, as published in ‘Poems’ (1920). ‘Poems’, by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1915). Chesterton considered himself first and foremost a journalist. However, he was a prolific writer contributing to most literary genres. Photograph of Isaac Rosenberg from ‘Poems’ (1922). Rosenberg was killed in action on 1 April 1918. The fourth verse of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, written in the early weeks of the war. From ‘For the Fallen, and Other Poems’ (1914). - See more at: http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/literary-memories-of-world-war-one#sthash.y5nWPlxZ.dpuf

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Sarah, One of the presistent fallacies about the US torture camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is that it was a “mistake” of the Bush Regime, a misguided attempt to “keep America safe.” You hear this from Democrat apologists, who for the last six full years, have been in position to close it. But listen to those who control Congress now, and those who passed the Military Commissions Act in 2006. That orgy of the complete abrogation of rights for people the US identified as enemies in the so-called “global war on terror” was vengeance against any group of people who challenged American supremacy. Their goal was to have a place where they could openly defy international norms. They crow about it, still, and do not intend to give it up. “I'd do it again in a minute,” Dick Cheney said on “Meet the Press” December 14. Cheney's repeating his basic message that the US has to be ready to go to the “dark side” using, “basically, any means necessary to achieve our objectives.” Senator Lindsey Graham, who has never met a piece of repressive legislation he couldn't get behind, said “We have a lot going for us that our enemy doesn’t. We’re actually good people, and they’re bastards,” as an explanation of why he supports everything that was done post-9/11. So this is what the “good” people did: “The CIA torturers took sadistic and ghoulish delight in inflicting sexually degrading torture on captives. Detainees were frequently stripped naked and forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. The report describes ‘rectal feeding’—forcing material up the rectums of detainees, a form of rape. Detainees were subjected to constant and viciously realistic death threats. They were placed in tubs of ice for extended times. One detainee was chained partially nude to a concrete floor and died of hypothermia. Prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week, driven to ‘hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.’” We also learned from the Senate's report on torture last month that, though publicly and privately there is intense struggle over letting out the truth about Guantanamo, the black sites, rendition, and torture under Bush, the Democatic leadership in Congress was fully briefed at the time, and kept quiet. Those in authority who people expected to act to stop these outrages have not done so. Does that mean we leave it alone? NO, it does not. Protest over the next week should bring out people who are determined to stop these depraved crimes. The torture report — redacted as it was — has inspired renewed focus on the crimes of the Bush Regime. Democracy Now! reported last month: “The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows the release of a Senate report on CIA torture which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan.” Torture lawyer John Yoo, defender of almost every single reactionary US position, was given an endowed chair at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School in 2014. Right now, there are renewed discussions on how to get him disbarred and investigated. Martin Garbus, the distinguished First Amendment attorney, wrote that the memos written by Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002 providing legal justifcation for torture were “not used to interpret the law — they were intentionally written to disregard the law.” Garbus said that if the government does not file a complaint to disbar Yoo and Bybee, he will. Cheers for that! January 2015 Events: CLOSE Guantanamo NOW Actions, Talks, Panels, Films On January 11, the US torture camp at Guantanamo will have been open 13 years. More than 100 men are still held, the majority of whom were cleared for release years ago. They suffer not knowing if they will be released, held indefinitely. Some are still on protest hunger strike, and being force-fed by the U.S. military. Join World Can't Wait in protesting this shameful anniversary with a series of events around the country. If you know of other events, email us quickly. Witness Against Torture's Annual Fast, Rally, and Direct Action to Close Guantánamo and End Torture is happening January 5-13 Washington DC, or you can join the fast from anywhere. Thursday January 8: New York City Stand with Shaker Aamer, Fahd Ghazy & all the Prisoners Unjustly Held Featuring British journalist Andy Worthington; Ramzi Kassem of CUNY Law School & attorney for Shaker Aamer; Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights & attorney for Fahd Ghazy; and Debra Sweet. 6:30 pm Rutgers Presbyterian Church 236 West 73rd Street @ Broadway, NYC Facebook Event Saturday January 10: Langley, VA Protest of US drone war, targeted killing, and indefinite detention Outside the homes of Dick Cheney & John Brennan, CIA director Herndon 8:00 am -11:30 am at and near CIA Headquarters Facebook Event Saturday January 10: Washington, DC From Ferguson to Guantánamo: Institutionalized Brutality & Torture A panel discussion with activists and attorneys involved in the struggles against police violence, racial profiling, and US detention policies 8:00 pm First Trinity Lutheran Church 4th & E Street NW Washington DC Facebook Event Sunday, January 11: Washington DC Vigil & Rally to Close Guantanamo 1:00 pm: Interfaith Prayer Vigil (Sponsored by NRCAT and Interfaith Action for Human Rights) 1:30 pm Rally to close Guantánamo at the White House followed by a march to the Department of Justice. In front of the White House Facebook Event Sunday, January 11: Miami, FL Protest to Shut Down Guantanamo at US Southern Command 2:00 pm NW 36th St & NW 87th Ave Doral,  FL Facebook Event Sunday, January 11: Los Angeles, CA Protests to Close Guantanamo 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Vigil & Rally at Santa Monica Pallisades Park Ocean & Pico 3 - 6 pm Vigil outside Golden Globes Ceremony TBA Sunday, January 11: London, UK Protest at US Embassy 24 Grosvenor Square Mayfair, London Facebook Event Monday, January 12: Washington, DC Witness Against Torture’s Nonviolent Direct Action Morning — TBD Monday, January 12: Washington, DC Leaving the Dark Side? Empyting Guantanamo and the CIA Torture Report with Andy Worthington, Tom Wilmer, Col Morris Davis & Peter Bergen.  12:15 pm - 1:45 pm New America Foundation, 1889 L Street NW Washington, DC Monday, January 12: Boston, MAClosing Guantanamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture with Andy Worthington 6:30 pm Old South Church 645 Boyston Street Boston Tuesday, January 13: UC Berkeley, CA Protests at the opening day of UC Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School, where torture lawyer John Yoo teaches. Tuesday, January 13: Harvard Cambridge MAClosing Guantanamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture with Andy Worthington 12:30-1:30 pm Harvard Law School * 1563 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge   * location : WCC 1015       WCC = large complex at corner of                 Everett St & Mass. Ave. [WCC= Wasserstein Hall/Caspersen Student        Ctr/ Clinical Wing Will try to get better info re location of # 1015 Wednesday, January 14: Springfield, MA Closing Guantánamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture, with Andy Worthington 12:00 pm The Commons, Western New England University School of Law, 1215 Wilbraham Road Wednesday January 14: Northampton, MA Closing Guantanamo and Seeking Accountability for Torture, with Andy Worthington & Debra Sweet 7:00 pm Friends Meeting House, 43 Center Street, 2nd floor Thursday January 15: Chicago, IL Rally to Protest 14th Year of Guantanamo, Torture & Indefinite Detention 4:30 - 6:00 pm In front of the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Facebook Event Thursday January 15: Chicago, IL Guantanamo 13 Years Later: Not One More Year of Torture and Indefinite Detention! Evening Discussion with Andy Worthington, Guantanamo attorney Candace Gorman, and Debra Sweet. 7:00 pm Grace Place, 637 South Dearborn. Facebook Event Share this message: Thank you! A strong thanks to all who have donated to World Can't Wait's year-end fund drive.  We more than surpassed the $5,000 matching-funds challenge from 7 generous donors! But we have not reached the goal of $35,000 yet — a goal we set based on the real cost of organizing all the protests you hear about on a regular basis via these emails. The remaining $8,000 will be used to pay for delivery of these e-newsletters, a cost that has just risen 50%. We send about 75 per year to people around the world; and many more to local areas announcing events. There are many ways to support World Can't Wait. Donating is a key way to be part of this movement, and help stop the crimes of our government. From a recent donor: “I made a contribution last week because of the very things you outline in this email. How much World Can't Wait has been in front of the genuine moral and political issues of our time. No one does it with the same fierceness as WCW and that is indeed a good thing.”  H. N. Above: scenes from actions over the past 13 years to shut Guantánamo. Now more than ever we can't quit!   Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait

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