All Honor To The Media, Pa. 1971 Whistle-Blowers-The Documentary 1971 

Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Whistle-blowers as we painfully know from the Chelsea Manning case and the others prosecuted to the fullest by the Obama Administration are honored more in the breech than in the observance (certainly by an administration that has the “distinction” of prosecuting and convicting more whistle-blowers than any other). This administration is also still hell-bent on coaxing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face the guns of the “justice” system here. But this administration as egregious as their conduct has been when confronted with truth-tellers (what the hell all Snowden, Manning, et.al have done is release the government’s own document for public inspection so the only made-up stuff comes from the government’s own sources) is not the only one that has clamped down on whistle-blowers as headline to this piece makes clear and as the documentary about the heroic work of the Media Eight, 1971, tells us in graphic detail.        

Probably the most famous whistle-blower from the Vietnam War period was Daniel Ellsberg and his revelations in the Pentagon Papers (also government documents but the veracity of some of those documents should be approached like you would a rattlesnake. Very carefully.) And he rightly deserves his honorable place in history (as well as kudos for continuing to keep up the good fight in his fervent defense of Chelsea Manning). But those were heady times, frustrating times for those who opposed that generation’s (mine too) endless Vietnam war so that by the late 1960s, early 1970s thoughtful citizens were up to all kinds of things, mostly illegal, to stop the madness of the war machine (sound familiar except then we had thousands ready to do what was necessary).

Ordinary citizens were burning draft cards, supporting such actions, sitting down in draft board offices, spilling blood on the files, protesting in front of every conceivable war-related institution, building mass rallies, committing acts of civil disobedience trying to shut down the government's war machine on the streets, and so on. Citizen-soldiers were going AWOL, refusing orders, particularly orders to Vietnam, fragging, and the Army was half in mutiny. Others were a bit more respectful of the institutions and pursued their angers in legal ways. But here is the rub. They, we, were all under surveillance (sound familiar, again) and that is where the story of the Media Eight intersects what was going on back then. The government, the press, the other media as described in the documentary all took a dive and so ordinary citizens did what ordinary citizens who have gotten “religion” do they took action.

The only different from today is that the Media Eight had to actually go and burgle the FBI office putting themselves in immediate personal danger rather than use some computer wizardry to get the information we need to know about. So yes, as the story below expands on, all honor to the heroic Media Eight whistle-blowers. You too have been looked at kindly by history.    

******

The Husband And Wife Who Burgled The FBI

John and Bonnie Raines are pictured with their three children in Glen Lake, Michigan circa August 1969. (1971film.com)

Before Edward Snowden, there was the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 1971, eight anti-war activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Among them were John and Bonnie Raines frequent anti-war protesters and the parents of three kids.

They were looking for proof that the FBI was involved in surveillance and harassment of civil rights and anti-war groups. And they found it in the over 1,000 documents that they stole and sent to three major newspaper: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
“The story almost never got published,” John told Here & Now’s  Robin Young. “Whistle-blowers depend on courageous investigative reporters” And those journalists, it seemed, were scarce.
At the time, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so powerful that even presidents feared him. Finally, only The Washington Post published copies of the documents. The response was enormous. The public was outraged.

 “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law.”

– John Raines

In a world where personal phones are locked with finger scans, it’s hard to imagine that these eight ordinary people could pull off such a major heist, especially considering they couldn’t even pick the lock on the first door they tried.

But other than that initial setback, the novice burglars succeeded.

“We had prepared so meticulously,” said Bonnie, who posed as a student from Swarthmore College exploring opportunities for women in the FBI in order to get inside the building during business hours to scout out security measures and the layout of the offices.

“We were very careful in our preparations,” John added. “We were not Don Quixotes, we were not martyrs, we were interested in doing the job we thought we had to do because nobody in Washington was doing that job, namely supervising and holding J.Edgar Hoover of the FBI accountable.”

Their actions led directly to the Church Committee hearings, the country’s first congressional investigation of American intelligence agencies. And later, the discovery of Cointellpro, short for Counterintelligence Program, which Hoover ran to secretly collect information on civil rights activists and groups the FBI deemed potentially disruptive to the bureau.

When the job was done, the commission disbanded and the eight members rarely spoke.
“We had to go into hiding of course,” said John. “J. Edgar Hoover sent 200 agents to try and find the Citizens Commission and they flooded the city of Philadelphia. So we knew we needed to go deep underground and the best place to go underground, of course, is in plain sight and we were able to do that here in Philadelphia because there were thousands of resistors back then. I mean our country was in fire in 1970 and 1971. So we decided as a group, the eight of us, that we needed to disappear from the public discourse and return to our private lives and we did that.”

The couple remained active, had a fourth child and raised their family, never revealing what they had done. “We did tell our children when they were older teenagers,” said Bonnie. Accustomed to their parent’s activism, they weren’t shocked. Actually, Bonnie recalls, “they were quite proud.” She hopes that among her four children and seven grandchildren there is a legacy of activism.

Does this include breaking the law? “Yes,” both parents say. “When the law becomes the instrument of the crime, then the only way you can stop that crime is to break that law. We found that out in the civil rights movement in the laws of segregation,” said John.

 “A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.”

– John Adams

Now, 43 years later, their story is being told in the new documentary “1971,” which opens in New York today.

While the Commission’s goal was not to be “Don Quixotes,” the film’s trailer suggests an element of heroism in their act. And while some may argue the Commission’s burglary was similar to Snowden’s, other’s say it’s a different time. Some say, in a post-9/11 world, we need to be more protective of the nation’s security.

“I believe our nation is driven by an excessive fear,” John said. “Yes, we have to worry about the terrorists, but even more we have to worry about how to protect the values of our nation that make our nation worth valuing and worth securing. The second president of the United States, John Adams, said something very wise in his time and it’s still true in our time. He said, ‘A people that would sacrifice liberty to gain security, deserve neither.’ What he said back then, those many, many hundreds of years ago, remain true today.”

Watch the trailer for '1971':

Guests

• John and Bonnie Raines, husband and wife who participated in the 1971 burglary of the FBI office in Media, Penn.

Old PIs Never Die, They Just…Paul Newman’s Twilight

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Twilight, starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, 1998

The movies and bookstores are filled (and have always been filled) with all kinds of private detectives, hardboiled guys like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the old days, oh yeah, Nick and Nora Charles too, old days that is, fetching female detectives, young guys and gals starting out in the profession, gumshoe types too who spill coffee over themselves on stake-outs and smoke far too many cigarettes. Yeah, a whole litany of types from languid shamuses to keyhole peepers doing the best they can. Harry Ross (played by Paul Newman) in the film under review, Twilight, is one of those guys, one of those PIs, who has lost a step or two, maybe is not as hungry to see the bad guys put down, maybe not as hungry to see himself put them down like in his youth, but when the deal went down all his shattered detective instincts rose to the top, almost. Not bad for a guy who did not even bother to renew his PI license with the Los Angeles police, not bad at all.        

Like a lot of guys who turn PI Harry started out as a public cop, did his time, and to help while away the retirement hours went PI, did a few cases and that was that. Well not quite “that was that” because his last case went awry on him. He was hired by Jack (played by Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (played by Susan Sarandon) to find their errant under-aged daughter who had run off with a sleazebag guy to sunny Mexico. Naturally Harry found them shacked up in a resort (hell of course he found them after all he was a good PI in his time and they did leave a trail of bread crumbs behind them). When Harry tried to take her back boyfriend, sleaze or not, seeing his meal ticket go down the tubes threw some fist, and the daughter, Mel (played by a young Reese Witherspoon) shot poor Harry accidently. Not good PR for a PI, no question.

Somehow that blow-out got Harry room and board at the Ames residence, they, Jack and Catherine, maybe you remember them if you are old enough, had lit up the screen in their younger days but now were on cheap street, or heading there what with the big overhead of running a La La house, keeping tabs on that errant teenage daughter and paying out of pocket medical bills for Jack (he had cancer). Of course in the movies you can’t just have an old PI retire and sit around the pool all day drinking some guy’s gin (or ginger ale in Harry’s case since he was drying out) so Jack asked Harry run an errand for him, an errand involving sending some hush money to a woman up in the Hollywood hills from the look of it when he got there, straight from cheap street.

See Jack in his vindictive fatherly way had that sleazebag boyfriend of Mel’s picked up and jailed for transporting a minor, you know the scoop, and he was looking for a payout to keep quiet about things he knew, or thought he knew about the mysterious fate of Catherine’s ex-husband who got lost in the mist of time some twenty years before. That missing person thing turned out to be very convenient for this pair of movie stars since they could get married once that ex was assumed to have given up the ghost.                 

Before Harry could do that simple errand though he ran into another PI who had been shot and killed, murdered, in that woman’s house by a party, or parties, unknown and that set off a whole string of events that led back to that twenty-year old case since that dead PI (an ex-cop too) strongly suspected he had been a victim of foul play. Of course when a dame (or dames) is involved you know, or you should be presumed to know in any noir-ish film, there will be plenty of treachery and a few more off-hand murders (of that boyfriend and his lady-friend parole officer) before the mystery is solved. You also know old dog Harry (after all this is blue-eyed Paul Newman we are talking about even in his twilight) had drawn a bee-line for Catherine. Bee-line or not Harry was determined to solve this one no matter who he went to bed with, whose house he had been staying at and who actually shot that ex-husband in the head and buried him out in the desert. Here though is where the aging PI not so hungry for justice whatever the cost comes in. After a little shoot-out with a co-conspirator of the Ames,’ an ex-cop Raymond (played by James Garner), everybody walked. I’ll bet old Bridget in The Maltese Falcon wished that she had Harry around then to twirl around her finger instead of Sam Spade who turned her over, turned her over even though every part of him did not want to. Yeah, aging PIs work differently, very differently.                         

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes In Boston- No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Young Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority youth, mainly black and latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six months have given us that. But below is an example, a beautiful graphic example, of just how deep the hurts go, and how deep into society these injustices are felt. Read on.

 

        

To Trust Or Not Trust-George V. Higgins’ Trust  

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Trust, George V. Higgins, Henry Holt, New York, 1989    

Recently I have been on a crime novelist George V. Higgins tear as a result of re-reading his classic first and I believe still his best crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and re-watched as well as a result of that read the film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Eddie). As is my wont when I get on a tear on an author I have been picking off his later work although in no particular order. Higgins certainly had an ear, a close ear, for dialogue, especially down in the streets dialogue gained from his growing up working-class town of Brockton where in the old days he would have found plenty of corner boys in the old Irish or Italian streets to perk his interest and from his having been a federal prosecutor where the joint was jumping with them.  

I noted in a review of Sandra Nichols Found Dead that Higgins has tackled all kinds of criminal situations, murder, extortion, leg-breaking, money laundering, you name it in the rough crime categories and has tackled white collar crime, you know, taking bribes, dishing out contracts for a cut, embezzlement, the whole litany of governmental and private company crimes. Along the way there seems to have been three main story lines that Higgins’ work can be grouped around. Stories about the classic street hoods like Eddie Coyle, corrupt government officials like Billy Ryan defended by recurring character criminal defense lawyer Jerry Kennedy, and those amorphous tales like Sandra Nichols Found Dead, involving, for lack of a better term, private citizen crimes, rough or white. I also mentioned in that review that I believe that the prolific Higgins had his best days when he took on the street hoods straight up, brought them to life, and those private crime sagas like Nichols and the book under review, Trust, pale by comparison.

The main story line here is, well, about trust, not implicit trust like one long-time friend might have for another but trust based on mutual understandings, based on a favor to one requiring a favor back. So this whole tale revolves around favors given, taken back, and which ones went awry. The central cause for all of these collisions is one “from hunger” let’s call him a grifter, Earl Beale. A small-time grifter, always scratching for ten here, a hundred there, maybe a thousand max around, unlike a big-time grifter I knew once named Top Hat who pulled a big scam for about a million in cash off a big time gambler and although I have not heard from him for a while I believe that he walked away alive.    

Earl of course had been cutting corners, small corners, ever since he took the fall for shaving points in basketball games that he played in for a New York college in the 1950s. Yeah, he did time as guys like him will when the heat is on and a fall guy is needed but he also made a career thereafter of small hustles whether working at a car dealership, or selling a hot car, or trying to shake down a businessman with telltale photos of him and a steady hooker who also happens to be Earl’s girlfriend. Still he couldn’t pull off that last deal, couldn’t close the biggest deal of his life due to his hubris, or maybe just commitment to the world of small grifts.          

Here is how the favor for favor thing gets played out. One “connected” guy, you know a low-end mobster, did a favor for a friend of Earl’s car-dealer brother, a big unnamed favor, for that friend was a politician, and did not need the heat. In return the politician through his connections in D.C. did the mobster a favor by keeping his gung-ho hot-headed son out of Vietnam in the 1960s when that meant something. That brother’s friend also got Earl’s criminal record erased as a favor to Earl’s brother. But that was not the end of the favor line for the mobster needed a favor for a judge friend (maybe customer is a better word). The favor: getting somebody to “steal” the judge’s car (or rather his wife’s) to avoid a scandal. So the politician calls in Earl’s brother’s debt and the brother calls in Earl. Of course Earl as we now know is the weak link since after he “stole” the car he decided to sell the car through his brother. So the brother sold the car as legit (on Earl’s word and paperwork) until the car turns up on the “hot” sheet and that begins the breakdown of favor-dom.

Now whether all of this back and forth on favors is enough to sustain interest over a couple of hundred pages filled out with plenty of filler is a close question. I say, as I have said before, old Higgins is in his glory with the serious street con artists and here just so-so.                 

 

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes-  Jazzonia 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 Jazzonia 

 

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Langston Hughes

 

 

This was the limit. That exact thought and no other crossed Louise Crawford’s mind as she fumed, fumed for the third time over the past several weeks waiting, waiting for his lordship, his budding poet lordship, to show up sometime in the next decade. Waiting so that he could take her to the Red Hat where “the Earl” and the boys were playing some heavy-noted down and dirty black-assed jazz that week and for “beat” aficionados, or like her, looking to be seen at the latest happening thing around the city she just had to be present at the creation. Yeah, she was like that, had a talent, no, maybe better a wanting habit which constantly needed to be replenished.

Other times he had begged indulgence because he was in the throes of writing some inspired poem, calling her his muse which stopped her in her tracks, or some small press publisher was all agog to print a few hundred copies of a small collection of his work. Still no, no Crawford, no Crawford whose forbears practically came over on the Mayflower was ever on this great earth to be kept waiting, for anything under any circumstances, and she would make that abundantly clear to him, again, when he arrived, if he did arrive. (For those not in the know, yes, that Crawford of the Wall Street financiers Crawford who have been making money hand over fist since about the time of the Mayflower so waiting had been bred out of the clan she, Louise the youngest daughter, twenty-two, if anybody was asking.) 

Of course, Louise recognized the double-standard, although only recognized it and would not be enslaved to it any more than any other twenty-two year old woman would be, that she was more than willing to play her own fashionably late card when it suited her, especially among her old boarding school friends who made something of a science of the custom. She, moreover, did not care, did not care one whit, that he, Jesse to give him a name, was somebody’s protégé , some friend of Mabel Dodge’s granddaughter or something like that, and the greatest poet, the greatest black poet since, what was his name, oh yes, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance back in the Jazz Age or something (not real jazz, not be-bop jazz, not from what she had heard on old records but more stuff to please the booze-swilling patrons, not like today with Earl, and walking daddies like Earl, and their cool, ultra-cool be-bop, be-bop sound).

She had had her full string of Greenwich Village hipsters, or want-to-be- hipsters, “beats” was the term of art ever since Jack Kerouac blew the lid off the straight world with his big book, On The Road, a few years back so every half-baked suburbanite joker was “beat,” beaten a better way to say it. Had had her fill of every variety that passed through Bleecker Street and she had had a veritable United Nations of lovers from the time she had turned sixteen and learned the karma sutra arts (and liked them) from poet prince Jesse back to Bob, the Jewish folksinger who wrote songs in honor of her pale blue eyes, his long legs and her natural blonde hair, and before him, Jim the jug band guy who made her laugh but had to go when he got into some serious drug stuff and got all devil cultish about it, and let’s see, Julio the painter who painted her in the nude, well, semi-nude and then took off with some senorita from Sonora , Michelangelo the sculptor who proclaimed his metal pieces the new wave( so no, not that old time one), Betty, the writer (just a crush and trying something new when some guy, a trumpet player so it figured, introduced her to sister and to some low-life sex stuff), Lothario the high-wire artist and juggler, and, well you know, a lot of very interesting people.

Of course Jesse was her first negro, oops, black lover. Jesus, she remembered one night when she called him that, negro, “the greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes,” when she introduced him to friends at a party and later he yelled holy hell at her saying that he was a black man, a black son of Mother Africa and that his people were creating stuff, human progress stuff, when her people were figuring out how to use a spoon, and trying to figure out why anyone would use such a thing if they could figure out how to use it. He said if he was in Mexico or Spain and was called word that it would be okay, okay maybe, but in America he was black, a sable warrior, black. And had been black since Pharaoh times. Later that night he wrote his well-received In Pharaoh Times to blow off the madness steam he still felt toward her. ( A poem which when she read it later, really read it expressed all his pent up stuff about being black, about coming from slavery and what that remnant still left had done to the psyche, the black male psyche not being able to protect his own, and about Mister Whitey, read Pharaoh, read Crawfords, read Wall Street, read waiting blondes cultivating their first black lover always getting what they wanted when they wanted it and some stuff she could not understand, some references to specific black cultural events.) And being her first black lover she had given him some room knowing that he was an artist, and he really was good in bed but this standing up thing was just not done, not done to a Crawford and so she determined that she would give him his walking papers this very night.

Just then she remembered, remembered the last time, that second time he, Jesse, had kept her waiting and the next day, as an act of contrition, he had written his lovely poem Louise Love In Quiet Time for her that some Village poetry journal was all aflutter to publish (and that she had re-read constantly). So maybe tonight she would not give him his walking papers…

***Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He wrote of small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder, never were heard over the rumble of the subway, working stiffs and their women, sometimes their kids, their kids growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments but what could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of North Adamsville, another town filled with small-voice people). Never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people who tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors, people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall (not some edenic fall but just a worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored). Wrote of the desperately lonely, a man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to him move on, or else, a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, no more. Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did Eliot call it, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man, about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. Wrote of the night people, of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all shape angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well, or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal moment. The next fix, how to get it, the next drink, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment. Waiting eternally waiting to get well, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any doctor could prescript, better than any priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn, the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine or whatever the traffic would bear, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred who of course they would never tell do when the whole thing goes public (although one suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent)who in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

He spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

Army Approves Hormone Therapy Treatment for Wikileaker Chelsea Manning

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The U.S. Army has approved hormone therapy for Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of leaking national security secrets to Wikileaks, defense officials told NBC News late Thursday.

Private Manning revealed her gender identity as a transgender female after being convicted and sentenced to 35 years in the military prison at Leavenworth in July 2013.

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According to the officials, since Manning has been clinically diagnosed as a transgender and is confined to the military prison, the Army is obligated to provide and pay for her hormone treatments — just as if she was confined to a civilian federal prison.

The hormone therapy development was first reported by USA TODAY.

Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, became the first military inmate to ask for treatment for gender dysphoria. She asked for a treatment plan that would consider three measures: dressing and living as a woman, hormone therapy and possible surgery.

In July 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel approved an Army recommendation to begin the early stages of gender reassignment, including counseling and approval to dress as a woman, officials said.

IN-DEPTH

The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind  

In memory of Peter Paul Markin, 1946-1972, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964:

This is the way the late Peter Paul Markin, although he never stood on ceremony and everybody in the corner boy night at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys down near Adamsville Beach called him plain old ordinary vanilla Markin, would have wanted to put his response to the question of what smell most distinctly came to his mind from the old neighborhoods if he were still around. Many a night, a late night around midnight usually, in the days and weeks after we got out of high school but before we went on to other stuff, maybe some of those nights having had trouble with some girl, either one of us, since we both came from all boy families and didn’t understand girls, or maybe were afraid of them, unlike guys who had sisters, who maybe didn’t understand them either but were around them enough to have figured a few things out about them we would stand holding up the wall in front of Jack Slack’s and talk our talk, talk truth as we saw it although we never really dignified the jive with the word truth.

Or maybe dateless some nights like happened a lot more than either of us, hell, any of us if it came right down to it, would admit to (I won’t even discuss the shroud we placed over the truth when talking, big talking, about “making it” when we were lucky to get a freaking kiss on the cheek from a girl half the time) we would talk. Sometimes with several guys around but mainly Markin and me, since we were the closest of the half dozen or ten guys who considered themselves Frankie Riley-led Jack Slack’s corner boys we would talk about lots of things.

Goofy stuff when you think about it but one night I don’t know if it was me or him that came up with the question about what smell did we remember from the old days, the old days being when we were in school, from around the neighborhood but I do remember we both automatically and with just a couple of minutes thought came up with our common choice- Ida’s Bakery. Ida’s over on Sagamore Street, just up the street from the old ball field and adjacent to the Parks and Recreations sheds where the stuff for the summer programs, you know, archery equipment, paints, sports equipment, craft-making stuff, how-to magazines and all were kept during the summer and after that, between seasons. Since both Markin and I when we went to Josiah Adams Elementary up the next block (named after some guy related to guys who ran the town way back when) would each summer participate in the program and as we grew older (and presumably more reliable) were put in charge of the daily storage of those materials during the summer and so got a preternatural whiff of whatever Ida was baking for sale for the next day. So yeah, we knew the smell of Ida’s place. And so too I can “speak” for old Markin just like if he was here today some fifty years later telling you his story himself.        

Unfortunately Markin laid down his head in a dusty back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac we never did really find out which with two slugs in his heart and nobody, not even his family, certainly not me and I loved the guy, wanted to go there to claim the body, worse, to start an investigation into what happened that day back in 1972 down Sonora way, that is in Mexico, for fear of being murdered in some back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac ourselves. See Markin had huge corner boy, “from hunger,” wanting habits back then, going back in the Jack Slack days. Hell I came up with him and had them too. But he also had a nose for drugs, had been among the first in our town as far as I know although I won’t swear to that now since some kids up the Point, some biker guys who always were on the cutting edge of some new kicks may have been doing smoke well before him to do, publicly do right out on Adamsville Common in broad daylight with some old beat cop sitting about two benches away, marijuana in the mid-1960s. That at a time, despite what we had heard was going on in the Boston Common and over in high Harvard Square,  when the rest of us were still getting our underage highs from illicit liquor (Southern Comfort, cheap gin, cheaper wine, Ripple, more than a few times, Thunderbird, when we were short on dough, nobody, including  our hobo knight in shining armor who “bought” for us as long as he got a bottle for his work, wanted to bother lugging cases of cheapjack beer, say Knickerbocker or Narragansett, out of a liquor store and pass it on to in obviously under-aged kids  so we all developed a taste for some kind of hard liquor or wine). Markin did too, liked his white wine. But he was always heading over to Harvard Square, early on sometimes with me but I didn’t really “get” the scene that he was so hopped up about and kind of dropped away when he wanted to go over, so later he would go alone late at night taking the all-night Redline subway over, late at night after things had exploded around his house with his mother, or occasionally, his three brother (and very, very rarely his father since he had to work like seven bandits to make ends meet for the grim reaper bill collectors, which they, the ends never did meet as far as I could tell and from what I knew about such activity from my own house, so he was left out of it except to back up Ma).

One night, one night some guy, Markin said some folk singer, Eric somebody, who made a name for himself around the Square, made a name around his “headquarters,” the Hayes-Bickford just a jump up from the subway entrance where all the night owl wanna-be hipsters, dead ass junkies, stoned-out winos, wizened con men and budding poets and songwriters hung out, turned him on to a joint, and he liked it, liked the feeling of how it settled him down he said (after that first hit, as he was trying to look cool, look like he had been doing joints since he was a baby, almost blew him away with the coughing that erupted from inhaling the harsh which he could never figure out (nor could I when my mary jane coughing spurt came) since he, like all of us, was a serious cigarette smoker, practically chain-smoking to while away the dead time and, oh yeah, to look cool to any passing chicks while we were hanging out in front of Jack Slack’s.

Of course that first few puffs stuff meant nothing really, was strictly for smooth-end kicks, and before long he had turned me, Frankie Riley, our corner boy leader, and Sam Lowell, another good guy, on and it was no big deal. And when the time came for us to do our “youth nation,” hippie, Jack Kerouac On The Road treks west the five of us, at one time or another, had grabbed all kinds of different dope, grabbed each new drug in turn like they were the flavor of the month, which they usually were. And nobody worried much about any consequences either since we all had studiously avoided acid in our drug cocktail mix.  Until Markin got stuck on cocaine, you know, snow, girl, cousin any of those names you might know that drug by where you live. No, that is not right, exactly right anyway. It wasn’t so much that Markin got stuck on cocaine as that his nose candy problem heightened his real needs, his huge wanting habits, needs that he had been grasping at since his ‘po boy childhood. And so to make some serious dough, and still have something left to “taste” the product as he used to call it when he offered some to me with the obligatory dollar bill as sniffing tool he began some low-level dealing,  to friends and acquaintances mainly and then to their friends and acquaintances and on and on.

Markin when he lived the West Coast, I think when he was in Oakland with Moon-Glow (don’t laugh we all had names, aliases, monikers like that back then to bury our crazy pasts, mine was Flash Dash for a while, and also don’t laugh because she had been my girlfriend before I headed back east to go to school after the high tide of the 1960s ebbed out around 1971 or so. And also don’t laugh because Moon-Glow liked to “curl my toes,” Markin’s too, and she did, did just fine), stepped up a notch, started “muling” product back and forth from Mexico for one of the early cartels. He didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to know much but for a while he was sending plane tickets for me to come visit him out there. Quite a step up from our hitchhike in all weathers heading west days. And of course join him in imbibing some product testing. That went on for a while, a couple of years, the last year or so I didn’t see him, didn’t go west because I was starting a job. Then one day I got a letter in the mail from him all Markin-y about his future plans, about how he was going to finally make a “big score,” with a case full of product that he had brought up Norte, he always said Norte like he was some hermano or something rather than just paid labor, cheap paid labor probably, and was too much the gringo to ever get far in the cartel when the deal went down. Maybe he sensed that and that ate at him with so much dough to be made, so much easy dough. Yeah, easy dough with those two slugs that Spanish Johnny, a guy who knew Markin in the Oakland days, had heard about when he was muling and passed on the information to us. RIP-Markin          

No RIP though for the old days, the old smells that I started telling you about before I got waylaid in my head about the fate of my missed old corner boy comrade poor old Markin. Here’s how he, we, no he, let’s let him take a bow on this one, figured it out one night when the world was new, when our dreams were still fresh:

“There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Tonight though I am in thrall to smells, if one can be in thrall to smells and when I get a chance I will ask one of the guys about whether that is possible. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while before, passed a neighborhood bakery on St. Brendan Street in a Boston neighborhood, a Boston Irish neighborhood to be clear, that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house like a lot of such operations by single old maid, widowed, divorced or abandoned women left for whatever reason to their own devises trying to make a living baking, sewing, tailoring, maybe running a beauty parlor, small change but enough to keep the wolves from the door, with living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.

Of course one could not dismiss, or could dismiss at one’s peril just ask Frank, that invigorating smell of the salt-crusted air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up hitting us in front of Jack Slack’s bowling lanes and making us long to walk that few blocks to the beach with some honey who would help us pass the night. A wind too once you took girls out of the picture, although you did that at your peril as well, that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at the far end of North Adamsville Beach, near the fetid swamps and mephitic marshes in the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. [Sorry I put those smelly adjectives in, Markin would have cringed.] Or evade the funky smell [A Markin word.] of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts with their broods of children in tow. Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously and the space between the yacht clubs was the only “cool” place to hang with some honey. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo “submarine race” expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.

Or the smell sound of the ocean floor at twilight (or dawn, if you got lucky) on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora or turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell you guys, the crowd that will know what I am talking about, to speak about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.”

That’s good enough for the Markin part, the close up memory part. Here I am for the distant memory part: 

You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set one foot in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you had grown up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (before or beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young Field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.

Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as in North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.

Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by Markin’s reference to that sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics like my family going back to the “famine ships,” and probably before, were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, but fish, really tuna fish had that on Ida’s oatmeal bread. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a tuna fish desecration of holy bread. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s Grape, also of course) on oatmeal and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.

And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I have drawn blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredients she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able now but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor. And with a tear in my eye as I say it fifty some years later my boy Markin did too.