Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

 

A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists )performing The World Turned Upside Down.

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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low–end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obama-care reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

  

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

 

THE FOLLOWING IS A SONG BASED ON THE DIGGER EXPERIENCE IN 1650

If John Milton was the literary muse of the English Revolution then the Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, were the political muses.

The World Turned Upside Down

We will not worship the God they serve, a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

In 1649 to St. George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's

will

They defied the landlords, they defied the laws

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow

We come to work the lands in common and make the waste

ground grow

This earth divided we will make whole

So it may be a common treasury for all "**

The sin of property we do disdain

No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain

By theft and murder they took the land

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

They make the laws to chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell

We will not worship the God they serve,

a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve

We work and eat together, we need no swords

We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords

Still we are free, though we are poor

Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!

From the men of property the orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers'

claim

Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn

They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on

Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care

This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share

All things in common, all people one

They came in peace - the order came to cut them down

WORDS AND MUSIC BY LEON ROSSELSON, 1981

 

*A Communist Before His Time –Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Colonies in the English Revolution

 

DVD REVIEW

Winstanley, starring Miles Harriwell, directed by Kenneth Brownlow, 1975

The time of the English Revolution in the 1640's, Oliver Cromwell's time, as in all revolutionary times saw a profusion of ideas from all kinds of sources- religious, secular, the arcane, the fanciful and the merely misbegotten. A few of those ideas however, as here, bear study by modern left-wing militants. As the film under review exemplifies, True Leveler (a. k. a. Diggers) Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tracts from the 1640's, the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long, heroic, and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and, in a limited sense, still do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time, the 1600's, what Communist Manifesto represented for Kaarl Marx's time-and ours-the first clarion call for the new more equitable world order. And those with property, those who controlled and gained from the means of production, hated both men with the same amount of venom, in their respective times.

One of the great advances Marx had over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley, by the state of economic development of his times, was forced to do. Marx, moreover, unlike Winstanley, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controlled the means of production a point that all previous theorists had either failed to account for, dismissed out of hand, or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means of changing human lifestyles. Marx posed the question differently by centering on the creation of social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival would be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levelers' weaknesses of program and their improbabilities of success in the 1640's militants today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.

Notwithstanding the utopian nature of the experiment discussed above the filmmaker, Kenneth Brownlow, and his associates here have painstakingly, lovingly and with fidelity to the narrative and detail that are known from the researches of the likes of Christopher Hill and George Sabine, among others, that make for an excellent snapshot of what it might have been like up on Winstanley's St. George's Hill long ago. Two things add to that end.

First, the use of black and white highlights the bleak countryside (after all although the land was "common" it was waste that the landlord did not find it expedient to cultivate) and the pinched appearances of the "comrades" (especially the deeply-farrowed expressions of Miles Harriwell as Winstanley). Secondly, the director has used to the greatest extent possible Winstanley's own pamphlets that dealt with what was going on in Surrey and what his political purposes were (expressed as almost always in those days in religious terms- but taking land in common for use rather than profit is understandable in any language. I might add that the attempts to replicate the costumes of the period, the furnishings and the music round out a job well done.

Note: Part of this DVD contains a section on the hows and whys of the making of the film, including in-depth coverage of its making and commentary by Mr. Brownlow. You are getting this film for the Winstanley reenactment but this section is interesting if you are interested in filmmaking as well.

Rodney Reed is innocent! Stop his execution on 5 March!
Rodney Reed, on Texas’ death row since 1998, is facing wrongful execution on 5 March 2015. He was convicted by an all white jury of murdering Stacey Stites in the small town of Bastrop, Texas. Rodney Reed is Black, Stacey Stites was white, and her fiancé Jimmy Fennel was a white police officer. There is some evidence to suggest that Fennel murdered Ms Stites.   Mr Reed's case is a troubling mix of prosecutorial misconduct, police corruption, poor defence, and institutional racism. Evidence of Rodney’s innocence is overwhelming and the need for a new trial is indisputable. DNA on some crucial pieces of evidence has never been tested. Three leading forensic experts doubt the reliability of his conviction. More than a dozen relatives of Stacey Stites have also stated that they do not believe Rodney Reed is guilty of her murder.
CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS So far there will be a gathering in PARIS (Place de la Concorde 6-8pm) and in LONDON on Wednesday 4 March (US Embassy, Grovesnor Square, W1A 2LQ, 5-6pm), in BERLIN on 1st March. (US embassy 3pm) If you organise an action in your city please let us and the Justice for Rodney Reed Campaign know so we can publicise it.
Rally at the Bastrop Co. Courthouse	There has been a lot of support for Rodney as well as national media attention for his case. But more is needed. We must demand that Gov. Abbott and the State of Texas stop the execution, ensure the DNA is tested and that Rodney has the day in court that he deserves. Test the DNA! Drop the Date!
More info on Rodney Reed case here Watch a 5 min video "I'm not giving up" – Rodney Reed A conversation with Rodney's mother and brother
·  Sign the online petition here ·  Write to Rodney ·  Read Amnesty International's action alert and send a letter for clemency.	More information and actions at Justice for Rodney Reed website
Issued by Payday a network of men working with the Global Women's Strike payday@paydaynet.org  www.refusingtokill.net

 

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A 50^th Class Reunion Of The Mind-With Sam Lowell’s Trials And Tribulations In Mind

 

A Sketch From Frank Jackman

Of course Jack Dawson attended the 50^th anniversary class reunion of his Class of 1964 at North Adamsville High, a school located some miles south of Boston for those who like to know geographic locations (although on this subject, this reunion thing, the location could have been anywhere since every high school has a graduated class each year and hence fodder for reunion memories because inevitably some energetic classmates will gather their forces and put one together). Now Jack was not much for such events, he had gone to his tenth reunion only because his first wife, Kathleen Clemens, had been a fellow classmate and insisted they go to show off the fact that class sweethearts could stay the course (they had been the subject of a photograph in the Magnet, the class yearbook, proclaiming them by vote of their fellows-class sweethearts). That did not stop her, them, before twenty rolled around from going her way, and he went his. He had failed to attend his fifth reunion which is the one that he really was interested in since he was pretty far away, out in an outpost near Pleiku up in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Somehow Sam Lowell, his old corner boy hang-out friend from the corner at Jimmy Jack’s Diner, had convinced him that since this particular anniversary would be the last effective time that the old gang would be reasonably likely to get together short of assistance, short of having the thing in a nursing home or some such place that he needed to go. So Jack and his second wife, Natalie, not a fellow classmate but met at work in Hingham when he was working for General Dynamics went to the affair and according to Jack had a pretty good time. Had a good despite the fact that Sam Lowell did not attend, had as Jack did not find out until later not even been on the same coast having been lost in the rain in Big Sur at the time. But I am getting ahead of the story, Jack’s story of the reunion and a bit part for Sam and his trials and tribulations.            

Maybe the Sam part is not necessary to tell the reunion story but Jack, well, really Natalie, thought that the reunion part would not make sense without telling why Sam was not at the Marriot Courtyard Hotel in Rockland (the one fast by the Plymouth River not the one just off Route 3 which is just for tired travelers) on the night of September 27, 2014. See Sam back in the fall of 2013 got very North Adamsville High patriotic (that was the way that he put the matter) since he had been brought face to face with the old town after many years of statutory neglect (his term) due to a series of family-related deaths combined with a certain nostalgia for the old gang as he had never attended a reunion ever, said he left the dust of the old town high school behind after graduation. More than attending though is that Sam decided that he would help organize the event since that was the trajectory his life had taken, he liked to organize events, usually political not social as in the reunion but he had talked himself into believing that the organizing principles for both were the same (and as it turned out they were although principles of organizing were not the source of why Sam was spellbound on September 27, 2014 in front of some Jack Kerouac-etched snarling ocean at Big Sur singing sutras to ancient memories and not in Rockland). So through the magic of modern communications technology, mainly the Internet and e-mail he had been able to contact Delores Knight (nee Reilly), whom he did not know and who had stayed in the old town along with several other women, some of whom he knew, who either lived in the old town or nearby and who had put on most of the previous reunions. Sam had used a search on Facebook where he found both Delores’s name and a notice that a Class of 1964 reunion committee was being formed by some classmates. He told Delores he was in.                  

Delores and her women friends had also put together a class website as part of their organizing efforts, something that would not have been a practical possibility even as recently as the previous 40^th anniversary reunion and that site is where things started to (and finished up) getting dicey (although Sam later was a pains to explain it was not technology that did him in, no, just old-fashioned human understandings, rather misunderstandings. Of course the easier way to communicate with a large body, maybe the only way, with about four hundred remaining classmates (something like seventy had passed on) who over fifty years have been strewn all over the planet (although a remarkably large number for an increasingly mobile society still lived within fifty miles of the old town) was to establish the website as people heard about what was up through other sources, including “snail mail.” The reunion website once people logged in provided each classmate with his or her own profile page and had other common sections which allowed people to talk to the class individually or collectively. Sam not totally savvy about all aspects of the new technology, although enough as he said to stay half-way computer literate, very definitely had an idea to write some screeds (Sam’s word) to the collective body and see what floated. You know stuff like who you hung out with back in the day (his piece on that subject was titled The Intellectuals or the Jocks? and you can get a flavor for what he was thinking about writing from that example alone). That was part of what Sam considered his role as a member of the committee (the only male for a while by the way until Jimmy Jenkins joined).

One of the first classmates to response to the setting up of the website and logging on was Melinda Loring who back in the day had been nothing but a “fox” as the expression went then who also was very smart, a social butterfly too. Every guy with any pretensions to style and grace was half in love with her, including Sam (Jack as well but don’t mention it to Natalie). Melinda however was back in the day also known as stuck-up, unapproachable, so Sam (and most guys) never did anything about his half-love (except pine). But apparently Melinda a hot-shot professor at State U. had learned a few things in the world (and had been twice-divorced, a big learning curve experience) and so she responded to one of Sam’s pieces with a comment, a positive comment which started a blizzard of e-mails between the pair. And that simple exchange had started it, started Sam and Melinda at 68 to what they could not do at 16.

There is no need to go into all the gory details of their short stormy relationship except to state that hard fact since this is about Jack’s take one the reunion but the relationship was short, a few months during the late winter and early spring before the reunion. What Sam figured out after some reflection later was that at 16 or 68 holding a fire-burning relationship together was nothing but tough work, and speaking for himself he was just not mentally up to the task, up to her everlasting planning their very moment from then on. (He would admit that Melinda was right about his attempting always to stay in the present and not even talk about the future.) Now the way things worked out at the end, the way Sam and Melinda bitterly broke up with plenty of mutual recriminations, too many for what turned out to be a fling, and far too many for the shortness of the affair, precluded one or the other of them from going to the reunion. See the number of people who were planning to attend had by the time the ticket sales closed was somewhat less than one hundred (that did not include spouses, companions, etc.) and the room that was reserved for use was rather too small unlike some cavernous Boston hotel ballroom so there was no way that Sam and Melinda could avoid each other, something Sam was desperate to do. So he unilaterally decided (he and Melinda were not on speaking terms, civilized speaking terms any way) since she was a veteran of these reunions and he had never attended he would defer to her on the issue.

Jack was not happy about the situation when Sam explained his decision to him. Jack was left feeling that Sam was leaving him high and dry on something that Sam had made a big deal out of doing and certainly not happy when as a known Sam friend he had would have to explain why Sam was not in attendance after Sam had made a big splash on the website with his little sketches. (Sam had also written, in response to one female classmate’s plaintive plea that she was fearful about going to the reunion alone, a comment that he too was afraid since this was to be his first reunion but that he was determined to go and many people had responded favorable to the comment, and a few had decided to go on that basis.)            

So with Sam’s “girl” woes as a drag on the evening let’s get to Jack’s observations on the event. Naturally the Marriott Riverside in September was a lovely location, the ballroom used actually cozy for the size crowd that was gathering and the buffet and liquor okay (other than a wine toast buying liquor was on one’s own hook, the inevitable cash bar which Jack played out buying half the guys in the place a drink that night before he and Natalie left). The committee had decided to have a DJ playing old stuff from their school days, not too fast since everybody had lost a step or two, hell, maybe seven so no twist or wiggle-warble but nice Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel stuff to get weepy over and other dance stuff from their parents’ generation, you know Frank Sinatra Shadows In The Night stuff which was old hat back in their youth but sounded better these day and mercifully danceable. One of the classmates, a profession singer, Jim James, sang some songs when the DJ took a break. Jack thought Jim whom he had known slightly in high school in a study hall did a good job and while he could see where Jim would never have made it big, his voice was too reedy for those times, he would have made a decent living working the lounge act scene (hell, he had listened to some guys even when he was late night half-drunk who did not sound nearly as good as old Jim).

But enough of the descriptions of the place, the quality of the food, or the entertainment since Jack had been to a million weddings, retirement parties, workplace parties, and other highlight moment events to know that whatever the occasion they all are basically the same. What intrigued Jack (Natalie too) was that other than Melinda Loring whom he had met when Sam and her thing was in full bloom in the spring, and who obviously had been drinking well before the seven o’clock start time in anticipation that she would have to face Sam he did not recognize very many of the classmates despite the fact that Sam had told him that several of the women on the committee including Delores except for some weight gain (which he smart boy kept to himself even from Natalie) looked pretty much like back in the day. Sam had been too kind. By the way on that Melinda thing Jack had not realized that Sam was actually keeping his decision on not going to the reunion to himself and when Melinda asked him about half-way through the night where Sam was, asked with an evil look, he said he did not know. And Jack actually did not know until Sam had come back about a week later that he had gone to Big Sur on the Friday before the reunion. Had as well to symbolically add insult to injury although Melinda would never know this had taken his second ex-wife, Laura, out with him and they were having something of a rekindled romance.             

Jack thought more than once that night “thank God for name tags” since he would have been hard-pressed to name names without that aid. Jack although nothing but a Jimmy Jack’s Diner corner boy along with Sam, Frankie Riley, the leader, Jimmy Jenkins, the late Peter Markin (he had been found face down in dusty Sonora down Mexico way with two slugs in the back of his head after a drug deal had gone awry back in the 1970s needless to say the murder was never solved) and a cast of rolling in and out boys, also was connected with many of those in attendance that night and still came up short on recognition. Funny, he thought to himself that at the tenth reunion he was able to remember almost everybody but the forty years since then had done their damage, had made him who had made some effort to keep himself in shape, although with less hair, a beard and a slight paunch wince at all the talk of surgeries and other medical conditions.    

First off was Delores who had been the designated greeter, a role she had played before in previous reunions, whom kind Sam had obviously given a pass to on the weight issue no question (Jack did not find out until later that Sam had never actually physically been present in the same room with a number of the committee members, including Delores, who lived with her husband in Florida most of the year, since a lot of the work was done through e-mails and such, a nice bow to modern technology.) A big fat guy then came up to him to greet him and it turned out to be Timmy Lally the famed quarterback of the Warrior football team. Another Muffy (real name) Sullivan, Timmy’s girlfriend and head cheer-leader had taken a turn for the worse with almost white blonde dyed hair and a cane. Jack though he was going to be able to go chapter and verse on all those that he knew from the old days at the reunion but he found himself just getting depressed as they told their seemingly mandatory medical histories (and incessant talk of grandchildren and strangely not children which is what he liked to talk about since he kept the grandchildren, all four of them, at arm’s length). He figured he could have gone to an AARP meeting and found the same amount of conviviality. As it turned out Jack and Natalie left an hour before the event was to close up, at around ten, and he was glad of it although they had been enjoying themselves and later would reaffirm that feeling. Here is why they left though. Glad-handing his way through to the coat checkroom Jack suddenly turned red, very red not from embarrassment but anger, an anger building all night, anger at Sam for leaving him in the lurch like that, leaving him to sift through some pretty broken dreams. Damn Sam.            

Stop The Damn Wars, Stop The Damn Bombings, Congress Vote Down Obama’s War Resolution On ISIS (And Whatever Resolution He Or The Next War President Brings Forth For The Next War)-Vote Down The War Budgets

 

 

For a very long time now under the influence of the Bolshevik Duma deputies in voting against the Czar’s war budgets for supplies in World War I (and winding up in Siberian exile for their troubles), the Bulgarian and Serbian Social-Democrats in that war voting against their respective war budgets, and more so the valor of  Karl Liebknecht in Germany in breaking with his Social-Democratic Party policy of voting as a bloc in voting against the Kaiser’s war budgets also in that same war (and winding in the Kaiser’s jails for his efforts) I have argued with those in the anti-war movement that the key to any political support to any politician is their negative vote on the war budgets. That is not the over-all defense budget which is asking for way too much these days and would have me put away for my own good even by Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont but just against the specific budgets for whatever current adventure the United States government has embarked upon. That is the litmus test for any serious opposition at the parliamentary level.

This is no abstract question these days as I write (February 2015) since President Obama is now scratching around once again for Congressional authorization to go after ISIS and whoever else he has in his gun-sights these days. That said this moment I, we are not asking anything about the war budgets but for Congress to simply say “no.” That would be a big step and even Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont would grant me a reprieve from that institution he was about to throw me in for such a reasonable request. Let’s get to it, let’s set a fire under the Congress and hold each and every hand to that fire on this one.  

Some of my fellow anti-war activists have argued with me about this “no support for politicians who say “yes” to war resolutions and budgets citing the “progressive” variation of the old chestnut that you must support Democrat X because despite the fact that he or she put up every hand for every war resolution and every war budget you have to support him or her because the other guys, usually Republican W, Y, Z, are so much worse, maybe wants to bomb extra countries or jack up the war budget or something (all these maneuvers whether my fellows know it or not honed to an art form in their turns by the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party the three leftwing organizations in this country that have had the minimal clout necessary to argue this point). I cannot follow that path. However I am always ready to join with the too few forces who care about such questions of war and peace to oppose whatever action the American government is taking to gear up for war, or gear up their incessant bombing campaigns. So yes you will see me walking along with the brethren whenever the call comes out.   

Off the recent track record in the failed state of Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the nearly failed state in Syria (I am still looking for those “moderate” anti-ISIS forces that the United States is trying to supply in Syria) and also the nearly failed state in Ukraine all of which have the fingerprints of American involvement over them the beginning of wisdom is to oppose further military involvement. Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings and Drone Attacks! No Military Aid to Ukraine….and that is just for starters.