Reflections On Boston’s Cancelled VFP-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Day 2015 -

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Frank Jackman would not be marching this year on Saint Patrick’s Day, not at all. And he was mad as hell about the matter, mad enough to call his old time high school friend from Carver, Sam Lowell, and spill his guts about it, to try to make some sense of the situation since toward the end, only a few days before he thought he would march, when things had happened quickly that forced him not to march. I knew Frank only slightly back in Carver during high school, enough to each give the other a passing nod, the “nod” signifying in that schoolboy goodnight that while the parties did not hang together everything between them was “cool” (remind me to tell you the intricacies of the “nod” sometime but today we are concern with Frank’s anguish not his coolness). I was closer to Sam back then since he had lived at the end of my street, we had hung around together during junior high before he got into the corner boy life in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner up on Main Street near the Commons and had kept in touch since he had set up his law practice was in the old town and I had worked on the Carver Democrat for a while after college before moving on to Boston and elsewhere. He is the one who gave me the “skinny” on what the recent events Frank had spoken to him about.

The pair had gotten back in touch with each other after Frank had moved back east after many years on the West Coast and after Sam’s older son Brad had been killed in Iraq on his second tour of duty in 2005 and he had taken an interest what Frank, an active member of an anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace (VFP), and his comrades were up to. Sam had attended some of their activities and had previously marched in their contingent at various parades. He had again planned to do so this year before Frank called with his story. For those who failed to scan the title of this piece what Frank Jackman was not marching in and what he was mad about at the same time was that the fifth annual Veterans For Peace (VFP)-led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston. He had, in accordance with the publicity surrounding the event put out by VFP, expected to step off at noon on Sunday March 15^th an hour before the official “private” Saint Patrick’s Parade sponsored by the Southie-centered Allied War Council (AWC) stepped off at one o’clock. A last minute decision by a federal judge though forced the peace parade to be cancelled by the VFP leadership.

(The time lag between the two events is important since by local court decree reflecting a decision on the type of parade AWC was sponsoring the two parades to be separated by one mile so as the AWC desired no one would think the two parades were in any way together. The reasons given for the peace parade cancellation for 2015, to be described in more detail below, centered on legal advice not to do so in support of a civic court action being pressed by VFP in federal court and that due to “the late in the day” timing of the results of the legal wrangling a proper parade could not be put together.)        

Frank, of course, had not been mad about not being able to march like he had been when he and Sam as kids were Boy Scouts from Troop Twelve in Carver and they were thrilled with the idea that they would go up to Boston some thirty miles away to strut their stuff. In those days back in the 1960s the parade, then sponsored in toto by the City would take place on March 17^th no matter the day. (under an Evacuation Day cover, you know, commemorating the day when the American revolutionaries kick butt on the occupying British forces something every Irish person could cheer as well as the “wink, wink” real purpose of the thing which is to celebrate Irish freedom from those same Brits and also to acknowledge some tale about the wicked old saint Pat kicking snakes out of the old sod when he got his dander up). The year Troop Twelve had been invited to march since it was their turn in the rotation of troops for Boy Scout Council Six wouldn’t you know that snow postponed the event for a week and due to some unforeseen circumstances that he never fully understood Troop Ten from Plymouth went instead. He had been furious since he had cousins that he would have been strutting his stuff in front of. The next year he having found himself a girlfriend or rather she found him he had dropped out of the Scouts and that was that.               

Frank had spent the many, many years since that time going about the business of his life, some good some bad, not worrying or thinking much one way or the other about the parade, although he was always ready to sport the green come Saint Patrick’s Day wherever he was and whoever he was with and to lift a glass to the memory of the boys of Easter 1916 reciting William Butler Yeats poem of the same name to allwho would listen. One of the “some bad” parts of his life had been his service in the military during his generation’s war, the war in Vietnam, which had torn the country asunder, including in the military where those “cannon fodder” like him who were supposed to fight for who knows  what reason were half in mutiny.     

Frank always liked to make sure that everybody, including Sam with whom he had many arguments about the question and who had been 4-F (unfit for military duty) during that war due to a much operated on left arm that was about ninety percent useless, knew that while he had had some reservations about military service he had gone in with both eyes open when he received his draft notice. He also made sure everybody knew that while he was not by any means the best soldier in Vietnam he was not the worse. A few guys in his unit had even paid him the compliment that they would have not gotten out of a few messes alive in fire-fights with Charley if it had not been for his coolness under fire. So during his time of service in order to keep himself together he did not think about right or wrong on the war, on the war policy or on anything but keeping low and keeping the damn bugs and sweat off. 

After Frank had been discharged in 1971 that was a different story. Even after a few days at home in Carver hanging around with Sam and the guys was too much after all he had been through and so he pushed on up to Cambridge where he wound up meeting a young Quaker woman whom he met at an anti-war rally who helped him sort things out, helped him get over the horror of what he had seen and done in Vietnam. A little. Just then lots of other veterans were also getting “religion” about the damn war and were doing something about it, organizing themselves into Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). For the next couple of years between that fetching Quaker woman and his ex-military ant-war comrades in VVAW he felt he had washed himself clean.

As the war petered out and as anti-war activity declined in the mid-1970s Frank drifted away from the organization and from that Quaker woman and headed west. Drifted west winding up in San Francisco, stayed in the west for many years, got married a few times, got divorced as many, had a few kids who all turned out pretty well considering, and did a lot of ad hoc anti-war and social concerns political work along the way. But Frank, as if those Vietnam days or maybe earlier his growing up poor childhood have never really receded to far from the horizon, also got caught up in some “wanting habits” (his term) addictions like drugs and con artistry along the way. I don’t know a lot of the details but some involved drug dealing connected with Mexico, some flim-flam insurance scams and a couple of swindles from what Sam who also was hazy on the same details told me Frank told him. After his last divorce in the mid-1990s he headed back East figuring a change of scenery would help.

In the fall, October Sam thinks, of 2002 Frank had been in Boston on some unrelated business on a Saturday afternoon when he heard a band playing I Ain’t Going To Study War No More, the music coming from the Boston Common. This, as it turned out, would be the first serious anti-war demonstration of a few hundred people before the war drums of the 2003 Iraq war overtook all reason (and despite all reason is still on the front-burner until this day). What drew Frank’s attention though was a cluster of about forty flags, white flags embossed with the words “Veterans For Peace” in black and a dove of peace also outlined in black on each, being carried by older guys, guys from the look of it who had served in Vietnam times, or earlier. As the march stepped off the Common to walk up Tremont Street toward the Federal Building further up the street he joined in their contingent. That was the real beginning of his story to Sam. 

Frank did not join VFP until several years later since the anti-war efforts against the Iraq war in late 2002 and early 3003 while intense before the war fell apart after the “shock and awe” campaign began in March of that year. He did however whenever he was around attend and march with the VFP. In November 2009 not having been doing much for a couple of years he received a notification by an e-mail that the VFP was attempting to march in the “official’ Veterans Day parade on the Common and he decided to join in. That day was an eye-opener, a shock in a way, since the “officials” were by might and main, mostly by having the police intercede and arrest anti-war veterans who refused to “stand-down” refused to let fellow veterans with a different message march in their precious parade. Frank and a number of others were arrested that day for disorderly conduct, were fined, and released. So maybe that, despite what Frank regarded as his start with VFP and their struggles for recognition in 2002, was really the beginning. VFP would continue without success to be part of the official Veterans Day Parade (a day by the way which they called, correctly, by its right name Armistice Day a name from the end of World War I).  

For the next year or so Frank worked closely with VFP on various projects (in the meantime he had retired and therefore had some time to spent on such work), especially in 2011 when VFP got seriously involved with the potentially exciting but short-lived Occupy movement. He had also spent a great deal of his time, still does, after he first heard about the case in September of 2010, in supporting the defense and calls for freedom for heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea (then Bradley, having subsequently revealed that she considered herself a woman a fact that the Army has now acknowledged) Manning who the Army was keeping in solitary down at the Quantico Marine Base outside of Washington, D.C.  (In August of 2013 Manning was convicted of about twenty of the charges against her and received an outrageous thirty-five sentence now being served at Fort Leavenworth pending the appeals process). The Manning case sparked something in him since here was a soldier, a soldier in Iraq to boot, who despite all the hell that was being rained down on her from top to bottom including torture had the courage to release important information about war atrocities and  other nefarious acts of the American government in the Middle East and elsewhere. Having not done his bit when he had the chance, his chance, Frank was just trying to put paid to his own lack of courage through Chelsea.  

In the spring of 2011 the leadership of the Boston VFP decided to apply to the AWC that had been running the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade for the previous twenty or so years. That request was summarily rejected and a member of that organization was quoted at some point in the process saying that he did not want the word “veteran” and the word “peace” put together in the parade. (This AWC having solely taken over the city parade had gone all the way up to the United States Supreme Court in order to have their parade declared a private event and therefore they could invite or not invite whoever they wanted. They had started out discriminating against the GLBTQ community and had now extended it to the peace community as well.) As a result of that exclusion the VFP put out a call for all the area peace, GLBTQ groups, and social justice activists to march with them after the official parade. And those five hundred or so who heeded the call marched through South Boston that day to generally good effect.  

VFP over the next three years continued to attempt to enter the official parade, were summarily rebuffed or ignored, and each year organized the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade that increased in size and began to look like any regular parade in Boston with floats, band, a trolley and the ubiquitous duck boat, all in the service of peace and justice. As the organization prepared for the 2015 event they took a different tack, decided not to waste any effort applying to the official parade officials, but also decided that the late afternoon in March (usually starting to march well after 3 o’clock) well after the crowds for the official parade had left and therefore were walking down sullen streets interfered with their right of effective free expression and applied to the City of Boston for a noon start time. 

That request was denied by the city and VFP thereafter filed a law suit in federal district court charging discrimination under the 1^st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and asked for injunctive relief requiring the city to grant the noon start time. A week before the parade date the federal judge turned down the request (although the legal civil case continues on). In response, as collectively agreed by the membership before the start of litigation, the failure to get the noon start time triggered the cancelling of the Peace Parade for 2015 (a stance which also dovetailed with the lawyers’ concerns about the court case adding fuel to their arguments about discrimination by the city).

A couple of days before the official parade was to start the AWC granted a gay rights organization’s application (Boston Pride) to march having previously granted the request of a group of gay veterans, OutVets to march. VFP and other peace groups were thus the only ones to have their parade rained on. Yeah, so Frank Jackman who over the previous four years had spent much time helping organize each parade, raising money, and a million other small tasks was not marching, and mad as hell about it. Do you blame him.  

Free Chelsea Manning Now! 

Chelsea Manning’s Next Chapter

March 13, 2015 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
On March 10, Bloomberg Politics published the article, “What Chelsea Manning Has Won”, presenting a summary of the many accomplishments and victories Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning has made since her summer 2013 court-martial. Now speaking out in New York Times & Guardian op-eds, Chelsea has, “long presented herself as a kind of public moralist… Her time in Iraq made her ‘question the morality’ of America’s military activity since 9/11. ‘I realized that in our efforts to meet the risks posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our Humanity.’ ”










Mar 10, 2015 2:45 AM PDT by Emily Greenhouse

Last December, when Chelsea Manning turned 27, she received birthday greetings from Michael Stipe, JM Coetzee, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Gilliam, Edward Snowden, and Lupe Fiasco: not a bad group of friends for any young woman. Vivienne Westwood sent her a card, too, a handsome graphical map of red and green, marked up with scribbles of support in the loose but confident scrawl of a fashion designer. Manning received it, of course, in Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks as a soldier in the U.S. Army. She replied to Westwood, “I am working a lot, studying, working on the appeal and a lawsuit on fundraising, writing articles and trying to stay healthy.” In February, in her capacity as an article-writer, Manning landed a new gig: contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US, focused on “war, gender, freedom of information.” Days later, the United States military approved hormone therapy for Manning’s gender transition, a first. And last Wednesday, in Washington, the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals issued an order saying that references to Manning in all future decisions, filings, and orders should use female or gender-neutral pronouns. The United States government is unlikely to champion her as a whistleblower—but Manning and her attorneys have managed to make the government see things her way when it comes to her gender, which is its own accomplishment.
Manning has long presented herself as a kind of public moralist. When she pleaded guilty, she did so by reading out a statement explaining her actions. It ran to some 35 pages, and took more than an hour. After her sentencing, she made a formal request for a presidential pardon. She wrote that the decision to leak secret documents was made “out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in.” Her time in Iraq made her “question the morality” of America’s military activity since 9/11. “I realized that in our efforts to meet the risks posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our Humanity,” she said.
Last September, after publicly coming out as transgender, Manning sued the U.S. military, charging that the denial of her medical treatment for gender dysphoria was a violation of her constitutional rights. The suit said that, without treatment, Manning each day “experiences escalating anxiety, distress and depression. She feels as though her body is being poisoned by testosterone.”
In December 2014, the month of her 27^th birthday, Manning wrote an op-ed in the Guardian (she had previously been published in that newspaper, and in the New York Times), about her identity and the violations of her rights as a trans person. She wrote of “unfinished business when it comes to protecting civil rights for many people,” from immigration reform to police brutality and racism to rampant discrimination faced by people like her. “We’re banned from serving our country in the armed services unless we serve as trans people in secret, as I did,” she wrote. She argued for self-recognition, the “absolute and inalienable right to define ourselves.”
Chase Strangio, an ACLU Staff Attorney who represents Manning in her gender dysphoria case, told me that in Fort Leavenworth, Manning is not allowed to browse the web. But she consults print news, remains “a voracious reader,” and has access to new gender theory texts, too.
Manning’s relationship with the Guardian is one kind of recognition. (The Guardian, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance program—revealed by Edward Snowden—has a special relationship with leaks.) She will not be paid for her contributions. Strangio said that she believes this is by choice.
The journalist David France sees the agreement with the Guardian as indication that Manning has “kind of figured it out.” France, who directed the documentary film “How to Survive a Plague,” and has corresponded with Manning, told me that Manning can only be visited by people she had named before her imprisonment, not by new friends, lovers, or journalists. She cannot be photographed, cannot give interviews on camera.
“Through the Guardian,” he said, “we can finally get a regular impression of Chelsea now, through her own voice, which is terrific. There’s so much she can tell us, about what her life is like. I think she’s very insightful, I think she’s very a keen observer of life. It’s interesting to start hearing from her now. We’re starting to see Snowden make his appearance. We’re actually starting to hear from these people, which I think is good for the dialogue.”
Strangio, Manning’s attorney, believes that Manning’s “work around trans justice is inextricably tied to her larger critique of the government with foreign policy.” Manning published a new op-ed Monday in which she demands that the CIA be held accountable for torture. On her author page, she is described as “a United States Army intelligence analyst [who] writes for the Guardian in her personal, civil capacity.” Manning’s author photo is a color portrait by Alicia Neal, a Philadelphia artist whoseday job is image-quality editor for a cable service provider. It is, Manning told Amnesty International in December, the closest approximation to “what I might look like if I was allowed to present and express myself the way I see fit, [as] a woman in public.”
Manning announced that she was a transgender woman the day after she received a 35-year sentence. In her statement, she wrote: “I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” She expressed her hope to begin hormone therapy, and to be referred to in the feminine pronoun.
The government has now granted her that much. Nancy Hollander, the lead counsel in her appeal, sees this as a “only a small step in a long legal fight,” but still “an important victory for Chelsea, who has been mistreated by the government for years.” Strangio said in a statement that this was no trivial thing: “at least the government can no longer attempt to erase Chelsea’s identity by referring to her as male in every legal filing.” Some recognition, some validation, some small ray of sunlight at Leavenworth.

What’s next for Chelsea Manning? Her legal appeals are this year, and appellate lawyers Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward are already hard at work.

Please help us fight the legal and political battle to free Chelsea, not only for her sake, but for all those she’s helped, and all whistleblowers endangered by her unjust conviction.

In The Twilight Of The Folk Minute- Peter Seeger And Arlo Guthrie In Concert
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
“Jesus, they charged me fourteen dollars each for these tickets to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Remember Laura when we saw Pete for five bucks (and the price of an expresso coffee for two people and maybe a shared piece of carrot since he had been on a date, a cheap date when he didn’t have much cash and the guy was expected, expected on a heavy date anyway to pay) at the Café Nana over Harvard Square and Arlo gave a free concert out on Concord Common back in the day,” said Sam Lowell to his date Laura Peters and the couple they were standing in line with, Patrick Darling and Julia James, in front of Symphony Hall in Boston waiting for the doors to open for the concert that evening. Sam continued along that line saying “things sure were cheaper then and people, folkies for sure, did their gigs for the love of it as much as for the money, maybe more.
 
And that reference got Julia thinking back the early 1960s when she and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue (Sam and Julia had despite dorm Julia BU dorm roommate rumors had never been lovers). Club Blue located in that same Harvard Square that Sam mentioned also had the Café Nana and about five or six other coffeehouses. Coffeehouses then where you could see Bob, Joan, Eric (Von Schmidt), Tom (Rush), Phil (Ochs) and lots of lean and hungry performers working for the “basket” passed among the patrons and be glad, at least according to Van Ronk when she had asked him about the “take” during one intermission, to get twenty bucks for your efforts that night. Coffeehouses where for the price of a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry, shared, you could wallow in the fluff of the folk minute that swept America, maybe the world, and hear the music that was the leading edge then toward that new breeze that everybody that she and Sam knew was bound to come what with all the things going on in the world. Black civil rights, mainly down in the police state South, nuclear disarmament, the Pill to open up sexual possibilities previously too dangerous or forbidden, and music too, not just the folk music that she had been addicted to but something coming from England paying tribute to old-time blues with a rock upbeat that was now a standard part of the folk scene ever since they “discovered” blues guys like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, and Skip James. All the mix to turn the world upside down. All of which as well was grist to the mill for the budding folk troubadours to write songs about.
 
She made her companions laugh as they stood there when she said that if worse came to worse and you had no money like happened one time with a guy she had a date with you could always go to the Hayes-Bickford and as long as you were not rowdy like the drunks, winos, panhandlers and hoboes who drifted through there you could watch the scene for free and on any given night, maybe around midnight you could hear some next best thing guy or gal singing low some tune they wrote or some poem.                
 
…As they walked down the step of Symphony Hall having watched Pete work his banjo magic, work the string of his own Woody-inspired songs and of covers from the big sky American songbook and Arlo wowed with his City of New Orleans and some of his father’s stuff (no Alice’s Restaurant that night he was saving that for Thanksgiving) Sam told his companions that “fourteen dollars each for tickets was a steal for such performances, especially in that acoustically fantastic hall” and told the three that he would stand for coffees at the Blue Parrot if they liked. “And maybe share some pastry too.”     
 

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

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as the marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss hi shigh tea. Jesus what a blasted nigh that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….            

The Adventures Of The U 202 Submarine: An Actual Narrative

by Edgar von Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim

The Adventures Of The U 202 Submarine: An Actual Narrative

3.23 of 5 stars 3.23  ·  rating details  ·  13 ratings  ·  2 reviews

 

CONTENTS Our First Success An Eventful Night The Sinking of the Transport Rich Spoils The Witch-Kettle A Day of Terror A Lively Chase The British Bull-dog Homeward Bound

Paperback

Published August 1st 2003 by Fredonia Books (NL)

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Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Five

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of the today’s bourgeois-driven push, you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address. Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing  maybe going back further to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook the boys to the wheel of the capitalist profit, profit for you at the expense of me, system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world with blinkers on) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few time but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed you off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups that while away your life), need to reach back to roots (reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America kicked the ass out of to make us crave oneness, to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget that simple country blues, mountain breeze songs, cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex, Cajun Saturday night that make the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay) and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table,   speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang or ask Max Weber), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, when he wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that bed to perdition, hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire, watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity), those who never had anything but lost, not those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling, in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel, better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japans ), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living, looking for busted black-hearted angels (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill), for girls with Monroe hips (swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and flaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells (by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys promising the world for one forbidden night), get real, and left for dead with cigar wrapping rings, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Dove Linkhorns of the world, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, the wretched of the earth and their kin, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning 

 

Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

I have always admired military resisters having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam Era time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out, began to see thing through the fog of war and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources. At first working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army one way or another was half in mutiny toward the end of American involvement in that war. And a serious need as guys, guys who get their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted when I had expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work while satisfying and rewarding by actually working with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.    

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown, Gloversville, up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go (I will tell you more of the details some time when I ask him some questions about events that I have forgotten) and did his time in the military that way.          

Sean’s story, and in a sense my belated story, are enough reasons to support Courage to Resist since, unfortunately, there are today very few organizations dedicated to providing informational, legal, and social support for the military resisters of the heinous onslaughts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization needs the help of every ex-soldier who got “religion,” of every anti-war activist, and of every honest citizen who realizes, now more than ever, that the short way to end the endless wars of this generation is to get to the soldiers, get to the cadre on the ground fighting the damn wars. Enough said.     

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	31 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.

Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

 

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!

 

*** As March 17^th Approaches-Remembrances Of Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade 2012

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

“Hey, just follow the Veterans For Peace (VFP) white and black dove-emblazoned flags down to D Street and you’ll run right into the Saint Patricks’ Peace Parade staging area,” a grizzled veteran, looking like a man who had seen his share of battles in war and peace, bellowed to one and all as Frank Jackman and his veteran and peace activist companions exited the Broadway Redline MBTA station on that overheated March 17^th 2012 Sunday late morning in order to form up in that parade the old vet had informed them about. Headed out into the South Boston (Southie) day.  

[As it turned out, by the way, when Frank “interviewed” him later while they were waiting in that flag-festooned staging area, the grizzled veteran, Bob Ballad, had indeed seen his share of battles, having done two tours in ‘Nam, two tours as a “grunt,” an infantry man, “cannon fodder,” during hell time, 1966-68, and also of peace time battles against drugs and liquor, a couple of bouts of homelessness, a couple of divorces, and a few other of the now well-known  pathologies of  those who had had trouble coming back to the “real world “ after Vietnam that Frank had witnessed in his own family, in his own old time Hullsville neighborhood,  and among his fellow VFPers. Moreover , unlike Frank, who was also a Vietnam veteran and had  turned anti-war while in the military, that grizzled vet had not turned against war, the rumors of war, and all that war entails until his own son started clamoring for permission to go in the service when Iraq exploded in 1991. That is when he put his foot down, kept his son out, and had been a stalwart anti-warrior ever since. Talk about a guy with street “cred” on war issue. Welcome aboard, brother, welcome aboard]                

Frank  had to chuckle to himself a little as he and his companions headed up Broadway among the throngs who were forming up for the official parade that although he had grown up in the Irishtown section of Hullsville (you could hardly walk down a street of that town at this time of year and not be confronted with more green than you would ever see short of  maybe Dublin , and that was true even these days when the town itself, reflecting a couple of generations more moving south out of  Boston had lost it dominate Irish feel) and had lived in Boston on and off for most of his adult life he had never gone to the official parade. Well except that one time in high school junior year when he and “flame” Kathy Flanagan (she of the long wild red hair, light freckled face and green eyes, and thin athletic body who disturbed his sleep more than one night in those days) had “skipped” school (unlike in Boston which was in a different county from Hullsville they did not have the day off from school in the days when the holiday was celebrated on the actual day not only on Sunday) and headed via the long haul Eastern Mass bus armed with a pint of  Southern Comfort, the drink of choice and cheap, over to the parade. They never got there, to the parade anyway. They had stopped off at Carson Beach and started drinking that ambrosia and well, one thing led to another and  who gave a damn about some silly shamrock drunken parade anyway when a guy had a wild, green-eyed, red-headed girl next to him on the seawall. So, although he had many close connections with old “Southie,” the first stop for many of the famine-borne (famine of one kind or another, not just the food kind although that was writ large on that benighted country’s history) Irish, including his family, this was to be the first time that he showed up in Southie for a parade on Saint Patty’s Day. And of course while he might be on those same hallowed official parade streets his purpose that day was to march with the VFP contingent in their alternative peace parade.                  

Frank was not sure of all the details then about why there was a need for a separate parade, although later after the event he dug out some of the details from some guys who were closely involved in organizing the alternative event, but the gist of it centered on exclusion. Everybody in town, everybody who cared anyway, knew that back in the 1990s the official parade organizers had gone to court, hell, had gone all the way to the Supremes, over excluding gays and lesbians (even Irish gays and lesbians like somehow such human categories could not exist in Catholic-heavy Irishtown and was a dastardly thing, a mortal sin maybe, so if there were then they did want any part of it publicly). And won, won the right to exclude whomever they wanted from their “private” parade, as the Supremes in one of their more arcane legal decisions that made no sense when he read it backed them up.

See though, when you have a “right” to exclude that can take you into some strange places so when the VFP decided they wanted march in the official parade to protest various war actions of the American government, or just to send out a peace message to a large crowd they too were excluded by the official parade organizers. The “reason”-short and simple reason, they, the officials, didn’t want the words “veterans” and “peace” put together in their parade.  Hence the march of the excluded that VFP had first organized the previous year. And hence too Frank Jackman had that year responded to their call and was approaching the staging area with that sense of solidarity in mind.

As Frank waited, seemingly endlessly waited for the peace parade to step off  (the officials had, as part of their victory, been able to legally keep any other formations at least one mile behind their procession) he began to think of the many connections he had with this old section of town, this section that he had heard had changed demographically and in other ways as the Irish moved south and the younger more diverse set moved in and rehabilitated the old cold- water triple-deckers that lined all the lettered and numbered streets of the section (at least showing some sense of order since the real of the town was identified by a miasma of odd-ball combinations). He remembered ancient first murky visits to those old cold- water flats where some great aunts and their huge broods lived in splendid squalor and of cheap ribbon candy offered at Christmas time and not much else. Or funny things like the few times that he had been “privileged” to drive his material grandmother Riley  (nee O’Brian) over to Southie so that the sisters (some of those grand-aunts) could go to one of the “ladies invited” taverns and get drunk since Grandpa Riley refused, absolutely refused, to have liquor in the house (or cigarettes either). He wished he could remember the exact gin mill but he couldn’t except that it was near the Starlight Ballroom. 

Or when he was older and his uncle on his mother’s side had taken him to Jim and Joe’s farther up Broadway, up toward M Street, and “baptized” him with his first drink of whiskey straight up (no beer chasers then, that would could later). Or later still when he became something of a regular at Jim and Joe’s while he was working his way through college servicing vending machines for York Vending just around the corner from the D Street staging area and the guys, the mainly Southie guys that he worked with, “forced” him to drink with them after work, drink straight shot whiskey (and hence the genesis of beer chasers). Beyond those episodes though, except an occasion walk on Carson Beach (with and without female companionship) he had not been around Southie much since then.

After a while, a long hot while, since the weather was unseasonably warm for March in Boston, the peace parade stepped off, stepped off with VFP black and white dove-emblazoned flags flying in the lead paced by several cars for those really old (so he thought) World War II  veterans, veterans from Frank’s late father’s time sitting on board. As he looked back he noticed a huge banner calling for No War On Iran and another calling for Freedom For Private Bradley Manning [now Chelsea], another worthy cause, and behind that contingents of LGBT in various combinations, and behind them broken up at intervals by marching bands other progressive and social groups wishing to express solidarity with the excluded here, and throughout the world. Frank felt good, felt he had made the right decision to come this day despite some medical problems recently.

As the parade turned onto Broadway, old Broadway, of a thousand drinks and other assorted goings on, he again thought about the old days as he passed various landmarks, or the spots where the landmarks had been once. Artie’s where his first serious serious “flame” Sheila Shea had left him, left him for good, Jim and Joe’s now called the Green Tavern, where he had had more cheap whiskeys than he cared to recall, a couple of places farther up where ladies were invited back then (quaint notion, right),and he had been invited by a couple of ladies and then up where another  small “flame” Minnie Kiley had lived, then up and over to  cavernous East  Broadway where the triple-deckers of his early youth still stood thick as thieves.

Then he started to notice that those self-same triple- deckers had been upgraded and that those who stood on the sidewalks clapping as the parade went by were not the “from hunger” Irish second and third cousins of his youth but looked, well, wed-fed and well-cared for. And as they marched toward the end of the parade route at Andrew Square he also noticed, very distinctly noticed, a small section of streets where gay men were standing with a sign and cheering. Frank then flashed back to an earlier time when the deep dark secret in Aunt Bernice’s brood, the one from K Street, was that one of the boys, Harry, was “different” and had been banished from the house. Yes, things had certainly changed but he wished that those idiots who were so keen on exclusion had moved away from those whiskey and beer chaser bar stools and come into the sunlight…               

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

No question the case of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning had fallen below the radar for the general public since her trial down at Fort Meade in Maryland where she was convicted and sentenced to thirty-five years for multiple charges including espionage in August 2013. (She was tried by the military under the birth name Bradley Manning and has subsequently had her name legally changed in a Kansas court.) Some of that fall-off would be expected even in a high profile case once the verdict was in and the case was taken off the front page and into the wrangle of appellate legal proceedings.  Important people, including the heroic whistle-blower Edward Snowden, still sign petitions and sent birthday greetings and the like and Chelsea has occasional Op-Ed and other media changes to make her views known to a candid world but what she needs is a renewed effort to get a pardon from President Obama who has the legal authority to grant such a request. I urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition to put pressure on President Obama to do so.