A View From The Left- Obama’s Hatchet Man Beats “Progressive” Rival Chicago: Democrats’ Segregation City Elections-We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1066	17 April 2015

Obama’s Hatchet Man Beats “Progressive” Rival

Chicago: Democrats’ Segregation City Elections

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

 

The Chicago mayoral elections drew national attention after incumbent Rahm Emanuel failed to win re-election on February 24, forcing a runoff. The mere fact that Emanuel, former chief of staff of Barack Obama’s White House, could not get a first-round knockout in Obama’s hometown was, as the Chicago Tribune put it, a “national political embarrassment.” Emanuel is widely despised for having pushed through brutal austerity measures in his first term as mayor of “Segregation City,” so named for its entrenched residential and school segregation. Most notoriously, he closed nearly 50 schools, overwhelmingly in black and Latino neighborhoods, as part of carrying out Obama’s “school reform” policies.

The once seemingly invincible Cook County Democratic Party machine has not been so for years and can no longer turn out the living and the dead to the polls as it did in its heyday. More than ever, the city’s Democratic Party electoral apparatus is dependent on the trade-union officialdom. In the face of widespread disaffection with the arrogant labor-hating mayor, many prominent union leaders along with the reformist leftists who tail them rushed to promote Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who finished second in February. Castigating Emanuel as “Mayor 1 Percent” and a “corporate Democrat,” they worked overtime to paint Garcia as some kind of alternative. Central to this effort was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which had waged a widely popular nine-day strike in 2012.

Many did not buy the idea that Garcia would be any better than Emanuel, who handily won re-election in the April 7 runoff. Despite all the hype, the voter turnout was 40 percent. Garcia’s main qualification was that he was not well known and hence didn’t have so much to live down. But “Chuy” is as much an enemy of working people as his much better funded opponent for mayor or any other Democrat. As floor leader on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Garcia served as hatchet man in his own right, pushing through attacks on public workers. In the campaign, Garcia vowed that he would wring concessions from the unions more effectively through negotiations rather than Emanuel’s ham-fisted provocations. He also promised to hire 1,000 more cops.

Last summer, there was much ballyhoo about the possibility that CTU president Karen Lewis would run for mayor against Emanuel. But then Lewis became ill, and she persuaded Garcia to take her place. Forces from national teachers unions to radical black professor Cornel West and the liberal MoveOn.org quickly jumped on Garcia’s bandwagon. In reality, Garcia’s campaign platform made clear that his “friend of labor” credentials were just lipstick on a pig. Among other lowlights, he upheld a 2007 state law enacted by Democrats that jacked up transit workers’ mandatory retirement contributions by more than 400 percent!

The journal In These Times surely spoke for many reformist leftists in painting Lewis’s withdrawal from the race as a “huge blow.” Encouraged to run as an independent for the mayoral race, Lewis is a Democratic politician with or without the label. In fact, Lewis is a longtime ally of Chicago’s own Jesse Jackson and a loyal Democratic Party supporter. The same goes for the leaderships of teachers unions nationally, who have handed over tens of millions of dollars in union dues to Democratic candidates and supplied hundreds of delegates to the last Democratic National Convention.

The labor bureaucracy, including the CTU leadership, represents a conservative, pro-capitalist layer at the top of these workers organizations. This layer is far removed from the militants who built the unions in this country by class-struggle methods, often in defiance of anti-labor laws and court injunctions. For Marxists, independence from the Democrats is not mainly a question of formal affiliation but means organizing the working people in uncompromising opposition to the capitalist class enemy and all bourgeois political formations.

On principle, we never vote for, or otherwise extend political support to, any capitalist politician, Emanuel and Garcia included. In Chicago and beyond, the Democrats have ruled by mastering ethnic “divide and rule” politics to mask the common interests of the working people and oppressed. Our aim is to build a workers party independent of and opposed to the Democrats and Republicans, one that champions the cause of all the exploited and the oppressed in the fight for socialist revolution.

Democratic Party of Massive Cutbacks

All it took was some vague “little guy” rhetoric for Garcia to become a darling of the “anybody but Emanuel” crowd. The “fight the right” refrain usually is the excuse to vote the Democrats into office in order to keep out the Republicans, but here the only contenders were Democrats, reflecting the party’s lock on the city. Showing the futility of supporting the “lesser evil” Democrats, in Illinois, as in other Midwest states, workers are facing an onslaught of union-busting government attacks. From the state legislature in Springfield to City Hall in Chicago, for decades it has been the Democrats who have looted public worker pension funds, while working to hamstring the unions.

Shortly after taking office as mayor in 2011, Emanuel canceled a 4 percent pay hike previously negotiated by the CTU and laid off almost 1,000 teachers. Later that year, Democrats pushed through a new state law dictating more school hours and a longer school year without any additional pay for teachers. The bill, ludicrously supported by the CTU executive board, also required 75 percent of the union membership to authorize teachers strikes. In 2012, the teachers voted overwhelmingly for a strike that succeeded in holding the line against some of Emanuel’s demands. However, the union leadership agreed in advance not to make school closings a strike issue.

Now the governor’s mansion has been taken over by a nut job free-market Republican, venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, who has called for lowering the minimum wage and slashing social spending, while vowing to hold back union dues collected for the state’s public-sector unions. Rauner’s aggressive posture is a gift to the Democrats, enabling them to come across as reasonable by comparison. In fact, despite minor policy differences, Republicans and Democrats are fundamentally united around austerity. For example, last month Rauner and Democratic House majority leader Michael Madigan (for decades the real boss of Illinois politics) agreed to a “short-term” service-slashing budget “fix.” It is no secret that Madigan, Emanuel and Rauner are all sharpening their knives for a deal to carve up the public employee pension plans to pay off the banks and balance the state and city budgets.

The trademarked response of the labor bureaucracy to union-busting onslaughts was displayed in Wisconsin in 2011, when 100,000 angry unionists who massed at the state capitol looking for a way to fight back were funneled straight into a campaign to recall the Republican governor. Since then, “right to work” (prohibiting the union shop) has taken root in one Midwest state after another, including most recently in Wisconsin. Forswearing the mobilization of labor’s social power in strikes and solidarity actions, the union misleaders continue to push the election of Democrats as their only “answer” to capitalist attacks on union rights and to declining standards of living.

Break with the Democrats!

The national attention to the Chicago election reflected broader tensions within the Democratic Party between Wall Street Democrats like Obama and Hillary Clinton and forces favoring more populist candidates such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York mayor Bill de Blasio. Seven years ago, it was the relatively unknown Barack Obama who spoke of “hope” and “change.” Now that disillusionment with Obama’s policies has set in, a new cast of Democratic wannabes wants the party to refurbish its image.

In the Chicago mayoral elections, the trade-union misleaders were working overtime to turn out voters for either Emanuel or Garcia, based on who they thought was more likely to win, or more likely to toss loyal supporters a few more bread crumbs off the table. Construction craft unions, many Teamsters locals and the firefighters lined up behind Emanuel, with UNITE HERE Local 1 airing nauseating “Rahm Love” TV ads. Other labor leaders, particularly from unions with a large proportion of black members, lined up behind Garcia, who was endorsed by the ATU transit union, the SEIU health care workers and National Nurses United. The CTU bureaucrats even urged teachers to stay in town during spring break to help get out the vote for “Chuy.”

The reformist left rivaled the trade-union tops in scrambling to make it seem as though something important was at stake in this election. The Communist Party touted the birth of a “new kind of people’s movement” (peoplesworld.org, 3 April). The Party for Socialism and Liberation enthused over Garcia’s “progressive credentials” and the possibility that he would initiate “badly needed reforms for working and poor people” (liberationnews.org, 1 March). Socialist Alternative cheered that Karen Lewis’s candidacy had opened up “the possibility of a labor backed, combative election campaign to challenge the Democratic Party establishment,” and advised Garcia to mount a “real fighting challenge to the corporate elite and their servants in the political establishment” (March 8). These groups and others like them differed only over whether to be open or backhanded in supporting Garcia.

ISO: Gooey for “Chuy”

The International Socialist Organization (ISO) publicly aired a debate over whether to vote for Garcia. While the ISO has not openly campaigned for Democratic candidates, it makes its preferences clear: when Obama ran for president, the ISO did not actually say workers should vote for him, but ISO spokesman Sharon Smith crowed after the fact that “Obama’s victory also represents a surge in class consciousness and a decisive rejection of neoliberal policies.” The program of these opportunists is to pressure the Democrats but they prefer to express it at one remove, for example by backing the Greens, a small-time capitalist party whose function is to corral disaffected Democratic voters back into the fold.

Over the Chicago elections, the ISO seemed torn: while trying to reassure its readers who worried that the group’s mild criticisms of Garcia would make them “irrelevant” in the eyes of the masses, the ISO stopped short of following CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey into Garcia’s camp. Sharkey boasted that he was out electioneering for Garcia in the frigid Chicago winter, and rhapsodized about hugging his candidate in celebration of Garcia’s getting into the runoff. The ISO has always strongly supported the CTU caucus led by Karen Lewis and Sharkey, and columns by Sharkey have been featured in the ISO’s paper, so this public divergence represents a dilemma for it. (As for Sharkey’s courtship of Garcia, the only tragedy in the latter’s defeat is that we will not get to see if it would have ended in a wedding or a broken heart.)

Given the disappointment in Obama expressed even by many black workers and others who still support him, the ISO is surely aware that unalloyed enthusiasm for today’s Democrats would be unwise. So an article by Lee Sustar and others in Socialist Worker (March 17) duly takes note of Garcia’s shortcomings before offering that “an article on the mayoral runoff can and should also show what we have in common with the militants in the CTU and beyond who are supporting Garcia.” Translation: we too support the lesser evil...for the millionth time.

Chicago: Divide and Rule

Chicago is the quintessential American city, where contradictions of race and class are raw. Historically, the fault line has been between blacks and whites but today the city is nearly a third Latino, adding another element into the mix. Unemployment in black ghettos is four times as high as in white neighborhoods, and black youth unemployment is estimated as high as 92 percent. The black South and West Sides are riddled with boarded-up “zombie” homes and apartment buildings, urban decay exacerbated by the subprime mortgage scams. Today in Chicago, the rate of racist police “stop and frisks” is three times the rate at its highest in New York City.

The ethnic constituency politics that the Democratic Party specializes in were much in evidence in these elections. The Mexican-American immigrant Garcia gained over two-thirds of the votes in Latino wards. What clinched the election for Emanuel was winning nearly 60 percent of the black vote; he took every black ward in the city. That fact reflected not only his ties to Obama, who flew into town to bolster support for his henchman before the February election, but also the rivalries that emerge from competition between ethnic groups in a capitalist society for what is seen as a fixed (or shrinking) pie. One black man was quoted by the New York Times (3 April): “I ain’t voting for a Mexican,” adding that he was tired of competing with Latinos for jobs. It is the task of revolutionaries to actively combat such backward attitudes among the oppressed. We seek to win black militants to the defense of immigrants, and Latinos to the understanding that the racist oppression of the black population is the bedrock upon which American capitalism was built.

Garcia and his cheerleaders invoke memories of the 1983 election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, who built a coalition of blacks, a majority of Latinos and liberal whites under the slogan “It’s our turn.” Although Washington’s election was met with a barrage of racist reaction, the reality is that he served as the enforcer of Reaganomics—wholesale attacks on the social services gained through earlier class and social struggles. It didn’t take Washington long to go after the very unions that had supported his election. He pushed a bill looting the ATU pension fund, introducing part-time jobs and tearing up the union contract. In 1988, teachers went out on strike against attacks on education and jobs.

A central demand of Washington’s 1983 campaign was to fire the racist cop commissioner, Richard Brzeczek. And the mayor replaced Brzeczek with a black police commissioner. This made not one whit of difference to racist cop terror in the city; throughout the Washington years, the notorious “midnight crew” under police commander Jon Burge continued to extract confessions from black men though such interrogation techniques as battery clamps to the genitals. Washington’s black top cop, Fred Rice, twice promoted Burge even after the allegations of torture began to surface. This February, the London Guardian ran a series of articles documenting continued torture of black men by Chicago police to extract confessions, including at a “black site” detention center at Homan Square where arrestees are held, their location unknown to their families or lawyers.

For all the nonsense spouted recently about re-creating Harold Washington’s supposed rainbow coalition, the falling out among Democrats in the mayoral squabble only underscored the black-Latino division (among others) in Chicago. For a taste of the possibility of uniting the working people, one can look back to the 2012 teachers strike, even hamstrung as it was by its leadership. Many black and Latino parents supported the strike, some joining the picket lines. The basis for this cooperation was not mutual affection but common interest: parents along with teachers had everything to gain by fighting to defend public education against further cutbacks and layoffs.

Through class struggle, the different layers of the working people can come to understand their unity of interests, a necessary part of which is rejecting the suicidal illusions of common interests with our exploiters. What is required is a revolutionary workers party based on the program of socialism—the fight to meet the needs of all of society by destroying the capitalist profit system itself. Our reformist opponents endlessly recycle their bankrupt strategy of supporting “progressive” Democrats, who make promises to the working people only to turn around and kick them in the teeth once they are in office. Believing the fight for socialism to be utopian, these fake socialists have nothing to offer except the truly hopeless prospect of reforming the system of brutal capitalist exploitation.

As we said in “Harold Washington Will Betray Black Chicago” (WV No. 328, 22 April 1983), at the time of his first mayoral victory:

“If it is to be ‘our turn’ to rule for blacks, workers, Hispanics and the poor they must break with the Democratic Party and find within their ranks the class-conscious leaders that can forge a fighting workers party determined to wage class war for power. Chicago may be the most segregated city in America but it has a powerful working class with an enormous potential for integrated class struggle.”

Stop the Saudi / U.S. Bombing of Yemen! UNAC statement on Yemen  The massive month-long bombardment of Yemen conducted by Saudi Arabia is in reality yet another U.S. war in the region. Not one Saudi bombing mission is possible without U.S. logistical and intelligence support.   It is critical that the U.S. antiwar movement understand and focus on the U.S. role and its military, political and diplomatic support of the brutal Saudi devastation of Yemen, the poorest country in the region. More than 1,000 Yemenis have been murdered to date, 8,000 wounded and 150,000 displaced from their homes. [read more]

MEDIA RELEASE from the 

United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC)

In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Several years ago, maybe in 2007 or 2008 Sam Lowell, the locally well-known lawyer from the town of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, wrote some small pieces about the old days in the town, the old days being for him the 1950s and 1960s. At that time the town was mainly a rural outpost, a place where instead of the usual rural occupation of farming the cranberry bogs and boggers (as kids we called then “boogers” not knowing what the hell bogs were about although knew what nasty boogers were) held sway and dominated a fair part of town life, ran the town politics and determined the ethos, determined the ethos to the extent that was possible in post-World War II America where the older cultural norms were rapidly being replaced by a speedier and less homespun way of doing business. In the teenage life line-up, the only one that was important in Sam’s world then, since he was not a bogger and had no bogger roots he had gravitated to those whose families like his  that were connected with the shipbuilding industry about twenty miles up the road. So you would have seen Sam and his corner boys on any given Friday or Saturday night if not dated up holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street daring, with the exception of Jack Callahan the great school football running back and fourth generation bogger who hung with them because he thought they were “cool,” any of the bogger clan to do anything but go in and order food or play the jukebox. (Seemingly every boy in town from junior high on, if not before, had his corner boys for protection against a dangerous world outside the corner, or something like that if you asked them. If you wanted an explanation more than self-preservation professional sociologists and cracker barrel philosophers of the time spent endless hours of their time analyzing that angst-driven night and could give you their take on the phenomenon).

Sam had seen that small town Americana all change over his long association with the town, including a few terms as a town selectman, although the boggers were still there, still moaning about their collective water tax bills, and still a force on the board but the drift over the decades was for the town to become a bedroom community for the sprawling high tech industry running the corridor about ten miles away. Sam though hung up with some old age nostalgia twist wrote about the old neighborhood now still intact as if time had passed that hell’s little acre by (the new developments were created on abandoned bog lands to the benefit mainly of Myles Larson, the largest bogger around), largely still composed of the small tumbledown small single family homes with a patch of green like that he grew up and came of age in on “the wrong side of the tracks (along with three brothers all close in age in a five room shack, Sam had never, except in front of his parents, ever called it anything but that). Sam sighed one time to his old friend from that very neighborhood Pete Markin after they had put the dust of the old town behind them for a while on the hitchhike road west that the “acres” of the world will always be with us. Markin, in his “newer world” turn the old world upside down phase did not want to hear that, blocked it out when Sam would bring the idea up on the road. That said a lot about Markin, and about Sam as well.   

Wrote too about the old (painful, the painful being that the school drew the more prosperous new arrivals staring to come into town leaving the boggers over at John Alden Junior High and subjecting him to lots of taunts about his brother hand-me-down clothes, stuff like that) days when he attended the then newly built Myles Standish Junior High School (such places are now almost universally called middle schools) where he and his fellow class- mates were the first to go through starting in seventh grade. In that piece he mentioned that he was not adverse, hell, he depended on “cribbing” words, phrases and sentences from many sources. One such “crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and feeling.       

Prior to writing those pieces Sam had contacted through the marvels of modern technology, through the Internet, Google and Facebook a number of the surviving members of that Myles Standish Class of 1962 to get their take on what they remembered, what search that they might be interested in undertaking to “understand what the hell happened back then and why” (his expression, okay). He got a number of responses, the unusual stuff that people who have not seen each for a long time, since the old days as school and so are inclined to put up a “front,” show that trajectory toward state prison or whore-houses had been put behind them long ago, so endlessly going on and on about beautiful houses in beautiful neighborhoods putting paid to the dust of the dingy old town, what they had done with their lives in resume form, endless prattle about grandchildren (Sam admitted to a certain inclination that way himself so he was more forgiving on that issue) and so forth who also once Sam brought the matter up wanted to think back to those days. One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, whom Sam in high school although not in junior high something of a “crush” on but so did a lot of other guys, after they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method (oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put out by the Myles Standish school administrators in 1987 commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in the art class photograph was of him.        

That set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take art in school and outside as well unlike today when he had been recently informed that due to school budget cuts art is no longer offered to each student but is tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center, when Mrs. Robert’s encouraged him to become an artist, thought he had talent (later at Carver High Mr. Henry thought the same thing and was prepared to recommend him to his alma mater, the Massachusetts School of Art in the Back Bay of Boston).

Art for Sam had always been a way for him to express what he could not put in words, could not easily put in words anyway and he was always crazy to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see some artwork by real professionals, especially the abstract expressionists that he was visually drawn to (and would leave after viewing feeling like he at best would be an inspired amateur). The big reason that he did not pursue that art career had a lot to do with coming up “from hunger,” coming up the hard way and when he broached the subject to his parents, mainly his mother, she vigorously emphasized the hard life of the average artist and told him that a manly profession (her term, although she did not mean the law but like all second generation Irish mothers in that town when they got their tongues wagging some nice white collar civil service job to support a nice wife, nice three children and a nice white picket fenced house outside the “acre,” such were motherly dreams) was better for a boy who had come up from the dust of society. He wondered about that after seeing the photograph, wondered about the fact that after a lifetime of working the manly profession of the law all he could conclude was that there were a million good lawyers but far fewer good artists and maybe he could have at least had his fifteen minutes of fame in that field. He resolved to search for some old artwork stored he did not know where, maybe still in the attic of the old house which after his parents passed on his unmarried older brother, Seamus, took over, to see if that path would have made sense.     

Sam had had to laugh after looking at the other photograph, the one of the music room, where he spotted his old friend Ralph Morse who went on in the 1960s to some small fame in the Greater Boston area as a member of the rock group The Rockin’ Ramrods. Many an after concert party found Ralph and Sam drunk as skunks talking about the old days when rock and roll music was not even let into the Morse household (his parents were Evangelical and hated “the devil’s music”) and barley tolerated in the Lowell household (a truce declared when his parents purchased a transistor radio for him one Christmas at the Radio Shack so they could not hear the music). Ralph had eventually headed west to seek his fame and fortune but kind of fell off the face of the earth and nobody even with today’s technology has been able to find out his whereabouts, if any.

That look too set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take music in school and outside as well like with art classes unlike today when he had been informed recently that due to school budget cuts music is no longer offered to each student but is also tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center. However unlike with his art teachers Mr. Dasher the music teacher often went out of his way to tell Sam to keep his voice down since it was gravelly, and off-key to boot.

At the time Sam did not think much about it, did not feel bad about having no musical sense. Later though once he heard folk music, the blues and some other roots music he felt bad that Mister Dasher had put a damper on his musical sensibilities. Not that he would have gone on to some career like Ralph, at least Ralph had his fifteen minutes of fame, but he would have avoided that life-long habit of singing low, singing in the shower, singing up in the isolated third floor of his current home where no one, including his longtime companion, Laura Perkins a woman with a professional grade voice that would make the angels weep, would hear him. The search for memory goes on….  

 
 

The Great Blue-Pink American West Ghost Dance Night-With The Late Peter Paul Markin In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell had for the past twenty or so years regularly tuned to the local National Public Radio station on his car radio when one day recently when after he started his car up he heard a sound, a familiar sound from the past, the sound of the primordial chant of some Plains Indians, warriors, echoing off the walls of some canyon as they took part in a ghost dance  (Indians now called variously Native Americans or Native Peoples but when he told his story to several old high school acquaintances he preferred to call them Indians a term of usage the first time he encountered the experience back in the late 1960s before AIM and others changed the nomenclature). He had had to stop what he was doing, stop getting ready to head back to his law office, and just sit and listen in order to find out why that ancient sound was coming from his car speakers that day. As it turned out the program, a talk program whose segments were each day dedicated to some topical subject, had been on the subject of a recent extraordinary exhibition of Plains Indian art and crafts being held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the ghost dance chants had been used as background to end one section of the program. As Sam put the car in gear once he knew what had transpired with the radio on in the background he began to think back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and the late Peter Paul Markin (always called just Markin by everybody except his mother and a first wife who tried to impress her Mayfair swell parents with the old WASP-ish three name moniker to no avail) travelling the hitchhike road like many in their generation found themselves out into the New Mexico high desert, high as kites on drugs, performing their own version of the ghost dance, the dance that Sam believed united them, he, Markin and two other travelling male companions with the memories of ten thousand years of warriors who had roamed that ancient space.     

That high heavens chanting haunted Sam Lowell, usually these days an unassumingly lawyer getting ready to down-size his life, down-size along his life with that of his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, but those sounds brought back all kinds of memories of those youthful days when he and Markin had believed that they could turn the world upside down, and live to tell about it. Markin, unfortunately, had paid the price by his over-indulgence into everything from money to women to drugs he could get his hands on and like many over-reachers he got burned, burned badly later in the 1970s when a drug deal down in Sonora went bad and he wound up face down in some dusty back alley for reasons that were still murky some forty years later.

That unclaimed fate in some dusty unmarked wooden plank grave in potter’s field with the wolves baying in the background, haunted Sam for years, especially since he had been warned by others who were in the know not to attempt to go to Mexico and find out what the hell happened under penalty of finding himself too down in some dusty back alley with half his head blown off and left to simmer in an unmarked grave in potter’s field. Sam, unlike Markin, had seen the writing on the wall as he sensed well before Markin that the ebb tide of the search for a “newer world” had been marked by  early 1970, the bourgeois reaction (Markin’s term but rightly used  under those circumstances) was getting ready to pull the hammer down, pull it down hard and he had walked back to the “new normal” (law school, budding law practice, first marriage, kids, white picket fence, and settling down to that bourgeois lifestyle Markin was always railing against right up until the last time Sam had seem him in late 1975 before that fateful trip to Sonora.

Funny Sam thought as he thought back to the early days, the days when he and Markin and a six or seven other guy would hang around holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in their hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, Markin had been the “prophet,” the guy who sensed the flood tide of the 1960s well before any of them. They were mostly poor ass corner boys into small larcenies and scams to grab dough for “hot” dates with girls from other towns, cars and swilling up cheapjack liquor. Markin had practically invented the words angst and alienation to define what they were about and would spout forth on any dough-less, girl-less Friday night that the new breeze that he could palpably feel when he would sneak up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see what was what and they would kid him, kid him mercilessly about being a “beatnik” or a fag (yeah, it was that kind of time among the hard-core working-class guys in a million towns like Carver when nobody thought anything of fag-baiting just as a test of manhood, thankfully done with, mostly).       

All this memory business was too much for Sam to handle on his own, had him preoccupied for days and Laura who had not known Markin having entered Sam’s life after his two hard-bitten failed marriages (hers too, two failed marriages) except by Sam harping on his legend whenever he got a drunk or melancholy. Laura made it clear on several occasions that she did not want Sam to talk about those times, the times of Sam’s two unsuccessful marriages which intersected with Markin’s time, and so she was no help in this matter. So Sam did what he had begun to do more frequently since he had been leaving more of the legal business in his office he had built up in Carver to his two younger partners and since he had a couple of years before had been involved with his 50^th anniversary class reunion committee and got in contact with his fellow still living corner boys. Guys like Frankie Riley, a fellow lawyer who had migrated to Boston and a large law firm, the guy who had been the unquestioned leader of the corner boys and one of the great midnight creep sneak thieves who ever lived in Carver, Jack Dawson, the now widowed print shop owner in town who had made a ton of money back in the day by expanding his business to include silk-screening posters and tee-shirts when that was all the rage, Jack “Mr. Toyota” Callahan, the great Carver High running back who subsequently became the owner of the biggest Toyota dealership in the area, Jimmy Jenkins, a pretty good car mechanic, and before he very recently had passed away, Allan Johnson, the great naval draftsman who designed several big ships.            

Since that reunion committee time, a committee which Sam had been active in around the edges and which had permitted him to connect with the old corner boys who had not been together since they had scattered to the winds a couple of years after high school, the guys would periodically get together at Frankie Riley’s favorite Boston bar, the Sunnyville Grille, over near Copley Square. (Although all the other guys had attended the reunion Sam had not attended the event since he had had a “run-in” with old high school flame Melinda Loring, run-in meaning serious steps leading to an affair which she called off before it got to that stage since he was balking over leaving Laura, which precluded his attendance under penalty of endless embarrassment and baiting by the guys). This “ghost dance” memory, no question, required a meeting in order for Sam to talk about that long ago event that some of the guys knew about vaguely when they too had headed west with Markin on different hitchhike road trips. So one Friday night, a spring Friday night, Sam gathered everybody n around a small side room table that they frequently used once Frankie became friendly with Johnny O’Connor the owner of the grille and told his story.  Frankie, who had an old habit of writing notes going back to law school days so he would not forget something, took notes of this session and gave the notes to me after he told me the story and I have tried to recreate what Sam told the group here, with just a little flourish:

The last time Sam went out on the road with Markin, or maybe the time before that, they had had some pretty tough luck after they got a ride to Chicago from a forlorn trucker who picked them up at the old Coca-Cola bottling plant right next to the Boston side of the Charles River but more importantly right at the entrance to the Mass Turnpike which led all road west. Sam thought he was pretty sure the guys knew where that now long gone spot had been (Frankie had nodded his head in the affirmative) once a professional drifter he had run into out in Springfield as he was heading to Albany to see some woman told Markin that was the place to start hitching west out of Boston proper. Most of the guys who had headed out from Carver with Markin had left from there and picked up the Pike closer to Sturbridge. (Heads nodded in the affirmative.) But in those days there was a truck depot in back of that Coca-Cola plant spot and you could go and ask guys, truck drivers mostly but once in a while a guy in a big old sedan (maybe with a girl, maybe not, but never a woman, or women, without guys, not until you got to California anyway) on where they were heading. Your best bet was older guys, older truck drivers, who were tough enough for the life and  who didn’t mind “hippies, ” guys like Sam and Markin then with long hair, wispy beards, the whole regalia (laughter), since maybe his son or daughter had caught the “bug” and he wanted to get your take on what was with young people in those days so when he got home, if he ever did so he could “relate” to the kids he hardly ever saw since those kids, that wife, and those house mortgage and credit card payments had him glued to the road. Some guys just liked to have somebody in the cabin to “yeah” them while they were chewing bennies like jelly beans with black coffee chasers and yakking away about the federal regulators, what they were carrying running overweight on the scales, their no good ex-wives bleeding them for alimony, their no-good girlfriends running around with every Johnny in town while they were humping out in white line night, taxes, and the country going to hell in handbasket right before their eyes into a sullen breeze at seventy-five miles an hour.

So the guys had had the usual good luck out of Boston, getting a ride from that forlorn Yale Freight truck driver named Denver Slim carrying a big load of motors to the Windy City who was neither from Denver (Baltimore, with alimony wife, kids who didn’t know him, and the eternal mortgage and assorted debts which were going to he said drive him to an early grave) nor slim (maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of  softness although neither of them would have wanted to tackle him if got his dander up) but after Chicago it was tough going, about three rides or four to Denver, maybe a couple more outside to Steamboat Junction and then a guy in a big black Cadillac stopped them on the road out of the Junction and asked them if going to New Mexico would help, Gallup, he said. Markin in those days didn’t care how or where he landed in California as long as he got to his precious Pacific Ocean so he could talk about that old flame of his, Angelica, whom he had met after he got out of the Army while he was on the road one time down in Steubenville, Ohio, who went on the road with him for a couple of months before deciding she was not built for the nomadic road life, and whom Sam thought he never got over despite two subsequent short marriages.

Angelica had come out to see him in California when he was living in a tent up at Point Magoo a few month later to see if they could go on together and she had flipped out the first time that she, a Midwestern girl from some Podunk town in Indiana, had ever seen the ocean and almost drown in a riptide around Malibu. Markin had had to pull her out just as she was going under. Things didn’t work out but he had a great story to tell about some big thing sex thing that had when she got stoned for the first time out there and they had some Zen experience as the sun went down on the ocean out to the Japan seas. Sam could always tell when they were within about fifty miles of the Pacific, maybe more, maybe out in Reno someplace, because Markin would start on his Angelica story. Jesus, what a mad man then (and Jesus they all agreed they still missed the bastard now too).

He thought that saving Angelica was the greatest thing because as the guys knew, especially Allan, who had known Markin the longest having known him back in the third grade down in the Carver housing projects where they had both grown up. Allan had been on the beach the day Markin almost drowned himself when he was eight or nine over in Plymouth when he did some bone-head thing, grabbed a log and sailed out sea and then let go when he was too far out and some lifeguard had to go save him. Markin had that mysterious furious love-hate thing about the ocean his whole misbegotten life, and hated the idea of being too far away from the ocean always making everybody laugh about not letting him be buried in Kansas or someplace like that. (The guys had all gotten melancholy more than a few times since they reconnection that there he was buried down in some sullen grave in some old dusty Mex town far from ocean breezes.)

Sam apologized for getting off track about Angelica and the old days in the great blue-pink great American West night that Markin always called what he was searching for but Markin really didn’t care which end of the state he landed in so they had taken that big old Cadillac ride, the first time either of them had been in a Caddy, down to Gallup. It seemed to take forever though since the guy, Billy Bob somebody Sam could not remember his last name from Odessa out in the Texas night, was an insurance salesman and he stopped in about twenty towns along the way to check out the local agents and their activities. That trip, or rather that part of the trip kind of made Sam realize that deep down he was not cut out for the eternal hitchhike road, was basically a small town boy rooted to home and no longer ready to take on the monsters who were holding the young,” youth nation” Markin used to call it trying to put some glue to the ten million things everybody young was doing, sometimes at cross purposes, back from that “newer world” Markin loved to talk about. Yeah, Sam had had enough of the road by then so there was a certain tension between them as they drifted toward Gallup.

Yeah, Sam had enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. (Laughter.) Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners used to heat quicksilver coffee when they were camped out in some desolate campsite  (that instrument last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out flame out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country willowing winds hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever more mildewed with each wet ground experience), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (which they had gotten not from Markin’s Vietnam army gear but as World War II surplus from Eddy’s Army and Navy store over in Plymouth and which Markin would slyly hint that his had last been in desperate need of washing after a couple of month of night exertions with Angelica, those ever laughing hands of his reaching out to her in those two to a bag days), and minute, small, no speed in throwing up, especially when rains came pouring down and they were caught out  without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe, pegged Army surplus pup tents too, also from Eddy’s. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Atlantic or Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it. Yeah, Sam had tired of the road after a couple of years running back and forth across the country, each trip seemingly with less purpose, less Sam purpose.

Sam told the others after that blast that he was sorry for ranting about all the stuff that they probably all remembered, or half-remembered about and how they all, after Markin insisted on making it his fashion statement, had the obligatory green Army surplus rucksack on one shoulder which Markin said contained all a man, “a new man,” or really an old Johnny Appleseed American primitive man needed to survive in the world of the road and  the bedroll, complete with ground cloth against the wetness and dampness if you found yourself alongside some cow pasture or some such unlikely place on the other shoulder. Lately though, as he had unburdened himself of the day to day running of his law office, Sam had been almost possessed by a certain line of thinking he was going through to take a whack at summing up a lifetime of activity. He thought in all fairness there were a million good lawyers out there, a goodly number better than he would ever be, and the world when he came through law school in the early 1970s would not have crumbled if he had not been the one million and first, had thought too that anybody of the billions of people in the world could have put two unsuccessful marriages together (although surviving that dual madness ultimately lead to Laura when she came his way in the later 1980s, a definite plus) but maybe if he had stuck it out with Markin and his dreams, hadn’t gotten tied up with those bourgeois dreams Markin kept putting holes in that had dragged at Sam’s heart back then, maybe kept that mad man in check a little, maybe had help try to turn the world upside down like Markin wanted when he got political, hell, got to be a street fighter after that Vietnam stint, he would be here with his old corner boys now, and he could tell this story that Sam was now bound to tell. Sam though also had thoughts mixed in that he did not know with Markin’s big, what did he call them (Frankie had shouted out “wanting habits,” adding Markin got it from a line in a Bessie Smith song), that’s right “wanting habits” snapped back maybe he was that doomed “half-Mick, half swamp hillbilly” that he was always talking about but that had been what Sam had been thinking about of late. [This is not the place to go about Markin’s genealogy but he had been raised by a half-crazed Irish mother who had been totally bewildered by motherhood and by the down cast of her life when she met up with certain good-looking po’ boy Marine from out into hill-billy hills of Appalachia and that division of the gene pool probably did give him reason to think he, like lot of political black guys at the time, that he was doomed.]  

After that insurance salesman left Sam and Markin off at Gallup, actually at a hobo “jungle” camp beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just outside of town they had stayed at that camp for a few days before heading west on Interstate 40 heading toward Los Angeles. They had had to leave that camp one night in a hurry once some ornery wino stew-bum, Blind Blinky, got an idea in his head that two good-looking (to him anyway) young boys (again to him) might make good bed companions and from what they had heard from other stew-bums if he wanted something like that he would get his way and nobody could stop him. Markin by the way always called them hobos telling Sam that some guy with the moniker Black River Blackie who was some kind of royalty in the stew-bum world of the Gallup camp told him there were three grades of stew-bums-tramps, bums, and hobos and that tramps and bums were not allowed in that camp since hobos were the kings of the drifter night. Someone else could figure out the “jungle” sociology they just wanted to get the hell out of there before they were both somebody’s sissies.   

After a couple of rides Sam and Markin had put many a mile between them and Gallup closing in on Phoenix before they stopped for a breather first getting a ride from a good old boy trucker from Alabama named Buck White who while chiding them on their Yankee-ness had been kindness itself with cigarettes, bennies, buying meals, good cheap meals too at the out of the way diners he frequented after a life-time of learning every good and bad truck stop from Boston to San Diego, but by then they really were well clear of that prairie fire nightmare and after that on to sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ otherwise Sam said he would have melted into the ground right there, Markin too who would sweat like a fiend the minute the weather got the least bit hot) not far from some old run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing their attention. Those sights, once Sam saw them, made him think of home for some reason, made him want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath since in preparation for a previous trip she had tried to stop him saying did he want to be boy scout living in the wilderness forever. (Joyell, Sam’s first disastrous wife had threated to leave him and marry another guy, a guy from Plymouth who had a car, a steady job, and worked at the shipyard making “good money” as she would badger him with if he did not stop hitting the road every time Markin clanged his bell which helped to get him to kick the road habit. In the end she had waited for Sam but that whole set-up had been wrong about seven different ways as Markin would periodically warn him but on the trip he was fretting about her and that latest leaving threat). Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when guys like Buck and his tribe come through because no way did you want to tangle with him, or guys like him, young or old.)

Part of the reason for heading to Joshua Tree once they had taken the ride and the road south toward Gallup and Interstate 40 had been to connect up with a couple of guys that Markin had run into the year before, Jack and Mattie, whom Markin had told Sam about, both fellow ‘Nam vets although they were all “in country” at different times, good guys, on the hitchhike road out of Massachusetts heading to Washington, D.C. for a big anti-war Vietnam veterans action and whom he had continued to stay in contact afterward as they ambled their way across the country. Originally Markin had arranged to meet Jack and Mattie in Denver but they had already headed west to avoid the snow-blazed trails which could have occurred any time before real winter had set in. They had thereafter agreed to meet Markin in Joshua Tree if they all got there by the end of October otherwise in Los Angeles where they all were going to stay with an up and coming “new age” film director, the guy who made one of the definitive “hippie” films of the time Something Happened you can get on NetFlix now, who had a communal house set up in Topanga Canyon. (After Joshua Tree and a few misadventures around Indio they all did get to Topanga Canyon and stayed at that commune for the winter.) Markin and Sam arrived while Jack and Mattie, and a Volkswagen bus filled with the usual assortment of freaks and good-looking “chicks” (a term of art at the time, sorry), were still in a primitive campsite in Joshua Tree. For a few days the dope flowed freely, the wine maybe a little less so as in the battle between getting “high” on drugs and booze drugs usually won out, and the big kettle on the fireplace brew stew made up of who knows what that every member in good standing of “youth nation” survived on during that whole time even less, mostly eating just enough to keep the vultures away.

One of those nights, maybe the third, third night of grass, mescaline, hash, some low-grade opium, and for the first time, first time for Sam, peyote buttons Jack had gotten from some Navajos on the way out to Joshua Tree. Jack had traded a stash of grass for the buttons, bartering being one form of payment transfer during those days when the talk was rife about how once “youth nation” was in charge they were going to abolish money. Markin would rant for hours about the need to abolish money and just trade stuff you needed for stuff the other guy needed although that did not stop him from conning money out of everybody he met, especially women who gave it to him without a quarrel, that “wanting habit” thing never far from his benighted fellahin head. That night they were all sitting by this big Joshua night camp fire that somebody, “Jumping” Jones the owner of the Volkswagen bus Sam thought, kept blazing, casting weird ghost night-like shadows that just made Sam’s Joyell hunger worst. Got him thinking about how she never really did fit into the Markin-Lowell-Riley-Johnson et al campfire road trip scene even close to home. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a long handle-bar mustache and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck White found ugly in his America although Mattie had done two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to Sam) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

And so there they were making that last push to the coast but not before they absorbed these Native American lands that, as it turns out, Markin, Jack, Mattie and Sam all had been interested in ever since their kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-A-long Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier on this day Sam had been talking about they had been  over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the West  not all that long ago but who were now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. (This before the great AIM movement break-out and Wounded Knee/Pine Ridge/Leonard Peltier kick ass times later in the 1970s.) The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of their own warrior shaman trances were still in their heads in front of this now blazing camp fire night. Sam was still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive out marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but they had all started in on those peyote buttons Jack had scored (scored from those wily Navajos who used it strictly for religious purposes, and as you so did they, kind of) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (everybody laughed that old time knowing laugh when Sam said that had been strictly for medicinal purposes as well).

Just then in this dark, abyss dark, darker than Sam had ever seen  the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell he was embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And his ears didn’t deceive him,  and they didn’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle Sam heard, and heard plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

After more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, Sam swore, swore on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls he saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that he had heard after so many defeats against the blue soldiers’ guns in the late 19^th century, got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, the four of them, three of them having seen hard combat in ‘Nam first-hand (Sam had been deferred from the military draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father died in 1965), those four, those four television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so they were actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until they sped up to catch the real pace. After what seemed an eternity they were, Sam too, were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.

 

But then just as quickly the flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and they crumbled in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. They, after regaining some strength, all decided that they had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, would do them in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment they, or at least Sam knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.

     

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ 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 hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted 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 laying 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 they 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 his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as 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, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

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 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 Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

 

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. That new dispensation for my generation began back in the late 1950s, early 1960s so maybe it was when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits (Mad Men, retro-cool today, okay) and before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on the fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by a soft felt hat. It would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit combination. Maybe it was when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you.  

But maybe it was, and this is a truth which I can testify to, noting the photograph above, when some girls, probably college girls (now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, go figure) having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, flippy, whatever  don’t hold me to hairstyles to long and straight strands. (Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover the folk scene was too young and small then to cause such a sea-change).

Looking at that photograph now, culled from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High (located about thirty miles south of Boston). But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy desire, and that was that.                   

My old friend Sam Lowell, a high school friend who I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion). He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when they had their folk night (before every night was folk night at the place when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together, That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Sam thought she looked fine. Sam (like myself) was not then hip to the long straight hair thing) and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.

Then one night a few weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met him at the door with the mandatory long-stranded hair which frankly made her face even longer. When Sam asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.

Of course he compounded his troubles by making the  serious mistake of asking if she had it done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go, So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl (and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched shirt things she used to wear).     

By the way let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Sam back the early 1960s. She and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. Sam and Julie were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to Sam as they waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with me and my companion, Laura Talbot, to see if he remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while he thought he remembered he was not sure.

He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk time (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo.