Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about three years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police actually in concert with other governmental bodies (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out, maybe think tanks, maybe ala Henry David Thoreau out in some edenic gardens). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses (and with not a little hostility as well but mainly indifference to the fight, really their fight too since that ahd been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the band who got bailed out). Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.

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

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No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and with the demise of that revolution he followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition  and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere  that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-The International Working Class Anthem The Internationale

 

A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.

Markin comment:

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

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States-Workers' Action- Winter 1969-1970

 I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
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Thanks to the Riazanov Library for their efforts in digitizing Workers Action. The works provided by the Riazanov Library are © copyrighted by the Riazanov Library in 2010 for the document formatting and editing as they appear here in their PDF format, on the ETOL. The actual content itself remains in the public domain pursuant to US and International copyright conventions.
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Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts runs a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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Markin comment on this issue:
Obviously a propagandistic left-wing, pro-labor newspaper from 1969, driven by current events, is going to contain a lot of material now of just historic interest like the struggle around the effects of containerization of shipping on the West Coast docks, a question that we now know costs many union jobs by the failure of longshoremen’ union to tie in technological improvement with unionized labor employment. And, of course, the union bureaucracy’s penchant for making “sweetheart” deals rather than a class struggle fight over the issue.

This issue does pose the question of questions centered on the labor movement and war that is currently very much with us with the Iraq, Afghan and whatever other hellish wars the American imperialist are raising around the world. For the anti-war movement, after trying everything but labor action in the previous period, 1969 represented a turning point where even the working class was getting fed up with the Vietnam War. No only by providing the mass base of “cannon fodder” but taking a beating on the economic front as well. The call for labor strikes against the war would later, in 1970, take on a more than propagandistic possibility when important sections of the working class began to take strike action over economic issues. While today, and maybe just today, the slogan has purely propaganda value it is always part of the arsenal of left-wing anti-war work.

The other section that still bears reading for today’s audience is the last article on, well, union caucus organizing. The point about standing on a left-wing militant program is the most important and dovetails with the struggle for the labor party to take state power when the time comes. Once again this says to me that we had better be getting a move on about the business of creating that revolutionary labor party-enough is enough. Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party that fights for our communist future.  

In The Family Way-Gary Cooper’s Casanova Brown

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Casanova Brown, starring Gary Cooper, 1944

 

In the modern cinema no social subject matter from transgender issues to various drug additions and family problems is off limits. And whether the issue is done as a serious dramatic effort or as a comedy sketch no one is “shocked” by whatever is on the screen (and if one is then the solution is to avert your eyes, walk out of the theater, or sent the DVD back). Sometimes looking at the old classic black and white romantic comedies movies which were usually done as “feel good” epics and skirted the tough social issue as much as possible you forget that every once in a while they actually dealt with serious subject matter that you would not have thought would have made it pass the producer’s or studio’s chopping block. Take the film under review, the romantic comedy Casanova Brown which is a slapstick way deals with gender issues, adoption, bigamy, marriage as an institution, science vs. the occult, and, well, the correct most up to date way to bring up baby (circa 1944).      

See this professor, well, writer anyway, Casanova Brown (played by lanky, laconic Gary Cooper usually seen in serious stuff like facing down gunslingers and the mob in High Noon, setting things right in Washington, D.C., or taking up the fight in the International Brigades in Spain, and a little romance on the side, in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s Farewell To Arms), all Midwest naiveté in tack goes off the rails when he, as will happen to anybody, goes to New York City and gets married to some Mayfair swell co-ed, Isabel (played by classic 1940s girl next door Teresa Wright),  in a whirlwind romance. The marriage does not take hold once Casanova pulls the hammer down on Isabel’s mother’s reliance on astrology and other occult methods for running their lives. They split up, that marriage is annulled, and Casanova heads back to the Midwest to try to marry a willowy blonde who also comes from wealth (and a dingbat ne’er-do-well gold-digger father)  

Then things start getting interesting since on the very eve of his marriage to willowy blonde, Madge by name, he gets information that a baby is to be born in Chicago and he needs to get there. As it turned out Isabel and Casanova might have split up by they were doing some fooling around before then since Isabel got pregnant and by the time Casanova gets to Chicago he is the father to a bouncing baby girl. A girl whom Isabel, now not married but a mother, not a good thing in staid 1940s land, has put up for adoption. Once Casanova gets a look at the baby though all his paternal, hell, maybe maternal instincts come out and he is daffy for the little one.

 

Not just daffy though but also determined to not have his baby adopted by some strangers. So like any good father he kidnaps the baby and hides out in a hotel where everybody except the police is looking for him. In the process he is also, as a good professor, man of science, and rational thinker a good mother to the child looking up all the then current literature on bringing up baby. But the heat was on so he decided to marry a hotel housekeeper (the called maids) to be able to keep the child. Naturally, in the end after all this is a romantic comedy, Casanova and Isabel get back together and all is right with the world and baby will grow up to be part of the generation of ‘68 who tried to turn the world upside down, and lost.

Now let’s see if you were paying attention. The baby was not illegitimate, Casanova did not commit bigamy, twice (to Madge or the hotel maid), and the stars were all aligned for them, occult mother or not. Now about that kidnapping charge. You know this is a 1940s film so you know very well no charges were brought. If you like screwball comedies this one will make you laugh, and scratch your head.            

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2015 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Two 

 

From The American Left History Blog Archives –May Day 1971

 

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

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Frank Jackman awoken from his light sleep with a start. Someone, a blurry figure, had placed a blanket, an Army blanket of all things, over him as he had sat dozing in front of the small campfire that was doing double-duty keeping the refugees in front of it warm. He shook himself awake, awake as anybody who had not slept in over twenty-four hours could be with only this cat nap to relief his sleepiness. He then began to think about the long chain of events that had brought him down to Washington in this late spring of 1971 after having been released from the Army stockade only a couple of  months before. Then he remembered the events he had begun to recount before he dozed off earlier. Let’s pick his story up from there.

 

No question one Private Francis Alan Jackman, US5034567859, with fresh orders for Fort Lewis, Washington in transit to RVN (Vietnam) was in a world of confusion in the summer of 1969. While he had not been a vociferous opponent of the war he had acquired definite views, had gotten “religion” on the subject, that he would not let himself be used as cannon fodder for a war that he deep-down opposed. Being a kid from a working-class neighborhood in his hometown of North Adamsville where guys, when called to military service kicking and screaming or not, went. So Frank had no model for oppositional behavior. In a panic he had heard from some source that he had now forgotten that the Quakers over in Cambridge had information and services for those who were opposed to the war (or rather in the case, all wars).He knew the Quakers but also knew that he was not one of them having been brought up a Roman Catholic with its ill-defined “just war theory,” meaning in practice supporting whatever war the state was up to, at least that was what he had constantly heard from the pulpit and on the street.        

      

After some counselling of his options, including a veiled option to go AWOL (absent without leave) for a period in order to be dropped from the rolls out in Fort Lewis, Frank ran through what he would wind up doing. And he pretty much kept to the Quaker- offered script for the first part of his odyssey. He found himself AWOL for a long enough period to have been dropped from the rolls (he was in communication with a Replacement Company clerk out there) so that when he turned himself in that he was able to go to nearby Fort Devens for any future action. He went through the formal military conscientious objector application finally being turned down for the very simple reason that according to military standards an applicant must come from a religious background that held all wars immoral and not just some unjust. He was thus place back in line to be reassigned to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam.

 

One of the other options presented to Frank was to seek legal redress through the federal courts once his CO application was turned down as he and the military counsellors in Cambridge assumed would happen.

This track involved seeking a writ of habeas corpus in the District Court of Massachusetts on the basis that the military’s decision in his case was arbitrary and capricious in light of a civilian CO case (the Welch decision) where the Supreme Court ruled that other ethical and non-traditional anti-war religious expressions could be considered by the authorities. One day soon after his rejection he went Cambridge to seek that option by hiring a “movement”-friendly lawyer who knew the ins and outs of this procedure. An option exercised that saved his life as it turned out since a judge in Boston agreed to hear the case and placed a restraining order on the military authorities at Fort Devens from moving him from the jurisdiction of the court. Since he had become something of an on base rabble-rouser the military authorities had tried to hustle him off base under guard. The restraining order arrived in just a nick of time (about two hours before they were closing in to round him up he had heard later from a friendly clerk in the Provost Marshall’s office.)

 

With the fire beginning to blaze brightly against the coming dark of night Frank, hungry from not having eaten for a several hours and tired of thinking about all those legal steps he had taken that would only interest a legal aficionado, went looking for something to eat…  

A View From The Marxist Left- Communism and the Family 

Workers Vanguard No. 1066	17 April 2015

TROTSKY

LENIN

Communism and the Family

(Quote of the Week)

In laying out the communist goal for the future, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described a world of material abundance in which socialized domestic services as well as collectivized care and responsibility for all children have liberated woman and child alike from the chains of the bourgeois family. To begin to realize this vision requires proletarian socialist revolutions all across the globe.

 

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

 

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

 

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….