This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style
A YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads, Charles Seeger, and the Lomaxes, father and son)"discovered" the song in 1916 in Kentucky. Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, or so I though at the time but was heard the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene) and hearing the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk like some latter-day Jehovah doing his version of the song. Quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago. The Carter Family famously arrived via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music to fill the air and their catalogs. The Seegers and Lomaxes went out into the sweated dusty fields, out to the Saturday night red barn dance, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren, out to the juke joint, down to the mountain general store to grab whatever was available some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.
The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player.
But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
For The Frontline Defenders Of
The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”
An Injury To One Is An Injury To
All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The
Oppressed Must Rule!
******** Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not
being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a
fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war
radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the
American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when
the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the
tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011. (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft
of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started
giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks,
break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Although
Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both
having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the
movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over
his father’s electrical shop in Troy, New York when he retired and Sam had gone
back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960, but
having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly
working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry
bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled
the roost, and had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about
not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this
wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from
the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as
the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for
parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the
more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the
wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.
So Ralph and
Sam would during most of the falloff 2011travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the
movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after
the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind
of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after
the then reigning mayor and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly
disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and
across the world and police departments doing likewise). Of more concern since
they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to
pull down the hammer was thereafter when the movement imploded from its own
contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do
their own thing, do their own identity politics which did much to defang the
old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might
give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the
monster down.
Ralph and Sam
in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think
decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of
the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them
since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly
had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had
talked about it even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how
each generation will face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to
be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Here
working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get
Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the
better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change
has to address these days and fight for and about as well.
A Five-Point
Program As Talking Points
***Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor
movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that
unemployment, under-employment, those who have just plain quit looking for work
and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this
high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great
Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula
to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. This is no
mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable
distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the
early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions when the union-run hiring
hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs is that the work would be divided up
through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its
capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This
would be a simpler task now than when it was first proposed in the 1930s with
the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via
computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level, and equitably divide up current work.
Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes
it such a powerful propaganda tool-without the key capitalist necessity of
keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be
used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather
than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must
admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such
thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso,
although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed
Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system
as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers
government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now
that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in
America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce and less
in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the
old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new
plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive
amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to
globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. (Strangely, or maybe not
so strangely, the North American auto industry employed almost a million
workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the
industry was union tight.)
The other sector that desperately need to be
organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries,
hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a
dominant aspect of the American service-orientedeconomy. Everyone should support the recent
militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service
unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially
acceptable wage in their Fight For $15.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area,
where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places
cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form
the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is
obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from
continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international
commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned
trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the
springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel
lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize
the truckers and distribution center workers, the place where the whole thing
comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail
stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how
hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more
thoughtful moments, once argued that it
would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant
mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point
that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private
workers to unionize. Simple-No more
defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the
hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts
or bourgeois recall elections either. Defeat all “right to work” legislation.
Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
*** Defend the independence of the working
classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very strayRepublican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012
labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to
elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results
speak for themselves as the gap between the rich, make that the very rich but
don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has
risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor
skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea
going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those
elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the
Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a
back seat to the elephants on this one. The past period of cuts-backs,
cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who
is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor
skates at the top of the movement. They always have their hands out.
The hard reality is that the labor skates,
not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other
way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid
the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One egregious
example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some
of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- the return
of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they
had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of
record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or
rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but
now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an
end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom
have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down when the deal
goes down.
This does not mean not using union dues for
political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever
in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized,
organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think,
for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union
recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and
other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual
reactionaries, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for
class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the
anti-union backs (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the
number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).
***End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied
troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of
non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer
to the initial stage if the opposition that we must recognize that we
anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that
withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early
2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind
the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now
with a new stage against ISIS (common moniker for the Islamic State) in Iraq we
had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we
are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before
that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings In Syria,
Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel
and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel
Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate,
Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries)
From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear
arms talks American (and world)
imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now)
and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust
has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have
even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as
we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for
the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the
Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran and Syria is
not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the
“belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention
but for defense of Iran. We will, believe us we will, deal with the mullahs,
the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran in our own
way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them
Off!- With the number of “hot spots”
that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, like
Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period have their hands on in this
wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny,
Not One Person For The Wars! Honor
World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just
that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders
who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for
an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The
litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war
budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get the drift). Then that big
leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would
be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their
military money. Well….okay.
***Fight for a social agenda for working
people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any
rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is
the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of
the prime concerns of workers states whatever political disagreements we may
have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political
problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, has been to
place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of
their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the
hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until
recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their
programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has already been shown to
be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against
those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and
denied basic health benefits.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under
student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any
rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a
society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society
together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many
working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the
middle-class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system
is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family
lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in
the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them
around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take a big chuck from
the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, if
you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top
heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students,
teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic
basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt
is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is
counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while
low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly
educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society,
desperately needs is going to be cast into some form of indentured servitude to
the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let
the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures and aid
underwater mortgages now! Although
the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so
this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past.
Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe,
clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of
the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing
crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also
burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application
processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
***We created the wealth, let’s take it
back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory
of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the
capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways
the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a
system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against
feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite
and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this
system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push
them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the
historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we
face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system
is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the
struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it
with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers’ party that fights for a
workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things
mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political
power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political
party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the
people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us
nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to
the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On
Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going
to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first
instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can
resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic
tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism
and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still
be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better
equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the
oppressed must rule!
********
Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Most people think, Great god will come from
the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!
Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )
Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Don't give up the fight! (life is your right!
)
Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the
fight! )
Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )
Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )
Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )
We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name,
lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the
time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah,
yeah, yeah! )
So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the
morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our
rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up,
don't give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up!
)
Get up, stand up! (... )
Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )
*************
We Don’t Want Your
Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And
The Wailers”- A CD Review
By Ralph Morris (2012)
One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And
The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
Admit it, back in the late seventies and
early eighties we all had, Sam and me included, our reggae minute, at least a
minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a
run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The
Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child
be-bop, hip-hop when that moved onto the scene. Others like me just took it as
a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those
black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.
Well not quite. Of late the Occupy movement, the people risen, has done a very
funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along
with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother
Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , have resurrected Bob Marley’s
up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and
brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and
most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems,
somehow, eminently right. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those
old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you
have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned
already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (yah, the
old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight
too.
As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Comes To A Close... Some Remembrances
The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth form all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts. Also clogged, or rather thrown in the nearest bin were the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. Other than isolated groups and individuals mostly in the weaker countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove thir manhood.
Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the last month of the first year of war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.
The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th century when the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war on the fronts (that is how the generals saw it mainly having won their promotions in those earlier wars and so held captive to the past). However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.
The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can, hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’sprisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America the Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell), were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.
Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day.
So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.
Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.
“The Mere Idea Of You”-With Billie Holiday’s The Very Thought Of You In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
A
while back I wrote about a guy named Otty Venise (not Otto as a number of
people assumed including school teachers who from first grade on thought he was
just misspelling his own name from what he told me one night sitting at
Charley’s Den on Charles Street in the Back Bay sipping low-shelf whiskies
since we were both in some financial difficulties). I had run into Otty in the
early 1980s when I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston and he lived in a small
studio apartment below me while working his way up the banking food chain. Otty
while a good guy to have a few off-hand drinks with was a great deal younger
than I was and so he had the inevitable woman troubles that I had put behind me
a bit then (two marriages and two divorces behind which explains low-shelf
whiskeys and financial difficulties forcing me to live in a studio apartment on
the Hill for a while when the rents weren’t sky high like now).
That little sketch I wrote about Otty had to do with one way
that he dealt with, maybe got through is a better way to say it, his miseries
with woman. See Otty had been in the dumps back then about his latest flame,
this Laura Perkins, who he said was five feet six inches of slender brunette
pale blues eyes and heartbreak, and who had him jumping through hoops. Nothing
new there since Otty said he had probably jumped through more hoops for more
unrequited love women than any seven men around Carver about thirty miles south
of Boston where he had grown up, maybe around Massachusetts. And with every
single one of them, or at least as far back as he could remember Otty said he would
feel just a little bit better if he listened, endlessly listened as if time did
not matter, or if time actually did stand still, when he played his old time
collection of four two-pocketed double-sided albums of Miss Bessie Smith which
he had inherited from his uncle when that uncle unexpectedly passed away in 1971.
Here is what didn’t figure, didn’t figure to Otty, and
certainly didn’t figure to me about his Bessie affliction. Here was a white
guy, a guy who before he got out of high school and went to work at a downtown
Boston bank in the junior exec program did not know one black person personally
and who moreover did not know squat about the roots of black music in slavery
times, in Mister James Crow times, in the great migration to the industrial North
times but who could only find solace in the raspy-throated voice of a black
back forty acres and a mule Southern Delta 1930s woman when he was in one of
his periodic dumps.
And that is my jumping off point. See I would have figured,
maybe to test out my own theory of Otty’s love depressions that one Miss Billie
Holiday, a certified torch singer is the one whom you would think would sent
those blues away. But she did not do so. Did not get him out of his dumps. No,
Miss Billie was reserved for when Otty and his latest flame were heating up
their affair, when some sweet woman was “curling his toes” as he always liked
to put the matter about his bouts of love-making. So I want to tell you the
Billie part of the Otty love triangle, the part when his and Laura’s love was
in its spring. Want to tell as maybe an exercise in full disclosure about that
mad young man especially since he held me to no confidence in the matter and
while I will not go into detail about that “curling his toes” business since
you can figure that out yourselves I can set the mood, the Billie mood for you.
Of course Otty’s whole thing with Laura read like an
adventure not written in the stars. He had run into her at the Surf Ballroom in
Hull hard by the Atlantic Ocean. He had gone there with Jimmy Eaton and couple
of other guys whom he had known in high school from the days where they had
hung out at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Thornton Street over by the Town Hall in
Carver. He was in need of some distraction after he had broken it off with
Jeanie Callahan (no Bessie needed on that one since he knew from the beginning
dating the sister of a friend of his, Jack Callahan, as a favor when he had
nothing better to do was not made in heaven) to listen to the latest break-out
cover group, The Rambling Jets, who played a hard rock and roll sound that
despite his Bessie mood thing was his natural musical base. As usual as such
places the Surf was filled on a Friday night with clots of single hanging out
guys and girls. He had simply asked Laura to dance, she consented, and that was
the start.
Sure there was plenty more to fill in. About how well Otty
and Laura got along at first, how she had stayed the night a few times in his
Beacon Hill studio apartment to seal the deal, how they had certain plans once
she finished school at Bridgewater State in her hometown, and he moved up the
banking ladder. Plenty too about the little fights about who he, or who she
could and could not see until that time. The usual boy-girl stuff going on
since they invented that boy-girl controversy stuff. It had all started when
Laura began having second thoughts about her old beau, Bart Webber, just back
from a tour of duty in the Army having been stationed in Germany. He had called
her and talked to her about getting back together. Otty had said to Laura no
dice to them even talking. Somehow though Laura and Bart had reconnected as
Otty found out the hard way seeing them one Saturday afternoon having lunch together
at the Sea and Surf in Hull when he and Laura had a date for the Surf that
night. After a couple of weeks of explosions on both sides Laura gave Otty his
walking papers.
That was at the end though but I want to go back to those
nights Laura stayed with Otty on Beacon Hill, or rather the first night they
“did the do” as the old scat blues singer Howlin’ Wolf would say. Like I said I
won’t fill in the sex details because you can figure that on your own but just
tell how he, a bottle of wine (white and pretty cheap from what he said), a
couple of joints (when that was still cool to do before “cocaine all round your
brain” became the drug flavor of the month) and of course Billie, Billie before
the pusher man got to her bad, put her on the nod, cut her torch voice into
little pieces at the end. Billie when she could make the angels cry about their
vocal inadequacies when they heard that voice.
See Laura knew from nothing about Billie so Otty just ran
the rack with LP album after album on his stereo and they just drank that wine
and smoked that dope until Billie’s The
Very Thought Of You came busting into the room and pulled something in
Laura’s usually semi-frozen heart. And that was that, they messed up the sheets
a bit that night (you know what I mean, right). So, yes, I can see where Miss
Billie Holiday might do, might do very well in the throes of love department. Although
frankly Billie as an aphrodisiac was a new one on me then.
But that is not the end because the night Otty told me this
story he also said that he had written something about one of Billie’s albums,
some kind of review for a local paper or something I forget, and about the
effect had on him. Here’s what he had to say:
“In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday
is the torch singer’s torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs.
That well-placed hush. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when
she is on a roll and the arrangements. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope
but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love, lost or both like no
other. And if it was the dope, let me say this- a ‘normal’ nice singer could
sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it
right when she was at her best. Dope, or no dope.
Was she always at her best? Hell no, as the current
compilation makes clear. [Otty was reviewing a then recently released “greatest
hits” compilation.] These recordings done between 1945 and her death in 1959
for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and
the dope put the nerves on edge toward the end.
Many of the songs on the current compilation are technically
sound, a few not, as is to be expected on such re-mastering. You will like Come Rain or Come Shine, Stars Fell On
Alabama and Stormy Blues. A tear will come to your eye with Some Other Spring and East of the Sun. The surprise of the
package is Speak Low, a sultry song
with tropical background beat. That one is very good, indeed.
One last word- I have occasionally mentioned my love of
Billie Holiday’s music to younger acquaintances. Guys and gals at work or at a
couple of place where I do volunteer work. Some of their responses reflecting,
I think, the influence of the movies (especially Lady Sings The Blues) or some black history up-lift looks on her
life have written her off as an addled doper. Here is my rejoinder- If when I
am in the mood for love and need a pick-me-up and put on a Billie platter then,
my friends, someone who can do that for me I will buy them, metaphorically of
course, all the dope they ever need. Enough said.”
A Real Independence Day Walk Through The
Streets- A Tale Of Two Parades
From The Pen Of Sam Eaton
Yeah, the streets of the small towns and
big cities of this nation were resplendent with red white and blue bunting, the
kids filled to the brim with soda, candy and hot dogs and adults coyly sipping
their store bought wines and beers in red plastic containers (or at least that
seemed the color of choice from a brief but telling visual unscientific poll)
as happens every hot summer July Independence Day, the Fourth to short-haul the
name of the event I am talking about. As a nice summer holiday nobody,
including me, has any quarrel, especially getting the school-stormed kids out
of doors and reddened from their prison pallor earned the previous past nine
months.
Well, maybe some out there in the
hinterlands have a quarrel with celebrating the Fourth as a freedom day after my
reading of an archival piece from a re-tweeted blog that my long-time friend
and political activist comrade, Ralph Morris (more about him later), send along
to me. He had received it via the Internet from our mutual friend living in New
York City, Fritz Jasper, a guy who refused to serve in Vietnam after he had
been inducted into the Army and his number was called to do 11 Bravo duty
(infantryman, grunt, cannon fodder, take your pick) back in the day and did a
serious year or more in an Army stockade for his troubles before some smart and
savvy civilian lawyer who knew the military law inside out got him sprung on a
habeas corpus petition in federal court or he might still be on in the wheat
fields of Kansas at Fort Leavenworth along with the heroic Wiki-leaks
whistleblower Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
The gist of the article and that is all I
want to do is give the gist since this sketch is about other matters, although
4th of July connected, was penned by a NYU professor who Fritz knows
and let’s write on his blog, American
Politics Today. The good professor’s argument was that due to the way this
country got its freedom from old Mother England as a result of a straight up
military victory and the kind of society that was formed afterwards based on
the enslavement of black people and later the extermination of Native peoples
(although a lot was done well before that “later” to those “collateral damage”
peoples) we should be more circumspect about celebrating the event. Unlike say
the English, French or Russian revolutions which were hell-bound flat-out
social revolutions whatever happened later to rein them in.
And the good professor from NYU, Jack
Kirby I think his name was who has written several books and monograms along
that same line, might have a very good point (and Fritz too who agreed with
that part of Kirby’s analysis about being circumspect all things considered but
disagreed with the “not celebrating” part since he sees it as a legitimate part
of the struggle from human freedom even if today we would recoil from what that
experience has produced. More on this in a minute when Ralph and I weight in).
But what interests today me as an old anti-war campaigner (make that a full-time
anti-war campaigner against the now endless wars of the American imperium and
other misadventures as well) since the early 1970s after I got “religion” as I
like to call it on the issues of war and peace is being able to use the day,
and more importantly the thousands of locally organized parades or other
commemorations, to get our anti-war message out.
The “got religion” part about war came
after some soul-searching when I learned that my best friend, Jeff Mullins,
from Carver High was blown away in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1969. Jeff had sent me a bunch of letters telling me
of the horrors of the situation, his desperation in trying to right it, and his
total disgust with the ugly abuse that the American government was putting its
soldiers, the people of Vietnam (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia as it turns
out), and virtually everything it touched a few months before he was killed to
tell one and all that the war was totally crazy, totally “off the wall” as he
called it. (I was a little sheepish at first since through the vagaries of life
I wound up with a military deferment due to being the sole support for my
mother and four much younger sisters after my drunken sot of a father passed
away suddenly from a massive heart attack in 1965. But I got over that when
somebody said the message “from the grave” I had to bring to the table squared
things.)
The hard fact is that in the year 2015
despite almost fourteen years of endless war from that first bombing raids on
Kabul by Bush II in the aftermath of the horrendous unspeakable criminal
actions in New York on 9/11 until the latest (Spring, 2015) announced Obama third
wave, or is it fourth,“creeping troop
escalation” in Iraq the streets of America have been abandoned as a way to get
our message out by those who previously knew (if only for a minute in the later
part of 2002 and early 2003) that you
need to get the anti-war message out via the streets, raise hell about the
situation, since the media has blocked any coverage out otherwise as
yesterday’s news.
So the 4th of July is an
excellent place to bring the message home to a war-weary (and wary) people
without an “in your face” confrontation. (How are you going to, on either side,
get red-faced angry when soda-hot dog-candy filled kids and ordinary everyday
citizens out to get some well-deserved time off and have a few red cup brews
are looking your way with not unkindly feelings.)Now, full disclosure, Ralph Morris as a
Vietnam veteran like the fallen Jeff Mullins (and not Vietnam-era either since
he served eighteen months “in-country” as he calls it) and I who have worked
with him since we “met” at the RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971
are both members of an organization dedicated to the principle of peace,
Veterans For Peace (VFP), and have been for a number of years (he as a full
member and I as an associate since I am not a veteran, a least a war veteran
although Ralph always says that I am a “veteran” in his book since being peace
veterans is really what is important about what we have, or have not, done with
our lives).
VFP likes to, maybe lives to, use any
reasonable occasion to get the peace message out. So these days events like 4th
of July parades, Memorial Day Peace remembrances, ditto Veterans Day/Armistice
Day (the real and original reason for the holiday going back to end of World
War I times), Saint Patrick’s Day in Boston, Gay Pride parades, you name it you
are very likely to find the white flags with the black-outlined doves of peace
embossed on them fluttering in the wind at some such occasion. And this Fourth
of July was no exception. Ralph who lives in Troy, New York when we are not off
somewhere spreading as best we can these days the good news of peace came to
Boston and joined the local VFP chapter, the Smedley Butler Brigade (named in
honor of the famous much decorated Marine Corps general who coined the phrase
“war is a racket” in a speech you can read if you Google his name or go to Wikipedia). We marched on the evening of July 3rd in the annual
parade in historic Gloucester (of the famed fishermen going down to the sea, those
battling our home land the sea for its bounty) and in the adjacent town of
Rockport the next evening.
Late on 4th of July evening
after having walked our legs off the previous two early evenings we headed to Johnny’s
Olde Wagon Wheel Diner over on Thornton Street (Rockport) for a meal (Johnny’s providing
the best meatloaf dinner around and both Ralph and I in our hitchhiking days in
the early 1970s either on our own or through the kindness of friendly truckers know
many, many diners to compare the bills of fare on that subject and that
accolade is thus deserved) and a few drinks of high-shelf whisky (although our
favorite watering hole for that purpose when Ralph is in Boston is Jack’s
Grille down by the Financial District in the downtown area but that place that
day would be a zoo with the huge crowds that attend the well-known concert on
the Esplanade and fireworks after) in order to “evaluate” what our takes on the
two events were.
Now you have to know a little something
about VFP’s past participation in these Fourth of July parades in Gloucester
and Rockport. VFP started about twenty years to participate in the two parades
via the efforts of VFP members in both towns to get us in (at the barbeque this
year before the Rockport parade that fact was honored with a short speech and,
well, a cake). The first few years in the second Clinton administration were
rocky since a key component to any of this American spirit holidays are groups
like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and American Legion posts who put a
lock on patriotism of a certain kind, mainly of the unthinking or
wrong-thinking “my country, right or wrong” kind, and that is that. Moreover
the other key organizers for such events are the town police and fire
departments whose memberships overlap with the veterans’ groups many times.
Those combinations are used to organizing such events and normally set the
agenda. So the first few years were tough with the local organizers taking a
stance out of the playbook of the Allied War Council (AWC) in Boston which for
five years now has excluded VFP from its Saint Patrick’s Day parade held over
in South Boston in March of each year under the rubric, as one AWC-er put
it-“we don’t want the words “veterans” and “peace” put together in our
(private) parade. Small towns and cities are however under pressure, or if not
should be, to see that the whole community is represented and so VFP found a
spot in each parade. Of course another hard pressed time was in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11 when even Ralph and I were afraid to go on the streets with
the peace message at a time when the average citizen who generally is
indifferent to our presence had daggers in their eyes at the sight of peace
signs or symbols (although we did, we did go out among the hostile populace, at
least in Boston that year, but with the most trepidation that either of us had
faced in our long anti-war careers) and then with the war drums beating in the lead-up
to the so-called slam-dunk 2003 Iraq War.
But each year since as the endless wars
have continued to meander their endless sun-less rivers the patriotic bounce
has stopped driving sneers, ugly remarks, old-time out of touch anti-commie
slurs and the like that every protestor from neophyte to veteran knows is at
least hidden in some quarters when you work “street” politics. Both Ralph and I
made that same observation this year (as well as our traditional one about how
those old yellow ribbons festooned on the back bumpers of cars and trucks have
faded to pale white). That absence of malice rather than the notable increased cheering
as the VFP contingent of white flag dove of peace –embossed limply-walking
older wars veterans, jauntily-walking younger Afghan and Iraq war veterans and
assorted peace group supporters approached their vantage points is the most
striking difference over the years. We both noted in Rockport there was plenty
of genuine cheering to overthrow any uncivil remarks (although one guy, an old
duffer who looked like he might have been a mess sergeant in 1958, told us to
“go back to Moscow” and another in that same old duffer category to “just stay
at home” apparently to not offend his starry eyes. Jesus, where have these guys
been since about 1991.)
Here is our dilemma though, and not just
Ralph, mine or VFP’s but for any
“peaceniks” working the streets these days. We could palpably see the
war-weariness in the remarks headed our way, especially in Gloucester an old
working-class town that has provided more than its share of soldiers and
sailors as the city memorial to the fallen of that place readily testifies, those
remarks made from many a flatbed working man’s truck that dotted the route of
the parade. Trucks, more than either of us thought existed in a town that size
(and missing for the most part from the more upscale Rockport parade with its
average Audi or BMW) complete with whole families in the bed taking in the
sights, having a little something to eat or drink, and probably trying to
figure out how to calm down the sugar-laden kids before bedtime after such a
hectic day of sights and sounds.
Here is where Ralph and I have racked our
brains in sullen frustration-how do you turn that obvious war-weariness into
some kind of protest movement beyond the kind words and rousing applause sent
our way on parade days. We did not solve that dilemma that night maybe because
we were tired, maybe we were too sated from Johnny’s meatloaf, maybe a few too
many high-shelf whiskeys or maybe like the kids too many sights and sounds. All
I know is that we will be back next year, hopefully with more people joining
our efforts to spread the good words of peace around. You can bet on that.
[Oops, before I forget since whenever I
mention how Ralph and I met down in D.C. on May Day 1971 people want to know
how that happened in a professional football stadium in May when the football
season is long past. Ralph wrote up his version in 2011 and I added a few pithy
comments (his term) for that American
Politics Today our friend Fritz runs for the fortieth anniversary of the
event. I will give a short wrap-up here to show why we have been amigos since
that strange day in May. You already know my reasons for turning anti-war but
Ralph’s came like Jeff’s from actual hard rock service in that benighted
country. In short as Ralph says when he is giving talks- “he grew disenchanted
with what he had to do as a soldier (as an 11 Bravo cannon-fodder like Jeff),
what his Army buddies getting blown away and mangled had to do, and what the
damn American government was making of them-nothing but animals (always said
with a sneer). So when he got out in late 1969, early 1970 he wound up working
with a predecessor of VFP, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). By 1971
with no end of the war in sight a lot of us, radicals, frustrated liberals, ex-G.I.s
upped the ante- decided to as the slogan went-“if the government would not shut
down the war, we would shut down the government.”
As thousands descended on Washington
including Ralph with New York VVAW and me then living in Cambridge with some
radicals I knew we really thought we had enough to change history. For that
illusion many of us, Ralph and me among them, wound upon the football field at
RFK being used that May as a holding area for those arrested. He noticed I was
wearing a VVAW supporter button in honor of Jeff and that started our
friendship. If you need more info on that day just check Wikipedia because I have to move on.]
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Nina Simone performing her "Mississippi Goddam. Thanks, Nina.
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
Markin comment:
50 years later and even the mere mention of Mississippi puts me directly in mind of Nina Simone's no-nonsense song about the struggle down South in the early part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Thanks, Nina.
Mississippi Goddam Lyrics (1963) Nina Simone
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam And I mean every word of it
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can't you see it Can't you feel it It's all in the air I can't stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune But the show hasn't been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail School children sitting in jail Black cat cross my path I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don't belong here I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I've been there so I know They keep on saying "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Washing the windows "do it slow" Picking the cotton "do it slow" You're just plain rotten "do it slow" You're too damn lazy "do it slow" The thinking's crazy "do it slow" Where am I going What am I doing I don't know I don't know
Just try to do your very best Stand up be counted with all the rest For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we
Picket lines School boycotts They try to say it's a communist plot All I want is equality for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years You told me to wash and clean my ears And talk real fine just like a lady And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies You're all gonna die and die like flies I don't trust you any more You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Desegregation "do it slow" Mass participation "do it slow" Reunification "do it slow" Do things gradually "do it slow" But bring more tragedy "do it slow" Why don't you see it Why don't you feel it I don't know I don't know
You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
