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
Some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school (The Farmer in the Dell, Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure, etc. in case you have forgotten) and embedded in the back of your mind even fifty years later. Or as in the case of junior high, with Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbook you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (We found out later that he was in a desperate rear-guard action to wean us away from rock and roll, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as we lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)
Some reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in my case was the music that got my parents through my father’s slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to your door telling you the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of my generation swooned over), The Andrew Sistersand their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of my generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what I wanted to hear when I had my transistor radio to my ear up in my bedroom. This transistor thing for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like iPod except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously before the rock break-out played the music that got our parents through their war). Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, we could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl I knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to roll over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming us with his raucous High School Confidentialfrom the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.
The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once I got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, I don’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff. The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through my brain.
What did not take a long time once I got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when I saw him perform. Once I saw him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There he was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered as they had many Chess Records blues numbers) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.
BERLIN — German airline Lufthansa is canceling 1,000 flights on Wednesday because of a pilot strike.
Some 140,000 travelers will be affected by the grounding, the airline said Tuesday.
"Lufthansa deeply regrets the resulting inconvenience to its customers," it said.
Lufthansa aircraft on the tarmac RALPH ORLOWSKI / Reuters file
The pilots union, Vereinigung Cockpit, began its strike on long-haul flights Tuesday, forcing the cancellation of 90 flights. On Wednesday it is extending the strike to include medium- and short-haul flights.
The airline said its subsidiaries Germanwings, SWISS, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines are not affected. Backcountry Battle: Websites Duel to Become the Airbnb of RVs
Lufthansa's 5,400 pilots want the airline to keep paying a transition payment for those wanting to retire early, and are opposed to a restructuring of the airline.
Lufthansa says passengers should check its website for details of forthcoming flight cancelations.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of June Carter Cash performing Storms Are On The Ocean one of Prescott Breslin’s favorite boyhood tunes.
Wildwood Flower, June Carter Cash, produced by John Carter Cash, Dualtone Music, 2003
Scene: Brought to mind by the song Storms Are On The Ocean performed by June Carter Cash on her Wildwood Flower album.
Prescott Breslin was beside himself on that snowy December day just before the Christmas of 1953. He had just heard, no more than heard, he had been told directly by Mr. John MacAdams, the owner’s son, that the James MacAdams & Son Textile Mill was closing its Maine operations in Olde Saco and moving to Lansing, North Carolina right across the border from his old boyhood hometown down in Harlan, Harlan, Kentucky, bloody Harlan of labor legend, song, and story right after the first of the new year. And the reason that the usually steady Prescott was beside himself at hearing that news was that he knew that Lansing back country, knew that the matter of a state border meant little down there as far as backwater ways went, knew it deep in his bones, and knew that come hell or high-water that he could not go back, not to that kind of defeat.
Prescott (not Pres, Scottie, or any such nickname, by the way, just dignified Prescott, one of his few vanities), left the mill at the closing of his shift, went across the street to Millie’s Diner, sat at the stooled-counter for singles, ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of Millie’s homemade pumpkin pie, and put a nickel in the counter jukebox, selecting the Carter Family’s Storms Are On The Ocean that Millie had ordered the jukebox man to insert just for Prescott and the other country boys (and occasionally girls), mainly boys, or rather men who worked the mills in town and sometimes needed a reminder of home, or something with their coffee and pie.
Hearing the sounds of southern home brought a semi-tear to Prescott's eye until he realized that he was in public, was at hang-out Millie’s where he had friends, and that Millie, thirty-something, but motherly-kind Millie was looking directly at him and he held it back with might and main. In a flash he thought, tear turning to grim smirk, how he had told his second son, Kendrick, just last year when he asked about the Marine Corps uniform hanging in a back closet in the two by four apartment that they still rented from the Olde Saco Housing Authority and naively asked him why he went to war. He had answered that he preferred, much preferred, taking his chances in some forsaken battlefield that finish his young life out in the hard-bitten coal mines of eastern Kentucky. And then, as the last words of Storms echoed in the half-empty diner, he thought, thought hard against the day that he could not turn back, never.
And just then came creeping in that one second of self-doubt, that flash of why the hell had he fallen for, and married, a Northern mill town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire), stayed up North after the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks, and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing boys, with Delores. He reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter jukebox, and played the flip side of Storms, Anchored In Love. Yes, times will be tough since the MacAdams Mill was one of the few mills still around as they all headed south for cheaper labor, didn’t he know all about that from the mine struggles, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and he would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way. ********* Carter Family - The Storms Are On The Ocean lyrics
I'm going away to leave you love I'm going away for a while But I'll return to see you sometime If I go ten thousand miles
The storms are on the ocean The heavens may cease to be This world may lose it's motion love If I prove false to thee
Oh who will dress your pretty little feet And who will glove your hand Oh who will kiss your rosy red cheeks When I'm in a foreign land
Papa will dress my pretty little feet And Mama will glove my hand You may kiss my rosy red cheeks When you return again
Have you seen those mournful doves Flying from pine to pine A-mournin' for their own true love Just like I mourn for mine
I'll never go back on the ocean love I'll never go back on the sea I'll never go back on my blue-eyed girl 'Til she goes back on me
Ralph
Morris had recently written a letter to his friend and comrade Sam Lowell from
the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent
of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals
like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of
cyber-audience after years of small rallies, some demonstrations, writing for
small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old
time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial
charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of
heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post
9/11 when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington
regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe”
in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following
in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a
follower, or out, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing
that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted
that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural
politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home. Ralph
encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a
while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many
still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette
Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged
(and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return) with whatever
ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the vicious
powerful enemies of all humankind, the United States government. Life,
or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now they have
made that condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need
is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the
days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as
best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently
has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day
and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went
back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys
like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense.
So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who
set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about
those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier
days. Here is what he had to say straight up: When we were young, meaning those of us who
were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the
“Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical
friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various
actions and who saw that the people he was being led by mad e their significant
actions in that year) up n we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old
Leftists (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion
labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman
on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and
ageless Wobblies) tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics.(the
designation “generation of ’68 signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots
of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the
general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more
candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American
bourgeois political partyupheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention
shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris
which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer
world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was
seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of
society that had the social power to lead that struggle.) Those
scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who
survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing,
the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck, to do by
any means waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in
the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who
survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) and the
thuggishStalinists to boot as they
carried the revolutionary torch forward had come of political age in the 1930s
and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels
were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies
to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world
without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles
to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but
then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.” Well,
we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding
down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit
threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971
when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond
taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to
shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to
those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned
Old Leftists of old had anything going or not expect cautionary tales but all I
know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New
Leftists. Problem
is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger
crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And
there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not
succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place
they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at
this site. So I
find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in
what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody
with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s
has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are
helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent,
as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively
“bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost
nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of
the last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn
and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing
militants. Recently
I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few
Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on
the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the
active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic
sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I names some of the possible
locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for
that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few
years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant
American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the
beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and
internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a
certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young
radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and
had talked to 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. I
noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old
New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective,
that 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 which I mentioned in the article still hold
true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into
account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as
is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the
size 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
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. That
said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now
being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing
had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the
old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the
interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody
to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old
must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political
life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for
pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very
one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory,
any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it
should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still
make sense. One
of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned
to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered
on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast
without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old
Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the
Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out, more times than I care to mention included my
own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and
intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around
programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix
of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the
furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. Off-hand,
as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to
fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies”
provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media.
But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the
“real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that
animates our efforts. So read on.
Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music OF The Carter Family (First Generation)
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
You know it took a long time for Sam Eaton to figure out why he 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, Etta Baker, 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. (Jimmy Rodgers, the great Texas yodeler was discovered at that same time. In fact what the record companies were doing to their profit was to send out agents to grab whatever they could. That is how guys like Son House and Skip James got their record debuts, “race record” debut but that is a story for another time although it will be told so don’t worry). The Seegers and Lomaxes went out into the sweated dusty fields, out to the Saturday night red barn dance the winds coming down the Appalachian hollows, I refuse to say hollas okay, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren (and many sinners Saturday wine, women and song singers as well as your ordinary blasphemous bad thought sinners, out to the juke joint(ditto on the sinning but in high fiddler on Uncle Jack’s freshly “bonded” sour mash come Saturday absolution for sins is the last thing on the brethren’s minds), down to the mountain general store to grab whatever was available some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.
As a kid, as a very conscious Northern city boy, Sam could not abide that kind of music (and I know because if I tried to even mention something Johnny Cash who was really them a rock and roll stud he would turn seven shades of his patented fury) but later on he figured that was because he was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of his, our generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. (And I was with him the first night we heard Bill Haley and the Comets blasting Rock Around The Clock in the front end of Blackboard Jungle at the Strand Theater when it was playing re-runs so you know I lived and died for the new sounds)
Later in high school, Lasalle High, when Brian Pirot would drive us down to Cambridge and after high school in college when Sam used to hang around Harvard Square to be around the burgeoning folk scene that was emerging for what he later would call the folk minute of the early 1960s he would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that he would find himself occasionally idly humming such a tune. (The version done by Alice Stuart at the time gleaned when he had heard her perform at the Club Nana in the Square one time when he had enough dough for two coffees, a shared pastry and money for the “basket” for a date, a cheap date. The only Carter Family song that Sam consciously could claim he knew of theirs was Under the Weeping Willow although he may have unconsciously known others from seventh grade music class when Mr. Dasher would bury us with all kind of songs and genre from the American songbook so we would not get tied down to that heathen “rock and roll” that drove him crazy when we asked him to play some for us. (“Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher,” the implications of which today would get him in plenty of hot water if anybody in authority heard such talk in an excess of caution but which simple had been used as one more rhyming scheme when that fad hit the junior high schools in the 1960s and whose origins probably came from the song Monster Mash not the old-fashioned sense of a lady-killer) But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught Sam’s attention when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.
Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with his family which Sam had been estranged from periodically since teenage-hood, going back to his own roots, making peace with his old growing up neighborhood, he started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when he was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in his mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that he went for reconciliation. To find out what his roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before he could rightly remember the early days. And in that process he finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to him.
The thing was simplicity itself. See his 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 Sam’s 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 Sam’s childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although he 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 Sam’s 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 Sam’s older brother Prescott was born and while his mother was carrying him. Apparently they stayed for several months in Hazard before they left to go back to Olde Saco before Sam was born since he had been born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in his DNA, was just harkening to him when he got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
The young son of a Dhaka garment worker calls
on Western brands and retailers to implement safety reforms in their Bangladesh
factories. Consumers worldwide pushed to make it happen. Credit: Worker Rights
Consortium
CIW, NESRI and WRC publish reflection in
Huffington Post on consumers’ power to demand workers’ rights at home,
abroad…
Labor Day is a day we set aside to celebrate the contributions of workers,
across the country and around the globe, to the ever growing richness of our
daily lives. From delicious fruits and vegetables available in stores year
round, to gadgets affordable to the working man and woman that only the
wealthiest among us could have dreamed of owning just years ago, the world of
abundance enjoyed by even the average consumer today was simply unimaginable to
past generations. Labor can be proud of the world it has created.
Unfortunately, the wealth and wellbeing created by workers — from
Immokalee to Bangladesh — is not shared as equitably as it might be, and workers
around the globe are organizing to demand a fairer share. In good news for
workers this Labor Day, consumers are beginning to step up and do their part to
demand a fairer economy, and never have consumers commanded more power than they
do today.
The alliance with consumers has been key to the success of the Campaign for
Fair Food, and the CIW is not alone among worker organizations in seeking to
harness the power of consumers to demand change from the corporations that buy
and sell the things workers produce. And that’s why, ahead of the long weekend,
the CIW’s Greg Asbed teamed up with Scott Nova from the Workers’ Rights
Consortium and Noelle Damico from the National Economic and Social Rights
Initiative to pen a response to a Huffington Post special report from July
titled, “The Myth of the Ethical Shopper”...
something everyone can do; get these up in YOUR
neighborhood;
put a website address on it (in place of "Slim" - can't let
real-estate go to waste :-) perhaps
topdocumentaryfilms.com/everybodys-gotta-learn-sometime/ [tinyurl.com/my3zgq]
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******* An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Working Class Everywhere!
******* Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A while back my longtime friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alternative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th (2011) scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past period (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally, content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometimes Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
***********
General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names.
Josh had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. As a paid political commentator for various publications Josh has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. He brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. He donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
Postscript from Markin:
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.”
On The 103rd Anniversary Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-Reflections In A Wobblie Wind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
One night Bart Webber, the now retired master print shop operator in Carver who made his mark in the business by early on in the 1960s counter-cultural explosion hiring a silkscreen artist to take advantage of craze for emblazoned posters and tee-shirts, and Frank Jackman who provided Bart with plenty of such business after taking his first trip west with the late Peter Paul Markin from up the road in North Adamsville and telling Bart of the craze for such materials out in Golden Gate San Francisco when he came back were cutting up old touches at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Plymouth. Since Bart and Frank had reconnected several years before via the “magic” of the Internet when they were both seeking information about an upcoming class reunion they periodically, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, or Johnny Callahan, would gather together and discuss old times, or if in a philosophical or political mood attempt to figure out what all that meant.
Back in the 1960s, the earlier part of that decade at least neither Bart nor Frank were all that political, were not ready to slay the dragon, and had both gravitated to the musical, sexual and dope end of what was going on at the time. It was only later in the decade after one of their hang around boys from high school, quiet Billy Badger, was killed during the Vietnam War in some jungle outpost whose name they still could not pronounce correctly that they began to go to the anti-war marches and take part in various acts of civil disobedience by sitting in at draft boards, including the hometown Carver one, blocking government buildings and stopping traffic to make political points, stuff like that. They had both been arrested and held for several days in a football stadium (then RFK Stadium) during the great if doomed May Day action in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they tried, futilely tried, along with thousands of others to shut down the government, a government which had no intention of ending the war. That dramatic action was something of a last hurrah for the pair as they both agreed afterward that something more than a symbolic street action where they were easily defeated by the massed arms of the state was necessary to change the way the business of government was done in this country.
During this short few year activist period though they had also read a lot, been caught up in left-wing reader circles, had read significant labor and left-wing history including plenty of Marxist-tinged material that was something of the flavor of the month at one point once all the student-centered actions proved to come up empty and the pair had picked their villains and heroes accordingly. And although they both forsook political activism as the seventies brought quiet on the left-wing political fronts and they went back to Carver “normal”, Bart to amp up his commercial printing operation once the silk screen craze died down in order to provide for his growing family and Frank to editorial work with a small commercial publishing house, they separately had kept up an interest on what went right and wrong back then as the years went by. So it would not be out of character at one of their gatherings for anybody to comment on almost anything political whether they were going to do anything about the matter or not.
This one night in particular Bart had gotten on his “high horse” about the odd-ball commemoration craze that had kind of snuck up on everybody with the advent of 24/7/365 media coverage of events and the need to “fill in” the time on slow news days or periods with hype, bells and whistles and the appropriate “talking heads” to explain what it meant to a candid world, or better an indifferent world. What Bart had meant by this reference was that unlike in the old days when there was a certain order to anniversary dates like five, ten, twenty-five, fifty and so on observances now there were odd-ball ones like the thirtieth this or fortieth that. The reason that Bart had brought that subject up that particular night was that he had recently seen and heard a jumble of coverage about the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City] and the thirty-fifth anniversary of the release of Dave Sargent’s masterful song, Don’t Rock The Boat. Frank, in response, challenged Bart on this point although he acknowledged that the craze existed, was something of a media and social networking contrived firestorm, and that far too many events were getting odd-ball year recognition. Frank, remembering as he had to in his later jobs on the editorial staffs of publishing houses, the Verve LeftPublishingCo in particular, which inclined to publish left-wing book and academic studies and to republish classics of major works on their sometimes odd-ball years, that certain events fell outside of the normal anniversary cycles they had known from childhood. To make his point Frank mentioned that the recent 144th anniversary of the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the first working-class in power government, if short-lived, in history, the upcoming 98th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, although since 1991 a major world working-class defeat with the demise of the Soviet Union and the 103rd anniversary of the great IWW-led (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 one of the great strikes of the pre-World War One world all fit into his exceptional category.
Now you have to know the long-time one-upsmanship characteristic that had been a part of the relationship between Frank and Bart since early high school which the years apart had not diminished to know that once Frank created the exceptions Bart would challenge him on such assertions. [And not just that pair, the whole hang-around Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street gang, Frankie Riley in particular who had made it an art-form, on lonely girl-less, car-less, dough-less weekend nights, and almost any night in summer almost made a “religion” of one-upping even if a guy said a color was brown and another guy would “correct” him and say beige.]Bart had no quarrel with the commemoration of the Paris Commune which in his funny now very middle-class and prosperous way said could be celebrated yearly since the leadership of that government such as it was didn’t exclude anybody but known counter-revolutionaries, spies, and thieves from participation and he had been to Paris and had taken part in the annual commemoration in the late 1970s. Bart also said he could see why there would have been an annual commemoration of the Russian Revolution while the Soviet Union existed even if he personally was still in thrall to the red scare Cold War anti-Stalinist ethos of his, his family’s, his town’s and his country’s attitudes toward that event but he would be damned why anybody would do so once the whole Potemkin Village edifice fell apart at the first serious wind in 1991. [Frank less in thrall to that Cold War ethos did an end around on Bart and reminded him that in 1972 just as they were getting wary of the political they had both attended, both had wanted to attend the fifty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the revolution put on by the Soviet-American Friendship Association which in turn brought Bart back to the point that at least there had been an actual dysfunctional society to pay homage to.] What really befuddled Bart though was about the Lawrence strike of 1912 which while important in Wobblie history and left-wing trade union history didn’t seem to merit special odd-ball anniversary status any more than the great general strikes in 1934 in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco which had a couple of years before been correctly honored on their seventy-fifth anniversaries.
Needless to say despite a few hours back and forth that night, despite a few too many high-shelf whiskies consumed too quickly as they got a little hot under their respective collars Frank later when he thought about what Bart had said decided to write a little something to argue for the great strike’s inclusion in the exception category. Here is what he had to say:
“Every kid who has had wanderlust, even just a starry little, little bit on his or her way to the big bad world had said “bread and roses” under his or her breathe (and not just shop-worn shop girls drawing insufficient pay to buy bread let alone roses while waiting for some immigrant young man from their respective immigrant communities to sweep them off their feet and move them into married bliss in some cozy triple-decker close to the mighty Merrimac and from there who knew where in gilded golden age America). Meaning every half-starved (brought up on baloney sandwiches, grey clumpy oatmeal, and flatulent baked beans and franks), ill-clothed (older brother hand-me-down, too big, too long, too last year or the year before fashion, worse, Mother-selected at the local Bargain Center, home to all the train wreaks of 1950s fashions), hard-scrabble kid (hustling dough here and there collecting bottles, selling newspapers trying to out-hustle the crippled “newsie” down the block, a go at the Mayfair swells caddying at the country club, pearl-diving [washing dishes], and if worse came to worse, even later on the midnight creep, hit Ma’s pocketbook for change), memory Carver kids too, reduced to life in walking paces (no automobile, no father automobile in trade in every three years prosperous America), footsore (those raggedy-assed Thom McAn’s bought for Easter time well-worn by summer’s end after walking what seemed like half the continent), time-lost sore (self-explanatory), endless bus waiting sore (walking half that half the continent rather than hoping against hope for that privately run solo Eastern Mass to come with its surly driver), and not the speed, the “boss” hi-blown ’57 gilded cherry red Chevy speed of the 20th century go-go (and, hell, not even close in the 21st century speedo Audi super go-go) itching, itching like crazy, like feverish night sweats crazy, to bust out of the small, no, tiny, four-square wall “the project” existence and have a room, a big room, of his or her own (shared dream with that shop-worn shop girl, and that crippled newsie too).
Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses (the ocean trains catering to Mayfair swells and not to pensive walk tow-headed boys), crashing, crashing if that is the right word to tepid waiting shores),flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to hate all such earthen colors to some evil muck prairie home expanses (and desires not to stay put in the center of nowhere), up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck(winter stuck, light jacket against snow-bound white howls). Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier, hell, go back to that turn of the century, 20th century and you will still not be far off, double hell go forward to the 21st century and if you believe the “talking heads you most certainly will not be far off) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?
And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock walking daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. Down the road to break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.
Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, yah, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?
And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that “the projects” rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Yah, crap like that happens, happens all the time in “the projects” time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.
And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.
Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got caught short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Yah, just like one-eyed Big Bill (Haywood who loved his Nevada Jane according to the lore), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, later that stalwart Stalinist that every red fearing young Carver boy crawled away from), Joe Hill (executed out in the Utahs, Frank Little (ditto private posse Montana), Vincent Saint John (the “Saint” who held it all together in those tough times around World War I when it counted, and me. Yah, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.
Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that childish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.
If that coming up short against the monster back in the day doesn’t deserve full yearly recognition from one Bartlett Webber then nothing more I can say to give him the spirit of the commemoration will do it.”
Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music Of The Carter Family (First Generation)
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.
As a kid, as a very conscious Northern city boy, I could not abide that kind of music but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high school when Brian Pirot would drive us down to Cambridge and after in college when I used to hang around Harvard Square to be around the burgeoning folk scene that was emerging for what I later would call the folk minute of the early 1960s I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. (The version done by Alice Stuart at the time gleaned when I hear her perform at the Club Nana in the Square one time when I had enough dough for two coffees, a shared pastry and money for the “basket” for a date, a cheap date. The only Carter Family song that I consciously could claim I knew was theirs was Under the Weeping Willow although I may have unconsciously known others from seventh grade music class when Mr. Dasher would bury us with all kind of songs and genre from the American songbook so we would not get tied down to that heathen “rock and roll” that drove him crazy when we asked him to play some for us.) But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.
Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family which I had been estranged from periodically since teenage-hood, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early day. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.
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.
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From the American Left History blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2009
With Unemployment Rising- The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program
Google To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages
and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
