When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

 

 

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby

Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh
Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Frank Jackman

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly (although there is some question even in my own mind and I went through the whole thing from folk boy to  patriotic soldier to flower child about whether the movement for all its high gloss publicity and whirlwind effect dominated as much as we though). That decade or so from about 1964 to about 1974   is nevertheless beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers (the ones born immediately after the war as the troops came home, came off the transports, and guys and gals were all hopped up to start families, figure out how to finance that first white picket fence house and use the GI bill to get a little bit ahead in the world, at least get ahead of their parents’ dead-end great depression woes) who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since we of the so-called generation of ’68, so called by some wag who decided that the bookends of the rage of the American Democratic Convention in Chicago that year and the defeat of the revolutionary possibilities in France in May of that year signaled the beginning of the ebb tide for the whole, who are still up for a fight against the military monster who is still with us are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive.

Thinking back a bit to that time a thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, something new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of our childhoods (that time always absurdly symbolically topped off by the sight of elementary school kids, us, crouched under some rickety old desk arms over our head some air-raid drill practice time as if, as the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can attest to, that would do the slightest bit of good if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs hit. Yeah, the Cold War time too when what did we know except to keep our obedient heads down under our desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if we were ready to face the bleak future if we survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally I remember telling somebody then that I would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take my chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do us.)

 

For a while anyway we were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with our world, our world even if we had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of us who were caught up in the whirl thought it would be for only a while or at least thought it would fade so fast just as we thought, young and healthy as we were, that we would live forever. But if you took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where I like to start dating my own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then I would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South in the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence I have found that these are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star  James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando in The Wild One and a brooding Montgomery Cliff in almost anything to the mix of what we could relate to as icons of alienation and angst .)   

 

An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys (and very few gals since that Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-William Burroughs-Allen Ginsberg mix was strictly a male bonding thing) who listened to the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz and wrote up a storm based on that sound, declared a new sound, that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang.

Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what we, or some of us, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed our parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.” Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for our parents we wanted guys who set the buzz going, let us think about getting some kicks out of life, that maybe with some thought we would survive, and if we didn’t at least we had the kicks.

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of our generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought as I get older and hear more stories about the guys who didn’t make it back to the “real” world after “Nam, those guys you see downtown in front of the VA hospitals, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.

 

There were more things, things like the “Pill” (and if you need to know what pill and its purpose where have you been) that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, sex, sex beyond the missionary position of timeless legends, something very different if the dramatic increase in sales of the Kama Sutra meant anything, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward.

Cultural things like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters (stuff that we only knew negatively about, about staying away from, thru reefer madness propaganda, thru the banning of some drugs that were previously legal like sweet sister cocaine and taunt Nelson Algren hard life down at the base of society in films like The Man With The Golden Arm), the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name (my moniker at one time was Be-Bop Benny draw what you will out of that the idea being like among some hipster blacks, although with less reason, we wanted to get rid of our slave names)  fashion (the old college plaid look fading in the face of World War II army surplus, feverish colors, and consciously mismatched outfits and affectation (“cool, man, cool” and “right on’ said it all). More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission when on the road, or later on the bum). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of us in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of us have our specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that we still live with for not taking the omens more seriously. (My ebb tide, as I have described elsewhere, was the events around May Day 1971 when we seriously tried, or thought we were seriously trying, to shut down the government in D.C. if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for our efforts. After those days I, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than we were about creating the new and that we had better rethink how to slay the monster we were up against and act accordingly.)

Then we have the photograph (see above) that graces this short screed, and which pictorially encapsulates a lot of what went then, a lot about which side were you on when the deal went down. This photograph is almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-“newer world” mix stirred up in the 1960s. Three self-assured women (the “girls” of photograph a telltale sign of what society, even hip, progressive society thought about women in those slightly pre-women’s liberation time but they, we, would learn the difference) comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt (and mother dread thoughts about whether daughter knew about the pill, and heaven forbid if she was sexually active, a subject not for polite society, not for mother-daughter conversation, then she damn better well know, or else).

They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no, outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured here. I wonder how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. I did not refuse induction for a whole bunch of reasons but then I did not have any girlfriends who made that demand, mine early on anyway were as likely to want me to come back on a shield as those warrior-proud ancient Greek women. Too bad. But I like to think that today we could expect more women to be like the sisters above. Yeah, more, many  more of the latter, please as we continue in the nightmare world of endless war.                     

Once Again….Then-With The Carver High School Class of 1962 In Mind

Once Again….Then-With The Carver High School Class of 1962 In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Jack Dawson as he prepared to get ready for his 50^th high school class reunion (or rather prepared to think about going to the event) in the early days of January, 2012 wondered out loud to his old friend Josh Breslin, a guy from Olde Saco whom he had met out in the California great blue-pink American West night back in the mid-1960s after he had graduated from high school himself, whether their parents or grandparents had in their 50^th anniversary times wondered, wondered out loud about all the changes, social changes that had taken place in their lifetimes. Since for both men that was a moot question as both sets of parents and grandparents had long gone to earth they could only speculate. Josh thought that his own Irish-French-Canadian (mother nee LeBlanc) parents and before them his F-C grandparents (he never met his paternal grandparents) pretty much acted like social change was a social disease and kept to the various old country ways (and old America ways too). Maybe, Josh thought, it had to do with the isolated existences in mill-towns, both Olde Saco and Carver being such worn-out towns, working hard and keeping their own counsel (no “airing dirty linen in public” the order of the day) and that particular Catholic fatalism which they were both exposed to as kids that attached to everything and drove both men crazy when they were trying to jail-break out of the old time mold.         

One night over high-shelf scotches, gone were the days of heavy drug use which got them acquainted back in the day and prior to that cheap low-shelf whiskies and lower shelf rotgut wines, in the Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Olde Saco across from the famous Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street they decided to play a game about the changes they could recall from back then. First off was the change in attitude toward drugs which back then were seen as the province of dead-beat junkies and odd-ball New York hipsters (read jazz musicians, read black people). They had to laugh when Jack said they probably ingested more drugs all the “beats” combined. Another was the change from fag-baiting guys who seemed girlish and dyke-baiting once they had understood the idea of different strokes for different (none of their forebears would have understood the whole gay marriage phenomenon). Josh mentioned attitudes toward cigarettes, especially since that was “cool” in searching for girls and both having been long-time heavy smokers who had only quit after many tries shook their heads at that idea. Of course the whole thing with women (then girls) had gone topsy-turvy with woman now in professions like the law and medicine that were unheard of and while both their mothers had worked (in the respective town mills) and so had been working Moms that was a necessity then to keep the families afloat and had been the cause of many caustic comments by guys whose mothers did not work, did not need to work.

Jack and Josh went on that way for a while until they ran out of broad-based big ticket social subjects to think about, ran out of  booze too as the hour got late and Jimmy the bartender wanted to close up. So as they walked up the street to Josh’s house about ten blocks away they started on the silly stuff. Stuff in high school like why did the boys and girls have separate gym classes, why were there separate sex bowling teams for Christ sake. Why girls could not run track like they had done (before that “cool” smoking stuff shifted their priorities). Why girls could only play half-court basketball. Big question: why even on a friendly date was the guy, them, poor as church mice guys, supposed to pay for everything and “dutch treat” was considered bad form, very bad form even when the girls had plenty of dough. It went on like that until they got to Josh’s house and then they having exhausted the subject started talking about whether Jack was going to his class reunion. Yeah, there was plenty of wondering going on that night, wondering too about whether when their kids were getting ready for their 50^th anniversary high school class reunions they would be wondering about their what their respective fathers made of their times.

[In the event Jack Dawson decided for a host of good reasons not to go to his class reunion which really is a story for another day. Josh, Class of 1965, is still up in the air about the question from last report.]

The Last Time I Saw Paris-Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast-An Encore

The Last Time I Saw Paris-Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast-An Encore  

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, MacMillan Publishing, New York, 1964

A while back I wrote a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last work, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously in 1941 where I commented that the publisher had done something of a disservice to the great writer’s name by publishing something that was not completed and that would not, on the internal evidence, add to his place in the American literary pantheon (he make its either under the old dead white men version or the modern, more inclusive pantheon on the strength of The Great Gatsby alone). I stated that at most the publication would over the long haul be grist for academic studies and not the general reading public and so it has proved except for the brief flare-up around the initial publication and the much later film version of the book. I also mentioned in that review a comparison with the book under review, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, also published posthumously in 1964 which had been completed and could with the normal editing make sense to publish.

I noted that, moreover, the subject matter of Hemingway’s efforts, his take on the post-World War I American (and others) ex-patriate scene in Paris among the “lost generation” during the decade of the 1920s provided plenty of useful information about those times for the general reader as well as some interesting tidbits and leads for the academic reader. I think that is the key different in the publishing history of the two works.      

 Hemingway, a “veteran” of World War I, newly and apparently happily married to his first wife, Hadley, felt alienated from the American scene back home, felt alienated from his journalistic career undertaken to make a living, and joined the exile to Paris to see what it was all about, and maybe write some things, who knows maybe the great American novel (he had the ego for such a project, no question). Hemingway became something of the prototypal creative artist living in “splendid squalor” in the crowded quarters of literary Paris with its cafes and cabarets. So much of the book, maybe too much, is spent on his travels around Paris and France, his various skiing expeditions, and endless descriptions of the foods and wines, cheaply bought, that he and his comrades ate.           

But that is filler. What grabbed this reader were the descriptions of his writing and reading work habits which were pretty regular despite the wine, women, and song aspects that he tells us about. And of that great bookstore/lending library run by Sylvia Beach which must have been something to have been part of back then. Of course this little book is a goldmine of information about “being at the creation” of the modernist artistic movement which blossomed in Paris in the 1920s when he name drops meeting almost every important cultural figure who passed through that town.   Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Picasso, Ezra Pound and on and on met usually at the home of fellow exile, Gertrude Stein, who is even today underestimated as a gifted writer.  And to put paid to this book plenty of gossipy stuff including a ton of information about his hot and cold relationship with that F. Scott Fitzgerald who name I invoked at the start of this review.  Thanks for publishing this enjoyable, readable, informative book.   

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East! –Stop The
U.S. Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

I have already mentioned the night not long ago when my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern Massachusetts, Sam Lowell, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure while having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also mentioned which is germane here in discussing the broader category of the seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at the close of our lives so that we never again utter the word “peace” with anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the last couple of generations of America’s wars has for over a quarter of a decade been determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first instrument, of American policy in what it sees as a hostile world (a view that it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of devastation brought forth has changed).  

I also noted Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective on the killer/spy drones. I thought his argument perhaps reflected an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. More importantly that Sam, who marched in any number of anti-Vietnam War parades with me after my service was over and I gave him the “skinny” on what was really going on in that war had in the post-9/11 period like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions. Something in that savage criminal attack in New York City against harmless civilians got the war lusts, yes, the war lusts up of people, good, simple people like Sam and lots of “peaceniks” from our generation to kill everything that got in our way. LBJ and Richard Nixon would have in their graves rather ironic smiles over that change of heart.   

And those many who changed positions, who sulkily went along with whatever was “necessary,” including I remember one time a woman who identified herself as a Quaker who, I swear, asked plaintively on some radio talk show I was listening to whether we (meaning the American government and not her individually I assume but who knows) could not surgically nuclear bomb Al Qaeda from all memory. Sam got caught up in this war lust wave and has since, starting with his initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, wound up in the end left with egg all over his face.

But Sam is nothing if not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and the with it whatever rationale made the American government built a thing from which it had to run.

As is also usual these days like with the question of killer/spy drones we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I again got to thinking about the issue of the debacle of American policy and while not intending to directly counter Sam arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:

 

“Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least more vociferously so) as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred at last count (but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti), to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to,  quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).

Of course the existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless American blunders from the get go has helped create.

All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes puts paid to that thought).

And during all this deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?

Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!     

***

Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent (small) anti-war rally:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]  

“I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man”-With Bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman In Mind

“I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man”-With Bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Once somebody, I think it was the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt who also hailed from Texas, asked the legendary bluesman Lightning Hopkins what the blues were. What they meant to him, what they meant in the great scheme of things. He answered quickly like he knew what was coming, what Townes was going to ask like he had been asked the question many times, or had thought about it a lot and had come up with this stock answer when asked the question-“the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind.”  Now the old reprobate, and he was from all the tales about his doings indicate, probably had other answers or thoughts about the blues like a woman getting you down, about Captain down on the Jim Crow plantation always on your ass, about some hard luck story of money ill-spent and about the morning after Jimmy Joe’s corn liquor hang-over but that answer brought a number of other phrases from blues songs to my mind. Brought to mind to try to define what the blues is, why it has “spoken” to lots of people over time, including old time blues aficionados like me. 

You name it, name your malady, and old time blues guys have coined phrases to fit the bill. Not to neglect the female blues singers who in the 1920s and 1930s actually were more in demand that the old plantation-bound male blues singers, but they might like Bessie Smith tell you that the blues are “good man is hard to find” or that it is “hard to love someone when that someone don’t love you” or maybe that she is looking for her nowhere around daddy to “put a little sugar in her bowl” if she is feeling that way, feeling a little salacious. But the best phrase from a female blues singer was to my mind done by Sippy Wallace -“don’t advertise your man” meaning do not tell your woman friends about your man’s virtues, physical or otherwise, or you will be singing the blues.

All of the previous thoughts were brought to mind recently when I was thinking about how important the blues were in my own life whenever I was feeling downhearted. How they got me through a few rough spots. I had along the way been thinking about my response back in the 1980s when I lived in a studio apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston after my divorce (number two) and the young guy downstairs from me, a good guy named Otty Venise, told me over drinks one night at Charlie’s Den on Charles Street that Bessie Smith actually helped him get over his blues. (He was having women troubles just then since his flame had just ditched him for another man, an old boyfriend). And I had to agree that a heavy dose of Miss Smith would chase some blues away. Chase some woman blues away.             

It is funny though that not all my blues memories revolve around woman relationship troubles, hang-overs, no dough (due to the settlements from those two divorces if nothing else), some sweat-filled dead end job, or the troubles in the world just getting the best of me. Once the blues, or my use of a phrase from a blues song got me into political hot water.

Now my politics are pretty far left, and pretty narrow. Mainly around the fight to end the endless wars this country had immersed itself in and the fight for some kind of social justice be it opposition to the death penalty, an increase in the minimum wage or to free political prisoners here and abroad. Stuff like that. Like I say narrowly focused but important. As part of what I do to, especially in the age of the Internet and social media, is make commentary on various issues via things like blogs (and now Twitter). Back in the early part of the presidential campaign of 2008 when Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were going at each other tooth and nail for the Democratic Party presidential nomination I was making plenty of commentary about each one. Not that I favored either, like I said my politics are to the left of that party even in the best of times. What did have me incensed (along with plenty of others who wound up in the Obama camp, at least for a while) was Hilary’s vote in 2003 for the Iraq War and her basic refusal to recant since she had egg all over here face from supporting what turned out to be a bogus war, which she knew, or should have known was bogus. Somebody, actually more than one person, more than one feminist friend was all over me to support her as the first serious woman presidential candidate (although in a face-off against the first serious black presidential candidate that argument lost some of its steam). Despite my known indifference to party politics. Between that pressure and a book review of a fawning political biography of Hilary I got my dander up and took up a line from the old bluesman Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman-“I’d rather be with the devil that be that woman’s man.” Jesus did I take heat over that one not only from my feminist friends who I expected it from in a sense but from the “don’t like” comments on the book review despite the fact that I had given beside the glossing over of the Iraq vote plenty of other reasons to not like the book, and not like the candidate including a big dose of Clinton fatigue. As now in 2015 we will be subject to plenty of both Clinton and Bush fatigue.

But leave it to the blues, to a blues woman, to bail me out of my troubles. Once I was on the ropes and had to figure out some way to cut across the sting on Hilary I had to check out some other blues lyrics to “get right.” And I didn’t have to look far. One Rory Block, she of the younger generation of blues aficionados who have taken to covering the old blues standards, actually did her own female-etched version of the Skip James song except she sang-“I’d rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Thanks Rory, thanks a million.     

Now ask me just ask me about my opinion, about supporting one Hilary Rodham Clinton in 2016. You know the answer already. Sanctified too. As to the more generic question-What is the blues? The blues is…

The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

The Son Of Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Jack Callahan thought he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road that had much to do with his wanderings, got him going in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin called the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams I will do so here. That “crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings, that search had begun, and finished, about fifty years before when he left the road for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life.

But maybe it is best to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day” get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block from where Jimmy lives. We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, most recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking (drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys). The night I am talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think, mentioned that he had read in the Globe up in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart and did as thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation of ’68 did and went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter Paul Markin.

Yeah, we still moan for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our youths come up, it might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies” was however a time when we could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions). We would change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre), and getting a “boss,” like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past square one with girls in those days).            

Markin was whistling in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading the heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart Webber in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better then once a couple of Cambridge girls asked me if I liked it one time in a coffeehouse and I said of course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several month.

But enough of me and my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota). In a lot of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all, all except  in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement (and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”  Add in that he also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.        

So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.               

Here the odd thing, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.           

But enough of the quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after about sixty-five kind of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade when he read about how his hero Benjamin Frankin had started in the business, get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading the book after about seven million drum-fire assault by Markin pressing him to read the thing.

So there he was by himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going  to hitchhike to save money and hell just to do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully started his trip on. There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French- Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of love was all about. Bart was ecstatic to have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the 1940s.

Ti Jean whose did not look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown, kind of blew that off when Providence seemed to provincial to him, had flew to New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters and hustlers. After the war was over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license, didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you could shake a stick, got laid more times that you would think by girls who you would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares” were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book that was never published because there were to many squares who could not relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.

Then Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin.               

A View From The Left -The Class Struggle In Greece- A New York CIty Forum

You Will Pay-With The War Tax Resisters League In Mind

You Will Pay-With The War Tax Resisters League In Mind

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Steve Whipple and Brad Lucas had never had many arguments in their long association together. That “association” business to not put a too formal spin on the matter started long ago when they were first introduced at the children’s session of the York Hill Friends’ Meeting in Salem. While Sam had drifted away from the Quakerly ways in the late 1960s after many fitful nights and more than a few “heated” arguments with his late parents who had, to use a term of the times, freaked out, when he decided to quit the traditional Friends’ Meeting House in Cambridge and join the break-away younger set who met at the Harvard Divinity School and had never looked back they had remained steadfast friends even though Brad still kept the faith at York Hill. Of course brought up under the guidance of the “inner light” the tendency of the two men would have been to reason things out and if things could not be reasoned out then they would agree to disagree and let the matter rest or until the situation changed enough to warrant a change of heart on one or the other’s part.  

 

For the most part that is how they maintained their long-term friendship which beyond the association business already mentioned which they had no say in since their respective parents had belonged to the same York Hill Meeting had survived relatively unscathed by modern standards. Brad had supported Steve when he broke away from the Cambridge Meeting although he was not altogether sure of why the young radical Quakers needed to seek another space except like a lot of their generation one of the ways of expressing one’s independence was to automatically do the opposite of what one’s parents were doing. Brad had done the same when he decided to pursue an academic career rather than join his father in his accounting business. Brad had also supported Steve when at the height of the draft resistance despite the almost automatic military exemption that young Quaker men were entitled to as a historically recognized pacifistic religion he had refused to register in order to gain that exemption. As it turned out the government despite threats over his failure to register never prosecuted the case (probably assuming that some judge would throw the thing out for wasting governmental resources when there were plenty of non-Quaker draft resisters with no such history to fill the bastinado). And Steve in his turn had supported Brad when he decided that he would do “alternative service” out among the Puma Indians in Arizona rather than resist.

 

So just two gentle angry guys going about their respective businesses and keeping some kind of connection to the peace movement that they were almost from birth organically attached to. That is until the Iraq War blew up in their faces back in 2003 (really as the war clouds were forming in 2002 since they were among the first in Boston to publicly at Park Street Station, an historic protest location on the Boston Common, come out of their shells in the aftermath of 9/11 and say “no” to Bush 43’s damn war intentions). No, there had been no question about the need to organize and protest to the high heavens about the bogus reasons for the war but rather after the “slam-dunk victory” what to do when the pre-war mass opposition had dissipated.

See Steve and Brad were if nothing else children of the 1960s anti-war explosion in America as the senseless, merciless and bloody Vietnam War dragged on devouring the flower of both American and Vietnamese youth for no known purpose on the American side anyway (they were both somewhat sympathetic to the national aspirations of the Vietnamese despite the blood spilled). They had been as very young men (along with their respective parents) among the first few thousands (maybe less) who had marched through Central Park in New York under the auspices of the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee calling for an immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam to the hoots and catcalls of “commie, reds, and traitors” by jeering passers-by. But they had also witnessed the increasing opposition from the young, mainly students, mainly men subject to draft induction and their friends and supporters, to the professors and academics, to elements of the political leadership, to the working-class people, and eventually to the housewives who stirred in righteous indignation. Finally as well in a sign that the whole project was doomed the anti-war fever got to the rank and file soldiers who had fought and bled in the war. So a growing and massive opposition evolved over time, maybe too long a time but evolved. Both men had been (have been) befuddled by the lack of opposition in the streets (where such matters as war and peace are resolved one way or the other) over time as the Afghan and Iraq debacles dragged on and on. It was almost in exact inverse relationship to the build-up of opposition over Vietnam. And hence Brad’s dilemma, or rather the government’s as he liked to put it.     

  

Brad (Steve too but he would have taken a different tack) had frankly had his fill over the previous several years of lonely small vigils on busy intersections around Boston or on the Common, had had his fill of teach-ins and shout-outs in university halls, had had his fill of arrests chained to the fence in front of the White House on snowy December days and humid spring nights in opposition to the various escalations and calls from troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan (calls still necessary under the theory of endless war by both the Bush and Obama administrations and probably the way things are going the next one too). So in 2011 he decided on his own as a symbolic material gesture of personal witness (which is the way the Quakerly like to put the matter) to stop paying his federal taxes, his war taxes as he called them, stopped being complicit with the war governments in the only real way that a private citizen acting on his or her own could protest the endless wars.   

 

The government, the IRS as the main collection agency of the government, is very jealous of is prerogative as far as collecting dough to keep the government running goes. So naturally when Brad had done the various maneuvers necessary to perk the government’s interest as to why a single-tax payer guy with a substantial income was not paying any taxes they went after him, tried all the various means they had to tie up every resource they could of his in order to get their blood money. The whole case is still in litigation and it has been a see-saw battle between Brad and the IRS so we will not know the final toll for a while. That part is not important, or of only lesser importance, compared to Steve’s getting “mad,” angry or whatever word you want to use to show that Steve though (thinks) that Brad’s actions were foolhardy and in the language of their youth, “elitist” and off-the-charts.

 

See Steve when he moved away from Quakerly ways also moved away from that “personal witness” business as a poor substitute for building mass actions (or trying to which is as important to him). That is why for the first time in a long time Steve and Brad have had an argument that has been brewing for a while now. Maybe an argument which will last as long as the endless wars. Yeah, maybe that long.         

 

[The story of the brother in the leaflet above, Matthew Hoh, presents another aspect of Brad Lucas’ argument. Personally I follow Joe Hill- Don’t mourn, organize!]