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Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Warrior Writers-From Those Who Know What The Cost Of War Is All About
From The Archives Of The Maine Peace Walk 2015
Direct link:
http://knox.villagesoup.com/p/maine-walk-for-peace-on-midcoast/1427797?cid=891905
Maine Walk for
Peace on Midcoast
By Dagney C. Ernest
| Oct 14, 2015
For the fourth time in recent years, Maine Veterans for
Peace is walking through the state, passing through the Midcoast Oct. 11, 12, 13
and 14 on the 175-mile trek from Ellsworth to Portsmouth, N.H.
This year’s Maine
Walk for Peace is focused on raising awareness of the Pentagon’s impact on the
world’s oceans, with a special emphasis on the Navy’s use of sonar, offshore
weapons testing and the under- construction base on South Korea’s Jeju Island.
But the walkers have more local sites in mind, as well;; as part of their walk,
they plan to deliver a letter to Frederick Harris, president of Bath Iron Works
and General Dynamics NASSCO.
That task lay ahead of them when they passed through the
Midcoast, spending the night of Oct. 11 in Belfast; Columbus Day in Camden; and
Oct. 13 in Rockland. At each evening stop, the walkers, organized by Maine VFP
Secretary Bruce Gagnon, enjoyed a potluck meal and shared their mission before
heading home with community members or bedding down in a host space: First
Church UCC in Belfast; Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church in Camden; and
First Universalist Church in Rockland.
In the Rockland church’s basement meeting hall, the Oct.
13 program featured opening remarks by Tarak Kauff, up from New York state to be
in the walk; a reading of the BIW letter by Morgana Warner Evans of West Bath,
spending her fall break from her senior year at college to join the Peace Walk
for the third time; a reading by Boston-area poet and Gulf War vet Eric
Wasileski; and a guitar-accompanied performance of Morrissey’s “In Mexico” by
Jason Rawn of Hope, who has been part of the protests at Jeju.
The group stepped out at 9 a.m. sharp Oct. 14, heading
for Damariscotta and a night at the Friends Meeting House. Driving ahead of them
is a van decorated with a colorful “Demilitarize Our Oceans!” banner and topped
with dolphin sculpture with peaceful protest history, having gone cross-country
in a cart with Greenpeace. Both were created by Hancock artist Russell Wray, who
is among the walkers.
The group will be joined in Freeport by a member of the
Nipponzan Myohoji order of Buddhist monks and nuns, who regularly lead the
non-violent action. In addition to local support by hosts such as the Midcoast
Peace and Justice Group, Maine Walk for Peace is sponsored by Maine Veterans for
Peace, PeaceWorks, CodePink Maine, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats, Peace
Action Maine, the Boston-area Veterans for Peace Smedley Butler Brigade,
Portsmouth’s Seacoast Peace Response and the Global Network Against Weapons
& Nuclear Power in Space.
The peace walk, which began Oct. 9, will conclude
Saturday, Oct. 24, in Portsmouth. It is along Route 1 and the public is invited
and encouraged to join in for any portion. For schedule and more information and
a copy of this story with photos included, visit vfpmaine.org.
The Golden Rule (The Ship That Challenged The Nuclear Testing In The 1950s) Returns to Humboldt Bay
The Golden Rule Returns to Humboldt Bay
October 15, 2015
 The Golden Rule departed from Eureka on July 23rd and sailed to San Diego in time for the Veterans For Peace national convention. Since leaving San Diego, theGolden Rule has been “port-hopping” up the coast, making stops in Long Beach, Marina del Rey / Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Morro Bay / San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Berkeley, Sausalito and Noyo Bay / Fort Bragg. At each stop, the crew was interviewed by local media, feted at public events and potluck dinners, and raised funds to continue the mission of the Golden Rule –Sailing for a Nuclear-Free World. “This was a very successful voyage,” said crew member Helen Jaccard. “Everywhere we went, people were happy and excited to see the Golden Rule. We made many new friends.” In 1958, the Golden Ruleand her intrepid crew of Quaker peace activists brought worldwide attention to U.S. nuclear bomb testing in the South Pacific. Their highly publicized attempt to sail into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands was stopped cold by the U.S. Coast Guard in Honolulu, but they spurred a worldwide movement. In 1959 President Eisenhower stopped the testing and in 1963 President Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty with the UK and the USSR. Five years ago, after the famous 30-foot ketch was pulled from the bottom of Humboldt Bay, members of Veterans For Peace launched a campaign to restore the Golden Rule. Scores of volunteers and hundreds of donors made it possible. The Golden Rule is once again sailing for a nuclear free world. To find more about the Golden Rule peace boat, go to www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org. |
The Promise of a Socialist Society
The Promise of a Socialist Society
Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.
Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
(Quote of the Week)
Workers Vanguard No. 1025
|
3 1 May 2013
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TROTSKY
|
LENIN
|
The Promise of a Socialist Society
(Quote of the Week)
In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.
Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.
Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for.
So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Occasionally Ralph would come to Boston on trips and Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany (or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in the decade, was still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, minus Lena for quite a while now).
The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas to fortify them have been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of the their early radical political work together. The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music. Sam had noted that Ralph with a certain sorrow had stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was despite his and Sam’s continued good old cause left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces had in the end and at great cost had no trouble doing so). People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites if not before and despite the obvious failure of capitalist to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had to agree that they in effect too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making.
Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).
Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s of the war and later a bunch of social issues, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation struggle at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activist no longer spoke in such terms but the more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “gender” reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s).
No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a bogger himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change.
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head, anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a false pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic. Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).
See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war
movement for personal reasons at first reasons which had to do a lot with
ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking
world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism
before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul. Ralph’s story is
a little bit amazing, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in
Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s
electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what
was happening to drafted as infantry guy he had enlisted (three years against
the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical
field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed,
desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more
grunts to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central
Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on
just like the General wanted. He had even extended his tour to eighteen months
to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but
because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had
to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the
American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing
more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late
1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main
anti-war veterans group at the time and a real indication even today of how
unpopular that war was when the guys, mostly guys then, rose up against the
slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York
City mainly.
Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had
remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter
button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly,
explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole
support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed
away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s
print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later
open his own shop after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started
heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the
anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not
involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been
blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on.
Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him in
Vietnam though that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more
than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell
people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few
months to go he was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or
pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been
Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten
Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got
him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some
intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war but because his
friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that
went.
At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist
types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out
more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation
to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft
boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had
been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the
neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters
took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try
to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the
slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings
where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop
the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government
was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile
little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”
1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two
stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at
that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help
out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about
changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had come down to Washington with a
group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the
war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main
holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the
week)
So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that
even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had
previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the
notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to
symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the
government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who
had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the
National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day,
treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968,
treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who
raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.
They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching
for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those
few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong
personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next
several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed
was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that.
Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that
were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions
which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few
years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed.
Such thoughts even
with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back
of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were
not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an
icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes.
Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one
night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading
home.
And the Marxism did
not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had
taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built
from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his
main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old
Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his
campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be
done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more
importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days
to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind
Marxism, that impossible to read Das
Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with
seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976
when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around
with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation
struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist
years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked
like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy
old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.
After that time while
they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody,
some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they
would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered
back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly
a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term
picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an
almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking
their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that
had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red
collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed
just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor
once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam
thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers
will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph
could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good
old cause.”
This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit complete with tie or best dress on when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which made the hymns make sense. Like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry told Mr. Beethoven and his ilk to move on over certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind).
Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and got full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right and for a time on television, long after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment). No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.
Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. He spoke of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley in Spain where it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.
The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).
It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.
Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.
WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME-Stop The Never-ending Wars Now
*
* * *
WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
DPPer Christine Maguire
passed this along:
Almost a year after Cleveland police officers gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice while playing with a toy gun in a playground, his mother is still waiting for the officers involved to be held accountable. Local prosecutors -- like Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty -- work closely with police officers because they depend on
their testimony
to win cases. That means local prosecutors cannot be expected to hold those
same officers, their trusted colleagues, accountable for criminal
acts.
Almost a year after Cleveland police officers gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice while playing with a toy gun in a playground, his mother is still waiting for the officers involved to be held accountable. Local prosecutors -- like Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty -- work closely with police officers because they depend on
A week ago, McGinty released two
reports from outside experts that he had hired. Both reports concluded the
shooting was reasonable -- but within hours of their release the media uncovered
troubling facts about both experts. One had declared in a TV interview before
being hired -- and before he had all of the facts -- that the officers couldn’t
be blamed. Even worse, the second expert was once admonished by the U.S.
Department of Justice for being "unfaithful" to the law, "overly protective of
law enforcement" and going "too far to exonerate the use of
force.2"
Tamir’s death at the hands of
police was senseless, unnecessary, and preventable. When police kill unarmed
children, we expect them to be held accountable for their wrongdoing. We need to
act to make sure these officers are prosecuted.
SURJ members take action. We work
to confront racial injustice in our own communities and across the country. This
may be the only way to get justice for Tamir, so we need to show up.
*
* * *
BLOOD MONEY,
literally. . .
Alabama judge: Give
blood or go to jail
On Sept. 17,
Perry County Circuit Judge Marvin Wiggins gave two options to those unable to
afford their court fees: give blood or go to jail. Yesterday, the Southern
Poverty Law Center filed an ethics complaint with the Judicial Inquiry
Commission against the circuit judge for what SPLC Deputy Legal Director Sam
Brooke called a “violation of bodily integrity.” “It’s shocking to say that to
avoid jail, you have to give blood,” Brooke said Tuesday. “It’s fundamentally at
odds with how the system is supposed to work.” … According to
Evans, 54 people registered to give blood at that location that day. Of the 54
registrations, 47 people gave blood, and 41 of those units – about 5.5 gallons –
were discarded because it couldn’t be determined if that blood was volunteered.
More
Lawsuit Challenges a
Mississippi Debtors Prison
Low-income
residents of Jackson, Mississippi, are being coerced into working on a penal
farm in a “modern-day debtors prison” for being unable to pay municipal fees and
fines for misdemeanors, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal
court last week. The suit alleges that the City of Jackson, in Hinds County,
employs a “pay or stay” system in which impoverished plaintiffs who are unable
to pay court-ordered fines must work off their debts at the county’s penal farm
in nearby Raymond at a rate of $58 per day. Those unable or unwilling to work
can sit out their debts in jail at a rate of $25 per day. More
*
* * *
Wednesday,
October 28
Hearing on the Budget
for All Resolution!
Rally 12:30 pm ·
State House Steps
Hearing 1:30 pm
· State House Room A1
You voted for a Budget for All! Now
it’s time to have the Massachusetts Legislature send your message to Congress
and the President. In the big 2012 election, Massachusetts voted for the
Budget for All! public policy question, passing it by an average 3
to 1 margin in each of the 91 cities and towns where it appeared on the ballot
(including towns that voted for Romney or Scott Brown). That referendum called
on state senators and representatives to vote for a resolution from the Mass.
state legislature calling upon Congress and the President them to: Prevent cuts to vital programs
that help all of our families: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans
benefits, and housing, food and unemployment assistance.- Prevent cuts to vital programs that help all of our families: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, and housing, food and unemployment assistance.
- Create and protect jobs in fields like manufacturing, education, transportation, and other public services.
- End corporate tax breaks, loopholes and offshore tax havens, so that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share.
- Redirect Pentagon spending to meet human needs. The US war budget is greater than the military spending of the next 10 largest military powers combined. While over half of the country’s discretionary budget is being spent to prepare for war, millions of us are unable to get their basic needs met.
Please
join Mel King, veterans, labor leaders, people who are threatened with more cuts
to demand that the Legislature respect the people’s vote? The Massachusetts
House and Senate will hold hearings on the Budget for All resolutions, S.1906
and H.3144. Sponsoring organizations include the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD
Tenants, Massachusetts Peace Action, and American Friends Service Committee.
Full list of 85 sponsoring groups: http://Budget4AllMass.org/sponsors
Saturday, October 24:
Public Transit is
a Public Good that Deserves and Requires Public Funding, 9:30am – 1:30pm,
SEIU Local 32BJ New England 615, 26 West Street, 2nd floor, Boston (off Tremont
St, near Park St. T stop). The Budget for All Coalition invites you to a half-day forum. The
state of public transit in Eastern Massachusetts; Investments needed for a
modern and efficient public transportation system; The impact of public transit
privatization on riders, T employees and their unions; The need for
re-allocation of our Federal Tax Dollars to mass transit; A role for the
Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Peoples Budget in mobilizing to improve mass
transit. Space is limited – To attend please pre-register at http://fed-invest.brownpapertickets.com/. $12 donation
requested to cover expenses, no one turned away
OBAMA VETOES $612
BILLION DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION BILL
President Obama
exercised his veto power Thursday for just the fifth time in his presidency,
rejecting a defense authorization bill because of the way it would sidestep
budget limitations for the military and because it would restrict the transfer
of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. The White House said that the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would tap an overseas contingency
operations account designed for emergencies and war costs and use it as a “slush
fund” to avoid budget restrictions. Those restrictions — known as sequestration
— would impose offsetting across-the-board cuts if spending passed certain
levels… The president wants spending limits raised for both non-defense and
defense discretionary spending, but most Republicans want to lift limits on
defense spending but not on non-defense spending. Obama would raise each
category about $38 billion. “The President has been very clear about the core
principle that he will not support a budget that locks in sequestration, and he
will not fix defense without fixing non-defense spending,” the Office of
Management and Budget said when the bill was first proposed.
More
Better Reasons to
Veto the Defense Authorization Bill
Bans new round
of base closures (BRAC): The Pentagon
supports a new round of BRAC as a cost-saving measure; but Congress is reluctant
to pass legislation that might hurt their constituents. Once again, the NDAA
prohibits a new round of base closings. Promotes wasteful missile defense
provisions: The NDAA includes a slew of terrible missile defense provisions,
including adding $30 million for an East Coast missile defense site the Pentagon
does not want, and directing the Missile Defense Agency to chose a specific
location 30 days after an environmental impact study is published. The Pentagon
has made clear that it does not want, or have any need for, a third
missile defense site. Expands the off-budget account for new nuclear
submarines; Limits reduction of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) alert
status; Restricts nuclear weapons dismantlement.
and More
President
Obama's veto also deep-sixed important provisions to assist Israel, including
$475.2 million for Israel's missile defense programs (an increase from the $155
million he had requested) and authorization to develop an anti-tunnel defense
capability - a provision sponsored by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) in the House and
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) in the Senate. The President's action sets the stage
for votes in the House and Senate to override the veto. The override vote is
expected to be close in both chambers. RJC encourages you to call your
Congressman and U.S. Senators and urge them to support an override of the
president's veto of the NDAA.
More
Iceland sentences
bankers to prison; US, not so much
In two separate
Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers
from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach
of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for
two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six
years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider
expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum. After the crash in 2008, while
congress was giving American banks a $700 billion TARP bailout courtesy of taxpayers, Iceland decided to go in a
different direction and enabled their government with financial supervisory
authority to take control of the banks as the chaos resulting from the crash
unraveled… Meanwhile, in America, not one single banking executive has been
charged with a crime related to the 2008 crash and U.S. banks are raking in more than $160 billion in annual profits with little to no
regulation in place to avoid another financial catastrophe. More
What Could Raising
Taxes on the 1% Do? Surprising Amounts
Sidestepping for
the moment the messy question of just which taxes would be increased, how much
more revenue could be generated by asking the rich to pay a larger share of
their income in taxes? … Raising their total tax burden to, say, 40 percent
would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45
percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and
local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least
$1 million a year. If the tax increase were limited to just the 115,000
households in the top 0.1 percent, with an average income of $9.4 million, a 40
percent tax rate would produce $55 billion in extra revenue in its first year.
That would more than cover, for example, the estimated $47 billion cost of eliminating undergraduate
tuition at all the country’s four-year public colleges and universities, as
Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, or Mrs. Clinton’s cheaper plan for a
debt-free college degree, with money left over to help fund universal
prekindergarten. A tax rate of 45 percent on this select group raises $109
billion, more than enough to pay for the first year of a new $2,500 child tax
credit introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.
More
Maine Veterans for Peace protest outside shipyard
-
Maine Veterans for Peace protest outside shipyard
http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20151024/NEWS/151029480/101098/NEWS
- KITTERY, Maine – Police were called Saturday morning when protesters for the
Maine Veterans for Peace showed up on the sidewalk across from Portsmouth Naval
Shipyard. They stayed on their side of the road and peacefully left, according
to Kittery police.
The walk, led by monks and nuns from the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order that does peace walks around the world, made a 175-mile peace walk down Route 1 from Ellsworth to Portsmouth, N.H., from Oct. 9-24. The purpose was to highlight links between the Pentagon’s environmental impact on the oceans and climate change, organizers said. Saturday’s portion of the walk began in Portsmouth’s Market Square and crossed over Memorial Bridge.
Maine Veterans for Peace said the Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on Earth yet was exempted from the Kyoto Protocols. War and military operations, the group said, consume massive amounts of fossil fuels and harm the environment – particularly the oceans.
– Suzanne Laurent
The Price Of Genius-The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s Love and Mercy
The Price Of
Genius-The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s Love
and Mercy
.jpg)
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
Love and Mercy,
starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, 2015
No question if you
read enough stories about geniuses of all sorts from big-brained physicists
like Newton and Einstein to big-be-bop musical guys like the Beach Boys’ Brian
Wilson who was the de facto impresario of that group you will find so very
troubling stories along the way. That is the case here as Wilson’s tell all
song from the 1980s when he was beginning to recover from his dark night got the
nod as the title of the film, Love and
Mercy. The film is a bit different from most biopics, especially of musicians
since it concentrates, sometimes successfully at others in a confusing manner
needing more detail, on two periods in Wilson’s life- the 1960s heyday of his
biggest successes and height of his creative energies and the 1980s when he was
fighting aided by the woman who would be his future wife, Melinda Ledbetter, to
control his demons within.
Admittedly I was not
a Beach Boys fan as a kid, found their music well too dishy when I was in thrall
to blues and protest folk songs at a time when my true love rock and roll had turned
to vanilla but that notwithstanding watching the sections of this film where
Wilson was going, haltingly at times, full blast at others and using
every sound under the sun that made sense and of the now famous “wrecking crew”
of sessions musicians I got the musical genius part. Of course that was an age
when a lot of people, a lot of musicians as well, got as caught up in the whole
live fast, die young and make a good corpse syndrome as anybody else. Some went
under to drugs like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendricks and Jim Morrison, other faded
after their moments in the sun, and still others like Wilson let their inner
demons get the best of them.
The reasons those
demons took command was never really explained, if such things can be explained
except an overbearing father, less that sympathetic brothers and an overwhelming
to create the greatest album ever took their toll. Then we get to see Wilson in
the 1980s when he is frankly a basket case although the direct causes for that
decline are not sketched out. What is sketched out very clearly is that his shrink,
his mad man over-the-top shrink who seemed to have imbibed every hare-brained psychological
theory from the 1960s and put it on top of a control freak persona, was the problem
not the solution. Also sketched out very clearly was that a determined woman is
a very hard thing to beat when the love game is in play as when his future wife
Melinda (played by Elizabeth Banks) digs in her heels to break the shrink’s
spell over Wilson. I didn’t come away from this film any more a fan of the Beach
Boys but for his struggles against adversity I did become a fan of the musical genius
Brian Wilson. Watch this one.
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