The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

@gimmekimmy

@timfranzen

Click below to link to the Fight For $15 website  for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://fightfor15.org/april15/
 

 

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.     

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked.  Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of today’s working people to move up in the world:      

“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters!

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers:

 

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

 

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

******

With Unemployment Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program

Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm

Guest Commentary

 

From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

************

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.” 

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins- Karl Liebknecht's May Day Manifesto (1916)

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins- Karl Liebknecht's May Day Manifesto (1916)   

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915 one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannon roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.    

 

Liebknecht's May Day Manifesto

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THIS May Day Manifesto called the people of Berlin to the May Day Demonstration of 1916. He was sentenced to jail for expressions in this May Day Speech.

 
"Poverty and misery, need and starvation, are ruling in Germany, Belgium, Poland and Servia, whose blood the vampire of imperialism is sucking and which resemble vast cemeteries. The entire world, the much-praised European civilization, is falling into ruins through the anarchy which has been let loose by the world war.
"Those who profit from the war want war with the United States. To-morrow, perhaps, they may order us to aim lethal weapons against new groups of brethren, against our fellow-workers in the United States, and fight America, too. Consider well this fact: As long as the German people does not arise and use force directed by its own will, the assassination of the people will continue. Let thousands of voices shout 'Down with the shameless extermination of nations! Down with those responsible for these crimes!' Our enemy is not the English, French, nor Russian people, but the great German landed proprietors, the German capitalists and their executive committee.
"Forward, let us fight the government; let us fight these mortal enemies of all freedom. Let us fight for everything which means the future triumph of the working-classes, the future of humanity and civilization.
"Workers, comrades, and you, women of the people, let not this festival of May, the second during the war, pass without protest against the Imperialist Slaughter. On the first of May let millions of voices cry, 'Down with the shameful crime of the extermination of peoples! Down with those responsible for the War!' "  

 

 

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

 

 

Sam Eaton, nothing but the son of a son of a son of an old swamp Yankee, that’s a Yankee who did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged his way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought him and his every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought him down in Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as a “bogger,” a man who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner, so yes, a swamp Yankee as against the Beacon Hill Brahmins who reaped the benefits of the bloodstained freedom fight without the risks and settled into a quiet life of coin counting and merchandise buying, had been puzzled at the age of fourteen at a time when he first heard a blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years on a fugitive radio station down in Carver one night in the late 1950s (a song that later, much later, seemingly a technological millennia later, he would see of Wolf on YouTube taken from a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s where he sweat roll from his ebony cheeks and forehead flowing down his face like some ancient Nile River snaking its way to the sea, deep voice seeming to get deeper with each drop of water would practically  eat the harmonica he had in the cusp of his hand talking, no preaching to himself, taking himself to task, about some woman, some mean mistreating mama if the truth be known who had him in a sailor’s knot, has him all twisted up, had him so depressed and blue his wanted to go under the grasses but who in the end took the walk of the beaten down, beaten around  and left old Minnie high and dry which Sam had sensed was happening way back when on that fugitive radio.).

That “fugitive” part just mentioned not being some pirate station off the coast which he had heard that some people who couldn’t get their music on the regular dial were doing somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean (he would find out later that this station was out in the North Sea someplace and was there because of the uproar in England, like in the states over the demon effect rock and roll was having on the Queen’s subjects, her gaggle of children who somehow heard the fresh new breeze from America was heading their way and which he found out more about still later when he saw a film starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman about the subject) the result of some mystical still not understood airwave heading out into the atmosphere all the way from Chicago where occasionally around eleven o’clock (ten Chi town time) he would pick up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour over WALM, a station that billed itself as the “Blues is the dues” station.

He was not sure but he thought then that Be-Bop Benny was a black guy, a Negro (the “polite” word of common usage then to signify blacks, now far out of style and thus the need to explain to generations born after who accept the racial designation black or Afro-American or some other local derivative), although he heard his father, Prescott, who was the last of a long line of downtrodden independent Eaton boggers who would soon thereafter go belly up and sell out to the mega-growers, call them “n----rs” without a trance of rancor or self-consciousness and put “damn” in front of that term with rancor when he had been drinking rye whiskey and bemoaning his fate and said the “n” word were being treated better than he and his were). Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.

See Sam had not really been happy when he heard that station come over the fugitive airwaves on late Sunday nights (although the song was okay, no, more than okay, cool even if he didn’t quite understand why the Wolf was letting some mean mistreating mama get him down, get him so crazy that he wanted to go six feet under which even naïve Sam knew meant old Wolf was losing it but that kind of hard-bitten lyric was not to his taste then since he was just getting that bug, just wanted to hear about roses and playthings, stuff like, happily ever after stuff). As a dedicated fourteen old white boy from a town with no Negro families, not even people who were connected with those workers in the town like his father and a couple of older adult brothers and uncles who worked the cranberry bogs, he was not interested, or maybe consciously interested is better, the blues.

Sam was totally into rock and roll, totally into listening to WMEX the local radio station out of Boston which was being interfered with by that blues is dues station out of Chi town at eleven o’clock (remember ten Chi town time). Interfered with his listening to Bill Haley blast away on Shake, Rattle and Roll, Elvis doing Tomorrow Night and Good Rockin’ Tonight, Johnny Grey doing a great version of Rocket 88, Sam Jackson doing This Is Rock, Bobby Sams doing One Night Of Sin good rocking stuff that DJ Arnie Ginsberg would play on his At The Hop show where he played songs that had dropped off the charts but were diamonds of rock and roll. So at fourteen he could not figure out, nor could they when he asked his friend Jack Caldwell who knew everything about roll and rock, what the appeal was of that Wolf tune. But that beat, that chord progression, that going down to the messy forlorn earth and then coming back up again would follow him for a long, long time. He never really found an answer, a satisfactory answer until he looked beyond the fugitive sound, looked back to why the blues was even the blues. Looked more to the way it made him feel when times were tough, when he would get into his depressive shell, and a blues is dues song would break the bad ass spell.               

Not until later did Sam figure some stuff out after he had kind of given up on rock and roll for a while, maybe around sixteen, seventeen, when the music seemed, well, square, seemed to be about blond-haired, blue-eyed guys searching for (and getting) blond-haired blue eyed girls with a “boss” car and dough as a lure, maybe a surfer guy cruising the beaches out west, out California way, none of which he and his had much of, the dough and car part, and Carver being kind of landlocked no surfer profile, and so kind of distant from the life of a son of a son of a son of a swamp Yankee.

Started figuring stuff out too when he got into his folk music thing for a minute, music which mainly made him go up a wall but which he put up with because Sara Leonard, his girlfriend or the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend got all excited about it when she saw Joan Baez in Cambridge at some club (the original Club 47 as it turned out where Joan and lots of other folkies hung out) and insisted that he like the songs or hit the road, you know how that is (this Sara by the way all dark hair and the whitest of white skin got hung up on the iron-your-hair-like Joan Baez craze and he would have to sit in the Leonard parlor cooling his heels while Sara did her ritual). Jesus. Part of that folk thing although he was not sure how and why was about the blues, about down south music from the plantations and sharecropper cabins, and how they made music to keep themselves from going crazy when the hammer came down and they needed some way to express their rage at their plight without getting hung up on a tree somewhere or shot in the back down some dirty road.      

The critics, and don’t ever ask Sam who these guys are since all he cares about is the music, about the blues, who performs it and whether it will take the bite out of his depression or not and not some discursive history stuff although if you talked about the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, some guys called the Diggers (not boggers, not as far as he knew), or about the Renaissance he will listen all day, as long as you realize that you will be listening all night, say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code). Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched nailed string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” home truth low down mean mistreating mama, two-timing man, cut you if you run, weary tune blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights out in the back woods accompanied by Willie’s fresh made brew and then sang high white collar penance blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.

Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, big-voiced in a naked world, speaking of freedom trains with her brothers and sister jam packed on the road, speaking of sweated field hand labor for damn Mister, man, women and child, speaking of that dirty bastard Mister James Crow and his do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t that like his charges were mere children to ordered about, or hung from stange fruit trees and lying down in some shallow bottomland grave chains tied around the neck, speaking of the haunted northern star which turned Mister’s plantation indoors as it headed north, speaking of finding some cool shaded place where Mister would not disturb, couldn’t disturb and making lots of funny duck, odd-ball,  searching for roots white college students whose campus halls she filled, marvel, mainly marvel, that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization, calling them back to where all, everything began.  

And then Sam knew, or began to know, what that long ago fugitive beat that stayed in his head meant.         

 

Foodie’s Delight-Today’s Special-A Film Review

Foodie’s Delight-Today’s Special-A Film Review   

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Today’s Special, starring Aasif Mandvi, 2009

 

No question these days with the craze for food shows and the creation of a whole cable channel devoted to just about every aspect of culinary preparation that you cannot go wrong if you are a filmmaker in producing a film centered on the struggle to make a name for yourself in the business. Make it slightly exotic, make it slightly multi-cultural, make it slightly intergenerational, make it in polyglot New York City, Brooklyn better these days than Manhattan for the diversity look add in the immigrant quest back story into the mix and you have an enjoyable film  labelled appropriately enough Today’s Special (which also is a recurring motif within the film)    

Here’s how the foodie craze plays out in this one. Samir a son of an Indian immigrant has been working his ass off just like everybody else in mostly low pay, long hours, little thanks restaurant industry in a high end noveau cuisine as a sou chef expecting to move onward and upward due to his hard work and diligence. No soap, no soap when the king hell chef gives the upward mobile job to some kid and to add insult to injury says Samir doesn’t have the magic hand to be a great chef. In a fit of hubris Samir quits with the idea, a very good idea at that, of going to Paris and making a name for himself there. No soap, no soap again because Samir’s father, an owner of a failing Indian cuisine restaurant has a heart attack when Samir tells him his plans. So naturally all plans on hold Samir just has to take care of his father’s business, something he had been running away from all his life.  

Since the push on this one is a rags to riches story, the failing endeavor to successful endeavor variant which Hollywood and Bollywood loves Samir turns this restaurant around. First by getting a max daddy chef posing as a cabdriver to end all chefs to come and work for him. Everything is on the upswing from there, the business starts getting better, the max daddy chef teaches Samir a few things and Samir’s love life takes an upswing when a foxy-looking young Anglo woman who used to work at Samir’s old place gives him some play. End of story. Well not quite the end since Samir has to go through a process to become that magical chef that was hidden within him. Worse though is that Samir’s father tries to undercut him by trying to sell the place. But as in all things culinary the tensions get worked out and all the intergenerational, multi-cultural, and striving immigrant have a happy ending. Yes definitely a feel good movie.       

 

Stop The Deportation Of.U.S. Military Veterans-Stop The War Thety Have To Fight Too.!

A Raven With A Broken Wing- With Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd’s This Gun For Hire In Mind

A Raven With A Broken Wing- With Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd’s This Gun For Hire In Mind  

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

“Everybody, every corner boy knew that the Raven, that’s what everybody called him in the old days and most people around didn’t know his first name was Phillip, would be famous someday, would put the old neighborhood in the daily headlines, put his home turf the Annandale projects in Pittsburgh on the map. And there he is now right there front and center of the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List after that caper at the Livermore Labs out on the West Coast, I am not sure exactly where but out around Frisco somewhere,” Frankie Ryan, the current Annandale Central High schoolboy king of the corner boy night was telling Bill Bradley about Annandale’s now most famous resident.

Bill had just moved into the projects, you know public housing that every town was supposed to provide after World War II for the down and out and which everybody from Mayfair swells to sociologists who study such things to the residents themselves calls the projects, a few months before when his father had run out with some woman, some whore he had been shacking up with for a while before hand when he said he was working late according to his mother when he asked where his father had gone, and  left her high and dry. So there they were reduced to public housing but what are you going to do since you had to live somewhere and it was better than the county farm where you basically stayed in a dormitory and had to do farm chores for the length of your stay which was the next step down, way down on the social curve. So Bill didn’t know about the effect that the Raven had on the kids in the projects like Frankie and his corner boys who hung on his every caper when they heard about them. Cheering him on, living vicariously through him although no one of them would have expressed it that way in a million years. Maybe didn’t know what the word vicariously meant although Frankie was covering up his native smarts behind a sullen no nothing facade (he would later turn out to be a crackerjack lawyer with a big firm in Boston when he settled scores with his wild oats and sullen looks). They were just hungry, how did Frankie put it, oh yeah, had their “wanting habits on”, for one of their own to break out anyway he could.      

In answer to Bill’s question about the Raven’s reputation around the projects this is what Frankie had to say, “Of course the Raven was seven or eight years older than the rest of us but that didn’t mean we didn’t still look up to him, especially after what he did to Father Benoit. See the Raven was living with his aunt, Fedora I think her name was, after his father who was some kind of hit man, maybe a heavy I don’t remember, for Dutch Malone’s gang out in the Midwest somewhere got caught for wasting some rum brave cop who thought the quarter million dollar heist of the First National Bank in Chicago belonged to him or something and took the big step-off, got the chair, as guys like his father do when they get caught and his mother died of a broken heart or something and so the Raven maybe about eight or nine himself then came to live with his aunt here. He husband had died and since he was some kind of city employees she got to stay here rather than the county farm when he passed on. This aunt was merciless with him, punished him for every little infraction, you know stealing candy from the jar, grabbing dough from her pocketbook, strong-arming kids at school for their milk money harmless stuff really and stuff every kid in the projects had done ever since they caught onto the projects idea to keep people off the streets and off the county farm.”

“Her idea of making a kid toe the line, make him see the light of reason according to my mother after Fedora died was to beat the badness out of the Raven. One day she went over the top after he took some candy or something, remember this is stuff my mother told me so there might be more to the story than she let on she was always “protecting” us that way not knowing we were wired into lots of stuff they didn’t have a clue we knew about, and took a hot flat-iron and broke his wrist, mangled it all to hell. That’s why they throw that photograph of his mangled wrist in the newspapers every day because it is pretty hard not to see that it was seriously deformed and easy to identify him by. Somehow that was the blow that blew the Raven’s gasket, made him stone-cold indifferent to any pain he might inflict, made him like some robot although he would always wave back to us when we waved to him at Carter’s Variety Store where we hung out. But he never smiled or if he did it meant no good.”       

Frankie stopped for a minute in his explanation to try to remember if the Father Benoit incident was two years before the Raven’s aunt’s death or more. He continued, “Yeah it had been two year before when the Raven was maybe sixteen. Part of the deal with the Raven living with his aunt meant that he had to regularly attend Mass over at Saint Francis’s on Taffrail Road, the one I go to still to. Had to attend Christian Doctrine class too. In one of the classes Father Benoit was grilling the Raven about something and the Raven gave a silly answer or surly one I forget since I wasn’t there although my older brother Johnny  whose in the Navy now getting every girl in every port the way he tells the tale was there. Now this Father Benoit didn’t take any guff and so had a reputation for not sparing the rod, the ruler is what I think he used. He ordered the Raven to the front of the class and prepared to exact punishment. Raven went up to him, gave him a stone-cold look according to Johnny, and said in a calm voice that if Father Benoit tried to impose punishment it would be his last time. They stared at each other for a moment and then Father Benoit backed off. That was the last time the Raven was seen in any church as far as I know except for maybe using one as a hideout. As for Father Benoit he would on Sunday, on any occasion as he got older declare that the Raven was the “angel of death” come to earth. But after that Raven incident the good Father never used that ruler for punishment again. So yeah even we younger boys admired the Raven.”         

Bill sat there in silent awe for a moment, Frankie too reflecting on what it took to be stone-cold tough in the world, to be indifferent to what society though about the low-lifes who lived in the projects, if they thought about them at all except when they crashed out, broke from the mold or made the Top Ten list and they started sweating that the guy was going to come up their front door.

Then Bill asked a question about when the Raven left the projects. Frankie replied, “You know after that Father Benoit thing the Raven must have realized that he could do anything, get anything he wanted if he made a man of God back down without a fight. That is when we first heard about his robbery sprees. One night, a Friday night the Raven walked into Carter’s Variety like he always did and then came out waving to us after we had waved to him. A few minutes later Mister Carter came out all pale and shaken. The Raven had robbed Mister Carter of all his cash without doing anything but telling him to give him the dough or lose his life. He gave the dough. When we asked if he was going to call the police he said he would later but he never did. And the next Friday the Raven walked into the store just as calm as could be, returned our waves like every other time, and came out with his pack of Camels that he just bought, we know he paid because Mr. Carter told us later, tapped the pack on his hand like all the guys did before they unwrapped the cellophane, open the pack, pulled out a coffin-clutcher, lit up and walked up the street to catch a bus to downtown. Beautiful. There were a few more like that gas stations, department stores and nobody called the cops until some goof in a jewelry store over in Harding got rum brave and called them in. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Bill asked why that event broke the camel’s back although he was not sure what that meant more intrigued than ever by these tales which seemed unbelievable but which he would later find were confirmed by the newspapers when they dug into the background details of the case when the Raven drew the F.B.I’s  big 10. “When the Raven was arrested over in Harding his aunt had to go draw his bail since he was still (barely) under eighteen. When she got him home not knowing what a cool customer she had turned him into she tried to use that flat-iron to break his other wrist probably thinking foolishly that he wouldn’t be able to do more crime. She was wrong. Dead wrong because unlike when he was eight and had to take it he was ten times stronger now and twenty-times angrier. He grabbed the flat-iron and bludgeoned her to death. With a nice touch he broke her wrist as well although according to my mother the coroner said that those wounds were post-mortem. That was the last anybody ever saw the Raven around the projects although we would occasionally scan the papers looking for any news about him. Nothing doing until after about four years we got this latest headline about the Raven’s latest caper which announced to us that he had been doing okay.”           

What Frankie did not know and what the newspaper headlines only alluded to was that the Raven had become a “hit man,” a freelance hit man doing whatever anybody needed to have done, done quickly and done on the quiet. After that botched unarmed jewelry heist in Harding and after the damn bludgeon murder of his aunt the Raven decided that going around without serious  weapons, and plenty of them, going around like some caveman with a club was a sure way to be dead or in prison. So he got very familiar with guns, practiced constantly to perfect his skills, did a few smaller jobs for cheap money to get a reputation for doing his work quickly and quietly. Eventually when a Mister Big wanted a rival wasted or some big time political or business guy wanted his wife, or his wife’s lover wasted they called for the Raven. Paid very nicely for quick and quiet work and the Raven prospered.                 

But the “gun for hire” business like any other business is filled with odd-ball quirks, filled with weirdoes looking to get off-the-wall jobs done. And like any other profession you have to pretty much take what comes in the door because you do not know when another job may come your way, maybe too the weirdos knows guys who need jobs done who are not weirdoes, or maybe you are bored and are willing to try an odd-ball job just to prove you can do odd-ball jobs quickly and quietly. Whatever the reason this latest caper is what got the Raven in the news and got him dug up for half the crimes committed in the country the previous four years.  

Here’s the way Frankie told it to Bill, Lenny, Larry and a couple of his other corner boys one night in front Carter’s Variety Store, half expecting the Raven to pop up in front of them with that old wave, when they asked about what the Raven was suspected of doing. “I don’t know about the other stuff, the string of gangland murders, the murders for insurance, the jealous husband or wife murders, it seems the newspapers, or the coppers, or the newspapers and the coppers, are trying to blow smoke and clean up their unsolved cases by laying them all on the Raven but this latest one, the one that has made him A Number One in my book makes sense.”      

“You know ever since the Russians got the bomb and old Stalin has the world sucking wind about it everybody in America has been going crazy to make sure that the Reds don’t get the plans for the really big next one that everybody knows we need if we are going to beat the damn commies. So some guy, a gofer, a suck-up, a pretty boy, probably a fag from his picture, who was something in Hollywood or owed somebody a favor, now dead, dead by the Raven’s hand, contacted him through this dame, some good-looking dame according to her photograph who I swear looks like Veronica Lake or one of those blonde Hollywood actresses that keep your temperature rising, who worked in one of his nightclubs as a singer. The guy, a guy named Walker according to the papers, didn’t want to go straight to the Raven because he was basically the middleman and because he was a punk really and just acting for a Mister Big. Not a gangster Mister Big but a guy who had plenty of dough, a guy who owned factories and stuff, but wanted some pull power in the world and had contacts with guys who worked at Livermore Labs where they deal with plenty of plans to make the next biggest bomb or whatever you want the next biggest and baddest of and they can figure out how to do it to order.”

“So this fluff goes to the Raven with Walker’s proposition about getting some plans from a guy who worked in Livermore, plans that would give that big factory owner plenty of power since his plants could produce whatever needed to be produced and he could give a damn about America. The Raven blew her off at first, whether she looked like Veronica Lake or not the Raven was always funny about women maybe after that aunt business although he was a pretty good looking guy in the Alan Ladd mold, a guy the girls would give a tumble if he just looked their way, some girls are like that, but he never did, tells her he only does certain kinds of jobs and this one looked like it would have the whole government down his back.”

“Now like I said I don’t ever remember the Raven ever having a girl on his arm, like I said maybe that business with his aunt turned him off women or something, made him a queer, but this blonde fluff worked on him, worked on him enough so that he bought into the idea of doing the job. But the whole set-up should have sent signals to the Raven that this caper was doomed. He must have gotten too much of that fluff’s perfume in his nose or spent too much time under the silky sheets with her.”

The Raven got to the Livermore guy alright, got through some back doors and cellars to get to his lab, had him with his hands in the air ready to give the plans, his wife and kids too if the Raven had asked, under duress but then this scientist, this nobody nothing goof scientist got rum brave himself or started seeing stars and stripes when he realized what the Raven wanted and refused. Blam, blam. The scientist got the wrong time to get brave against the wrong guy and he got himself killed for his efforts. The Raven fled trying to find the fluff to eliminate her from being able to talk about the whole deal but instead found this Walker down at one of his nightclubs, The Dove Club, auditioning acts. The Raven asked at the door if Walker was in, the usher pointed him out and he called him aside a little and without blinking his eyes, I don’t if that part is true but two of the witnesses said that is the way it went down, and put two square through his heart. Done. Now the Raven is wanted, wanted bad as some kind of red agent, a guy working for Uncle Joe according to my mother who really believes that a stone-cold killer like the Raven is working for the international Communist conspiracy something. Jesus are they kidding. I tell you thought I figure his next stop is that fluff and no silky sheets this time. I wonder how he will do the job when he catches up to that fluff, probably just like Walker. I hope he doesn’t go soft or anything like that. Hope he makes the old projects proud of him.”