*****For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”

*****For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Although Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy, New York when he retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960, but having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, and had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.    

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011 travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after the then reigning mayor and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise). Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was thereafter when the movement imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which did much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how each generation will face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Here working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well.       

A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

***Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, those who have just plain quit looking for work and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions when the union-run hiring hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level,  and equitably divide up current work.

Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes it such a powerful propaganda tool-without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

 

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce and less in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production.  Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. (Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the North American auto industry employs almost a million workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the industry was union tight.)

The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American service-oriented  economy. Everyone should support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For $15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

 
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution center workers, the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more thoughtful moments,  once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point that’s a thought.

 

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Defeat all “right to work” legislation. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

*** Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very stray   Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich, make that the very rich but don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a back seat to the elephants on this one. The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement. They always have their hands out.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One egregious example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down when the deal goes down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the anti-union backs (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

 

***End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer to the initial stage if the opposition that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (common moniker for the Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings In Syria, Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear arms talks  American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran and Syria is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe us we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, like Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

 

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get the drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

***Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states whatever political disagreements we may have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has already been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take a big chuck from the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast into some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

***We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Preacher man, don't tell me,

Heaven is under the earth.

I know you don't know

What life is really worth.

It's not all that glitters is gold;

'Alf the story has never been told:

So now you see the light, eh!

Stand up for your rights. come on!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,

Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.

But if you know what life is worth,

You will look for yours on earth:

And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!

Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )

Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )

Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )

Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )

Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )

Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -

Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.

We know when we understand:

Almighty god is a living man.

You can fool some people sometimes,

But you can't fool all the people all the time.

So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),

We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )

Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )

Get up, stand up!

Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )

Get up, stand up! (... )

Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )

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We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review By Ralph Morris (2012)

One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
 

Admit it, back in the late seventies and early eighties we all had, Sam and me included, our reggae minute, at least a minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when that moved onto the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.

Well not quite. Of late the Occupy movement, the people risen, has done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , have resurrected Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems, somehow, eminently right. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (yah, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight too.

Originally Posted 10th February 2012 on Amazon  

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006 archives). I made some special points here last year about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in January 2006 archives). This year it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

 

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

 

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

*In the Time of the Thin Man-Dashiell Hammett's Noir Detective, Of Sorts

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American detective story writer extraordinaire, Dashiell Hammett.

BOOK REVIEW

Crime Stories and Other Writings, Dashiell Hammett, Library of America, New York, 2001

Dashiell Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, reinvented the detective genre in the 1930's and 1940's. They moved the genre away from the amateurish and simple parlor detectives that had previously dominated the genre to hard-boiled action characters who knew what was what and didn't mind taking a beating to get the bad guys. And along the way they produced some very memorable literary characters as well. Nick Charles, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective. However, on the way to creating these literary works of art Hammett did journeyman's work at the detective genre in various pulp detective magazines. The series of stories produced here in one volume is from that period. Kudos to the Library of America.

The unnamed universal Continental Operative who is the central character of the stories is the prototype for Hammett's later named detectives. He has all the characteristics that mark a noir detective-tough, resourceful, undaunted, and incorruptible with a sense of honor to friend and foe alike that sets him apart from earlier detectives. Although the stories are mainly set in San Francisco the Op branches out to other locales in some of the stories but he, however, keeps those same virtues. Although the stories ran from murder and mayhem, on a mass or small scale, the psychological motivation behind the crimes, and the criminals gets a little workout in such stories as Two Sharp Knives, The Golden Horseshoe, The Assistant Murderer, and The Tenth Clew.
If you want mainly well-thought out stories that are also well-written this one is for you. Additionally, and this may be as good a reason to read this book as the stories mentioned previously, there is an early version of his classic Thin Man. A very different take on the plot from the one we know and love. Read it and compare.

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Note: It is not altogether clear to me what Hammett’s political sympathies (or rather more to the point, organization connections) were in the period of his great detection-writing period, the early 1930s, although one can speculate they were at least progressive. I should note for those who are only familiar with the detective novels and crime short stories that Hammett was a make-no-bones-about-it supporter of the Communist Party during the hard, don’t turn the other cheek on your neighbor, see reds under every bed, your mommie is a commie turn her in, prison house, American night of the red scare, Cold War, post World War II period (and earlier as well, during the Popular Front all the way with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Joe Stalin, our father can do no wrong, Moscow Trials liquidate the Old Bolsheviks, the makers of the revolution, time but this post-war period is what concerns me here).

This was period when anything to the left of Herbert Hoover, including probably red tablecloths on restaurant tables, was suspect. This is also the period of the unlamented Joe McCarthy, the equally unlamented Richard Nixon, the deep, fatal, anti-communist purges in the labor unions from which we still suffer today (and anti-red purges in many other political and cultural institutions as well), and of the time of “the naming of names.” The high watermark time of the “fink” and of the “blacklist.” I have vilified, rightly so, no, righteously so, the likes of movie director Elia Kazan (Viva Zapata, On The Waterfront) for their “stool pigeon” scab actions before the "committees".

Kazan was, unfortunately, not alone in that dark, witch-hunt, keep your eyes down, keep walking straight ahead with blinkers on, tell them what they want to know although they already know it, night. I have also heaped tons of well-deserved praise on the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, for holding their ground under intense pressure and under penalty of paying the ultimate price, their lives, for their steadfastness. For defending the Soviet Union, not in our Trotskyist way, but in their own honorable way, and didn’t complain about it when they were called on it, unjustly, by the American imperial state.

Dashiell Hammett was called, tooth brush in hand, before the “red scare” committees and just said no. Hats off. Now there is no need to get mushy about it, and one should not forget that in the end Hammett’s Stalinist politics (and vilification of leftist political opponents like our Trotskyist forbears) made us not less political opponents, but isn’t there something in old Hammett’s actions, that sense of “tilting to the windmills,” that leads right back to Sam Spade. Yes, I thought you would think so.

*****Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

*****Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

 

 

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning 

 



Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

I have always admired military resisters having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam Era time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out, began to see thing through the fog of war and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources. At first working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army one way or another was half in mutiny toward the end of American involvement in that war. And a serious need as guys, guys who get their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted when I had expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work while satisfying and rewarding by actually working with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.    

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown, Gloversville, up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go (I will tell you more of the details some time when I ask him some questions about events that I have forgotten) and did his time in the military that way.          

Sean’s story, and in a sense my belated story, are enough reasons to support Courage to Resist since, unfortunately, there are today very few organizations dedicated to providing informational, legal, and social support for the military resisters of the heinous onslaughts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization needs the help of every ex-soldier who got “religion,” of every anti-war activist, and of every honest citizen who realizes, now more than ever, that the short way to end the endless wars of this generation is to get to the soldiers, get to the cadre on the ground fighting the damn wars. Enough said.     

***From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Development of Soviet Educational Policies

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Markin comment on this article:

Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.

A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
*******
Development of Soviet Educational Policies
by Janis Gerrard


Along with the family and the church, the capitalist educational system serves to perpetuate bourgeois ideology. Expensive private schools and elite institutions of higher learning are for the privileged few. Public schools, on the other hand, stress the skills and discipline necessary to prepare the plebeian masses for their future exploitation.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had as one of its goals the elimination of the distinction between mental and manual labor, took quite a different approach to education. "Every cook must rule," said Lenin. But in order to rule, one must know how to read and write and think. The illiterate person, he said, stands outside politics.

The Bolshevik Party regarded education as both a pledge to the workers and a necessity for workers democratic rule. An illiterate population, steeped in religious superstition, would be a barrier to socialist development.
At the time that the Bolsheviks seized power, the cultural level of the Russian masses was abysmal. Illiteracy, which was the norm for men, was nearly universal among women. The tsarist school system had catered to the children of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes who were preparing for the professions and government posts. There had been trade-school apprenticeships for a lucky few working-class children, but most children of poor families went to work at an early age.

After the 1905 Revolution, despite the general reaction and repression, there was a slight liberalization in the arts and education. Within the tsarist system a layer of educational reformers came to the fore, many of them Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and other right-wing reformers, and outside it communists and anarchists set up their own schools and study circles, which taught workers and peasants the basics of literacy and hygiene along with politics. This tradition of popular education was part of the Russian radical heritage which dated back to the work of the Narodniki in the 1870s.

The academic intelligentsia enthusiastically welcomed the February revolution, which freed them from the repressive restrictions of the autocracy. However, in October most of them proved to be as anti-communist as they had been anti-autocratic.

This preponderance of anti-communism in academic circles added to the difficulties of the Soviet Commissariat of Education—Narkompros. The tasks it faced were monumental, and during the critical period of the civil war only those commissariats immediately necessary for the survival of the proletarian dictatorship—the army, the food commissariat, the transport authority— received much in the way of human and financial resources.
Almost immediately after the October Revolution, teachers joined the municipal workers of Petrograd and Moscow in an anti-government strike. Allegedly financed by the Ryanbushinsky banking family, the strikers were able to hold out all through the bitter winter. Threats to fire the teachers were ineffective since they could not be immediately replaced.

Many leaders and members of the All-Russian Teachers Union (VUS) joined the counterrevolutionary Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, which worked openly for Bolshevik defeat and used the example of the Bolsheviks' unsuccessful negotiations with the striking teachers in its propaganda. V.M. Pozner, an ultra-leftist within Narkompros, led the tiny minority of pro-Bolshevik teachers out of the VUS to form the Union of Teacher Internationalists and argued that the VUS should be forcibly dissolved. One of the main opponents of this position was Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote in Izvestiia (July 1918):

"I, like comrades Pozner and Lepeshinsky, wanted to tear VUS from the influence of its present leaders, but I am an old splitter and thought it more appropriate to break up VUS from within. In my opinion it was necessary to persuade all teachers supporting Soviet power...not to leave VUS, but to attend its Congress as delegates, and there form a compact group and develop their programmed to the full. Then it would have been clear what the real strength of the internationalists was...."

—N.K. Krupskaya, quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightment

The pro-Bolshevik teachers who had left the VUS were not eager to return, preferring the safety of sectarianism to the rigors of struggle. But with the support of Lenin, the "splitters" won against the red unionists and a successful fight was waged inside VUS, resulting in the formation of a broad, independent Union of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture.

Inspired Beginnings...

Despite its shortcomings, Narkompros initially had great authority. Anatol Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, was well-known and greatly admired. During the Bolshevik struggle against the Provisional Government in 1917 his audiences at factories and in the workers' districts regularly numbered in the thousands. His deputy, Krupskaya, was a respected Bolshevik known for her educational work and writing.

From the time the Bolsheviks seized state power they struggled to make education accessible for the first time to the masses. Child labor was abolished and schooling made mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and seventeen. Literacy was made mandatory for everyone through age 50, and a two-hour reduction in the work day was given to those engaged in such study. Tuition was abolished along with all academic titles, tests, degrees and homework. Teachers were subject to dismissal by their pupils. Unfortunately, however, much of this legislation existed only on paper, since the civil war left few funds for its implementation.

Nevertheless, by 1920 about 25,000 schools for literacy had been established, many of them organized by Zhenotdel, the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women. Though placards over the entrances said "Children are the Hope of the World," in fact the whole nation was going to school and learning to read and write. And those who learned also taught. The slogan of the campaign against illiteracy was: "Every literate person trains an illiterate one."

Despite the anti-communism of most professors the universities were kept open, and admission was free to anyone over 16 years of age who could demonstrate literacy. Special departments called rabfaks were also established in the universities to bring workers up to the standard of university entrance.

The early years of Soviet rule witnessed heated theoretical debate on the philosophy and methods of education. Once again V.M. Pozner crossed swords with the Narkompros leadership. Unlike Lunacharsky, he emphasized the replacement of the family by the school commune and a full reintegration of education with life, asserting that labor skills would be taught by "life itself" rather than artificially in a workshpp.

While these concepts were not at odds with Bolshevik ideals, they were unrealistic during a period of "war communism." The imperialist war and then the civil war had left thousands of homeless children roaming the countryside. Under these conditions the skills such children "learned from life" were likely to be lock picking and thievery. Lenin intervened in the controversy to have Lunacharsky's "Declaration on the United Labor School" declared a literary document, which meant that it was no longer subject to alteration. Lenin's implicit support gave the document the edge it needed to defeat Pozner's "Statement on the United Labor School."

...Clash With Hard Realities

While struggling against the threat of ultra-leftists who sought to realize communist ideals in a backward and impoverished country, the Narkompros leadership had also to wage a continual fight against a hardened, right-wing, anti-communist bloc of educators who remained loyal to the defunct Provisional Government, and with short-sighted elements within the Bolshevik party, including many trade unionists, who were most susceptible to the pressure to gear education solely to fill the desperate, immediate need for skilled workers. Narkompros consistently defended a policy of long-term polytechnical education as opposed to early specialization in trade schools and free education as opposed to the reintroduction of tuition fees.

Drawing on the only resources available, Narkompros attempted to supply the Soviet educational system with the facilities of the old, tsarist technical and trade schools During 1918 and 1919 two hundred trade schools were dismantled and destroyed under Narkompros direction—a rash act at a time when skilled workers were desperately needed and before new facilities had actually been created. This put Narkompros in a defensive position against the proponents of monotechnicalism, who were already gathering a "technical lobby" around a proposal for a United Technical School—a system in which only primary education would have a general character. This lobby gained a powerful ally at the end of 1919 in Leon Trotsky's Commission on Labor Conscription.

Trotsky's plan to allow a limited reintroduction of private trade to regenerate the ravaged economy had been rejected. This plan was to be introduced two years later in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), but during the period when it was temporarily defeated," Trotsky proposed a quasi-military mobilization of labor as the only alternative. An adjunct to this mobilization to ensure the production of qualified workers was educational conscription, with specialized professional training beginning at age 14. The bloc was short-lived, however. The Controversy which arose over Trotsky's proposal centered on the relationship between the state and the trade unions. Trotsky argued that labor conscription necessitated the transformation of trade unions into a disciplined arm of the state. The trade unionists, who made up the bulk of the "technical\ lobby," while supporting educational conscription, opposed the general plan. Lenin sided with the trade unionists on the question of the unions' right to strike and the threatened infringement of trade-union independence, and with the Narkompros leadership in its defense of polytechnicalism.

Narkompros emerged from this struggle victorious but weakened and with the authority of its leadership damaged. The "technical lobby," although temporarily defeated, was strengthened. The general sentiment that Narkompros, whatever its program, had not been able to organize much of anything was close to the truth.

This lack of confidence in Narkompros reached a crisis when an emergency necessitated an unexpected relationship between Narkompros and the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation and Delinquency in Office— otherwise known as the Cheka.
In 1920-the Soviet Union was terrorized by gangs of starving, homeless delinquent youth. Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky proposed that since the Cheka had well-supplied and efficiently operating branches in many areas, it could take on the task of rehabilitating these homeless youth (bespryzornye)—an idea which sent panic through liberal pedagogical circles.

The Cheka proceeded to organize rehabilitation colonies along the lines laid out by Commissar G.F. Grinko of the Ukrainian Narkompros, a long-time foe of the Russian Narkompros' child-centered theories of education. The work was headed by Grinko's protege, Anton Makarenko. Although Makarenko's methods, which included military discipline and hard labor in addition to instruction, were highly unorthodox by Soviet standards, he was successful in rehabilitating seemingly incorrigible delinquents with police records ranging from petty theft to manslaughter.

Each of his collectives was a carefully constructed unit with a built-in stratified, hierarchical and democratic structure calculated to create an atmosphere of intense social pressure to curb the anti-social tendencies of the bespryzornye. Discipline was collective and often self-imposed. Transferred from Narkompros to the Cheka, Makarenko continued to run this operation throughout the 1920's.

Retreat

Under the pressure of the "technical "lobby," Narkompros was forced in 1920 to the conclusion that the shortage of qualified workers made it necessary to temporarily reduce the labor school from nine to seven years and to begin specialized training at age fifteen. This time, even Krupskaya gave in. Since the nine-year school did not exist in any case, except on paper, the real task was to construct the seven-year school.
Narkompros emphasized that this was a regrettable and temporary expedient, and Lenin fought for a reaffirmation of the principle of polytechnical education which he correctly viewed as being in danger during this period of retreat.

The introduction of the New Economic Policy halted the few advances that Narkompros had achieved. The end of food requisitions and the introduction of the tax in kind meant a drastic reduction in state funds available for education. All departments were urged to take advantage of the limited free market and become self-sufficient. Narkompros, however, had nothing to market but theater tickets and literature. At the same time, costs skyrocketed, since public services such as sewage, electricity, fuel and transportation now cost money. In February and March of 1922 an acute financial crisis led to a large number of Soviet employees being taken off state supply. The number of teachers receiving or even entitled to salaries fell drastically, leading to a wholesale closing of schools.

After reaching a peak of 82,000 in 1921, primary schools were driven down to 49,000 by October 1923. Those schools which did survive the removal of central funding initiated local self-taxation in kind, making teachers directly dependent on the kulaks (rich peasants) for their most immediate needs.

Narkompros initially forbade the reintroduction of tuition fees but was soon forced to allow it as a temporary expedient. Krupskaya called this decision, which once again made education a privilege of those who could afford it, a vulgar retreat from the party program.

Stalinist Education

Many Narkompros members became involved in the oppositional struggle against the rise of Stalinist bureaucratism which followed Lenin's death in 1924. Krupskaya initially fought with the joint opposition but was seduced back into the fold by the ultra-left policies of Stalin's "third period." But although she remained a figurehead in Narkompros, she was stripped of all real influence. Lunacharsky avoided the political struggle, apparently hoping to defend the gains of Narkompros in the arts and education against the general social retrenchment.

Although Narkompros now entered a period of demoralization and relative inactivity, it continued to wage some agitational campaigns. In 1925, the League of the Militant Godless, an organization dedicated to the replacement of superstition with scientific knowledge, was founded with Narkompros support. The campaign to combat illiteracy was also pursued vigorously, despite the inability of schools to accommodate students.
The defeat of the Left Opposition meant the defeat of Leninism. However, in education this void was not immediately filled by Stalinist policies. Instead, the crackpot theories of "pedology" and "spontaneous education" became popular during the middle and late twenties. The adherents of these theories predicted the "withering away of the schools," perhaps in an effort to justify the unfortunate reality—there were not enough schools!

The first All-Union Congress of Pedology boasted 2,500 participants.
From 1929 on, Stalin attempted to give programmatic justification to the temporary and unavoidable retreats in the field of education. The old tsarist educators returned to the classrooms, degrees, titles and pedagogic discipline were reinstituted and the schools again were devoted to instilling labor discipline and servility. A major pedagogic text of the early Stalinist period was entitled I Want to Be Like Stalin!
Stalin found his perfect educational theorist in Makarenko. After his successes in the twenties with the besprizornye, Makarenko could argue in the thirties with the authority of an enlightened and successful pedagogue for militarism, discipline and patriotism. With Makarenko at the head of Stalin's campaign against "pedological perversions," the popular theory served as a straw man to guillotine the whole concept of education for individual development. And since Makarenko's old foes in Narkompros, including Krupskaya and Lunacharsky, were tainted by their association with pedology, the campaign served both as a scapegoat for the failure of early Soviet educational policies and as a screen for the turn from the earlier prevailing approach to education.

In 1940 the imminent danger of a German invasion motivated a switch to quick vocational and military training ranging from six-month factory courses to two-year vocational schools. Tuition fees for education beyond the eighth grade made the factory courses the only real option of the poor. By 1942 vocational schools were introduced for children as young as ten years of age, and military training was instituted.

In 1943, separate education for boys and girls was re-introduced on the grounds that co-education had served its purpose—smashing the vestiges of the tsarist oppression of women. The liberated Soviet woman, it was argued, needed a separate education to better prepare her for her special Work in life—not the least of which was marriage and motherhood.
The contradictions generally inherent in Stalinism were duplicated in the Stalinist educational system. The Stalinist bureaucrats achieved their privileged position by politically expropriating the working class, yet they maintained their rule only by defending collectivized property, which is in the historic interests of the workers. These property forms demand technological and scientific development, which is dependent on individual human creativity possible only in the context of a generally high cultural level. Thus, the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to return a high proportion of the national surplus to mass education. It created an educational system which supplied necessary scientists and technicians and at the same time indoctrinated the young with a misplaced loyalty to the bureaucracy and its programs.

The self-serving bureaucracy is at times its own worst enemy. Disastrous consequences often result from the attempt to bolster the reactionary program of "socialism in one country" with Utopian, anti-materialist theories. Thus, Lysenko's crackpot genetic theories applied to agriculture led to the destruction of vast tracts of arable land. But Soviet education nevertheless achieved great leaps in science, industry and even sports. In a matter of decades the Soviet Union was transformed from a backward, largely feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial state and a major military power. The appearance of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, and the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb put a spotlight on Soviet education, producing in the U.S. a flood of books with such titles as: What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, and The Challenge of Soviet Education.

The achievements not only of the USSR but of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and China show what socialized property and centralized education can achieve even without enlightened policies. Only a political revolution based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, however, will restore intellectual and artistic freedom and unleash the unknown capacities of the human mind. With the victory of the reforged Fourth International, EVERY COOK WILL RULE!

***A Pauper Comes Of Age- For the Adamsville South Elementary School Class Of 1958

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Haley and the Comets performing Rock Around The Clock placed here to give a nostalgic reminder of the times, the times of our 1958 elementary school times.

Fritz Taylor, if he thought about it at all, probably would have said that he had his history hat on again like when he was a kid, that day in 2008 when out of the blue, the memory time blue, he thought about her, thought about fair Rosimund. No, before you get all set to turn to some other thing, some desperate alternate other thing, to do rather than read Fritz’s poignant little story, this is not some American Revolution founding fathers (or mothers, because old-time Abigail Adams may have been hovering in some background granite-chiseled slab grave in very old-time Adamsville cemetery while the events to be related occurred) or some bold Massachusetts abolitionist regiment out of the American Civil War 150th anniversary memory history like Fritz used to like to twist the tail around when you knew him, or his like.

Fritz, that 2008 early summer’s day, was simply trying to put his thoughts together and write something, write something for those who could stand it, those fellow members of his who could stand to know that the members of the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 were that year celebrating the 50th anniversary of their graduation from elementary school. In Fritz’s case not North Adamsville Elementary School like many of his fellows but from Adamsville South Elementary School across town on the “wrong side of the tracks.” And although, at many levels that was a very different experience from that of the average, average North Adamsville class member the story had a universal quality that he thought might amuse them, amuse them that is until the name, the thought of the name, the mist coming from out of his mouth at the forming of the name, holy of holies, Rosimund, stopped him dead in his tracks and forced him to write a different story.

Still, once the initial trauma wore off, he thought what better way to celebrate that milestone on the rocky road to surviving childhood than to take a trip down memory lane, that Rosimund-strewn memory lane. Those days although they were filled with memorable incidents, good and bad, paled beside this Rosimund-related story that cut deep, deep into his graying-haired mind, and as it turned out one that he have not forgotten after all. So rather than produce some hokey last dance, last elementary school sweaty-palmed dance failure tale, some Billie Bradley-led corner boy down in the back of Adamsville South doo wop be-bop into the night luring stick and shape girls like lemmings from the sea on hearing those doo wop harmonies, those harmonies meant for them, the sticks and shapes that is, or some wannabe gangster retread tale, or even some Captain Midnight how he saved the world from the Cold War Russkies with his last minute-saving invention Fritz preferred to relate a home truth, a hard home truth to be sure, but the truth. So drugged with many cups of steaming instant black coffee, a few hits of addicted sweetened-orange juice, and some protein eggs he whiled away one frenzied night and here is what he produced:

At some point in elementary school a boy is inevitably suppose to learn, maybe required to, depending on the whims of your school district’s supervisory staff and maybe also what your parents expected of such schools, to do two intertwined socially-oriented tasks - the basics of some kind of dancing and to be paired off with, dare I say it, a girl in that activity. After all that is what it there for isn’t it. At least it was that way in the old days, and if things have changed, changed dramatically in that regard, you can fill in your own blanks experience. But here that is where fair sweet Rosimund comes in, the paired-off part.

I can already hear your gasps, dear reader, as I present this scenario. You are ready to flee, boy or girl flee, to some safe attic hideaway, to reach for some dusty ancient comfort teddy bear, or for the venturesome, some old sepia brownie camera picture album safely hidden in those environs, but flee, no question, at the suggestion of those painful first times when sweaty-handed, profusely sweaty-handed, boy met too-tall girl (age too-tall girls hormone shooting up first, later things settled down, a little) on the dance floor. Now for those who are hopped up, or even mildly interested, in such ancient rituals you may be thinking, oh well, this won’t be so bad after all since Fritz is talking about the mid-1950s and they had Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on the television to protect them from having to dance close, what with those funny self-expression dance moves like the Stroll and the Hully-Gully that you see on old YouTube film clips. And then go on except, maybe, the last dance, the last close dance that spelled success or failure in the special he or she night so let me tell you how really bad we had it in the bell-bottomed 1960s (or the disco 1970s, the hip-hop ‘80s, etc.). Wrong.

Oh, of course, we were all after school black and white television-addled and addicted making sure that we got home by three in the afternoon to catch the latest episode of the American Bandstand saga about who would, or wouldn’t, dance with that cute girl in the corner (or that amazon in the front). That part was true, true enough. But here we are not talking fun dancing, close or far away, but learning dancing, school-time dancing, come on get with it. What we are talking about in my case is that the dancing part turned out to be the basics of country bumpkin square-dancing (go figure, for a city boy, right?). Not only did this clumsy, yes, sweaty-palmed, star-crossed ten-year-old boy have to do the basic “swing your partner” and some off-hand “doze-zee dozes(sic)” but I also had to do it while I was paired, for this occasion, with a girl that I had a “crush” on, a serious crush on, and that is where Rosimund really enters the story.

Rosimund see, moreover, was not from “the projects” but from one of the new single-family homes, ranch-style homes, that the up and coming middle-class were moving into up the road. In case you didn’t know, or have forgotten since North Adamsville High days, I grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks” down at the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments. The rough side of town, okay. You knew that the minute I mentioned the name, that AHA name, and rough is what you thought, and that is okay. Now. But although I had started getting a handle on the stick "projects" girls I was totally unsure how to deal with girls from the “world.” And Rosimund very definitely was from the world. I will not describe her here; although I could do so even today, but let us leave it at her name. Rosimund. Enchanting name, right? Thoughts of white-plumed knighted medieval jousts against some black-hooded, armored thug knight for the fair maiden’s hand, or for her favors (whatever they were then, mainly left unexplained, although we all know what they are now, and are glad of it)

Nothing special about the story so far, though. Even I am getting a little sleepy over it. Just your average one-of-the-stages-of-the-eternal-coming-of-age-story. I wish. Well, the long and short of it was that the reason we were practicing this square-dancing was to demonstrate our prowess before our parents in the school gym. Nothing unusual there either. After all there is no sense in doing this type of school-time activity unless one can impress one's parents. I forget all the details of the setup of the space for demonstration day and things like that but it was a big deal. Parents, refreshments, various local dignitaries, half the school administrators from downtown whom I will go to my grave believing could have cared less if it was square-dancing or basket-weaving because they would have ooh-ed and ah-ed us whatever it was. But that is so much background filler. Here is the real deal. To honor the occasion, as this was my big moment to impress Rosimund, I had, earlier in the day, cut up my dungarees to give myself an authentic square-dancer look, some now farmer brown look but back then maybe not so bad.

I thought I looked pretty good. And Rosimund, looking nice in some blue taffeta dress with a dark red shawl thing draped and pinned across her shoulders (although don’t quote me on that dress thing, what did a ten-year old boy, sister-less, know of such girlish fashion things. I was just trying to keep my hands in my pockets to wipe my sweaty hands for twirling time, for Rosimund twirling time) actually beamed at me, and said I looked like a gentleman farmer. Be still my heart. Like I said I though I looked pretty good, and if Rosimund thought so well then, well indeed. And things were going nicely. That is until my mother, sitting in a front row audience seat as was her wont, saw what I had done to the pants. In a second she got up from her seat, marched over to me, and started yelling about my disrespect for my father's and her efforts to clothe me and about the fact that since I only had a couple of pairs of pants how could I do such a thing. In short, airing the family troubles in public for all to hear. That went on for what seemed like an eternity. Thereafter I was unceremoniously taken home by said irate mother and placed on restriction for a week. Needless to say my father also heard about it when he got home from that hard day’s work that he was too infrequently able to get to keep the wolves from the door, and I heard about it for weeks afterward. Needless to say I also blew my 'chances' with dear, sweet Rosimund.

Now is this a tale of the hard lessons of the nature of class society that I am always more than willing to put in a word about? Just like you might have remembered about old Fritz back in the day. Surely not. Is this a sad tale of young love thwarted by the vagaries of fate? A little. Is this a tale about respect for the little we had in my family? Perhaps. Was my mother, despite her rage, right? Well, yes. Did I learn something about being poor in the world? Damn right. That is the point. …But, oh, Rosimund.
************

Rock Around The Clock Song Lyrics from Bill Haley

One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock,
Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock,
Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.

Put your glad rags on and join me, hon,
We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.

When the clock strikes two, three and four,
If the band slows down we'll yell for more,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.

When the chimes ring five, six and seven,
We'll be right in seventh heaven.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.

When it's eight, nine, ten, eleven too,
I'll be goin' strong and so will you.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.

When the clock strikes twelve, we'll cool off then,
Start a rockin' round the clock again.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.

***Erroll By Starlight- The Piano Of Erroll Garner

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Erroll Garner playing "Misty".

CD Review

“Concert By The Sea”, Erroll Garner, Columbia Records, 1955

Misty sprays furiously coming off of the rocks in some seaside scene. Smoke-filled nightclubs with the tinkling of martini glasses and of the piano. Better yet, background music for some Bogart film noir of the 1950’s. That is what the jazz piano of Mr. Errol Garner reminds me of. And it seems natural to believe in those dream-like scenarios mentioned above as Garner’s heyday was in the 1950s when jazz was going through some turns and it needed to rest, a little, on his capable shoulders. I need only add, since this concert took place in Carmel, California in 1955, that this is one of the few times that the future mayor of Carmel, actor/director Clint Eastwood, and I can agree on something. He has used Garner’s work as background in more than one of his films. Hell, he may have been in the audience for this one. I wish I was.