*****Revelations -For Chelsea Manning And All The Military Resisters To America’s Endless Wars

*****Revelations -For Chelsea Manning And All The Military Resisters To America’s Endless Wars  

 

 

 

From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris had always considered himself a straight-up guy. Straight up when he dealt with customers in his high-precision electrical shop in Troy, New York he had inherited from his father after he retired before he himself recently retired and turned it over to his youngest son, James, who would bring the operation into the 21^st century with the high tech equipment-driven  precision electrical work needs nowadays. Straight up when he confronted the trials and tribulations of parenthood and told the kids that due to his political obligations (of which more in a minute) he would be away and perhaps seem somewhat pre-occupied at times but he would answer any questions they had about anything as best he could. The kids in turn when characterizing their father to me, told me that he was hard-working, distant but had been straight up with them although those sentiments said in a wistful, wondering, wishing for more manner like there was something missing in the whole exchange and Ralph agreed when I mentioned that feeling to him that I was probably right but that he did the best he could.

Straight up after sowing his wild oats along with Sam Eaton, Pete Markin, Frankie Riley and a bunch of other guys from the working-class corners of the town they grew up in who dived into that 1960s counter-cultural moment and hit the roads, for a short time after the stress of eighteen months in the bush in Vietnam. Meaning sleeping with any young woman who would have him in those care-free days when they were all experimenting with new ways to deal with that fretting sexual issue and getting only slightly less confused that when they got all that god-awful and usually wrong information in the streets where most of them, for good or evil learned to separate their Ps and Qs. After which he promised his high school sweetheart, Lara Peters, who had waited for him to settle down to be her forever man. And straight up with what concerns us here his attitude toward his military service in the Army during the height of the Vietnam War where he did his time, did not cause waves while in the service but raised, and is still raising seven kinds of holy hell, once he became totally disillusioned with the war, with the military brass and with the American government (no “our government” in his vocabulary signifying that while he was still in love with his country he was not of its governance-his way of saying it is not mine) who did nothing but make thoughtless animals out of him and his buddies.            

Giving this “straight up” character business is important here because Ralph several years ago along with Sam Eaton, a non-Vietnam veteran having been exempted from military duty due to his  being the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his ne’er-do-well father died of a massive heart attack in 1965, joined a peace organization, Veterans For Peace (VFP), in order to work with others doing the same kind of work (Ralph as a veteran automatically a full member, Sam an associate member in the way membership works in that organization although both have full right to participate and discuss the aims and projects going forward) once they decided to push hard against “the endless wars of the American government” (both Ralph and Sam’s way of putting the matter).

Without going into greater detail Sam and Ralph had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when they with their respective groups (Sam with a radical collective from Cambridge and Ralph with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a predecessor organization of VFP) attempted to as the slogan went-“shut down the government if it did not shut down the war.” Unfortunately they failed but the several days they spent together in detention in RFK Stadium then being used as the main detention area cemented a life-time friendship, and a life-time commitment to work for peace. (Sam’s impetus the loss of his best corner boy high school friend, Jeff Mullins, killed in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968 who begged him to tell everybody what was really going on with war if he did not make it back to tell them himself.)       

That brings us to the Ralph straight up part. He and Sam had worked closely with or been member of for several years in the 1970s of VVAW and other organizations to promote peace. But as the decade ended and the energies of the 1960s faded and ebbed they like many others went on with their lives, build up their businesses, had their families to consider and generally prospered. Oh sure, when warm bodies were needed for this or that good old cause they were there but until the fall of 2002 their actions were helter-skelter and of an ad hoc nature. Patch work they called it. Of course the hell-broth of the senseless, futile and about six other negative descriptions of that 2003 Iraq war disaster, disaster not so much for the American government (Sam and Ralph’s now familiar term) as for the Iraqi people and others under the cross-fires of the American military juggernaut (my term).

They, having then fewer family and work responsibilities, got  the old time anti-war “religion” fires stoked in their brains once again to give one more big push against the machine before they passed on. They started working with VFP in various marches, vigils, civil disobedience actions and whatever other projects the organization was about (more recently the case of getting a presidential pardon and freedom for the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle –blower soldier Chelsea Manning sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence at Fort Leavenworth in 2013 for telling the truth about American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan). Did that for a couple of years before they joined. And here is really where that straight up business comes into play. See they both had been around peace organizations enough to know that membership means certain obligation beyond paying dues and reading whatever materials an organization puts out-they did not want to be, had never been mere “paper members” So after that couple of years of working with VFP in about 2008 they joined up, joined up and have been active members ever since.       

Now that would be neither here nor there but Ralph had recently been thinking about stepping up his commitment even further by running for the Executive Committee of his local Mohawk Valley  chapter, the Kenny Johnson Chapter. (Sam as an associate member of his local chapter, the James Jencks Brigade is precluded as a non-veterans from holding such offices the only distinction between the two types of membership.) He ran and won a seat on the committee. But straight up again since he was committed to helping lead the organization locally and perhaps take another step up at some point he decided in 2015 to go to the National Convention in San Diego (the geographic location of that site a definitive draw for other reasons) and learn more about the overall workings of the organization and those most dedicated to its success.

So Ralph went and immersed himself in the details of what is going on with the national organization. More importantly he got to hear the details of how guys (and it is mostly guys reflecting the origins of the organization in 1985 a time when women were not encouraged to go into the service), mostly guys from his Vietnam War generation as the older World War II and Korea vets have begun to pass on and the Iraq and Afghan war vets who are still finding their “voice” came to join the organization. What amazed him was how many of the stories centered on various objections that his fellow members had developed while in whatever branch of the military they were in. Ralph had kept his “nose clean” despite his growing disenchantment with the war while serving his eighteen months in country. He had been by no means a gung-ho soldier although he had imbibed all the social and political attitudes of his working class background that he had been exposed to concerning doing military service, fighting evil commies and crushing anything that got in the way of the American government. He certainly was not a model soldier either but he went along, got along by getting along. These other guys didn’t.

One story stood out not because it was all that unusual in the organization but because Ralph had never run up against anything like it during his time of service from 1967-1970. Not in basic training, not in Advanced Infantry Training (AIT), not in Vietnam although he had heard stuff about disaffected soldiers toward the end of his enlistment. This guy, Frank Jefferson, he had met at one of the workshops on military resisters had told Ralph when he asked that he had served a year in an Army stockade for refusing to wear the uniform, refusing to do Army work of any kind. At least voluntarily.

The rough details of Frank’s story went like this. He had been drafted in late 1968 and was inducted into the Army in early 1969 having had no particular reason not to go in since while he was vaguely anti-war like most college students he was not a conscientious objector (and still doesn’t feel that way since he believes wars of national liberation and the like are just and supportable, especially those who are facing down the barrel of American imperialism), was not interested in going to jail like some guys, some draft resisters, from his generation who refused to be inducted and he did not even think about the option of Canada or some such exile. Moreover the ethos of his town, his family, his whole social circle was not one that would have welcomed resistance, would not have been understood as a sincere if different way of looking at the world. Add to that two guys had been killed in Vietnam from his neighborhood and the social pressure to conform was too great to buck even if he had had stronger convictions then. 

Three days, maybe less, after Frank was deposited at Fort Jackson in South Carolina in January, 1969 for basic training he knew he had made a great mistake, had had stronger anti-war feelings, maybe better anti-military feelings than he suspected and was heading for a fall. This was a period when draftees, those fewer and fewer men who were allowing themselves to be drafted, were being channeled toward the infantry, the “grunts,” the cannon-fodder (words he learned later but not known to him as he entered the Army) and that was his fate. He was trained as an 11 Bravo, killer soldier. Eventually he got orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transport to Vietnam. On a short leave before he was requested to report Frank went back to Cambridge where he grew up and checked in with the Quakers which somebody had told him to do if he was going to challenge his fate in any way. The sympathetic counsellor in the basement of the Quaker Meeting House off Brattle Street advised him to put in a CO application at Fort Devens nearby. He did so, was turned down because as a Catholic and general moral and ethical considerations objector he did not qualify under the doctrine of that church. (And he still held to his “just war” position mentioned above). He tried to appeal that decision through military then civilian channels with help from a lawyer provided by the Quakers (really their American Friends Service Committee) although that was dicey at best.

Then, despite some counsel against such actions Frank had an epiphany, a day of reckoning, a day when he decided that enough was enough and showed up at parade field for the Monday morning report in civilian clothes carrying a “Bring The Troops Home” sign. Pandemonium ensued, he was man-handled by two beefy lifer-sergeants and taken to the Provost Marshall’s office for identification since the MPs were not sure whether he was not some hopped-up radical from nearby Boston who were starting to hold anti-war rallies in front of the Main Gate to the base. Once identified as a soldier he was thrown in the stockade. Eventually Frank was tried and sentenced to six month under a special court-martial for disobeying orders. He served the whole term (minus some days for good conduct). When he got out after during that stretch he continued to refuse to wear the uniform or do work. So back to the stockade and another special court-martial trial  getting another six months, again for disobeying lawful orders.

Fortunately that civilian lawyer provided by the Quakers (and who had grudgingly since he did not agree with Frank’s way of making a statement while other legal remedies were available been his lawyer at both trials) had brought the CO denial case to the Federal Court in Boston on a writ of habeas corpus and the judge ruled that the Army had acted wrongly in denying the application. A few weeks later he was released with an honorable discharge as a CO, one of the first in that category in the military. Frank said with a twinkle in his eye that if that legal relief had not cut the process short he still might forty plus years later be doing yet another six month sentence. So that was his story and there were probably others like him whose stories went untold during that turbulent time when the Army was near mutiny in America and Vietnam (the jails as Long Binh, LBJ for short, were then always full with miscreant soldiers).

Ralph said to himself after hearing the Jefferson story, yeah, these are the brethren I can work with. Guys like Jefferson really won’t fold under pressure when the American government tries to pull the hammer down on political dissent. Yeah, that’s right Ralph.          

 

Out In The Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man

Out In The Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man

Books In Brief

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett, 1934

Dashiell Hammett is perhaps better known for creating the classic modern prototypical detective, one Sam Spade the detective-hero (or anti-hero, if you prefer) of the literary noir The Maltese Falcon. With The Thin Man he took a different tack in providing a model detective- the urbane Nick Charles, his side-kick society wife Nora and their ever present faithful dog companion, Asta. The story line here centers on a missing eccentric inventor/businessman who it is suspected has been a victim of foul play. Enter Nick, Nora and Asta at the request of his wondering society family (wondering, that is, about the fate of the dough necessary to keep them in their luxuries) and after a series of misadventures and false leads Nick grabs the villain. That is what old Nick has in common with the illustrious Mr. Spade-the dogged (no pun, intended) and tenacious search for the truth and the killer, come what may. If you like your detectives with a light touch this is for you. If you like your detective novels to be minor works of literary art this is also for you. Hammett (along with Raymond Chandler) practically reinvented the previously rather shabby art of the early detective story into literature. Kudos.

The Slumming Streets Of 1950s L.A.- Joseph Ellroy’s “L.A. Confidential”

Click on the headline to link to an interview article on crime novelist
Joseph Ellroy

Book Review

L.A. Confidential, Joseph Ellroy, The Mysterious Press, New York, 1990

Crime writer Raymond Chandler, and his detective creation Phillip Marlowe, owned the slumming streets of 1940’s Los Angeles and in the process set the standard by which to judge modern crime novels (along with the work of Dashiell Hammet, of course). However, as time moves on, others have set themselves up to take the challenge posed by these forbears. The author of the book under review, Joseph Ellroy, has thrown down the gauntlet with a series of Los Angeles –based crime novels. Although I believe that Raymond chandler is still king of the mound out in those wavy brownish-yellow western hills and shorelines Ellroy is pushing him, and pushing him hard.

On other occasions I have noted that I am an aficionado of crime book and film noir, although that designation has previously been somewhat limited to the 1940s-1950s period mentioned above, the golden age of black and white film and grainy, sparse language detective novels. I, frankly, was not that familiar with Mr. Ellroy’s work, although I had seen the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential several years ago and had heard about the Black Dahlia case, the basis for another book in the L.A. series. Perhaps, strangely, I took up his works after reading a review of his memoir in The New York Review of Books out of curiosity, if nothing else. Thus this is the first book that I have actually read of the several that he has produced thus far. As I intend to read others this review will act to fill in a little why, as I stated above, I believe that Raymond Chandler is still king of the L.A. seamy-side night.

Chandler’s 1930s-1940s L.A. was still a rather sprawling, sleepy town, an old West town just becoming a magnet for, well, for everyone and with every kind of dream, and dream thwarted, imaginably. Ellroy has moved up to set him material in the 1950s when, in the aftermath of the great post-World War II expansion, the place was the stuff of dreams, the stuff to cash in on. And that is a basic premise behind the plot here, as well as the usual human motives that drive crime novels in general. The plot centers on L.A.'s finest, represented by three distinctly different types of cops, uncovering (and occasionally covering up) present crimes, in their also very distinct ways- you know the usual murder, mayhem, pornography, drugs, prostitution but also, of necessity coming up against an age-old crime from the 1930s. Thus an on the face of it inexplicable mass murder at a diner pinned on three black men turns out to be a five hundred page look, and a revised look at an older crime. And in the process it dives into human greed, police corruption, political appetites, vengeance, sadism, and just plain perversity. At five hundred pages it may be a bit too long to carry the plot but Mr. Ellroy has put a few nice twists in to keep us guessing for a while, always an important test for a crime novel.

No question that Mr. Ellroy has professional police language, motivation, angst down pretty well and can tell a story. My problem off of reading this first book is that using the three professional city cops (Bud, Edward, Jack) approach to the plot doesn’t have the same feel as getting inside private investigator Phillip Marlowe’s motivation for his keeping on tilting at windmills even after taking his usual several beatings in his search for justice. None of the characters here “spoke” to me in that sense. Maybe L.A. crime is just too big a story to be amenable to what comes down to a police procedural. More later.

Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-“The Dark Corner”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir, The Dark Corner.

DVD Review

The Dark Corner, Clifton Webb, Lucille Ball, William Bendix, Mark Stevens, directed by Henry Hathaway, 1946

As I have mentioned before at the start of other reviews in this crime noir genre I am an aficionado, especially of those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh ya, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, The Dark Corner, is under that former category.

And here is why. The dialogue, even though the film itself was under the direction of Henry Hathaway a more than competent noir director, if not of the first order, is, well, way too smaltzy for a good crime noir. First off the love interest between the framed-up detective, Brad Galt (played by Mark Stevens), and his girl Friday secretary (played by Lucille Ball) is played up front and without subtly and lacks the dramatic cat and mouse build-up of classic noirs. In any case whatever Ms. Ball’s later recognized talents as a screw-ball comic, and they were considerable, here as a lower-class "good girl" with all the right morals, all the right world-wiseness for her joe, and all the right instincts to stand by her man set my teeth on edge. That lack of tension between two such leading characters spills over into the rest of the doings. This one does not even have the cutesy “Oh, you devil Sam” of Sam Spade and his girl Friday secretary, Gladys, in The Maltese Falcon.

A little summary of the plot line is in order to demonstrate that lack of tension. Said detective is being framed again in New York (and had already been framed before, although not in New York but San Francisco) by, he believes, his SF ex-detective agency partner. That, however, is merely a blind ruse used by a certain high-powered high society art dealer (played, naturally, by Clifton Webb, a central casting fit for such a role if there every were one), an art dealer with a young wife. After all the other misdirection this one was telegraphed the minute that we see the “divine” pair together, and that fact is cemented when we see said ex-partner and lovely trophy wife ready to take off right under the nose of Mr. High Society. But a high society art dealer, with a young wife or not, does not get where he is without a strong possessive desire and so the frame is on and our detective is made to fit the frame, and fit it very easily until our real culprit is discovered and dealt with. And dealt with forthrightly, as all overwrought, possessive older husbands are dealt with in noir. By the pent-up hatred of that trophy wife, after she finds out that dear hubby has killed her man. You don’t need to know much more to know what that will mean, or that the framed guy and his good girl Friday will eventually walk down the aisle together. Doesn’t this sound a little too familiar? Like, maybe a low-rent Laura in spots? Hmm.

Note: Clifton Webb, as mentioned above, seems to have been a gold-plated central casting stereotype for the repressed, possessive, and, well, psychopathic high-powered high society swell with an eye (or maybe two eyes) for lovely young women. As seen here, and more famously, in the classic crime noir, Laura. Apparently Mr. Webb never learned that those 1940s lovelies may be wily enough to latch on to a rich man for fame and fortune but are a little headstrong about being roped in, roped in completely by, well, an old lecher, high class or not. It doesn’t take a Mayfair swell to know this is not a country for old men. Any young joe could have told him that.

Out In The 1930s Crime Noir Night- Dashiell Hammett's "Thin Man"-Goes Home-Kind Of

The Thin Man Goes Home, starring William Powell, Myrna Loy, Asta, 1945

I am a devotee of the hard-boiled detective writer Dashiel Hammett. I believe that Nick and Nora Charles in the original Thin Man represented interesting transitional figures from the old amateur drawing -room detectives to the modern hard-boiled detectives but enough is enough. As in current blockbuster films the desire to go milk an original idea beyond its point of saturation is clear in this the fifth in the series. Oh, yes Nick and Nora are in love. Asta is, well Asta is Asta. Beyond that Nick’s return home to solve a murder and make papa proud, all without alcohol, should have send everyone scurrying back to New York or San Francisco on the next train-make that the next plane.

*****The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

*****The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Here is the drill. Bart Webber had started out life, started out as a captive nation child listening to singers like Frank Sinatra who blew away all of the swirling, fainting, screaming bobbysoxers who really did wear bobby sox since the war was on and nylons were like gold, of his mother’s generation proving that his own generation, the generation that came of age to Elvis hosannas although to show human progress they threw their undergarments his way, was not some sociological survey aberration before he, Frank,  pitter-pattered the Tin Pan Alley crowd with hip Cole Porter champagne lyrics changed from sweet sister cocaine originally written when that was legal, when you could according to his grandmother who might have known since she faced a lifetime of pain could be purchased over the counter at Doc’s Drugstore although Doc had had no problem passing him his first bottle of hard liquor when he was only sixteen which was definitely underage, to the bubbly reflecting changes of images in the be-bop swinging reed scare Cold War night, Bing Crosby, not the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? when he spoke a little to the social concerns of the time and didn’t worry about Yip Harburg some kind of red pinko bastard raising hell among the workers and homeless guy who slogged through World War I  but White Christmas put to sleep stuff dreaming of very white Christmases along with “come on to my house” torchy who seemed to have been to some Doc’s Drugstore to get her own pains satisfied Rosemary Clooney (and to his brother, younger I think, riding his way, Bob and his Bobcats as well), the Inkspots spouting, sorry kit-kating scat ratting If I Didn’t Care and their trademark spoken verse on every song, you know three verses and they touched up the bridge (and not a soul complained at least according to the record sales for a very long time through various incantations of the group), Miss Patti Page getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod Bay in the drifty moonlight a place he was very familiar with in those Plymouth drives down Route 3A  and yakking about some doggie in the window, Jesus (although slightly better on Tennessee Waltz maybe because that one spoke to something, spoke to the eternal knot question, a cautionary tale about letting your friend cut in on your gal, or guy and walking away with the dame or guy leaving you in the lurch), Miss Rosemary Clooney, solo this time, telling one and all to jump and come to her house as previously discussed, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no account man to do right, do right by his woman (and swinging and swaying on those Tin Pan Alley tunes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers and Jerome Kern best with Benny Goodman in wartime 1940s which kept a whole generation of popular singers with a scat of material), the Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks, not cousin, thank you remember what was said above about the switch in time from sweet sister to bathtub gin), the McGuire Sisters getting misty-eyed, the Dooley sisters dried-eyed, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band for some reason, maybe sibling rivalry, look it up if you like) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s.

The radio which his mother, Delores of the many commands, more commandments than even old Moses come down the mountain imposed on his benighted people, of the many sorrows, sorrows maybe that she had picked a husband more wisely in the depths of her mind although don’t tell him, the husband, his hard-pressed father or that she had had to leave her own family house over on Young Street with that damn misbegotten Irish red-nosed father, and the many estrangements, something about the constant breaking of those fucking commandments, best saved for another day, always had on during the day to get her through her “golden age of working class prosperity” and single official worker, dad, workaday daytime household world” and on Saturday night too when that dad, Prescott, joined in.

Joined in so they, mother and father sloggers and not only through the Great Depression and World War II but into the golden age too, could listen to Bill Marley on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression (no mean task not necessarily easier than slogging through that war coming on its heels)  and when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or the Pacific atoll island one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. A not unusual occurrence, that shoe dropping, when the lightly trained, rushed to battle green troops faced battle-hardened German and Japanese soldiers until they got the knack of war on bloody mudded fronts and coral-etched islands but still too many Gold Star mothers enough to make even the war savages shed a tear. 

Bart, thinking back on the situation felt long afterward that he would have been wrong if he said that Delores and Prescott should not have had their memory music after all of that Great Depression sacking and war rationing but frankly that stuff then (and now, now that he had figured some things out about them, about how hard they tried and just couldn’t do better given their circumstances but too later to have done anything about the matter, although less so) made him grind his teeth. But he, and his three brothers, were a captive audience then and so to this very day he could sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister’s) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not his music, okay. (Nor mine either since we grew up in the same working class neighborhood in old Carver, the cranberry bog capital of the world, together and many nights in front of Hank’s Variety store we would blow steam before we got our very own transistor radios and record players about the hard fact that we could not turn that radio dial, or shut off that record player, under penalty of exile from Main Street.)     

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which Bart “dug” (his term since he more than the rest of us who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Clam Shack on Main Street [not the diner on Thornton Street, that would be later when the older guys moved on and we stepped up in their places in high school] was influenced by the remnant of the “beat” generation minute as it got refracted in Carver via his midnight sneak trips to Harvard Square, trips that broke that mother commandment number who knows what number), seriously dug to the point of dreaming his own jailbreak commandment dreams about rock star futures (and girls hanging off every hand, yeah, mostly the girls part as time went on once he figured out his voice had broken around thirteen and that his slightly off-key versions of the then current hits would not get him noticed on the mandatory American Bandstand, would not get him noticed even if he was on key) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us, to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Payne, call that stuff the music that he, I came of age to.

Although the echoes of that time still run through his, our, minds as we recently proved yet again when we met in Boston at a ‘60s retro jukebox bar and could lip-synch, quote chapter and verse, One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course, too bad he couldn’t keep his hands off those begging white girls when the deal went down and Mister wanted no interracial sex, none, and so send him to hell and back), Let’s Have A Party ( by the much underrated Wanda Jackson who they could not figure out how to produce, how to publicize -female Elvis with that sultry look and that snarl or sweet country girl with flowers in her hair and “why thank you Mister Whoever for having me on your show I am thrilled” June Carter look ), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night, well almost one hit, but what a hit when you want to think back to the songs that made you jump, made you a child of rock and roll), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course, who had long ago answered the question of who put the rock in rock and roll and who dispute his claim except maybe Ike Turner when he could flailed away on Rocket 88), Peggy Sue (too soon gone Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

 

The music that Bart really called his own though, as did I, although later we were to part company since I could not abide, still can’t abide, that whiny music dealing mainly with mangled murders, death, thwarted love, and death, or did I say that already, accompanied by, Jesus, banjos, mandos and harps, was the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with his, our coming of chronological, political and social age, the latter in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside us filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which neither of us tied up with knots with seven seals connected with until later after getting out of our dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down.

By the way if you didn’t imbibe in the folk minute or were too young what I mean is the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell, a guy you probably never heard of and haven’t missed much except some history twaddle that Bart is always on top of (from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act, conscious or unconscious, of historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed Bart by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend of his and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let him in on his treasure trove of music from that genre which he tried to interest me in one night before I cut him short although Everett was a cool guy, very cool for a guy from the hills and hollows of Appalachia). Protest songs too, protest songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crow’s midnight hooded ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the “ticky-tack little cookie-cutter box” existences all of us were slated for if nothing else turned up by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. Bart said that while he was in college (Boston College, the Jesuit school which was letting even heathen Protestants like Bart in as long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again on their dime, or could play football) the latter songs (With God On Our Side, Blowin’ In The Wind, The Time They Are A-Changing, I Ain’t Marching No More, Universal Soldier and stuff like that) that drove a lot of his interest once he connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which he has written plenty about elsewhere and need not detain us here where he hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights.

Bart said a lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that he, we although I just kept replaying Elvis and the crowd until the new dispensation arrived, kept hearing on his transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers (Fabian, a bunch of guys named Bobby, the Everly Brothers) and vapid young female consumer-driven female singer stuff (oh, you want names, well Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Leslie Gore say no more). I passed that time, tough time it was in that cold winter night where the slightest bit of free spirit was liable to get you anywhere from hell form commandment mother to the headmaster to some ill-disposed anonymous rabid un-American committee which would take your livelihood away in a snap if you didn’t come across with names and addresses and be quick about it just ask the Hollywood Ten and lesser mortals if you think I am kidding which I agreed was a tough time in the rock genre that drove our desires, feeling crummy for not having a cool girlfriend to at least keep the chill night out playing my by the midnight phone classic rock and roll records almost to death and worn down grooves and began to hear a certain murmur from down South and out in Chicago with a blues beat that I swear sounded like it came out of the backbeat of rock. (And I  was not wrong, found out one night to Bart’s surprise and mine that Smiley Jackson big loving tune that I swear Elvis ripped off and just snarled and swiveled up. Years later I was proven right in my intuition when it turned out that half of rock and roll depended on black guys selling scant records, “race records” to small audiences.)  

Of course both of us, Bart and me, with that something undefinable which set us apart from others like Frankie Riley the leader of the corner boy night who seemed to get along by going along, being nothing but prime examples of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about, hell, gnawing at their knuckles since the big boys expected them to earn all that research money by spotting trends not letting the youth of the nation go to hell in a handbasket without a fight, worried that we were heading toward nihilism, toward some “chicken run” death wish or worse, much worse like Johnny Wild Boy and his gang marauding hapless towns at will leaving the denizens defenseless against the horde and not sure what to do about it, worried about our going to hell in a handbasket like they gave a fuck, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world although I would not have characterized that trend that way for it would take a few decades to see what was what. Then though the pretty boy and vapid girl music just gave me a headache, a migraine if anybody was asking, but mostly nobody was.  Bart too although like I said we split ways as he sought to seek out roots music that he kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once he found a station out of Providence  (accidently) which featured such folk music and got intrigued by the sounds.

Part of that search in the doldrums, my part but I dragged Bart along a little when I played to his folkie roots interests after he found out that some of the country blues music would get some play on that folk music station, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport for the famous folk festival there, the one where we would hitchhike to the first time since we had no car when Steve  when balked at going to anything involving, his term “ faggy guys and ice queen girls” (he was wrong, very wrong on the later point, the former too but guys in our circle were sensitive to accusations of “being light on your feet” and let it pass without comment) to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be with the devil than to be that woman’s man, a song that got me into trouble with one girl when I mentioned it kiddingly one time to her girlfriend and I got nothing but the big freeze after that and as recently a few years  when I used that as my reason when I was asked if would endorse Hilary Clinton for President, Bukka White (sweating blood and salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited which you can see via YouTube), and, of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south in the late 1950s and early 1960s looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation, guys who came from the Mister James Crow’s South and had learned at their feet or through old copies of their records like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, the late B.B. King, to make the move north, to follow the northern star like in underground railroad days to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis on Beale Street to polish up their acts, to get some street wise-ness in going up river, in going up the Big Muddy closer to its source as if that would give them some extra boost, some wisdom) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had, as the legendry Robert Johnson is said to have done one dark out on Highway 61 outside of Clarksville down in the Delta, made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  

B.B. King was by no means my first choice among electrified bluesmen, Muddy Waters and in a big way Howlin’ Wolf, especially after I found out the Stones were covering his stuff (and Muddy’s) got closer to the nut for me, But B.B.  on his good days and when he had Lucille (whichever version he had to hand I understand there were several generations for one reason or another) he got closer to that feeling that the blues could set me free when I was, well, blue, could keep me upright when some woman was two-timing me, or worst was driving me crazy with her “do this and do that” just for the sake of seeing who was in charge, could chase away some bad dreams when the deal went down.

Gave off an almost sanctified, not like some rural minster sinning on Saturday night with the women parishioners in Johnny Shine’s juke joint and then coming up for air Sunday morning to talk about getting right with the Lord but like some old time Jehovah river water cleaned, sense of time and place, after a hard juke joint or Chicago tavern Saturday night and when you following that devil minister showed up kind of scruffy for church early Sunday morning hoping against hope that the service would be short (and that Minnie Callahan would be there a few rows in front of you so you could watch her ass and get through the damn thing. B.B. might not have been my number one but he stretched a big part of that arc. Praise be.

 

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: No end in sight for terrorism or the refugees fleeing to safety

There is no reason for Assad and his supporters to agree to a political transition whereby a real transfer of power could take place because they still control most of populated Syria… The real balance of power between the main players in Syria is better expressed by the figures for population in areas held by the different sides. The French cartographer Fabrice Balanche at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy estimates that the population of Syria is now down to 16 million because of the exodus of refugees (it was 23 million before the war). Of these, 10 million people are in government-held districts and 2 million each are in Isis, non-Isis rebel and Kurdish territory. Isis and al-Nusra are not in the business of negotiating with anybody, and Ahrar al-Sham, which turned up but then withdrew from the recent conference of opposition groups in Riyadh, is divided on the issue… Even if Assad did go but was replaced by somebody from the existing Syrian power structure, why should the opposition accept cosmetic changes in Damascus when they still have a military option? … Silver linings in Syria and Iraq are hard to detect, but the greater cooperation between the US and Russia in the run-up to the Vienna talks is one of them.   More

 

Saudi Arabia is Obliterating Yemen — with Our Help

Eight days after the bombing campaign began, the US began providing crucial aerial refueling to Saudi Arabia and its partners. As of Nov. 20, US tankers had flown 489 refueling sorties to top off the tanks of coalition warplanes 2,554 times, according to numbers provided to GlobalPost by the Defense Department.  The US military is also advising the coalition through what is known as the “Joint Combined Planning Cell,” which was authorized by US President Barack Obama, according to Capt. P. Bryant Davis, a CENTCOM media operations officer. The joint cell is based in Riyadh, where US military personnel regularly meet with senior Saudi military leadership… Meanwhile, the US continues to send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. In November, the State Department approved a $1.29 billion deal to replenish Saudi Arabia’s air force arsenal, depleted by its bombing campaign in Yemen. The sale includes thousands of air-to-ground munitions such as laser-guided bombs, bunker buster bombs and “general purpose” bombs with guidance systems.    More

 

U.S. Foreign Arms Deals Increased Nearly $10 Billion in 2014

Foreign arms sales by the United States jumped by almost $10 billion in 2014, about 35 percent, even as the global weapons market remained flat and competition among suppliers increased, a new congressional study has found.  American weapons receipts rose to $36.2 billion in 2014 from $26.7 billion the year before, bolstered by multibillion-dollar agreements with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Those deals and others ensured that the United States remained the single largest provider of arms around the world last year, controlling just over 50 percent of the market.   More

 

How Sunni-Shia Sectarianism Is Poisoning Yemen

While Yemen is home to two major religious groups, the Zaydi Shia Muslims in the north and the Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’i school in the south and east, the religious divide has historically been of limited importance. Internal conflicts have certainly been endemic to Yemen, but they have typically been driven by political, economic, tribal, or regional disparities. While these conflicts sometimes coincided with religious differences, they were rarely a primary driver. Instead, religious coexistence and intermingling was taken for granted by most Yemenis and seen as a normal feature of everyday life.  But with the outbreak of the most recent round of conflict after the 2011 Arab Spring, sectarian discourse has become more heated, reorganizing Yemeni society along sectarian lines and rearranging people’s relationships to one another on a non-nationalist basis.   More

 

 

A View From The Left-IT’S OFFICIAL: THERE NEVER WAS A ‘WAR ON COPS’

IT’S OFFICIAL: THERE NEVER WAS A ‘WAR ON COPS’

This year will go down in the record books as one of the safest for police officers in recorded history, according to data released this week from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. There were 42 fatal shootings of police officers in 2015, down 14 percent from 2014, according to the organization.  Overall, 124 officers were killed in the line of duty this year. More than one third of those deaths were due to traffic accidents, the largest single cause of officer fatalities. Thirty other officers died of a variety of other causes, including job-related illnesses… But they contrast sharply with a narrative we've been hearing about a "war on cops" in the wake of demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere in protest of fatal shootings by police. The narrative has been especially popular among Republican presidential contenders… Even though it's squarely at odds with the facts, this rhetoric has an effect: A Rasmussen poll in September found that 58 percent of Americans said that there's a war on police in the United States today.   More

 

TA-NEHISI COATES: The Paranoid Style of American Policing

Two days after Jones and LeGrier were killed, a district attorney in Ohio declined to prosecute the two officers who drove up, and within two seconds of arriving, killed the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. No one should be surprised by this. In America, we have decided that it is permissible, that it is wise, that it is moral for the police to de-escalate through killing… When policing is delegitimized, when it becomes an occupying force, the community suffers. The neighbor-on-neighbor violence in Chicago, and in black communities around the country, is not an optical illusion. Policing is (one) part of the solution to that violence. But if citizens don’t trust officers, then policing can’t actually work. And in Chicago, it is very hard to muster reasons for trust.   More

 

America’s Incarcerated Population, Largest in World, Grew Even More Last Year

The federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new numbers detailing how America’s incarcerated population — already the world’s largest — grew even bigger in 2014.  The bureau’s researchers report that the number of individuals incarcerated grew by 1,900 people over the course of last year — “reversing a 5-year decline since 2008.” … Their report found that just seven jurisdictions “accounted for almost half of the U.S. correctional population at yearend 2014,” with Texas topping the list with 699,300 offenders. Overall, “about 1 in 36 adults in the United States was under some form of correctional supervision at yearend 2014.”  More

 

TY BURR: The most important movies of 2015 were not in any theater

To me, the most important movie of 2015 was the police car dash-cam video of the July arrest of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, in Prairie View, Texas. Not just the three minutes or so of the altercation with a white police officer that resulted in Bland’s being taken to the local jail, where she allegedly hung herself three days later, but the entire 52-minute expanse of the tape… Nor was this hardly the only “found footage” of note in 2015, video imagery that is so much more worth your time and thought than — I hate to say it but I have to — a new “Star Wars” movie… They’re the latest in a horrifying hit parade that includes videos of the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice in 2014 and Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino in 2013… England’s The Guardian has a helpful, if horrifying database of US police killings this year — www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database — that parses the numbers in varying ways. Of the 1,103 Americans shot and killed by police, 537 have been white and 272 have been black. (Hispanic/Latinos account for 170 deaths.) But those numbers translate to 2.7 white deaths for each million versus 6.5 black deaths per million… But this was a year in which, for people whose unacknowledged privileges give them a hall pass allowing them to move freely through America, it became impossible to look away, or to forget, or to hurry on.    More

 

Terror Fear Trumps Populist Anger: a Corporate Media Triumph

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll notes a recent development in the opinion and focus of the United States electorate.  

“Heightened fear of terrorism is rippling through the electorate, thrusting national-security issues to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign…, Some 40% of those polled say national security and terrorism should be the government’s top priority, and more than 60% put it in the top two, up from just 39% eight months ago… Never mind that everyday Americans are more likely to be killed by an asteroid than by a terror attack.  Or that those Americans are at much greater risk to mortality from the nation’s current savage “New Gilded Age” levels of economic inequality – a leading factor behind the recent striking rise in white middle aged and working class mortality in the U.S…   The polls are ironically juxtaposed with a recent Pew Research report on the economic disparity that ends and ruins far more American lives than Islamic terrorism.    More

 

GLENN GREENWALD: Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS

In 2006 — years before ISIS replaced al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain — Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights… In a follow-up article titled “The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact,” Gingrich went even further, arguing that terrorists should be “subject to a totally different set of rules,” and called for an international convention to decide “on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims.” … Fast forward to 2015, where the aging al Qaeda brand has become decisively less scary and ISIS has been unveiled as the new never-before-seen menace. There are now once again calls for restrictions on the First Amendment’s free speech protections, but they come not from far-right radicals in universally discredited neocon journals, but rather from the most mainstream voices, as highlighted this week by the New York Times.   More

 

 

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The Lost Treasure Of The Outback-With Burt Lancaster’s Rope Of Sand In Mind

The Lost Treasure Of The Outback-With Burt Lancaster’s Rope Of Sand In Mind

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Zack James

Every once in a while Josh Breslin liked to abandon his hideaway in his old growing up hometown of Olde Saco up in coastal Maine which he had several years early returned to after living in many other places to “get the dust of that old town off his shoes” as he liked to say to his old gang and go down to Boston and join up with some old friends from Carver whom he had met back in the early 1960s through his connection with the late Pete Markin out on the hitchhike road in San Francisco. He, they, including Markin before he went over the edge in a drug deal and lost his life in the mid-1970s dealing with some serious mal hombres down south of the border who did not give a damn about some “from hunger” gringo, had spent a few years living that alternative lifestyle counter-cultural dream that was the 1960s before the night-takers pulled the hammer down and sucked all the air out of whatever small Eden they were trying to build.

They all, except Markin, one way or another read the tea leaves of the ebb tide of the 1960s and made their respective “armed truces” as Sam Lowell, one of their number from Carver, liked to call it and went back to whatever they had intended to do before the action in the 1960s caught them in its web, including Josh who spent his time as a free-lance writer for half the small and medium-sized publications in the country. Josh, Frankie Riley the schoolboy leader of the tribe in Carver although more laid back out West where being herd-riding “boss” was in bad odor, Sam, Sam Eaton, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber and the recently deceased Benny Borden known always as the Be-Bop Kid after he latched onto  Benny Goodman and went crazy for swing when the rest of us were seriously into acid-etched rock (we called that friendly enough “different strokes for different folks,” and it was just fine) kept in touch over the years and would meet periodically over drinks and dinner, although frequently as they have been retired or semi-retired mainly drinks, at the Rusty Nail in downtown Boston to reminisce over old times and tell some new lies. One such occasion a while back was the reason that Josh had come down from Maine.

Now almost like in their schoolboy days the subject matter under discussion at any of these get-togethers could range from the general rage they felt for the war policies of the current American government since they had all more or less retained their hatred for war carried over from Vietnam War days of which Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley and the Be-Bop Kid had been veterans of and the others staunch opponents of including jail-time to what was new in music or seen on YouTube, film or books. (Sam Eaton said filled in the blank for which current government it is in the now endless wars that preoccupy Washington.) Josh usually of late had been regaling the group with his reviews of various old-time black and white movies he had watched via Netflix DVDs or streamed on his T.V. now that he had time to do so. He was especially crazy over film noir or anything that smacked of that genre and the other guys usually gave him a listen since they had all seen at least some the films from the old days down in Carver at the Strand Theater where they would take in the Saturday afternoon kids’ matinee double-feature or later went at night on hot dates up into the balconies with “hot” dates at that same locale.     

On the night in question after warming up to the subject with a high shelf shot of Chivas neat (many steps up from old time Johnny Walker Black with water chaser, praise be, Josh praise be)  Josh started talking about gold, about how the gold lust in the classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre did Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston in. Got them nothing but windy graves down in old Mexico when the mal hombres came to take the gold away from them. (Everyone, including Josh, could only think after he had made that statement about what happened in the film about Markin and his unmarked potter’s field grave down there in Sonora, south of the border, and you could almost hear a collective moan, moan for man, moan for that old sainted bastard still missed and moaned over all these years later.)       

The reason Josh brought up the gold lust was that that precious mineral was not the only substance that men would fight and die over, would get that strange blood lust in their eyes to grab a fistful of. Having seen almost all the A film noirs available these days Josh had been checking out the vast array of B noirs and the one he wanted to talk about that night starred Burt Lancaster in an odd-ball noir entitled Rope of Sand. Here the lust, blooded or not, name your lust but here diamonds, diamonds found by the bags full, diamonds for the taking down in Southern Africa if you were man enough to go and grab them, and had the strength to keep them. A lesson lost on the boys in the Sierra Madre. Here’s how Josh ran to ground with the story.

“See this Davis guy, the part played by Burt Lancaster had been a hunting guide in the outback, out in Southern Africa probably South Africa but down in serious diamond country. One of his clients not only wanted to hunt animals but to seek what he was told were diamonds just waiting on the ground to be grabbed, grabbed by him as it turned out. Davis was not into that action but the client was and he took off one morning to cross the bushy savannah and serious dry rot desert to find them. He did but lacking proper hydration he was too weak to close the deal and dropped down on the ground ready for the grim reaper to take his hand.

“During this time Davis tracked him, found him seriously dehydrated, and after hiding the cache tried to get back to civilization to no avail. The client died. That was not the end of Davis’ troubles though since news of a huge diamond cache just waiting for somebody to grab set all kinds of wheels turning. Especially since those diamonds were on the private property of the main mining company in the area. The mining company security chief Vogel, played by Paul Henreid, you know he was the guy who played Victor Lazlo the escaped leader of the European anti-Nazi resistance in World War II who Rick, of Rick’s American Café in Casablanca gave up fetching Ilsa for on the theory that the love woes of three little people in this wicked old world don’t amount to a hill of beans when the night-takers are on a rampage, and he was right of course, played the heavy here and tried to torture Davis for the information about the whereabouts of the diamonds. Getting that haul would put a feather in his cap, put him in good with the mining company boss. No go, Davis wasn’t so brittle, got away to fight another day under better conditions and that is the backdrop to the action to follow.

“Davis, who despite his toughness, was strictly from hunger after he was banished from the guide trade decided he was strong enough to grab the diamonds a couple of years later. Of course Vogel would have a say about that, a big say since he controlled the most guns. But here is where Monty, played by Claude Rains who you will remember was the Vichy cop who wound up walking in the fog with Rick of Rick’s American Café once Rick played out that “hill of beans” theory and needed to get out of Casablanca fast and he was just the boy to do it, the mine owner has his own plan. After suffering a false rape scene with Suzanne, a local bar girl, maybe an independent street-walker they never made that easy rider stuff clear in those 1940s and 1950s movies expecting  that kids would get all worked up if they called women whores and men pimps that kind of stuff. For some filthy lucre she was to seduce Davis into telling her where the diamonds were, get the information and he would cut Vogel out. See how the lust works even with guys who have a ton of dough.                

“Well the seduction business doesn’t work on Davis and not because Suzanne did not have her charms but because along the way she turned out to be the whore with the golden heart and decided to side with him (after a couple of off-screen tumbles in the hay that off-screen another Hollywood play in those days). She was messing up his silk sheets for free on the side although like I say they didn’t spell that out for us then which might have helped clear up a lot of misunderstandings about sex, girls and what makes the world go round if they had but I will save that screed for another day.

“Naturally Davis went after the diamonds, has about six misadventures getting there. And of course you know that the evil Vogel had the “fix” in. But you know when you have a “from hunger” guy and a whore with a golden heart in a 1949 noir that Vogel was going down and things would  come up roses for Davis and Suzanne. They do since after wasting Vogel Davis made a deal with Monty for his life, free passage, a couple of rocks and Suzanne and Monty went for it. But see how that lust business did old Vogel in, and almost Davis.”

Everybody laughed but it was not an easy laugh since every man in that group in that bar that night had grown up “from hunger” and was probably wondering if the diamonds in Rope or the gold in Sierra Madre had been within their reach they might have wound up on the wrong side of the grave.