Okinawa: A Unique Joint US-Japanese Colony

Okinawa: A Unique Joint US-Japanese Colony

To the Courts! To the Streets!

By Gavan McCormack

Onaga vs. Abe

The confrontation pits the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Japan against the Governor and people of Okinawa. Since assuming office (for his second term) in December 2012, Abe has pursued a radical agenda, not only oriented towards enforcing his will over Okinawa but towards transforming the national polity: reinterpreting the constitution, committing Japan to global military support for the US, and joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet for none of these things did he have a mandate, and it is salutary to remember that the political dominance (holding 61.3 per cent of seats in the lower house) that allows Abe such concentration of power rests on an electoral victory in December 2012 in which his coalition secured just 33.4 per cent of the votes in the proportional system. That is, since only 52.4 per cent of people voted, Abe’s team gained the support of just 17.4 per cent of eligible voters.

Within Okinawa the margin of opposition to the base project stands in successive surveys at above 70 per cent, on occasion even as high as 80, while even nationwide he faces growing opposition, i.e., support for the Okinawan stance.² “All Okinawa” is one of the most recent, representative, and determined of the civic organizations challenging the Abe agenda.

When Abe Shinzo at the end of 2012 formed government for the second time (following his 2006-2007 administration), virtually the entire prefecture, including the Governor and the Okinawan branch of his own party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), opposed the Henoko project. He therefore concentrated on weakening, dividing and neutralizing that opposition. In 2013, he achieved his first success by persuading two prominent Okinawan LDP politicians to reverse themselves and drop their opposition to the Henoko base in April, and in December they were followed by the Okinawa chapter of the LDP itself and eventually by the Governor. The first defector, Shimajiri Aiko played a key role in leading and helping orchestrate the shift and was rewarded by being made parliamentary secretary to the cabinet (naikaku seimukan) and later (October 2015) given a seat in the third Abe cabinet. Her task was plain: to steer Okinawa’s polity and society from resistance to compliance, as she had helped do earlier with the LDP.

In July 2014, relying as warrant on the formal consent to reclamation/construction extracted from Governor Nakaima in December 2013, the Abe government began preparatory works on Oura Bay. By late 2015 it was moving towards the actual reclamation – readying to scour the coastal hills and beaches of much of Western Japan to provide two and a half million tons of soil and sand to dump into it.

Having taken office as Governor in December 2014 committed to “do everything in my power” to stop the Henoko construction project,

Onaga Takeshi became the figurehead of Okinawan resistance. Once in office, Onaga referred the Nakaima decision process to a Third Party (Experts) Committee of environmentalists and lawyers. When they in due course concluded from their meticulous examination that the process had indeed been marked by fundamental flaws, Onaga on October 13 formally cancelled the reclamation license. The national government, its warrant for works removed, temporarily suspended them, but it was determined to evade and negate the governor’s ruling. The Minister for Lands and Infrastructure (Ishii Keiichi) issued an order cancelling the Governor’s order on grounds that otherwise it would be “impossible to continue the relocation” and because in that event “the US-Japan alliance would be adversely affected.” ³ He proceeded to issue first an “advice,” and then, three days later, an “instruction” to Governor Onaga to withdraw the cancellation order. Onaga summarily rejected both.

On October 27, the Abe cabinet met and decided to step up its pressure. It declared (through the Minister for Defense) that there had been no “flaw” in the license Nakaima had granted, suspended ongoing (if mostly in effect stalled) negotiations with the prefecture, launched judicial proceedings in the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court to compel the prefecture’s compliance, and ordered the resumption of works at the site. It also ordered an additional 100-plus riot police from Tokyo (units with names such as “Demon” and “Hurricane”), to reinforce the mostly local Okinawan forces who till then had been imposing the state’s will at the construction site. Overall, it amounted to a constitutional coup: stripping the Governor and prefectural government of powers vested in them by the constitution and the Local Government Act.

Okinawa for its part refused the direction to withdraw the cancellation order, prepared to launch a vigorous judicial defense, and launched a formal complaint under the little-used “Council for Resolving Disputes between Central Government and Local Governments”⁴

That same late-October session of cabinet also decided to abandon the plan to shift some units of Marine Corps MV 22 “Osprey” VTOL aircraft training to facilities in Saga prefecture (i.e. in Kyushu, mainland Japan), since local municipal and prefectural authorities there were resolutely opposed. In other words, local opposition was respected in the case of Saga, but over-ruled in the case of Okinawa. Throughout Okinawa, this was seen as decisive evidence of the national government’s discrimination against it.

Information

Both the Abe state and the Onaga prefecture strive to represent their case in terms of a “story” that would be persuasive in Okinawa itself, Japan, and in international fora. While Abe and his ministers insist that there is no alternative to the Henoko project, that it amounts to a “burden reduction” for Okinawa, and that the project has now entered the irreversible phase of “main works” (hontai koji), Governor Onaga presents the totally different story of an inequitable and increasing burden, building upon the initial illegal seizure of Okinawan land and in defiance of the clearly and often expressed wishes of the Okinawan people; of a struggle for justice and democracy and for the protection of Oura Bay’s extraordinary natural biodiversity, worthy, as the prefecture saw it, of World Heritage ranking. Increasingly, Okinawa carries that message to international fora, including the the Governor’s mission to the US in May and the UN (Human Rights Committee) in Geneva in September 2015. The All Okinawa mission of November 2015 is part of that process.

The visit to Okinawa by the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior in early November 2015 was another expression of this gradual internationalizing of the dispute. Though Greenpeace had several times in the past (2000 and 2005) visited Okinawa, including Oura Bay, this time the vessel was allowed to dock only in in Naha and Nago harbours, its crew forbidden even to go ashore at Naha for four days, and refused permission to visit Oura Bay. It signified the Abe government’s determination to contain the Okinawa story and stop it from gaining wider international publicity.

Another measure of the Abe government’s intent to control the “Okinawa story” is the view, several times articulated, by Abe’s close friend, the novelist Hyakuta Naoki, that the two Okinawan newspapers (Ryukyu shimpo and Okinawa Times) should be closed down because they express “traitorous” views. Hyakuta is an Abe appointee (2013) to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK. Though such views amounted to “hate speech,” they attracted little attention in mainland Japan.⁵

The Abe government steadily strives to sway local Okinawan opinion, finding and encouraging supporters for the government’s design and countering elected officials who oppose it. In the cabinet reshuffle of October 2015, Shimajiri Aiko, the original “turncoat” of 2013 was promoted to cabinet as Minister for Okinawa, with responsibilities that included also the Northern Territories, science and technology, space, oceans, territorial problems, IT, and “cool Japan.” She was much appreciated in Abe circles, not only for her role in 2013 but for the views she expressed in 2014-5: calling for the Riot Police and Coastguard to be mobilized to curb the “illegal, obstructionist activities” of the anti-base movement (February 2014), denouncing Nago mayor Inamine for “abusing his power (April 2015), and referring contemptuously to the “irresponsible citizens’ movement” (October 2015). As Okinawa minister, she could be expected to use her considerable powers of patronage and influence to try to sway Okinawan society towards submission to the Abe design.

Since Nago City had from 2010 twice returned a mayor and local assembly majority that resisted all attempts at suasion, and refused to accept any monies linked to it, Abe, Shimajiri, and other members of government paid close attention to trying to divide and weaken the city’s anti-base movement. Late in October, the heads of three of the city’s 55 sub-districts (ku) – Henoko, Kushi and Toyohara (population respectively 2014, 621, and 427) – were invited to the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo. They set out their wish-list, asking for repairs to the local community halls, purchase of lawnmowers, and provision of one (or perhaps several) “azumaya” (a kind of summer-house or gazebo).⁶ They were told they were to be allocated the sum of 13 million yen each in the 2016 budget, a subsidy that would bypass the representative institutions of the city and prefecture. It was to be (as Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga later put it), “compensation” for the noise and nuisance caused them by the protest movement.

It was a trifling enough sum (less than half a million dollars in all), but it was without precedent, it defied the principles of parliamentary sovereignty and local self-government, and was a most likely illegal attempt to evade democratic will and constitutional procedure. ⁷ Public funds were appropriated, with no accountability, to encourage a cooperative, base-tolerating spirit in a few corners of a stubbornly anti-base city.⁸

The ku in rural Japan and Okinawa are the very smallest administrative units, commonly based on traditional and family networks. No head of a ku had ever been invited to the Prime Minister’s residence, seated at the table with top state officials like a head of state, and offered direct subsidy from state coffer

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Suga declared that the local ku districts “agreed” to the Henoko construction albeit with some strings attached, and suggested it was only natural that they be given every encouragement. However, within weeks, the heads of all three contradicted him, saying he had misunderstood them. The head of Kushi insisted that that district had not changed its opposition to Henoko base construction since taking that position in 1997, and the head of Toyohara that “absolutely no-one in Toyohara” wanted a base.⁹

The extraordinary appropriation for the three districts was in the same vein as the LDP Secretary-General’s 50 billion yen offer of funds for Nago City’s development on the eve of the crucial mayoral election of January 2014 (decisively rejected by the city which returned instead its anti-base incumbent). Citizens of Nago are familiar with such crude interventions, and might even take heart from this most recent one because there was something pitiful about the spectacle of the national government hosting local bigwigs and trying to seduce them with lawn-mowers to its base construction cause. It was, as Ryukyu shimpo put it, an “unprecedented politics of division”¹⁰.

However, although such extraordinary, unaccountable disbursements (almost certainly illegal and probably unconstitutional) were intended to show how cooperativeness would be rewarded, Shimajiri’s position late in 2015 was fragile. A civic ombudsman organization launched a criminal complaint against her alleging breaches of the Public Election Law and the Political Funds Regulation Law,¹¹ precisely the offences for which two female ministers of the Abe cabinet had been forced to resign in September 2014.

Law

In a democratic polity, when different units of the polity are in dispute, resort to the law would normally be seen as the necessary path to resolution. But as the Henoko problem is referred to the judiciary, there is a question as to whether Japan, especially Abe’s Japan, enjoys the division of powers and independence of the judiciary that are the hallmark of modern, constitutional states. As the Abe government in July 2014 had effectively amended the constitution by the simple device of adopting a new interpretation, so in 2015 it showed scant respect for the relevant laws in the way it addressed Henoko reclamation. On the one hand it pretended for purposes of its dispute with Okinawa to be just like a “private person” (ichishijin) seeking redress under the Administrative Appeals Law (a law specifically designed to allow aggrieved citizens to seek redress from a recalcitrant state, whose function he was thus reversing), while on the other it deployed the full powers and prerogatives of the state under the Local Self-Government Law to sweep aside prefectural self-government and to assume the right to proxy execution of an administrative act (gyosei daishikko). As constitutional lawyers had, overwhelmingly, condemned the 2014 de facto revision of the constitution, so in 2015 they criticized as manipulation or breach of several laws the way the Abe government was proceeding in the dispute with Okinawa prefecture.¹² In Okinawa such proceedings are seen as a mockery of any claim to fairness and objectivity.”¹³

The legal procedures, still at a relatively early stage, will play out in months ahead. However, the grim reality facing Okinawans is that the courts have, since the Sunagawa case of 1959, abandoned their theoretical, constitutional prerogatives to adjudicate on contests involving state rights on the grounds that “matters pertaining to the security treaty with the United States are “highly political” and concern Japan’s very existence.¹⁴ This means that in effect the security treaty is elevated above the constitution and immune from challenge at law. As former [1990-1998] Governor Ota Masahide, remarked,

“Despite the principle of separation of powers, the judiciary in Japan tends to subordinate itself to the administrative branch … I think it will be very difficult for the prefectural government to win the suit.” ¹⁵

Ota had himself been the target of heavy Tokyo pressure when in 1995 he refused to sign the proxy lease-agreement documents to allow the continued confiscation of private Okinawan land for base purposes. Arraigned before the High Court, he was issued in August 1996 with a peremptory order to obey. The fact that he then submitted makes this a worrying precedent for those who would place their faith in his successor.

In the meantime, however, there are many legal options open to

​ ​

Okinawa and to Governor Onaga to delay and obstruct the government. The law had never envisaged the carrying out of a massive project in the teeth of local non-cooperation. The Governor of Okinawa and mayor of Nago City could, and undoubtedly would, block and delay each stage of the process. The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly in 2015 adopted a law empowering the prefecture to inspect soil or sand being imported from outside the prefecture (and at least in principle to forbid its entry) because of the fear that pathogens imported from elsewhere (including Argentine ants) could wreak devastating effects on the island’s environment.¹⁶ The Okinawan protest movement on this front was gradually stirring a response in the many districts throughout Western Japan targeted for the provision of sand and soil for the base project; in other words, opposition was spreading at the “supply” end as well as at the Okinawan reclamation site. Henoko was also found to be the location of important “natural monuments” such as hermit crabs, and of historically important “cultural relics” dating back to the pre-modern Ryukyu era such as “anchor stones.” Even as Abe readied his heavy machinery to step up the assault on the Bay, the discovery of 17 culturally significant earthen and stone-ware objects in the Oura Bay site vicinity was announced. It was thought almost certain to lead to legal measures to protect and further investigate the site.¹⁷

Physical Confrontation

The Abe government is different from previous LDP governments in the violence with which it treats the resolutely non-violent protest encampment at the Camp Schwab gate that opens to the Henoko construction site. The earlier design of a Henoko offshore base had been abandoned in 2005 because, as then Prime Minister Koizumi put it, of “a lot of opposition”¹⁸ and, as was later learned, because the Coastguard was reluctant to be involved in enforcing the removal of protesters from the site for fear of bloodshed.¹⁹ No such inhibitions appeared to affect Prime Minister Abe and his government in 2015.

Designated Land-fill Sources and Routes of Transport to Henoko/Oura Bay (Map showing, from top, Setouchi, Moji, Amakusa, Goto, Amakusa, Satamisaki, Amami oshima, Tokunoshima, with Henoko at far bottom left.)

Despite being relatively remote and difficult of access, especially in the early mornings, Henoko attracts steadily growing numbers of participants, exceeding 1,000 for the first time on the 500^th day of the sit-in, November 18, 2015. While the citizenry remains committed to non-violence and to the exercise of the right of civil disobedience only after exhausting all legal and constitutional steps to oppose the base project, the National Coastguard and Riot Police appear to be flaunting their violence more and more openly, dragging away protesters (quite a few of whom are in their 70s and 80s), dunking canoeists in the sea, pinning down one protest ship captain till he lost consciousness, and on a number of occasions causing injuries to protesters requiring hospital treatment.²⁰ The daily scenes from the Henoko site are shown on local television and in the two prefectural newspapers (i.e. the media that in Abe circles is seen as deserving to be shut down).

If the Abe government design had been to induce submission by the exercise of overwhelming force at the works site, and by wielding its authority in the judicial arena and executive arenas, it has not worked. If anything, it is counter-productive. Okinawan anger deepens. If the ongoing “Battle of Henoko” were to continue indefinitely on its current lines for the five years that the government reckons reclamation and construction would take, “unforeseen” events, with the real possibility of bloodshed, become more likely. In the supposed pursuance of “security,” insecurity spreads. The riot police reinforcements sent from Tokyo at the beginning of November 2015 were no doubt chosen in part because they could be expected to remain insensitive to this Okinawan pain and anger.²¹

Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), in his lament over the German people’s failure to contest the rise of Nazism till too late, wrote “First they came for the Communists” after which “they” came for the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc, but it did not concern “me” till it was too late. In today’s Japan, “they” is the Abe regime and “they” have come now for the Okinawans. If democracy is to survive, the Japanese people as a whole will have to realize that, like the sometime Germans, they today are “all Okinawans.” It is not just the fate of Oura Bay but the principles of a law-based constitutional state, committed t truth, justice, and democracy, that are under threat in Okinawa and must be defended there lest they be swept aside in Tokyo, Osaka and throughout Japan.

Gavan McCormack is an honorary professor of Australian National University, editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal, and author of many texts on aspects of modern and contemporary East Asian History, including Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012 (co-authored with Satoko Oka Norimatsu). His work is commonly published in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, as well as English. For some of his recent essays, “Okinawa as sacrificial victim,” Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2015, pp. 6-7, and “Chauvinist nationalism in Japan’s schizophrenic state,” in Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, eds, The Politics of the Right, Socialist Register 2016, London, The Merlin Press, 2015, pp. 231-249.

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*In The Time Of The "Fixer"- Dashiell Hammet's "The Glass Key"

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American detective story writer extraordinaire, Dashiell Hammet.

DVD/BOOK REVIEW

The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1932

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 (and sidekick society wife, Nora), Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective.

In The Glass Key Hammett takes a little different run at that same idea. The protagonist this time is not the usual detective but an old fashioned political "fixer". No, not the "spin doctor" or "flak" of modern media-driven politics but the older handler of the retail politics that counted in the local urban scene with the added factor of a little off hand, old fashioned mob influence. Nevertheless, the "fixer" Ned Beaumont has all the resourcefulness, toughness, loyalty, and hard-boiled common sense that we have come to expect of Hammett's 'real' detectives.

The plot revolves around the familiar problem of electoral politics-getting elected. In this case getting a Senator with a beautiful daughter, Janet, and an errant son, Taylor, reelected. Add in some political factions, also mob-dominated, a fair share of corrupt officials, an off-hand murder and other crimes and misdemeanors and you would hardly know we are not dealing with a `normal' Hammett novel. Further add in a slowly evolving romance between Ned and the afore-mentioned Senator's daughter who is also the object of his political boss's affections and you have quite a mix. Frankly, I prefer Hammett's detectives but any time you can get your hands on one of his books do so.

In the film version of the novel that follows the script of the book pretty closely the part of Ned is played by a young Alan Ladd. The Senator's daughter, Janet, is played by Veronica Lake. Naturally in the film the romantic tension is given more play than in the book. Some of the scenes between them, especially that classic silky hair over one eye Lake look when she is being coy, are worth the price of admission. Brian Donlevy as Ned's political boss also has his moments. Nice.

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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.

Support Courage To Resist-The Oraganization That Supports Chelsea Manning And Other Military Resisters-Buy Stuff

Everything 65% off + free shipping! https://orders.couragetoresist.org/shop/ Why we are closing the online shop of Courage to Resist and Chelsea Manning shirts, stickers, and other stuff Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist January 1, 2016 In order to better focus our time and energies on our core mission of supporting war resisters (including Chelsea Manning), Courage to Resist is closing our online shop that has featured shirts, stickers, posters, buttons, and the like. We have come to the conclusion that offering up this stuff via a secure online retailing platform, producing each item, securing the items from various vendors, and then fulfilling each order, simply is not worth our limited staff time. We are currently well into the process of liquidating our inventory of materials. However, there is still a lot of stuff left. We hope you take advantage of this sale to pick up a shirt for a few bucks, or stock up on thousands of stickers! When the stuff is gone, that’s it. We have a lot of experience producing these materials, as well as the original artwork. We’ll be happy to assist any organizers, who in the future, might want to produce their own campaign shirts, posters, banners, etc. For example, if you’d like a few thousand Chelsea Manning info card and stickers down the road, we’ll be available to help you get them made and shipped directly to you. As an extra bonus to those folks that have read to the end of this post, you’re invited to take an additional 15% discount off any order by using discount code “resist15” during check out. https://orders.couragetoresist.org/shop/

*The Stuff Of Dreams- Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon"

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

Book Review

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930

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 and Nora Charles, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective.

Hammett and Chandler also speak to a different, more macho if you will, but also a more world-wary and world-weary style of detection than today’s hyper-extended and techno-detail-oriented detectives who rely on computers and gadgetry more than guts. Still, with few exceptions, it is hard now to find a better proto-type for the kind of detective that writers of detective fiction wished they had, in their long, smoke-filled, whiskey-soaked, staring at that blank white page, writer nights (and we will not even speak of the days), dreamed up than Sam Spade. Nor a better, sparse, functional language-filled story line than old Dashiell Hammett thought up.

A little summary of the plot line is in order. It’s the bird, stupid. Get it. Except this is a gem of bird, a stuff of dreams, stuff of wild, exotic, face the gates of hell for, bird that has more than one crew of thieves, well-groomed, well-spoken thieves, and in their way polite unless a crippled newsy or two get in their way, but thieves nevertheless looking to get their hands on the damn thing, and wealth, Great Depression get out from under wealth. Hey, anytime get out from under wealth. In any case you need a scorecard to sort out who, and who is not, on the level at any particular time, except maybe the kid hired gunsel who keeps shadowing old brother Spade.

Naturally, in a noir detective story, and Hammett is nothing if not a noir writer from word one, there has to be a femme fatale dame with a checkered, if vaguely sketched past, and a dubious present, a very dubious present. But she, Brigid O’ Shaughnessy, in this one, has that look, you know that look, that women’s look, that look that will set the boys walking, no racing, to run into walls, to take more than their fair of hits on the head, to go full tilt at those damn windmills, gladly. Enter ever so jaded Sam Spade (and partner, Miles Archer, but he is just in it for the sappy dupe-guy dressing). Sam 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. And still he, been around the block many times and more, Sam Spade, is smitten when the femme fatale goes into her, well, femme fatale, act. Go figure. But those other traits will be hard-hearted Ms.Femme Fatale’s undoing in the end, as her version of the stuff of dreams goes awry. There, I have set up the mood for you. But this is one you should read and savor so I will leave it at that. If you want a well-thought out story that is also well-written from a member of the second echelon of the American literary pantheon, this one is for you.

Note: It is not altogether clear to me what Hammet’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 Hammet was a make-no-bones-about-it supporter of the Communist Party during the hard, don’t turn that eye from 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 heroic 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.

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

*****Then and Now-A Pamphlet On The American Labor Struggles Of The 1930s

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1072 7 August 2015 New Spartacist Pamphlet   Newly available for purchase is our publication Then and Now, which explains how class-struggle leadership made a key difference in three citywide strikes in 1934. We reprint below the pamphlet’s introduction describing its contents.   The “Then and Now” article in this pamphlet addresses the crucial political lessons of the 1934 strikes by Minneapolis truckers, maritime workers on the West Coast and Toledo auto parts workers. Waged amidst the all-sided destitution of the Great Depression, these strikes, like others that year, confronted the strikebreaking forces of the capitalist state. A key difference was that these strikes won. What made this outcome possible is that their leaders were, at the time, committed to a program of class struggle. Unlike other trade-union leaders of that day—and today—they did not buy into the notion that the workers had interests in common with the employers, their political parties or their state. Instead, these strikes were fought by mobilizing the mass strength and solidarity of the workers in opposition to the forces of the capitalist class enemy.   The review of Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters provides a more in-depth study of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes, which were led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (CLA). Here they confronted the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, who commanded the allegiance of many workers with his often radical-sounding, friend-of-the-little-guy rhetoric. The FLP postured as a “third party” alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans, but it was no less a capitalist party.   This is effectively addressed in the 1930 article “The Minnesota F.L.P.” by Vincent Dunne, who went on to become a central leader of the truckers’ strikes. As Dunne makes clear, the two-class Farmer-Labor Party was based on the subordination of the workers’ struggles to farmers and other petty-bourgeois forces “whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order.” After an on-again, off-again alliance with the Democratic Party, the FLP finally merged with the Democrats in 1944.   Dunne and other CLA leaders of the Minneapolis strikes had been armed for battle against farmer-labor populism by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who in the early 1920s had intervened to pull the young American communist movement back from giving political support to the capitalist “third party” candidacy of Robert La Follette, a maverick Republican Senator from Wisconsin. The excerpts from Trotsky’s introduction to his book, The First Five Years of the Communist International, summarize his opposition to this opportunist course which, if pursued, would have politically liquidated the fledgling Communist party.   Today, what remains of the gains that were won through the momentous class battles of the past continues to be ravaged in a one-sided class war enabled by trade-union misleaders, who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were founded. The working class, the poor, black people, immigrants and countless others at the bottom of this society have paid the price in busted unions, broken lives and all-sided misery.   To be sure, it is not easy for the workers to win in the face of the forces arrayed against them. Many strikes, even very militant ones, will lose. But as was demonstrated in the three 1934 strikes addressed in this pamphlet, when important working-class battles are won it can dramatically alter the situation. These victories inspired a huge labor upsurge later in the 1930s that built the mass industrial unions in this country.   Hard-fought strikes can provide an important school of battle for the workers in which they learn the power of their collective strength and organization and begin to understand the class nature not only of the capitalist system but of the government, laws and political parties that defend its rule. But while able to strike important blows against the conditions of the workers’ exploitation, trade-union struggle on its own cannot end that exploitation. To win that war there must be a struggle for working-class power under the leadership of a revolutionary party that can arm the workers with the understanding and consciousness of their class interests in the fight to emancipate labor and all of the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.

 

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA

Frank Jackman comment on the labor Struggles of the 1930s:

Everybody, everybody who has been around for the last generation or two and has been breathing knows that the rich have gotten richer exponentially in the one-sided class war that they have so far successfully been pursuing here in America (and internationally as well). We really do not need to have the hard fact of class thrown in our faces one more time by the dwindling band of brave pro-working class leftists who must be legitimately perplexed by the lack of push-back, lack of basic trade union consciousness that animated those of a couple of generations ago to at least fight back and win a few precious gains. Or to have those of the think tank crowd of craven sociologists and make-shift policy wonks who are always slightly behind whatever the current reality is and well behind on what the hell to do about it if they would dream of lowering themselves to such considerations tell us of their recent discovery that the working classes (and the vaunted middle too) are getting screwed to put in working class language. What we really do need to have is some kind of guidance about how to fight back, how to get some room to breathe and figure out a strategy to win some class battles, small, large, hell, any size if for no other reason than to get the capitalists, mostly finance capitalists these days to back off a bit in that relentless drive to push everybody else to the bottom.

So it is very good, and very necessary, that this informative and thought-provoking pamphlet, Then and Now, goes back to the 1930s, the last serious prolonged struggle by the American working class as a class. Goes back and discusses those three very important class battles of 1934 –Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco all led centrally by “reds,” by those who had some sense that they were joining  in episodes of the class struggle and were willing to take their lumps on that basis. It probably would have seemed crazy to those militants that over 75 years later that their battles would be touted as the last great struggles of the class and that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be looking over their exploits with a certain admiration (and maybe puzzlement too since they have not seem such uppity-ness, ever). It speaks volumes that today’s leadership of the organized working class in the trade unions is clueless, worse, consciously works to keep everybody under their thumbs clueless about the battles that gave them their jobs. But that should not stop the rest of us from picking up some pointers. Read this one-and act.  

   

*Writer’s Corner- Dashiell Hammett’s "Women In The Dark"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American detective novelist Dashiell Hammett.

Book Review

Woman In The Dark, Dashiell Hammett, Introduction by Robert B. Parker, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988

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 and in serial form in popular magazines. The latter is how the short novel under review, Woman In The Dark, began its life.

The late Robert B. Parker, a very fine detective story writer in his own right, noted in the introduction to this work that this plot line, and its twists and turns, represented a very strong example of Hammett’s sense of the randomness of human existence. But also the drive for some regularity, some place to hang one’s hat, as well. Even down at the edges of society, the places where no one really wants to be, the place of kept women, cons, and ex-cons and of those who have the resources to make such dwellers their playthings. The plot line centers on a hardened, take no bull, been around the block, femme fatale, certainly not your typical damsel in distress, who is fed up with the antics of the rich guy who “rescued” her, for a time, the antics of the rich guy who doesn’t like to take no for an answer, especially when he has bought and paid for the merchandise (the femme fatale in this case), and a hard-nosed, hard-luck ex-con (a non-detective for once, if you can believe that) who simply will not go back to prison but who is not adverse to a little romance. And is willing to give, and take, a hard punch, if necessary.

Naturally, as is almost always the case with Hammett, the story line is driven, Hemingway-style, by sparse, functional language. However, for my money, there is just not enough of it to grip the imagination. Other than as an example, arguably a failed example, of Hammett trying to put steamy love interest and hard-boiled guys together on short notice, this novelistic effort could have stayed back in the pulp archives. Or waited to be anthologized, as it was, in the Dashiell Hammett volumes of the Library Of America series. For the real Hammett read The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon, those two efforts, my friends, are why Hammett is in the American literary pantheon.

*****In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind

*****In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 

From The Pen Of Zack James 

A few years ago, maybe more like a decade or so, in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia incantation fit Sam Eaton, who will be described further below, had thought he had finally worked out in his head what that folk moment had meant in the great musical arc of his life. Had counted up, had taken up and put value on its graces, did the great subtractions on its disappointments, that lack of beat that he had been spoon fed on in his head having heard maybe in the womb the sweats of some backbeat that sounded an awful lot like a band of the devil’s angels giving battle to the heavens, and got his head around, his expression, its clasps with certain young women, some absolute folkie women met in the Harvard Squares of the heated horny sex night and loves too not always with folkie women but just the muck of growing up and taking what came his way. So he had taken a back-flip, his expression, when he was required not out of his own volition like that great prairie fire burning before about why he felt after all these years that he needed to go back to what after all was a very small part of his life now that he was reaching four score and seventy, going back over the terrain of a small part of the musics that he had cultivated since early childhood.

Some of those musics from his parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II be-bop swing big band Saturday night get your dancing slippers imposed on his tender back of brain not to be revived and revisited until many years later when he had heard some ancient Benny Goodman be-bop clarinet backing up a sultry-voiced Peggy Lee getting all in a silky sweat rage because her man like a million others was not a do right man but had been chasing her best friend the next best thing when he got his wanting habit on and Peggy turned ice queen when he ran out of dough after shooting craps against the dealer and decided he had been wrong to dismiss such music out of hand. Some of the music along the edges of his coming from that edgy feeling he got when he heard the classic rock that just creeped into his pre-teen brain and lingered there unrequited until he found out what in that beat spoke to his primordial instincts, what caused his feverish nights of wonder, of what made him tick, of what he had missed.

Folk, the folk minute he deeply imbibed for that minute, at least the exciting part of the minute when he heard, finally heard, something that did not make him want to puke every time he turned on the radio, put his ill-gotten coins, grabbed from mother’s pocketbook laying there in wait for his greedy hands or through some con, some cheapjack con he pulled on some younger kids in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner jukebox to impress a few of the girls in town who were not hung up on Fabian or Bobby, heard something very new in his life and so different from the other musics that he had grown up with that he grabbed the sound with both hands. He thought that sweating a decade ago where he done a few small pieces to satisfy his literary sense of things and put them in a desk drawer yellow, fray and gather dust until he passed on and somebody put the paper in a wastebasket for the rubbish men, thought he had ended those thoughts, closed out the chapter. Recently though he did another series of short citizen-journalist sketches of scenes from that period for various folk music related blogs and social media outlets. Sam had done that series at the request of his old time friend, Bart Webber, who will also be described in more detail below, from Carver, an old working-class town about thirty miles south of Boston which at the time was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it, and close enough to have been washed by the folk minute that sprouted forth in Harvard Square and Beacon Hill in Boston.

Sam and Bart who in their respective youths had been very close, had been corner boys together when that social category meant something, meant something about extreme teen alienation and angst combined with serious poverty, dirt poor poverty as in hand-me-down older brother clothes, as in no family car for long periods between old wreak of cars, of many surly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, many Spam suppers, all fashioned to make these young men forever talking about big break-outs, about getting something for them and theirs but also for big candy-ased dreams too all put paid to, as one would expect of sons of “boggers,” those who cared for and harvested those world famous  cranberries, but also close because that was the way that corner boys were then, “having each other’s backs” was the term they used which confused even the best of the social scientists who investigated the phenomenon when that corner boy life meant juvenile delinquency, meant some unfathomed anger, some lack of socialization, some throwback to primeval muds, to some rising of the unkempt heathens they were payed to watch out for. Meant as well worry to those in power who were trying to weld society as one piece of steel to fight the internal and external red scare Cold War fight.

Like a lot of high school friends the cement that bound them in high school, that alienation, that comradery, those best left unsaid larcenous moments, the “midnight creeps” in Bart’s words when somebody asked him later what had made him and the corner boys put their reputations at risk for such small gain, a fact which also played a part in that “having each other’s back” broke apart once they graduated, or rather in their case once they had sowed their wild oats in the 1960s, those wild oats at the time meaning “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” combined with drifting the hitchhike road west in what one of their number, the late Pete Markin, called the search for the great blue-pink American West night.

Sam had stayed out in the West longer before he drifted back East to go to law school and pursue a professional career. Bart had returned earlier, had gotten married to his high school sweetheart and had started up and run a small successful specialty print shop based on the silk-screening tee-shirt and poster craze in Carver. They would run into each other occasionally when Sam came to town but for about twenty years they had not seen each other as both were busy raising families, working and travelling in different circles. One night though when Sam had been sitting in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner over on Spring Street in Carver having a late dinner by himself after having come to town to attend the funeral of a family member Bart had walked in and they then renewed their old relationship, decided that some spark from high school still held them together if nothing else that they both had been deeply formed, still held to those old corner boy habits toward life whatever successes they had subsequently enjoyed.

Along the way to solidifying there new relationship they would alternate meetings, some in Carver, some in Boston or Cambridge where Sam lived. On a recent trip to Boston to meet Sam at the Red Hat at the bottom of Beacon Hill Bart had walked pass Joy Street which triggered memories of the time in high school when he and his date who name he could not remember but she was a cousin of Sam’s “hot” date, Melinda Loring, who they went to school with and whom Sam was crazy to impress even though Melinda was not the daughter of a “bogger” but of school teachers and so from among the town’s better element and he was constantly on eggshells that she would toss him aside once she had figured out he was just another Fast Eddie corner boy trying to get into her pants, had taken them on a cheap date to the Oar and Anchor coffeehouse which stood at the corner of Joy and Cambridge Street to hear Lenny Lane who was an up and coming folk singer whom Sam had met on one of his clandestine midnight trips to Harvard Square on the Redline subway to hang out at the Hayes-Bickford.

That cheap part of the cheap date thing was important since Bart and Sam were as usual from hunger on money in the days when around Carver, probably around the world, guys paid expenses on dates, girls just looked beautiful or if not beautiful glad to not be forever hanging around the midnight telephone waiting for some two-timing guy to call them up for a date, and so short of just hanging at the Hayes for free watching weirdoes, con men, whores plying their trade, drunks, winos and occasional put upon artists, poets, writes and folk-singers perfecting their acts on the cheap, for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” for the performer you could get away with a lot especially when Bart was doing Sam a favor with that cousin (and worse could have gotten in trouble if Besty Binstock, his high school sweetheart. found out he was two-timing her although the two-timing involved the possibility of some off-hand sex with that cousin who was supposed to be “easy” but that in another story although come to think of it the situation could serve as another  prime example of “having each other’s back” when one of them was up against it).

Bart remembered that he had been very uncomfortable that night since he had had some feelings of guilt about two-timing (and lying to) Betsy starting out, had had trouble talking about anything in common, school, sports, the weather, with that cousin since she said she was doing Melinda a favor in order that she could go to Boston with Sam which Melinda’s mother would have balked at if she had told her they were going into Boston alone, going into Boston with a “bogger” alone. Moreover she knew nothing, cared nothing for folk music, didn’t even know what it was, said she had never heard of the thing, was fixated on Bobby Vee, dreamy guys, or something like that. What made that date worse was that Bart too then could hardly bear the sound of folk music, said repeatedly that the stuff was all dreary and involved weird stuff like murder and mayhem done on the banks of rivers, in back alleys, on darkened highways just because some woman would not come across, Jesus, strangely thwarted love reminding him of Sam’s forlorn quest for Melinda which seemed like some princess and pauper never the twain shall meet outcome, or hick stuff about home sweet home down in some shanty town in some desolate cabin without lights or water which sounded worse than Boggertown, singing high holy Jehovah stuff that made him wince, and of the hills and hollows in some misbegotten mountains made his teeth grind. So not a good mix, although it did turn out that the cousin was “easy,” did think he was dreamy enough to have sex with (with their clothes mostly on which was how more than one quicky one night stand wound up down by the boathouse near the Charles River after they had split from Sam and Melinda after the coffeehouse closed and that helped but had been the result of no help from the folk music they half-listened but more some dope that she had in her pocketbook after she passed had a joint around to get things going.            

After telling Sam about his recollections of Joy Street and that cousin, whose name was Judy Dennison Sam told him and who Sam had gone out with and agreed was a little sex kitten once she was stoned Bart started asking some questions about folk music. Sam said he was not finished with that Judy story, told Bart that fling was after the thing with Melinda had passed due not to class distinctions but to that hard fact that she was saving “it” for marriage, and had been very glad that he had that run and was not sorry he did. Bart started in again and asked Sam a million questions about various folk-singers and what had happened to them, were they still playing, still alive since Sam although he did not have the same keen interest of his youthful folk minute still kept small tabs on the scene, the now small scene through his long-time companion, Laura Perkins whom he met one night at the Café Nana several years before when Tom Tremble was playing there after Sam had not heard him in about forty years. The reason for Bart’s interest given that above he had said that the genre made his teeth grind was that after that night with Judy Bart did go on other double dates with Sam and Melinda, and later Suzanne when she was Sam’s next flame and a real folkie, to folk places and while he still would grind his teeth at some of the stuff did develop more tolerance for the genre, especially if the date Sam set up was a real foxy folkie girl (thinking on it now he couldn’t believe how unfaithful he had been to Betsy in those days but she too was saving “it” for marriage and some of those young women were very willing and had apartment or dorm rooms too).

The upshot of all of Bart’s questions was that Sam found that he was not really except for Tom Tremble who had lost his sweet baby James voice, forgot lyrics and had “mailed it in” that night he had met Laura and was cold “stonewalled” by the audience but possibly motivated by that old folkie feeling, or maybe just feeling sorry for a guy who had a big local following back in the day when the “basket” went around everybody put some dough in, Sam and Laura included, and a couple of other guys up on what had happened to the old-time folkies since for years he had merely listened on radio station WCAS and when that station went under WUMB out of U/Mass-Boston or listened to records, tapes or CDs. (Sam got big points from Laura that first night when he panned Tom, who Laura had never heard before being enough younger not to have been bitten by the folk minute craze and she agreed that Tom had “mailed it in”.) Since he was not all that familiar with what had happened to most of them he thereafter did some research, asked Laura some questions to lead the way and wound up writings that series of sketches. One series entitled Not Bob Dylan about the fate of prominent male folk-singers was a direct result of the Sam and Bart conversation. Here’s what he had to say about Tom Rush who back in the day he knew best from hanging around the old Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street:     

“…Other than enigmatic Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour male performer most people would still associate with that folk minute period they would draw a blank on a list of others who also were aspiring to make names for themselves in the folk milieu. I am not talking about guys like Lenny Lane who had one hit and then went back to graduate school in biology when he couldn’t get another contract, when his well ran dry, or like Tom Tremble who had a big local following around the old Club Nana when it was on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge not where it is now on Brattle Street but who did mainly covers and just never broke out or Mike Weddle who had good looks, a good stage presence, had the young women going crazy but who just walked away one day when some good looking woman from Radcliffe came hither and he “sold out” to her father’s stockbroking business.

I’m talking about people like Tom Rush from New Hampshire who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard campus folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician who knew more about what happened in the early, early days in the Village at the point where “beat” poetry was becoming passe and folk was moving in to fill in the gap, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beats” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics mid-1960s hippie explosion before folk got amplified of the bunch.

My friend Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours up in Maine and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series (as had the second) had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she)  and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Phil Ochs of suicide early, Dave Von Ronk of hubris and Jesse Winchester of his battle lost over time had come, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it will be at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those big-hearted souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2005 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records which pushed the likes of Dylan and John Hammond forward) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.

And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming “burn down the building fire,” just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage occasionally, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

“Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”).

So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this documentary and find out what happened to one Not Bob Dylan when the folk world went under.