*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

 

Who knows how it happened, how the jug bug craze got started in the folk minute of the 1960s, maybe it happened just like in the 1920s and early 1930s when “jug” got a boost by the likes of the Memphis Jug Band, The Mississippi Sheiks, and about twelve other state-named Sheik groupings using home-made weapons, uh, instruments, picked up from here and there, a jug here, a triangle there, fashion a kazoo of wood or grab a metal one at Woolworth's 5&10 there (got you on that one folkies, right, but they along with Sears & Roebuck's catalogue and maybe Marshall Fields' too sold all manner of musical instruments and before the folk boom of the 1960s when with disposable income [read: allowances and parents of means ready to indulge a few fantasies through their kids] which allowed kids to buy instruments from music stores a lot of guys, guys like Hobart Smith, Homer Jones and Matthew Arnold got their instruments handed down to them or some desperate mother or father like Guy Davis,' Son House's, Cliff Mathers', and Slim Parsons' ordered straight from the catalogue not the finest instruments but those guys spoke highly of their first store-bought instruments even when they could afford better when they made their marks), pluck a worn out grandmother's washtub there and come up with some pretty interesting sounds. Yeah, once you listen to the old stuff on YouTube these days where the Memphis Jug Band has a whole video file devoted to their stuff, same with a lot of the others, you could see where that period might have been the start of the big first wave.

Maybe though back in the 1960s somebody, a few musicians, got together and figured here was something that folk-crazed kids, a very specific demographic not to be confused with all of the generation of ’68 post-war baby boomers coming of age rock and roll jail break-out but those who were sick unto death of the vanilla rock and roll that was being passed out about 1960 or so, get this, music that more than one mother, including my mother, thought was “nice” and that was the kiss of death to that kind of music after the death of classic Elvis/Chuck/Bo/Jerry Lee rock for a while before the Brits came over the pond to stir things up and the West Coast acid-eaters ate enough of the drug to sink the Golden Gate Bridge or at least the park and headed east in the Second Coming of rock and roll (not to be confused with the Christian second coming which would signify the end of the world as we know it or with Yeats' mystical version with the seven-headed dragon staring you in the face so stay away from those who want to travel that route) so they started tinkering. Maybe, and remember the folk milieu perhaps more widely that the rock milieu was very literate, was very into knowing about roots and genesis and where things fit in (including where they, the folkies who also a vision about a kinder, gentler world all mixed in until heads got busted in goddam Mississippi goddam, got their heads busted on Fifth Avenue in NYC for calling for an armed truce to the Vietnam War, got their heads busted come May Day 1971 when all the evil spirits in the world rose to bust a certain kind of dream) somebody in the quickly forming and changing bands looked up some songs in the album archives at the library, or, more likely from what later anecdotal evidence had to say about the matter, found some gem in some record store, maybe a store like Sandy’s over between Harvard and Central Squares in Cambridge who had all kinds of eclectic stuff if you had the time and wherewithal to shuffle through the bins. Institutions like Sandy's and a lot of towns had such oases even some unknown name ones like Larry's in Portland, Maine and Sukie's out in Eire, Pennsylvania if you can believe that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and the Village in the East you could find some gems if you searched long enough and maybe found some old moth-eaten three volume set Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and came up with The Memphis Jug Band and K.C. Moan or the Sheiks doing Rent Man Blues, maybe Furry Lewis on Kassie Jones (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something second hand by Miss Patti Page singing about Cape Cod Bay all moony for the parents or try to hustle our young emotions but traipsing a dog in front of us, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about sixteen tons, tons of coal and breaking your back too, or good god, some country bumpkin George Jones thing like I couldn't even give you a title for stared you in the face).

From there they, the jug masters of the revival, found the Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, could be the way to prosper by going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, since that was what allowed the jug bands to prosper in the commercial markets of those days, keep the melody so simple that every working stiff and every forlorn housewife had the tune coming out of the sides of their brains and that was that. See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand they had on their fetid bodies. Let’s make it simple, something that was not death-smeared we-are- going-to-die-tomorrow if the Ruskkies go over the top red scare bomb shelter Cold War night that we were trying to shake and take our chances, stake our lives that there was something better to do that wait for the foreordained end.

And that wide awake search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence I have held from those who came of age with me in that time after having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music, since those who were left behind or decided out of ennui or sloth to stay put kept up the old country British Isles Child ballad stuff (their own spin on the stuff not Child’s Brattle Street Brahmin rarified collection stuff) and found some grizzled old geezers like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, Homer Jones, Reverend Jack Robinson and the like, who had made small names for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , the most famous and long-lasting of the 1960s jug groupings, all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, say they were well-versed, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin, smooth Cole Porter and the saucy Gershwin Brothers got a hearing from them and if they could simple those damn complicated Tin Pan Alley melodies they took a shot at those as well), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound but maybe some down in the cellar grandpa jug from the old days of Ball jars and crockery, a found washtub grandma used to use before she got that electric washer from the old garage where she put it against a rainy day when she might have to use it again when hard times came again as they usually did, a washboard found  in that same location, a triangle from somewhere, a kazoo from the music store, some fiddle, a guitar, throw in  a tambourine for Maria and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area within the sound of the bay.

And for a while the band did conquer, picking up other stuff chimes, more exotic kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even up-graded guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Made some stuff up as they went along, or better, made old stuff their own like Washington At Valley Forge, Bumble Bee, Sweet Sue from Paul Whitman and plenty of on the edge Scotty Fitzgerald Jazz Age stuff that got people moving and forgetting their blues. Here is the beauty of it unlike most of the 1920s first wave stuff which was confined to records and radio listening, a lot of the rarer stuff now long gone lost, you can see the Kweskin Jug Band back in the day on YouTube and see the kind of energy which they produced when they were in high form (music that they, Jim and Geoff anyway, still give high energy to when they occasionally appear together in places like Club Passim in Harvard Square these days). Yeah, in the beginning was the jug… 

A View From The Left-Democrats, Republicans—Dump ’Em All!-For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!-Fear, Loathing and the Primaries

Workers Vanguard No. 1087	8 April 2016

Democrats, Republicans—Dump ’Em All!-For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Fear, Loathing and the Primaries

In his 1917 book, The State and Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin succinctly described the fraud of bourgeois democracy: “To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” As revolutionary Marxists, we oppose on principle a vote to Republicans, Democrats and any other bourgeois candidates. At the same time, this year’s primaries show the anger and despair that has been building at the bottom of U.S. society for decades.

There is widespread hatred for the political establishments of both parties, who are correctly seen as the bought-and-paid-for agents of the financial con men on Wall Street and the profit-bloated corporations that are responsible for the ruin of millions. But thanks above all to the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, the anger among working people has found no expression in class struggle against the rulers. As a result, the discontents of the ruled are finding expression in support for bourgeois “anti-establishment” candidates. The flagrantly racist, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump is, to date, dominating the Republican primaries. The self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders is giving the second coming of the Clinton dynasty a run for her money to an extent greater than anyone predicted.

Sanders is the only candidate in this electoral circus to offer bread to the masses with his calls for free tuition, Medicare for all and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. This has struck a chord particularly among white petty-bourgeois youth, as well as with a layer of white workers who have seen their unions destroyed, wages plummet, benefits looted and decent-paying jobs all but disappear. Sanders’s promises are nothing but hot air. Such concessions will only be wrung from the bourgeoisie through class struggle. Despite being redbaited, Sanders is no socialist, but a capitalist politician. Nevertheless, it is a gauge of the mounting anger in this society, where socialism has long been reviled as an attack on “the American way of life,” that he is garnering support from a layer of white workers.

Sanders’s claims to be leading “a political revolution against the billionaire class” have been tolerated by the Democratic Party establishment. He has long served the interests of the ruling class, particularly with his support for the bloody wars, occupations and other military adventures of U.S. imperialism that have devastated countries around the globe (see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February). Not only is Sanders running for the top ticket of a party that, as much as the Republicans, represents the interests of the bourgeoisie; he is helping refurbish the image of the Democrats as the “party of the people.” Moreover, he has made clear that in the general election he would support whoever is the Democratic nominee, presumably Hillary Clinton. For her part, Clinton is overwhelmingly winning the black vote as fear of Republican victory, amplified by the fascists crawling between Trump’s toes, further drives black people into the Democrats, the onetime party of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.

On the Republican side, we now witness the spectacle of the party’s establishment pouring millions of dollars into ads attacking, not the Democrats, but their own party’s front-runner. Former Republican Party candidates are being trotted out to preach against Trump’s raving anti-immigrant racism and his revolting sexism. Coming from the mouths of those who told “illegal immigrants” to “self deport,” who reviled workers and the poor as “moochers” for wanting health care, food and housing, who have worked overtime to roll back every gain of the civil rights movement and who have reveled in biblical scripture and railed against women needing abortions, gay people and other “deviants,” the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Trump is simply saying openly what Republican Party leaders have been promoting for years. What bothers them is that he is not playing by the party establishment’s rule book. For them, inciting racist reaction serves as an ideological battering ram to further impoverish the working class and poor by slashing such social programs as continue to exist. Trump says that he will not attack Social Security and Medicare. This reactionary demagogue will say or do anything. His claim that he’ll bring back manufacturing to the U.S., invoking a particularly racist variant of “save American jobs” protectionism, has won him a hearing among the white working poor. For its part, the Republican Party leadership is worried that Trump is whipping up the jobless and impoverished masses at home and putting at risk the profits that U.S. imperialism garners from its “free trade” rape of the neocolonial world.

For the Republican leadership, Trump is adding insult to injury by trading on the campaign slogan of Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the Republican Party: “Make America Great Again.” Reagan rode into the Oval Office by playing on and ramping up a white racist backlash against social programs seen as benefiting the black ghetto poor. The race card was played, as it always has been by America’s rulers, to further the brutal exploitation of the working class as a whole. Today, the devastation that was visited first on the black working class and poor is increasingly the reality for many white workers and poor.

In the 1990s, racist ideologue Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve blamed the misery of ghetto poor on the “genetic inferiority” of black people. In 2012, his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 blamed the destitution facing poor whites on their insufficient family and other values. Such class contempt was put most baldly by a recent article in the right-wing National Review (28 March) by one Kevin D. Williamson. Titled “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” the article raves:

“Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America....

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally they are indefensible.”

The liberation of working people from the bondage of wage slavery will never happen without the proletariat taking up the cause of black freedom, which itself requires the shattering of this racist capitalist system through socialist revolution. In Volume I of Capital (1867), Karl Marx captured the great truth about American capitalist society when he wrote: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Our purpose as Marxists today is to translate the boiling anger and discontents of the toiling masses into a conscious understanding that the working class needs its own party—not an electoral vehicle vying to be the administrators of the capitalist state but a party championing the cause of all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers rule.

Whom the Gods Would Destroy They First Make Mad

The insanity in the Republican Party is simply a manifestation of the dangerous irrationality of U.S. imperialism. Having achieved the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union—which emerged from the world’s first and only successful proletarian revolution—America’s capitalist rulers acted as if they were the unrivaled masters of the world. Under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, they have thrown their military might around the world. But U.S. imperialism’s unending series of wars has done nothing to stem its declining economic might.

Declaring that “Trump needs to be stopped,” a former foreign policy adviser to the Bush administration railed, “He has upset our allies in Central America, Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.” Trump’s denunciation of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq has particularly riled up the neocons who were the architects of that war. An op-ed column reviling Trump in the Washington Post (25 February) by Robert Kagan concluded: “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Why not? Her credentials as a leading hawk for U.S. imperialism are solid gold.

Many, including Republicans writing op-ed pieces in the New York Times, have asked, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” Others compare his candidacy to the end of the Weimar Republic and rise of Hitler’s Nazis. But the soil in which the Nazis grew was that of an imperialist power that had been defeated in World War I. Appealing to the discontents of an increasingly destitute petty bourgeoisie, the Nazis became a mass movement by the early 1930s. When the leadership of the millions-strong Communist and Socialist workers parties failed to make a bid to overturn the decayed capitalist order in Germany, the discredited bourgeoisie unleashed the Nazis in order to preserve their rule through crushing the workers movement, and in the process set the stage for the unspeakable barbarism of the Holocaust.

In contrast, the U.S. is not a defeated imperialist country but rather remains the “world’s only superpower,” whose military might is many times greater than that of its imperialist rivals combined. Nor does the American ruling class currently face a challenge from the working class at home. On the contrary, thanks to sellouts standing at the head of the now dwindling ranks of organized labor, the U.S. bourgeoisie has thus far prevailed in its decades-long war against labor.

Trump is not a fascist; his projected road to power is not outside the electoral framework. But there is nonetheless plenty to fear from the yahoos being whipped into a red-white-and-blue anti-immigrant frenzy at his rallies, which have spurred integrated protests against him throughout the country. Demonstrators protesting Trump’s rallies have been assaulted and black protesters subjected to cries of “go back to Africa.” The KKK and other fascist groups are crawling out of their holes, with former Klan grand wizard David Duke declaring, “Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage.”

In the 1980s, the official racism emanating from the Reagan White House similarly encouraged the Klan and Nazis. When they tried to stage their rallies for racist terror in major urban areas, we put out the call for mass labor/minority mobilizations to stop them. In Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and elsewhere they were stopped by thousands-strong protests based on the social power of the multiracial unions mobilized at the head of the black ghetto poor, immigrants and all the intended victims of fascist terror. In microcosm, these mobilizations demonstrated the role of the revolutionary workers party that we seek to build.

Workers, Blacks: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

It is squarely the responsibility of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that a significant layer of white working people supports a man once best known for the phrase, “you’re fired.” Trump is gaining that support by flying the AFL-CIO misleaders’ flag of “America first” protectionism. Under this flag, the labor fakers have continually surrendered gains won through the militant battles of the working class—black, white and immigrant.

In order to maximize their profits, the capitalists will always go where labor is cheapest. But the scapegoating of foreign workers for the loss of jobs in the U.S. is a reactionary response. Protectionism reinforces illusions in American capitalism. It undermines prospects of struggle by poisoning the working class’s consciousness and subverting solidarity with its potential class allies in China, Mexico and elsewhere. Such protectionism also imbues workers with the false notion that improving their material conditions is completely out of their hands and their ability to organize and fight, but rather lies with a bourgeois savior.

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump play the same economic-nationalist card. But while Sanders appeals for “unity” in opposition to Trump’s xenophobic racism, Trump’s rallies are simply a stark reflection of the chauvinism that lies at the heart of calls to “save American jobs” from foreign competition. If the unions are going to be instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must take up the fight for immigrant rights, demanding an end to deportations and raising the banner of full citizenship rights for all immigrants. The fight for such demands would advance common struggle between American workers and their working-class allies internationally.

Today, the discontent of many working people is being channeled into the campaigns of either Trump or Sanders. But the workers’ anger has also found expression in an impulse to struggle against the capitalists’ offensive—an impulse that has been repeatedly thwarted by the union misleaders. Last year, young auto workers, many of them black, were ready and willing to strike against the hated multi-tier system, which fosters divisions in the workforce. In this, they had considerable support from older workers, white and black, pointing to the potential for class unity across racial lines. But the United Auto Workers union tops crammed down their throats a sellout contract with the “Detroit Three” that in fact expanded the hated tier system.

In 2011, such a fighting spirit was also vividly manifest in Wisconsin, where Republican governor Scott Walker launched an offensive threatening the very existence of public unions. Thousands of workers occupied Wisconsin’s Capitol rotunda and mobilized in demonstrations that drew 100,000 people. Despite the workers’ militancy, the trade-union bureaucrats ensured that no strike action was taken, instead funneling the workers’ outrage into the losing strategy of recalling Walker.

The result? The devastation of an already declining union movement. In 2011, over 50 percent of public workers in Wisconsin were unionized; by 2015, the unionization rate had plummeted to 26 percent. Similar earlier attacks in Indiana resulted in the virtual disappearance of public-sector unions there. And in 2015, Wisconsin joined Indiana, Michigan and 22 other states in becoming an anti-union “right to work” state. Wisconsin stands as a most glaring example of the bankruptcy of the union bureaucracy and its strategy of reliance on the Democrats. It is such defeats that clear the way for reactionaries like Trump to posture as defenders of working people’s interests.

Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party has had a strategy of appealing to white workers, with some success, on the basis of racist scapegoating, pushing the lie that these workers suffer because the liberal establishment has showered blacks and other minorities with benefits at their expense. The central enduring feature of American capitalism is the structural oppression of the black population as a race-color caste, the majority of which is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. Obscuring the fundamental class division between the capitalists who own the means of production and the working class who must sell their labor power to survive, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist exploiters based on the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color.

In the Democratic primaries, black people are overwhelmingly voting for Hillary Clinton, viewing her as the best option to defeat the Republican ghouls in November. In fact, in her 2008 contest with Obama, Clinton openly played to anti-black racism by declaring that Obama couldn’t win the support of “hard-working Americans, white Americans.” Now she presents herself as the torchbearer of Obama’s legacy, while simultaneously cashing in on the popularity of her husband, Bill Clinton, with the black population.

During his time in office, Bill Clinton probably did more harm to black people than any American president since World War II. During the 1992 election campaign, he grotesquely flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector. In office, he eradicated “welfare as we know it” and vastly increased the powers of the state, including to round up and imprison black youth. In this, he was backed by Hillary Clinton, who described black ghetto youth as “superpredators.” At the same time, Bill Clinton was the first president who had black friends and who openly and comfortably engaged with black people. It is a bitter measure of the depth of racist reaction in America that Clinton’s token gestures have won him the support of many black people despite his gruesome deeds.

With the 2008 election of Barack Obama, black expectations were high. But while those are a faded memory, there remains among black people a deep sense of racial solidarity with Obama. This has been reinforced by nearly eight years of backlash from Congressional Republicans, amplified by the likes of the teabaggers and “birthers.” Nonetheless, the truth is that black people have gained nothing from his reign, during which black unemployment spiked, wages flatlined and the median wealth crashed. Meanwhile, blacks continue to be gunned down with abandon by racist cops.

Contrary to the arguments of many black spokesmen, this state of affairs is not because Obama has been held hostage by the Republicans. Certainly their relentless attacks on Obama are overwhelmingly driven by racism. But the black man in the White House was from the beginning a Wall Street Democrat. This was demonstrated shortly after he took office. At a March 2009 meeting with the high-rolling financial swindlers, he pledged to them that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” adding, “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.” And he was as good as his word, ably assisted by his labor lieutenants in the union bureaucracy who sacrificed their members’ jobs, wages and working conditions to preserve the profitability of U.S. capitalism.

Black people remain that section of the population that is most keenly aware of the vicious nature of racist America. At the same time, they are tied to the Democratic Party and will in their mass continue to support it so long as there appears to be no alternative. The key to unlocking that situation is forging that alternative.

Workers Need Their Own Party

With millions unemployed or scrambling to get by through miserably paid part-time and temporary work, many thrown out of their homes and reliant on food stamps, their pensions and health benefits slashed, there is a pressing need to build a workers party based on the fundamental understanding that the workers have no common interests with the bosses. Such a party would unite the employed and unemployed, the ghetto poor and immigrants in a struggle for jobs and decent living conditions for all. The power to carry out such a fight lies in the hands of the men and women—black, white and immigrant—whose labor keeps the wheels of production turning and produces the wealth that is robbed from them by the capitalist profiteers.

Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, set forth a series of demands that addressed the catastrophe facing the working class amid the 1930s Great Depression. The aim of these demands was to arm workers with the understanding that the only answer was the conquest of power by the proletariat. To fight against the scourge of unemployment, it called for uniting the employed and the jobless in struggle for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work around as well as a sliding scale of wages rising with the cost of living. It demanded a massive program of public works at union wages. All must have housing and other social facilities to provide decent living conditions, as well as access to medical care and education at no cost to them. Benefits for the unemployed must be extended until they have jobs, with all pensions completely guaranteed by the government. Only a struggle for such demands can address the dire conditions workers face today.

As Trotsky, who together with Lenin was a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, argued:

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

Renewed labor battles will lay the basis for reviving and extending the unions, ousting the current sellouts and replacing them with a new, class-struggle leadership. For the workers to prevail against their exploiters, they must be armed with a Marxist political program that links labor’s fight to the struggle to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Such a party would lead the struggle to sweep away the capitalist state through socialist revolution and to establish a workers state where those who labor rule.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now!

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

As I pointed out in the headline the idea of “divesting” from the deadweight of the Pentagon overlay on society’s resources is the beginning of wisdom. Hell, a nice idea until you figure out that the military-industrial complex that old-time President Eisenhower, a recipient of much military largess in his time, railed against is degrees of magnitude far greater than the “skimpy” role it played in society in his day. For leftist militants, for anti-imperialist fighters, heck, for just rational people the real beginning of wisdom is to not to “tweak” this or that aspect of the complex but to smash it, smash it utterly. There is no other way so when you thing about this slogan-think about what is behind it. The task. Think too that you will be about being a slayer of some very big monster-and there will be blowback. For now that is enough said.

*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Who Was That Man In The Orange Pants?-“Michael Jackson’s: This Is It”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Michael Jackson: This Is It".

DVD Review

Michael Jackson’s: This Is It, starring Michael Jackson, dancers, singers, and musicians, Columbia Pictures, 2009

I have done a fair number of musical reviews in this space from old country blues tunes to Cole Porter to Billy Holiday to Bob Dylan and so on. All either reflected my personal interests or represented a segment of, mainly, American cultural expression that I thought was important to take note of. Some groups and individuals like the Beatles, most, but not all, hip-hop, Joan Baez and others have gotten short shrift in this space not because they are not important components of the modern cultural scene but out of sheer personal preference. The late performer, Michael Jackson, with or without the Five, fit very comfortably in that niche for me. No longer though after viewing the film documentary, although performance is a better term, “”This Is It”, based on rehearsals for what was to be Michael Jackson’s last world tour.

I am not sure, and in any case it is not important to this review, whether the film footage here would have seen the light of day if Michael Jackson had not died in 2009. The core of the film is a series of rehearsals that Jackson and his cast of singers, dancers, and musicians went through in preparation for a “This Is It” last Jackson world tour that was planned to begin just after his untimely death. The concept, according to Jackson, was to give his fans one last extravagant chance to hear and see him perform his greatest hits.

Now these kinds of world tours, last ones or not, are all in a day’s work in the entertainment business. As are behind-the scenes “reality” looks at how certain cultural events are put to together. What make this film extraordinary are the fire, the imagination, and the sheer stage presence that Michael Jackson brought to the whole enterprise.

Did you read that right? This reviewer, who has spend the last forty or some years happily ignoring Michael Jackson, his music, his dancing, his off-stage antics, and his legal difficulties was totally transfixed, totally riveted by Jackson’s work here. In rehearsal, of all places. Christ, as the headline indicates, he is probably one of few men who have ever lived who did not turn into a cartoonish character while wearing orange pants during some of his numbers. Although this film also demonstrates the very deferential way in which those who worked with him treated him, which may be a key to some of his off-stage problems going back to his childhood days, and I am positive I would not want to work with him this man, as singer, dancer and stage personality comes through. This kind of personality does not pass through this earth all that often. Watch what you missed. Watch what I missed.

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming (expected in the Winter, 2016) . A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (as we did this past December for her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

 
  

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea  were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”         

 

Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)      

 

All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.

 

The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.

 

In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.

 

While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.             

From Hell To Eternity-With The Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity In Mind

From Hell To Eternity-With The Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity In Mind  

 

By Zack James

 

“You know I never got too deeply involved in the nuts and bolts of Army life when I was drafted into that branch of the service in 1969 during the heart of the Vietnam War but I do know that down at the base of the Army, down at the platoon, company, brigade level that the “top kick,” the First Sergeant was the guy who made everything work. Forget the supply sergeants who just stole whatever was not nailed down and sold what they could to whoever would buy it. How do you think all those Army-Navy stores that we bought our de riguer World War II surplus Army jackets, knapsacks and boots got their inventory? Forget that foolishness too about how an “army travels on it stomach,” the mess sergeants put out swill, keeping the good stuff for themselves and the officers, always the officers getting their kick-backs, and there is special place in hell for every freaking “mess” the way they have ruined generations of young men’s appetites. It was the “top kick” and no other who kept things going. That part of the film was straight up as far as I could tell,” long-windedly as was his wont when he got “tagged” on a common subject answered Sam Lowell to the question that Laura Perkins his long-time companion had asked about the movie that they had just watched.

The movie; the classic black and white film adaptation of James Jones’ just prior to American involvement via the dastardly deeds at Pearl Harbor World War II book, From Here To Eternity. Laura had at fist nixed the idea of seeing this film (brought to them via the beauties of Netflix mail delivery-not streaming) because the way the film had been described in the blurb it was a “war” film something she shied away from. Sam told her that while it was a war film in the generic sense it was much deeper than that, not some The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan “blood and guts” and so he had persuaded her to watch it with him one Saturday night after she had come home from a short but necessary stay in the hospital and they had decided to just take it easy that night. She had liked the film so much that she had immediately afterward asked the question about how true to life it had been and had not been peeved as she had occasion to be many times when he did his long-winded wont.

Knowing only a little of Sam’s checkered military career, knowing basically that he had been in the military during the Vietnam War period like her younger brother and a lot of other guys from Riverdale where she and Sam had grown up during that turbulent time Laura had asked the question after observing  that “Top,” Sergeant Warden played by hulky Burt Lancaster (“hulky” Laura’s term) seemed to have been running the show quite nicely and efficiently while the philandering Captain went off base to some rendezvous with some dishy dame (Sam’s term). That seemed counter-intuitive to her since she had thought that officers, the higher up the better, ran the show.        

You know Sam’s answer and for a guy who was seven kinds of hell to the Army in his time he had the “Army way” down pat. That was what amazed Sam about seeing the film again after maybe forty years. How despite the difference in time periods (pre-World War II and Vietnam, hell, from stories that he had heard from younger “vets” from Afghanistan and Iraq in his work for Veterans for Peace later too), the pre-war voluntary army versus a basically conscripted army, and advances in the killing machine methods the same “chicken-shit” stuff had happened back then. The same freaking stupid stuff down at the base of the Army where it lived.   

“Sure I knew guys like Prewett, the main antagonist played by Montgomery Clift who was given the “treatment” because he did not want to box for the company, a company whose only existence seemed to be so they could win the regimental boxing tournament for the Captain who figured to ride that to a Major’s rank, The tourney set for, get this, December 15, 1941, you knew once you saw that date no damn tournament was going to happen. Yeah there was no damn place for an odd-ball like Prewett despite the fact that he loved the Army. Not many guys during my short time were thinking about making it a career, about being “lifers” but Prewett out of the sticks down in Kentucky where he probably didn’t even have shoes, didn’t get three “squares” a day [three meals a day, okay] had it all mapped out. Figured on thirty years and an easy grift. But he was only fooling himself, because even “from hunger” guys who don’t toe the line don’t have long careers in that man’s Army-where do you think the whole idea of “go along, to get along” came from. Sure the Army, the politicians just picked it up later.”   

“Guys like Maggio too?,” echoed Laura [Played by Frank Sinatra in a great and underrated performance which should be mentioned since we are now in the centennial of his birth.]

Sam chuckled, “Especially guys like Maggio, guys who half the time like my brother had the “choice.” “The “choice”? queried Laura. “Yeah, guys, guys for the neighborhoods, working-class ethnic guys, Italians, Irish, maybe Eastern European, would get the choice. Not blacks, not many anyway who were in segregated units at the time period of the film, although not in my time hell blacks and Latinos were over-represented since the kids from the good schools and neighborhoods took a pass on induction. You noticed you didn’t see any black faces in high or low places in the film. Usually a guy like Maggio, my brother, got into some trouble short of murder, one. My brother’s was for armed robbery of a gas station for about fifty stinking bucks. He was seventeen and so the judge, like a million judges handed the “choice” out. In my brother’s case it was either three to five hard at Norfolk, you know about Norfolk, right? [Laura nods silently.] Or join the Army, no that was not the way it was put my brother told me, you would sign up for military service and you could s choose the branch.”    

“Needless to say that didn’t happen as much during the later stages of the Vietnam War when going to that country was like a death warrant but it happened. Still does even with a volunteer Army,” Sam continued. He could see though that Laura’s eyes were glassing over so he moved on to some of the other aspects of the film that seemed true.

“You know every guy was forever thinking about weekend passes, passes to get away from the bases. Passes to go into some Army town like in the film, or like Anniston down in Alabama where I took Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) which would have put me in a unit just like Prewett’s and Maggio’s except in 1968, 1969 nobody, no grunt, no canon-fodder, was being sent to Hawaii as a final destination. The only place, or practically the only place where 11 Bravos, infantry, were wanted and needed was hell-hole Vietnam. Period.,” Sam prattled on nervously.

“You didn’t go to Vietnam, did you? You never told me much about your military stuff, said it was in the past. Said the Veterans for Peace stuff was what was important when we reconnected after all those years at our fortieth class reunion back in 2006.  I heard something about you back then, back in about 1971 I think, about you being arrested in some protest but I thought that was after you got out of the service. My brother said something about it, and not in a nice way either. You know how gung-ho he was.”    

Sam red-faced as he answered said “he would talk about it later.” “Yeah, going to town even in the hell-hole Deep South was something to look forward to, to see girls, even if they were tramps and ‘skags’ Go get drunk and drown in the sorrows of the hard fact that they were being trained to be nothing but killers.” [Laura laughed remembering that old time term for the less attractive girls in the class back in the 1960s.] 

Then Sam turned sullen as he thought about the question that was really being posed that night, posed beyond the film and the true aspects of the film from the parade marching and drilling, the chow lines, the rinky-dinky stuff, and the overlay of romance-Army style-foremost between “Top” and the Captain’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr and in the background between Prewett and Lorene, played by Donna Reed who would in turn in the 1960s become a very loud Hollywood opponent of the Vietnam  madness. He chuckled silently no way the Army, peacetime or wartime, was built for romance. Those love affairs were doomed just as his marriage to his first wife was doomed when they hastily decided to do get married during the heat of the Vietnam War. Mistake.

That was not what was agitating him just then but that scene of Maggio escaping from the stockade all battered and half-dead (a few moments later he would be dead but “free,” free from the brutal stockade). This night under the spell of this film he would finally tell Laura about the end of his Army career and be done with it.

“I freaked out a little at that scene of Maggio all battered and bloody after he escaped from the stockade. I “served” two terms in the Army stockade up at Fort Devens, you know up in Ayer mostly gone now as far as I know so I know that it was no easy trip. I never ran into anybody as brutal as Sergeant Judson (played by Ernest Borgnine) but it was no picnic even though I was being held in a separate area for “political prisoners” and other malcontents whom they didn’t want in the “general population” of the stockade.

Laura interrupted, “Are you serious?”  

“Yes, let me tell the highlights now and some other time when I have thought about how much I more I want to tell you I will go into more detail. I am only going to tell you this much because of this damn film,” Sam told Laura with a certain dry-voiced low tune.

“I didn’t resist the draft, didn’t have my head on straight enough before I got inducted, got drafted, like your brother, like a million other guys who when called-went-like it, hate it, you went and you know that was true in Riverdale like in a million other towns. I had my anti-war views more lightly held then, not enough to be a conscientious objector, a Quaker or so I thought. About three days into basic I knew that I had made a mistake that my anti-war views were a lot stronger than I realized (mixed in with confusion, a desire not to die and a few other not always unconfused feelings). Needless to say as the die got cast with me as an 11 Bravo my reactions got more intense. But not enough until I got orders for Vietnam in the summer of 1970 to do anything about it.   

“Then I got “religion,” decided to go see the Quakers in Cambridge that somebody told me about to see if they could help. In the meantime I got married to Josie and I don’t want to talk about that tonight, please, okay. I was supposed to report to Fort Lewis in Washington state for transport to Vietnam but I was “advised” that if I went absent without leave (AWOL, like Prewett) for a period that I would be “dropped from the rolls” out there and could turn myself in to Devens and up there place my conscientious objector application in. I did so. As basically a Catholic “just war” objector then the damn thing was turned down then and I was set for orders back to Vietnam again.

“In those days, 1969, 1970 the war had gone on so long that anti-war protestors were tired of the same old, same old demonstrations in Washington each spring and fall and were beginning to demonstrate at military bases. I joined in one of those in front of Devens one weekday-afternoon in my uniform. That was the first special court-martial- (and stockade time-six months the maximum for such a tribunal). At this time I had been given a civilian lawyer through the Quakers who was pursuing my CO case in the federal court in Boston in a habeas corpus action for illegal detention-basically that they should have approved my CO application which was kind of a complicated legal argument more suitably to be told later.           

“I did the time without too much hassle, actually did a lot of reading and thinking so it wasn’t a total bust. Then I got released after my six months were up-no good time either since I refused to work and so on so I got the full kick. When I got out though I was right back in because I refused to wear the uniform. I am getting tired so let me finish up. I got another six month sentence most of which I served when the federal courts came through on that habeas action, I was discharged and told never to darken their, the Army’s, doors again. Get this-with an honorable discharge which was right since they should have discharged me prior to the stockade-that is what the court said. I’ll tell you more sometime but just remember that look on Maggio’s face when he broke out of the stockade. Free, free at last. That was me when I got out, okay.