*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   
 

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/


Ralph Morris had recently written a letter to his old friend and comrade Sam Lowell from the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of cyber-audience after years of small rallies, small demonstrations, writing for small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post 9/11 world when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe” in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a follower, or another clink to opt out of status, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural and oppositional politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home.

Ralph encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged (and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return as a result ) with whatever ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the most vicious powerful enemies of all humankind, chiefly in the "heart of the beast," the United States government.

Life, or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now a goodly number of them (check the Rag Blog if you don't believe is what both Ralph and Sam recommended when another old radical friend discounted what they had seen)  have made that unkind condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense.

So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier days. Here is what he had to say straight up:    
 

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various actions and who saw that the people he was being led by make their significant actions in that year) we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and ageless Wobblies). (The designation “Generation of ’68 " for those not in the know signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American bourgeois political party  upheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of society that had the social power to lead that struggle.)

Those scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on (thuggish  Stalinists to boot) who survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing, the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck when the "red-hunters" came knocking at your door, to do that surviving by any other means necessary including that down-turned head waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) as they carried the revolutionary torch forward and who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us.

Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.”

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going or not except cautionary tales but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.

Problem is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be, should be youthful voices crying to the high heavens. (Recent small stirrings out of the remnant of Occupy and Black Lives Matter do not negate the  greater youthful indifference to our message.)  That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

Recently I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I named some of the possible locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class (classes) and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that it is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high-speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics; immigration, the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against the robber barons should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   

One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out,  more times than I care to mention included my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

*From The Marxist Archives- Lenin On The State- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard" excerpt article from Vladimir Lenin, dated, May 25, 2007.

*****Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind

*****Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

There was always something, some damn thing to remind Jeff Higgins, Class of 1964, a fateful year in his life and not just because that was the year that he graduated from North Quincy High School down in outer edge of the Southeastern corner of Massachusetts. He had recently, well, let's call it 2014 because who knows when some iterant reader might read this and because that as will be pointed in a second has significant for why Jeff Higgins that it was one damn thing after another when dealing with that class issue. If you did the math quickly in your head while I was pointing to the significance you would know that year represented the fiftieth anniversary of the his graduation and furthermore had  gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left him numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Jeff in 1964, or better in 2014, with his three messy divorces and several affairs from flings to some more serious relationships along with scads of children and grandchildren now from the marriages not the affairs, you would know that it was about a woman, always about a woman, he eternally afflicted as old as he was.

About a woman this time, this eternally afflicted time, named Elizabeth Drury whom he had had a brief puff of air affair with in that same 2014 but which had seemingly vanished in his dust of memory until he went up in the attic to clean up some stuff. (By the way not Liz, which would show a certain informality, a certain good sport and not standing on ceremony or Betty, a nickname which conveyed continued childhood in those days as old as a woman might be, so no way she was not anything but a proper Elizabeth-type, who held maybe Queen Elizabeth I, you know the so-called Virgin Queen, the one who ruled England for a long time and had more lovers than you could shake a stick at but all we knew then was that she was the Virgin Queen, as her model, even in high school.) 

Yeah finally getting rid of most of stuff which had been gathering dust, maybe mold for years, in anticipation of selling his house and moving to a more manageable condo, down-sizing they call it in the real estate trade, and found a faded tattered copy of his class’ remembrance card. You know those time vault cards that card companies like Hallmark, the source of this one, put out so that people, or this case the whole class by some tabulations, can put down favorite films, people, records, who was President, and other momentous events from some important year like a graduation to be looked at in later years and ahhed over. That yellowed sheet brought back not just memories of that faded long ago year but of Elizabeth in the not so faded past. So, yes, it was always some damn thing.      

But maybe we had better take you back to the beginning, back to how 1964 and Elizabeth Drury had been giving one Jeffery Higgins late of North Quincy nothing but pains. Jeff had been for many, many years agnostic about attending class reunions, had early on after graduation decided that he needed to show his back to the whole high school experience which was a flat-out zero once he thought about every indignity and hurt he had suffered for one reason or another, and to the town, a small hick town anyway which needed to be fled to see the big old world. A lot of that teenage angst having to do with his humble beginnings as a son of a “chiseler,” not meant as a nice term, a father who worked in the then depleting now depleted granite quarries when there was work for which the town was then famous and which represented the low-end of North Quincy society. The low-end which others in the town including his fellow classmates in high school who were as socially class conscious as any Mayfair swells made him feel like a nobody and a nothing for no known reason except that he was the son of a chiseler which after all he could not help. (Of course those social exclusions played themselves out under the veil of his not dressing cool, living off the leavings of his older brothers, living off of Bargain Center rejected materials not even cool when purchased, you know, white shirts with stripes when that was not cool, black chinos with cuffs like some farmer, ditto, dinky Thom McAn shoes with buckles for Chrissake, just as his younger brothers lived off his in that tight budget world of the desperate working poor, of his not having money for dates even with fellow bogger’s daughters, and hanging corner dough-less, girl-less corners with fellow odd-ball bogger outcasts). So Jeff had no trouble drifting away from that milieu, had no trouble putting dust on his shoes to get out and head west when the doings out west were drawing every wayward youth to the flame, to the summers of love.

And there things stood in Jeff’s North Quincy consciousness for many years until maybe 2012, 2013 when very conscious that a hallmark 50^th class reunion would be in the works and with more time on his hands as he had cut back on the day to day operation of his small law practice in Cambridge he decided that he would check out the preparations, and perhaps offer his help to organize the event. He had received notification of his class’ fortieth reunion in 2004 (which he had dismissed out of hand only wondering how the reunion committee had gotten his address for while he was not hiding from anything he was also not out there publicly since he did not have clients other than other lawyers whom he wrote motions, briefs, appeals and the like for, until he realized that as a member of the Massachusetts bar he would have that kind of information on his bar profile page) so via the marvels of modern day technology through the Internet he was able to get hold of Donna Marlowe (married name Rossi) who had set up a Facebook page to advertise the event.

That connection led to Jeff drafting himself onto the reunion committee and lead directly to the big bang of pain that he would subsequently feel. Naturally in a world filled with social media and networking those from the class who either knew Donna or the other members of the committee or were Internet savvy joined the class’ Facebook page and then were directed to a class website (as he found out later his generation unlike later ones was on the borderline of entering the “information superhighway” and so not all classmates, those still alive anyway, were savvy that way). On that website set up by tech savvy Donna (she had worked in the computer industry at IBM during her working career) each classmate who joined the site had the ability to put up a personal profile next to their class photograph like many other such sites and that is where Sam saw Elizabeth Drury’s profile and a flood of memories and blushes.            

In high school Jeff had been smitten by Elizabeth, daughter of a couple of school teachers who worked in Marshfield and therefore stationed well above the chiselers of the town. But in things of the heart things like class distinctions, especially in democratically-etched America, are forgotten, maybe not rightly forgotten when the deal goes down but there is enough of façade to throw one off if one gets feeling a certain way,and sometime makes one foolhardy. That had almost happened to Jeff, except his corner boy Jack Callahan put him wise. Jeff and Elizabeth had several classes together senior year and sat across from each other in English class and since both loved literature and were school-recognized as such they had certain interests in common. So they talked, talked in what Jeff thought was very friendly and somewhat flirty manner (or as he thought later after the flame had burned out maybe he just hoped that was the case) and he formed an intention (that is the way he said it the night he related the story to me so forgive the legal claptrap way he said it) to ask her out even if only to Doc’s Drugstore for an after school soda and a listen to the latest platters on Doc’s jukebox which had all the good stuff that kids were dancing to in those days. He figured from there he could work up to a real date. But sometimes the bumps and bruises of the chiseler life left one with a little sense and so before making attempts at such a conquest Jeff consulted with Jack Callahan to see if Elizabeth was “spoken for” (Jeff’s term if you can believe that).

See Jack, a star football player even if a chiseler's son got something of an exemption from the rigid routine of the social structure of the Senior class just by being able to run through defensive lines on any given granite grey autumn afternoon and had excellent “intelligence” on the whole school system’s social network, in other words who was, or was not, spoken for. (By the way that “grapevine” any high school grapevine, maybe middle school too would put the poor technicians at the CIA and the spooks at NSA to shame with the accuracy of the information. It had to be that resourceful otherwise fists would fly.) The word on Elizabeth, forget it, off-limits, an “ice queen.” So Jeff saved himself plenty of anguish and he moved on with his small little high school life.

Seeing Elizabeth's name and profile though that many years later made him curious, made him wonder what had happened to her and since he was now “single” he decided he would write her a private e-mail to her profile page something which the website was set up to perform and which the reunion committee was recommending alumnus to do. That “single” a condition that he now considered the best course after three shifts of alimony, child support and college tuitions made him realize that it was infinitely cheaper to just live with a woman and be done with it. Jeff wrote a short message asking whether she remembered him and she replied that she very well did remember him and their “great” (her term) conversations about Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton. That short message and reply “sparked” something and they began a flurry of e-mails giving outlines of their subsequent history, including the still important one to Jeff whether she was “spoken for.” She was not having had two divorces although no kids in her career as a professor at the State University.

Somehow these messages led Jeff to tell her about his talk with Jack Callahan. And she laughed not at the “intelligence” which was correct but not for the reasons that Jack gave (her father was an abusive “asshole,” her term for her standoffishness and reputation as an “ice queen”). She laughed because despite her being flirty, at least that was what she thought she was attempting to do because she certainly was interested when they would talk Jeff had never asked her out and then one day just stopped talking to her for no known reason. Damn.                    

They say, or at least Thomas Wolfe did in the title of one of his novels-you can’t go home again but neither Jeff nor Elizabeth after that last exchange of e-mails about the fateful missing chance back in senior year would heed the message. They decided to meet in Cambridge one night to see if that unspoken truth had any substance. They did meet, got along great, had many stories to exchange and it turned out many of the same interests (except golf a sport which relaxed Jeff when he was all wound up but which Elizabeth’s second husband had tried to teach her to no avail). And so their little affair started, started with great big bursts of flames but wound up after a few months smoldering out and being blown away like so much dust in the wind once Elizabeth started talking about marriage. Jeff was willing to listen to living together but his own strange marital orbit had made him very strongly again any more marriages. So this pair could not go home again, not at all, and after some acrimonious moments they parted.           

Jeff knew that was the best course, knew he had to break it off but it still hurt enough that any reference to 1964 made him sad. As he took a look at the sentiment expressed in that tattered yellowed document he had a moment reprieve as he ahh-ed over the information presented. Had he really forgotten that there was not Vice-Presidential succession then when Lyndon Johnson became President after the assassination of home state Irish Jack Kennedy. That My Fair Lady was popular then as now. That the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show and done a film, that Chapel of Love had been a hit that year as well. That 1964 was the year the Mustang that he would have died for came out into the world. That gas was only about thirty cent a gallon, and that another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Taylor, married one Richard Burton for the first time (although not the last). And on the note he put the yellowed tattered document in the trash pile. He would remember things past in his own way. 

*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…

*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

No I was never a “Dead Head,” never would have accepted that designation in any case if somebody tried to lay that moniker on me, tried to tie me down with that crowd who lived and breathed (still do) for every tune the Grateful Dead ever produced. In the old days, the days of the 1960s mad dash to seek a newer world that got trashed about seven million ways before the deal went down and “the authorities,” as my mother used to say when speaking of the ruling class or its agents, pulled the hammer down and soured a whole generation, no, make that three generations now, working on a fourth recently born, since they are still furiously trying to keep us in lock-down mode, I went out in San Francisco by the moniker Prince of Love. So it wasn’t about the moniker, wasn’t about being type-cast, just wasn’t into the group, although half, more than half of whatever group I was travelling with at any particular time would have Dead-Heads and Dead music coming out the sound system to be heard in Afghanistan or some such place, personal musical preference is all. 

By the way that "Prince Of Love" moniker was strictly among the brethren, those who were, literally, my mates on the yellow brick road converted school bus, Captain Crunch's bus purchased according to rumor never confirmed by me or admitted to by the Captain for obvious reasons, obvious legal reasons, by money made in a big dope deal, a marijuana/hash deal with some guys south of the border. Hell maybe I shouldn't be saying anything about the source now because who knows who is listening and looking and who knows if there isn't some infinite statute of no limitations on such transactions although I heard somewhere that murder was the only crime tagged with that designation. That old yellow brick road school bus converted into an itinerant home  for wandering waywards and seekers  was a mode of transportation which while not ubiquitous on the California roads, that distinction would go to Volkswagen mini-buses, they were not an infrequent sight and after a while were not remarked on by anybody but tourists averting their eyes and the eyes of their children aged five and up,and cops, the cops usually looking  for that fatal violation, you know, the rear license plate light out, a sagging tire, too many people on the bus which allowed them to haul the beast to the side of the road and give some each dweller some hassle, some hassle man.( That "on the bus," our version of "on the bus" being an expression stolen from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, our blessed mothers and fathers who had come on the road a few year before us to signify "cool," to signify that one had made the leap from square-dom, to signify until one "got off the bus," that the iterant life was worth pursuing for a while anyway until the dope, the road itself, or about six thousand other reasons to go home, or go stationary for a while.

A group of us sometimes sticking together for months like the Be-Bop Kid, Peter Markin, my closest friend since he hailed from North Adamsville about twenty miles north of my hometown of Carver, Tiny Slim Tim as you might suspect a giant whose real name was Dexter something and Butterfly Swirl (Catherine Clark) from down in Carlsbad who was “slumming” from the perfect wave surfer crowd she hung with in high school to see what the next best thing was in the frenetic California night until she she decided to "get off the bus" and go back to her perfect yellow-haired pruned surfer boy and who every guy on the bus took a shot at, including Be-Bop, and me stuck together longest. (Markin as it turned would stay out on the road for years after the rest of us "got off" the road since psychologically he had much more invested that most of the rest of us in seeing what he called the "new breeze coming through the land" before he ended up badly down in Mexico, all sister crazy, over a busted drug deal he was trying to put together with the cartel boys who were not pleased).

Others, Mustang Sally (you can figure that one out if you know the song by the same name which went over as a wild rock hit when Mustangs, the cars, became the "boss" vehicle replacing the '57 Chevy in the imaginations of the generation of '68), Reefer Jones (ditto on the figuring out the "reefer" part just throw yourselves back to any urban college dorm, student ghetto apartment, rock concert and high school boys’ or girls’ lav when it filtered down to the teenagers after say 1965, 66 and sniff the air for a second-hand high and you will be on the right track), Guy Fawkes (after the high holy Catholic Church English plotter against the Protestant King James I who has had a resurgence lately between the NSA and the young libertarians, at least for wearing anonymous masks), Digger Stewart (after the 17^th century English communists led by Gerrard Winstanley up on Saint George’s Hill for a while anyway, a movement before its time which unfortunately depended on the good graces of Lord Fairfax who soon withheld his favor and the whole affair when tumbling down but communists even today I notice still pay homage to those efforts and there is even an appropriate modern folk song The World Turned Upside Down commemorating that struggle) stayed for shorter periods.

I called the Captain Crunch Express home for a couple of years as we went up and down the coast looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for the great blue-pink American West night as the Be-Bop Kid described it and everybody kind of bought into that idea, hell, maybe just looking to turn the world upside down like those Diggers up on Saint George Hill just looking to be left along to wander although none of us at the time either wanted to work the land somewhere almost all being strictly urban dwellers or find some old broken down house and convert it into a wayward-driven commune, and see if that life was any better than the gruel that was on tap for us by "straight" society, the gruel force-fed to us for no known reason.

The “Express” named after the guy, Captain Crunch (real name Slade Stokes, Haverford College Class of 1958), an older guy of indeterminate means (nice way to put that dope-injected rumor, right) who actually knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, knew everybody who was anybody in the West Coast alternative cultural scene (for example could get “boss” tickets for 20 of us to the Fillmore to see the Jefferson Airplane when the Be-Bop Kid “married Butterfly Swirl, before she tired of the road, and after she tired of me, but that is a long story for another time), who bought and rigged the bus complete with outrageous high end sound system, or wink, wink,  got it in some drug trade barter deal, and was some kind of father we never knew a la Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady/drug lord/ philosopher king to us.

No, as well, I never went to one of the Dead’s sold-out stoned out concerts at the Fillmore (which the Captain also could get tickets for since he knew the Dead drummer whose name I forget and who I think passed away a few years ago), and something of a ceremonial rite of passage for those who did consider themselves “Dead Heads” and insisted that each and every time out they eat so much acid (LSD, blotter, and so on not battery acid or some such thing), smoke so many reefers (for the clueless see reference above to Reefer Jones, student ghettos, dorms  and the like about 1965 and after), swallow some many bennies (speed my drug of choice then and later in law school where I used them just to get through the damn silly case studies we were required to know at the cost of being berated by some professor who had shark’s teeth and was not afraid to use them or leave incriminating slashes) just like the very first time they heard the Dead in order to get that same guitar rush that drove them to eternal fan-dom.

And taking something from sports figures and their superstitions like the baseball players who eat exactly the same thing every day they on some kind of streak, a positive streak, who wear the same outfit, the same faded denim, throng sandals, flowered shirt, male, granny dress, sandals, flowers in hair, female, each time to be washed clean by the Dead magic. Of course those who never gave up the tradition had pretty threadbare outfits something just south of tramp/bum/hobo before Jerry went over the top, went to see the “fixer” man to get well one more time, one time too many. (Jerry should have read Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm to know you can never mess with the fixer man, never trust him either especially if he is a junkie too, can never get washed clean no matter what they say).The fixer man no friend as the lyrics to The Pusher Man by Steppenwolf make perfectly clear, goddam. So like I say despite the voodoo macabre stuff I have any number of friends who were/are ardent fans and they seem to be, well, normal, normal except in those flashback moments where they see “colors, man, colors,”  speak of having “far out” experiences when they would/will get ready for a Dead concert.

Remind me to tell you sometime about a friend of mine, a stone-cold Dead Head, from back in Carver, my growing up hometown about thirty miles south of Boston, who to give you an idea of the tenor of the times back then went from a foul-mouthed corner boy looking to do a nickel or dime in some state pen for armed robbery, or at least straight up robbery although if you are going to make a career of that you should probably be armed against the crazies out there, if the ‘60s hadn’t come along, actually using that moniker "foul-mouth" in high school, he said it turned the girls on, and maybe it did, to “Far-Out Phil” when he came West to join us. So even the best of them would succumb to the western winds and the ghost dance night until the wheels kind of fall off ….for a while.  

But here is my take on the Dead just to keep things in perspective, just to keep things right. I, after a couple of years on the road out there, and maybe not directly in the inner circle of the hippie/drug/literary scene but close enough to get tangled up in the new dispensation I liked to look at the connections, the West Coast connections, where a lot of the energy of the 1960s got its start or if started elsewhere got magnified there. Liked to draw the lines, if you will, from the wild boy alienated, there is no other word that says it so well, bikers over in Oakland and the edges of other working-class towns, mostly white, mostly with some kind of Okie/Arkie background roaring up the streets of Squaresville in search of the village daughters and putting the fear in the average citizen who thought Attila the Hun’s kin had descended, but remember that alienated part that is the hook-in to all the other stuff. Hot rod after midnight “chicken run” runners out in the valleys, alienated too but with a little dough and some swag and a hell-bend desire to go fast, go very fast, if for no other reason than to break out of  valley ennui (although they would punch somebody out, fag bait somebody if they ever used such a word in their presence- if they knew what it meant) and surfer boys, coast boys and with a little more laid back approach in search of the perfect wave (read: Nirvana), maybe not quite so alienated because of that golden tan blonde dish sitting on the beach waiting to see if Sir Galahad finds the holy grail, golden tan blonde dishes like Butterfly Swirl who was a fox even when she wore a granny dress, to the “beat” guys Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and friends running across America just to keep running, writing up a storm, wenching, whoring , pimping, white blue-eyed hipsters “speaking” be-bop to a jaded world, to sainted Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (and our Captain Crunch, leader of our own merry prankster psychedelic bus), the Hell’s Angels (bad dudes, bad dudes, no question), Fillmore with strobe light beams creating dreams, et. al and you have the skeleton for what went on then, right or wrong. Wasn’t that a time, yes, Lord, wasn’t that a time. And the Dead were right in the mix.         

A Different Time-Barbara Stanwyck’s My Reputation

A Different Time-Barbara Stanwyck’s My Reputation

DVD Review

By Zack James

 

My Reputation, starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, 1946

 

Sometimes film, especially older films like the one under review Barbara Stanwyck’s My Reputation can act as a slice of social history of a time when mores were different, when what was proper in gentile society and why were different. Take the background issue where; what is a lovely younger widow to do with her life in society once her husband is gone at a young age. Today with the six million possible living arrangements and live and let live attitude among many sectors of the population the way this film played out, maybe even the fact that the question had even been posed would seem to be something out of a social archeological dig.

Still it is interesting to see how the situation played out so here is the skinny. Jess, played by Barbara Stanwyck in a not very memorable role in like say Double Indemnity, a proper high society recent widow with two sons is expected by her social peers and a nose-out-of-joint mother to burn herself on the pyre of her love for her late husband who by all accounts was a good guy, a good dad too. But Jess brought up in the straight and narrow high society world of Chicago and never having a previous chance to blossom decided that she would step out a bit, get a new fellow maybe but not endlessly grieve over her late husband. Eventually through the good graces of friends who takes her with them on a vacation in ski country she meets a Major Landis, played by George Brent, who is both charming and unattached. The rest of the film revolves around their growing attachment, their intentions toward each other and the fact that with a war on who knows what will happen in this cockeyed world. That and then the kids, two young but growing boys who are still attached to their father’s memory and who balk at anybody else coming into their lives-sound familiar.

Of course along the way plenty of eyebrows are raised, plenty of eyes are rolled as Jess almost escapes from the social bonds that chain her to that leafy suburban existence that she knows too well is suffocating her. She learns a hard lesson on who your friends are but also that in a lot of ways she was stuck in her upbringing which meant that her boys had to come first-and then see what would happen if the good Major got back from the war in one piece. They called this film a ‘tear-jerker’ back then,  a melodrama, but today it couldn’t be made because nobody would believe that a young good-looking woman with kids, or not, wouldn’t be out on the hustings looking, well, looking for something. A nice period piece though .             

The Church Of The Brethren Of All Non-Believers-The Film Adaptation Of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

The Church Of The Brethren Of All Non-Believers-The Film Adaptation Of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

 

DVD Review  

 

By Sam Lowell

Wise Blood, starring Brad Dourif, Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, directed by John Huston, based on Flannery O’Connor’s novel of the same name, 1979 

Sure, religion, any religion but we will concentrate on evangelical here since that will come into play, will tie a man in knots, a woman too. Ask Hazel Motes, played by Brad Dourif, in the film adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, he’ll tell you true, he’ll give you the Word, the Word without the guff, without the big theology behind it. The fight against the word that got branded inside his head as a little child like a lot of us and it would not let him go, no question, would not let him go as a boy, or man. Got it branded in his head by a fiery old fundamentalist evangelical tent preacher of a grandfather and the experience never let him rest. Yeah, as the story line unfolds it just never let him rest and maybe that was one of the point Ms. O’Connor was trying to make in her book about the Hazels of the world. Maybe that struggle for redemption and salvation just was too embedded by that damn old tent fire and brimstone preacher. Some of us let it go, let it go a bit once we left home, got away from the hothouse effect religion played in our youths but some like Hazel went over the edge, went to war with a vengeance the religion of his youth.             

Here is how it played out in the film (which followed the themes of the book fairly closely as well as the story line which had been cobbled together from four shorter stories by Ms. O’Connor published in magazines when the book was first published in 1952). Who knows what will cause a person to test the ends of his or her faith, or how one winds up scratching and clawing trying to figure out how it got broken, got pushed into the depths of hell fire and damnation.  Our boy Hazel, Hazel Motes, out of some Podunk Southern town, do we really need to know its official name they were, are, legion, North and South, some small town, with small town eyes and small town mores, and if small enough one small town Christian faith, fundamental, Old Testament fundamental if the place had been “burned” over by one of the periodic “great awakenings” that have swept the country since its founding came back from war ready, willing and able to war on his old-time religion. Came back from war with a war-wounded heart and a government check for his troubles (given for some undisclosed wound suffered in real war).

(The war in the film was unmentioned but in the 1979 film it would follow that the war was Vietnam, a war to try men’s souls in and out of uniform, a war that created a whole generation of guys who had trouble coming back to the “real” world, some who wound up as “brothers under the bridge” out along the railroad track “jungles” and arroyos of Southern California and guys like Hazel to battle other inner demons. The war in the O’Connor book was World War II, a war that tried men’s souls in a different way and which would undermine the resolve of many small town boys who got a glance at the big wide world only through troop transports).          

This Hazel was an odd-duck from the get-go in his struggle against his inner demons. Kind of manic in everything he attempted to do right down to the determined stride of his walk, always on the edge when he did not get the respect he thought he deserved for his wisdom about what was what in the world. Always on the edge of some psychotic event. Had had it up to his head with religion and talk of redemption and salvation. Questioned the hell out of end sin and sorrows. Wanted to bring his hard-fought for message to an indifferent world. A world filled with the need to repent for some unknown original sin like the average person had caused the world’s sorrows. Wanted the world to know that it did not need Jesus-saving. Wanted most of all for people to stop fearing to take one step forward for fear that they would fall down in sin. A beautiful religion in a lot of ways, a way forward for a candid world.

The problem for Hazel, weak vessel Hazel, was two-fold though. Old Hazel wasn’t so sure that his struggle against religion, against temptation was over, was himself always half-looking looking for somebody to lead him if necessary. Someone, if you think in Freudian terms, to replace the father figure, the grandfather, who put the mark of Cain on him. The other problem is that in the small town world he was trying to preach the “Word” in was filled with fakers, charlatans, misfits, grifters, grafters, drifters, deadbeats and midnight sifters who wanted to get their messages out (read: run their own cons). So Hazel has to not only fight off an indifferent world, but a motley of con men on the hustle, itinerant religious fast-talkers with their own scripted visions of the new day coming, a teenage nymphomaniac trying to bring him to sexy sinless sin, miscreant youth, losers, fakers, bizarre cops, even more bizarre carny artists and in the end a lonely hearts landlady.

No wonder his went over the edge at the end. Went and literally blinded himself with quick lime, self-flagellated himself with barbed wire, walked with stones in his shoes to atone for the sins of the world by my reading. Such a man could not live in this mortal world and in the end he did not. Did not leave us with a viable church of all non-believers. Watch this one-and read Ms. O’Connor’s book too if you want to think about questions of redemption, salvation and just surviving in the modern world without some overbearing creed to stifle you.            

In Boston Veterans For Peace Memorial Day For Peace-May 30th

In Boston Veterans For Peace  Memorial Day For Peace-May 30th  


Veterans For Peace, Chapter 9 - Smedley Butler Brigade will host its annual

Memorial Day for Peace

Monday, May 30, 1:00-3:00 p.m.

Christopher Columbus Park

(corner of Atlantic Ave. & Richmond St., Boston, MA)

This is a solemn and honorable event featuring songs, speeches and poetry.  It culminates with a Flower Ceremony when veterans and members of the audience alike drop a carnation into the harbor as the names of every Massachusetts service member killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since Sept. 11 2001 are read aloud.

This is a public event. All are welcome.

The complete program for this event will be sent to this email list within a couple days.

Attached is a map showing the location of the park.  A purple pin indicates where we have the ceremony.

If you have questions, please email:  vfpsmedley@gmail.com

Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls

Free All The Class-War Prisoners-Help Those Behind The Walls 

A View From The Left-PT Popular Front Paved Way for Right-Wing Reaction-Brazil Impeachment: Workers Have No Side

Workers Vanguard No. 1089	6 May 2016

PT Popular Front Paved Way for Right-Wing Reaction-Brazil Impeachment: Workers Have No Side

Break with the PT—For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

With a widespread corruption scandal rocking the country, Brazil’s lower house of Congress voted last month to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. Since 2002, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT—Workers Party), first under its founder, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and then under Rousseff, has governed Brazil in a series of class-collaborationist coalitions. Now, Rousseff is being accused of accounting gimmicks to cover up state budget deficits. The PT’s erstwhile coalition partners—many of whom are under investigation or face criminal charges for corruption—are among those leading the charge against Rousseff. This includes Vice President Michel Temer of the bourgeois PMDB, who would take over as president if she is suspended or deposed.

Brazil’s governing bloc is an example of a “popular front,” a class-collaborationist coalition in which one or more workers parties join bourgeois forces to govern on behalf of the capitalists. We oppose these bourgeois formations on principle. Reformist workers parties like the PT have a class contradiction between their proletarian base and their leaderships’ pro-capitalist program. However, when such parties enter a popular-front alliance, the class contradiction is suppressed in the bourgeoisie’s favor, a guarantee that while in power they will not exceed the bounds of what is acceptable to the ruling class. The experience of PT rule has once again confirmed this.

For over five years, Rousseff’s government has inflicted a litany of attacks on working people, from implementing austerity measures and cutting social spending to attacking workers on strike and peasants who protest land seizures. These attacks followed nearly a decade of harsh IMF-mandated strictures under former labor leader Lula who, as president, was a credible servant to both the imperialists and the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Lula’s PT used its authority over the workers movement to carry out neoliberal policies even its right-wing predecessors were not able to achieve. At the same time, the first era of PT rule coincided with a global boom in the price of raw materials, of which Brazil is a leading exporter. The PT was able to distribute some crumbs, such as cash payments to the poor (Bolsa Família) and increases to the minimum wage.

But the boom is long gone. During the past couple of years, Brazil has been undergoing its biggest economic decline in decades. Alongside the impeachment drive, Rousseff’s allies as well as her enemies are caught up in the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation over graft and money-laundering schemes involving the state oil company, Petrobras. Much of the population views the country’s politicians as a nest of thieves. Against the backdrop of political instability and deepening immiseration, the PT is largely discredited within its working-class base. Such discontent was visible in the 2013 protests, initially sparked by transportation fare hikes and later spreading to include the government’s extravagant spending on World Cup stadiums, the dismal state of health care and education, and cop violence. The right-wing opposition parties seized on this popular dissatisfaction to lead a major anti-PT campaign.

With elections scheduled for the following year, Rousseff sought to mobilize support among the PT’s base by promising to improve living conditions for workers and the poor. Re-elected in 2014 by a narrow margin, she immediately reneged on her promises and imposed austerity as the country plunged further into recession. This served to demobilize and demoralize working people and the oppressed, further emboldening the right wing, including the PT’s own bloc partners. Today’s millions-strong anti-government protests are spearheaded by reactionary political factions backed by the media oligarchy and by pro-U.S. business groups.

Rousseff and PT loyalists decry the impeachment proceedings as a “violent act” against “democracy” and falsely present it as a coup d’état. Such claims are a potent scare tactic, conjuring up fears in a society where memories of the wounds inflicted by the bloody military regime ushered in by the 1964 coup remain vivid. Many working people, fearful of the right-wing forces coming to power, have mobilized in demonstrations against Rousseff’s ouster. These protests, replete with red flags and leftist and trade-union contingents—centrally the PT-associated CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores)—are being used by the PT to channel the workers’ anger back into support for the popular front. Meanwhile, PT leaders sought to head off the impeachment by offering ministerial posts to small bourgeois parties in exchange for a “no” vote in Congress.

At this point, Brazil is not facing a military coup to overthrow the government, but rather a series of sordid maneuvers within Congress to remove the president. To oppose Rousseff’s impeachment would mean a vote of confidence in—that is, political support to—the PT-led popular front. To favor impeachment would amount to support to the right-wing political forces mounted against Rousseff. As Marxists who stand for the political independence of the proletariat, we say the working class has no side in this conflict.

What the bourgeoisie can get away with in attacking the workers will be determined by the level of working-class resistance and struggle. The Brazilian proletariat is the only force with the social power to lead the struggle on behalf of all the oppressed, from the urban poor in the favelas, to women, to landless peasants. Such a perspective requires the forging of a revolutionary workers party, which would fight to break the proletarian base of the PT and the trade unions away from their current leadership as part of the struggle for socialist revolution and for workers rule.

Internationalist Group: Left Tail on Popular Front

Among the more militant versions of class collaborationism in Brazil is that put forward by the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB), affiliated with the U.S. Internationalist Group (IG). As with the bulk of the left in Brazil, their line is “No to Impeachment,” which is a vote of political support for Rousseff’s popular-front government (www.internationalist.org, April 2016). The IG/LQB, while not using the phrase, offers up a version of much of the left’s hype about a “judicial coup” by warning that a “bonapartist strong state dominated by courts and cops”—i.e., a military-police dictatorship—will come to power if Rousseff is removed from office. To obscure their defense of a bourgeois government, the IG/LQB throws around calls for factory occupations and a general strike, even claiming to politically oppose the government.

In reality, their position is no more than thinly disguised fight-the-right opportunism. While the IG/LQB cynically rants and raves about “bonapartism,” they admit that a coup in Brazil is unlikely “since with impeachment the right wing will have obtained its primary goal.” Ritually denouncing the popular front and calling not to vote for it, the centrist IG/LQB simply offers Marxist-sounding rationales to push the same line as much of the reformist left: save the Rousseff government.

The IG/LQB acknowledges that the PT has carried out attacks against the working class, “including some that even the military dictatorship did not dare undertake.” At the same time, they argue that a regime of parliamentary parties to the right of the PT would be qualitatively more dangerous than the popular front. The IG/LQB is, to the extent of its limited forces, helping to prop up the very class-collaborationist alliance that paved the way for right-wing reaction.

The IG/LQB intones that “if the bonapartist right wins, they will proceed with the entire weight of the judicial police apparatus behind them.” As if the PT popular-front government hasn’t mobilized, time and again, “the judicial police apparatus” against workers and the poor! Tell that to the impoverished and predominantly black masses in the favelas facing daily police terror. Earlier this year, Rousseff’s government passed a draconian anti-terrorism law that strengthens the repressive powers of the state against social protests.

The bourgeois state—consisting at its core of the army, police, prison system and courts—exists to defend the interests of the bourgeois rulers against working people and the oppressed. For its part, the LQB in 1996 had no compunction about inviting the capitalist state, through a series of lawsuits, to settle union affairs (see “Court Papers Prove They Sued the Union—IG’s Brazil Cover-Up: Dirty Hands, Cynical Lies,” WV No. 671, 11 July 1997).

The whole history of Leninism and Trotskyism has been a struggle against class collaboration and for the political independence of the working class. That is how the Bolshevik Party was able to lead the workers of Russia to power in October 1917. Following the February Revolution that overthrew the tsarist monarchy, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries entered into a coalition government with bourgeois forces. V.I. Lenin’s Bolsheviks denounced this as a betrayal of the proletariat and refused to give any support to the government under Alexander Kerensky.

To provide an orthodox-sounding gloss for its position on the impeachment, the IG/LQB in a short article (currently available only in Portuguese) invokes one aspect of the Russian Revolution: the attempted military coup in August by General Kornilov to overthrow the bourgeois Kerensky government, sweep away the soviets and crush the revolution. The Bolsheviks responded by calling for a united front of all workers organizations to smash the counterrevolutionary offensive, fighting militarily alongside Kerensky’s troops while maintaining their opposition to the government.

The IG/LQB’s article on the Kornilov coup acknowledges the Bolsheviks’ position, but through a sleight of hand blurs the hard line of military defense versus political support in order to justify its own capitulation to the popular-front government in Brazil! Their article lists the ways that the situation in Brazil today is different from Russia in August 1917: Russia was at war, there was a revolutionary situation, there were soviets and a mass revolutionary party. But they deceitfully omit a significant difference: Russian workers were facing an actual military coup, whereas Brazilian workers are facing empty bluster about a coup intended to whip up support for a bourgeois government.

One year after the Stalinized Communist International enshrined the policy of the popular front (or “People’s Front”) at its 1935 Seventh Congress, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky stressed:

“From February to October, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the ‘Communists’ and Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this People’s Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the People’s Front. Their demand was to break this People’s Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government.”

— Leon Trotsky, “The Dutch Section and the International” (July 1936)

For Marxists, the distinction between military defense and political support is of vital importance. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the popular front collaborated in the suppression of a workers revolution, paving the way for the victory of General Francisco Franco’s forces. At the time, the Trotskyists were giving military support to the Republican side against Franco and the Spanish fascists. In 1937, Max Shachtman, a senior member of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, argued in favor of supporting war credits for the popular-front government under Socialist prime minister Juan Negrín. Shachtman asked: “How can we refuse to devote a million pesetas to the purchase of rifles for the front?”

In a 1937 letter, Trotsky insisted that the only correct position would be a “negative vote” on the military budget. He explained:

“A vote in parliament for the financial budget is not a ‘material’ aid, but an act of political solidarity....

“All the Negrín government does is done under the sign of war necessities. If we accept political responsibility for their management of the war necessities, we would politically vote for every serious governmental proposition.... How can we, under such conditions, prepare for the overthrow of the Negrín government?”

— “Letter to James P. Cannon” (21 September 1937)

In opposing impeachment, the IG buries the class line, buying into the reformists’ framework of “progressive vs. reactionary,” which has time and again been used to claim that Marxist opposition to left-bourgeois governments aids the right wing. Such an accusation was raised regarding a classic case of opposition to the popular front. In 1964, sometime Trotskyist leader Edmund Samarakkody and one of his comrades cast a parliamentary vote in favor of an amendment put forward by a right-wing politician that brought about the downfall of a popular-front government in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka). That principled and courageous action was debated at the First International Conference of the international Spartacist tendency in 1979. Earlier, Samarakkody had wrongly repudiated his 1964 vote. Our comrades defended his 1964 vote; a better option for Samarakkody would have been to denounce the parliamentary procedure and walk out of parliament. Against Samarakkody’s repudiation, current IG leader Jan Norden, then a leading member of our tendency, rightly stated in 1979:

“Another common objection to our policy of proletarian opposition to the popular front is the charge of aiding the right. But until you’re prepared to overthrow the existing government, any kind of opposition to a popular front in office will be open to the attack that it is aiding the right.”

— Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 27-28, Winter 1979‑80

But that was then. Since leading a small group of followers out of our organization two decades ago, Norden has moved steadily to the right while covering his tracks with pseudo-militant rhetoric.

The working class has no common interests with its capitalist exploiters and oppressors. Throughout the recent period of left-bourgeois governments in Latin America—whether popular-frontist in Brazil or populist in Venezuela and elsewhere—this is the understanding that the ICL has uniquely and consistently fought to bring to the proletariat. Over 13 years of PT rule provides a graphic example of the lesson Marx drew from the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune: The proletariat cannot wield the levers of the capitalist state for its own interests, but must smash it through a socialist revolution that establishes a workers state in its place.

To unchain the revolutionary potential of the Brazilian proletariat requires the forging of a revolutionary internationalist party, one that is based on a perspective of socialist revolution throughout the Americas and internationally, especially in the imperialist heartland of the U.S. Only world socialist revolution, laying the basis for international socialist planning, can ensure qualitative economic development for the countries which are today under the imperialist boot. The ICL fights to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International as the necessary instrument to bring communist consciousness to the proletariat and to lead it to power at the head of all the oppressed.

The Cantonsville Nine’s Father Daniel Berrigan Passes At 94

The Cantonsville Nine’s Father Daniel Berrigan Passes At 94-A Belated Tribute  

 

By Frank Jackman

 

The Oakland Seven, The New York Twenty-One, The Chicago Nine (later Eight), The Harrisburg Six, The Fort Dix Twelve, The Fort Sam Houston Eleven, Free Huey, Free Angela, and of course the case I want to highlight this day after hearing on the radio a while back the passing of Father Daniel Berrigan at 94, the Cantonsville Nine, a town name down in Maryland and a cause, draft resistance, which he will be forever associated with. And forever honored for as a participant in that antiwar, anti-draft action.  

Of course bringing up that litany of political defense cases that ran through the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s only brings home once again what an extraordinary time that was, a time like a few others in our checkered history to try men’s and women’s souls. A John Brown moment in the face of the relentless onslaught against people that we had no cost to attempt to obliterate (or as the saying want at the time by some major military figure “bomb them back to the Stone Age”). In those days the distance between being catch up in the government’s dragnet and placed behind walls and staying on the streets to fight another day was sometimes just a matter of luck, of happenstance. What everybody knew though, everybody who was worth their salt was that whatever you did, or didn’t do, in those days would shape your life forever. How were you to talk your children, somebody’s children, tell your grandchildren, or somebody’s grandchildren that you kept your head down, that you kept your eyes on the ground while all hell was breaking out around you? The political rock group Steppenwolf maybe put it best:

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

 

Looking back on the times now there were actually relatively few of the older generation, of our parents’ generation, those like the Berrigans, William Sloan Coffin, Noam Chomsky, and a few others, those forged by the dregs of the 1930s Great Depression, slogged through World War II and made their peace with an unjust society during the heyday of the Cold War who stepped up to the plate, took a stand and we were mainly left on our own to make every mistake in the political book. Although when you think about the monsters we were up against those mistakes were innocent child’s play against the carnage they, the government and their hangers-on, were wreaking on foreign lands, and America cities alike. We had and HAVE nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for in that bare-knuckles tragically uneven fight against that dark night in America

Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phil, and others who would become Catholic “liberation theorists” later condemned in Rome did step up to the plate, did commit acts of resistance to evil. Did a very practical thing. Took out a draft board in Cantonsville, Maryland, destroyed or tries to destroy draft records, the life-blood of the draft system as a symbolic gesture of opposition to the slaughter of American boys (only boys then) in their slaughter of Vietnamese boys and girls. (Remember once again the old call the fights, they don’t do the actual fighting the young do.) And stayed around to get arrested, went to trial.    

Originally I had thought that a short homage to the late Father Berrigan would do the trick placing him as one of the older generation who took the risks that we, the young, were forced into. The more I thought about it though the more my own struggles with a hard-nosed Irish Catholic upbringing and the fight to break from the more onerous tenets of that church were reflected off the efforts of that man-whatever difference we might have then, or later.

In those days when I was having my own struggles against the military, when I was trying to resist going to Vietnam after having been inducted into the Army it was good to know I had allies raising hell against the system. Good knowing that guys, good Irish Catholic brethren, Society of Jesus guys, the soldiers of the Church, guys who would give the lessons to be learned about life at Sunday school or at Boy Scout retreats were breaking ranks who under ordinary circumstances would have counseled non-resistance to civil authority were coming over to the people’s side meant a lot to me whatever I would come to later think about the value of such actions in the great scheme of things. Like I said the actions and actors in the Cantonsville Nine case will always have an honored place in the pantheon of the anti-war struggles. They did not keep their heads down. Daniel Berrigan too.