*****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-Winter 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. 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 fifth year in prison last May [2015] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2015, celebrated her 28^th birthday in December with a rally.
 

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.              

 

 

*From The Archives-On The Anniversary Of The Execution Of The Rosenbergs- E.L. Doctorow's Fictional Treatment "The Book Of Daniel" And Sidney Lumet's Film "Daniel"

Click On Title To Link To The Rosenberg Fund For Children.

Commentary- June 2, 2009

This June marks the 56th Anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state. I have defended the Rosenbergs elsewhere in this space, including a review last year of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, titled "Heir To An Execution".(Check Archives). Directly below are some remarks made in additional to that review in light of a flurry of controversy around their names that surfaced in the Fall of 2008. This year I have chosen to review E.L. Doctorow's 1971 fictional treatment of some aspects of the case and the film based on the book. Needless to say I stand by my defense of this heroic radical couple. Justice still awaits in their case.

*****************

Commentary made in addition to a September 14, 2008 review of a film documentary by Rosenberg granddaughter, Ivy Meerpol, in this space.

Honor the Heroic Soviet Spies Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobel

In the commentary above I alluded, somewhat obliquely, to the Verona Tapes-the decoded Soviet transmissions from World War II- as an earlier American governmental source for the proposition that Julius Rosenberg was providing scientific information of some sort to the Soviet Union during that period. Recent news has highlighted the possible truth of that assertion. First the release of classified grand jury testimony in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case mentioned above. Also the assertion by convicted Rosenberg co-conspirator Morton Sobel that he passed scientific information to the Soviets during that period. More recently, in some interviews in The New York Times, the Rosenberg children (Meeropols), after having spend their adulthoods trying to build a case for their parents’ innocence have seemingly come to the position that their father, at least, was indeed working for the Soviets.

Let’s be clear here. For those who saw military defense of the Soviet Union, Stalinist warts and all, as an internationalist socialist duty until its demise in the early 1990’s the question of honoring Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has not hinged on their guilt or innocence of the charges of aiding the Soviet Union leveled by the American government. Nor has it hinged on opposition to the death penalty, although we are opposed to that barbaric punishment. The question has always been, if not openly then otherwise, the service they were in a position to provide to the first workers state. In the interest of “muddying the waters” we have never earlier proclaimed them, as we have with Kim Philby and his Cambridge cohorts, Richard Sorge or Leopold Trepper, heroic Soviet spies. Now, apparently, we can openly acknowledge our debt at last to Julius and Morton Sobel. The case remains unclear about Ethel although we honor her as a soldier of the revolution as well. Some little piece of historic justice is finally possible in their cases.

I would add here that although I had spend a fair portion of my life as a military defender of the Soviet Union and the other workers states of East Europe while they existed that, as a practical matter, that defense never got beyond the propaganda stage. Apparently, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobel, in their attempts to defend the interests of the Soviet Union as they saw that duty, were in a position to do more. Although the political gap that separated us was, at times drawn in the blood of our murdered comrades at the hands of the Stalinist henchman that they defended, they acted as soldiers of the revolution here. That is the why of honoring them in this space.

Finally, I have mentioned before that I have always liked the idea of Julius organizing in the 1930’s in behalf of freedom for the jailed militant labor leader Tom Mooney while at City College of New York (CCNY). As those who follow this space know the late Professor Irving Howe, the social democratic founder/editor of Dissent also was at CCNY during this period as an anti-Stalinist socialist who was won to Trotskyism, for a moment, during this same period. He, along with a fair number of others recruited from the Socialist Party milieu at CCNY dropped out of the Socialist Workers Party (the main organized Trotskyist organization in America at the time) over the question of defense of the Soviet Union when it mattered in the late 1930’s. I pose this question- When the fight for socialism is on the line who do you want with you- Julius Rosenberg or Irving Howe? To ask the question is to give the answer. The Rosenbergs and Sobel were not our people- but they were our people.


*********************

Book/ DVD Review

This review is being used for both book and DVD versions of Doctorow's work as the central points to be made in regard to both works are similar. The film starring Timothy Hutton as Daniel and directed by the acclaimed Sidney Lumet fairly closely hems to Doctorow's story line. Hutton does an excellent job as Daniel. Obviously, such dramatic moments as the attempts to run away from the state authorities by the Rosenberg children after their parents' arrest, the touching visiting scenes by the children in the prison just prior to the executions, the executions and the tragic fate of one of the children (in the book, not real life) get more attention than in the book. But that is cinematic license, and here is not overplayed.

The Book Of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow, Random House, New York, 1971

Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton, directed by Sidney Lumet, DVD release 2008

At first blush the Rosenberg Cold War Soviet espionage case of the 1950's, that ended in the execution of both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the American state despite a worldwide campaign to save their lives, would not appear to be a natural subject for fictional treatment. Unlike, let us say, Kim Philby and the various Cambridge spies the Rosenbergs' biographies and political profiles do not have the stuff of larger than life drama. Moreover, whatever their efforts were on behalf of the defense of the Soviet Union, as they saw it, the details do not jump out as the makings of a spy thriller. And the well-known historical novelist (`Ragtime", Loon Lake", etc.), E.L. Doctorow, does not go into any of that material. What Doctorow has attempted to mine, and I think within the parameters that he has set himself successfully so, is the effect that the political actions of the Rosenbergs had on their children at the time, on their children's futures (in state custody and later adopted privately) and on the trauma of being the "heirs to an execution" in adulthood. Add to that the biblical implications ("The Book Of Daniel") that Doctorow weaves into his story and that is more than enough material for one novel.

Naturally, the question of the fate of the children of famous (or infamous, as the case may be) is a fair subject for treatment, fictional or otherwise. There is a whole flourishing body of literature concerning this topic. What makes the Rosenberg children distinct (a boy and girl, rather than the real two boys, fictionally named Daniel and Susan Issacson here) is that they were son and daughter to parents who in the eyes of the American state and significant parts of the American population were traitors. Not a good way for young kids to develop their self-esteem. That struggle, placed in the context of the traumas over personal identification which were rift as they grew to adulthood and that helped define the 1960's the time of the action of this story, drive the main themes of the story. The interlocked questions of life in the academy (Daniel is something of a professional graduate student), life on the political streets (Susan has chosen a psychologically dangerous way to cope with her heritage by going full-bore into the left-wing political activity of the period) and coming to grips, successfully or not, with their legacies give the plot substance.

Aside from Doctorow's main themes of exploring the thorny question of the responsibility that parents have for their children, either as parents or as political people, the last part of the book where Daniel, as a coping mechanism if nothing else, begins to get "political" provides some interesting (for the time) theories about what happened in the Rosenberg case. The themes of "good Jew, bad Jew" (as shown by the large cast of Jewish characters in the trial process), the alleged inadequacies of the defense, the scarcity of government evidence (the Rosenbergs were convicted of that old stand-by "conspiracy"), the nature of the early Cold War period and the personal and political limitations of the Rosenbergs themselves get a full workout here. In the end though, as I mentioned in a commentary reviewing Rosenberg granddaughter Ivy Meerpol's film, "Heir To An Execution", concerning the personal characters of the Rosenbergs they did their duty as communists, as they saw it. For that they deserve all honor. And someday some real justice to clear their names.

Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop 1960s Life-When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love-An Encore

Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop 1960s Life-When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love-An Encore

 

 


From The Pen Of [The Late] Peter Paul Markin

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin back in sunnier days before he took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we cobbled from whatever we collectively still had around. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but his golf rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start. That is where we met the subject of this piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys.        

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life.

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment it would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out in the West.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happens for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]  

 


“Jesus, I never thought I would get here and here I am in San Francisco all in one piece standing at the foot of  Russian Hill,” Russian Hill where all the ‘hippies’ were hanging out before they went over to Golden Gate Park a few months before and ‘blew their minds, really blew their minds from what somebody had told him about the trendy electric kool-aid acid tests, taking hits of powerful psychedelics like LSD in Dixie cups filled, for the unwary or those who preferred to pay homage to their childhood delight with name your flavor Kool-Aid, cool. The speaker of those words, Joshua Breslin (a.k.a. Prince Love or Prince, and hereafter so identified reflecting the mania for the sometimes off-the-wall monikers to go with the new sensibilities of the age, to break out of the slave names as some clever wit put it with tongue in-cheek), late of Olde (very old to hear him tell it) Saco (Maine) High School Class of 1967, but just now of youth nation, youth nation descending on friendly, friend-sized, go West young man (and woman), go West, heaven said to his boon companion of three days, Benny Buzz (real name Lawrence Stein, Brooklyn High School of Science, Class of 1967), also currently of youth nation. It was Benny Buzz who, having the vast experience of having been in ‘Frisco for a week now, and having “been up the hill,” a few times already who guided Prince Love to the foot of Russian Hill  in preparation for, well, for his first summer of love experience. No, not the  eternal teen summer of love at some beach, camp or vacationland amusement park where boys ogle girls (and they back, maybe) but the long expected jail break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan every step of your life world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles.      


Yes, Prince Love, could write the book on hassles, hassles followed by man, or not. Just a few week before he, having just graduated from Olde Saco High, had a “job offer,” a job working as a janitor in Shepard’s Textile Mill, yeah, the ones who make those “boss” cashmere sweaters the girls are all crazy for these days. Crazy for in winter anyway because right now warm suns, California, Denver, hell even Maine suns, require nothing more than some skimpy top, shoulders showing, and a pair of shorts, short shorts depending on the legs or vanity. His father, Prescott, a longtime employee of the mills, the lifeblood of Olde Saco just then, “pulled a few wires” to get him the job for the summer before he went off to State U in the fall. Last year, last year when he was nothing but a raw hang out in front of the Colonial Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street (officially U.S. Route 1) with his boys (and occasionally girls, but only for a few moments while they picked up their orders) he would have jumped with both feet, maybe with both hands and feet, at the job to get some money for college.          


But that was then and this is now, as they say. Now, or rather the now just a few weeks or so before he got to the foot of Russian Hill, he had received word through that mysterious youth nation grapevine that parents, squares, cops, and authority guys were frantic to figure out, but who, in the end, were  clueless  about,  of a “great awakening”  that was going on in ‘Frisco. That news fed, fed deeply, into the wells of the discontent Prince Love was feeling about his own desire to break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan every step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles mentioned before.


The grapevine, by the way, was not all that mysterious. Some young, long-haired, wild-looking guy dressed in a blotted multi-colored shirt (later he found out such things were called “tie-dyed,” an interesting process that was popular among the kind of “back to nature,” and if not back that far then maybe to some simple agrarian society, crowd who were beginning to ad hoc come up with new ideas about how to clothe, feed and transport youth nation and get away from the rat race plan every step ways) from the West Coast had come east to see his grandparents who lived on Olde Saco Beach a few miles down the road and had run into Prince Love at the doughnut shop when he was looking for some joe and cakes to tide him over before a walk on the beach and told him about what was happening on the West Coast. Simple as that, okay.     


That information, those pressing on the brain existential jail-break things that Josh was feeling press against his brain, and well, the cold hard fact that he had just broken up with his girl, his long time high school honey, Julie Cobb, were what drove him to seek the road west. Simple as that. Well not so simple, really, because, if the truth be known, Julie left him for another guy, an older guy who was already working in the mills (not Shepard’s but Cullen’s, the high society linen-makers), had some dough, had a boss 1964 Mustang and, most  importantly, wanted to get married, and pretty soon too. That was the sticking point between the Prince and Julia, the conventional marriage game thing that had been going on in the town since, since, well Prince didn’t know how long but it was pretty common. Here was the drill. Graduate Olde Saco, work in the mills, get a couple of bucks, get married, get a tiny house on Atlantic Avenue, maybe,  have two point six children, throw in a dog or two cats, and then finish up whitewashing that picket fence in front of the house with the grandchildren.


No sale, not for Prince Love. He was going to college, leave the dust of that old town behind, and make a name for himself at something before he settled down in not-Olde Saco, maybe, maybe on the settle down part but just then he had the wanderlust, had it bad. And from what he had heard along the way on his way west, and since he had arrived in San Fran a lot of people were feeling, wondering, groping for some answers just like him. And, yeah, just like them the Prince was looking to try some dope, listen to some far out music, grab some cool chick to shack up with, and really leave that home town dust behind before going back east for the fall semester of school.                


Now you are filled in, a little, on the what and the why of Prince (and Benny Buzz who however had been right then leaving Prince to go see a man, well, go see a man about something, let’s just leave it at that)  being on Russian Hill, that classic San Francisco hill mentioned a while back.  A hill not previously known to first time Frisco Prince, although maybe well-known to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working its way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.


I just remembered, you know everything, everything except how Prince Love got here which is not a big deal since he took some dough he had  originally saved up for college and used it for the Greyhound bus fare to get him here. Not for him the hitchhike road like the old time beat “beats” craved to get what they called the feel for authentic America which the Prince just slightly drenched with the end of the “beat” minute had to laugh at since according to guru Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road which he had finally read the previous summer old Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) was blazing about one hundred and ten miles per hour so the whole thing was a blur. Beside he didn’t need the hassles, man, the hassles first of Mother Breslin going crazy over the idea that he son would be some “jungle” hobo just like one of her cousins and didn’t need the hassles from weird guys picking up lone guys in Winnemucca or a place like that and then trying something funny. Not for him either merry prankster buses driven by mad monk zen masters in the heated western night since he had heard of nobody going west like that, heard the yellow brick bus road was mainly a California thing then (although not for long after the news of the summer of love filtered through the grapevine).


But this too Well, come on now, not everybody got every piece of news, especially in Podunk Maine, about the ways west, VW bus west, stick out the thumb west and that there were people, your kind of people, ready to pick you up and take you down the road a piece. Even back up on super-highway interstates to pick up a fellow youth nation straggler left on some desolate stretch fair game for hungry police eyes. Besides, after about a two-day bout with his parents about not taking that summer job, using the dough for college for such foolishness (to quote his everywoman mother), and other assorted arguments, family arguments started back in childhood, he had promised them to take the bus west. Let’s just say hassles, man, hassles and be done with it. Now we are done with the past.


Right then though, after saying a few things in parting with Benny Buzz after Benny had “scored” (you figure out what in summer Frisco ’67) about catching up with each other later, as he started walking up the hill toward the entrance to the mini-“people’s park” that was about half way up Russian Hill Prince spied a tall young man, maybe a few years older than him although such things were always hard to tell with making guys look older beards, the trauma of three-day drug haggards, and glazed looks.  He was, at second glance,  tall but not as tall as Prince, lanky, maybe not as lanky as him either and from the look of him with his drug stews diet having taken some additional pounds off, and some desire for pounds as well,  not really normally lanky.  Dressed, always worthy of description in 1967 ‘Frisco, male or female, in full “hippie” regalia, faded olive drab World War II army jacket, half-faded blue jeans, bright red bandana headband to keep his head from exploding, stripped checkerboard flannel shirt against the cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds too, and now that we are on the West Coast, with roman sandals on his feet).


And to draw the eye more fully to the scene this guy is sitting with two foxy looking young women. One, the younger one, maybe a high school student, blonde, blue-eyed, slender, short shorts belying West Coast origin,  and de rigueur practical road-worthy peasant blouse. A poster child for San Francisco summer of love if he ever saw one, and of his own feverish Maine night teenage desire summer or winter of love now that Julia was past. The other women, who called herself  Lupe Matin just then although the Prince found out later from the lanky guy that she had run through several monikers previously, a college student for sure , dark-haired, dark-eyed, slightly voluptuous, seemingly a little out of place with her male companion completed the entourage. (Her real name, Susan Sharp, Vassar College, Class of 1966, and “trying to find herself.”)  


Prince cast several glances at that regal company, nodded slightly, a knowing nod eyes fixed as was the fashion just then, and then turned around and asked to no one in particular but kind of zeroing in on the blonde (yah, he had a thing for blondes, see Julia was just that same kind of waspy blonde, minus the tan and year-round sunshine, that he fell for, fell for hard and fast), “Got some dope, for a hungry brother?” The male, who Prince would later come to know as “Far-Out” Phil (Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville, Massachusetts, Class of 1964), looked at him in a bemused manner (nice touch, bemused, right).  Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this Prince traveler had either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding himself” bug he could have, thought “Far Out” to himself,  been his  brother, biological brother.


That line, that single Prince Love line, could have been echoed a thousand, maybe ten thousand times that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed at any small clot of like-minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Gold for the head, okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway, relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Joshua Breslin.  And the women, of course.                  


That sense that Far Out had that he and Prince Love were kindred had been based on the way that the Prince posed that first question. His accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but farther north. And once the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting everybody a little talkative then Prince spilled out his story. Yes, he was from Olde Saco, Maine, born and bred, a working-class kid whose  family had worked  the town mills for a couple of generations, maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some cheaper labor, real cheap. So Joshua, after he graduated from high school a few weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and check out prospects here on the coast for later use after college. Josh, now fully into his Prince Love persona finished up his story by saying, “And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope and sitting with some sweet ladies.”


The Prince was just being a little off-handedly flirtatious as was his style when around women, young or old (old being thirty, tops), aiming his ammunition in general but definitely honing in on the blonde, the blonde now identified for all eternity as Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School, California, Class of 1968). (Phil, by the way, never ever said what his reaction to that last part of the Prince’s spiel, the flirtatious part, which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in the re-telling, filled with menace. Girl-taking menace. Well, old North Adamsville corner boy Phil menace would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer of love it just passed by like so much air)  Naturally Phil, a lordly road warrior now, on the bus now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited the Prince  to stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Prince Love was “family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.            


And of course, family, meant home, and home for Far Out, Butterfly Swirl, and Lupe Matin meant the now locally famous (West Coast local, okay) yellow brick road bus now known as Captain Crunch’s Crash Pad (after the owner of the bus, and “leader,” whatever that meant, of the expedition). Prince Love, from the first night, not only felt that he had found a home, a home that he never felt he had in Olde Saco but that whatever happened out here he would survive. And as more dope-filled pipes were passed that night, and as the music played louder into the sea-mist bay night, and lights gleamed from all directions the Prince grew stronger in that conviction. Especially when Far Out Phil, acting out of some old testament patriarchal script, came sauntering over to The Prince around midnight and whispered in his ear, “Butterfly Swirl wants to be with you, okay?”         


And that night the Prince and Butterfly Swirl were “married.”

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Haki Malik Abdullah, (s/n Michael Green)

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Haki Malik Abdullah, (s/n Michael Green)

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

Click on the link for more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

 

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

 

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck [now deceased], whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania [former] death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long -time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

 

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases here. Likewise any cases, internationally that may come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

Photos & video of Memorial Day for Peace, taken by Michael Brokson

[smedleyvfp] Photos & video of Memorial Day for Peace, taken by Michael Brokson

To smedleyvfp@googlegroups.com  

Hi peace people,

Yesterday May 30, about 40 people observed

an anti-war Memorial Day with the Boston

Veterans For Peace. The predicted rain stopped

a half hour before the event began at Waterfront Park

on Boston Harbor. Veterans of past and current wars

spoke eloquently against the pro-war mainstream

Memorial Day events.

After the speakers, people solemnly tossed flowers

into the harbor as the names of Mass. soldiers who

died in the present US wars were read aloud. During the

speeches was frequent mention of the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan,and other nations, killed by the US wars.

Links below to the photos and video I took.

no war,

Michael Borkson

Boston, Mass.





Photos:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157669036376676






Video:


https://youtu.be/sjCkANNPjTw





Boston Veterans For Peace Smedley Butler Brigade:

http://www.smedleyvfp.org/











Attachments area



Preview YouTube video Veterans For Peace Anti-War Memorial Day-Boston 5-30-2016














Veterans For Peace Anti-War Memorial Day-Boston 5-30-2016




























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The Trouble With Harry P. - With Fritz Lang’s Blue Gardenia In Mind

The Trouble With Harry P. - With Fritz Lang’s Blue Gardenia In Mind  

By Zack James

 

Harry Peddle, was a real piece of work. Harry P. is what everybody called him, what every girl who got ensnared by his so-called charms called him, called him when she wasn’t thinking, and not thinking very quickly and frantically about what he was peddling, what disgusting thing he wanted her to do to play out the end of the evening with his “come on” etchings scam that guys have been doing since Adam grabbed Eve, maybe before. Yeah, Harry with his eternally proffered filled up wine glass and averted eye as he undressed every woman under sixty and maybe some older too after all Hollywood the Mecca of ageless youth, his bailiwick, could work miracles under soft lights even for those beyond their bloom.

Yeah Harry P. was one of a kind in his own way. I should know because I knew him as well as anybody and if there ever was a snake-in-the-grass about women it was Harry, yeah, Harry P.  Harry showed up one morning dead, very dead with a very big bloody crack in his head, broken wine glasses all over their contents creating big stain blotched all over his Persian rugs, broken fireplace mirror from some nefarious thrown object, assorted women’s accessories (meaning shoes and handkerchiefs not bras and panties for the perverts out there listening to Harry’s sing-song and what he got away with), and his patented blue gardenia from the café of that same name where he liked to take his girls, in his bungalow studio off of Vine. Nobody, least of all me, was surprised.

Vine a place back in the 1950s when that locale had some cache (and was an automatic magnet for young women on the way up, on the way up some thought to a bigtime acting career in the bright lights of Hollywood just like Ava, Liz and Lauren from Omaha and Davenport before they got wised up on one too many casting couch). But despite his faults, his big “love ‘em and leave ‘em” sometimes two or three in one night faults, Harry was a friend and so I took it upon myself to see who the hell, meaning what woman scorned of his took that bloody fireplace poker and sent old Harry P. to his final hellish resting place.

Let me explain, first of all my name is Phil, Phil Larkin. In those days of my youth, the silent slumming late 1940s after I got out the Army when  the Pacific Wars were done in WWII I decided California was as good a place to start life as going back to Riverdale in haughty Massachusetts. When I met Harry I had just blown off “the cops” in the City of Angels, in what they now call La La Land but then back in the 1950s before all the freeways and all the desperate people from Omaha and Davenport came looking, well, looking for something it wasn’t a bad town to live in, nice weather, the beach filled with plenty of young women looking to be something and not choosey about how they got there-once they figured out the score. Or got the word from the older wiser girls. That “blowing off the cops” thing was that I could not take any more guff about graft, anymore bullshit about not stepping on this guy’s toes or ignoring that guy’s indiscretions, you know the big shot payoff that maybe was overrated in Omaha and Davenport but was real in enough in movie-power mad Hollywood.

What broke the camel’s back was one night a famous producer, a big shot whose name if I told who it was would make you shudder, had been drunk, had been drunk with a woman not his wife of which he had had several and slipped off the  Pacific Coast Highway near Laguna and the girl got killed. He walked away clean and without anything being done. Nothing, not even pay-off dough to the girl’s parents when they came in from Fargo to make a stink and got booted out of town for their troubles, that and their daughter got called nothing but a two-bit hooker by the Hollywood blats which that big-name producer had bought and paid for with his big budget weekly ads in the Movie sections of their crummy newspapers. Jesus. They wanted me to cover up, cover up big time, and say that the place where that big-time producer paid the girl’s rent off of Wiltshire was nothing but a whore’s apartment complete with boxes of condoms, Vaseline by the jars and every kind of sex toy. Damn. I just walked away.

That’s when I got into the private detection business and how I wound up meeting Harry P. See he and I had offices of sorts on the same floor in the Taylor Building off the not plush, then, high numbers on Wiltshire and I would notice that he had plenty of good-looking and busty young women walking in and out of his “office” all the time. I checked it out one day by just walking in the foyer to his office and found that Harry P. was the famous Harry Peddle who did pin-up girl calendars, you know the ones that you would see back then in Army barracks lockers, auto garages and in men’s rooms at low-end bars showing very provocative for the time good-looking busty women exploding out of their bathing suits or tight sweaters showing plenty of cleavage and –desire- but not much else. Harry was smart that way, leaving much to the imagination at least for those guys taking a leak or washing their hands in some smelly greasy men’s room.

Of course that was just the public stuff back then, the stuff the Vice Squad could give a fuck about, what made Harry his dough and got him plenty of “hot” numbers in his little black book was the stuff he sold to “discriminating collectors” as he called them. See his “racket” was to go to let’s say for example some big insurance company steno pool, maybe hit the colleges where plenty of girls were enrolling what with the Korean War taking all the young men away and they needed to fill those joints up, say UCLA or USC, maybe hang out in some drugstore on Hollywood and Vine and start sketching some doll, maybe a plain jane with no tits, maybe some Jane Russell it didn’t matter because 99 times out of a one hundred he made the doll look like a sex goddess and that was his entre. Later in his “studio” in the Taylor Building or at his loft over off of Vine where he was found in that bloody condition one very bleak morning after plying the doll with booze or drugs he would nudge her into some nude pose. Most of them didn’t, or couldn’t, squawk because what would mother, her friends or the town if it was small enough say back in Grand Island or Saint Paul when he sold the material.  Wouldn’t or couldn’t squawk if they did object because he would claim they had forced themselves on him-and show some made-up nasty poses of them doing strange sexual things. Nice grift if you can live with yourself after each caper which seemed to get nastier as he got more successful with his damn grift. Harry could, loved the thrill of degrading a woman. Half the time I think he really hated women, was as the expression went then “light on his feet,” a fag is what we called guys with limp hands like that in the old working class neighborhood around Riverdale in Massachusetts where I grew, what they call today gay. You know the story of guys taking advantage of women whether liked them or liked to degrade then, it has been going on since before Adam and Eve got tangled up with some strong applejack. Harry was just a little rawer about it.      

That stuff Harry was peddling before Hugh Hefner and Playboy real high grade color nude photographs exploded on the scene and such drawings, even the nasty ones, were considered quaint and old-fashioned in the super-heated sex –charged atmosphere when the old values broke down. When a young woman, plain jane or Jane Russell would be knocking down the doors of porno magazines to get in the girlie magazines. Nowadays you can’t even Google the letters “s” and “x” without being inundated by every kind of sex act done by male and female alike looking like they were actually enjoying what they were doing. So maybe somebody did old Harry a favor by wasting him with that poker but back then I wanted answers.  I never got them as you could figure out from what I just said about somebody, some party unknown, doing old Harry in but it wasn’t for lack of trying. See Harry would sometime give me one of his “rejects” some woman he was tired of or just because right then he had too many in his little black book. What drove me, made me afraid really, was that one of the “rejects” might take umbrage at me for Harry’s indifference and I might wind up like poor old Harry with my own bloody skull cracked.           

The place to start was the “little black book” as the blats and the cops called it which contained not just those “lost soul” girls from Steubenville or Richmond but some starlets and up and coming actresses. Most of the more famous ones, the ones not permanently consigned to the casting couch or who never got that far, were “protected” by some producer like that guy whose antics made me call the public cops quits and I could never get close to. They didn’t figure anyway since Harry’s day was beginning to pass as I said when Hugh Hefner changed the mores on girlie magazines and any kinky past probably played to their vanities.   

The steno pools proved to be more useful, and I thought I had a solid lead when the roommate, Clara, of this girl Harry had gone out with had told me that Iris had come in on the night of Harry’s murder with no shoes on and her dress all messed up and wet. It had been serious California raining the night Harry died. She was also inebriated. So drunk that she dived right into bed and slept half the next day. This Iris was a looker no question from the photograph that Clara showed me. Just the meat for Harry. The back story as far as I got it was that Iris had met Harry in the cafeteria of the Fidelity Insurance Company when he was “sketching” some other girl and she had walked up to him and “dared” him to sketch her. Just what Doctor Harry had ordered.  He did have a very quick hand with the pencil or anything else from what I could gather and she was impressed with the sketch that made her look like Veronica Lake. Catnip for Harry.

So they had gone out according to Clara a number of times, sometimes to his place on Vine sometimes when Clara had come home from a date she would hear them in the love swoon in Iris’ room. Then he stopped coming back. And Iris became more depressed, and more angry and augmentative with Clara. Clara though Iris had begun to put on weight, telltale weight but by the time I got to Clara Iris had blown town with all her belongings. Including shoes from which I could have deducted her shoe size in comparison to the ones found in Harry’s living room. Sometimes a case goes cold, this one went cold just like Harry.

The only good thing that came out of investigating Harry’s death was a few very intimate dates with Clara-and her showing me the naughty sketches Harry had made of her when she asked me up to her place to see her etchings. Such is life.               

Memorial Day Thoughts-A Speech Given A Smedley Butler Veterans For Peace Member At The Annual Memorial Day For Peace Commemoration In Boston May 30, 2016

Memorial Day Thoughts-A Speech Given A Smedley Butler Veterans For Peace Member At The Annual Memorial Day For Peace Commemoration In Boston May 30, 2016 

    

Those of you who know me and who have attended the Midnight Voices program that Veterans for Peace supports along with other organizations know that I periodically read some pieces about guys, mostly Vietnam veterans, guys from my generation who had a hard time coming back to the “real” world after “Nam.” Especially guys that I met when I was out in California after my own checkered military service. Guys whom Bruce Springsteen addressed in his powerful song-Brothers Under the Bridge. Most of the guys once they came to trust me, trust me as far as any guys could in that very here today, gone tomorrow world out under the bridges and along the railroad tracks of Southern California would want to talk about something, get something off their chests. Maybe it was about the war, maybe about some girl who sent them a Dear John letter which tore them up, and still did, maybe about the old neighborhood, especially if they were from the East and I might know about their town, maybe about buddies who got left behind in “Nam, whose names are now eternally etched in black marble down in Washington.

When I volunteered at our last VFP monthly meeting to be on the program today I knew I was going to be talking about one of those guys, talking about Phil Larkin, a guy from Carver down in cranberry bog country, down where the bogs provided work for generations of Larkins. Talk about him because the story he told me one night out in the Westminster railroad “jungle” while we were drinking cheap wine, cheap wine was all we had dough for fits in very nicely with what we are about here today. Phil, unlike a lot of veterans I met out West had had qualms about going into the service, had thought about jail, going to Canada, going underground you know the stuff a lot of guys from our time had to think through as we can under the threat of induction. He went in, went in when drafted and not before which he was very proud of, did the 11 Bravo route since cannon fodder was all they were looking for in late 1967, early 1968-later too. Took his physical beating, two purple hearts if I recall correctly, took his psychological beating which explained why he was drinking cheap wine with me out in some desolate railroad patch but that night he didn’t want to talk about himself but an uncle, no grand uncle, Frank O’Brian, whom when he said his name said it with a sneer. This guy, this grand uncle is why he wound up going into the service against his better instincts.                  

See Frank O’Brian had served in World War I, had died shortly after the war from some wounds he received during the war. Because of that, and because he was one of the few guys from Carver who had died in that war he had a square up by the town hall named after him, had a plaque stating as much. You know the corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many.  Probably you I and pass five, ten every day without even recognizing them as such, except maybe today or on Armistice Day when some organization puts a flag or something to acknowledge those deaths.

But see that damn plaque was the final straw that got Phil into his olive drabs. Frank O’Brian was his Grandma Riley’s brother and when Phil tried to get counsel from that august, his word, old lady whom he loved dearly she tore into him said what would people think, what would her dead brother think if a Larkin/Riley/O’Brian son, a son of Carver did not do his duty. That ended any thought of Phil’s not going into the service. But you can see why he had that sneer on his face that night when he mentioned that uncle’s name. Maybe we should start naming the squares and corners of the world after those who would not serve in the military, the brave resisters who have languished in the prisons and stockades.  

From The Marxist Archives-The Bolshevik Revolution Versus The State Church

From The Marxist Archives-The Bolshevik Revolution Versus The State Church 

Frank Jackman comment:

Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one such time, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.     

 

 

Reflections In The Aftermath Of The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

Reflections In The Aftermath Of The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Last year, 2015, I like a billion other citizen-music critics meaning no more than that I wrote a small sketch about the 40^th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic first widely admired album, Born To Run (“iconic” a word now attached to every half-baked event and fully-baked person that has ever come to the surface with the slightest bit of renown but until the fever flavor of the month gets replaced by a more sober assessment like enigmatic I will follow the herd on this one) and placed my assessment in various blogs that I follow and other relevant social media sites but also no less than I had the same right as professional music critics to commemorate a milestone event in my own trek through life.

 

Since then I have been thinking about what I said back then and I have some additional things that might be of interest to “Bruce Springsteen nation” even though we will presumably not be commemorating the anniversary of the first distribution of that album for about another ten years. Part of the impetus for reflecting on the album was that one night my old Carver High School friends Bart Webber, Sam Eaton and Jack Callahan were discussing my sketch at one of our periodic get-togethers at the Rusty Nail, a bar we hang out in of late near Kenmore Square in Boston, now that we are all retired or semi-retired and have time to philosophize over some high-shelf scotches and whiskeys. (For those who do not frequent bars, are tee-totallers, or are just curious that “high-shelf” designation is important especially to four guys who grew up “from hunger” down in Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world or close to it who when young and thirsty drank Southern Comfort, low-shelf whiskeys like Johnny Walker Black, no scotches high-shelf or low, and if pressed hard drunk Thunderbird or Ripple wines.)

 

That night we got, as we have been doing since those high school days when we hung out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys pining away, into a dispute, although we always called it a beef back then about the virtues of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics on stuff like Thunder Road and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. Their collective wisdom was that Bruce “spoke” to that Saturday night “chicken run” everything is all right down at the far end of the beach as long as you have your honey on board, take your baby for a ride, see the sights but get the hell out of Carver at all costs unless we wanted to wind up like our parents tied by a million cords to the freaking bogs. Me, well me, I thought they all had had too much to drink that night, maybe too much to dream too since while I am willing to give Bruce plenty of simpatico for merely having survived his youth in Jersey a few years after us that we were driven much more by guys like the literary on the road Jack Kerouac, the poetic mad monk Moloch-hunter Allen Ginsburg, and muse musically by Bob Dylan. They raised a collective sigh and then made the inevitable comment that covers all our disputes these days that I had probably done too much grass/ cousin/speed/hash or any combination thereof and the chickens have finally come home to roost. Here in my updated version of that sketch from last year reflecting that conversation with my friends. I hope it will hold everybody’s tongues until mid-2025 when we have to think through the damn thing again:                               

 

“I got my ‘religion’ on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance, that trio of corner boys who still think I am addled by the acid trips of my youth and therefore feel free to discount everything I have said for the past forty years, would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this little sketch, the day when Bruce Springsteen busy in the subterranean world around New York City trying to catch on well after the folk minute and acid rock moments had played out sprung his sweet baby everything is all right Saturday night Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the album Born To Run on a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that a small stab was being attempted to create a “new breeze” after the previous breeze had played out a few years before, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past. (As will be explained presently there were reasons for that, reasons that the in-tune Bart, Sam and Jack did not have to deal and they could track the rise of Springsteen in the normal progressive of their rock musical interests.)  

“Here comes reason for that ass-backward part though. See I really was ‘unavailable’ in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, really a lot of guys although that was something I didn’t know until many years later, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (the area which I had come from since Carver is about thirty miles south of Boston) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the ‘real’ world when we got home. The post ‘Nam ‘real’ world that just wasn’t the same as before we left from home and our standard dreams of marriage, white picket fence houses, kids and dogs after whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. Plenty of guys, most probably if anybody took a survey on the subject of post-war adjustment, got back and just went to their standard dream lives. Others of us, me and my brothers under the bridge, took a detour, a wrong detour but a detour and so the old hangout with the buddies world of high school chatting about girls with didn’t have or if we did have didn’t have dough to take out properly, about cars we didn’t have either and mostly just hung out talking about music, about what we talk about since we always had a spare quarter to play the latest tunes on Jack Slack’s jukebox, or our leader madman Frankie Riley did, seemed very far away. The fight to keep warm, to keep doped up, to keep from jail except when we wanted to be “vagged” to get indoors and some food and a shower, and most of all to keep moving, something that I still feel even today at times, is what drove our sullen dreams.      

“So we, me, were not doing a very good job of getting along with our lives, mostly. Not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Seaside Sean from up in Hampton Falls in New Hampshire who gathered a fistful of medals in Vietnam and who tossed them over the fence at the United States Supreme Court building in that famous VVAW demonstration earlier in the decade unlike me who only survived because a couple of black kids from Harlem saved my ass a couple of times although later not their own, whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down into the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with my hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them and if the young girl behind the register had decided to take a stand I probably would not be writing this, at least not as a free man), and the fight to stay away from the labor market. Work which seemed so irrelevant then, work for what purpose if your dreams were not of white picket fences,  the curse of the ‘lost boys of the bridges,’ the boys who wanted no connection  with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding  addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking garbage strewn rivers, rode the dreamless smoke streams trains, faced the rats mano y mano under the bridges. Work if pressed up against the wall only at some day labor joint giving false social security numbers, pearl-diving where no question were asked as long as the dishes and pans didn’t pile up, or in-kinf for a few nights reprieve from the bridges at some Sally (Salvation Army) harbor lights mission. Not the time to be worrying about grabbing that girl heading to Thunder Road.  

“Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, a very close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now, still see as he trogged his way to that night bridge and just let himself free fall I hope somebody up in Hampton Falls claimed him for we, I, couldn’t do so since I was on the run myself, didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black granite  down in D.C.-although maybe they should be.

“Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital in the early 1980s trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes, still want my sweet jesus high, when I say the word) and that was that. I cried that night for my lost youth, for Sean, for the guys who played the song over and over again, Saigon, long gone… no way long gone. The next step, after a few more months of recovery,  was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

“Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready cash supply was low I admit I got embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and few years thereafter. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out in the streets making all that noise (and where are they now, Frankie, Markin, Josh, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out over the high school years).

“Singing about getting out on that Jack Keroauc-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, did hit that road, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico  dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.”

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-Free The Jericho Movement Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-

All The Jericho Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners