This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
From The Mouth Of A Guy Who Knew War,
Knew What The Deal Was When It Went Down-With Marine Corps General Smedley
Butler In Mind
Frank Jackman comment:
For a long time now, maybe since
Vietnam War times when there were enough rank and file soldiers who felt that way
I have mentioned that the guys, now guys and gals, who fought the wars and then
got “religion” on the questions of war and peace had a certain “street cred”
that any proud Quaker, ardent civilian anti-war activist or renegade ex-government
agent just did not have. Had that credibility based on having been there, done
that which gave them more than a passing nod at the ugly truth of war, and who
did or did not benefit from the blood-letting. If you don’tbelieve me go back to the books, or to
something like YouTube or Wikipedia is to see what effect a bunch of anti-war
GIs had back in the day when just the sight of a Vietnam Veterans Against The
War banner on the street with ex-GIs marching behind in silent formation made
ever the most hardened chicken-hawk keep quiet, turn his or her head.
If that “street cred” was true for the
rank and file soldier it held even more true when the anti-war movement was
able to snag a high ranking officer, in this case a top Marine general Smedley
Butler, who had been through the ranks, had risen to the officer class, had
been decorated and who when the deal went down said it was all bullshit. That
as the expression quoted above stated it clearly and susinkly he had spent his
career as a military man as nothing but a hatchet man, a butcher boy for the
ruling class. Had almost been snared into one of their nefarious schemes to
change the government under cover of national emergency, a coup like we are
used to seeing or reading about in other countries not America.He said in the parlance of the common
soldier-“fuck it.” Said as precious few soldiers have done since soldiers started
taking orders from somebody for some purpose “no” when the deal went down and
the one had to decide quickly-war or no to war. Listen up when a dog soldier or
a decorated general says no.
From A Veteran For Peace-In The Time Of
The Dark Night Vietnam War-A Memoir
Frank Jackman comment:
When the war screams start drowning out
the night, when the “chicken-hawks,” male and female, which America seems to
produce with endless and monotonous regularity, when those in charge cry out
for the precious blood of your sons and daughters on the altar of some
misadventure, and when the voice of reason and sanity is in short supply like
these end-times in America then pick up any book of memoirs including this one
and get the “skinny” about what war is really like in the trenches and how a few
have gotten “religion” about the futility of war. It does not matter the war
from Erich Maria Remanque’s All Quiet On
The Western Front to General Smedley Butler’s revealing memoir to this book.
Enough said.
*****Mimi’s Glance - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind
Mimi’s Glance, Circa 1963
Mimi Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need, of the self-impose need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years before, back in 1958, with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, her “walking daddy,” Pretty James Preston, although he as long as she had known him never walked a step when his “baby,” his bike was within arm’s length. I knew this information, knew this information practically first hand because the usually polite but loner Mimi Murphy had told me her thoughts and the story that went with it one night after she had finished a tough on the feet night working as a cashier at concession stand the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater out on Route One in Olde Saco, Maine.
That night, early morning really, she had passed me going up to her room with a bottle of high-end Scotch, Haig& Haig, showing its label from a brown bag in her hand while I was going down the stairs in the rooming house we lived in on Water Street in Ocean City, a few miles from Olde Saco. A number of people, including Mimi and me, were camped out there in temporary room quarters after the last of the summer touristas had decamped and headed back to New York, or wherever they came from. The cheap off-season rent and the short stay-until-the-next-summer-crowd-showed-up requiring no lease drew us there. Most residents, mostly young and seemingly unattached to any family or work life kept to themselves, private drinkers or druggies (probably not grass since I never smelled the stuff which I had a nose for from youthful smoke-filled dreams while I was there so coke, opium, speed, maybe horse although I saw no obvious needle marks on arms or cold turkey screams either), a couple of low profile good looking young hustling girls, probably just graduating from amateur status and still not jaded “tarts” as my father used to call them, who didn’t bring their work home, guys maybe just out of the service, or between jobs, and so on. I had seen a couple of guys, young guys with horny looks in their eyes, maybe an idea of making a play, making passes at Mimi but thought nothing of it since they also targeted the hustling girls too.
Since I had never bothered Mimi, meaning made a pass at her, she must have sensed that being contemporaries, she was twenty-one then and I twenty-two, that maybe she could unburden her travails on a fellow wayward traveler. That no making a pass business by the way due to the fact that slender, no, skinny and flat-chested Irish red-heads with faraway looks like Mimi with no, no apparent, warm bed desires, that year and in those days not being my type after tumbledown broken-hearted youthful years of trying to coax their Irish Catholic rosary bead novena favors to no avail over in the old Little Dublin neighborhood around the Acre in Olde Saco.
Whatever she sensed and she was pretty closed-mouth about it when I asked her later she was right about my ability to hear the woes of another wanderer without hassles, and she did as she invited me up into her room with no come hither look (unlike those pretty hustling girls who made a profession of the “come hither look” and gave me a try-out which after proving futile turned into small courtesy smiles when we passed each other). But she showed no fear, no apparent fear, anyway.
After a couple of drinks, maybe three, of that dreamboat scotch that died easy going down she loosened up, taking her shoes off before sitting down on the couch across from me. For the interested I had been down on my uppers for a while and was drinking strictly rotgut low-shelf liquor store wines and barroom half empty glass left-overs so that stuff was manna from heaven I can still taste now but that is my story and not Mimi’s so I will move on. Here is the gist of what she had to say as I remember it that night:
She started out giving her facts of life facts like that she had grown up around this Podunk town outside of Boston, Adamsville Junction, and had come from a pretty pious Roman Catholic Irish family that had hopes that she (or one of her three younger sisters, but mainly she) might “have the vocation,” meaning be willing, for the Lord, to prison cloister herself up in some nunnery to ease the family’s way into heaven, or some such idea. And she had bought into the idea from about age seven to about fourteen by being the best student, boy or girl, in catechism class on Sunday, queen of the novenas, and pure stuff like that in church and the smartest girl in, successively, Adamsville South Elementary School, Adamsville Central Junior High, and the sophomore class at Adamsville Junction High School.
As she unwound this part of her story I could see where that part was not all that different from what I had encountered in my French-Canadian (mother, nee LeBlanc) Roman Catholic neighborhood over in the Acre in Olde Saco. I could also see, as she loosened up further with an additional drink, that, although she wasn’t beautiful, certain kinds of guys would find her very attractive and would want to get close to her, if she let them. Just the kind of gal I used to go for before I took the pledge against Irish girls with far-away looks, and maybe red hair too.
About age fourteen thought after she had gotten her “friend” (her period for those who may be befuddled by this old time term) and started thinking, thinking hard about boys, or rather seeing that they, some of them, were thinking about her and not novenas and textbooks her either she started to get “the itch.” That itch that is the right of passage for every guy on his way to manhood. And girl on her way to womanhood as it turned out but which in the Irish Roman Catholic Adamsville Junction Murphy family neighborhood was kept as a big, dark secret from boys and girls alike.
Around that time, to the consternation of her nun blessed family, she starting dating Jimmy Clancy, a son of the neighborhood and a guy who was attracted to her because she was, well, pure and smart. She never said whether Jimmy had the itch, or if he did how bad, because what she made a point out of was that being Jimmy’s girl while nice, especially when they would go over Adamsville Beach and do a little off-hand petting and watching the ocean, did not cure her itch, not even close. This went on for a couple of years until she was sixteen and really frustrated, not by Jimmy so much as by the taboos and restrictions that had been placed on her life in her straight-jacket household, school and town. (Welcome to the club, sister, your story is legion) No question she was ready to break out, she just didn’t know how.
Then in late 1957 Pretty James Preston came roaring into town. Pretty James, who despite the name, was a tough motorcycle wild boy, man really about twenty-one, who had all, okay most all, of the girls, good girls and bad, wishing and dreaming, maybe having more than a few restless sweaty nights, about riding on back of that strange motorcycle he rode (a Vincent Black Lightning, a bike made in England which would put any Harley hog to shame from rev number one when I looked for information about the beast later, stolen, not by Pretty James but by third parties, from some English with dough guy and transported to America where he got it somehow, the details were very vague about where he got it, not from her, him) and being Pretty James’ girl. One day, as he passed by on his chopper going full-throttle up Hancock Street, Mimi too got the Pretty James itch.
But see it was not like you could just and throw yourself at Pretty James that was not the way he worked, no way. One girl, one girl from a good family who had her sent away after the episode, tried that and was left about thirty miles away, half-naked, after she thought she had made the right moves and was laughed at by Pretty James as he took off with her expensive blouse and skirt flying off his handle-bars as he left her there unmolested but unhinged. That episode went like wildfire through the town, through the Monday morning before school girls’ lav what happened, or didn’t happen, over the weekend talkfest first of all.
No Pretty James’ way was to take, take what he saw, once he saw something worth taking and that was that. Mimi figured she was no dice. Then one night when she and Jimmy Clancy were sitting by the seawall down at the Seal Rock end of the beach starting to do their little “light petting” routine Pretty James came roaring up on his hellish machine and just sat there in front of the pair, saying nothing. But saying everything. Mimi didn’t say a word to Jimmy but just started walking over to the cycle, straddled her legs over back seat saddle and off they went into the night. Later that night her itch was cured, or rather cured for the first time.
Pouring another drink Mimi sighed poor Pretty James and his needs, no his obsessions with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she had given him plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen-year old girl, pretty new to the love game, totally new, new but not complaining to the sex game, and his well-worn little tricks to get her in the mood, and make her forget the settle down thing. Until the next time she thought about it and brought it up.
Maybe, if you were from around Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1957 and 1958. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Mimi said Pretty James used to say all the time, he “cashed his check.” Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and if that was to happen he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also used to say, “coffee and cakes” but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe down Sonora way, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.
And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, an extra forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a final getaway. She never having handled a gun mush less fired one was scared stiff it might go off in that purse although she Pretty James had her in such a state that she would have emptied the damn thing if it would have done any good. But he never made it out the bank door. Some rum brave security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her, with a tear, sweet boy Pretty James.
According to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, maybe an accessory to felony murder or worst charge hanging over her young head, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving on dough. (She mentioned some funny things about that stay, which was not so bad at the time when she needed dough bad, and about strange things guys, young and old, wanted her to do but I will leave that stuff out here.)
And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at Olde Saco Drive-In to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store, where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.
And so Mimi Murphy, a few drinks of high-shelf scotch to fortify her told her story, told it true I think, mostly. A couple of days later I saw her through my room’s window with a suitcase in hand looking for all the world like someone getting ready to move on, move on to be a loner again after maybe an indiscrete airing of her linen in public. Thinking back on it now I wish, I truly wish, that I had been more into slender, no skinny, red-headed Irish girls with faraway looks that season and maybe she would not have had to keep moving, eternally moving.
ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like
Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Box Hill they did ride
/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /
/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /
Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine
Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22
And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae
For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
Four Score And Seven Years Ago Time-With Frank Capra’s Mister Smith Goes To Washington (1939) In Mind
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Mister Smith Goes To Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, directed by Frank Capra, 1939
Recently I wrote a short review of a Cary Grant and Jean Arthur film, Talk of the Town, where I argued that while the film could certainly be held without any ado as a good example of a romantic comedy from the golden age of such films. I argued though that the film had more merit as a social drama since while there were plenty of light-hearted moments the theme of the virtue of the rule of law trumped the obvious romantic interest between the two stars (and add in a third player Ronald Colman as well). I am in a similar quandary on the film under review, Frank Capra’s Mister Smith Goes To Washington. In that previous review I noted that Frank Capra along with Preston Sturgis and George Stevens (I left the question of Howard Hawks to the reader’s choice) was one of the great directors of romantic comedy during the golden age of the genre in the later 1930s and early 1940s when anybody who had any sense knew the general population needed a little escapist humor with the onslaught of the Great Depression and the World War grinding them down. But I also argued that the subject matter-the threat to the rule of law which underscored the plot line made that film a vehicle for social drama as well.
I want to argue for a similar conclusion on this on. Here’s the play. A U.S. Senator, in an unnamed state but presumed to be out in the heartland where people overall were not as jaded as elsewhere and still believed in some of the old truths even in the late 1930s when America was going to hell in a handbasket, had died. The “bosses” who ran the state and ran the governor couldn’t decide on a suitable candidate and so one so-called apolitical do-gooder, one Jefferson Smith (already we can get the flags out with that name), played by Jimmy Stewart, got the nod. The assumption was that he would do the bidding of the organization while it was stealing everything that was not nailed down, specifically a big boondoggle dam project where everybody who was in on the deal would get well, including the senior Senator, Joe Paine, from the state, played by Claude Rains last seen in this space walking arm and arm with Humphrey Bogart in the fog after giving the Germans the “what for” in the classic film, Casablanca.
Of course old Jeff was the classic believer in good government, believed in the whole nine yards, probably believed that George Washington actually did chop down that cherry tree just like Parsons Weems said. Naïve, a babe in the woods, he got to Washington and was ready to serve with pride. Except he had this idea, this national boys’ camp idea that he planned to run through Congress as a way to instill true democratic values in future generations. (Girls, I guess, were just supposed to sit around and look pretty.) Problem, big problem in the end; the boys’ camp idea ran smack against the big dam boondoggle. The fight was on.
I mentioned that this film could be a romantic comedy at some level. That idea would come into play when Jefferson brought his wised-up to the ways of Washington super- secretary Clarissa, played by heartland wised up Jean Arthur, into his orbit, got her on his side in the fight for the boys’ camp despite her cynicism after having been around the town a little too long. But get this, or rather get two things. This Jeff was not built to be a good old boy, to carry some boss’s water, he had fighting for lost causes in his bones, grabbed a few such genes from his father, a newspaperman shot when he got too close to the dark side of politics and couldn’t be bought. The other thing is that while Jeff had more illusions than anybody should be allowed to have and still be allowed within fifty miles of the Washington zip codes he was not a quitter. Stood up to the bosses and their stooges, including that Joe Paine who had been a friend of his father’s but who was being held up in this film as the consummate sell-out to the big interests.
Here is the really funny part. The way old Jeff won his battle was through an old-fashioned filibuster, you know he took and kept the floor until exhaustion set in to prove his point. Now since the time of the film, 1939, the filibuster has been used for less worthy fights like against civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s and now to basically try to close down the government. So a filibuster seems an odd way now to make his point but there you have it. That pluck and Clarissa pulling for him from the sidelines. I mentioned in that The Talk of the Town review that that film was more of a social drama than a romantic comedy now that I have given you the “skinny” on this one I think this one follows that same path. You decide, okay.
Town Without Pity-Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
The Chase, starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, directed by Arthur Penn, based on the book by Horton Foote, screenplay by Lillian Hellman, 1966
Okay let’s go by the numbers here. Take a play about small town oil boom town 1950s Texas by the great Texas novelist Horton Foote (okay, okay maybe not the greatest that title would have to go Larry McMurtry in his prime with The Last Picture Show). Throw in a screenplay by Lillian Hellman who despite her inability to tell a politically truthful statement back in her Stalinist sympathizer days could write excellent screenplays-just ask Dashiell Hammett. Add in a great and thoughtful director Arthur Penn (who later expressed dissatisfaction with the results of the film). Top off with a whole crew of young up and coming actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickerson, and Robert Duvall, who were still hungry (and a well-known one in Marlon Brando when he still had a hungry edge). Result a pretty good sleeper film from the 1960s The Chase which I am surprised I did not see back in the day but which sticks out as ensemble cast film from an age when such melodramas would be too over-played.
Funny this film could be called The Chasers since it is much about the sordid, dysfunctional, sometimes comic life styles of the town’s residents as about the guy being chased. That guy Bubber (played by a very young Robert Redford who frankly did not, does not fit the category of Bubba when you think about that good old boy type) who escaped the state penal farm with another con who had gotten frisky with a guy they were trying to rob and killed him so the escape turned into felony murder thus creating the chasers as Bubba headed back to town after being left behind high and dry by his fellow con and after striking out on his other options.
Naturally Bubba’s movements are of great concern to the high sheriff, Calder, played by Marlon Brando, to Bubber’s young and attractive wife, Anna, played by Jane Fonda who while he was in stir was having an affair with the son of the local magnate banker, to that son Jake who was a friend of Bubber’s from childhood, to that banker who was worried once he found out that his son was having an affair with Anna, to one of that banker’s Walter Mitty employees, played by Robert Duvall, who ratted him out when they were kids, to his distraught parents worried that the sheriff will shoot first and ask questions later, and to half the township’s population worried that Bubber will come back and seek revenge for any hurts imposed on him. Will wild out on them and their comforts mainly drinking too much booze, rousting blacks, and having a confusing set of sexual affairs for which one would need a scorecard-if one were interested.
Although Sheriff Calder tried might and main to impose the sense of the rule of law on the angry, scared and drunk townspeople who in the end turned into just another vicious mob bent on vigilante justice that drunken mob got out hand and Bubber got a few slugs and his face down right on his hometown street. Some of this one is a little too melodramatic especially the casual sex-capades thrown around during the night’s drinking bouts but overall the film gave an interesting slice of life in the golden age of the oil boom down in oil fields Texas.
When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower-In The Times Of Isabella Stewart Gardner And Her Museum
By Sam Lowell
When I was much younger, after I had gotten out of the Army and was all raw from the experience, had had a close call with having to go to Vietnam and was “saved” only by some last minutes self-imposed graces I was all hopped up on changing the way this society did business, the way those in charge treated people from soldiers to workers to the dispossessed and homeless to the hobos, bums, and tramps who I ran with for a while. One of the way stations that I was attracted to for a while was the Marxist analysis of capitalist society. At that time I was thrilled by the analysis of how to overturn the system through some revolutionary purge of the old society and the creation of new forms of communal existence. Very appealing then and now although it does not look like I will see anything like those possibilities created this side of the grave.
All of the above a roundabout way of saying something that I found at the time very odd about the Marxist analysis but which makes more sense now. Marx and his followers were ready to concede that capitalism was not only a necessary stage of more effective and productive way gathering up the collective good of society as against earlier forms of production and distribution such as in feudal times. Was willing to say that at certain stage of history that capitalism was progressive in undertaking certain tasks. That hard fact was true in his own times as he projected forward. Capitalism then unlike in the 20th and now 21st century still had something progressive to offer despite its contradictions.
Even in America, even in the late 18th century in the age of the robber barons who grabbed everything not nailed down with every hand, there was still a spark of progressive thought and action. In short in time span of the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a woman born into wealth and who married wealth, from before the American Civil War until after the First World War such socially important tasks as creating a museum for everybody to see great works of art in accrued to those scions of the capitalist class. Now we will not inquire too closely into how she purchased some of her prized possessions, not will be inquire into how they got into the country, nor even about the fact that she could drive as hard a bargain against her fellow robber barons confederates but I for one am glad, glad as hell to live close enough to go see what she pirated away over there in the Back Bay. So if you need one, or can only think of one example of a time when the bourgeoisie was in full flower-think Mrs. Gardner.
Click on title to link to Leon Trotsky's Internet Archives copy of "Their Morals and Ours". A must read for every radical in order to understand the revolutionary "code" we stand by, although much distorted by almost a century of Stalinist and Social-Democratic distortion.
BOOK, REVIEW
THEIR MORALS AND OURS, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1969
One of the most tragic results of the Stalinization of a significant part of the international workers movement in the 20th century was the steep decline in the norms of revolutionary morality. In fact a persuasive argument can be made that the Stalinist lies, distortions and destruction of revolutionary cadre, as well as untold innocents, dragged the workers movement to a moral level below even the abysmal bourgeois hypocrisy of modern day liberalism and social democracy. But, although one would be hard pressed to refute that idea that is an argument for another day. Here, Leon Trotsky, as he had done in the political struggles to defend the ideas of the socialist revolution raised his lonely voice to defend revolutionary morality against the onslaught of Stalinist falsifiers, liberal cynics, social democratic hypocrites and some of his faint-hearted intellectual former ‘supporters’ who were beginning their rapid retreat from revolutionary politics in the run-up to World War II.
Trotsky’s argument is fairly simple and straightforward. Not only do the ruling classes own the means of production and control the educational, cultural and state apparatuses but impose their concept of morality on their society. Thus it follows, in order to break the stranglehold of the ruling classes, it is necessary for revolutionaries to develop their own moral sense- outside and in counter position- to the ruling classes. That truth may not be the most profound idea that Trotsky ever uttered but in light of the rise of fascism, the Stalinist Moscow Purge trials and the Stalinist role in the destruction of the Spanish Revolution in the 1930's that formed the backdrop for his analysis it needed saying-and needs repeating today. No militant can hope to change society for the better if he or she does not make a clean break from bourgeois norms of morality, period.
Politics and morality obviously are not counterpoised but flow from the nature of the task. If the politics are not revolutionary then it is hard to see how the moral compass that leads to a revolutionary life can be. Again, Stalinism in its political guise as a form of international class collaborationism blurred the lines between what to a revolutionary is the norm and an ‘amoral’ or ‘anti-moral’ world-weary bureaucratic response. And that tension has not stopped with the defeat of Stalinism. Because leftists did not defeat Stalinism politically but rather it collapsed from its own internal moral decay and ineptitude that line has never been straightened out. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than today when revolutionaries use the bourgeois institutions against others in the labor movement, including other revolutionaries, to further their aims. Yes, of course we use these alien institutions when we fight the oppressors-that is part of our arsenal. No, we do not ask (really beg) the class enemy to adjudicate disputes within the labor movement. Learn to fight the political struggle for socialism the proper way. To get the necessary foundation for that way read this little book.
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube entry for Bob Dylan performing Like A Rolling Stone.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
As I mentioned in the first installment of this series in this space, provided courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seemed to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
These sketches have been done on an ad hoc basis, although the format of this story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.
After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.
The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.
Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this 1979 sketch had an off-beat story, hell in this case very off-beat, that brought him down to the ravines. But see he, Allan “Red” Bradley (hereafter called Red, the only name he would answer to from friend or foe alike after about age ten he informed me) out of the low red clay back water tobacco road North Carolina night, like Jean LeBlanc whose story I have already related and a lot of other guys I ran into did not want to talk about ‘Nam, about his war- weary troubles in the “real world” or about how he got himself hoboed up a continent away. He, they, seemed to “enjoy” some amnesia net over that ‘Nam period and who was to blame them for what they saw, and did. No Red wanted to talk about the time just after Vietnam, early 1970s time, the time when he was the be-bop daddy (his term) of the Fayetteville (NC) Fort Meade(MD) and Fort Devens (MA) night with the girls (women, my term), a time when if he had made few right moves inside his head or left before all hell broke loose over his head, or something like that things might have been different. I like to finish up these introductions placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Red Bradley’s sign was that of the rolling stone:
That night, that night a few months after it had all turned utterly bad back in 1975 maybe a little into 1976, I had dreamed of two brunettes, two blondes and a red-head, jesus, cut the dream cord, cut it quick because I am about to be sick, sick from some jumped up snow, snow the current dream cutter. Yah, it all started with that dream, that five girl, three-colored dream but that was just the candy-coated cover, the real story you don’t want to hear, maybe but it, that dream got me to thinking about back in the day rolling stone stuff (and, no, not the band, and, no, not some mad Dylan troubadour riff thing connecting me with my, his, their generation). But the dream reoccurred, reoccurred with that same quintet, and an absurd mystery about a guy in a hungry night, and nowhere to go, and nowhere to deal with five snow dream figures, what was it, yes, two brown, two yellow, one red, hair color not skin. That was the start, that was the reoccurring start, but that was not the story, not by a long shot. Lets’ call it a snow dream, a dope dream it could have been any addiction- affliction but let’s just call it by its right name, a snow dream, and be done with it.
[Kenny Jackson, whose story I have already related previously and who travelled with Red for a few months around the mean streets of L.A. and was close to him at the time of this story because Red was in Kenny’s words a “colorful guy,” clued me in on Red’s way of talking, of making a grand gesture before he got to serious stuff. When I reviewed my notes to try to bring life to Red’s story I at first forgot about that comment and could make neither heads nor tails out of the following lines until I remembered Kenny’s remark. Of course Red, kind of a smart guy in a street way, maybe half- smart, and we will leave it as that had to preface his whole spiel by making the following remarks which, according to my notes, he insisted be included. The remarks moreover were made after Kenny had gotten Red sobered up for a couple of months so he thought he was king of the world. Sober here, by the way, when referenced by the veterans in these sketches is all inclusive-alcohol, drugs, love, hate, cons, etc. –JLB]
If you, as I do even now while I am out here on the wild streets of L.A. trying to make my comeback, even now when my soul is fresh, every once in a while as least from a comfortable distance need to hear about boozers, losers, dopesters, snow dreams, hipsters, fallen sisters, midnight sifters, grifters, drifters, the driftless, small-time grafters, hoboes, bums, tramps, the fallen, those who want to fall, Spanish Johnnies, stale cigarette butts, whiskey-soaked barroom floors, loners, the lonely, sad sacks, the sad and others at the margins of society then this is your stop. Red Bradley is going to give it to you straight, straight as a crooked man knows how. I was one of them, one of the snow birds, and I fell, fell big time.
My words, maybe, are an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring when I gather myself up to storm heaven looking for busted black-hearted angels, for blonde girls with Monroe lips or maybe Joni Mitchell falling hair, for brunettes who had sense to quit while they were ahead with or without falling hair, for demon red-heads with old time neighborhood Irish hearts and poet’s souls, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. Christ almighty for all the misbegotten.
Endless tramp, no, bum and note the difference, walked streets, waiting for the next fix. Waiting really for some god miracle, some murmured pray sacrilege and redemption seeking miracle. Waiting for all the accumulated messes of this world, this made world to seep into the gutter. Waiting for all past history, all past memoir better, all past sorrows, given and received, all pass two roads taken, wrong road chosen, all personal hurts, given and taken, all past vanities to break down in the means streets, and closure. No, not closure, relief. Waiting, yah, waiting but to no avail. And so all roads, chosen and unchosen closed, all forward turned back, all value devalued, all this ….
[After that Red got serious-okay]
Jesus, for a few years after ‘Nam I had it made, had it made in the shade with women. Let me tell you before ‘Nam I had a fistful of girls, total, since the time I started noticing them, noticing their shapes turning along with my own desires. Nice big-hearted red-headed neighborhood Irish girls not afraid to smite god late on Saturday night before showing up chaste, virgin mary chaste, I promise, for early Sunday mass, sometimes with me in tow just to prove their conquests and their sullen virtue. Irish girls too, not big-hearted, brunettes usually maybe with some heathen English blood in them ,with a handful of rosary beads in one hand and blushed unfulfilled lust in their hearts, and minus me in tow. Later a few off-hand blondes with loose morals and big time Monroe dreams and nice Jewish girls off on their first goy adventures looking, looking hard, for some fierce blue-eyed devil, and finding him.
I wasn’t complaining about how few I had then and I am not now but after ‘Nam was the best women time. See after ‘Nam, oh around late 1971 and 1972, I got involved with some anti-war stuff, with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) stuff because some of the stuff I saw in ‘Nam just freaked me out, and some of the stuff me and my buddies did too. But I don’t want to get into war stories. I want to get into anti-war stories because that is the only way you’ll make sense of what I am saying.
See I would go to G.I. coffeehouses that had been springing up all over the place near military bases around that time and talk to guys still in and all that. I went on speaking tours sometimes and with my southern accent and my anti-war war “cred” guys would listen up to me for a minute. But the real deal was the chicks [read: women] who started hanging around the coffeehouses after getting tired of just marching in the streets every spring and fall and wanted to be around guys who had seen it all and lived to tell about it. Why I still don’t know and I didn’t care as long as they gave me a tumble. I did that speaking and organizing stuff for a couple of years around Fort Bragg down in North Carolina and Fort Meade in Maryland. Then I headed further north to Fort Devens in Massachusetts. [He had been there about two years after I helped start that one. It was weird to meet him in L.A. several years later along an abandoned ravine, right.] That was where things started to fall apart.
See Boston and Cambridge (the nearest big city action to Fort Devens) was filled with women who, like I said before, wanted to be around guys who had seen it all. So it was like taking candy from a baby, sort of. Those were the days when you could be seeing several chicks at one time, unlike back before ‘Nam when unless you were very careful one guy, one girl was strictly the norm out in open anyway. So I loaded up with my standard two blondes, two brunettes, and my always needed one red-head.
The thing though as the American government started to pull everybody out of Indochina the anti-war movement and the dough for anti-war coffeehouses started to dry up. But I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to put two and two together. Hell, I didn’t want to. And here is why. After a couple of soft years and with all the chicks I wanted I began to get a feeling that the world owed me a living, a soft touch living and so I lived off some of those five women in the dream. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes separately.
Then the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or whatever they wanted to call it at the V.A. hospital kicked in. Anyway between the anti-war action dying down and not having much to do otherwise and having my hands full with the chicks I started doing some serious cocaine. Yah, the snow bird, “my girl,” my real girl. I had had a few tastes in ‘Nam but in those days I was strictly a boozer, a whiskey and water chaser guy. I didn’t really like or understand the potheads, opium-eaters and junkies. Not then.
Coke was cheap mainly except you needed about a ton of it to feel alright all the time. And I needed a ton of it because I needed to feel alright all the time after a while. And that is where things really got busted up. I was “borrowing” money like crazy from one chick or another. I had a regular “Ponzi” scheme going at one point. I would borrow a hundred from one, buy my goods, and then borrow another hundred from another chick to pay the first chick back and so on.
I was also running some dope myself through a connection down Sonora way in Mexico “pimping” a couple of so-so girlfriends (not the five) to make ends meet after a while. Christ I was “muling” them and myself a few times just to score some dope. One time I almost wound up face down in a dusty Sonora back alley, like I guy I knew in Cambridge, when I tried to go “independent.” Jesus, that was close and every once in a while I think about that poor bastard who they found face down in that damn alley and think that could have been me. That pimping thing by the way was not some professional thing but just telling the chicks to sleep with some dope-dealers in return for dope. They were serious hopheads too as that was what gravitated toward you, or clung to you, on the way down. Still it was pimping and I am sorry about that part.
At some point the thing got weird, real weird, maybe after a few months as I started losing girlfriends, the real ones, one after the other until one day I finally realized through a snow storm that I had gone from five to zero and the cheap streets of Boston, friendless.
Here is how I remember that descent, or part of it- Five AM, dark turning to a shade lighter, after a hard ground under the Eliot Bridge bed night, cold October cold with all newspapers, Herald, Globe, upscale New York Times used for a pillow and for ground cover yelling about some guy named Jimmy Carter and about how he is saved. [Must have been 1975-76 or there about.] Running for president too. The guy will need more saving that I need I thought. Ironic though, just that minute when I needed to be saved. Lord saved, mercy saved, some humble Marcia (my main squeeze and the one who stuck it out longest, a brunette) saved (although I did not know it, know it for a very long time, too long and too late).
Long walk along the Charles River, supermarket double brown bag (laughed at Mexican luggage we used to call it) for all worldly possessions. A tee shirt, maybe two, underwear, socks, a half rank pair of pants , another shirt to match the one I was wearing, a comb, and a bar of soap, Dial, and done. All worldly possessions reduced almost to grave size.
Long walk to safe downtown Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, and five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. My street bathroom, a splash (unlike those ocean wave splashes on ancient dream North Carolina cape wind nights now faded) of water on the face, some precious soap, paper towel for a wash cloth, haphazard combing (hell, I was not entering a beauty contest, jesus, no), some soap under the tee shirt for underarms and done. Worldly beauty done.
Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out under some other Eliot Street Bridge bungalow (switched nightly to avoid cop riffs and fellow tramp rip-offs). Walk, stopping for an occasional library break , for a quick nod out, really, and quick read, not some political book though, those days, Genet, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac (not On The Road magic but Big Sur traumas), and such self-help books. (Ironic.)
And minute plan, plan, plan, plain mex paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Waiting for the next fix. Desolation row, no way home.
And then, half sneaking out of town, half desperate to get away and start fresh I walked to the entrance of the Massachusetts Turnpike near the Coca-Cola warehouse in Cambridge put my thumb out and started heading west, west anywhere west. With genetic memories of two brunettes, two blondes and a red head permanently etched in my brain to disturb my sleep.
[When I last heard from Kenny Jackson in late 1979 he had not heard from Red in several months. The only conclusion he, or I, could draw was that Red had gone back to his snow dreams. That was the way things were out in the ravine world. After than I lost contact with Kenny (who was putting his life in order) as well so there is no ending one way or the other to this story.]
