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
Between now and November 8th, the Nation will be caught up in a frenzy of debates, campaign ads and political commentary. Raising the visibility of veterans working for peace is more important than ever. In what has become a polarizing global climate, Veterans For Peace has a unique opportunity to highlight that #PeaceIsPossible. We can and MUST use every venue to share our experiences and help people understand that war is not the answer.
Every week, from now until the election, Veterans For Peace will release a list of questions for the presidential candidates, and we want YOUR help
This election cycle, with its abysmal political dialogue, is overwhelming. We know that our work continues, regardless of the political outcome. The world and indeed our planet are facing a deep and challenging emergency, with perpetual wars, 65 million refugees of war and violence, the growing climate crisis, economic inequality and continuing social and racial injustice.
VFP member, Lynn Weeks, MA MFT, passed away this month in his sleep. He became a Ventura County, CA, VFP Chapter 112 member in 2008. He was in the USMC (E-4) from the middle to late 1950's. He had careers as a California Highway Patrolman and Marriage Family Therapist.
We know members will be traveling to the camp in the upcoming weeks. VFP's presence is important but also critical that we follow the guidelines set out by the indigenous activism already taking place.
If you are planning on traveling to Standing Rock, please contact the new Standing Rock VFP Committee:
Brian Trautman: trautman@veteransforpeace Tom Palumbo: tpeacenik@gmail.com Tarak Kauff: takauff@gmail.com Martin Bates: learn7peace@yahoo.com Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the historic resistance at Standing Rock. We join our Indigenous sisters and brothers in opposing the construction of an oil pipeline by the Dakota Access company that threatens drinking water and sacred burial grounds. <Full Statement Here>
Have you started thinking about what you're doing for Armistice Day?
Veterans For Peace is calling on all our members to, once again, take a stand for peace this Armistice Day. This year, with a political arena fueled by hate and fear, it is as urgent as ever to ring the bells for peace. We call for the observance of Veterans Day to be in keeping with the holiday’s original intent, to be “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’." After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to re-brand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
If you need tabling materials or VFP promo items for Armistice Day, please e-mailcasey@veteransforpeace.org! No matter what action you decide to take, please let us know so we can promote the work that you're doing.
The four-day gathering comprised a broad-spectrum program that brought together labor, faith-based, political, and social justice organizations. Check out reflections from members Jonathan Engle, Santa Fe Chapter and Ed Kinane, Central New York Chapter!
*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Eaton
Sure 1920s guys, gals too, black guys, black gals sweating out their short, brutalized lives on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland along the river in Mississippi or some such number of acres, probably it didn't matter to have an official count on the acres to them because all of the land went endlessly to the horizon and the work too had plenty to have the blues about. Had suffered the double whack of having to put up with Mister's Mister James Crow laws to boot which only added to the misery of those endless acres. Sure maybe some woe begotten poor white trash down in hard-boiled Appalachia in those famed hills and hollows had plenty of blues too although they did not call them that even in those few integrated evenings when the whole town went to Rence Jackson's dirty red barn in need of a serious paint job but this is about the blues, the musical blues and not some general social issues commentary. So those “no account” whites don’t play a role here at this time, don't play except as devotes of generic old country British Isles ballads like the ones collected by Francis Child back in the 1850s which thrilled the Brahmins of Brattle Street on a wild utilitarian Saturday night. Actually whites in general don't play a role in the blues since their access to such songs by the likes of the various Blinds, Robert Johnson, and the belting barrelhouse mamas would be minimal in an age when "race" record pieced everybody off into their own tangent. They will not play a role until the music heads north in a generation, or so, and the “white negro” hipsters (to use big daddy Norman Mailer’s term for the little daddies who hung around the back streets of cool, Harlem 125th Street cool at that time), “beats (to use Jack Kerouac term hustled from some dead-pan beat down hustler, a white negro hipster if it came right down to it named Huncke via high brow John Clellon Holmes for Christ sake),” folkies (to use the Lomaxes’, father and son, expression), college students (to use oh I don’t know the U.S. Department of Education’s expression), and assorted others (junkies, grifters, midnight sifters, drifters on the wing, winos trying to sober up, good time prostitutes, the denizens of Hayes-Bickford's, the Automat, places like that, no hip as a rule) decided that that beat in their heads had Mother Africa who spawned us all had to be investigated but all that indeed was later. Like I said the real blues aficionados, if only by default, had their say, had their lyrics almost written for them by the events of everyday human existence what with talking in their own "code words" about how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him, Mister, and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they, his children and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times, come Mississippi and Alabama too goddamn times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings).
Here is how the scene played out as near as I can figure from a wide-ranging reading of most of the lyrics from that time (and always remember when you speak of "blues," speak of the folk in general this is mostly an oral tradition handed down and bastardized as it gotten handed down so there are very few definitive lyrics but rather more a sense of what miseries were being talked about. How Mister James Crow said every day of the week, even the Lord’s Day, Sunday that if you were black, get back, if you were white and right you were alright and proved it by separate this and separate that, keeping his street clear of stray “negros,” yeah, with small “n” if he was being kind that day, another today socially not acceptable expression if not, telling the brethren to go here, not go there, look this way but not that (and by all means not peeking at his womenfolk), walk there but not here, or face nooses and slugs for his troubles. So yeah the blues almost cried out to be the order of things. Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper-ing and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the leavings he didn’t want, meaning what he couldn’t sell to his profit as the rest.
Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have had the blues back then except some old nappy Tom who didn’t get the word but they were far fewer than you might think the others just fumed at who knows what psychic costs (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, maybe second step-child via in your face if there is space hip-hop nations, the angry ones who put words to the rages of the modern “post racial” American society that somebody has jerked them around with lately). Hey and to Mister’s miseries, very real, very scary when the nightriders came, woman trouble (maybe at night the worse kind of trouble if Mister wasn’t in your face all day with her where you been, do this, do that, put it right here, put it right there), trouble with Sheriff Law (stay off the sidewalks, keep your head down, stay down in the bottom lands or else) and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own (or face his razor and gun down on Black Mountain).
Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew, freshly batched, which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s Sunday service to have their sins, lusts, greeds, avarices, covets, swaggers, cuts, from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the “devil’s music” (funny because come the white rock and roll teen explosion a generation later Mister, some Mister, said that too was the devil’s music which confused those clean cut angelic angst-filled teens although not enough to stop listening to Satan and his siren song) by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner, loving his whiskey more than somewhat which Howlin’ Wolf took him to task for down in Newport one year in the early 1960s at a jam session, and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister James Crow laws by singing the blues and making them go away.
That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from small label record companies like Paramount, RCA, the radio company looking to feed the hours on their stations with stuff people would listen to (could listen to in short wave range times and hence regional roots work). They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money (and maybe a few white hipsters, Village, North Beach, Old Town denizens tired of the same old, same old if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, “race records,” that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains, and hills and hollows too).
But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend. Some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.
And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more to her claim than mere record sales since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s (untimely in the Mister James Crow South after an car accident and they would not admit an empress for chrissakes into a nearby white hospital, yes, rage, rage against the night unto the nth generation-black lives matter).
Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, Tin Pan Alley kind of guys in places like high holy Harlem and Memphis, Saint Louis would write stuff for her, big fat sexy high white note sax and chilly dog trombone players would back her up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dog’s tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need (and you know she needed a little sugar in her bowl just like Bessie and a million, million other women, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on), the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all. From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder after losing that bout with TB coughing, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.
Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman allpain, pathos and indignity as her good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the light of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums (four double record sets from beginning to end) and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin. That’s what I done more than once when I was down on my luck living in flea-bitten rooming house in a cold-water flat with me and my bed, bureau, desk and chair and a battered old RCA record player and just let it wail, let the fellow stew-ball tenants usually behind on their rents anyway howl against the night. Bessie was on the square.
Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners) who have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on. Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.
Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry
Chapter Eleven The Commonwealth of Virginia v. John Brown and His Men
Jefferson County Courthouse
Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the Boyd B. Stutler Collection
Charles Town jail
After being captured on October 18, John Brown was moved to the paymaster’s office, where he was interviewed by Senator James Mason (from nearby Winchester), Colonel Faulkner, and M. C. and Clement L. Vallandigham. On October 19, John Brown, John Copeland, Edwin Coppoc, Shields Green, and Aaron Stevens were taken to the jail in Charles Town. They appeared before the court and were arraigned on October 25. On the 26th, they were charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, inciting slaves to rebel, and the murders of George Turner, Fontaine Beckham, Thomas Boerly, Heyward Shepherd, and Luke Quinn.
"The Arraignment," sketch by Porte Crayon, Harper's Weekly, November 12, 1859
Charlestown lawyers Lawson Botts and Thomas C. Green were appointed defense counsel for Brown, whose trial began on October 27. Andrew Hunter and Charles Harding prosecuted the case for the State, with Richard Parker sitting as judge. Information on insanity in the Brown family was soon introduced, but John Brown completely dismissed that as a defense tactic. The trial also brought the addition of a young lawyer, George Hoyt of Massachusetts, to the defense team; the withdrawal of Botts and Green at Brown’s request; and the arrival of lawyers Samuel Chilton of Washington, DC, and Hiram Griswold of Ohio. In three and one-half days, nearly two dozen witnesses were called. Defense counsel Samuel Chilton argued against the three counts of the indictment and most vigorously against the treason charge. Still, after less than an hour, on October 31, the jury found John Brown guilty on all counts, and, on November 2, Judge Parker sentenced Brown to death.
Richard Parker
Trial of John Brown, sketch by Porte Crayon, Harper's Weekly, November 12, 1859
Andrew Hunter. Source: Portrait Files
Brown’s defenders attempted to save his life by pursuing two courses of action. Affidavits regarding insanity in John Brown or members of his family were submitted to Governor Henry Wise of Virginia in hopes of saving his life. At the same time, counsel filed a petition with the Court of Appeals of Virginia seeking a writ of error in the Charlestown trial. A principal argument was that Brown could not be tried for treason against Virginia because he did not owe allegiance to that state. Neither of these efforts succeeded. In the meantime, trials were conducted for John Copeland, Shields Green, Edwin Coppic, and John E. Cook, who was captured in Pennsylvania a week after the raid. All four men were found guilty of inciting slaves to rebellion and murder; Coppic was also convicted of treason. George Sennott, attorney for Copeland and Green, successfully argued that his clients, both of whom were black, could not be tried for treason because they were not citizens of the United States according to the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. Cook confessed to his role in the raid, but not to treason, and the eloquent oratory of his defense attorney Daniel W. Voorhees apparently moved the jury to find him not guilty on that count. Nevertheless, Cook was given the same sentence as Copeland, Coppic, and Green--death by hanging on December 16. The two remaining prisoners, Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett, were not tried until 1860. Stevens’s trial had been suspended in November, as Gov. Wise considered turning him over to federal authorities for trial in the district court in Staunton. Hazlett, like Cook had been captured in Pennsylvania a week after the raid, but had given his name as William Harrison, a deception he and his fellow prisoners continued in hopes of saving him. Convicted of treason, murder, and inciting slaves to rebellion, Stevens and Hazlett, too, were given a death sentence, ordered to be carried out on March 16, 1860.
View of Charlestown. Source: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, November 19, 1859, Periodicals Collection
Cook, Coppic, Greene and copeland Receiving Sentence of Death. Source: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, November 26, 1859, Periodicals Collection
The Bam-Bam World-Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher-Never Go Back (A Film
Review)
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Jack Reacher-2 Never Go Back, starring Tom Cruise, 2016
Strangely, or maybe not so strangely if I thought for a
moment about the circumstances under which I have watched them I have been running
the rack on adventure, what I call bam-bam movies, for all the shooting,
killing, maiming and general mayhem that can be done in two or so hours. That
rack now includes an aging (but probably still ladies’ man handsome) Tom
Cruise’s Jack Reacher, version number two. And as bam-bam movies go this one
was not too bad, at least it had a decent story line to augment the seven kinds
of hell each side put each other through. Maybe too having a female version of
Jack Reacher as his companion and a side story about his possible paternity of
a wayward young girl helped push this one along.
Here’s the play, here is what makes this one a better than
okay second version of the saga of lone wolf, irascible, listens to his own
drummer by one of the last of the pure good guys Jack Reacher who is good with
his fists, his legs, his eyes and his assortment of weaponry generally taken
from the bad guys after some dispute resolution (okay, okay after being beaten
the hell out of or killed in action). Jack, ex-Army, an ex-Army officer of legendary
stature, who still has it comes off the hitchhike road long enough to help that
female Jack, Major Turner, commander of the 110th MPs, Jack’s old
command, who needs help in figuring out who killed a couple of her subordinates
in Afghanistan while they were investigating missing or displaced arms caches.
Jack figured, ha ha right, to take a pass on the help except
two things happened-that fetching Major had been arrested for espionage out of
the blue and he was named in a paternity suit of a wayward fifteen old girl
whom he may or may not have fathered. So off the road our Jack comes and off come
the gloves early on too as people, nefarious people hired by the head guy, an
ex-general, of a private mercenary operation which was in deep financial trouble
and who needed to keep the fact that it wasn’t about the missing arms that they
cared about but the many kilos of heroin from the poppy fields of sunny
Afghanistan that they were hiding in the arms caches which would get the operation
well again.
Of course to set the
framework for the maimings and mayhem to come Jack had to get himself, the good
Major and that potential daughter out of harm’s way. Naturally the CEO of the
mercenary operation was not going to tackle Jack by himself so he used his
supply of mercenaries headed by an ex-Special Ops guy who despite his retirement
from those kinds of assignment still had the scent of the hunt in his blood.
The chase was on-the chase that would lead as it always does in these vehicles
to a solo mano y mano fight at the end between the two real antagonists. But
along the way he, and the Major, take out what must have been the heart of the mercenary
operation. Hey even that alleged daughter played her part with a few nice moves
to keep us guessing that maybe it was in her Jack-derived DNA. In the end the
bad guys took it on the chin, and everywhere else. In the end too despite Jack’s
furrowed brows of worry about that could be daughter she turned out not to be
his. Which once again left our Jack free as a bird on the hitchhike road that
seems to be his fate-until the number three version comes up.
“Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers
Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. The words still apply as we head into 2016:
No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.
But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action.
Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now. I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles.
Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!
