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
The Movement for Black Lives has released the Vision for Black Lives. Developed by some 50 participating organizations and embracing detailed agendas in 30 issue areas, the Vision for Black Lives is a comprehensive program for racial, social, and economic justice in the United States, as well as for a peaceful foreign policy. Massachusetts Peace Action endorsed the Vision for Black Lives in September 2016. In a series of 6 workshops, we'll dive into each of the broad demand…
Since our founding, Raise Up Massachusetts has been on the front lines of legislation for working families and has fought to build an economy that works for everyone. That's why we want you to join us for a major legislative announcement on Tuesday, November 29th. Join us as we hold our legislators accountable to all workers across the Commonwealth.
Iyad Burnat will be in Boston to speak about his new book: Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance Iyad Burnat is the coordinator for the Popular Committee in Bil'in, Palestine. For 10 years, Iyad and the Popular Committee of this small village have held weekly non-violent demonstrations against the confiscation of their land. They have repeatedly been met with violence by the Israeli military. Iyad is coming to the Boston area to describe what life is like under Israeli occupation, his village's ongoing struggle for…
Friday, Dec 2, 4pm, State House: With one month until Trump is sworn into office, we are faced with frightening appointees that will protect the rights of the few rather than the many: Steven Bannon, a white supremacist xenophobe Jeff Sessions, a senator with a racist track record Former Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who openly calls for a war against Islam Massachusetts Peace Action's student leaders have joined together to organize a rally protesting these appointments and the future injustices they…
Festivities start at 7:00 p.m. $15 donation requested This is a Pot-Luck Dessert & BYOB Party Bring what treats, finger foods and libations you like. We’ll have some backup on hand. Please consider bringing a donation for Food Not Bombs. Good Humor w/Raffle ~ win great prizes! ~ Get Down and Boogie Stanley & the Undercovers Classic Hits guaranteed to get you dancing! Special appearance by Comedian & Artist GI Joe Kebartas Questions? (617) 721-5689
The Paresky Conference Center is fully reserved. We are now taking reservations for seats in an overflow room. Please register ASAP to ensure a seat! Conference Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Simmons College 300 the Fenway, Boston Paresky Conference Center Keynote Address Bob Wing Social and racial justice organizer; Founder of Color Lines and War Times; Co-author of "Organizing on Shifting Terrain" Issues Panel Paul Robeson Ford Racial and social justice Union Baptist Church, Cambridge Elena Letona Economic justice Neighbor…
An evening of information and response to our government's drone assassination program We will show excerpts from the film "Drone" and a video of a talk by Christopher Aaron, a former drone program analyst, speaking about his experiences working in Afghanistan and Iraq. Christopher Aaron is a former counter-terrorism officer for the CIA and Department of Defense droneprogram. He deployed twice to Afghanistan and Iraq from 2006 - 2009, serving as an intelligence analyst and liaison between the military and…
Massachusetts Peace Action, along with Greater Boston Physician for Social Responsibility and the First Parish Cambridge Environmental Justice Task Force, will show The Age of Consequences on Friday, December 9, at 7:00 PM at First Parish, 3 Church St. in Harvard Square. This new film, directed by Jared P. Scott, investigates the impacts of climate change, resources scarcity, migration and conflict through the lens of US national security and global stability. How will the US military respond to the violence and threat of violence…
Michael Dukakis (Former Governor of Mass) Critical Public Transit Needs for Massachusetts and the Nation Fred Salvucci (Former Secretary of Transport) The Role of the Federal Budget in Improving Public Transit MC: Mike Connolly (State Rep-elect, East Cambridge and East Somerville) Public Transit for Climate Protection Kristie Pecci (MASSPIRG) Upgrading the Red Line John Attanucci (MIT Transit) Extending the Green Line Denise Provost (State Representative, Somerville) Young People's Needs Elechi Kadete (Cambridge Residents Alliance) The Fare Share Tax as a…
Arlington United for Justice with Peace is organizing a fundraiser event for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Saturday January 14, 2017 (Doors will open at 7 PM) to aid in their struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Join us for a Sing Along to Songs of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, and more! Performers: The Harmonators, Arc&Land, Chris and Quinn Eastburn, Anne Sandstrum and John Loretz, Liz Buchanan and Gordon…
Based on numerous reporting trips to the region, freelance foreign correspondent Reese Erlich discusses the growth of Syrian extremist rebel groups, the status of the Assad regime, foreign intervention and the failure of US policy. He provides up to date analysis and what the new US president will likely face after the November elections. Erlich is a Peabody winning journalist and author of Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (Foreword by Noam…
A Ladies’ Man-With All The Ladies He Was Not
With Tonight In Mind
By Jason Taylor
David McGovern always considered
himself a ladies’ man, although it was not obvious from his appearance or his
demeanor that he harbored such thoughts. No, Dave (his preferred nickname and
not Davey as his blessed late mother used to call him, call him with a certain
tone that meant he was in some kind of trouble, under some maternal menace and
he would run for cover against her wrath), was not a guy who had his
generation’s idols like Paul Newman or Robert Redford good looks (and now let’s
say Brad Pitts for those baffled by the mention of the previous names). Rather
he had the craggy good looks of a weathered Irishman (or as one gal put it
after he had turned her over, had left her in the lurch for the “next best
thing,” his constant search, a Rasputin look complete with that evil eye spell
that had been the bad night of her existence, and not her alone) when young
which played to his advantage among the gentile and non-gentile beat/ hippie
young women he was attracted to from his high school roaming days on around
Cambridge and environs.
He emphatically was not, could not be
attractive to the ice cold beautiful set of women that he attempted to avoid
like the plague (you know the cheerleaders and social butterflies in high
school and the stockbroker trophy wives later). They ignored him and laughed at
him in his funny hand-me-downs in any case so as much a question of accepting
social reality as anything else. His demeanor, well his demeanor, or his “hook”
as he always kidded himself in private moments was to take a woman by main
force-by the fact of wearing her down with his two thousand assorted facts
ready for distribution at a moment’s notice and his thousand, roughly, ideas
some off-point but some fascinating to intellectually-oriented women -also sent
by main force. So you could see that he knew early on that he would be
attracted to, attractive to certain types of women-and they to him. So for a great
deal of his sweet soft soap life he had at any given time a bevy, nice word
huh, of women in his orbit.
That bevy idea to Dave is important,
will become more important because he defined himself by his “list” (what in
the old days would be called the black book, the book where you had a list of
names of available, available to you, and telephone numbers, so you can tell by
that old-fashioned instrument it had been a while since that concept had been
in its prime, of as many young women as you had come across and not crossed
off).
Some of Dave’s exploits when he was
younger were the stuff of local urban folk legend among his crowd. In this day
and age it might cause snickers or raised eyebrows as rather sophomoric and a
sign of youthful insecurity (even though the particular “run” to be spoken of had
occurred when he was in his mid-twenties). That insecurity part, upon later
reflection by Dave himself in some private moments had some merit since in
early high school due his poverty and self-consciousness of that hard fact, and
his female classmates’ as well he did not have any girlfriend at all. It was
only Harvard Square, the folk scene, the coffeehouses, the old Hayes-Bickford and
what was happening there that gave him a new lease on life.
But enough of the psychological reasons
for his need to take a “run” every now and again. That “run” meant that between
serious women friends he would try to date, lure or whatever (and bed) as many
women as he could logically handle. This was no meant trick in the days when
all you had was a landline telephone and only a certain amount of time to do
your hard-boiled loving. Five, well, maybe six was the highest number he could
handle when Dave was in the “rut.” Here’s what a “run” might look like and
remember this was not some teen frenzy but from his mid-twenties times.
Needless to say it started with him going to a friend’s party (pot party if
anybody is asking although the liquor flowed as well) and he ran into Josie, a
delicious young woman fresh from the campus at half-revolutionary Madison at
the University of Wisconsin (via Manhattan and a high ranking at Hunter College
High) and so just Dave’s meat in those days when he was particularly attracted
to high achiever Jewish women who had a radical past, or wished they had since
that was one of his calling cards then. Dave had been a draft-resister, had
served some time for his resistance so he played the “girls say ‘yes’ to boys
who say ‘no’” card for all it was worth. (There is a famous, maybe infamous
today, photograph from 1968 maybe you can Google it with three fetching women,
three women a guy would be willing to say “no” to the draft for if you wanted
to get an idea of what they looked like, sitting on a couch under a sign with
just that expression written above them.) Josie went for him in a big way, and
if things had been different, if he hadn’t just broken up with his first wife
(a wife he had married as he was going off to jail so that she could have
visitation rights and so he in a morose mood would have been married something
he was hung up about since his teens-bad move, very bad reason in the end) and
was in no mood for being serious just then they could have been a solo match.
In fact at one point Dave seriously considered dumping the other women for
Josie but he was just not smart enough to see that he could have had a much
simpler life had he had the brains given to geese.
In a way Josie just whetted Dave’s
appetite for she was not only a radical gal she was also very inventive in bed
as a number of women were in those days after “the pill” and some discreet
reading of the Kama Sutra had freed things up for a whole younger generation of
women who were ready to break out of their mothers traps. A few weeks after
meeting Josie Dave though he met an art student from the Museum School at an
opening of an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had decided to go see some
of the Impressionists that he was (and is) crazy about when he saw this young
woman with sketch book in hand drawing free-hand (and very well) a painting by
Monet (one of those rural France scenes all misty and pointy). He stepped up to
her and gave her, gave Robin, some of his two thousand facts about Monet (the
stuff that even artists don’t know or give a damn about) and that was enough to
whet her appetite although she was not as impressed with his left-wing
credentials as Josie since she was one of the most apolitical people he had
ever met, totally into her art to the avoidance of all else (she would tell him
later that she had seen her brother go “wrong” with radical politics, having had
been around the Weather Underground when that organization meant something for
the political action of the time and cause all kinds of problems in her
family’s household so she very consciously avoided the subject).
Of course with two women being dated at
the same the question, a question that would grow exponentially with the addition
of more women, there were times when one wanted to see him or he to see her and
so the juggling started (and the notorious “no show” without calling to cancel
the date and just leaving Josie or Robin hanging, and the bullshit reason for
not doing so. The “no show” business drove the very reliable Robin crazy when
he decided that he needed to check out what the sexual inventive Josie was
thinking up.) That question, no, that problem, hit home when Robin brought him
to her apartment across the Fenway from school to meet her roommate, Rachel,
after Robin had told her so much about Dave and after a few visits began to
“see” Rachel. Rachel who was a student at Boston University and had come there
from upstate New York near Saratoga Springs was very political, and very much a
good spirit unlike Robin who would get moody was thus number three. (Much
later, after the “run” had run its course and he was alone again Dave had a
private laugh about some advice the old time blues singer, Sippy Wallace, a
singer that Bonnie Raitt had help “discover” as the blues revival hit high gear
told her female listeners to follow-“don’t advertise your man.”)
Naturally that idea of dating roommates
was not without problems as far as keeping it from Robin. Rachel said she
didn’t give a damn who he was “seeing,” nice clean way to put it right, as long
as he was available to her and didn’t tell Robin about them because she was a
both a good roommate and finding another place before the school was out would
have been hard. Needless to say Rachel and Dave met at his place or at hers
when Robin was away although one Sunday night they had almost played it too
close as Robin came in the door from a family visit and Dave had to go out the
fire escape that came with apartment building sin the Fenway, praise be. The
next conquest meeting Dave would gather in was a friend of Robin’s from school,
Catherine, whose father had been a “lifer” military officer and since she was
estranged from that man she was impressed, very impressed by Dave’s anti-war
credentials. Fortunately she lived in Cambridge and so there was no problem
seeing her (except she balked at first when he told her that he was “seeing”
Rachel as well as Robin but his old trick of the frontal attack, of “shaming”
her into being too bourgeois about the whole thing and that they should live in
the world of ideas, and of art got him through the door). Dave had been in
error about this “run” consisting of six young women since that would have
actually been an earlier “run” (and reflects the vagaries of age on the
memory). So Martha, was number five and the end, a woman he had met at a
political event and had surprised him with her knowledge of politics and ideas
and who knew the classics in German as well. She had stayed with him every step
of the way when he started his two thousand facts and myriad of ideas. It was a
serious question of who seduced who on that one.
All of this womanizing had to come to
an end sometime and you would be surprised that the big reason that the whole
house of cards fell apart was that Dave developed a little “habit,” a little “date”
with cousin cocaine, with the snowman. In the end he would get clean but along
the way he did some awful things to those women from conning them for money for
coke to the infamous no shows which got more frequent as he got into his “head”
(and had to spend so much time hustling to get his dope). Martha left him early
since she was involved with an organization who wanted her to go to Germany.
Catherine found some other guy once it was clear Dave was not going to take her
seriously (and she was having second-thoughts about cheating on her friend
Robin). Rachel went crazy when Dave tried to get her to do a little coke to get
them in the mood and threw him out of the apartment one cold night). Josie he
kind of let go when he realized that she was worth having as a solo
relationship but he was in no shape to work on that (to his everlasting
sorrow). Robin, poor crazy artist Robin was the only one who was willing to
stand by him, even after he lied about where the money she lend” went before it
became too obvious that he was a cokehead. But by then the “run” had run its
course and he left town to head out west without saying good-bye (to make a
coke deal connection and “get well”).
All of this youthful prelude mentioned here
to observe that sometimes you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, or some guys
never change may be a better way to put the matter. Dave, after “getting clean”
would subsequently have three unsuccessful marriages and a few scattered
affairs (some while married, some not). But mostly he stayed with one woman at
a time, no more than two. After his third divorce a few years ago he had
decided that he would no longer deal with having a relationship with a female,
the work was too hard, he was getting too old for all of this. That resolve
lasted a couple of years then one night he told his old drinking companion,
Jack Collins, at Jimmy’s Grille that he needed to “break out,” needed the
company of a woman again. The problem was that he was out of practice, and
moreover as the mostly older male crowd that frequented Jimmy’s demonstrated
where would a guy meet mature women these days. Bars were out, the museums were
passe and the old time trick of haunting the bookstores was out since they were
mostly out of brick and mortar in the age of Amazon. Jack then suggested to him
an on-line dating service, Seniors Please, which he had tried and had gotten
some dates from although he admitted that it had been a lot more work than he
would have expected. That work including having to wade through the endless
photos of older women holding their grandchildren, their pets or posing with
their adult children. Jack told Dave from that look on his face that he was
probably in need of that service despite the problems.
Dave balked at first, balked in front
of Jack that drinking night but about a week later he took the plunge. The
whole idea of these on-line dating sites from the site’s prospective is to sell
memberships and other come-ons to “fast-track” your chances of actually getting
a date (and who knows what else). Merely signing up gets you nothing but a good
laugh since you can’t respond or get a response without ponying up some
credit-carded membership fee. So Dave went through his paces, paid his dough,
answered a bunch of supposedly relevant questions to see who you would match up
with and, most importantly, put up a few paragraph profile about what he was
looking for, and who should answer his plea. Of course this part to Dave with
his now two thousand plus facts and few thousand ideas was like manna from
heaven. He immediately got plenty of ‘messages” from women who appreciated his
sincere profile (he would find out later that the guys on the site ranged for
the most part from Neanderthals to con artists looking to prey on women for
dough and so his very reasonable and well-written words impressed a lot of
women-the bar apparently among the senior set with their collective histories
of failure very low).
That flurry of messages from local
women got him thinking about how he really was a ladies’ man, got him thinking
back to the days when he went through women like water (by the way he totally
discounted as bizarre messages of women from Texas or Wisconsin since why would
he travel half way around the world for what was really a blind date and why
would they expect anything from their long range messages). One woman clued him
in to what was really going on since there were more men, already outlined
above, on the site than women so they gravitated toward the sane, the rational
and those whose photograph(s) showed some promise. There was no kidding about
this as guys would put photographs of them in the bathroom and other strange
places, would come on strong with the sex bit for no particular reason and
would liberally strew their incomplete sentences with obscenities. Jesus, Jack
had been right this whole thing was a lot more work than one would have though from
a generation who had been through the mill already. Had all, including Dave,
carried enough baggage with them to fill the belly of your average commercial
jet airplane.
Undaunted though Dave was amazed at how
many women on the basis of one or two short messages were eager, more than
eager in some cases, to meet for coffee or some such proposition. That ease was
his downfall and that is what sent him back to his old ways. What one woman
called the “harem” effect since while there were more men than women on the
site there were only a finite number that seemingly had not been junkies,
jailbirds or juke artists a guy like him, in person unseen, presented a target
for all the disappointed lonely-hearted women (and he admitted, not
untruthfully that he too was lonely). The woman, Betsy, who told him about the
harem effect was actually his first date on the site and here is how it played
out. After a couple of short messages she asked him if he would like to meet
her the next day at the Museum of Fine Arts. Since he was still crazy about art
and the location of the meet-up was a neutral place he accepted for the next
afternoon around one. All that morning he wondered what she would be like in
person, somebody with three heads, a mass murderer, who knows what else. As it
turned out she was just a more mature version of the kind of free-spirited
women he was attracted to in his youth. So he decided to play out his hand with
her for a while.
In the meantime he was getting flurries
of messages from other women (some of them unsolicited, others which he
initiated on the basis of their profiles). Enough to get “hungry” for his old
ways despite that successful Betsy meeting. One day, one Sunday he had in
succession, a date for brunch with Debbie, a late lunch with Chrissie, and a
medium late supper with Alison. All without his now usual afternoon nap. Add in
one more with Ellen a week later and at one point his was dating five women.
Here’s the problem though our ladies’ man Dave had lost a step or five and
despite the beauties of modern technology and his still intact ability to throw
facts into the wind at random he grew tired, very tired of trying to make
arrangements to meet this latest bevy. Moreover his interest level had
diminished with age. What he really wanted was to see what there was to see
about Betsy and so he gradually left the others behind (older women seem to be
better natured about a guy not returning calls or taking no calls as a signal
that he was no longer interested than in the old days. But you know when they
put up the score in such matters Dave McGovern will be thought of as an old dog.
Will always have been thought of as a ladies’ man right to the end.
