President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A 

Story Goes With It -Observe Her Birthday December 17th 

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/commute-chelsea-mannings-sentence-time-served-1

By Fritz Taylor 

[The organization that the two men, Ralph Morse and Bartlett Webber, in the story below belong to, Veterans for Peace, has been a long-time supporter of the struggle for freedom for heroic whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Veterans for Peace has supported Chelsea since the organization found out in the summer of 2010 through Courage to Resist, an organization dedicated to publicizing the plight of military resisters, that she had been arrested and through a long process wound up in solitary confinement down at the Quantico Marine Base south of Washington in Virginia. She had been charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents via Wiki-leaks to a candid world. Many of them documenting the cover-up at all levels of military atrocities by American soldiers, mercenaries under contract to the American government or within the American-led coalition. The most graphic and infamous piece of evidence of such actions was a tape of a helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians in Iraq which is available on YouTube under the title Collateral Murder and laughing about it afterwards. (That tape, the entire tape, all thirty-nine minutes is permanently part of the record in the Manning case placed there at trial by the defense team. No one ever challenged the veracity of the tape although no one was ever charged with any crimes either.)

Chelsea was held in pre-trial confinement for over three years (opening an appeal question about constitutional speedy trial rights-applicable even in the military courts. Her solitary confinement (for her own good either because she was then a suicide risk by one account or because her fellow soldiers would be so outraged by her whistle-blowing that they feared for her safety by another-take your pick) at Quantico lasted almost a year before she was due in part at least to a public outcry and rallies of hundreds at the gates of Quantico for her release she was placed in Fort Leavenworth. (Here is the military logic tough-every time she had to appear for some matter before the court at Fort Meade she would be flown back and forth after the conclusion of whatever had transpired.) Ms. Manning (Private if you prefer her rank) has after an over two month trial been convicted of a number of charges including several counts of espionage under a law going back to World War I and sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence as a result of being court-martialed in the summer of 2013 and is currently being held in the all-male barracks at Fort Leavenworth out on the prairies of Kansas.      

Ralph and Bart first heard about the details of the case in the fall of 2010 when they received an e-mail from the American Civil Liberties Union announcing a forum to be held at Boston University to publicize the case. (Bart was not sure that he had not seen something about the matter earlier on Boston Indy Media where Anonymous, a radical underground group, had places news about the case and of course the leaks would have been by then public knowledge but this forum was the first active part they played in the case.) They both attended that forum and as a result have been ever since involved one way or another in Chelsea’s defense. Their first action was to “pony up,” these are working-class guys so pony up is right, some money for the defense. (Courage To Resist was/is the repository for raising and accounting for all legal defense monies since the beginning. As stated above that organization has had a long history of supporting military resisters-for military whistle-blowers as well.)          

There were many reasons why this case had appealed to them personally but the strongest reason was that they were “paying their dues” as Bart put it while speaking about the case one Saturday afternoon at a vigil for Chelsea at historic Park Street Station on the Boston Common for not having had the courage during their own military service during the Vietnam War to “buck the system.” For a long time, actually since the last days of the Vietnam War when they supported an anti-war G.I. coffeehouse near Fort Devens about forty miles outside of Boston, they had no opportunity to get involved in a military resister case so once this case surfaced they were “all in.” (After they “got religion” on the war issue they had done their respective peace activist works through various mostly ad hoc organizations and for the past several years through VFP. The last time I checked they were still “all in.” That will tell you something about them, about how razor sharp that military service had made them  about the folly of war and about the importance of the Chelsea Manning case, especially as now as the long drag of her sentence and her environment has worn her down and she has attempted suicide twice in the past few months. (Google the Chelsea Manning Support Network for details.) So Frank Jackman’s phrase “she must not die in jail” in the headline is not a rhetorical flourish. Not at all. F.T.]       

******

“You know it is a crying shame that the Chelsea Manning case has fallen beneath the cracks, that her plight as the only woman prisoner in an all-male prison out there in the wheat fields of Kansas, out at Leavenworth has been ignored except for an occasional news note or yet another petition for President Obama to do the right thing like he has with the draconian drug cases and pardon her, to commute her sentence to time served, to the six plus years she has already been tossed away behind the walls,” yelled Ralph Morse over to Bart Webber while they were preparing to set up a banner proclaiming that very idea as part of a birthday vigil for Chelsea on her 29^th birthday on this cold December day. The banner “President Obama Pardon-Chelsea Manning-“We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind” with two copies of a photograph of her as some friendly artist had drawn of an image her as she might look like if she could express her full sexual identity (see above) and not the Army’s hard-ass male version since she had “come out” as a transgender woman shortly after her sentencing in 2013 had been inspired, the last part anyway by their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman. Frank had had his own very personal “war” against the military during his war, again Vietnam, and had served time in an Army stockade for refusing to go to that war. He always said that the one thing the Army did teach him was that you did not leave your fellow soldiers behind, and sometimes that might be the only reason left to fight. He thought it appropriate that peaceful veterans could express that same sentiment about a political prisoner who once the notoriety of the case faded could use plenty of that sentiment.  

(Ralph thought to himself while he was yelling over to Bart and cutting some wind holes in the banner to cut the sometimes fierce winds that passed through the Boston Common that he would never get over those basic training drill sergeants during his time in the military during the Vietnam War, never get over being spooked by them that if you did not toe the mark you would wind up in Leavenworth and here he was supporting a young transgender whistleblower who wound up in that very place after having done what he should have done-resist- but he cowered to those redneck drill sergeants. Well even 60-somethings can learn a thing or two from the younger crowd.) 

“Yeah, between the fact that she had to in order to protect herself against maltreatment from a bunch of goddam threatening guards who told her to “man up” at Leavenworth after she was convicted and sentenced to those hard thirty-five years in 2013 “come out” as a transgender woman and the overriding blow-up over the Snowden revelations which took all the air out of any other whistle-blower case Chelsea got the short end of the stick,” replied Bart also yelling his comment across to Ralph against both the windy day and the constant stream of loonies, crazies and con men and women who populated the environs around the Park Street subway station at Boston Common on any given Saturday of while both men could tell a million zany stories about between the hours of one and two in the afternoon when the space, or part of it, was given over to  peace action groups and other left-wing political organizations. 

(That business about formerly Bradley having to reveal her true sexual identity the day after her sentencing had been a personal safety necessity against the taunts of the guards out in Leavenworth as both men had been told by a man from Courage To Resist who knew the inside story when they asked why she had “come out” so soon after the sentencing which threw a lot of supporters off-center who had not been privy to the sexual politics involved although some stuff had come out courtesy of the Army about her sexual identity in order to diminish her heroic actions.)    

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly at that, Bart, as he told Ralph later that day when they were sitting in a bar having a couple of drinks to warm themselves up against the coldness of the day thinking about the day’s action that he too had been thinking about how incongruous it would have been in his old working class neighborhood in Riverdale to be supporting a transgender soldier condemned to Leavenworth, a “transvestite,” a drag queen they would have called her not then making the subtle distinctions that have evolved on questions of sexual identity. Had that day thought about the time that he and his corner boys, that is what they called each other back then when there were corners for dough-less guys to hang around on, that one summer they had travelled down to Provincetown, even then a gay and other odd-ball Mecca for the specific purpose of baiting the drag queens, faggots and dykes along with getting the usual drunk to gather courage. Jesus.                    

Ralph thought to himself as he continued to cut a few wind holes in the banner proclaiming the need for President Obama to grant Chelsea her pardon that he had come a long way (and Bart too) since the fall of 2010 when they learned that Chelsea (then using her birth name Bradley but here we will use her chosen now legal name and assume everybody understands that this is the same person we are talking about) was being held essentially incommunicado down at the Quantico Marine Base (strange location since Chelsea was in the Army and the various branches of the services jealously guard their prerogatives) in solitary and their organization, Veterans for Peace, had called for demonstrations to have her released even then, or at least taken have her taken out of solitary and stop being tortured (not some  small “peacenik” charge or propaganda super-charged to gain sympathy for the victim of government repression since the appropriate United Nations rapporteur had made such a finding in her case concerning her pre-trial treatment). Ralph and Bart had been among the very first to set up a rally (not at Park Street but in Davis Square over in Somerville where Bart had lived for the previous decade) and they had been committed to her defense ever since. The weekly shout-out on Friday afternoons is the place where Ralph not known a as a public speaker but more as a “Jimmy Higgins” figure (a rank and filer who did the odd chores to insure the success of the event) began get his “voice,” get his political facts in a row with at first maybe a minute speech. By the end of that series of vigils which were switched the busier intersection at Central Square in Cambridge you could hardly get the “mic” out of his hand. Bart who had some college behind him where he had to take a debating class as a requirement his freshman year tended to give the pitches about what people could to support Chelsea, usually a set five minute speech.    

(That shout-out designation was simply current usage for such events in the wake of the Occupy movement where the term took on an almost religious mantra quality. Also acceptable and used at other times including the event that Brad and Ralph were helping stage this day- vigil, rally or whatever other appropriate name you want to call an event where people were free to express their opinions about Chelsea’s case and other causes which made sense to speak of and a few times budding folk singers who also hung out in the space would come by and sing some song, especially David Rovacs tribute to Chelsea’s heroic action.) 

Both men freely admitted and it bears repeating here that what was driving them on this case more fervently that other peace and progressive actions they had been involved with over the decades had been their own admittedly sorry response to “their” war, Vietnam. In Ralph’s case joining the Army, meaning volunteering for three years   and in Bart’s case by accepting induction into that same Army for the mandatory two years had caused then after the fact, after their military service to “get religion” on the questions of war and peace. Ralph had gone out of his way to join up as soon after high school as he could. Had bought in hook, line and sinker all the admittedly paper-thin anti-communist domino theory reasons provided by the government any given week to justify their actions. Hell, the hard truth and Ralph was hardly alone in this a young man was looked down at in his old Forsythe Street section of Troy if he waited for the draft board to come calling for him to get on the ball. Most of the guys he knew were already in or getting ready to. The neighborhood had already lost a few guys over in Vietnam, a few more had come back as shells of their former selves. Ralph in any case like his class had done his “tour” in Vietnam without a peep although already he knew that he had to do something to let people know what really was going on-mostly straight out murder and mayhem against people that he had no quarrel with-after he got out if he survived to calm the horrible pit that never left his stomach one he got “in country.” 

Bart had had more qualms about the war, had seen no way though that he could escape the draft once the draft board tagged him. Like Ralph most of his friends and neighbors supported the war, the guys doing their service, a few not coming back as in all wars. While he made a few more noises about his feelings about the war while he was in uniform he had kept quiet mostly, kept the drill sergeant-driven “you don’t want to wind up in Leavenworth” quiet. He did not wind up going to Vietnam as after Tet in 1968 when all hell broke loose which signaled either endless war or an ordered retreat the military authorities were beginning to pull back the troops during his time. He often wondered though if he had gotten orders for Vietnam what he would have done. Probably gone quietly like his wife, his very patriotic wife whose two brothers were doing second tours in ‘Nam wanted him too when the deal went down. No Canada or jail for him. To his shame as he told the military resister one night at a VFP general meeting after hearing about what Frank had done during his time (this is about Chelsea but Frank had done time in the Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam).          

They saw the Chelsea case as pay-back to a real hero, maybe the only hero of the Iraq War and had worked like seven dervishes on the case. More importantly had kept the faith even after the case inevitably went off the front pages and became a cipher to the general population. Not doing what was right at the time of your confrontation with your own war a very powerful now lifelong impetus to push on in the face of indifference and hostility among the general public these days.)           

Both men had agreed once the fanfare had died down that along with keeping the case in the public eye as best they could they would commemorate two milestones in Chelsea’s life yearly-the anniversary of her incarceration by the government now over six years in May and her birthday in December (her 29^th). That was why Ralph and Bart were struggling with the downtown winds to put their banner in place. These days they were not taking the overall lead in setting up such events but had responded to a call by the Queer Strike Force to do so and they were following that organization’s lead to rally and to make one last desperate push to get Chelsea a pardon. Everybody agreed, willingly or not, that under the impending Dump the Trump regime that Chelsea’s chances of a pardon were about zero, maybe less. So the rally. And so too the desperation in Ralph and Bart’s own minds that the slogan their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman had coined-“we will not leave our sister behind” would now fall on deaf ears, that she would face at least four, maybe eight years of hard ass prison time-time to be served as a man in a woman’s body when the deal went down. Worse that Chelsea had already attempted twice earlier in the year to commit suicide and the hard fact emblazoned in the added sentence on their banner-“she must not die in jail” had added urgency.        

Ralph and Bart had met down in Washington in 1971 after both had been discharged from the Army and had gotten up some courage, with some prompting from their respective very anti-war girlfriends (Bart had divorced that hung-ho wife as soon as he got out of the Army), to go down and get arrested during the May Day actions when in another desperate situation they tried to help shut down the government if it would not shut down the war-the Vietnam War. They had been through a lot over the years in the struggle to keep the peace message alive and well despite the endless wars, and despite the near zero visibility on the subject over the previous ten plus years. 

Both had grown up in very working class neighborhood respectively Troy in upstate New York and Riverdale out about thirty miles west of Boston and had followed the neighborhood crowds unthinkingly in accepting their war and participating in the war machine when it came their time. So no way in 1968,1969 say could either have projected that they would hit their sixties standing out in the lonesome corners of the American public square defending an Army private who in many quarters was considered a traitor and who moreover was gay. In the old days the best term they could think of to describe their respective attitudes toward gays was “faggot and dyke”-Jesus. (That whole gay issue was already well known to them from some information provided by agents of Courage to Resist, the organization which was the main conduit for publicity about the case and for financing Chelsea’s legal defenses. They also were aware through those same agents about Chelsea’s sexual identity which all partisans and Chelsea herself had agreed to keep on the “low” in order not get that issue confused with her heroic whistle-blower actions during trial and only later revealed by her publicly as a matter of self-defense as mentioned above.)     

Later that night after the birthday vigil was over and Ralph and Bart were sitting at Jack’s over in Cambridge near where Bart lives (Ralph still lived in Troy) having a few shots to ward away the cold of the day’s events both had been a bit morose. The event had gone as well as could be expected on a political prisoner case that was three years removed from the serious public eye. The usual small coterie of “peace activists” had shown up and a few who were supporting Chelsea as a fellow transgender and there had been the usual speeches and pleas to sign the on-line petition to the White House to trigger a response from the President on the question of a pardon (see link above). (That lack of response by the greater LGBTQ community to Chelsea’s desperate plight all through the case had had Ralph and Bart shaking their heads in disgust as the usual reason given was that all energies had to be expended on getting gay marriage recognized. The twice divorced Ralph and three times divorced mumbled to themselves over that one). 

Ralph and Bart were in melancholy mood no question since they had long ago given up any illusion that the struggle against war and for some kind of social justice was going to be easy but the prospects ahead, what Ralph had called the coming “cold civil war” under the tutelage of one Donald Trump had them reeling as it related to Chelsea’s case. They bantered back and forth about how many actions they had participated in since they got the news of the case that a young whistle-blower was being held for telling the world about the cover-up of countless atrocities committed by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (via Wiki-leaks, not the mainstream media who would not touch making the information that Chelsea had gleaned for love or money). 

There were the trips to Quantico down in hostile Virginia in order to get Chelsea out of the “hole,” get her out of Marine base solitary (and where they faced an incredible array of cops and military personnel all to “monitor” a few hundred supporters). The trips to the White House to proclaim their message. The several trips during the trial down at Fort Meade in Maryland where they had to laugh about being on a military base for the first time in decades (they had been barred many years back for demonstrations on a military base against the Reagan administrations war against Central America). The weekly vigils before the case went to trial and over the previous three years the fight to keep the case in the public eye.          

As they finished up their last shots of whiskey against the cold night both agreed though that come May they would be out commemorating Chelsea’s seventh year in the jug if Obama did not do the right thing beforehand. They both yelled as they went their separate ways (Ralph was staying with his daughter in Arlington) old Frank Jackman’s coined phrase-“we will not leave our sister behind.” No way.    

*****Out In The 1960s Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind

*****Out In The 1960s Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind   

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell 

Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. With the wizardry of modern technology Frank had had the review placed in a blog dedicated to all things retro 1950s and 1960s (two slightly different retros but guys like Frank and Jack squeeze both eras.) Prior to Jack’s viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days. About the days when chance had caused him to meet Frank at Myles Standish after his family had moved from Clintonville a few miles away in the summer before fifth grade and the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade created their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails and gain their own fame (although their standard had not been fifteen minutes but infinity, or when the girls started gathering around, whichever came first).    

What got Jack thinking along those lines was something Frank’s long-time companion, Laura, whom he had seen the film with, had told Frank. She said to him that she had had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film’s story line, the part about the furious growing up “from hunger” strivings of the guys who would become the Four Seasons out in the 1950s New Jersey night, had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period of late. The kind of things that Frank wrote about after Jack and he discussed various incidents in growing up absurd in the 1950s at their “watering hole” sessions which they initiated after they had then recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that part, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed Frank, for better or worse, no question. And that feeling got through to Jack as well.

Frank’s had told Jack when he asked why he was writing some many sketches about the past, also placed in retro blogs dedicated to such reflections, that his purpose in writing about the old days had not been to put paid to some ghosts of the past as a lot of guys they knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going back to Carver to re-flame old sport’s dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of their other pals, Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone to his (their) fiftieth class reunion at Carver High and came away more depressed than anything since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already. Moreover Frank said he certainly had not intended to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate, how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela wheel any particular way but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other of his later acquaintances Josh and Phil Larkin who were also from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean. 

Of course lately Jack had begun, feeding off Frank’s tidbits as well as that film, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Strangely both Frank and Jack agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s big interest in this film had been the almost chemically pure corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not at all unlike his (and Frank’s) Carver corner boy growing up saga.        

In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options mentioned early in the film once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson, who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles, the reformatory, or become famous. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.

It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (doo wop girls’ groups too who were cruising to the top the charts but the Carver guys really weren’t interested in them because there was no way they could get anything to help them break-out from paying attention to girl groups, yeah, foolish guys) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew were hitting it big from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. Dick Clark and that Bandstand was in elementary school anyway, in elementary school at the time when they were getting hipped to music was mandatory to see who was who in the teenage song firmament, see what guys were wearing, see what dances guys were expected to know how to do, sweaty palms and two left feet not withstanding, and, and what chicks looked cool on the show. That last maybe the biggest draw of all as everybody rushed home after school to catch the show.     

Funny the black group thing was not a big deal, or Jack and the others didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television. Jack would never really since a live black person until years later when he ran track and would run against black guys in the big meets up in Boston Garden. Other than grabbing tips, like having the lead singer off to the side, everybody having the same outfit, the harmony guys snapping their fingers to the beat, and staying on beat with the lead singer they had no racial options about the music and they,  meaning mainly Jack at first, figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers so they would be working a different street. (Jack and Frank, later in high school, when the civil rights movement was on the television every night practically would get a very rude awaking both within their families and among their fellow students and neighbors when they expressed the slightest sympathy for the black liberation struggle but back in sixth grade there was nothing to it)  That niche was not all thought out in such a refined manner as Jack was now recalling in retrospect but what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.   

That summer before sixth grade right after school got out for the summer was when the Myles Standish corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame, got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there had not been any stores to stand in front of holding up the wall in the “projects” where they lived like in the pictures they had seen on music magazines they looked through up in the main library up in Carver Square their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School. On hot summer nights the back was all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field from the gym entrance where they hung out. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly street corner guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead about the white boy doo-wop niche figured they could cash in on.

For a couple of weeks they practiced like crazy each night, no paying much attention to much else except exchanging fantasies about what kind of suits they would by, how to act when the crush of the crowds came on, what to do with swooning girls, kids’ stuff dream stuff. But mainly the practiced, trying like hell to work a smooth harmonious sound on the material they covered, covered by Frank copying down the lyrics each time a song they wanted to cover came on WMEX the local rock station (fortunately the big hits got played endlessly each cycle so Frank mainly got the words but on few he missed a couple and so they just incorporated what was there) with Red in the lead. Red really did have the best voice, really could project his voice, and Jack thinking back thought Red with some work and breaks could have made a nice career maybe as a lounge act out of his talent.      

That doo wop practice worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this doo wop jail break out had to do with sexual stirrings, with this cohort of corner boys finally noticing that those shapeless girls from fifth grade class like Cindy, Linda, Bessie, Rosalind (Jack’s favorite), some of them, were starting to get shapes and who the year before had been noting but nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night Red and the Roosters (nice name, right) crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche.

At first they were left all by themselves, maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as they left the courts, but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away up against a fence not hiding or anything but just kind of listening and swaying back and forth to the songs. (Jack thought the song they were working on was Little Antony and the Imperials Tears On My Pillows, although he would not swear to that. In any case that was the song that got him a dance with Rosalind so maybe he was confusing the two situations.)

A few nights later there would be several girls, including sixth grade girls and one from the other fifth grade class, Lorna who they called Lorna Doone for no particular reason but who was hot, standing at that fence. Jack thought that night if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ tear-jerker Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. Sang it several times. The girls came running on the excuse that they thought it was somebody’s birthday, somebody who needed consoling. Yeah, it was like that in the innocence boy-girl thing then, probably still is. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood just like since Adam and Eve time, maybe before. Jack never got to Rosalind then only later after school started and then she moved to another town and that ended his first serious love affair. Frank even with his two left feet got a date for the movies with Bessie, and Jack thought Red (with that mass of red hair), the best looking guy of the bunch from what the girls said but maybe that was just because they wanted get near the lead singer, as always, had gone “steady” with Lorna for a while until Red kind of went off by himself.           

See here is where things broke down. Sure Red and the Roosters could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what had happened. Their problem was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons from the get-go, they really did not have any serious raw musical talent (except Red) and did not as Frankie and his guys did really have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed about mid-way through sixth and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s did too but that was after the group broke up). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up in the summer before junior high. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out from the ‘from hungers,” on musical fame.

Red would a little later after they moved on to junior high turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime, which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close. Both of them had been “look-outs” when Red began his “clip” five-fingers discount rampage of the various stores up in Carver Center and Jack had worked with Red one night when they jack-rolled a drunk for fifty bucks. Frank and Jack soon moved away from that business though once they realized it was too much work and they felt too much anguish over what they were doing to make a career out of that life.     

Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd with some older tougher boys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner based on midnight creeps and some of those corner boys later wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Billy later who did a nickel’s worth for an armed robbery after he failed to make a half-hearted one more chance career singing alone and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a two-bit White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina after a second nickel stretch for another armed robbery).       

Jack as he thought about Red as he had not done so in a long time, thought about those last parts of the Carver corner boy story, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons thought the difference was important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as Jack noted in that review he had written and as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth seeing once again. And telling the Carver corner boys story too.   

[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts the when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,  Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]

Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners!

Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners!

(Quote of the Week)

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal raises funds for its program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. The PDC’s stipend program revives a tradition of the early American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense. James P. Cannon was the ILD’s first secretary, a Communist Party leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism. In motivating support for those who have been imprisoned for taking the side of the working class and oppressed, he stressed that such support is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity.

The New York Times, the organ of big business, is making its annual plea for contributions for Christmas to the “100 Neediest Cases.” Other capitalist papers and organizations are conducting similar drives. The men, women and children of the working class, who have been on the rack of capitalist exploitation and are now dropped into the abyss of misery and poverty, are chosen and classified by these arch hypocrites—so their sanctimonious appeal can be made to the comfortable capitalists, to soften the bitterness of these few workers with the insult of charity, and to salve their own conscience by acts of “generosity.”

This horrible farce is annually repeated in scores of other cities.

The militant workers have nothing but hatred and contempt for such appeals and drives. This year, therefore, they are again following the world-wide custom that has developed in the ranks of the working class for many years. It is the custom of raising a special fund for the men in prison for the labor cause and their wives and children, of transforming the hypocritical spirit of Christmas into the spirit of solidarity with the class-war fighters behind bars.

The International Labor Defense has already started a campaign for a Christmas Fund for the men in prison, and their dependents who suffer on the outside. The labor militants throughout the entire country are working to collect this fund. Nowhere has the appeal or the response been made on the basis of charity. Everywhere has been emphasized the duty of those who are outside toward the men on the inside....

The men in prison are still a part of the living class movement. The Christmas Fund drive of International Labor Defense is a means of informing them that the workers of America have not forgotten their duty toward the men to whom we are all linked by bonds of solidarity. It is the Christmas drive of Labor and must have its generous support!

—James P. Cannon, “A Christmas Fund of Our Own,” Daily Worker, 17 October 1927, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (Pathfinder Press, 1973)

A View From The Left- Fidel Castro 1926—2016 Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution! For Workers Political Revolution Against Stalinist Bureaucracy!

Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Fidel Castro 1926—2016

Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution!

For Workers Political Revolution Against Stalinist Bureaucracy!

Having survived hundreds of assassination attempts by the U.S. and its counterrevolutionary gusanos (worms), Fidel Castro, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, died in bed on November 25 at the age of 90. As Cuban reactionaries in Miami celebrated his death in the streets, president-elect Donald Trump described Castro as a “brutal dictator” whose legacy includes “the denial of fundamental human rights.” This coming from the man who will soon be the CEO of U.S. imperialism, which is holding dozens of prisoners within the torture chambers of Guantánamo Bay, a major U.S. military base on a piece of stolen Cuban land.

Ever since the government of Fidel Castro expropriated the capitalist class in Cuba in 1960, establishing a bureaucratically deformed workers state, the U.S. ruling class has worked relentlessly to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and re-establish the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in that country. These attacks included the 1961 Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) invasion under Democratic president John F. Kennedy, the funding of counterrevolutionary terrorists in Miami and on the island as well as the starvation economic embargo.

The elimination of capitalist class rule in Cuba led to enormous gains for its working people. With aid from the Soviet Union, a centralized, planned economy was built, guaranteeing jobs, housing, food, health care and education. The revolution especially benefited women and blacks, breaking down racial and gender barriers. Despite decades of the U.S. embargo, Cuba’s health care system, which includes abortion as a free service, is still the best in economically underdeveloped countries. The infant mortality rate is lower than in the U.S. Cuba has more doctors and teachers per capita than just about anywhere else, and Cuban doctors have provided medical assistance to scores of other countries (for example, sending hundreds of doctors to assist during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa).

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 had disastrous consequences for Cuba. The Cuban economy had been heavily subsidized by the USSR, amounting in the 1980s to up to 36 percent of the Cuban national income. By 1993, per capita economic output had suffered a 40 percent decline, resulting in power outages, shortages of basic goods and tight food rationing. In response, the government instituted a series of “market reforms,” which have led to greater inequality that has hit women and black Cubans hardest. Such inequality persists because of material scarcity, reinforced by technological backwardness and national isolation and compounded by mismanagement by the Havana Stalinist bureaucracy.

As Trotskyists who fight for world socialist revolution, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution—as we do for the other remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos. At the same time, we stand in political opposition to the Stalinist bureaucratic misrulers—a parasitic layer sitting on top of proletarian property forms—whose nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” and its attendant ideology of “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism are obstacles to the defense of the workers states. The fight to defend and extend the Cuban Revolution requires an additional revolution, a proletarian political revolution to sweep away the ruling Castroite bureaucracy and establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

We oppose the U.S. embargo—which has been loosened but still remains—and demand the immediate return of Guantánamo Bay to Cuba. We defend Cuba’s right to trade and have diplomatic relations with capitalist states, including the U.S. While increases in small-scale private enterprises and commercial and financial ties to the U.S. and other imperialists do not amount to a piecemeal restoration of capitalism, they do pose the danger of undermining the collectivized economy. They also strengthen internal counterrevolutionary forces, which will doubtless be working out of the recently established U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Fidel Castro was to many people a larger than life figure, a David who stood up to the American Goliath. Having spoken out against American racism, he was admired by many black activists during the civil rights movement and afterward. When he visited New York to address the United Nations in 1960, he made a point of staying at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. A number of black militants found refuge in Cuba, including Robert F. Williams, hounded out of the U.S. because of his advocacy of black armed self-defense. He escaped to Cuba in 1961, where he broadcast “Radio Free Dixie” until it was shut down after Williams developed political differences with the Castro regime. To this day, black militant Assata Shakur lives in Cuba, having escaped the clutches of the U.S. authorities, who still seek her head. Many people in southern Africa recall the role Cuba played in the anti-apartheid struggle, including the courageous Cuban soldiers who, supported by the Soviets, fought against CIA-backed forces and apartheid South Africa’s invasions of Angola in the 1970s and ’80s.

We remember all that and more. But we also know that the Cuban regime that was headed by Fidel Castro and since 2006 stewarded by his brother, President Raúl Castro, is fundamentally nationalist and opposed to international proletarian revolution. Time and again, the Castro regime admonished leftist insurgents in Latin America not to follow the “Cuban road”—i.e., the overthrow of capitalist rule. When the Nicaraguan masses smashed the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Fidel Castro advised the Sandinista government “to avoid the early mistakes we made in Cuba: the political rejection by the West, premature frontal attacks on the bourgeoisie, economic isolation.” At home, the Cuban government has accommodated the growing power of the reactionary Catholic church, including by warmly welcoming the Pope of counterrevolution, Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), in 1998 and more recently the current Pope, who played a pivotal role in negotiations between the regime and the Obama administration.

While we recall the heroic battles fought by Cuban troops in Angola, we also recognize that the objective of the Cuban and Soviet Stalinists was never the overthrow of capitalist rule in Africa. That war was followed by the 1989 execution of Cuban General Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez, a war hero in Angola, after a Stalinist show trial orchestrated by Castro and reminiscent of the Moscow purges of the 1930s.

The Origins of the Cuban Deformed Workers State

Cuba under the dictator Fulgencio Batista was essentially a subsidiary of the American Mafia and the United Fruit Company (a point captured well by the movie The Godfather: Part II). When Fidel Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces of the July 26 Movement entered Havana on New Year’s Day 1959, the bourgeois army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus that had propped up the hated Batista dictatorship disintegrated. The initial measures of the petty-bourgeois Castro government were to outlaw gambling, suppress prostitution and seize the holdings of Batista and his cronies. These actions were followed by modest land reforms in line with Cuba’s 1940 bourgeois constitution.

Fidel Castro’s forces were temporarily estranged from the bourgeoisie and independent of the proletariat. Under ordinary conditions, such rebels in power would have followed the same pattern as similar movements in Latin America, wielding radical-democratic rhetoric to reassert bourgeois control. But with the capitalist state apparatus shattered and under the relentless pressure of U.S. imperialist hostility, the Castro regime nationalized U.S.-owned and domestic capitalist holdings, creating a deformed workers state.

The existence of the Soviet Union was crucial in this development, providing not only a model for the Castro regime but, more importantly, economic assistance and a military shield that fended off the U.S. imperialist beast just 90 miles away. It was only as a result of exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for power, imperialist encirclement and the flight of the national bourgeoisie, and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—that Castro’s petty-bourgeois government smashed capitalist property relations (see “Cuba and Marxist Theory,” Marxist Bulletin No. 8).

This Trotskyist understanding of the Cuban Revolution was a key programmatic question in the founding of our organization as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s. Following the 1959 victory of Castro’s rebels, the SWP majority lionized the forces led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, falsely equating the Cuban regime with the revolutionary Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky that emerged out of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. This political capitulation went hand in hand with the SWP’s deepening abandonment of the struggle for workers revolution in the U.S.

In fact, the Cuban regime is qualitatively similar to the one that emerged in the Soviet Union after the Stalinist bureaucracy took political power out of the hands of the working class in a political counterrevolution that began in 1923-24 and was consolidated over the next several years. With the unfolding of the Cuban Revolution, the SWP claimed and expected that peasant-based guerrilla warfare would be the wave of the future and the means to overthrow capitalism. In counterposition, the RT asserted in the programmatic document, “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International, Draft Resolution on the World Movement,” submitted to the 1963 SWP convention:

“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”

While Cuba under Castro never had democratic organs of workers rule—soviets (workers councils)—the fact that in the early months and years after the 1959 takeover the ruling bureaucracy was only in the process of formation made Cuba initially open to the intervention of Trotskyists. This was a transient opening, but one that had to be tested. The RT thus gave the program of political revolution in Cuba a transitional formulation, calling to “Make the Government Ministers Responsible to and Removable by Workers’ and Peasants’ Democratic Organizations.” But in short order, the bureaucracy consolidated its rule over the working masses.

An example of this was the repression of the Cuban Trotskyist organization, the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR, affiliated with the international tendency led by Juan Posadas). In May 1961, the Havana government seized their newspaper and smashed the type for an edition of Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution. Leading members of the POR were arrested and sent to prison. Despite our political differences with the POR, we vigorously defended them against Stalinist repression (see “Freedom for Cuban Trotskyists!” Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965).

Today, in the wake of Castro’s death, many “democratic” imperialist leaders are emphasizing their denunciations of repression in Cuba and their call for “free elections.” The latter, i.e., parliamentary democracy, is nothing other than a call for “democratic” counterrevolution: the electoral rise to power of capitalist-restorationist forces. It stands in sharp counterposition to soviet democracy, which would encompass those parties chosen by the workers and their petty-bourgeois allies that stand for and defend the socialist order. We defend the Havana regime’s imprisonment of active collaborators with U.S. imperialism. At the same time, we oppose the repression of critics or political opponents who are not actively working for counterrevolution.

Notwithstanding its many accomplishments and its survival for nearly 60 years, the Cuban Revolution remains in the crosshairs of the world imperialist order. The U.S. and other imperialists aim at nothing less than the re-enslavement of the island and its people, turning it into a neocolony of poverty, racial and sexual oppression and brutal exploitation.

Revolutionaries in the U.S., the bastion of world imperialism, have a special duty to defend Cuba against capitalist restoration and U.S. imperialism. The isolated Cuban deformed workers state will not forever be able to withstand the immense economic and military pressures exerted by the U.S. and the capitalist world market. Genuine defense of the Cuban Revolution demands a revolutionary internationalist perspective that links the struggle against Stalinist misrule with the fight to destroy U.S. imperialism from within through socialist revolution. The key requirement for victory is the building of revolutionary workers parties as sections of a reforged Fourth International that Trotsky would recognize as his own.

Eve’s Rib-Katharine Hepburn And Spencer Tracy’s “Adams Rib” (1949)-A Film Review

Eve’s Rib-Katharine Hepburn And Spencer Tracy’s “Adams Rib” (1949)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Adam’s Rib, starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Judy Holliday, directed by George Cukor, written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin 1949  

Now that we are deep into the “third wave” of women’s liberation (except mostly noticeably these days that glass ceiling still hovering over the White House) it is a nice touch to see that even if in a comic way the question of woman’s equality before the law, before society norms was being addressed after the “first wave” early in the century (women getting the vote and other legal rights like owning property in their own name). Although we today might cringe a little at some of the dialogue and some of the social expectations no matter how high-minded this film, Adam’s Rib, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy two unmarried off-screen lovers in an age when that status was frowned upon, is a rather nice for the time look at the double standard between men and women (of which there is still plenty of residue.) 

Here’s the premise being worked out. Then if a guy cheated on his wife with some floozy that was “not nice” but if a wife decided to do something about the matter-say, as here, take a rooty-toot-toot gun and blast the creep (and take shots at his floozy as well) that was terrible. Hang her, hang her high. That double standard implied that the guy could get away with anything while the poor wife has to suffer and grin and bear it. Of course in Adam’s Rib where the two main characters, Adam, played by Spencer Tracy, and Amanda, played by Katharine Hepburn are both married and lawyers (by the way then woman lawyers were unlike today sparse, very sparse on the ground) you know from minute one that they will be locking horns with each other over their respective views of what was right in the case. So married to each other writers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin have set the stage for a battle royal between the two views on display- Adam’s stern if blind-eyed justice demanding a conviction against Amanda’s fight against the double standard and an acquittal.          

As the gloves come off-you know of course that Adam, a crack prosecutor, and Amanda who has wangled her way into defending the scorned woman, Doris, played by Judy Holliday are going to go for broke to win the case. The law, the stern law would seem to be on Adam’s side since Doris freely confessed that she plotted to pop her man for his infidelities. But Amanda throws plenty of monkey wrenches into the mix, including ticking Adam off when she brings in a female weight-lifter who lifts him over her head to prove the general point that a woman can do what a man can do. Needless to say Amanda wins the day.

But that is not the whole story-not a 1940s whole story which is moreover billed as a romantic comedy even if it is now a proto-feminist classic. The wrangling between Adam and Amanda in the court case had frayed their own marriage and Adam decided he had had it and flew the coop-was looking for the divorce court. Maybe by his lights he was right to blow town once Amanda bested him but when the deal went down he and Amanda loved each other and so that was that. After all this was Hollywood-first wave or not. The film’s plot-line would make little sense today but as a snapshot about the battle between the sexes and the social mores of the time before the “second wave” of the 1970s changed many things it is worth a view. And to see Hepburn and Tracy go through their paces too.            

*****Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

*****Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some deep fogged memory producing, maybe acid-etched flashback memory at the time, accompanying CD booklet tossed aside on the coffee table by a guy from the old days, the old New York University days, Jeff Mackey, who had been visiting Sarah, Josh Breslin’s wife of the moment. Jeff had just placed the CD on the CD player, the intricacies of fine-tuned down-loading from YouTube beyond anybody’s stoned capacity just then and so the “primitive” technology (stoned as in “turned on,” doped up, high if you like just like in the old days as well although Josh had gone to State U not NYU but the times were such that such transactions were universal and the terms “pass the bong” and “don’t bogart that join” had passed without comment). Don’t take that “wife of the moment” too seriously either since that was a standing joke between Sarah and Josh (not Joshua, Joshua was dad, the late Joshua Breslin, Jr.) since in a long life they had managed five previous  marriages (three by him, two by her) and scads of children and two scads of grandchildren (who had better not see this piece since grandma and grandpa have collectively expended many jaws-full hours of talk  about the danger of demon drugs, the devil’s work).

When Josh had picked up the tossed aside booklet he noticed a  wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. The woman maybe kin to Janis, maybe not, but certainly brethren who looked uncannily like his first ex-wife, Laura, who had taught him many little sex things learned from a trip to India and close attention to the Kama Sutra which he had passed to everybody thereafter including Sarah. And no again don’t take that wistful though about Laura as anything but regret since their civil wars had passed a long time before and beside Laura had not been heard from since the time she went down to Rio and was presumably shacked up with some dope king or diamond king or something probably still earning her keep with those little India tricks.

Still looking at the tantalizing artwork he thought of the time of our time, passed. Of wistful women belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if the dough was tight and there had been ginger ale or ice to cut the sweet taste or if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing, no, better evoking, yes, evoking barrelhouse down-trodden black empresses and queens from somewhere beyond speaking troubled times, a no good man taking up with that no good best girlfriend  of hers who drew a bee-line to him when that empress advertised his charms, no job, no prospect of a job and then having to go toe to toe with that damn rent collector man on that flattened damn mattress that kept springing holes, maybe no roof over a head and walking the streets picking up tricks to pass the time, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or in a down town “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay. Jesus, maybe he had better kick that dope thing before he actually does start heading to Rio.

*******

Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or someplace like that, maybe Russia he was not sure of the geography all he knew was that he had made a wag wiggle a little for his indiscretion)  was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Yeah, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then. Hell, he had dropped out of State U, dropped out of Laura Perkin’s life, dropped out of everything to chase the Western arroyo desert ocean washed dream that half his generation was pursuing just then.

Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.

Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).

Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain is the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).

But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).

Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.

Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.

The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

*****The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan

*****The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

Click below to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://www.jwjblog.org/

From the American Left History blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2009
 

With Unemployment Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program

Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm

Guest Commentary
 

From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

*From The Partisan Defense CommitteeArchives - An Update On Class War Prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal's Case

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site. This information concerning Mumia is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. As always, free Mumia!

30 November 2009


Dear Friend,

We are now preparing for our annual Holiday Appeal for class-war prisoners. This year marks the 24th year of sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and imperialist depredation. All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals go to the Class-War prisoners Stipend Fund enabling US to send stipends to 16 class-war prisoners and extra gifts to them and their families around the Holiday. Please phone us or go to our PDC website, www.partisandefense. org, and look under upcoming events for the time and location of Holiday Appeal benefits in Chicago, Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Toronto.

Support for class-war prisoners is not an act of charity, but the duty of those on the outside toward those inside prison walls. We ask at this time for all of our friends to consider becoming monthly sustainers to the PDC so we can continue our important work and ask that our loyal sustainers consider increasing their monthly donation.
At the Holiday Appeal benefits we will continue to highlight the case of death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As you may know the Supreme Court summarily refused to consider the documented racist jury-rigging in turning down Mumia's appeal, while considering the prosecutors' efforts to reinstate the death sentence. In 2001, federal district court judge Yohn overturned the death sentence on the basis of faulty jury instructions, under the authority of the 1988 Supreme Court Mills decision. Upon doing so Yohn deferred ruling on Mumia's other challenges to the death sentence. This means that if his ruling on the Mills issue is ultimately reversed, Mumia's case would go back to Yohn to rule on these other issues.

Ominously, while the Court sits on the prosecutor's appeal in Mumia's case, it recently held oral argument in the case of Ohio neo-Nazi Frank Spisak, in which the prosecution sought to reverse a lower court decision overturning the death sentence on the same Mills grounds. Eighteen state attorney generals, including from Pennsylvania and California have filed an amicus brief urging the court to rule against Spisak explicitly citing Mumia as another case where they, in effect, want an execution. We don't know when or how the Supreme Court will decide. The Supreme Court could decide the Spisak appeal without addressing the jury instructions issue. But, should they restore Spisak's death sentence by overturning the lower court on the Mills issue this would represent an ominous legal development for Mumia. Should that happen, Mumia would be a step closer to the death chamber, although it would probably take at least a year for this issue to wend its way through the courts. If at the end of that round of litigation, the court ultimately reverses Yohn and restores the death penalty, the case would again go back to Yohn to rule on Mumia's other challenges to the death sentence.

You may be aware, black Republican documentary film maker from Philadelphia, Tigre Hill, is preparing a movie against Mumia entitled The Barrel of a Gun. Its disgusting premise is that Mumia was itching to kill a cop since his teenage days in the Black Panthers and that he got his chance on December 9, 1981. The trailer features shots of Bobby Scale calling to "off the pig" and BPP cartoons interspersed with shots of Mumia and Faulkner. It was scheduled to be release on December 9 this year, but has been postponed so that Hill can document some important "new development."

One of the talking heads in this movie is Seth Williams, the newly elected District Attorney in Philadelphia. While it is hardly news that the Philadelphia DA's office is gung-ho to execute Mumia, Lynne Abraham, the Queen of Death, is stepping down and a black Democrat, Williams, will now replace her. Like all the other Philly DA candidates he was approached by (Obama's pal) Michael Smerconish as to what they would do if Mumia's case comes before him. Williams campaigned on the promise that he will seek to reinstate Mumia's death penalty. You will recall that if Yohn's decision stands, the DA has six months in which to go for a new sentencing or let his decision stand which gives Mumia life in prison without parole. So even if the Supreme Court does not rule against Mumia, he could be subjected to a new sentencing phase trial where prosecutors will try to get him killed.

Mumia is Innocent! Free Him Now!

As WV No. 941 said, "The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia's freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man in prison for more than half his life."