*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

*****Important  Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Commentary

The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.

The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.

*****

Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):

Mumia Is an Innocent Man Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty   Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 24 years, falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and mountains of evidence show this, including the confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, to the murder. All the elements of the capitalist “justice” system colluded in framing up this former Black Panther and MOVE supporter because he is an eloquent and defiant spokesman for the oppressed. The fight to free Mumia has now reached a critical juncture. Last December, the federal appeals court put Mumia’s case on a “fast track” for decision, marking the last stages of the legal proceedings. Both Mumia and prosecutors are appealing decisions made in 2001 by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned the death sentence but upheld every aspect of Mumia’s frame-up conviction. The state is as determined as ever to execute Mumia and has appealed. He has been barred by the courts from presenting evidence that he is innocent. But the district attorney filed legal papers in the federal appeals court in April, opening its case with a venomous, lying statement to portray Mumia as a cop-killer who must be executed. In a short time, even as soon as six months, the court could decide what is next for Mumia: death, life in prison or more legal proceedings. Mumia was locked up on death row in 1982 based on lying testimony extorted by the cops without a shred of physical evidence. The judge at his trial, Albert Sabo—known as the “King of Death Row”—was overheard by a court stenographer saying, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” Rigging the jury to exclude black people, the prosecution incited jurors with the grotesque lie that Mumia’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was committed to kill a cop “all the way back then.” The 1982 conviction was secured with arguments that the jury could disregard any doubts about Mumia’s guilt because he would have “appeal after appeal.” In nearly two decades of appeals, each and every court has rejected the reams of documented evidence of the blatant frame-up of Mumia. For over four years, Pennsylvania state as well as federal courts have refused to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December casts an ominous shadow. The legal lynching of Williams, which provoked an outcry nationally and internationally, signaled the determination of the U.S. capitalist rulers to fortify their machinery of death in the face of growing reticence in the population over how the death penalty is applied. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, is the executioners’ number one target. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this clear when, in denying clemency for Williams, he cited the fact that Williams’ 1998 book, Life in Prison, was dedicated to—among others—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s case demonstrates what the racist death penalty is all about. It is the lynch rope made legal, the ultimate weapon in the government’s arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. A legacy of chattel slavery, the death penalty is maintained in a society where the segregation of the majority of the black population is used as a wedge to divide the laboring masses and perpetuate the rapacious rule of capital. The murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system was displayed for all to see when thousands of people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mumia’s appeal takes place in the context of the government’s assertion of its “right” to disappear, torture or even assassinate its perceived opponents, and to wiretap and spy on anyone and everyone. In the name of the “war on terror,” rights won through tumultuous class and social battles are being put through the shredder by the Bush administration with the support of the Democratic Party. The purpose is to terrorize and silence any who would stand in the way of the capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits and their imperialist adventures, like the colonial occupation of Iraq. As Mumia’s case moves through the final stages of legal proceedings, the fight for his freedom is urgently posed. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—stands for pursuing every legal avenue in Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Through publicity and action, we have struggled to mobilize the broadest social forces, centered on the labor movement, to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty. As Mumia faced execution in August 1995, a mass outpouring of protest nationally and internationally—from civil liberties organizations and such heads of state as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to trade unions representing millions of workers—succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand. Today we face greater odds. But if undertaken through a mobilization based on the social power of the working class, the fight for Mumia’s freedom would be a giant step forward in the defense of all of us against the increasingly depraved and vicious rulers of this country.   Anatomy of a Frame-Up In the eyes of the capitalist state, from the time Mumia was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 1969, he was a dead man on leave. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pronounced: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This policy was carried out under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and the Republican Nixon administration. Under the FBI’s “counter-intelligence” program known as COINTELPRO, 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds of others framed up and railroaded to prison. The 900 pages of FBI files the PDC was able to obtain on Mumia’s behalf, even though highly expurgated, make clear that the FBI and cops used any “dirty trick” in their mission to get him. His every move was tracked and his name put on the FBI’s Security Index, the 1960s version of a “terrorist” hit list. Even with the demise of the Panthers, the state did not call off its vendetta against Mumia. As a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia’s impassioned defense of black rights continued to enrage them. The Philly cops particularly seethed over his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, which was subjected to an onslaught of state terror. Mumia was targeted for death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said. And in the early morning hours of 9 December 1981 at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, the cops finally saw their chance. Mumia was driving a cab through the area that night. He heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother and got out of his cab to help him. Moments later, Mumia was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest. Nearby lay a wounded police officer, Daniel Faulkner. The cops found their long-awaited opportunity and seized on it to frame up Mumia as a “cop killer.” The prosecution’s case rested on three legs, all based on lies: the testimony of “eyewitnesses” coerced through favors and terror; a “confession” purportedly made by Mumia the night of the shooting that was such a blatant hoax that it didn’t surface until months later; and nonexistent ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, this frame-up was completely blown to pieces with Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was the man who shot Faulkner. In a sworn affidavit printed in the PDC pamphlet Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!, Beverly stated:   “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.   “Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting.” Beverly stated that the second shooter also fled the scene. This is supported by a sworn affidavit by Mumia’s brother, Billy Cook, who testified that his friend Kenneth Freeman was a passenger in Cook’s VW at 13th and Locust that night. Freeman later admitted to Cook that he was part of the plan to kill Faulkner and had participated in the shooting and then fled the scene. This is further corroborated by the testimony of a witness at the scene, William Singletary, who said he saw a passenger get out of Cook’s VW, shoot Faulkner and then flee the scene. At least half a dozen witnesses who were on the scene the night of the shooting saw, from several different vantage points, one or more black men flee. Police radio “flashes” right after the shooting reported that the shooters had fled the scene with Faulkner’s gun. Five witnesses, including two cops, describe someone at the scene wearing a green army jacket, which both Beverly and Freeman were wearing that night. Neither Mumia nor Cook wore a green army jacket: Mumia wore a red ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes and Cook had a blue jacket with brass buttons. Beverly said that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. This is confirmed by no less an authority than the state Medical Examiner’s office, whose record written the same morning as the shooting quotes a homicide officer saying that Mumia was shot by “arriving police reinforcements,” not by Faulkner. Other witnesses have corroborated Beverly’s testimony that undercover and uniformed police were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, which Beverly assumed meant that they were in on the plan to kill Faulkner. One witness, Marcus Cannon, saw two undercover cops on the street across from the shooting. William Singletary also saw “white shirts” (police supervisors) at the scene right after the shots were fired. The prosecution dismisses the idea that the cops would kill one of their own as an outlandish invention. Leaving aside that Beverly passed two lie detector tests, his account fits with the fact that at the time of Faulkner’s killing in 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal investigations into police corruption in Philadelphia, including police connections with the mob. Police working as FBI informants were victims of hits in the early 1980s. A former federal prosecutor acknowledged that the Feds had a police informant whose brother was a cop, just as Faulkner had a brother who was a cop. A sworn affidavit by Donald Hersing, a former informant in an FBI investigation into police corruption, confirms that at the time of Faulkner’s shooting the word was out that the Feds had an informant in the police force. The commanding officer of the Central Police Division, where the murder of Faulkner took place, the chief of the police Homicide Division and the ranking officer at the scene of Faulkner’s killing, Alfonzo Giordano, were all under investigation at the time on federal corruption charges. These cops were literally the chain of command in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Giordano had been the right-hand man for Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police chief and later mayor, Frank Rizzo. From 1966 to 1970, Giordano was in charge of the cop “Stakeout” squad, which led the police raid on the Black Panthers’ headquarters in 1970. He was also the supervisor of the 15-month police siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village house in 1977-78, which resulted in nine MOVE members being sent to prison on frame-up charges of killing a cop. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was. The senior officer on the scene, he had both motive and opportunity to frame up Mumia for the killing of Faulkner. Giordano originated the claim that Mumia’s gun—the putative murder weapon—was lying beside him on the street. But according to police radio records, the cops were still looking for the gun some 14 minutes after hordes of police had arrived on the scene. Giordano arranged the identification of Mumia by cab driver Robert Chobert, who became a witness for the prosecution. Giordano was the central witness for the prosecution at Mumia’s pretrial hearing. But he was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. Shortly before the trial, he was assigned to a desk job. One working day after Mumia was convicted, Giordano resigned from the force. In 1986, Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on his receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs from 1979 to 1980. He didn’t spend a day in jail.   Prosecution’s Web of Lies The prosecution’s story is that two people were on the corner of 13th and Locust where Faulkner was shot: Mumia’s brother Billy Cook and Faulkner. They claim that Mumia ran across the street when he saw his brother being beaten by Faulkner. According to police and prosecutors, Mumia shot the cop in the back, the cop shot back at Mumia and then Mumia stood over the fallen cop and shot him “execution style” several times in the head. Even a close examination of the cops’ and prosecution’s own evidence gives the lie to this scenario. A look at the “three legs” of the prosecution’s case provides not only stark confirmation of Mumia’s innocence but clear corroboration of Beverly’s testimony. The Prosecution’s Witnesses: Even with police and prosecution threats and favors at the time of the 1982 trial, no witness testified to seeing Mumia actually shoot Faulkner. Only one, Cynthia White, the prosecution’s star witness, testified that she thought she saw a gun in Mumia’s hand when he crossed the street. A prostitute working in the area, White claimed to have witnessed the events from the southeast corner of 13th and Locust. Yet the other two prosecution witnesses, as well as two defense witnesses who knew White, all denied she was at the scene during the shooting! Other prostitutes testified in subsequent court hearings that White alternately got police favors or was threatened by police in order to extract her testimony. As for Robert Chobert, at first he told police that the shooter “ran away.” After further interrogation, he changed his story, claiming that Mumia stood over Faulkner while the shots were fired and that no one ran away. A cab driver using a suspended license while on probation for felony arson, Chobert was given favors by the prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He later admitted that he never saw the shooting. The third state witness was Michael Scanlan. He initially identified Mumia as the VW driver but then claimed that the shooter ran across Locust Street, which Beverly admits that he did. He also admitted that he did not know if Mumia was the man he saw. Ballistics and Forensics: The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence was “consistent” with Mumia’s gun being the murder weapon even while admitting that the “consistency” applied to millions of handguns. There is no evidence that Mumia’s gun was even fired that night. There was every opportunity to test Mumia’s hands, or the gun, for evidence that it had been recently fired. But according to police no such tests, which are standard operating procedure, were ever done! The Stakeout officer who claimed he picked up Mumia’s gun did not turn it over for more than two hours, providing more than ample time to have it tampered with. The Medical Examiner’s report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet, yet Mumia’s gun was a .38 calibre. Although the crime lab claimed that the main bullet fragment removed from Faulkner’s head was too damaged to test, the defense team’s ballistics expert denied this. A second bullet fragment removed from the head wound simply disappeared without a trace. Evidence at the scene—bullet fragments, blood stains, the absence of divots in the sidewalk—refutes the prosecution claim that Faulkner was shot repeatedly while lying on the ground. The bullet patterns are far more consistent with multiple shooters, as Beverly testifies. A copper bullet jacket found at the scene was inconsistent with either Faulkner’s or Mumia’s guns, suggesting that a different gun was fired. Similarly, type O blood was found at the scene, but Faulkner, Mumia and Cook were all type A, suggesting that another person was present and injured. The angle of Mumia’s own wounds is impossible if he was shot while standing over Faulkner as the prosecution claimed. However, Mumia’s wounds are consistent with Beverly’s testimony that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. The “Confession”: The frame-up’s final leg was the claim that Mumia, lying in a pool of blood at the hospital where he was taken for treatment, shouted out that he had shot the cop. Yet the police officer assigned to guard Mumia there reported that same day that Mumia “made no comments.” In reality, he was so badly wounded, with a bullet hole through one lung, and had been so badly beaten by police on the street and at the hospital, that he could not have “shouted” anything. The “confession” was manufactured by the prosecution at a roundtable meeting with cops two months after the shooting. Priscilla Durham, a security guard, was the only hospital employee who backed up the cops’ “confession” lie. In 2003 Durham’s stepbrother Kenneth Pate swore that Durham said she was pressured by the cops to say Mumia confessed. Pate also said Durham heard Mumia say, “Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me.” Mumia Abu-Jamal has always categorically maintained his innocence. As he declared in a 2001 affidavit: “I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent…. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to.” Mobilize Now to Free Mumia! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state. Its justice system is class- and race-biased to the core. The cops and courts who framed up this innocent man, the living tomb of the prison system in which he is jailed, the executioner who stands ready to kill—all are instruments of organized violence used to preserve the rule of the capitalist class through the forcible suppression of the working class and oppressed. Smashing this racist frame-up machine will require a socialist revolution that overturns the capitalist system. Demands for a “new trial” which have been raised by liberals, self-proclaimed socialist organizations, black nationalists and others have fed illusions that there can be justice in the capitalist courts. Those illusions demobilized a movement of millions around the world in Mumia’s defense. The time is now to rekindle mass protest—nationally and internationally—on behalf of Mumia. Mumia’s freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged “justice” system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. The power that can turn the tide is the power of millions—working people, anti-racist youth, death penalty abolitionists—united in struggle to demand the freedom of this innocent man. Crucial to this perspective is the mobilization of the labor movement, whose social power derives from its ability to shut down production. As we have stated since we first took up Mumia’s defense in the mid 1980s, what’s necessary are labor-centered united-front actions, generating effective protest across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring all the right to have their own say. The time is now to make Mumia’s case a rallying cry against the racist death penalty, against black oppression, against government repression. Raise your voice and organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! —Partisan Defense Committee, 27 May 2006

An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)



The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.

Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.

Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.

Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.

I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.

Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Yeah, the Baron, Baron Haussmann if you need a name to go with the damage, the social damage done, had done a good job, a damn good job of breaking up beloved Paris with his squeaky clean street lines and wide boulevards. Yeah, changed the face of Paris, the Paris of squalid throw your leavings out the window and heaven help who is below, and heaven help what awful thing was thrown down to the trash-filled streets. The Paris of funny crooked cul de sac streets, which reflected the add-ons over centuries to make a great city from the piss-pot small town back in the Middle Ages when the university was the center of attraction and the good bourgeois in embryo were trying to hold off the barbarians, the wayward no account peasant drifters who snuck off the land, or tried to in order to sulk and menace in the shadows down by the Seine, the river of life and of intrigue.

The Paris of the small craftsman working his trade in some lonely workshop, maybe an indentured apprentice by his side if the craft was skilled enough to warrant such service, his “home” and hearth in the back rooms where the dutiful wife and undutiful screaming children scratched out their pitiful existence. Said craftsman working furiously always brow-beaten worrying about being edged out by Monsieur So and So with plenty of capital and fifty men in his employ underselling him by virtue of economy of scale (or just plain greed at having anybody even a single slave craftsman in his “invisible hand” market place). The Paris too of the jack-roller, the pick-pocket, the wharf rats, the tavern-dwellers, the drifters, the grifters, and the midnight sifters along the shallow shadows of that same beloved Seine     

He, Jean Villon, was called Jean-bon out of respect for his courage under fire in the hell-hole barricade days of 1848  when he and his neighbors, all working-men, held out to the last when the vicious petty-bourgeois who would have benefited most from victory deserted the barricades and he and his took to their fallen losses and jail cells with equanimity (he and his comrades ever after called ‘48ers and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town). And called Jean-bon as well for his general good humor when he was not talking politics or scheming the next plot that would bring on the newer world that he and his brethren were seeking. This morning he had had to laugh about the changes in the Rue Madeleine, the urine-laned street where he grew up, about the smell to high heaven of tanning chemicals, rough blacksmith coals, clothe dyes, slaughtered cattles and poultries. Laughed too that in those days, the days before the Baron got the itch (Baron dreams prodded on by ’89 dreams of san-culottes crowds demanding his head on a platter, or maybe just his head any way they could get it preferably via the people’s justice of the guillotine and more recent close calls in ‘48) none of the government’s men dared to enter those quarters even to look for the treasonous or seditious whoever was in power was always nervously pacing the floor about (it did not matter-king-premier-emperor-they all nervously paced their respective floors).

Yeah, back then nothing but crooked little streets leading to harmless little cafes, where he, workingman Villon held “court” with the riff-raff so-called of the old society. Calmly and cautiously quartered where no king’s men would bother to penetrate for they might not come back. Villon descended in some cousin-age degree never quite figured out back to the 15^th century from the outlaw poet mad monk bastard saint Francois Villon who wrote longing "exile in his own country" verse with one hand and stole whatever was not nailed down with the other a fact which Jean never tired of pointing out when back in the day, back in ‘48 on the barricades when it counted comrades would wonder whether his revolutionary energies were flagging and he would drag out his pedigree to small-mouthed scoffs and tittles.

Yeah, the Baron was a slick one tearing down the old quarters to let the rising petty-bourgeois have their elegant apartments tucked away from the steamy stinking markets, the riff-raff cafes, the shadow men of the Seine. Let the bourgeoisie laugh in their clubs about how the riff-raff, meaning their working-men, those who slaved for them, those they had fired for being what some wag called “master-less men” for their habit of robbing said masters whenever the shadows fell, and robbing the once innocent peasant girls who followed in their train and cast their fate with the lot of their virtue, would get a belly-full of lead from the phalanx encircling infantry the next time they tried to pull up brick number one in order to build a barricade.

Although for a while when Thiers, that wizened troll who never uttered anything but treacherous remarks and never stopped for one minute to give the orders to  send whatever troops against the barricades which remained loyal to keep him in power. Rammed those troops against the brave Paris communards of blessed memory back in 1871 when the frightened bourgeoisie realized that the barricades could still be constructed when the working-men rose up in righteous anger at the betrayals put upon them. (Those communards like their earlier brethren of ’48 called communards and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town.)

But those days were long gone now. The Baron had won, had won his victory over the riff-raff and Jean-bon Villon knew it would be a long time before the blood of the communards dried. Dried and avenged.  

 

Now the picture before Villon as he walked along Rue Madeline a place foreign to his eyes this rainy Sunday morning is that of prosperous petty bourgeois walking under the shadows of their handsome umbrellas along the well-trodden brick-laid slippery street taking in the sullen airs of the day. Each pair, male and female from a rough look at the scene, in their own world heading perhaps to some café breakfast (under awnings this morning) maybe going to the gardens up the road. Villon, the old revolutionary, looking down and noticing that every spattered brick had been inlaid (although that never stopped them from tearing them up in the old days), noticed that  as one wag put it that now the streets were big enough for all of Paris without regard to class to walk and fete wherever they cared to. Here is the waggish joke though, except for some ragman with his cur of a dog his sort were nary to be seen on these wet streets and intersections. Yeah, the Baron did his work well.      

A Town Without Pity-Spencer Tracy’s Bad Day At Bad Rock (1955)-A Film Review

A Town Without Pity-Spencer Tracy’s Bad Day At Bad Rock (1955)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Bad Day At Bad Rock, starring Spenser Tracy, Robert Ryan, 1955

No question the internment of every Japanese person who could be found on the West Coast during the early days of World War II whatever their beliefs, whatever their loyalty to America, aided by the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court rubber-stamping that executive decision, was a dark day for the vaunted American values and adherence to a belief in civil liberties. (And if anybody wants to say that the governmental action then was an aberration look at the plight of most Moslems here these days in post-9/11 America.) Despite that injustice one would not assume that those actions would be the backdrop for a 1955 film, Bad Day At Bad Rock, which obliquely addresses the whole question in a dramatic way.

John MacCreedy, played by Spenser Tracy, is a man on a mission, an undisclosed mission through most of the film, as he gets off the train in some Podunk town in the Southwest. This town, like a lot of towns which are isolated out in the sticks, and insulated too, had citizens very unfriendly to our man. All he wants is to be able to contact a resident of the town, a Japanese-American, in the immediate post-World War II period. This fact sets off a train of events that by the end will make it very dicey about whether MacCreedy will get out of the town alive. But before that he stirs up some hidden past that many of the townspeople are trying to forget-or at least not rake up again. The leader of this town, a large ranch owner named Reno Smith, played by Robert Ryan, orchestrates the negative attitude that MacCreedy finds at every turn as he doggedly looks for that missing Japanese man whom he wants to find. At the beginning everybody, standing in fear of Reno, or indifferent to MacCreedy fate, stonewalls him at every point. Then slowly as the injustices to his person mount up and the citizens get tired of Reno’s overweening antics a few brave souls help MacCreedy. But in Reno’s eyes MacCreedy is a loose cannon, has to be gotten rid of-and fast. 

The attempts to murder MacCreedy, there is no other way to put the matter, naturally failed as Reno went down, literally, in a blaze of fire. You might ask why Reno and his accomplices were so adamant about kicking MacCreedy out of town. After Pearl Harbor Reno’s hatred of “Japs” was uncontrollable (especially after he was turned down when he tried to enlist) and after a drunken spree he had killed the “Jap.” That madness known to the residents either through direct knowledge or fear, was why the townspeople were so suspicious of MacCreedy. And Mac’s mission-to give a Japanese father the posthumous medal his son had won saving MacCreedy’s life in Italy where laid down his head as an American soldier (there actually was a famous Japanese unit that fought all the battles in Italy and grabbed a ton of medals and commendations. Nice plot-line to make that point-a point that bears repeating today.            

*Etta James Is In The House- One More Time

Click on the title to link to YouTube's film clip of Etta James performing "I'd Rather Go Blind". Sorry, I could not find ""Please, No More" except by Joe Cocker.

CD Review

Let’s Roll, Etta James, Sony BMG Europe, 2003



The name Etta James goes back in my memory to associations with my first listening to rock music on the old transistor radio in the late 1950’s. At that time, I believe, her music was in the old doo wop tradition of the late 1950’s, a music that I was fairly soon to dismiss out of hand as the ‘bubble gum’ music that was prevalent in that period between the height of Elvis/Jerry Lee/Carl Perkins classic rock & rock and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That is where things were left until a dozen years ago or more when Etta ‘stole the show’ at the Newport Folk Festival. Well, we live and learn.

The stand outs here include: the rocking “Business Is Good,” the saucy “Lie No Better,” and Etta at her gospelly, bluesy best on “Please, No More”. Wow on that last one. That is worth the price of admission here.

"Please No More"- Joe Cocker Lyrics

We start a fight, who knows what for
Who knows who's winning, or who's keeping score
You say it's all right, as you slam the door
All I can say is, "Please no more, please no more."

I've had enough after how I swore
I'd never give you up
Loving you was easy, but one thing's for sure
It ain't me, it ain't me, you're trying to please no more.

Passions will burn, burn endlessly
All that's left behind are these broken dreams
While I still got some pieces laid out on the floor
I'm asking you baby, "Please no more, please no more."

I've had enough, after how I swore
I'd never give you up
Loving you was easy, but one thing's for sure
It ain't me, it ain't me, you're trying to please no more.

*Etta James Is In The House- Again

Click on the title to link to YouTube's film clip of Etta James performing "Born Under A Bad Sign".

CD Review

Life, Love And The Blues, Etta James, Sbme Special Mkts., 1998



The name Etta James goes back in my memory to associations with my first listening to rock music on the old transistor radio in the late 1950’s. At that time, I believe, her music was in the old doo wop tradition of the late 1950’s, a music that I was fairly soon to dismiss out of hand as the ‘bubble gum’ music that was prevalent in that period between the height of Elvis/Jerry Lee/Carl Perkins classic rock & rock and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That is where things were left until a dozen years ago or more when Etta ‘stole the show’ at the Newport Folk Festival. Well, we live and learn.

The stand outs here include: the blues rocker “Born Under A Bad Sign,” Willie Dixon’s classic “Spoonful,” and Etta’s own version of the Dixon/Muddy Waters classic, “Hoochie Goochie Gal”. Not her best album, by any means, but solid.


Born Under A Bad Sign
by Booker T. Jones / William Bell

Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck,
I wouldn't have no luck at all

Hard luck and trouble is my only friend
I been on my own ever since I was ten
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck,
I wouldn't have no luck at all

I can't read, haven't learned how to write
My whole life has been one big fight
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck,
I wouldn't have no luck at all

I ain't lyin'
If it wasn't for bad luck
I wouldn't have no kind-a luck
If it wasn't for real bad luck,
I wouldn't have no luck at all

Wine and women is all I crave
A big legged woman is
gonna carry me to my grave
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck,
I wouldn't have no luck at all

Yeah, my bad luck boy
Been havin' bad luck all of my days, yes

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday December 17th

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

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday December 17^th      

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 cypher to the general population. The case like all high publicity and high stakes political prisoner cases had been front and center for a while, say from the time of the Wikileaks exposes with their endless documentation of the nefarious activities of the American and other governments in covering up everything that could be covered up in order as both Ralph and Bart knew from their short Army experiences to “cover your ass” to the verdict and sentence at trial. After that unfortunately even some supporters drift away and the thing becomes yesterday’s news in the welter of some new case (here the Snowden case took a lot of the air out since his revelations were current unlike Chelsea’s which dealt with pass atrocities and had personal effects on almost everybody in the cyberspace universe meaning almost everybody). Yesterday’s news to everybody but the defendant who has to do the hard time while the attorneys sniff around for issues on the long drawn out appeal. That is the hard reality of political prisoner cases, especially when it seems the trial was “fair” and the defendant had been convicted of a crime after all.

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. They had urged everybody who had not done so to sign the on-line petition to President Obama (see link above) to commute her sentence to “time served.” That on-line petition needed one hundred thousand signatures in order to get an official response from the White House about the matter (it also had to be done in a thirty day period). They were still short so hence the urgency of their calls. 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. (She had as well under some bizarre Army logic been “sentenced” to fourteen days in solidarity for the first attempt-Jesus, figures both men had blurred out when they heard that news earlier in the fall.)         

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 gung-ho wife as soon as he got out of the Army, or maybe she divorced him but the parting was in any case acrimonious and threats had emanated from those two lifer brother after he had been arrested in Cambridge at the draft board along with a bunch of Quakers and other angry gentle people), to go down and get arrested during the May Day actions. Bart’s anti-war girlfriend, Josie, a lovely gentle woman from, if you can believe this, Manhattan although she like a lot of NYC kids went west to Wisconsin for college, had been met at the Morning Report coffeehouse located just outside of Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston when they were part of an action to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s “hot” Pentagon Papers. Pretty good credentials to start an affair in those days. (Ironically forty years later Daniel Ellsberg would be one of Chelsea Manning’s most fervent public supporters raising a ton of money so that she could have a complete transcript of all the pre-trial and trial work. A very expensive proposition without “angels” gathered by Ellsberg to fund the effort of what would become the longest trial and number of volumes of transcripts in Army history.)

Ralph’s girlfriend, Sarah, had been a woman who he had known in high school in Troy but who after leaving the town and heading to Skidmore blossomed into a fervent anti-war activist. He had met her in Albany when the local Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) whichhe had joined was staging a silent march through the streets of that city and she had helped plan the event. The lived together for a few years before she got weary once again of Troy and headed west. He would even now run into her when several years ago she returned from the Wet after her husband had passed away among the small diehard crowd of peace activists who could be counted on to show up at events in that section of upstate New York.         

That 1971 May Day event which was in some ways decisive in both men’s understanding of how hard the struggle against the American war machine was going to be. In those desperate times when it seemed like the Vietnam War would never end (seemed endless although now with Afghanistan entering its sixteenth year the record for endless had definitely been extended) they tried to help shut down the government if it would not shut down the war-the Vietnam War. All they got was tear gas, police batons and several days in RFK stadium for their efforts. Totally unprepared for the vicious governmental response when under threat. Ralph and Bart had met on the floor of the stadium when Ralph had noticed that Bart had his VVAW pin on and had asked where he was from (where he “hailed from” was the way Ralph put it) and had become fast friends over the years-with the usual periods of absence from each other’s lives when family commitments got too heavy. 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 as previously mentioned 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. That was Chelsea’s public persona then before she came out as a transgender woman.

In the old days they had also gone along with the “better dead that red,” “if your mommy is a commie turn her in” red scare dark age Cold War night, “the night of the night-takers” Ralph had called that time one night when told Bart how he had stood shoulder to shoulder with his father trying to get some poor bedraggled family out of the Forsythe Street neighborhood because they were some kind of “reds” (he later had also stood shoulder to should with his father and neighbor when blacks tried to move into the neighborhood in the mid-1960s). As far as the sexual preference-sexual identity stuff went in the old days the best term they could think of to describe their respective attitudes toward gays was “faggot and dyke”-Jesus. Trans-genders did not compute didn’t come up on the radar and were dismissed as transvestites and weirdos whenever Bart would see them strutting their stuff around the Boston Common on Saturday nights. One time he and his boys had gone to Provincetown, P-town then as now the summer Mecca in New England for LGBTQers, dressed in drag just to “lure” the guys down there (and who knows for  what non-drunken reason-could have been insecurities about their own sexual identities they after all were only late teenagers so who knows)   

(That whole Chelsea gay-transgender 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 in charge of handling the 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 having a few shots to ward away the cold of the day’s events both had been a bit morose. (Ralph has after bouncing around on the West Coast and New York City for years picking up wives along the way after that last divorce moved back to hometown Troy after he father was too ill to care for himself and then after he passed away took over the family house which looks with few updates almost like it had back in the days when Ralph and his father were “smoking” out reds, commies, and holding blacks at arm’s length side by side on old Forsythe Street.) The event had gone as well as could be expected for a political prisoner case that was three years removed from the serious public eye. Ralph and Bart both speculated that there must be something like a law of diminishing returns on these types of cases once the verdict and sentence has been rendered and the mainstream media move on to the next 24/7 event that just has to be covered. Of course then the prisoner is left to fight his or her future battles out of the public as paper-heavy appeals slowly work their way through  the court systems. The winter holiday season is particularly tough as Bart knew when he was sentenced to thirty days for “criminal trespass” and to show jailhouse solidarity all six convicts decided to not pay the fine and went to jail instead. The winter holidays were when the sentences came up and although Bart was not a big fan of Christmas not being able to celebrate the occasion made the time that much tougher.   

As the pair sat, talked, and compared notes they found that the usual small coterie of “peace activists” had shown up and a few who were supporting Chelsea as a fellow transgender to listen to 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-the petition in the end got the 100, 000 on-line signatures it needed in order for the White House to be required to officially respond to the request-here the commutation of Chelsea’s sentence to “time served”). (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. This in the days before the U.S Supreme Court rulings in favor of gay marriage. The twice divorced Ralph and three times divorced mumbled to themselves over that one. Moreover there was some push back about her actions being traitorous and/or that she was “grandstanding”-Jesus).

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. If Obama ignored her case, the likely situation before January 20^th then she was in for a very long wait before there was any realistic possibility of clemency again. 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. The last stand-out across from the main entrance to the base had been one of the few times that Ralph, and remember he was in Vietnam for a year and they both had faced down the brunt of the action when the cops went berserk on May Day, 1971, had been afraid, hell, scared, at what might have occurred if the government had used the full force it had on hand. Had been personally afraid of some “bad shit” coming down since the cops looked like they were ready for bear. As it was there were a few dozen arrests and some very forceful pushing around by the cops and MPs. Barr mentioned at the time that they should have known there was going to be trouble for they had parked up the road at the Marine museum which turned out to be a staging area for the governmental forces and there had seemingly been contingents from every local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the D.C. area. All in all an incredible array of cops and military personnel all to “monitor” a few hundred supporters. Bart figured out later that unlike in D.C. where some kind of demonstration, sit-I, acts of deliberate civil disobedience are all in a day’s work for the security forces out in the boondocks of nowhere Triangle, Virginia they were not used to such activity and frankly over-reacted.

There had also been trips to the White House to proclaim their message as part of various other ‘anti-war actions, including the time they were arrested when they had hand-cuffed (plastic hand-cuffed, okay) themselves to the iron fence that surrounds the White House. (They paid the fines after being held for a few hours processing through-there should have been cops from Virginia there to see what proper reaction to non-violent demonstrations are like). 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). Those trips in summer heat which affected Bart considerably were to sit in the court room and show Chelsea physical solidarity while she was going through the arduous trial. (The trial itself on a day to day basis was like any other such event rather boring except at points like the time the defense had the full thirty-nine minutes of the damning video called Collateral Murder where helicopter gun crews in their search for enemies blew away some unarmed civilians-and laughed about it afterwards.) Of course the weekly vigils for almost three years at various locations around Boston and the suburbs 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 Ralph and Bart 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.