*****For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”-Join The Resistance!

*****For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Although Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy, New York when he retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960, but having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, and had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.    

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011 travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after the then reigning mayor and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise). Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was thereafter when the movement imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which did much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how each generation will face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Here working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well.       

A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

***Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, those who have just plain quit looking for work and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions when the union-run hiring hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level,  and equitably divide up current work.

Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes it such a powerful propaganda tool-without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

 

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce and less in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production.  Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. (Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the North American auto industry employs almost a million workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the industry was union tight.)

The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American service-oriented  economy. Everyone should support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For $15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

 
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution center workers, the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more thoughtful moments,  once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point that’s a thought.

 

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Defeat all “right to work” legislation. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

*** Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very stray   Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich, make that the very rich but don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a back seat to the elephants on this one. The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement. They always have their hands out.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One egregious example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down when the deal goes down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the anti-union backs (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

 

***End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer to the initial stage if the opposition that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (common moniker for the Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings In Syria, Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear arms talks  American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran and Syria is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe us we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, like Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

 

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get the drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

***Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states whatever political disagreements we may have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has already been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take a big chuck from the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast into some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

***We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Preacher man, don't tell me,

Heaven is under the earth.

I know you don't know

What life is really worth.

It's not all that glitters is gold;

'Alf the story has never been told:

So now you see the light, eh!

Stand up for your rights. come on!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,

Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.

But if you know what life is worth,

You will look for yours on earth:

And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!

Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )

Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )

Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )

Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )

Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )

Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -

Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.

We know when we understand:

Almighty god is a living man.

You can fool some people sometimes,

But you can't fool all the people all the time.

So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),

We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )

Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )

Get up, stand up!

Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )

Get up, stand up! (... )

Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )

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We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review By Ralph Morris (2012)

One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
 

Admit it, back in the late seventies and early eighties we all had, Sam and me included, our reggae minute, at least a minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when that moved onto the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.

Well not quite. Of late the Occupy movement, the people risen, has done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , have resurrected Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems, somehow, eminently right. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (yah, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight too.

Originally Posted 10th February 2012 on Amazon  

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!

 

*****Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now!    

 

 

 

 

***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now! 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized like the mass of autoworkers into unions) and others like Deportee (in serious need of a renewed hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal out of this system, it ain’t pretty), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations that has not happened again in the long “night of the long knives” since the 1970s), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart’s imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom  come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “economic royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name even one musical one today in America carrying that designation unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.”

Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new lifestyle  that could not have been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not now ) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (Markin, is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

 I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with go through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always only in our dope-flamed moments either.)

Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common when things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla America (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston and hence Maine radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up the Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil, in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was as evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.

*****International Women's Day, 1916;A From The Archives Of Women And Revolution

*****International Women's Day, 1916;A From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

 
-Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


****
International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

We reprint below a statement of greetings from the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women, an internationalist oppositional grouping within the French social democracy, on International Women's Day 1916. It is translated from the version published by the Gruppe Internationale, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches, in the illegal Spartacusbriefe (No. 17, 30 March 1916).


Following the definitive betrayal by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the outbreak of World War I, when its entire Reichstag fraction (initially including even such revolutionists as Karl Liebknecht, who misguidedly yielded to considerations of party "discipline" and "unity") voted the war credits demanded by the government, the minority of revolutionary -internationalists within the party were reduced to tiny, isolated propaganda groups without a party press or a party apparatus.

"Without an organization," said Lenin, "the masses are deprived of the sole expression of their will." The task, then, which the left radicals in the German social democracy faced, was the creation of an organization that might begin to overcome the atomization of the working class. This task had to be accomplished under conditions of illegality and against the old party leadership which, in its fear of such attempts to reach the masses of disfranchised party members, had imposed a moratorium on all discussion and criticism of the "official" line and refused to hold the yearly party congresses required by SPD statutes.

Coinciding with the increasing class collaboration of the party executive from 1910 onward had been a cessation in the growth of party membership (indeed, membership would have dropped, for the first time ever, had it not been for disproportionate recruitment of women). The large masses of non-organized workers were unwilling to take risks for a party whose timidity had emboldened employers to ever harsher attacks on their living standards.

The SPD section for work among women led by Clara Zetkin constituted a laudable exception to the party's general drift to the right (see "Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy," Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9, Spring and Summer; 1975). While subscriptions to the central party press were falling off, Zetkin's Die Gleichheit ("Equality") was able to chalk up a large increase in subscribers; similarly, it was undoubtedly Zetkin's activizing radicalism which in large measure accounted for the growth in women members—an indication that the SPD's capitulation to national chauvinism was not an expression of the "will of the masses" but rather of the revisionist leadership's default of socialist principle.

But Zetkin was able to carry on her fight for socialist international working-class solidarity in the forum of Die Gleichheit only for a short time longer; with the collaboration of the Prussian authorities the party leadership was able to gain control, install a compliant editor and proceed to run the journal into the ground. Circulation fell off sharply, and soon Die Gleichheit was suspended.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee is of interest not merely for its uncompromising interna¬tional proletarian solidarity in the midst of the chauvinist hysteria of the imperialist holocaust but also for the solutions it advances to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Revolted by the quiescence and then by the outright betrayal of the party leadership and correctly viewing the masses as far more revolutionary than this petty-bourgeoisified leadership, many revolutionists over¬reacted by adopting a theory of mass revolutionary initiative exemplified by the "spontaneism" of Rosa Luxemburg. According to this view, the party was to be primarily an educational organization, providing leadership when the masses did decide on their own to initiate the final collapse of capitalism.

Such glorification of the masses' undirected revolutionary will led the social-democratic lefts to downplay the role of proletarian leadership. Thus, Luxemburg could write in 1910, when the SPD party executive was throttling mass demonstrations in favor of electoral reform: "If the mass of party comrades comprehends and truly feels this [the need for militant struggle], then our leaders will also be found at their posts. 'It's the masses that are decisive'."

Similarly, in the Paris Action Committee's statement, there is the belief that the old social democracy will somehow be revived and reconstituted "from below." A complementary error was the divided left social-democrats' neglect of the crucial need for organiza¬tional unity achieved on a firm programmatic basis.

But the theoretical/organizational failings of the social-democratic left opposition display a deeper inadequacy: a failure to come to grips with the changed conditions generated by the dominance of imperialism by the turn of the century. In foreign affairs imperialism had meant an unprecedented aggressiveness of the major capitalist powers, posing an imminent threat of world imperialist conflict. Internally, the dominance of monopoly cartels interpenetrated with bank capital found reflection within the German Second Reich in a closing of ranks by the capitalist exploiters and an unparalleled intransigence toward the labor move¬ment. Now, for example, lockouts were financed by a joint fund set up by all significant German industry. This hard-nosed stance of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the social-democratic threat found expression politi¬cally in a strengthening of the reactionary bloc between industry and the East Elbran junkers with the aim of excluding the SPD from parliament. Within the labor movement itself, imperialism was accompanied by increasing divisions within the working class—not only industrialist-fostered "yellow unionism" but also what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" of relatively well-paid workers.

In the face of this challenge, the German social democracy remained tied to its old policy of verbal militancy and practical impotence. In particular, the entire left still clung to the Kautskyan theory of the "party of the entire class," i.e., including both those backward, reactionary layers which had not even achieved trade-union consciousness and a labor aristocracy whose relatively, elevated status made it prone to accept the status quo. Proponents of proletarian "unity" overlooked the fact that backward and non-revolutionary layers in the party would certainly generate spokesmen for their views within the party leadership.

While the Gruppe Internationale, which published this greeting, consisted of uncompromising revolution¬ists who were to found the German Communist Party, in failing to lend an organizational form to their views, they could offer no real solution to the social-democratic betrayal of the SPD leadership. It was only in the codification of Bolshevik practice in the early Comintern (particularly in the "Theses on Tactics" and "Guidelines on Organization") that the division between maximum and minimum program, enunciat¬ed in the Erfurt Program of 1891, was to be transcended in the creation of a party of a new type, the Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, in which a conscious leadership of professional revolutionaries would be able to intervene decisively at crucial world-historical junctures precisely because it rested on an alert, class-conscious rank and file. Not Kautskyan "unity"-mongering, but such tactics as the united front simultaneously unmasked the old social-democratic misleaders and achieved working-class unity around the achievement of particular shared, strictly limited goals.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women reprinted below is thus essentially a backward-looking document, harking back to the great traditions of the Second International and attempting to preserve a synthesis—"the great socialist family"— that had been first eroded and then dissolved by a triumphant imperialism. But the Second International had died in an act of definitive class-collaborationist betrayal. It was the Third International which was to continue the fight for international proletarian revolu¬tion through the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war directed against the international bourgeoisie under the leadership of an effective and disciplined international party of the working class.

To socialist and proletarian women of all countries the Committee sends an expression of its warmest sympathy on International Women's Day. From the ' bottom of its heart it hopes and desires that a great many socialist women's organizations will succeed— more freely and openly than it has itself been able to— in calling upon women everywhere to express their dearest wish, the wish for an immediate end to the frightful struggle that for 19 months now has been inundating the world in blood, and in uttering in numerous mass meetings with a clear voice the, word "peace" tabooed in our country.

We feel ourselves in solidarity with the socialist proletarians of the so-called enemy nations, with the proletarians whom we no more confuse with their exploiters than we would be confused with our own hangmen. We feel this solidarity the more strongly the more zealously our own, our true enemies, the capitalists, strive to incite us against foreign proletari¬ans. Thus under the present conditions it is particularly to the socialist and proletarian women of countries at war with us and especially to the proletarian women of Germany that we offer the assurance of our most heartfelt, warmest sympathy, and above all to Clara Zetkin and all the women comrades who, heroically and inspired with glowing conviction, are struggling for socialism and for peace without counting the costs to themselves.

The Committee renews the vow of proletarian solidarity made by its members at the time of their entry into the great socialist family. To each and every one it sends fraternal greetings, sad, painful greetings, but greetings supported by the unshakable belief in the future of the proletariat.

For the Committee: Louise Saumoneau, Paris

The Average Joe Fall Guy Falls-With Kansas City Confidential In Mind

The Average Joe Fall Guy Falls-With Kansas City Confidential In Mind

By Bart Webber 

No question Joe Rolfe, formerly Joey Bops, was built for the frame, built for that frame to fit snuggly around his head. Not that Joe was stupid, far from it he had received his high school diploma and was in his first year of college when December 7, 1941 happened, when the world changed and he was all wrapped in the mess. Not that Joe wasn’t brave either since he received a couple of big military ribbons all shiny bright as a result of his service. And not that he wasn’t good-looking, good-looking to girls good-looking and so always had a girl on his arm in the old days before the war. Still when the deal went down Joey always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, always seemed to be the fall guy falling.

It had not always been like that. Before the war, during high school, during the days when he wore the moniker Joey Bops since he was crazy for swing music, you know Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, guys like that, when he hung around with Frankie Riley, James Riordan, Lefty Kelly, and Rusty Shea in front of Harry’s Drugstore in Carterville, that’s out in “show me” Missouri, he could do no wrong. He and what did they call them then, oh yeah, the corner boys, led by the ingenious Frankie Riley, “Sparks” Riley, would carry out every midnight caper in search of loot that one could think of and never got in trouble with the law, any that would wind up on the books. Not even when the very, very suspicious Carterville police thought they had the lot of them nailed tight for the heist at the Lamar mansion. Yeah those were the days when even nice Catholic girls who went to church every Sunday and for the public record said their rosaries and swore they had a Bible between their knees at all other times would that previous Saturday night give up what they had had to give up, those sweet pussies, when they went out on a date with a Harry’s Drugstore corner boy they knew some nice jewelry or maybe some dough would go with the giving that sweet thing up. And good-looking Joey Bops got all he wanted, even from those Bible-worn girls, maybe especially from them.      

But the war, well, the war changed Joey Bops a lot, like I said, Joey had seen a lot of action in Europe, had gotten those medals, those well-earned medals, but he had lost a step, had lost the beat, maybe the be-bop beat of his youth, but most importantly the beat of how to beat the rap on some midnight adventure. Once he got home, after the fanfare was over and he went back to being just average Joey Rolfe citizen, after he decided all he saw and did in Europe made it kind of silly for him to go back to State U even though the newly enacted GI Bill would have pulled him through like it would many other ex-soldiers, he kind of lost his moorings and figured that he would go back to that sweet life of crime. Maybe it was because he went solo (the other corner boys had all dispersed, gone on, except Rusty Shea who was buried over in France during the war after being killed by a German mortar), maybe it was because he had lost the touch, maybe it was because he was crazy to hit a foolish gas station but Joey, Joey Bops of all people, got pegged for the robbery, armed robbery, when he tried to pull the caper just as a cop car was passing by Fred’s Esso station. So Joey got a nickel, did three and that was that.          

That was that until he got out, got his probation. Got himself into another town, got himself into the city, the big city, Kansas City, where he picked up a job delivering flowers, simple stuff, but one of the few jobs an ex-con on probation could get-driving a truck. But getting that job turned out to be the kiss of death for old Joey. See one of the delivery stops that he made was to Jones’ Funeral Home, not the one on Center Street in K.C. but over on Main, next to the First National Bank. One day while he was parked out front of Jones’ delivering a rack of roses for some departed soul next door the bank was being robbed in broad daylight by some guys in masks. They got away with half a million in cool hard cash (just walking around money today but then real dough). Got away clean in a sweet job. Naturally the coppers looking around saw Joey’s silly flower truck, checked it and him out, and once they found out that he was an ex-con and had served time they took him downtown (and they had contacted as well the Carterville cops who put the blast on him for all the crimes that they couldn’t prove he committed). There he stayed for a couple of weeks until the coppers found enough information about the robbery plan to know that he was not part of the caper and they had to let him go.

Here’s the lesson Joey learned though from that experience he was never going to be able to go straight if he didn’t find out who pulled the First National Bank caper. (Or if he decided to go crooked again he would always have that fall guy tag on him for any “cold cases” the cops caught nothing on and he would spent many nights before those stupid police lights blaring line-ups.)  So hunting down the guys who did the deed was his next “career.” His new reason to get up in the morning. For this he needed a little help, help from the only private detective that he could afford at the time, Philip Larkin. Phil had been a guy that he met in the Army overseas and they had been transported home on the troop ships together landing in New York Harbor, spent a few days getting drunk as skunks and laid seven different ways including Joe’s first blow job in a long time, since before the world when some of those Catholic girls in Carterville who didn’t want to “do the do” would piece a guy off with some head to save their reputations, as virgins and yet at the same time as willing to be frisky, and you can figure what that “frisky” part meant  as best you can. They then parted Joe to Carterville and the slammer and Phil up north to Riverdale in Massachusetts to join the cops.        

They had stayed in contact via the U.S. mails and Phil had gone out to the Missouri State pen a couple times to visit Joe after he got himself booted off the Riverdale cops for not going along with the cover-up of a vehicular homicide case involving one of the town’s Mr. Bigs. Those were the days when Phil was just starting out in the private detection business before the Altman case which put him in the local headlines for a while. That had been a whirlwind which soon faded and when Joe contacted Phil he was more than happy to help out an old buddy since he had been shuffling along doing key-hole peeping, getting the goods on adulterous guys or gals for their ever-loving spouses in order for those ever-loving spouses to take to court and get divorces and grab as much dough at the traffic would bear from their shamefully unfaithful spouses. Tough wormy work. That and hitting the bottle stashed conveniently in the bottom desk drawer of his dust-filled office a little too much while killing time between jobs.      

Here’s the stuff they don’t show or tell you on detective shows on television or in those glossy-covered crime detection novels where the P.I. always outsmarts the public cops. Even on the obvious cases like where the distraught wife has a smoking gun in her hand with three bullets gone into a philandering husband now dead who just so happens to have three bullets in his worthless body. Even they, the public cops, can figure that one out, as long as there are three bullets in the body. Less or more all bets are off.  But as a rule a private eye if he or she wants to have any career better either leave the serious crime detection to the public cops or report everything he or she finds out in a case they are handling involving crime to them. That had been Phil’s policy early on in his career and he kept his license no sweat because of that hard fact. What that sound policy had allowed Phil to do for Joe was to get access to the First National Bank job stuff the cops there in K.C. knew about via his connections with a couple of Riverdale detectives whom he had helped out a couple of times.    

Funny the layout of the K.C. job was simplicity itself and even Joe had wished he had thought of the plan rather than having been the fall guy falling. See the truck that delivered the bank its working money, say it  had a half million or so in the back for such deliveries, arrived at the about the same time as Joe made his fucking flower deliveries to the funeral parlor. What happened was that on the day of the armored bank truck robbery the robbers had a replica of the flower truck to throw the coppers off the scent. The robbers, four in all, all wearing Jimmy Cagney gangster masks, pulled the heist of the armored vehicle leaving two guards severely wounded (they would recover), and taking off for parts unknown in the fake flower truck. Leaving Joe the fucking fall guy of fall guys once the APB went out and his truck was the only one still in sight. With Phil’s information as a guide and stuff he had heard when the K.C. cops were giving him the “third degree” Joe figured to figure the whole scam out before he was done. Joe thanked Phil for his help and that is the last we will see of Phil in this caper because Joe couldn’t afford the twenty-five bucks a day, plus expenses, that Phil needed to stay on the case and Joe was itching to blam blam the bad hombres who put him in that tight spot on his own.        

Don’t let the fall guy Joe thing fool you too much, that probation straight and narrow  either since Joe who did his drinking at Matty’s Tavern a well know hang-out for hoods and other loose-livers was pretty well-connected to the underworld even if he had to in the over-world play the probation game. Matty, working the bar himself one night when Joe came, gave him the tip that was the first step in getting his handle on the guys who set the frame on him. One of the hoods, name undisclosed, that hung around Matty’s had told Matty that Zeke Zimmer, a low-life gambler who had owed him money, five Gs, had  blown town  after paying  him off, was headed south to sunny Mexico and the gambling joints there. This Zeke was a serious low-life who half the time didn’t have two dimes to rub together and when he did he bet them on the roulette wheel, the blackjack table, the ponies, or the queen of hearts so his having dough was the lead that got Joe going, had him heading down to Juarez and some Touch of Evil madness.  This tip was proof positive, as much proof positive as Joe needed to follow the trail south since it was much more than likely that Zeke had been in on the bank heist.   

Juarez was and still is a tough town to get anything out of, any kind of information about anything even directions to Rosa’s Cantina and that place to this day is still etched with a huge neon sign so you can see it almost from across the border in El Paso. Back in the 1950s it really was something out of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil you could smell the corruption the minute you got over the international border, the minute you had to hand some foul-breathed Federale five dollars American to let you through without the usual hassle inspection, maybe planting some illegal drugs or other contraband on you if you didn’t fork over the fiver.  It got worst from there as every con man, hooker, drifter, and all the batos locos descended on your head looking for his or her piece. Joe, after spending an hour in Senorita Santa Maria’s whorehouse since he had not had a piece of a woman’s flesh for a while and the Senorita specialized in fresh young fluff from the country, made his way to Rosa’s Cantina where there was 24/7/365 casino action, action that an in the chips guy like Zeke would naturally gravitate toward to see how fast he could lose his shirt and begin his usual begging gringos for two dimes to rub together. 

Rosa’s like all such places in Juarez in those days was no place to be asking any questions about gringos with money to spend, maybe asking any questions at all so Joe just kind of plunked himself on a barstool, ordered some tequila, and waited until he spotted a low-rent gambler who fit the description given to him at Matty’s. The key piece of information Joe had received had been that Zeke always wore (except when it was in hock) a gold-plated onyx ring with a diamond stud set in the center which you could see from a distance. So Joe waited, waited a couple of hours getting a little blasted on that harsh high-shelf tequila he was ordering (and fending off the barmaids who were offering blow jobs over in a quiet corner if he would buy them a drink, yeah, Rosa’s was that kind of place, you could get anything there you wanted from sex to gold-plated dentures you just had to ask, no, just had to wait long enough and somebody would come by selling themselves or something).

Finally Zeke rolled in and headed to the blackjack table. Joe waited and watched looking for an opening to “talk” to Zeke. About two in the morning Zeke went outside for a breather, went out with a lot less dough that he had come in with. So when Joe approached him with the intend of collaring him to find out who and where the other guys were Zeke surprised him when he asked if he had five bucks he could lend him until “pay day.” Joe flagged Zeke off, gave him the fiver and then quick as a rabbit strong-armed Zeke and force-marched him to a quiet area where they could talk.

Zeke filled with anger, hubris, and morphine was ready to talk, or else as Joe made very clear. Joe was persuasive enough against this low-life punk that he found out that the other three guys were in Sonora further south and that Zeke was supposed to head there in a couple of days to meet up with them and divvy up the rest of the dough. Zeke even under extreme pressure from the gun that Joe had at his head could not come up with the names of the three other guys because they had all worn masks at all meetings and on the job. The only name Zeke knew was of the guy who planned the whole caper, a guy who called himself Mister Big, a lot of help that was. At the meeting in Sonora Zeke was to go to the El Dorado Cantina and present his calling card-a sad ass joker from a special deck of cards Mister Big gave each confederate.      

Joe convinced Zeke in the most dramatic way possible that he was going to Sonora with him and that dramatic encounter was enough for Zeke to see the light. The very next morning after some tacos and tomales one Joey Bops and one Zeke Zimmer were seen heading taking a dusty old bus headed south to Sonora. The ride down was uneventful except the endless dust, the locals with their Mexican luggage and their sweaty smells and goddam fowls brought along like children, and the story that Zeke, going slightly cold turkey from the morphine, had to tell.

Tell about how Mister Big put the whole production together. It was Mister Big who had figured out that the similar arrival times of the flower truck at the funeral home and the armored car at the bank gave a few minute opportunity to grab the cash and take off in a “fake” flower truck. They had practiced the route and run about twenty times before Mister Big told them they were ready. It was also Mister Big who thought of the idea of the masks so nobody could fink on the other guys to the coppers if caught and of laying off for a while before splitting up the big dough. It was his caper but they were to split four ways even, and that was why they each had a card from the special deck as identification. (Joe thought to himself knowing stoolies since he was about twelve years old Mister Big was smart enough to know guys like Zeke and the others who were probably dredged from the same barrel bottom would sell their mothers for five bucks and change if they were in a squeeze and were looking to get out from under some rap. This Mister Big would be a tough nut to crack.)

Arriving in the early morning in Sonora Joe checked into the Rio Grande Hotel, which unlike it high class sounding name was a flea-bag joint but which had the best bar in town, a bar that the touristas did not frequent and so adequate for Joe’s needs (naturally with Zeke as his boon roommate and drinking companion). The next morning, late, Joe left Zeke in the room, taking the added precaution of grabbing that joker as insurance for his survival and so that Zeke could not sneak away to grab his dough forgetting about his boon companion Joe and went down to the bar to grab a few quicks shots of tequila that he was getting to like very much. At the bar he noticed a gringa, a good-looking gringa, brunette, blue eyes, a little on the tall side, thin, nice shape, well-turned legs and wondered what she was doing in hot, sweaty dusty, Mexico. He walked over to her, asked her name, she answered Laura, asked her if she would like a drink, she accepted and then he asked her why she was down in dusty Sonora apparently by herself. Laura replied that she was down with her father who was there on business, she was bored and had decided that she would drink the morning away.

As it turned out this Laura, after a few more drinks, was in the time of her time, was looking for little sexual escapade to while away the hours while her father did his business. That was her story to Joey anyway. Joe obliged her, grabbed a bottle from off the bar and they went to her room. They stayed drunk and sexed-up for a couple of days as it turned out. Then coming out of his alcoholic and sex haze he remembered Zeke, told this Laura that he had to check into his own hotel to finish some business but would be back the next day. Naturally by the time Joe got back to his hotel Zeke was long gone. Joe decided that he would sleep for a while and then the next day head back to Laura’s place and figure out how to keep her in tow and go about the business of finding the bank robbers. 

Joe needn’t have been in any rush because by the time he got back to Laura’s room the next late morning he was met with a “welcoming” committee of four guys, three in Jimmy Cagney masks, Zeke, and of course Laura. What he had not known although he should have figured it out was that the father that Laura was down in Sonora on business with was none other than Mister Big. See the hood that had given Matty the information about Zeke up in K.C., later identified as Lefty Finley, a known pimp and bad guy to mess with, had been one of the robbers keeping an eye on Zeke who with his morphine habit was the “loose cannon” in the operation. All that special joker card stuff Zeke talked about to avoid stoolies by Mister Big in the end was so much razzle-dazzle for the paying public.   

Yeah Joe shouldn’t have been in any rush to see that Laura since a few days later he was found with two big bullets in his head in a dusty back road in Sonora with a joker in his coat pocket and some hundred dollar bills later identified as being from the robbery. Alongside him in that back alley were Zeke, Lefty and the other member of the gang, Bugs Malone, a known drug runner and another bad hombre. They also had special jokers and some hundred dollar bills in their coat pockets. End of case, end of case for the Sonora police, the Federales, since they chalked it up to some Mexican bad guys wasting some gringos trying to cut in on their play. The K.C. cops, having unloaded an unsolved bank robbery and four creeps wrote the whole thing down to what they knew they knew at first. Joe had been the Mister Big of the operation all along and had out-smarted himself somehow. A wise guy double-dipping on that fake flower truck stuff. The real Mister Big and his daughter, Laura, well they were never heard from again as far as anybody knew- if they had ever existed. Yeah, Joe Rolfe, Joey Bops, All-American fall guy falling the big fall.