This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-Sign The Petition Now-She Must Not Die In Prison
ake actions on Chelsea Manning's birthday - 17 December
Happy Birthday
CHELSEA MANNING!
Free her now!
International Actions, 17 December 2016
Organise a protest, a vigil, a party, send Chelsea a message/birthday card! Tell us and we will publicise it! Take a photo and send to her (as well as us). Sign the newpetition to free her.Circulate this invitation to your contacts.
Actions planned so far
London12.30-2pm Vigil on the steps of St Martin in-the-Fields, London WC2N 4JJ
PhiladelphiaPlans in progress
OaklandPlans in progress
Chelsea Manning will be 29 years old on this day. She is the trans woman, ex-military analyst, who leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaksexposing the truthabout US, UK and other governments’war crimes and corruption in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq,Israel & the Palestinian Authority,Peru, Venezuela. . .
CHELSEA NEEDS OUR SUPPORT URGENTLY! She has twice tried to commit suicide in prison, the second time after being thrown into solitary confinement for her first suicide attempt. One of her lawyers, Chase Strangio said: “She has repeatedly been punished for trying to survive and now is being repeatedly punished for trying to die.” We must send a strong message to the US military and Obama that their torture of Chelsea must stop. We must get her out!
Chelsea was first imprisoned in 2010, and in 2013 she came out as a trans woman. For six years an international movement has been supporting her struggle in prison, winning significant victories:
·April 2011: released from Quantico, Virginia, US, where she had been held for months under torturous conditions;
·August 2013: whilst sentenced to 35 years, the court had to drop the charge of “aiding to the enemy” which carried a possible death penalty
·June 2014: Chelsea elected Grand Marshal at San Francisco Pride 2014
·February 2015: she won “hormone therapy” after 30 organizations from US, UK, Germany and Italy signed a letter in support of her demand
·May 2016: she lodged an appeal against her conviction
·September 2016: after a 5-day hunger strike, the Army agreed to provide the gender reassignmentsurgery she is entitled to, a decision that may benefit a great number of trans prisoners.
However, the army has continued to harass her.
·In August 2015, she was threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for possession of expired toothpaste and deprived of her privileges.
·In July 2016, when she attempted to end her life the army threatened her with indefinite punishment which, after a public outcry, was limited to 14 days (7 suspended).
·In October, she made a second attempt to end her life.
Chelsea is part of a great movement of thousands of whistleblowers who have revealed abuses and demanded their rights.From prison Chelsea has writtenagainst police killing young people of colour in the US, and insupport of immigrants and refugees – including queer and trans people.
For the last six years, every time she was under threat, people in many countries have organized vigils and protests: petitions reached over 100,000 signatures in a matter of days. We call on the anti-war, anti-racist, anti-sexist, LGBTQ movements, whistleblowers, war veterans, and everyone who stands for justice and against poverty and the arms trade to campaign to Free Chelsea Manning now!
Chelsea is now appealing to Obama “to commute her sentence to time served”. Sign the petition, read Chelsea’s moving statement and the letters of support from Daniel Ellsberg, Glen Greenwald and David Morris.
In The Age Of A Cold Civil War-Immigrant Or Citizen- Know Your Rights From The ACLU-Short Course
Comment
In the age of Trump no matter how many generations you and yours have been here in America the beginning of wisdom is to know your rights such as they are and who to contact if they “come in the morning” for you and yours.
*****Out In The 1960s Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. With the wizardry of modern technology Frank had had the review placed in a blog dedicated to all things retro 1950s and 1960s (two slightly different retros but guys like Frank and Jack squeeze both eras.)Prior toJack’s viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days. About the days when chance had caused him to meet Frank at Myles Standish after his family had moved from Clintonville a few miles away in the summer before fifth grade and the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade created their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails and gain their own fame (although their standard had not been fifteen minutes but infinity, or when the girls started gathering around, whichever came first).
What got Jack thinking along those lines was something Frank’s long-time companion, Laura, whom he had seen the film with, had told Frank. She said to him that she had had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film’s story line, the part about the furious growing up “from hunger” strivings of the guys who would become the Four Seasons out in the 1950s New Jersey night, had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period of late. The kind of things that Frank wrote about after Jack and he discussed various incidents in growing up absurd in the 1950s at their “watering hole” sessions which they initiated after they had then recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that part, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed Frank, for better or worse, no question. And that feeling got through to Jack as well.
Frank’s had told Jack when he asked why he was writing some many sketches about the past, also placed in retro blogs dedicated to such reflections, that his purpose in writing about the old days had not been to put paid to some ghosts of the past as a lot of guys they knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going back to Carver to re-flame old sport’s dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of their other pals, Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone to his (their) fiftieth class reunion at Carver High and came away more depressed than anything since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already. Moreover Frank said he certainly had not intended to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate, how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela wheel any particular way but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other of his later acquaintances Josh and Phil Larkin who were also from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean.
Of course lately Jack had begun, feeding off Frank’s tidbits as well as that film, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Strangely both Frank and Jack agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s big interest in this film had been the almost chemically pure corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not at all unlike his (and Frank’s) Carver corner boy growing up saga.
In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options mentioned early in the film once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson, who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles, the reformatory, or become famous. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.
It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (doo wop girls’ groups too who were cruising to the top the charts but the Carver guys really weren’t interested in them because there was no way they could get anything to help them break-out from paying attention to girl groups, yeah, foolish guys) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew were hitting it big from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. Dick Clark and that Bandstand was in elementary school anyway, in elementary school at the time when they were getting hipped to music was mandatory to see who was who in the teenage song firmament, see what guys were wearing, see what dances guys were expected to know how to do, sweaty palms and two left feet not withstanding, and, and what chicks looked cool on the show. That last maybe the biggest draw of all as everybody rushed home after school to catch the show.
Funny the black group thing was not a big deal, or Jack and the others didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television. Jack would never really since a live black person until years later when he ran track and would run against black guys in the big meets up in Boston Garden. Other than grabbing tips, like having the lead singer off to the side, everybody having the same outfit, the harmony guys snapping their fingers to the beat, and staying on beat with the lead singer they had no racial options about the music and they, meaning mainly Jack at first, figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers so they would be working a different street. (Jack and Frank, later in high school, when the civil rights movement was on the television every night practically would get a very rude awaking both within their families and among their fellow students and neighbors when they expressed the slightest sympathy for the black liberation struggle but back in sixth grade there was nothing to it) That niche was not all thought out in such a refined manner as Jack was now recalling in retrospect but what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.
That summer before sixth grade right after school got out for the summer was when the Myles Standish corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame, got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there had not been any stores to stand in front of holding up the wall in the “projects” where they lived like in the pictures they had seen on music magazines they looked through up in the main library up in Carver Square their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School. On hot summer nights the back was all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field from the gym entrance where they hung out. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly street corner guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead about the white boy doo-wop niche figured they could cash in on.
For a couple of weeks they practiced like crazy each night, no paying much attention to much else except exchanging fantasies about what kind of suits they would by, how to act when the crush of the crowds came on, what to do with swooning girls, kids’ stuff dream stuff. But mainly the practiced, trying like hell to work a smooth harmonious sound on the material they covered, covered by Frank copying down the lyrics each time a song they wanted to cover came on WMEX the local rock station (fortunately the big hits got played endlessly each cycle so Frank mainly got the words but on few he missed a couple and so they just incorporated what was there) with Red in the lead. Red really did have the best voice, really could project his voice, and Jack thinking back thought Red with some work and breaks could have made a nice career maybe as a lounge act out of his talent.
That doo wop practice worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this doo wop jail break out had to do with sexual stirrings, with this cohort of corner boys finally noticing that those shapeless girls from fifth grade class like Cindy, Linda, Bessie, Rosalind (Jack’s favorite), some of them, were starting to get shapes and who the year before had been noting but nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night Red and the Roosters (nice name, right) crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche.
At first they were left all by themselves, maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as they left the courts, but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away up against a fence not hiding or anything but just kind of listening and swaying back and forth to the songs. (Jack thought the song they were working on was Little Antony and the Imperials Tears On My Pillows, although he would not swear to that. In any case that was the song that got him a dance with Rosalind so maybe he was confusing the two situations.)
A few nights later there would be several girls, including sixth grade girls and one from the other fifth grade class, Lorna who they called Lorna Doone for no particular reason but who was hot, standing at that fence. Jack thought that night if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ tear-jerker Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. Sang it several times. The girls came running on the excuse that they thought it was somebody’s birthday, somebody who needed consoling. Yeah, it was like that in the innocence boy-girl thing then, probably still is. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood just like since Adam and Eve time, maybe before. Jack never got to Rosalind then only later after school started and then she moved to another town and that ended his first serious love affair. Frank even with his two left feet got a date for the movies with Bessie, and Jack thought Red (with that mass of red hair), the best looking guy of the bunch from what the girls said but maybe that was just because they wanted get near the lead singer, as always, had gone “steady” with Lorna for a while until Red kind of went off by himself.
See here is where things broke down. Sure Red and the Roosters could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what had happened. Their problem was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons from the get-go, they really did not have any serious raw musical talent (except Red) and did not as Frankie and his guys did really have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed about mid-way through sixth and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s did too but that was after the group broke up). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up in the summer before junior high. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out from the ‘from hungers,” on musical fame.
Red would a little later after they moved on to junior high turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime, which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close. Both of them had been “look-outs” when Red began his “clip” five-fingers discount rampage of the various stores up in Carver Center and Jack had worked with Red one night when they jack-rolled a drunk for fifty bucks. Frank and Jack soon moved away from that business though once they realized it was too much work and they felt too much anguish over what they were doing to make a career out of that life.
Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd with some older tougher boys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner based on midnight creeps and some of those corner boys later wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Billy later who did a nickel’s worth for an armed robbery after he failed to make a half-hearted one more chance career singing alone and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a two-bit White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina after a second nickel stretch for another armed robbery).
Jack as he thought about Red as he had not done so in a long time, thought about those last parts of the Carver corner boy story, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons thought the difference was important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as Jack noted in that review he had written and as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth seeing once again. And telling the Carver corner boys story too.
[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts the when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man,Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]
*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind
By Bradley
Fox
Back in 2014,
the summer of 2014 Josh Breslin the now retired old-time alternative newspaper and
small journal writer from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell
from Carver out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater
Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie
he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie
from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that to
thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take
on when he first heard Woody (and to Laura Perkins, Sam ‘s long-time companion sitting
between them whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far
but who made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue
to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware
of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along,
had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and
girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going
back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride.) Here is what Sam had to say:
Some songs, no, let’s
go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even
fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those
church hymns that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best
Robert Hall white suit complete with tie on or fi a girl your best frilly dress
on when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything
else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion
drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends
which made the hymns make sense.
Like as well the bits
of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary
school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to
that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the
survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when
you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a
lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your
coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when
a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou
with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you two left
feet you want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music
guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new
sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of
passage, mainly about boy-girl things.
One such song from my
youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This
Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless
America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came
through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind). Although I had immersed
myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the
coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or
learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with
folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had
the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the
air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after
the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned
about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by
that time like with the just previous “beat” scene that you were close to the
death-knell of the folk moment).
No, for that one song
the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles
Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music
Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able
to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of
thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed,
his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and
wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some
Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old
Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that.
So that is where I learned it.
Mr. Dasher might have
mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these
things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the
American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody
revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee,
literally, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots
music to the then new interest, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte
made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for
that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the
drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. He
spoke of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and
legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right
around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers,
talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun
for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down
to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels of the West and how those
marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his
support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more
and more on the machinations of Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign
Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley in Spain where it counted.
Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in
school.
The important thing
though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about
him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one
of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his
feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same
melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but
the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world
mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was
not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly
college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were
looking for authenticity, for roots).
It was not until
sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life
of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels
and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo
legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California
and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the
Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That
laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that
“keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he
headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good
dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John
Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could
almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in
the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad
“bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.
Yeah, Woody wrote of
the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of
existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things
going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the
desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused
and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a
gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber
barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the
wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful
orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have
the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin
bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song
chapter and
verse.
*****Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some deep fogged memory producing, maybe acid-etched flashback memory at the time, accompanying CD booklet tossed aside on the coffee table by a guy from the old days, the old New York University days, Jeff Mackey, who had been visiting Sarah, Josh Breslin’s wife of the moment. Jeff had just placed the CD on the CD player, the intricacies of fine-tuned down-loading from YouTube beyond anybody’s stoned capacity just then and so the “primitive” technology (stoned as in “turned on,” doped up, high if you like just like in the old days as well although Josh had gone to State U not NYU but the times were such that such transactions were universal and the terms “pass the bong” and “don’t bogart that join” had passed without comment). Don’t take that “wife of the moment” too seriously either since that was a standing joke between Sarah and Josh (not Joshua, Joshua was dad, the late Joshua Breslin, Jr.) since in a long life they had managed five previous marriages (three by him, two by her) and scads of children and two scads of grandchildren (who had better not see this piece since grandma and grandpa have collectively expended many jaws-full hours of talkabout the danger of demon drugs, the devil’s work).
When Josh had picked up the tossed aside booklet he noticed awispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. The woman maybe kin to Janis, maybe not, but certainly brethren who looked uncannily like his first ex-wife, Laura, who had taught him many little sex things learned from a trip to India and close attention to the Kama Sutra which he had passed to everybody thereafter including Sarah. And no again don’t take that wistful though about Laura as anything but regret since their civil wars had passed a long time before and beside Laura had not been heard from since the time she went down to Rio and was presumably shacked up with some dope king or diamond king or something probably still earning her keep with those little India tricks.
Still looking at the tantalizing artwork he thought of the time of our time, passed. Of wistful women belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if the dough was tight and there had been ginger ale or ice to cut the sweet taste or if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing, no, better evoking, yes, evoking barrelhouse down-trodden black empresses and queens from somewhere beyond speaking troubled times, a no good man taking up with that no good best girlfriendof hers who drew a bee-line to him when that empress advertised his charms, no job, no prospect of a job and then having to go toe to toe with that damn rent collector man on that flattened damn mattress that kept springing holes, maybe no roof over a head and walking the streets picking up tricks to pass the time, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or in a down town “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay. Jesus, maybe he had better kick that dope thing before he actually does start heading to Rio.
*******
Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or someplace like that, maybe Russia he was not sure of the geography all he knew was that he had made a wag wiggle a little for his indiscretion) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Yeah, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then. Hell, he had dropped out of State U, dropped out of Laura Perkin’s life, dropped out of everything to chase the Western arroyo desert ocean washed dream that half his generation was pursuing just then.
Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.
Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.
What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.
Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).
Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain is the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).
But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.
What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.
Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).
Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.
Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.
The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.
From The Partisan Defense Committee- 31st Annual Holiday Appeal-Free the Class-War Prisoners!
Workers Vanguard No. 1100
18 November 2016
31st Annual Holiday Appeal
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
Featured NYC Speakers: Albert Woodfox and Robert King of the Angola 3
“The path to freedom leads through a prison....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
— James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926
As the Partisan Defense Committee mobilizes for its 31st annual Holiday Appeal to raise funds for monthly stipends and holiday gifts to class-war prisoners, the capitalists’ jails are being filled with hundreds of young activists who have protested the election of racist demagogue Donald Trump, adding to the many more who have been jailed for protesting racist cop terror over the past couple of years.
At this year’s New York City benefit, featured speakers will be Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who along with Herman Wallace were known as the Angola 3. These intransigent opponents of racial oppression spent decades in prison, victims of a state vendetta for forming a Black Panther Party chapter in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Woodfox and Wallace were falsely convicted of the 1972 killing of prison guard Brent Miller. King, who was framed up for the killing of a fellow inmate in 1973, was released in 2001, and dedicated himself to fighting to prove the innocence of his imprisoned comrades. Wallace was released in October 2013—just three days before dying of liver cancer! Despite seeing his conviction overturned twice, Woodfox spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement—the longest stint of any prisoner in the U.S.—before being released this past February, on his 69th birthday.
The PDC stipend program is a revival of a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), an early leader of the Communist Party who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. Like the ILD before us, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and the oppressed in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]). In its early years, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners—socialists, anarchists, union leaders and militants victimized for their struggles to organize the working class and for opposition to imperialist war.
The PDC started our class-war prisoner stipend program in 1986, during the Reagan years, a period of rampant reaction. Those years were marked by vicious racist repression, brutal union-busting, anti-immigrant hysteria, malicious cutbacks in social services for the predominantly black and Latino poor as well as government efforts to equate leftist political activity with “terrorism.” Over the decades since, we have supported dozens of prisoners on three continents, among them militant workers railroaded for defending their unions during pitched class battles—including coal miners in Britain and Kentucky.
The 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle, but the convulsive battles for black rights in the 1960s and ’70s still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party, the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism. Other early stipend recipients were members of the largely black Philadelphia MOVE commune. Among those prisoners to whom we continue to provide stipends are Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost class-war prisoner, and Ed Poindexter, a leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, Committee to Combat Fascism, whose comrade and fellow stipend recipient Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died in March after 45 years in prison.
There is every reason to believe that the period we are entering will be no less reactionary than the one we faced 30 years ago. Class-struggle legal and social defense, including support for class-war prisoners—those today behind bars and any militants who join them—is of vital importance to labor activists, fighters for black rights and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties. In a small but real way, our prisoner stipend program expresses the commonality of interests between black people, immigrants and the working class. The struggle to free the class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters against exploitation and oppression—a schooling centered on the role of the capitalist state, comprising at its core the military, cops, courts and prisons. Join us in generously donating and building our annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 12 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.
* * *
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia. In a significant development in the decades-long battle for his freedom, on August 7, attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a new petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). Mumia’s application seeks to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his frame-up conviction. In the meantime he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole. Mumia also faces a life-threatening health crisis related to active hepatitis C, which brought him close to death in March 2015. On August 31, eight months after oral argument in Mumia’s lawsuit to obtain crucial medication, a federal judge rejected his claim on the pretext that the lawsuit should have been directed against the members of the state’s hepatitis committee—a secretive body which Mumia’s attorneys had no way of knowing even existed at the time the suit was initiated! The Pennsylvania prison authorities have adamantly refused to treat his dangerous but curable condition.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its Native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 72-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eight years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and has received a confirmed diagnosis of an abdominal aortic aneurysm—a life-threatening condition which the federal officials have refused to treat. He is incarcerated far from his people and family and is currently seeking executive clemency from Barack Obama.
Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 39th year of imprisonment. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. This year Eddie, Debbie, Janet and Janine were all denied parole.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter was railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and he has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjury.
All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252. For more information about the class-war prisoners, including addresses for correspondence, see: partisandefense.org.
Dublin
