Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Jody Reynolds “Endless Sleep”- Billy’s View

Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Jody Reynolds “Endless Sleep”- Billy’s View

 

 

A  YouTube film clip of Jody Reynolds performing the classic Endless Sleep

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

A while back, maybe four or five years ago now, Sam Lowell, from the old neighborhood, from the Acre, the run down, run-downest if there is such a word,  low-rent, low-rentest ditto on the such a word,  section of North Adamsville where he grew to manhood and where he like at least two generations of young men before him lived the hard-bitten sullen life of a corner boy in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor started writing up some remembrances from the days, from the time that rock and roll entered his testosterone-infested head, gave the first jail-break notion that something new was coming. (Frankly Josh had not thought that thought, had not been that wise to the world that he could sense the music shift that grabbed hold of him and millions of others was to be the precursor of greater upheavals. That swami task was left up to the late Peter Markin who at the time was ragging everybody about what was coming although nobody on that corner gave, as an expression of the day said it straight, a rat’s ass about the vague futuristic musings of a guy who read too many books and who held onto about two thousand obscure facts like they were the “Word.”)

Sam had, as he thought about the matter recently tried might and main to think about exactly when he got the rock and roll bug and which songs were key to that bug.  He knew that it was not Rock Around The Clock, the classic by stray-curly hair big bopper Bill Haley and his sexy sax-driven back up crew, the Comets. Knew too that it had nothing to do with Elvis since he was both too young to do anything but sulk over the fact that he, Elvis, got all the girls, had all the cars, and all the dough in the world and that all the young bud girls in the neighborhood had crushes on him. They would not even speak to a guy like Sam since he refused to wear sideburns, refused to swivel his hips, or rather couldn’t, not without doing bodily injury, and had the most pitiful sneer in the world that the girls did nothing but laugh at much less try to wipe a sneer off his face liked they dreamed of doing to Elvis (and locally Pretty James Preston who had their hearts all a-flutter). So like all good writers he started making things up, making stories up centered on some of the songs that he knew were important at the time and how he remembered them.

Sam had titled his little pieces- Oldies, but Goodies….., or some variation on that idea since after a fifty year or so hiatus they were in fact now old, now called classics, classics of rock and roll just like when he was a kid they talked about Mozart and Bach and guys like that as musical classics and were dismissed out of hand when Mister Lannon, the music teacher at Adamsville Junior High, tried to entice his charges with a little what he called culture. Yeah, right, Mister Lannon. Sam remembered with a sidewinder chuckle that Markin had shouted out in class one day that Mister Chuck Berry had called it right when he told a candid world that Mister Beethoven had better move over and tell members of his crew as well that there was a new sheriff in town. For his transgression he spent a few afternoons doing penance when he refused to apologize for his outburst. (Everybody had called him Markin in junior high school he would not be knighted with the moniker “the Scribe” until high school after Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy night came up with that designation for him)      

So this is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under Sam’s headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billy, William James Bradley, the central character in the series and the mad hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in Sam’s “the projects” neighborhood. Yah, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days, every kid, including his best friend Sam lived to hear what Billy had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that they would recognize as their own, the ones they would flip out over.

This song, Endless Sleep, came out at a time when Sam’s family was beginning to start the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, at a time when he had begun to move away from Billy’s orbit, Billy’s new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe. Billy was a kid of “no middle,” he was either going to replace Elvis as the teen idol of the universe or he was going to get what later would be called his “fifteen minutes of fame” and be the next Red Riley, the legendary bank robber and young men of neighborhood hero. Sam had begun by then to be at the start of his  24/7 reading at the local public library branch phase in lieu of being Billy’s accomplice on various, well, let’s call them capers just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Still Billy, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make everybody laugh to boot. Here’s what Sam remembers of Billy’s take on Endless Sleep. Oh yeah Sam says wherever you are Billy he is still pulling for you. Got it.

JODY REYNOLDS

"Endless Sleep"

(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)

The night was black, rain fallin' down

Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around

Traced her footsteps down to the shore

‘fraid she's gone forever more

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

 

Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?

Why did I leave her alone tonight?

That's why her footsteps ran into the sea

That's why my baby has gone from me.

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

 

Ran in the water, heart full of fear

There in the breakers I saw her near

Reached for my darlin', held her to me

Stole her away from the angry sea

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“You took your baby from me away.

My heart cried out “she's mine to keep

I saved my baby from an endless sleep.

 [Fade]

Endless sleep, endless sleep

*****

Billy back again, William James Bradley, if you didn’t know. Sam Lowell’s pal, Peter Paul Markin’s pal too but Sam was always my best friend, although I don’t know if we every shook on it or mentioned it during the years his family and mine lived in the projects, you know how hard boy guys are, so yeah his pal from over at the Adamsville Elementary School and the pope of rock lyrics down here in “the projects.” The Adamsville projects, if you don’t know. Sam, who I hadn’t seen for a while since he told me his family was going to move out of the projects and who had developed this big thing for the local library and books lately, came by the other day to breathe in the fresh air of my rock universe-adorned bedroom when we got to talking about this latest record, Endless Sleep, by Jody Reynolds. All the parents around here, at least the parents that care anyway, or those who have heard the lyrics screaming from their kid’s plug-in blaring radio (that’s why they invented transistor radios-so parents wouldn’t, or couldn’t, catch on to what we are listening to- smarten up is what I say to those kids still on plug-in mode, for christ’s sake) about the not so subtle suicide theme.

Yeah, like that is what every kid is going to do when the going gets a little tough in the love department. Take a jump in the ocean, and call one and all to join them. Come on, will yeah, give me a break. It's only a song. Besides what is really good about this one is that great back beat on the guitar and Jody Reynolds' cool clothes and sideburns. I wish to high heaven I had both.

But see the pope of rock lyrics, me, can’t just leave this song like that. I have to decode it for the teeny-boppers around here or they will be clueless, including big time book guy Sam Lowell who cycled all the way over here from a across town to get my opinion on the lyrics since he was confused about what was happening, why a girl would jump into the ocean over some slight by a guy, when there are millions of guys around or why a guy would put himself in danger by trying to rescue such a bimbo and not let old Neptune have his way with her.

Naturally Sam has to these days show how bright he is with all those books under his belt like he is not doomed like the rest of us to toil for our meals and knowing all that stuff won’t as my mother always says bring home the bacon. Has to spout some crazy theory backed up by some weird thesis, whatever that is. That foolish theory is really what is going to make the difference between us here. We had a battle royal over this one. See, Sam always wants to give big play to the “social” meaning of the song, whatever that is, you know where the thing sticks in society, at least teeny-bopper society. Yah, and Sam is also the “sensitive” guy, usually. Like always pulling for the girl to get her guy back, or at least go back to her old boyfriend for some back-up love, like he wanted the whole fucking world, yeah I swear what about it, to know about when we went round and round about the whereabouts of Eddie in the great song Eddie My Love. Or the time he had a kind thing to say about the dumb cluck of a bimbo who went back to the railroad track-stuck car to get some cheapjack class ring in Teen Angel (although he agreed, agreed fully, with me that the dame was a dumb cluck on other grounds).

Here though I am the sensitive guy, if you can believe that. Here’s why. It seems that Sam has some kind of exception to the “social” meaning rule, the positive spin rule, the hand-wringing if you ask me about sappy girls when it comes to the ocean, to the sea, christ, probably to some scum pond for all I know as the scene for suicide attempts. Apparently he is in the throes of some King Neptune frenzy and took umbrage (his word, not mind I don’t go to the library much) at the idea that someone would desecrate the sea that way, “our homeland the sea” was the way he put it. Like old Neptune hasn’t brought seventy-three types of hell on us with his hurricane tidal waves, his overflowing the seawalls, his flooding everything within three miles of the coast, or when he just throws his flotsam and jetsam (my words, from school, from vocabulary, from the voice of old biddy Miss Winot but I like them) on the world’s beaches, hell, on local teeny Adamsville Beach if it came to that, whenever he gets fed up. So I have to defend this frail’s action, and gladly.

You know it really is unbelievable once you start to think about it how many of these songs don’t have people in them with names, real names, nicknames, anything to tag on them. Here it’s the same old thing. Sam would just blithely go on and on and make up names to fill out this “theory” but I’ll just give you the “skinny” without the Sam literary touches, okay. Rather than calling the girl every name in the book for disturbing the fishes or the plankton like Sam I am trying to see what happened here to drive her to such a rash action. Obviously they, the unnamed boy and girl, had an argument, alright a big argument if that satisfies you. What could it have been about? Sam, wise guy Sam, wants to make it some little thing like a missed date, or the guy didn't call or something. Maybe it was, but I think the poor girl was heartbroken about something bigger. Maybe boyfriend didn’t want to “go steady” or maybe he wasn’t ready to be her ever lovin’ one and only. Let me put it this way it was big, not Sam’s b.s. stuff.

Okay she went over the edge, no question, running down to the sea and jumping in. On a rainy night to boot. Hey she had it bad, whatever it was. But see old Neptune, Sam’s friend, maybe father for all I know, is taunting said boyfriend, saying he is taking his baby away. Well, frankly, and old wimpy Sam dismissed this out of hand, those are fighting words in the projects, and not just the projects either. And the girl, given the cold and what that does to you when you have been in too long is forced to taunt her lover boy, trying to bring him down too. This is the part I like though, although Sam would probably take umbrage (again), the boyfriend is ready to reclaim his honey, come hell or high water. Yah, he’s taking his baby back, and taking her no questions asked, from that nasty relentless sea. Chalk one up for our side. Yes, Billy, William James Bradley, is happy, pleased, delighted and any other words you can find in the library that this story has a happy ending. Sam be damned.

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth

Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 

 

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

One night when Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris were sitting in Johnny D’s over in Somerville [this night was several years before the recent 2015 announcement that that central spot for the blues tradition and up and coming newer musical genre was closing after a forty year run], over near the Davis Square monster Redline MBTA stop sipping a couple of Anchor Steam beers, a taste acquired by Sam out in Frisco town in the old days on hot nights like that one waiting for the show to begin and picked up by Ralph along the way when drinking his life-time scotch whiskey became verboten after a bad medical check-up about ten years before Ralph mentioned that some music you acquired kind of naturally. A lot of their conversations of late, the last few years as they slid into retirement Ralph giving the day to day operations of his specialty electrical shop over to his youngest son and Sam giving the day to day management of his high volume printing business to his longtime employee, Jimmy Jones, who held the place together at the beginning while Sam headed West with a gang of other Carver corner boys in search of the great blue-pink American West night that animated much of the late 1960s had centered on their lifetime of common musical interests (except folk music which Sam came of age with, caught the drift as it came through Harvard Square where he would hang out to get out of the house when tensions boiled  o to some extent but which mostly even with Bob Dylan anti-war protest songs made him grind his teeth.

By naturally Ralph meant, you know like kids’ songs learned in school. Songs like The Farmer in the Dell, which forced you a city kid like Ralph born and raised in Troy, New York a strictly working class town then, and now,  although you might not have designated yourself as such at that age to learn a little about the dying profession of family farmer and about farm machinery; Old MacDonald, ditto on the family farmer stuff and as a bonus all the animals of the farm kingdom and their distinctive noises that still rattled Ralph’s head on hard drinking night if he got melancholy for his tortured childhood; Humpty Dumpty, a silly grossly overweight holy goof of the rankest order, an egghead to boot and that didn’t mean intellectual, far from it, who couldn’t maintain his balance come hell or high water although you might not have thought of that expression, that hell or high water expression, or used it in the high Roman Catholic Saturday-go-to-confession-to confess those damns, hells, and fucks that had entered you vocabulary through osmosis and Sunday-go-to-communion-to-absolve-all-sins Morris household out in Troy where Ralph still lives; and,  Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure looking for water like they couldn’t have gone to the family kitchen sink tap for their needs but thinking about it later what were they really doing up there. All this total recall, or mostly total recall showing indeed whether you designated yourself as a city kid or not you were one of the brethren, etc. you have embraced that music as a child in case you have forgotten. Music embedded in the back of your mind, coming forth sometimes out of the blue even fifty years later (and maybe relating to other memory difficulties among the AARP-worthy but we shall skip over that since this sketch is about the blues, the musical blues and not the day to day getting old blues).

Sam nodded his head in agreement then chimed in with his opinion the music of junior high school as he thought, looking behind the bartender’s head to the selection of hard liquors displayed with the twinkle of an eye, about switching over to a high-shelf scotch whiskey, Haig &Haig, his natural drink of late, despite the hot night and hot room beginning to fill up with blues aficionados who have come to listen to the “second coming,” the blues of James Montgomery and his back-up blues band. (Sam unlike Ralph suffering no medical warning about the dire consequences to his system about throwing down a few shots since his health was in better shape than Ralph, Ralph having taken a beating in that department with whatever hellious chemical his government, or rather the American government for which he refused to take any credit or blame, was throwing on the ground of Vietnam from the nightmare skies during that long, bloody lost war).

That “second coming” referring to guys, now greying guys, who picked up the blues, especially the citified electric blues after discovering the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim and James Cotton back in their 1960s youth, made a decent living out of it and were still playing small clubs and other venues to keep the tradition alive and to pass it on to the kids who were not even born when the first wave guys came out of the hell-hole Delta South of Mister James Crow sometime around or after World War II and plugged  their guitars into the next gin mill electric outlet in places off of Maxwell Street in Chicago, nursing their acts, honing their skills.  

Yeah, getting back to junior high, Sam thinking about that hormonal bust out junior high weekly music class with Mr. Dasher which made Sam chuckle a bit, maybe that third bottle of beer sipping had gotten him tipsy a little, as he thought about the old refrain, “Don’t be a masher, Mister Dasher” which all the kids hung on the poor, benighted man that time when the rhyming simon craze was going through the nation’s schools. Thinking just then that today if some teacher or school administrator was astute enough to bother to listen to what teenage kids said amongst themselves, an admittedly hard task for an adult in any era, in an excess of caution old Mister Dasher might be in a peck of trouble if anyone wanted to be nasty about the implication of that innocent rhyme.  Yeah, Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher (who on the side in those days, not unlike these days, when teachers couldn’t live on their teaching incomes led an old-time, old time to Sam and his classmates Benny Goodman-style swing and sway big band at special occasions and as a regular at the Surf Ballroom over in Plymouth on Friday nights), who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbooks. Thus  you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance, God Bless America, and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death.

Sam and his corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore found out later that the Dasher was motivated by a desperate rear-guard action to wean his charges away from rock and roll, away from the devil’s music although he would not have called it that because he was too cool to say stuff like that, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as they all lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain. And they were not putting their three selections for a quarter to hear hokey Home on the Range.   

Ralph agreed running through his own junior high school litany with Miss Hunt (although a few years older than Sam he had not run through the rhyming simon craze so had no moniker for the old witch although now he wished he had as he chuckled to himself and turned a little confession red although he not been into that stifling confession box on his gamy knees in many years, and it would not be nice either). Ralph added that some of the remembered music reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in Ralph’s case was the music that got his parents through his father’s soldierly slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass against the Nips (his father’s term for the dirty bastard Japanese) and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to her door telling her the bad news World War II.

You know, guys like Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of Sam’s and Ralph’s generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters  and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of their own generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what they wanted to hear when they had their transistor radios to their ear up in their bedrooms or could hardly wait to hear when the jukebox guy came into Doc’s to put the latest selections in (and to have his hand greased by Doc for “allowing” those desperately desired songs onto his jukebox to fill his pockets with many quarters, see he was “connected” and so along with the jukebox hand over fist money-maker cam the hand).

That mention of transistor radios got Ralph and Sam yakking about that old instrument which got them through many a hard teenage angst and alienation night. That yakking reflecting their both getting mellow on the sweet beer and thinking that they had best switch to Tennessee sipping whisky when the wait person came by again since they had moved from the bar to a table near the stage to get a better view of the band if they were to make it through both sets that night (and Ralph thinking, just this once, just for this bluesy night he would “cheat” a little on that scotch whiskey ban). This transistor thing by the way for the young who might wonder what these old geezers were talking about since it was clearly not iPods was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like an iPod or MP3 except you couldn’t download or anything like that.

Primitive technology okay but life-saving nevertheless. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously strictly only played the music that got all of our parents through their war before the rock break-out made somebody at the station realize that you could made more advertising revenue selling ads for stuff like records, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, and cool clothes and accessories than refrigerators and stoves to adults).

Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, they could hear Elvis sounding all sexy, her word whether she knew the exact meaning or not, meaning all hot and bothered, according to one girl Sam knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television. Chuck Berry telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, all had to move over because there was a new sheriff in town.  Bo Diddley asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate. Buddy Holly crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming all with his raucous High School Confidential from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired by Sam through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once he got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station, WBZ and later WCAS. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, Sam didn’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.  (Sam later carried Ralph along on the genre after they had met down in Washington, D.C. in 1971, had been arrested and held in detention at RFK Stadium for trying to shut down the government if it did not shut the Vietnam War, had become life-long friends and Ralph began to dig the blues when he came to Cambridge to visit Sam although he would shutter his ears if Sam played some folk stuff).

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting (and plenty taken away when the soldiers and sailors, white soldiers and sailors came home on the overcrowded troop transports looking to start life over again and raise those families they dreamed about in the muds of Europe and the salty brine of the atoll Pacific). But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t work at all without kudos to blues chords, think about Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through Sam’s brain.

What did not take a long time to do once Sam got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when he saw him perform down in Newport when everybody who was anybody that high school and college kids wanted to hear in that folk minute showed up there.  Once Sam had seen him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There the Wolf was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that polished professionalism when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered early on in their career as they had covered many other Chess Records blues numbers, as had in an ironic twist a whole generation English rockers in the 1960s while American rockers were basically clueless until the Brits told them about their own roots music) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band. Playing like god’s own avenging angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did.

They both hoped that greying James Montgomery, master harmonica player in his own right, blew the roof off of the house as they spied the wait person coming their way and James moving onto the stage getting ready to burn up the microphone. And he and his band did just that. Yes, that blues calling from somewhere deep in the muds is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    

A View From The Left- Bay Area Housing Crisis: No Room for Workers, Poor

Workers Vanguard No. 1104	27 January 2017

Silicon Valley Moves In, Blacks Driven Out

Bay Area Housing Crisis: No Room for Workers, Poor

For Low-Cost, Quality Housing for All!

Last December, a firetrap of a warehouse in Oakland’s Fruitvale district burned to the ground, killing 36 people—the deadliest fire in the city’s history. Many among the 100 partygoers who had come for a music and dance event were trapped in the upstairs performance space as flames raged through a building lacking sprinklers, smoke detectors and fire escapes. Known as the Ghost Ship, the warehouse, like many other unused buildings, had become home to an artists’ collective and others priced out of Oakland’s housing market by soaring rents. In the aftermath of the Ghost Ship fire, a nationwide drive was launched, not to make such “illegally occupied” structures livable, but to shut them down and throw their residents onto the streets.

Housing costs in the Bay Area have skyrocketed as tech industry nouveaux riches have flocked to San Francisco, where the median home price is nearly $1.2 million and the median monthly rent is $4,200; a single room can go for over $1,000 a month. In San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, a/k/a “Billionaires’ Row” or “Specific Whites,” Oracle chief Larry Ellison’s $40 million mansion and the similar digs of older-money clans like the Gettys have been joined by the lavish estates of tech moguls. One threw himself a million-dollar 40th birthday party on the theme “Let Him Eat Cake,” with guests dressed up as courtiers of Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile, drivers of the “Google buses” that ferry tech workers to Silicon Valley live in their cars.

Longtime tenants of rent-controlled apartments are being evicted by landlords hoping to cash in on the rental bonanza. In a city where it reportedly takes $200,000 a year to live comfortably, newly minted yuppies are fleeing across the bay to Oakland. Median rents in this once half-black city have roughly doubled to $3,000 since 2008. In a recent one-year period, over 11,000 eviction notices were issued. Two-thirds of low-income Oakland renters spend more than half their income on housing.

San Francisco’s Democratic Party administrations, which generally present themselves as the most progressive in the country, have viciously persecuted the city’s homeless population for decades. Now homeless people face the wrath of tech industry moneybags who want them swept off the streets. As one fat cat ranted in an open letter to Mayor Ed Lee and the city’s then police chief last February: “The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city.... I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.” In November 2016, a ballot initiative, bankrolled by tech billionaires, to ban tents on public sidewalks passed. This adds another measure of pure cruelty that aims to rip away the few shreds of shelter that the homeless have. From Oakland and San Francisco to San Jose and Sacramento, sweeps to demolish homeless camps are the order of the day. In 2015 alone, Oakland authorities under Democratic Party mayor Libby Schaaf closed 162 encampments, trashing personal possessions and chasing the inhabitants from spot to spot around the city. It is a stark expression of the depravity of capitalism that the poor are denied housing and then criminalized for being homeless.

Escalating cop terror is the handmaiden to gentrification. The current targets in San Francisco are the historically Latino Mission District and the formerly majority-black Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. Last April, cops who had been called by a so-called Homeless Outreach Team gunned down Luis Gongora, a homeless man from Mexico, near an encampment in the Mission. Four months earlier, a hail of SFPD bullets cut down Mario Woods, a young black man, in Bayview. Mary Ratcliff, the editor of the black newspaper San Francisco BayView, told the paper in regard to ongoing redevelopment schemes: “Police occupation of the community intensified to a fever pitch with gang injunctions, mass imprisonment of our youth and more targeted acts of police violence, all designed, I believe, to further push us out” (11 January 2016).

During the last housing boom swindle manufactured by Wall Street, banks preyed on tens of thousands of home buyers with sub-prime mortgage scams, hard-selling them door to door particularly in black and Latino neighborhoods. The banks made billions for themselves and triggered a global economic collapse. The mass foreclosures and layoffs that followed the 2008 financial crisis hit all sections of the working class hard, but black people and Latinos got it worst. Foreclosure rates for blacks were more than double those for whites on both sides of the San Francisco Bay. For Latinos, the rates were almost triple in the East Bay and five and a half times higher in the West Bay. Meanwhile, heavily minority low-income housing has been displaced by vast developments of luxury apartment towers, corporate offices and the like, generating huge profits for real estate magnates.

The growing desperation of many was reflected in a raft of housing initiatives that were on the ballot around the Bay Area in the November elections, most of which passed. One set of measures established bonds for “affordable housing” that at best would create small islands in the sea of rising prices. Other measures sought to impose or strengthen rent control and limit evictions, offering some protection, if only partial and temporary, to those faced with losing their homes. We support rent control and other measures that would even slightly alleviate the all-sided misery faced by the working class and poor. But the truth is that this viciously class-divided system cannot guarantee decent living conditions to its wage slaves, much less those who have been thrown on the scrap heap of permanent unemployment.

Under the capitalist order, the supply of housing, like the rest of the economy, is determined not by the needs of the many but by the profits of the few. Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, Friedrich Engels, explained the shortage of housing in his 1872 pamphlet The Housing Question:

“It cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages, that is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the machinery, etc., continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time on to the streets unemployed.... In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.”

From Urban Ghettos to Black Exodus

In capitalist America, where the forcible subjugation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society is firmly rooted, the desperation facing the working class as a whole is magnified for black workers and poor. Once supplying a “reserve army of labor” to be brought in during economic boom times, the inner-city poor are now considered expendable by America’s capitalist rulers. During World War II, thousands of black people from the rural South were brought in to work in Bay Area shipyards. Those jobs dried up with the end of the war, and today the former factories and warehouses that once thrived in the region are also a distant memory. With the filthy rich gobbling up San Francisco real estate and the attendant spillover of yuppies into Oakland, black people are increasingly being driven out of the metropolitan Bay Area.

More than four decades ago, black people were 13 percent of the San Francisco population. Now that number is about 5 percent and falling, with most black residents living in what remains of the city’s run-down public housing. Black flight from Oakland accelerated during a preliminary gentrification drive initiated 15 years ago under then mayor, and now California’s Democratic Party governor, Jerry Brown. Today, many more are being forced out of historically black urban areas like Oakland and Richmond to inland towns like Antioch and Brentwood in the eastern Sacramento River Delta and Tracy and Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley. Oakland’s black population fell from 47 percent in 1980 to 26 percent in 2013, while Richmond’s has been cut in half since 1990.

Even when the capitalists needed their labor for the war industries during WWII, black people could not rent or buy housing outside of specifically designated areas. Racial segregation was enforced by realtors, racist housing “covenants” and Jim Crow New Deal housing policies. As one black resident of Oakland recalled, there was “such a small part of the city that black folk could live in that they were sleeping on top of each other” (quoted in Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland [2003]). Tens of thousands of units of shoddy “temporary” housing—mostly segregated—were hastily built by the federal government near the shipyards, from West Oakland through Berkeley and Albany to Richmond.

After the war, black workers were the first to be laid off. As unemployment soared, West Oakland—once an integrated working-class neighborhood—became an increasingly poor, overcrowded and run-down ghetto. At the same time, real estate developers and local commercial interests waged a racist campaign to get rid of wartime housing projects in the name of fighting “urban blight” and “socialized housing.” Hundreds of acres of homes from Oakland to Richmond were torn down to open up land for private development and tens of thousands were evicted.

At the time, the potential for integrated working-class struggle for jobs, decent wages and integrated housing was palpable. San Francisco was a strong union town, forged in large part through the 1934 maritime strike, which culminated in a citywide general strike that laid the basis for the founding of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). A key to that victory was opposition to the segregationist policies of the AFL craft union bureaucracy by the longshore workers’ leadership, which brought black workers into the union in the Bay Area. But during WWII, the ILWU leaders joined the racist AFL officials in enforcing a no-strike pledge and abandoned the fight for black rights as part of supporting Wall Street’s imperialist war effort.

After the war, workers’ pent-up combativity exploded in a nationwide strike wave. In 1946, a 54-hour general strike erupted in Oakland as employers sought to crush a union organizing drive by mostly white women department store clerks. This fight posed the need for mobilizing black and white workers in struggle for their common needs. Instead, the strike was stabbed in the back by the union tops. Conservative Oakland AFL bureaucrats opposed cooperation with the ILWU and other CIO unions, while Harry Bridges, ILWU leader and the CIO’s regional director, held back the integrated ranks of his union in the interests of his alliance with the Democratic Party. The virulently anti-Communist Teamsters president Daniel Tobin and West Coast vice president Dave Beck effectively destroyed the general strike when they ordered truck drivers back to work.

Seeking to widen the racial divide and pit white workers against the black working class and poor, the policies of federal and local governments in league with real estate developers increased segregation. Mortgages offered at a favorable rate to whites under the GI Bill were denied to black people. White workers moved out of West Oakland to better neighborhoods in the east of the city, where a number of industrial plants were located, as well as to new suburban housing divisions. Developers used redlining and Jim Crow covenants to keep blacks out of these areas. When black people began to break through the color bar in East Oakland in the mid 1950s, real estate brokers promoted racial fears to goad whites into selling low, and then the brokers resold high to blacks moving in. California’s Rumford Act banning housing discrimination was finally passed in 1963, but it was repealed a year later when developers pushed through Proposition 14.

In 1955, United Auto Workers Local 560, an integrated union of Ford assembly plant workers in Richmond, scored a notable if partial victory against the “whites only” segregation of the suburbs. With the plant moving from Richmond to Milpitas, near San Jose, the union prevailed against the die-hard opposition of big developers in building a cooperative, integrated housing development in the area called Sunnyhills. Nonetheless, Sunnyhills remained only an isolated area of integration surrounded by segregation. Unskilled black production line workers who could not afford even the relatively modest price of these houses had to commute from Richmond, West Oakland and other impoverished urban black neighborhoods.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Sunnyhills was seen as an example of the promise of the civil rights movement. But the pro-Democratic Party leadership of that movement pushed the program of liberal integration, the idea that black people can find genuine equality without the overthrow of the system of racist American capitalism. That program was and is a myth. It was the failure of the liberal-led civil rights movement to fundamentally challenge the desperate conditions of life for blacks in the inner cities that led to the birth of the Black Panther Party in West Oakland. While they fought with great militancy and heroism, the Panthers dismissed the one force in this society with the social power to challenge the racist capitalist rulers—the multiracial working class. Hounded by murderous state repression, the Panthers increasingly turned to their own liberal programs, such as “breakfast for children.” Many of those who weren’t killed or jailed by the state ultimately found their place in the Democratic Party.

Today, the need for quality, integrated housing and schools, medical care and jobs is all the more urgent. Any real struggle for livable homes must include the demand for low-rent, quality, integrated public housing. This must be linked to a fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek at no loss in pay and a massive program of public works to repair this country’s decaying infrastructure. The Bay Area’s integrated unions—longshore, transit and municipal—have the ability to mobilize their own members for such a fight. As significant concentrations of black workers, they provide a crucial link to the ghetto poor and can play a leading role in the fight against black oppression. The key to unlocking labor’s power is breaking from the union misleaders’ political subservience to the capitalist class enemy and its political representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.

The American working class as a whole will not advance in struggle against its exploiters, who wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the workers, without taking up the fight against the vicious oppression of black people. To secure the vital necessities of life for the working class, black people and the poor will take a massive reallocation of the wealth and resources of this country. That will only be possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state, where production is based on human need and not profit. What is required to lead this struggle is a revolutionary workers party forged in implacable opposition to capitalist class rule and steadfastly committed to the fight for black freedom.

When workers become the ruling class, the housing crisis, insoluble on the basis of capitalist private property, will be resolved in a straightforward way. Taking the banks, factories, transportation and land away from their profit-driven owners, a workers state will institute a planned, collectivized economy. Homelessness will be tackled overnight, simply by requisitioning the mansions, luxury hotels and real estate holdings of the former capitalist rulers so that everyone has a place to live. As society’s productive forces are rationally developed in the interests of all, poverty and inequality will be overcome.

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

 

A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical and electrified  work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, the going was tough which to say the least most of these efforts  were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works, reflected that long curve decline in the genetically-based illnesses that laid him low by the end.


After some thought, and some prodding by an old-time classmate who had stayed in town and who had been in the class with me, I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called "Dasher the Flasher" just for rhyming purposes when being a rhyming simon was the cat's meow and was the subject of many strange rhyme schemes, some not publishable even today, but which also with today’s sensibilities in mind about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.


Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female we could get our hands on at Chip's Record Shop downtown or on the jukebox at the Dew Drop Diner where we corralled ourselves on many an after school afternoon. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that particular Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.   

In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of import is when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being played in the fall of 1962 on the Boston sell-out rock stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned out to be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming as he walked down from the mountaintop). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine on WBNC at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short but all speaking to a low-down guy trying to get back with his sweetie come hell or high water). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well on that path until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare "reds under every bed" brush.

Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with father and son Lomaxes  did so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie treated like the bible-and stole like crazy from like Dylan did with Rabbit Allen's James Alley Blues, I think that).


Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday night illegal homemade jug and head to the electricity-less juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the self-same illegal and homemade  jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle as the mist rolled in from the damps.

Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.  Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles. 

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes-Freedom’s Plow

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes-Freedom’s Plow 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman



February is Black History Month

Freedom’s Plow



When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.

First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.

The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.

A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!

With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.

Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.

Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.

A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.

With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.

America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."

America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!

A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

Langston Hughes



… he, call him Chester Moore, to give him a name, although in the end he was nameless, or maybe too many names to name and so stick with Chester, Chester of the thousand dreams, Chester of the ten generations in the Mississippi night, the, what did Nina Simone call it, call right and righteous, Mississippi goddam night, if that helps. Chester now several generations removed from Mister’s slavery, now a couple of generations removed from the plow, that damn sharecropper’s plow and forget all that talk about freedom’s plow, forget about “forty acres and a mule” plow, forget all that “talented tenth” talk about hands joined together, white, black, indentured, adventurous, pushing that plow, that plow that kept his daddy and his daddy before him still under Mister’s thumb and Mister’s strange book of etiquette, his Mister James Crow (or call it Miss Jane Crow for his womenfolk were as obsessed and thrilled as old Mister with the forms of the, ah, etiquette and the great black fear-the great miscegenation –damn race-mixing ).



Chester all citified now, all up from the Delta to Jackson, all book-learned, a little anyway in those damn segregated schools (except if you pushed his buttons he would admit that some schooling was better that the none Mister offered, offered after about grade six and so he was the first in his family to avoid the infamous X mark of illiteracy although he had heard of this strange group of brothers, mostly prison-etched brothers, who took back the X to x-out Mister’s slave name but he was proud to write his given name, write his righteous given name). A little more worldly, having been to nightclubs with electricity and jukeboxes not some old juke joint drinking Wet Willie’s home-made by lantern light, than daddy and granddaddy who never, ever left the Delta for one day, after having done his American, hah, duty to fight off old white bread Hitler in all the crevices of countrified Europe.

Chester a little less enamored of slave-owners Mister Thomas Jefferson (who rumor had it could not keep out of the slave quarters although that was an unverified rumor learned from Johnny Logan a fellow soldier who hailed from Alexandra in Virginia near the old plantations) and Mister George Washington (who at least did go to the cabins) than daddy or granddaddy (although still enthrall to Father Abraham, who had the guts to say no more to slavery even though he never had truck with black people, wanted them banished back to Africa from what he heard and heard not from Mister Carl Sandburg of Chi town whom wrote Massa Abe up either and that silky smooth mad monk John Brown who led an integrated band, including kin to a future poet, in some doomed old prophet Jehovah project over Harpers Ferry way) and ready, black hands and all, and only black hands if that is what it took to fire old Mister James Crow (or maybe ravage Miss Jane Crow, if that was what it took) to seize the moment (long before Bobby called his tune- seize the time) and to break out of that fetid Mississippi muck, that cold steel Alabama, and maybe shave that peach fuzz off old stinking gentile new south Georgia.

So Chester gathered Booker, all greasy hands and dank uniform, from the auto shop, gathered Uncle Bill, grizzled by too much processed beef, from the barbecue stand, gathered Edward, head and back bent from ancient seedings, from his hard-scrabble low-down no account dirt share-crop, gathered Robert, full of book knowledge on the sly, from his janitorial duties over at the court house , hell, even gathered Reverend Sims, fat with Miss this or Miss that’s home cooking, from his Lord’s Worship Baptist Church sanctuary from the world, gathered Miss Betsy, an old time love before she took up with Johnny Grey while he was overseas, from her Madame Walker beauty salon (a very strategic move as it turned out since Miss Betsy knew everybody, everybody that Chester needed to turn that silly freedom plow talk into kick ass freedom talk ), gathered Miss Millie from her maid duties at Mister John Connor’s house, and even gathered (although not without controversy, not by a long shot, mostly from Reverend Sims) Miss Emily Jones, habitué(see he learned something in Uncle Sam’s Army) of Jimmy Jack’s juke joint, hell, just call her a good time girl, okay. All others, reverends, bootleggers, juke joint owners, northern liberals, white and black, shoe-shine boys, newspaper shouters, streetwalkers (yes, those streetwalkers), bus-riders (front or back), walkers of indeterminate reason (along Highway 61 dusty roads ready to make an arrangement with the devil if need be), Johnny-come-lately boys (brave too, despite the late hour, brave after the first jail night, the first blooded street fight) , children, high school be-boppers, you name it fill in the rear, because daddy and granddaddy Mister Whitey’s judgment day is here, here and now.

A Veteran’s Open Letter to President Trump

THE FOLLOWING LETTER APPEARED IN TODAY'S COUNTERPUNCH.  THE AUTHOR MADE A SIMILARLY POWERFUL STATEMENT AT THE ISLAMOPHOBIA RALLY WE CONDUCTED LAST FEBRUARY AT THE ROXBURY MOSQUE.  THE LETTER WAS BROUGHT TO OUR ATTENTION BY SAMTHA'S MARC LEVY AND MARTIN REY.

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

A Veteran’s Open Letter to President Trump

by ERIN H. LEACH-OGDEN

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Mr. President,

As my family and friends could attest, I do not advertise my veteran status as the first thing people hear about me, but I use it here simply to achieve several minutes of your time to read this letter in its entirety. What I write here comes from a place of deeply held moral conviction, and an utter abhorrence for your treatment of democracy. As a great many veterans and military members did, I signed an enlistment contract with the intent of serving my country and protecting the values we consider most sacred. I was naïve in many ways, and my experiences in Afghanistan showed me that, but my original intention was rooted in service to country and to others. Your idea of service seems to be unilateral decisions and swift strokes of a pen with which you destroy the lives and hopes of millions of human beings. Your idea of “protecting” us is to label entire countries and people groups as evil, which is not only ignorant, but it puts a larger target on America’s back and provides terrorist recruiters all the ammunition they’ll need for the next decade.

I know you value your own voice over that of anyone else, but just try for the next five minutes to hear me – actually hear me, and not automatically dismiss what I’m saying just because it doesn’t pad your ego. I am the daughter of a housekeeper and a maintenance man, both life-long republicans and devoted Christians. I do not share all of their political beliefs, but I respect them as people and I adopted key elements of my character from their lived example. They taught me the value of hard and honest work, rather than the endless pursuit of a vast accumulation of personal wealth. They taught me that the value of human life means ALL human life, young or old, rich or poor, white or black, American or not. They taught me that if a person needs a place to live, you open up your home. They taught me that if someone is hungry, you offer them a place at your own table. They taught me that a person’s character is judged by their actions, and yours speak to an incredible level of arrogance, selfishness, and narcissism.

For someone who has never witnessed war, you are awfully quick to speak of dropping bombs. For someone who used veterans as a regular prop in your campaign, I’m hard pressed to find a single shred of evidence that you ever spent time in a VA hospital or visited troops in a combat zone. For someone who professes to be a Christian, you blatantly ignore the overarching and continual theme of the Bible which is to show love and compassion for those most in need, especially to those in poverty, those being oppressed, and those considered immigrants. Refugees are all of those things, and should be receiving the best help America can offer. Instead they are being treated like the enemy. You claim to be a patriotic American, yet your every action spits on the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on Lady Liberty “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I suppose if past presidents acted as you are now, then your family would never have made it here from Germany.

I speak now to the tiny shred of you that may actually care about the whole next generation of Americans, not just your own children. Stop talking and start listening. Stop signing things for which you have no idea the true impact and start doing some research. Stop playing on people’s worst fears and start employing their best values. Because you see, Mr. Trump, America is not your country, it is OURS – those of us who live in its flawed but still precious neighborhoods and not in its ivory towers or corner offices; those of us who work decades just to own a single home, not multiple mansions or resorts. You seem to live in an alternate reality, but let me tell you some true history – this country was stolen from indigenous people, enlarged by forcefully taking land from Mexico, populated through mass immigration, enriched on the backs of slaves, and made powerful through the constant use and abuse of the military for geopolitical motives. Now for our future you want to:

1 Desecrate what remaining land indigenous populations do have 2 Ban the arrival of refugees who are fleeing for their very lives 3 Build the next Berlin wall to keep out Latin American people who are more entitled to the land than we are (FYI – your hero, Ronald Reagan, thought the Berlin wall was …

Here are some alternative options that would actually achieve some of things for which your voters elected you WITHOUT trampling on the Constitution and the other half of the country who did not vote for you:

1 Rather than forcing the building of oil pipelines (a finite resource), you could try asking Native tribes and other land owners to partner with you on building and maintaining wind and solar fields (infinite resources and sustainable jobs). Give something back to Native Americans instead of contin…

Mr. President, you will likely never see this letter or read these words, but the truth still needed to be said. If you truly cared about the working class, you would have put them on your Cabinet in place of Goldman Sachs. If you cared about being the highest example of ethics and leadership, you would have divested from all of your businesses, because that is what is in the best interest of the American people. If you truly cared about veterans, you would never dare say “maybe we’ll get another chance” to “take the oil”. The truth is, you don’t care, you are just obsessed with people thinking that you care. There is a world of difference.

Sincerely,

Erin H. Leach-Ogden
US Army veteran

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